File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_2000/nietzsche.0009, message 42


Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 17:14:56 -0700
From: George Sherwood <search-research-AT-worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Re: Be done simone du boudoir


At 03:06 PM 9/20/00 -0400, you wrote:

>

>So what do they say?  "Hey, woman, let's hit us a pig for supper!"? 

>Ooops, perhaps they are kosher.  And this "careful training" of
children,

>is it not a form of violence?  Can one "train" without doing violence
to

>whatever it is that the training is meant to replace?


Decide for your self (From "The Shaman's Doorway* by Stephen Larsen):


The Senoi, like the Iroquois, have public dream interpreting ceremonies,
but also use them as a part of the daily household ritual. Breakfast time
functions as a "dream clinic"; dreams of the previous night are told,
compared, interpreted. Working with dreams is a vital part of child
education and a major area of communication between children and their
parents.


In our culture the usual response to a child's nightmare is to say,
"Don't worry dear, it isn't real." The Senoi do otherwise. The child is
rather told that the dream is real but partakes of a different reality
from the waking world. And the child is encouraged to go further with the
dream, not to repress it or flee from it. Kilton Stewart reports:


<paraindent><param>left</param>The simplest anxiety or terror dream I
found among the Senoi was the falling dream. When the Senoi child reports
a falling dream, the adult answers with enthusiasm, "That is a wonderful
dream, one of the best dreams a man can have. Where did you fall to, and
what did you discover?" He makes the same comment when the child reports
a climbing, travelling, flying, or soaring dream. The child at first
answers, as he would in our society, that he awoke before he had fallen
anywhere.

"That was a mistake," answers the adult-authority. "Everything you do in
a dream has a purpose, beyond your understanding while you are asleep.
You must relax and enjoy yourself when you fall in a dream. Falling is
the quickest way to get in contact with the powers of the spirit world,
the powers laid open to you through your dreams. Soon, when you have a
falling dream, you will remember what I am saying, and as you do, you
will feel that you are travelling to the source of the power which has
caused you to fall.

"The falling spirits love you. They are attracting you to their land, and
you have but to relax and remain asleep in order to come to grips with
them. When you meet them, you may be frightened of their terrific power,
but go on. When you think you are dying in a dream, you are only
receiving the powers of the other world, your own sprifitual power which
has been turned against you, and which now wishes to become one with you
if you will accept it."


</paraindent>In this remarkably sophisticated piece of education, the
child learns three important things: first, that the terrifying forms of
the dream are in reality his own thought-forms; second, that he may
operate as an active as well as passive participant in the process of
dreaming; and third, that he may relate to these inner powers in a
creative dialogue. Thus the child is instructed in behavioral strategies
for dreaming as well as waking consciousness, and his dreams, unlike
ours, are cultivated, not allowed to grow wild.

When Stewart visited among the Senoi in 1935, he reported some
astonishing things about these highland folk, living in their
bamboo-stilt thatched longhouses. According to elders of the tribe, there
had been no violent crimes or intercommunal disputes for hundreds of
years. There were few or no psychological problems, and everyone seemed
remarkably well adjusted and happy.

The Senoi did not practice black magic like so many Malaysian tribes, but
did allow neighboring tribes to believe that they were extremely powerful
magicians, thus making sure that outsiders had little desire to invade, a
remarkably wise psychological strategy.

There were few formal rules and little political structure among the
Senoi, as Stewart tells us.


Study of their political and social organization indicates that the
political authority in their communities was originally in the hands of
the oldest members of patrilineal clans. . . . But the major authority in
all their communities is now held by their primitive psychologists whom
they call halaks. The only honorary title in the society is that of
Tohat, which is equivalent to a doctor who is both a healer and an
educator, in our terms.


They have then, no professional politicians-praise the Lord! The secular
authority is grounded in a technician of the sacred, and fortunately he
is no priest with a dogma to enforce, but rather a shaman, psychologist,
astral traveler. The interpretation of dreams is so widespread that the
halak may not hide his psychological incapabilities behind a mask
ofprofessionalism, as do so many therapists in our culture. He has the
same skills everyone else has, only more highly developed. Stewart says
of the development of these halaks, "The cooperative reverie (or trance
state) is not participated in until adolescence and serves to initiate
the child into states of adulthood. After adolescence, if he spends a
great deal of time in the trance state, a Senoi is considered a
specialist in healing or in the use of extra-sensory powers. 1121 Like
the shaman, the halak personally enters the mythogenic dream realm, to
deal there with the dream forms in their natural, protean state. The
basis of the Senoi psychological system is simple enough, and Kilton
Stewart explains it clearly.


While the Senoi do not of course employ our system of terminology, their
psychology of dream interpretation might be summed up as follows: man
creates features or images of the outside world in his own mind as part
of the adaptive process. Some of these features are in conflict with him
and with each other. Once internalized, these hostile images turn man
against himself and his fellows. In dreams man has the power to see these
facts of the psyche, which have been disguised in external forms,
associated with his own fearful emotions, and turned against him and the
internal images of other people. If the individual does not receive
social aid through education and therapy, these hostile images, built up
by man's normal receptiveness to the outside world, get tied up together
and associated with one another in a way which makes him physically,
socially and psychologically abnormal. Unaided, these dream beings, which
man creates to reproduce inside himself the external socio-physical
environment, tend to remain against him the way the environment was
against him, or to become disassociated from his major personality and
tied up in wasteful psychic, organic and muscular tensions. With the help
of dream interpretations, these psychological replicas of the
sociophysical environment can be redirected and reorganized and again
become useful to the major personality.


In this theory the Senoi have captured some of the deepest and most
valuable insights of psychoanalysis. Particularly impressive is the
notion that nonconscious, uncultivated experiences and memories can
become psychologically destructive. These "systems of tensions" which
Stewart describes seem quite analogous to the theory of "complexes," an
important cornerstone of Jungian theory. The meaning of these destructive
systems becomes apparent, not to the consciousness of the waking state,
but rather to that of the dream. And in the dream, present in symbolic
form, the dreamer is to dialogue with them, unravel their tensions, use
them. Once again we see the functional power of a technique that is
willing to experience the dream, not simply interpret. "Cooperative
reverie," a major technique of working with dreams in a trancelike
condition, seems remarkably similar to the Jungian technique of "active
imagination," or the guided fantasy techniques used in Gestalt, or
Psychosynthesis.


And what would Freud have thought of this little sleight of hand with
sexual sublimation?


Dreams of sexual love should always move through orgasm, and the dreamer
should then demand from his dream lover the poem, the song, the dance,
the useful knowledge which will express the beauty of his spiritual lover
to a group. If this is done, no dream man or woman can take the love
which belongs to human beings. If the dream character demanding love
looks like a brother or sister, with whom love would be abnormal or
incestuous in reality, one need have no fear of expressing love in the
dream, since these dream beings are not, in fact, brother or sister, but
only have chosen these taboo images as a disguise. Such dream beings are
only facets of one's own spiritual or psychic makeup, disguised as
brother or sister, and useless until they are reclaimed or possessed
through the free expression of love in the dream universe.

Thus, too, these remarkably insightful masters of symbol shortcircuit the
compelling power of the incest taboo (a technique Freud might have
thought not quite "proper, " perhaps). The fatal attraction is, the Senoi
realize, a symbolic, psychological one and should be treated
accordingly.

The Senoi, like the Iroquois, value the enactment and making public of
messages contained in their dreams. The dreamer is ever to gain from his
dreams, or the beings involved in it, a song, a dance, a poem, to be
presented to the group. As with the Iroquois, if someone appears in a
hostile form in a dream, one is to go to the actual person to see if
there is any problem between them. Stewart says,


<paraindent><param>left</param>A child dreams that he is attacked by a
friend and, on awakening, is advised by his father to inform his friend
of this fact. The friend's father tells his child that it is possible
that he has offended the dreamer without wishing to do so, and allowed a
malignant character to use his image as a disguise in the dream.
Therefore, he should give a present to the dreamer and go out of his way
to be friendly toward him, to prevent such an occurrence in the future.


</paraindent>The dream here is trusted as being valid on two levels.
First, in that the dream presents a real psychological situation which
needs the attention of the dreamer. His enactment of attention to it on
the outer level also carries a symbolic message to the inner. Second, the
dream is considered to have at least a possible objective validity. That
is, since the dream playwright chose the form of this or that person to
carry a conflictual content, perhaps it is because there is an
objectively real problem: between the dreamer and that person. The dream
is thus credited with transpersonal perspective, a clairvoyant view of a
situation between two people.

One might go on describing the wonders of the Senoi dream psychology,
from which we so obviously have much to learn. But I refer the reader
rather to Kilton Stewart's brief but highly informative monograph, Dream
Theory in Malaya.


  Relevance to the list is this: "It's a dream, well then, I shall go on
dreaming!" (BT, paraphrase?) It seems Nietzsche was capable of lucid
dreaming, which not only enhances the personal psychological power of the
dreamer, but also connects the Apollonian with the Dionysion. To my
knowledge, no one has yet considered this possibility.


George


>-m

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"As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease

of the intellect" -- Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Fav book: http://www.mcwilliams.com/books/books/aint/


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