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Comment by Balder on October 23, 2011 at 11:57am

Hi, David -- interesting!  I had forgotten about this dream, but I like being reminded of the dream yoga practice we did together.  There's still for me a feeling of 'magic' I associate with that time -- in a good way: the feeling of a lot of creativity flowing, insight unfolding.

Comment by Davidu on October 22, 2011 at 12:44pm

Hi Brother Bruce,

Remember this dream from Sept. 2000…when we were practicing the Tibetan Yoga’s of Dream and Sleep while exchanging emails daily discussing our dreams, and the difficulties and successes of our practice?  The subject of this email was ‘A Sacred Lodge’:

“Last night I dreamed I was with a friend and guide, and we traveled to a sacred place.  It was an Indian lodge built of logs, boulders, and glass.  One large room was uniformly furnished as a dorm with many beds on both sides of the room.  Each oversized bed had an oversized secretary’s desk filled with books, and next to it, and an oversized wing chair.  The wings were 10 feet tall.  The floor was made of wide wooden planks.  The lodge reminded me of Ken Wilber’s house in Boulder, Colorado.

 

I went off exploring by myself into another large room a little distance away, and it had an opening to the outside.  It was a death room, and as I ventured further into the room I stepped over dead rats and squirrels, and there was a dead bear over on the side, and dead birds, and there was the howl of wolves outside.  I felt uneasy and thought I had better return to the others.  When I joined the others my friend became possessed by a spirit, and I grabbed him and was about to push him away when the wise man signaled me not to.  So I stopped and it turned out the spirit was friendly and we listened to it.  Then it was time to leave so in the corner of the sacred room we set a little place with memories of ourselves and left the place with good feelings.

 

The underlying emotional tone was the wonder of exploration and slight unease over what appears to be a recurring symbol of wolves...  During the day leading up to the dream I was trying to explore seeing emotion as an object and to experience its underlying energy which was one of the exercises in the book I’m reading, ‘Quantum Consciousness’.  I was also trying to recognize my existence as a series of sensations with no one behind them as indicated in the book, ‘The Experience of Insight’.  I think the dream was an expression of that exploration.

 

This morning I woke a little before 4:00 AM after the dream and couldn’t get back to sleep so I decided to meditate…”

 

The photo of the ritual alter you and your class assembled was very close to what I saw in my dream almost a decade prior to your creation.  And while my dream had uneasy elements of beginnings and endings, the dream memories we left of ourselves were good feelings of communion.  Thanks for giving and external reference to what had always been just a personal impression.  :-)

Best,

David

Comment by Balder on May 28, 2011 at 8:39pm

:0)   Yes, there was a pipe, but I don't recall a yoni.  One of the class members was Cherokee, and the pipe was made by her grandfather.

Comment by kelamuni on May 28, 2011 at 7:53pm

is that some kinda hash pipe i see in the northern quadrant?  and possibly a yoni in the southwest?

Comment by Balder on May 27, 2011 at 8:05am

The ritual was about 2 and a half hours long.  We co-created the altar at the beginning and disassembled it at the end, and did a number of activities in between, some of which centered around the altar (such as the creating of a kind of mandala out of natural objects -- reeds, branches, leaves, etc) and some of which did not.

Comment by Lol on May 27, 2011 at 12:41am

Did the ritual lie in co-creating the altar, and/or did the altar serve as focal point for another ritual?