Andrew R. Long runs the wonderful Excellence blog.  He’s someone who not only thinks about gift economy and the gift world, but who actually takes phenomenal steps to put it into practice — he’s not philanthropist-style rich, but he’s giving away thousands of dollars this year as part of his Get Giving Project.  Which I find intensely admirable and fascinating.

Andrew and I share a commitment to giving and – what’s a little more rare – a mutual distaste for interest and usury.  He interviewed me in the fall and I got to thinking I would really love to interview him…. so I did!

We tried doing a video interview (since I hear those are the kinds of thrills and chills the interweb loves these days) but it failed to record properly. So now we bring you… a good old-fashioned text-based interview!

Carolyn: Okay– so how about — tell me how you first got interested in gift economy stuff?

Andrew: It was a combination of reading Douglas Rushkoff and Charles Eisenstein. Rushkoff came first with the excellent Life, Inc, which alerted me to the degree to which modern consumer society has been created by and for the large corporation, and how society used to be arranged in a fashion that was more conducive to what today we’d call ‘the middle class’. Rushkoff is really good at articulating what it means to make a profit, and the mechanism by which profit is made. Eisenstein recently came out with Sacred Economics, which digs quite deep into the idea of a gift economy. And before that, it was Lewis Hyde’s 1983 classic “The Gift”, which is probably the best anthropological or ethnographic treatment of gift societies.

What all of these writers really conveyed to me was that there was something natural about gifting, and that explained to me why the for-profit world always felt so twisted.

Carolyn: Wow, you just said it– that’s what resonates about it for me. Where do you feel you see the most twistedness in the for-profit world? (and as I ask that I realize it may be hard to choose)

Andrew: People thinking they have to turn themselves into mini-corporations just to survive.

Really, that’s what disturbs me the most — people see that big companies have all this money, and power, and they decide that that must be the way to do it, so they essentially emulate the corporate form, right down to creating their own personal corporation — and the crazy thing is, that’s not a crazy thing to do. It actually works! If you want to be seriously self-employed, you don’t just start working with clients — you incorporate as an LLC and pay yourself a salary and (the corporation) pays a lower tax rate and so forth and so on.

The modern corporate world has really changed the game — in order to transact or do commerce now, there’s got to be this layer of a corporate structure that mediates between people. That’s what I dislike.

Carolyn: That’s a really interesting point you raise– I’ve just begun my self-employment and it’s just really hit me that the tax rates I’m expected to pay are crazy– but the thought of making myself an LLC gives me the chills.

Andrew: Yup. My sister is a successful self-employed writer and I helped her set some of this stuff up. I guess you don’t have to view it as pathological — certainly it’s rewarding to be your own boss — but as Rushkoff points out so adroitly, it’s really a problem that the world is now built on a corporate scale, which is much bigger (and less humane) than the human scale. The corporation doesn’t care about you. People in the corporation might, but to the extent they obey the corporate bylaws and follow the policies, they can still act as a group in a really inhumane way.  Look at Apple (and other tech companies) and the worker’s conditions in Asia where the products are manufactured. Horrible stories come out of there! But you know what? That’s actually capitalism working! Production is taking place where the cost of production is lowest! It’s efficiency! It’s working!

Carolyn: Horrible stories indeed– I just started talking to my students this semester about the ills of corporatism-capitalism and they get it but they’re all like, “But what are we supposed to do? We’re marketing majors!” and I’m like… “Well, we need to get creative about changing stuff, because the current employment landscape undeniably puts us in compromising situations just to live…”– I feel those compromises myself all the time. I’m wondering– what are your thoughts about what people like us and even younger people like my students can do to get along in the world as it is while helping to move us into a more sustainable, gift-intensive future?

Andrew: Well, I’m incredibly optimistic at the level of awareness and hope that people younger than me seem to have. Occupy is just one example.

The basic thing, I think, is to cultivate a personal integrity. What I mean by that is be informed, and from information you get, make a decision about what you’re going to do. Where does your coffee come from? Where do your clothes come from? What is your company doing in the world, really? What system(s) are you contributing to? And do those align with the most beautiful world you can imagine? It sounds really idealistic when I type it out, but I have to remind myself that the Founding Fathers of this country were idealistic (though not ideologues). The other thing, of course, that I would encourage everyone to do right now, young or old, is to throw away anything that isn’t working and give your gift, wholeheartedly, and trust that your needs will be provided for, one way or another.

Carolyn: That last sentence so resonated with me.  It’s the essence of so many spiritual teachings, and I think about it all the time. I know that that trust can be tough to cultivate– we get so many messages that are anti-trusting– things like, “You have to save for retirement! And have excellent health insurance! Or else you’ll die alone in a gutter and no doctor will touch you!” Which is part of why I felt so touched when I learned about your experiment this year in giving money away– something many folks who aren’t uber-rich are very shy about doing. Could you talk about what’s motivating that experiment and how you came to the place of trust that makes you feel good about doing it?

Andrew: The Get Giving project really just came out of realizing that I didn’t have anything left to buy. You know all those studies about how happiness doesn’t increase above a certain income level? Well, they’re right. I’ve also made some fairly unusual (I think) choices in life, such as not having a mortgage, not having a car, not owning pets or raising children at this stage, so I can keep my expenses pretty low. It really boiled down to – I have the money, and I have my every material need taken care of and then some, and I know many people who don’t have their material needs taken care of, so why wouldn’t I give? It really just became a mental place where I couldn’t not do it. This was a pretty big deal for me, personally, because I grew up in a fairly chaotic environment, and all my life I’ve been a big worrier — mostly about my own security in the future. And then I had the realization that there was literally no pile of money big enough to calm my worry. And once that happened, I realized that the pile of money I had accumulated to date was really irrelevant. Plus, I was earning interest on it, and that also sort of became reprehensible to me. I realized that my interest earnings could be some other guy’s foreclosure notice. Like, I may not be Scrooge McDuck, but I was paying somebody else to be for me. I was making money by having money. And what kind of sense does that make? I mean, really?

Carolyn: Oh boy, yes.  I remember reading in Lewis Hyde’s book about how interest and usury used to be considered sins, abominations… money growing out of money.  Which was thought to be unnatural and monstrous, like cancer.

Andrew: Yup. If you look at our economic system today, it’s just all wrong. The underlying conceit is unlimited growth, and that’s plain crazy. I recently read Clinton’s latest book, Back to Work, and it was just “jobs, jobs, jobs.” And the crazy thing is, he’s right — we could have more jobs, and we could have more growth. But we’re at this brilliant juncture in history where we actually have the opportunity to ask, Is that really what we want? Like, let’s say the GDP starts growing 10% a year. Is that really going to make me happier, personally? Because I’ll be able to buy more stuff? What would actually make me happier is if I could work 10% less and have 10% more amazing conversations with my friends, or 10% more sex. Or 20%. Or 30%, you know? In the modern age we seem to be collectively confused about what actually makes life worth living.

Carolyn: I hear you. I notice that the more I let go of my concerns about security and practice generosity, I seem to center myself in the present and become available for better relationships, which surprised me when I first noticed it. Have you found an unexpected spiritual or emotional (or otherwise) benefits to your practice of giving?

Andrew: I would say it’s calming. And it generally gives a big rush of energy when you let go of a substantial amount of money, and send it on to somewhere it can do more. I really think money has a spirit, in a sense, like it wants to be used and spent and put to a good use. And that’s certainly not happening if it’s sitting in my bank account.

Carolyn: That’s a beautiful truth, about money having a spirit and wanting to move. I can see how keeping it in a bank account is a bit like caging an animal that wants to roam.

Andrew: For sure. If you think of money as energy, then we have these massive pools of energy just sitting around in the banks and the corporations right now, going nowhere. And at the same time, there are huge challenges facing humanity right now, like our climate, and we’re doing virtually nothing. Even though we have the resources! It’s a form of madness that I believe we’re slowly recovering from.

Carolyn: I agree– it looks like more and more people, both within and without those institutions are realizing the madness and wanting to put a stop to it.

Andrew: Likewise

Carolyn:   :::warm fuzzies:::

All of us do dream interpretation as soon as we wake up each morning.  Even if our dream interpretation is only, “That’s meaningless nonsense I can forget about.”

Some dreams pack an intense emotional punch: we not only remember them, but we feel their images and energy throughout our waking day.  These are the dreams that we don’t want to dismiss.  Instead, we get curious.  We want to know what’s behind those gripping images and sensations.  What’s alive inside of me that could have created that? Unless you’ve been trained as a Jungian or Freudian psychologist, it’s likely that your method of dream interpretation is rather haphazard and loose.

You may have seen dream dictionaries and have gotten the idea that decoding a dream is just a matter of looking up its symbols. While it’s true that some dream elements have universal connotations that you’ll want to be aware of, dreams are subtle and slippery creatures.  If you really want to do dream interpretation you have to learn to think as your dreams think.

Along the way, you’ll discover the symbols (people, places, objects) that have deep significance for you.  This is the process of discovering the myth, or spiritual adventure story, that you’re alive to live.

Taking action on your night-time dreams

In order to discover and live your spiritual adventure story, you need to not only interpret your dreams but also to take action on what you learn from them.  Dreaming is a process of spiritual evolution that requires our active participation. Most people, by paying no attention to their dreams and doing nothing to act in response to them, squander an unbelievably valuable opportunity for developing their consciousness and thereby expanding their enjoyment of life.

So many of us go through life without an awareness of our own myth.  This lack of awareness makes us hungry and leaves us without a sense of our own rich power; we go seeking for a story outside of ourselves.  We become attached to movie stars and musicians, attracted to consumer goods, fixated on the physical.  Not knowing our own purpose and our own power, we look for it elsewhere.  We end up weakening ourselves in this process; we become sick, depressed, tired.

Ancient people didn’t live this way.  It used to be common for both men and women to undergo intense rituals and quests that would bring them directly in touch with the mysteries of their own soul.  They would go out into the wilderness, dream great prophetic dreams, and then base their names and their paths in life on what they learned from their dreams. Now, our society doesn’t support such quests.  If we want to be in touch with our soul power, we have to do it ourselves.  And this, among other things, means paying attention to our dreams.

The physical body and the energy body

We all have a physical body.  What’s more difficult for us to understand in this day and age is that we also all have an energetic body.  This energetic body holds traces of all we’ve ever experienced or felt, just like our physical body holds scars and bumps. Our energetic body needs nourishment and exercise just as does our physical body.  We neglect it at our peril.

During the waking day time, our physical body is in motion and our energy body is in a less active state.  During night-time dreaming, our physical body is at rest and our energy body is alive and wandering about.  Where is it wandering about? Well – let’s see. Our physical body moves in the physical world — and it just so happens that our energetic body moves in the energetic, or subtle world.  This subtle world contains numerous layers and locales; it’s not a single unified “place” but rather a field of possibility.

Mundane dreams

It’s important to realize that most of our dreams happen at an energetic level that’s fairly close to our physical body and experience.  These are the “boring” kind of dreams.  They play out anxieties or simple wish fulfillments.  They may contain some metaphoric images, but mostly they’re rather literal and don’t require all that much thought to interpret.  For example, you may have had dreams like these:

• You’re standing in the grocery store check-out line, and the clerk has just finished ringing up your order.  You reach for your wallet to pay, but realize you don’t have it.  You’re embarrassed in front of the other patrons in line.
• A really sexy person in your acquaintance gives you a long, charged kiss.
• You sit down to a nice campfire with a group of your friends and eat roasted marshmallows.

These mundane dreams feature people and locations from your ordinary life.  It doesn’t take much pondering to realize that they’re about simple anxiety, desire, and love.  These dreams serve a rather straight-forward teaching purpose: they make you aware of what you’re feeling.  They give you an opportunity to come face-to-face with how you see yourself in the world.

 The most important action to take with these kinds of dreams is just to acknowledge them and use them as reminders to deal honestly with the emotions that they emphasize.

For example, after you dream about lacking your wallet in the check-out line, you may want to admit to yourself (without judgment and without trying to ‘fix’ it) that you really do care a lot about what other people think of you. You really would feel mortified if you ended up forgetting your wallet.  Just take a deep breath and sit with that.  That’s who you are right now. Another example – if you dream about kissing some sexy person, you may want to admit the sincerity of your attraction.  Again, just breathe it in.  You don’t have to act on it or do anything about it, you just need to know it and honor it.

As we pay attention to them, our dreams serve the function of widening our knowledge of ourselves.  Mundane dreams, though rather dull and not all that thrilling to interpret, are still important because they prevent us from getting stuck in denial.  The more we become acquainted with our own daily fears and longings, the more intimately we know our own humanity.  We become less likely to judge someone else’s anxiety or lust.  We understand that those same feelings live within us.  This knowledge gradually makes us more loving.

Psychological dreams

The more fully we know ourselves and the more loving and accepting we become, the more we start to have a second kind of dream.  This second kind of dream we can call a psychological dream.  It shows us something about our own psychological make-up that goes deeper than just surface fears and wants.  Psychological dreams often strongly invoke the past in some way: we dream of our parents or of people we knew long ago.

These dreams feature symbols and settings that are a good deal stranger than our mundane dreams.  What’s the reason for this strangeness? It’s that psychological dreams represent what the energy body finds when it wanders farther away from the physical body.  The further the energy body moves from the physical body, the more fantastic become its adventures.  The land of the psychological dream is often a land that still throbs with our childhood perceptions and emotions.

Psychological nightmares are much more terrifying than mundane anxiety dreams.  In psychological nightmares we are faced with replays of the traumas we endured growing up.  No matter how wonderful our upbringing, we all suffered some kind of trauma in the journey from childhood to adulthood.  This hurt lives on in this second layer of energetic territory.  For individuals who were abused as children, this is an extremely difficult place to confront.  Our psychological dreams compel us to make real peace with our pasts.  Until we do this, these dreams take us again and again to dark and ugly territories.  Psychological dreams demand more subtlety of interpretation than mundane dreams.  This is because they’re speaking to us about events, places and feelings that we have done our best to forget.

In order to understand your psychological dreams, you’ll have to be very honest with yourself about what happened to you in the past. This is a natural process: just consider the content of your dream and allow it to “connect the dots” within you.  In order to move through this level of dreaming, you’ll have to nurture in yourself a strong intention to forgive and heal.  Here are some examples of psychological dreams:

• You’re being chased down a dark alley by a menacing figure in a white mask.
• Your parents have laid out their table for a fancy dinner – and you’re the main course.
• The girl who was mean to you at school puts a red snake in your bed which turns into a dragon.

These kind of dreams are more symbolic and require more figural (i.e., metaphorical or tropic) thought to unpack.  For example – you’re the main course in a fancy dinner your parents are eating – could it be that your parents once “fed” on your energy and accomplishments? Did you feel at some level threatened or overwhelmed by their attention to you?

How to Think Like Your Dreams Think

Dreams think in metaphors, puns, story, and drama.  In other words, they think in poetic devices.  In order to understand your dreams, you also have to be willing to think poetically.

To think poetically means to consider elements of the dream in terms of all their connotations and associations.  It means encountering the dream as a holistic experience and meeting it with your whole heart rather than coming at it as a problem to be solved with your mind alone.  Instead of asking yourself, “What does this mean?” try asking yourself, “What kind of metaphor is this? What does this symbol make me feel? What does it invoke in me?”  For example, you may realize that the red snake put in your bed by the mean girl from school makes you think of the blood of your first menstrual period and how threatened you felt by the changes of puberty.

But menstrual blood is not what the red snake means - it’s a possible symbolic association for the red snake.  The red snake is not just a dramatic stand in for “menstrual blood” – it’s also a red snake – something slithering and alive and startling.  Something possibly dangerous and definitely strange to find in your bed.  What feelings does its presence evoke in you?

Psychological dreams are more challenging than mundane dreams to resolve through action.  Often it’s not enough to simply acknowledge the feelings that a certain dream tells you about: you usually have to do something to show your energy body (i.e., your soul) that you “get” what it’s showing you.

For example, if you’ve thought a lot about the dream of your parents eating you at a fancy dinner table, and you’ve realized that the dream is about your feelings of being consumed by your family life, you may need to take the steps of learning how to set and enforce more appropriate boundaries with your family.  Such a process could take months or years.  No matter how much work it is, you need to do it if you want to progress on your journey.

Another example: if you realize that the red snake in your dream makes you think of your first period and the trouble of transitioning from childhood into adulthood, you may need to re-examine your thoughts about your feminine identity.  Do you need to revise or expand your beliefs about what it is to be a woman?  Do you need to inwardly forgive the mean girl at school who teased you for your pimples and awkward clothes?  Do this, and you’ll heal the unease that the dream points to.

Once you’ve worked through a large quantity of your psychological dreams, you arrive at the third layer of dreaming: spiritual dreams.  Tune in soon to learn just exactly how those kinds of dreams work and what interpretive tools you need to meet them.

image: [jurvetson]

Hard & Hollow

In my dream, I’m in another country, stuck in a city that’s totally brown.  Everything is made out of earth.  But it’s not as pretty as the cob houses I admire.  It’s all rather drab. Everything is brown and hard and hollow.  I have an apartment there.  I can only get to it by walking up some stairs in a narrow corridor.  Sometimes I catch a glimpse of another person walking up the same narrow stairs, and I sense it’s a man, but I never meet him.  The place I’m in is quite small and confined.  There’s a town square where I go to buy things and do things.  It’s like a raised platform.  I can’t speak the language; I don’t know anyone there.  I have the thought, “This is Kolkata” – but of course, Kolkata is a giant metropolis and not made of mud. I have a sense that I came to this place to do something, to accomplish something, but I’ve completely forgotten what it was.

Or maybe I haven’t forgotten.  Maybe I’ve just failed.  But now all there is for me to do is wander out into the brown city, into the square, do busy things like buy vegetables and then come home to my brown apartment where I live alone, only catching glimpses of the man on the narrow stairs.  I have the thought, “I want to go home,” but I don’t know where home is or how to get there.  I consider that maybe I am home.  Sometimes the stairs that I have to climb up to my apartment actually go down, and my apartment is then on a lower level.  I’m worried that if I have to go down the stairs to get to it, then I’m not going to the same place – but it turns out that I am.

Reflective Interpretation

This dream seems to speak to me both about my feeling in a rut in my hometown of Pittsburgh (I just leave my little apartment and then wander around and come back to my little apartment, rinse & repeat) and also about my deep attachment to Pittsburgh as my home and my fear of living somewhere else.  The brown city is both Pittsburgh and not-Pittsburgh.  The fact that I had the thought “This is Kolkata” reminded me of a fear I had while visiting India with Dey: I kept worrying that I would lose my passport and my money and somehow not be able to return to the United States, that I would be stuck where I don’t speak the language, where I have no friends, where I can’t walk alone at night because I’m a tempting target as a clueless white lady.  The Brown City represents the worst of both worlds: it’s both small and a little dull (which I can let Pittsburgh be) and also alienating and lonely (which is how I experienced India).

Today (April 12, 2012) marks my resumption of my dream journal project – I started it in the fall and fell off because of doubtful voices.  Something kept saying, “Really, Carolyn. Who cares about your dreams? NO ONE.” And while that may be true, I do know that one of the great pleasures of the internet is voyeurism.  I’ve learned a lot from closely reading other people’s accounts of their lived experience. Maybe somehow someone out there in interweb land will learn something from my chronicle.  In any case, I feel drawn to do it.  And I’m committed to keeping this journal everyday for the next 90 days.  Soooooo… with no further ado…..

Moon Phase: Third Quarter of Full (55%)

The Megabus that Takes Me to My Mom

I’m riding a Megabus to meet my mother at a mall.  This seems a little strange to me since generally one rides a Megabus to another city and not to the mall — but it’s a long ride to the mall.  Maybe the mall is in another city.  Anyway, I’m on the Megabus and I’m the only one on it.  The driver is talking to me about what I’m up to.  The driver asks me if my mom is one of those impossible-to-please, really up-tight and bitchy moms.  I’m all like, “No, my mom is great, she’s a big sweetheart.” (Which is absolutely true and I’m very lucky.)   The Megabus drops me off not at the mall, though, but at a house in a neighborhood that’s very beautiful – it’s filled with tall, green trees — the streets are hilly — the houses are big and old, just the way I like them. It looks like Wilkinsburg or Regent Square, but it’s as hilly as Carrick or Beechview.  My mom and dad and younger brother (the whole of my immediate family) are standing on the porch of this house and smoking.  I get the impression that it’s “our house” even though it doesn’t look much like our actual house.  I realize that I’ve forgotten all my bags on the Megabus, but it’s too late to get them now and I actually don’t mind.  I’m just glad to be hanging out with my family.

Interpretive reflection:

I get the impression that this is just a dream to help me realize and process my love and connection to my family.  It’s a love that’s been very fraught at times over the years but now seems to have mellowed out into something that’s just happy and supportive, and I’m grateful for that.  The Megabus ride seems to symbolize the circuitous length of that journey (a long ride just to go meet my mom who lives in the same city as me) to being able to love myself and my family even despite all our manifold flaws.  The fact that the neighborhood I saw in my dream was more beautiful and lush than the one my parents actually live in seems to suggest to me that we’ve somehow moved together to a more beautiful spiritual place, even if we remain materially in the same location.

The Missing Scenes from It’s a Wonderful Life

With my family, I watched It’s a Wonderful Life. The version we watched, though, had new scenes in it.  In these new scenes, girls were drowning.  One girl drowned while lying on her bed (a bare mattress on the floor).  Her bedroom filled up with water in great crashing waves, and she just died.  The angel Clarence came and tried to help her, but to no avail.  I got the impression that George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart’s character) somehow had a sexual relationship with these drowning young women.  After the movie finished I went outside onto the porch of my family’s home to smoke a cigarette.  My friend Jon was there and I told him “it’s a matter of interpretation what the girls stand for – they’re affected by George Bailey’s lack of proper fathering, even though they aren’t his daughters exactly.  Their tragic fate is a consequence of his inadequacy as a father.”  I showed Jon this by making notes on the backs of business cards and shuffling the cards around.

Interpretive reflection:

It seems this dream also has to do with my feelings for my family – but darker shades of it. I think this one is certainly speaking to me about my relationship with my father, and hitting at the deep contradictions it contains (i.e., my father is a good guy like George Bailey, but hidden scenes of the movie suggest more problematic dimensions.)

So that’s all for now, folks.  Tune in tomorrow!

image: [Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com]

image: [Andrew.Beeb]

The Trouble with Dream Journals

Maybe this happens to you in your struggle to keep a dream journal: every once in awhile you go through a period of crazy, intense night-time dreams.  You jot them down and you make your friends try to help you interpret them.  Through these conversations with your friends and with yourself about your dreams, you come to know things about yourself that are shocking and yet deeply satisfying.  You grow. You feel exultant and bigger.  You say to yourself, “This is amazing.  I have to be more disciplined about remembering my dreams.  There’s so much going on in them, and I’m totally missing out when I don’t pay attention.”

So you resolve to keep a dream journal by your bed.  You get a nice, clean notebook and a fresh pen.  You set them near your alarm and your glass of water.  For a few mornings in a row you even succeed in writing down what you can recall.  You have it there, in black and white, that your friend Gloria convinced you to dig up a corpse from the Allegheny Cemetery and annoint it with lavender oil and bring it to your high school reunion.

Then life speeds up. The pressure to wake up, jump out of bed and start doing stuff NOW increases.  You don’t feel you have the leisure to lie there and sleepily try to recall pertinent details: “Wait, I was in a castle – no, it wasn’t just a castle, it was a school, but it was a fortress-like school controlled by evil aliens- and Tommy was there with me, we were eating pizza and feeling guilty about murdering someone – but then Tommy turned into John – and I had the definite impression that somehow he was my grandfather. Hmmmmmmm.”

Your rational mind tells you you don’t have the time to waste on all that nonsense. I wrote about this before – it’s why you don’t remember your dreams.  Your ego wants you to know that you’re an important, busy person who’s well-being is threatened by a thousand practical pressures and who must take concrete action to fix things and make stuff happen.

In other words, keeping a dream journal is hard because it takes discipline, and we human beings have a limited amount of discipline at any given time.  You might be using all the discipline you’ve got to keep yourself eating a healthful diet, and then you end up having none left over for the effort to keep a dream journal.

The good news is that discipline is like a muscle, and can grow stronger over time with exertion.  After enough practice, it takes less effort to get yourself to eat healthfully, so then you have discipline-effort left over to beam onto your dream journal.

Gathering Motivation

But a quicker route to committed dream journal keeping is to fuel up your motivation.  And the simplest way to gather motivation is to get really clear about the why’s and wherefore’s of your desire to do this work.  Put simply: what are you going to get out of it? What wonderful result will you have if you persist in keeping a dream journal for the next 90 days?

“Well, man, I don’t know – it’s like, a mystery. That’s the whole point. I don’t know what I’ll find.”

Okay, yeah, but there’s something specifically alluring about that mystery, and we need to be really precise about that.  We need to get our rational minds to cooperate with us in this endeavor, and in order for that to happen, our rational minds have to believe that they’re going to get something out of this deal.

Here’s my list of 5 amazing things that I believe will come from my keeping a dream journal for the next 90 days (which I’ll be doing right here on this blog):

1. I’ll a collection of far-out, deeply personal images and symbols that I can use in my poetry and art.

2. I’ll be able to chart the relationship of my dreams to the cycle of the moon, and see how they synch up.  This’ll give me important knowledge to use in future dream interpretation work for myself and others.

3. I’ll be more familiar with the things that tend to happen in my dreams – so I’ll be more likely to become aware that I’m dreaming while I’m dreaming (i.e. become lucid) and then be able to do all sorts of fun lucid dream stuff.

4. I’ll be able to gather information about my underlying feelings about my relationships that otherwise I wouldn’t have access to (it’s my experience that my dreams always tell me the truth of how I’m feeling even when I’m trying to lie to myself).

5. I’ll finally learn some subtle spiritual lessons that the universe is trying to teach me which otherwise don’t get through to my inhibited waking mind.

So those are my motivating reasons for keeping a dream journal for the next few months.  Go ahead and take a few minutes right now to jot down your 5 reasons.  I hope you’ll write them in the comments section – maybe we can inspire each other.

We all must wonder sometimes: what are dreams? Are they just weird little synaptic hiccups? Or something vaster and stranger?

Theories abound about what dreams are.  Scientists only have a very basic grasp: they know that when humans dream, certain perceptual areas of the brain light up with electrical activity.  This knowledge doesn’t really solve any mysteries for us.

I want to offer that what we experience as dreams are actually worlds similar to our waking world in some regards.  How can that be? you might wonder.  Our waking world is so firm and solid – there’s the ground beneath our feet, the hours that drag out through the day while we’re at work, our stable identities and our stable friends.  Meanwhile, in dreams things shift and alter constantly.

Dreams Are Energy

It can be because our waking world, just like the worlds we experience in our dreams at night, is only energy interpreted by our minds and senses into a specific configuration that seems very stable.  Both dreams and the waking world are just streams of energy.  Though the energy of our waking world certainly appears quite stable compared to that of our dream worlds, it’s actually not rock solid.  Far from it – everything we experience as matter is made up of tiny particles moving very rapidly through space.

And consider this: do you remember exactly what you ate for breakfast two mornings ago?  And don’t your friends always recall stories about your exploits together rather differently than you do?  And haven’t you often perceived things in a certain way that you later learned to be false or incomplete?  I ask these questions only to point out that there’s many facets of our reality that are subject to shift.  Memory is especially vulnerable, but even present-moment happenings can be experienced very differently by various subjects.

The Dream Body

Just as we have a physical body with physical senses, we also have a dreaming body with dream senses. The sense organs of the dreaming body correspond to the chakras, or energy centers, of the body. One of the reasons why the worlds we experience in our night-time dreams don’t seem as stable as our waking world is that our dreaming senses are not as highly developed as our physical senses.  Many of us have undergone a very thorough education in navigating the physical world via our physical senses (remember your parents telling you to always “look out” for dangerous things and to always “listen” to them? they were drawing attention to and training your senses as they did that) and a very poor or nonexistent education in navigating the dream world via our dream senses (did your parents or teachers ever give you dreaming advice other than suggesting that you have “sweet dreams”?)  In many other cultures in other times, the cultivation of the dream senses and the navigation of the dream world was considered just as important (if not more so) than the cultivation of the physical senses and the navigation of the waking world.

How could navigation of dream worlds possibly be more important than navigation of waking worlds?  Don’t we need to know how to get around in the waking world in order to survive? Absolutely, yes.  And in that sense the waking world has a fundamental importance.  But our present society wrongly values the navigation of the waking world so much more highly than that of the dreaming world that we actually end up having a lopsided and less happy existence.   “Man cannot live on bread alone” is an old proverb.  It means that human beings are more-than-physical creatures who need more-than-physical nurturance.  It’s not enough to just survive.  We need to flourish at the level of soul, of spirit.  And the dreaming experience is so crucial because that experience is actually where the soul can find its nourishment.

If the human physical form is nourished by food, water, and oxygen, the human soul is nourished by the symbols given to us in our dreams.  Just like we have to gather food and water and oxygen in order to survive, we have to gather and assimilate our dream symbols in order to flourish.  This is something that goes almost entirely neglected in our society because the prevailing paradigm doesn’t like to recognize that there’s a vast source of power beyond any worldly or material power. The capitalist system that we dwell in masterfully controls material resources and material power.  It has, however, no such monopoly on immaterial power.  The only way that capitalism can perpetuate itself is by having its institutions teach us to deny, ignore, minimize and otherwise neglect the vast power of insight and creation that comes to us each night through our dreams.

Revolutionary Dreaming

By choosing to meditate, keep a dream journal and practice dream interpretation, we begin to cultivate our dream body and our dream senses.  We grow closer to integrating the energy streams of dreams with the energy stream of our waking world.  As we achieve that integration, life within our waking world becomes more intuitive and more in harmony with our deep being.  This occurs because most of us mistake who we are: we think we’re our waking egos, a little separate “I” with a personal history of grievances and desires, longings and fears.  In a way, this is correct.  We are our egos. But we are also much more.  We are souls, and our waking ego is just one little part of the whole soul that we are.  The work of being alive is to come to know ourselves as complete, integrated souls.  As we do this work we shed our pettiness and selfishness and become aware of our connection to the larger forces at work in the universe.

As we become fully integrated (Keats liked to say “made”) souls, we are more and more capable of working for the good of everyone rather than just for the good of our individual egos.  We’re of greater service to others; we generate less drama in our lives; we experience greater joy.  We don’t need to look to the external world for validation through status, power, physical gratification and material wealth.  In short, we become free of the snares of greed that tie us into capitalism.  Instead, we become the sovereigns of our own selves, capable of answering directly to the source of everything that exists.

image: [zbigphotography]

Ever experience the negative voice in your head as not at “voice” at all but rather as an instant, visceral wincing?  Like, something happens not-according-to-plan and your internal response is just to feel kinda squingingly weak and hopeless and desperate to hide?

Yeah, me too.

Lately I’d been circling around in the same old dance with self-rejection, fear and shame.  I’ve come a long way from where I used to be, but alas— spiritual growth tends to be a spiral and not a straight-shot to infinite beatitude. Unless, of course, it is for you.  In which case, you better hurry up your bodhisattva work and help me join you on your enlightenment train.  That is, please?

What’s been helping me lately is to remember my all-too-easy to forget commitment to radical innocence.  I sometimes hesitate to speak about it, because I know when I spell it out it can sound like straight-up denial or lunacy.  But I think it’s far from it. Allow me to explain.

Radical innocence means letting go of my judgment that anything is wrong with the world, at all.  Ever.

I find it’s the only attitude that truly helps me let go of self-rejection.  Why is that? Well, it has something to do with the world being a precise mirror for the self.  Any attitude I project onto the world, I will simultaneously project onto myself, and vice-versa.  So if I’m inwardly rejecting, hating, saying “no” to anything “out there” — another person’s behavior, global economic inequity, the fact that I myself am far from wealthy, anything — I’m also rejecting, hating, saying “no” to something inside myself.

In other words, if I was completely, 100%, fully okay with myself — I would be fully okay with the world.  My antsy, demanding, insistent need to fix, secure, and figure out comes from my own sense of not-okayness.  When I’m in that not-okayness, I need the world to fit into a nice arrangement so it won’t poke any of my wounds and make me hurt.  When I feel really frustrated that things in my life aren’t the way I want them to be, it’s because I’m holding on to the belief that it would be easier to make the world conform to my will than actually practice love and acceptance.

It occurs to me that radical innocence boils down to just the old adage, “Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.” Which doesn’t mean willful ignorance.  Instead, it means refusing to interpret anything that appears as evil, terrible, wrong.  There are plenty of things in the world that we’d all like to see eradicated — hunger, war, abuse — but my reactive rejection of that stuff doesn’t do anything to heal it at a fundamental level.  It just perpetuates reactive rejection inside me.

Radical innocence isn’t anything I made up, of course.  It’s the message of A Course in Miracles, The Four Agreements, Loving What Is and all those other metaphysical heavy-hitters that I love so much. It can be a real bitch to practice, though.  Being truly vigilant about it means paying close attention to my inner monologue and challenging myself to not insult or disrespect anyone or anything — not out of weird New Age piety but out of a genuine sense of humility.  This gets really tough when reading about politicians.

Which reminds me – excuse me while I close my eyes and send love to Mitt Romney.  Bless you, Mitt, you’re human, too.

Anyway — if you’re feeling awful lately, I suggest you join me in the practice of radical innocence.   Decide that you don’t have to reject anything that exists.  Trust that your heart and intuition will help you navigate life with discernment rather than judgment.  Open up and relax.

Dear Wonder,

Here are the gems I dug up a few weeks ago. If you’d like my discoveries fresh in your inbox, sign up here.

THE GEMS

 The Mindscape of Alan Moore – free online documentary 

Alan Moore is an art-sorceror. Fact.

I’ve enjoyed Alan Moore’s amazing graphic novels for a long time, but it wasn’t until just the other day that a friend posted an interview with him on facebook that I saw his wild-man visage and heard his intense working-class British accent. Just watching Alan Moore speak feels like its own graphic adventure. This documentary gives ample opportunity to listen to Moore explain himself and his creative ethos in-depth. Which is grand. Here’s a bit of Moore’s dark, dry humor on his own career trajectory: “I found myself working at a skinning yard and tannery, at the bottom of Bedford road in North Hampton, which was probably the bleakest place I’ve ever been in my life, waking up at seven in the morning and dragging huge heavy dripping sheep skins over vats of urine, water, blood, excrement….I was expelled from that job for smoking dope in the bathroom…. the next job I could get was that of a toilet-cleaner at a hotel… it more or less went down hill from there until I finally ended up as a comics writer.”

Stephen LeBerge’s Lucidity Institute

I’ve been contemplating making Love & Anarchy more about dreams and dreaming– and in my researches I came across Stephen LeBerge’s wonderful resource. LeBerge is one of the pioneering researchers into lucid dreaming, and has published a number of classic books on the subject. The Lucidity Institute page features excerpts from the books and pretty much everything one could need to get started with becoming conscious within one’s dreams.

Ithaca – Michael Guy Bowman (free streaming album)

My weekly stroll around bandcamp uncovered the quirky, upbeat and delightful pop genius of Michael Guy Bowman. Listening to this a lot like listening to early 90s Top 40, with all the earnest weirdness of that genre underscored and inflated. Bowman has done for the 90s what the Modern Lovers did for the 50s — revved it up again with fresh, bouncy enthusiasm and unironic joy.

UPDATES

I interviewed one of my favorite folks, Matthew Stillman, about creativity and living in the gift. Part one of that interview is available now.

Abigail Amalton offered a beautiful guest post on Art, Love and Transmutation.

I’ve been thrilled to have coaching sessions with amazing folks all over the world. After one session, a client told me that she felt she’d had a bigger shift from talking to me for 45 minutes than she would have from years of therapy. So, that was rad. Wanting your own breakthrough? Why not schedule your own session with me today?

[The following is my reply to the wonderful Elinor Predota-- both to her comments on my recent post about Love & Anarchy and my interest in gift economy and to her post about her purpose for money which takes into consideration Marx and Durkheim -- I've augmented it with additional notes]

Elinor– after reading this post, I think that you and I actually ARE on a similar path– I’m also interested in earning money and spending money in an integrous way (which to me means both receiving & giving gifts and also payment for products and services that contribute to shifting our world out of its current difficult state) — I guess I’m just fundamentally suspicious about the nature of money as it exists in our present system.

[[How I currently make a living might put some of this in context: I receive a stipend from the University where I teach and am finishing my doctorate.  The stipend is a fellowship and technically a gift.  On top of this, I do some freelance writing and editing, which is conventionally paid labor.  I give my book as a gift. I do coaching at a rate which is 1/4 of what most coaches charge, and so I count the value that I give via this coaching as partly a gift. For the future: I'm thinking about ways to offer ecologically-conscious products and services that I believe will ultimately contribute to the end of the unsustainable debt-economy. My life at present involves plenty of buying and selling.  I just don't think that my life-- or anyone's life -- should have to involve these things. Ever.]]

Since we’ve set money up as interest-bearing debt (which means whenever money is created, more debt is created– so that there’s always more debt than there is money in the world) we’ve made it so that it actually encourages the creation of scarcity, competition, and hoarding. In the way things are presently work, it requires a broad mind and a deep sense of principle to live as you and I want to live– without hoarding, with lots of connection.

[[In other words, if you're a person of principle, you have to actively work against the built-in tendencies of debt-money.]]

That’s why I’m not able to get on board with the notion that “money is energy” — because it’s not.

Energy is energy. Money is an abstraction, a flawed human fiction, that actually most often hinders energy from going where it’s needed. (How much important work is there in the world which needs to be done– restoring ecosystems, educating children– which won’t be done because there’s ‘no money in it’?).  Money as we know it gains in value as it’s hoarded.  It never decays.  It never dies.  There’s much more incentive to hang on to it in giant piles then there is to spread it around. Money is a tricksy means of channeling energy and limiting energy, it is NOT energy itself.

The poet Ezra Pound liked to say that the notion that “money is energy” constituted a “satanic transubstantiation” because it falsified the facts about where energy really exists: in nature, in people, and in the divine.

[[The idea that "money is energy" is also a "satanic transubstantiation" because it draws our attention away from the real mystery of transubstantiation and incarnation: the presence of miraculous divine love in ordinary life.  Jesus (who had a lot of great mojo) said "You cannot serve both God and Mammon." By "Mammon" he meant the notion of the separate, egoistic self that strives for control through leveraging material wealth and power.  You can't serve both God and Mammon because God is an ultimate unity that transcends separation and egoism.

Saying that "money is energy" when money as we know it (and as Jesus knew it) is designed to be scarce is a lie.

Energy isn't scarce.  Energy is infinite and abundant while money is finite and limited. We have enough energy, enough resources to heal and care for everything and everyone that lives upon this earth.  But we don't accomplish that care because the agreed-upon illusion of money hypnotizes us into behaving as if our love is scarce.  Here's a prime example: there's no shortage of houses in the United States.  Houses abound.  There's plenty of gorgeous houses standing EMPTY.  And yet there's hundreds of thousands of homeless people.  The abundance, the plenitude is THERE.  Yet homeless people can't go live in the empty houses because they lack money.  We have police forces, laws, judges, courts, prisons fully ready to prevent people from living in those empty houses.  Does that make any sense at all? Does that sound remotely compassionate or just?

I'll go ahead and say no, it doesn't.  Because justice and compassion are built into our hearts.  They're not built into our money.  And money as it presently exists acts as a hard veil that very often prevents us from seeing and acting upon the true impulses of our hearts.]]

As you can see, I spend a lot of time thinking about this and I’m glad that you do, too. It’s an important time to be thinking deeply about the nature of economy and the purpose and structurings of currency. A thinker who really inspires me on the topic is Lewis Hyde who wrote The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.

You’re tired of being exploited by systems and institutions that take advantage of your labor and leave you with barely enough to live on.

You’re tired of seeing it happen to everyone around you.

You’re hungry for change that’s real, that’s lasting, that’s beautiful.

You’re willing to do whatever it takes to make that change happen through joy rather than violence.

And you want to thrive along the way.

Me too.

Welcome to Love & Anarchy.

I believe that deep success, real success, entails creating a world where everyone has enough and all our resources and knowledges are held in common.  The kind of success that says, “I’ve made it big! And all you guys can either go bugger off or pay me lots of money to learn my secrets!” is no success at all.

I’m interested in transitioning to a world without interest-bearing debt-currency.  I’d like to live in a society that engages in sacred gift economics.  I work towards this by offering my book for free and my one-on-one coaching at a low-cost. I’m interested in exploring more of what it means to live in the spirit of the gift.

Revolutions that result in the same-old-same old domination games bore me.  So do revolutions that are just  New Age  metaphors for attitude shifts.  I’m excited by the thought of real revolution — a fundamental change in the way that we live together and organize our resources.

I’ll be offering you stories and helpful ideas from my own path of evolution and from inspiring folks all over the earth.  The days of “personal development” are over.  No genuine personal development can happen in isolation from societal evolution.

It’s clear to me that love & anarchy are two primary ingredients of every human soul and imagination.  Our night-time dreams are lawless gifts that come with no price and no condition. They have important things to teach us.

I don’t believe we can make cultural evolution happen without giving deep attention and honor to our own inner landscapes of dream and archetype.  Within us are the symbols that will found a fresh world.

This site is a bright hearth for you in the strange and liminal world of spirituality, gift entrepreneurship, and radical politics.

You’re so welcome here.

Image: [eflon]