Dao of Dream continues
Liu Ming on symbols, sensitivity and direct experience... (transcribed by clarissa gunawan)
“So there’s a possibility of us having an experience of symbols - as symbols with names, that work in systems - this is like language and literature and poetry and art. But we can also go back to just a direct appreciation of symbols. This is also, for instance, being able to appreciate a symbol from another culture that we don’t have a name for. But there’s also another level to that, which is direct symbolic experience. And when we have those direct symbolic experiences we’re actually experiencing direct, our original nature. Because that’s just coming up from our original nature back into it. It’s not one of those, “Oh cats are symbolic of crazy sex.” It’s not out on the edge of something that’s been analysed by culture or a particular group within a culture. It’s really close to its roots.
So the types of dreams, they go from being ones we write details about, to letting them remain more symbolic, until we actually develop a kind of response to the symbolic roots. Because if we are experiencing dream from a direct symbolic roots we will notice from time to time during the day that that’s what we’re doing now too. Below the conversation with language and all of that there is a series of symbolic gestures going on. And we could actually stay there and nobody would notice. Because actually the performance of language and all that, comes out of itself. You don’t have to be way up on the edge of it. You could actually sink into the response level.
Lots of people now especially in modern times think, people are sensitive. Chances are it’s a roomful of people who think they’re sensitive, but we don’t even know what that means. We gather together in small groups to feel safe. That sensitivity itself has nothing to do with anyone else. If you feel this kind of sensitivity don’t get into how dangerous other people are, instead you should just empower the fact that your sensitivity really is sinking closer and closer to this direct symbolic language. For instance you can read a long argumentative essay on the way the government is handling something. And at the end of that have all these tangled emotions, maybe you’d even be crying. You could also see a single photograph and get to the same place. Everybody already knows that. And maybe you’d actually not get sad reading the argument you’d get angry. If you saw a picture of the result you’d get sad. And something deeper would happen to you from the picture.
This means you’re getting more plain symbolic message. Because maybe the picture relates more to your physicalness. You see something that imprints on your own body, that if somebody had this much suffering you can feel it in your own body. You read the why they have suffering, maybe it’s a little more different or distant. So this process is going on all the time. Not just when you read that essay about the government. It’s actually happening all the time. You’re reading in to things all day long. Or you’re letting them at you directly. So the idea of what symbols are, they’re just kind of an in-between place, a soft version of our appreciation of ourselves. Not of someone else. It’s not that symbols are always of something else. Symbols are actually the conversation we're having with ourselves. And in some sense, dreams are a conversation we’re having with ourselves.”
My dead teacher.
Theres too many shenanigans to consider from my time trying to help the last five years. Good stuff too, but lots of poisonous materials. The path also uses those. Its not really about trauma or healing or karma or whatever. Those are words-symbols that point to other, more intimate ecosystemic phenomena.
The dreaming is happening right now, wherever there is a perceiver that exists in the reflective realm of the clear void mirror that is reality and the dancing elements.
The dreams you have of me are not me. I dont need to shamanically enter your dreams to “help” you. I just represent something for you that you cant yet figure out for yourself. You cant yet radiate what ive learned to practice. Your dreams have nothing to do with me except i am a symbol reflecting something for you that you arent yet willing or able to consciously accept. This goes for all sorts of projections, opinions, ideas and concepts too. All of those are also dreams.
To lay inside the mind that senses, experiences before language and concepts is the real world and the world of our ancestors and the world of medicine, the “world between worlds”, but there is no other world. Its all happening simultaneously in the exact same space. It only appears to be an other place an other time.
in all my time practicing i have only had two dreams in which ming or “ming” visited me. Both were profound “true dreams” in the terminology of ming’s and the liu family’s dream teachings.
Ming was and was not in my dreams. To say more about the content in this container would be foolish and disrespectful, but what i can say is that whatever energetic phenomena showed up as ming and as myself effected me deeply and dissolved many fantasies and “attachment preferences” i picked up along the way.
to believe that either ming did show up, or ming did not show up and it was just my own projection are both diminishing of the power of these kinds of dreams that happen through a real practice. A practice of sobriety and mystery, of dedication and of defiance against the rampant stupidity of popular culture.
true dreams are beyond such petty dualisms. I dont think most americans will ever get close to this kind of lucidity during their lives. But it’s possible if one truly dives into life as a divinatory symbol set that cuts through attachments and addictions.
traveling really takes a toll out of my system. that and environments. i’m really feeling the end of this dream more and more, even as i try and cut through. because to cut through the beken/gu syndrome i was born with, destroys everything. “good & bad” are both destroyed, churning up more and more red dust. im writing this last portion in bellingham, i already miss the climate of LA. i might have to run to baja or something just to extend what little qi i have left. but there will still be a few more months or years of the pacific northwest until i can somehow manage the next life destruction. each few years i can really see my own past folly, all the bad ideas and desires that took years from my life, all the fate and fortune that caged my qi before i ever got out of the gate.
in the end, the story of “darius carrasquillo” is meaningless ephemera. this is not depression or nihilism. merely the reality of the great absence-presence which gazes at and through and with absence-presence.
i’m also recognizing in a parallel way that i have given too much too freely, with far too little recognition, respect and reciprocity. scraping by with mounting medical bills, i am treated as a pauper by paupers, even though i have some mature expert practitioners in my field who tell me i am one of the best practitioners they have ever met. this kind of dissonance is also creating sickness in me. i’ve also been the subject/target of a long gossip/hex campaign from past relationships i should have not been in. like never cleaning the shit off my shoes. hygiene practice never ends because there is hygiene beyond western/modern concepts.
all of this became clearer while i was away from portland in California. i have a lot of work ahead of me to emancipate my social persona, physiology and heartmind from the constant barrage of toxic patterns inherent in my fate inside this culture.
the demo course still has some slots for approved applicants. the last shot. the final bow.