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Many contemporary spiritual teachers offer methods for awakening that may actually impede rather than encourage the process. Some of these entail dissolving the ego or subduing the emotional/pain body, while others focus on transcending thought, and even form and language. These methods give the erroneous impression that only by overcoming certain exigencies can a person be on a path to awakening.

What does it mean to awaken? Eckhart Tolle, in his book A New Earth, defines awakening as a shift in consciousness during which thinking and awareness separate. This concise definition of awakening implies that thinking limits our awareness. While this may be true, it is unclear why a definition and resulting methodology of awakening would rest on such a separation, just as for others it hinges on dissolving, subduing, doing away with, or moving beyond everyday realities. As spiritual teachers, we should be asking ourselves if our models of awakening originate in separation consciousness, which compels us to “cut out,” “stop,” or “fix” things in order to achieve our desired outcome. Separation consciousness, by definition, limits the scope of awakening by partitioning off great segments of reality.

What does it really mean to awaken? It seems that awakening is an extensively aware state of mind that takes in everything. There is no “path to awakening” nor end to be gained — only awareness without likes or dislikes, which gives way to more awareness. As a thought or feeling unfolds, it reveals hidden layers of reality, causing the unseen to become seen.

Just as awakening does not require us to separate thought from awareness or transcend the ego or emotional/pain body, it also does not ask us to subscribe to the limits of form. From this vantage point, there are no such limits; within every form is the immeasurable, waiting for our awareness to unfold into it. This is why an awakened chef can taste the soil in a piece of chocolate and identify the region of the world where it originated. It is also most likely how transcendent abilities awaken within us—non-local awareness, spontaneous healing, prophecy, and clairvoyance.

As spiritual teachers, our task is to invite seekers into awakening through models that support it, void of any sort of imposition. Surely we can guide the minds of seekers to give full attention to an experience without relying on exclusion or division. Great painters, for instance, can so reduce a reality to its color content that it assumes a new existence beyond color, unassociated with any previous memory of it. We, too, can show the scales of an infinitely expansive reality.

Ultimately spiritual teachers can invite seekers directly into the unfolding of awareness by bringing our own awareness to the task. In doing so, we demonstrate that expanded awareness, the state of mind that takes in everything, is an integral phenomenon, not one that is divided. We also realize that a mind engaged in this process could never look for a method, because it is constantly opening, continually awakening.

More about Christina Donnell…
Christina Donnell, Ph.D., is a spiritual teacher and author of the five time award winning book Transcendent Dreaming: Stepping Into Our Human Potential. She conducts workshop intensives and training in receptive wisdom. For more information, www.wocaassoc.com.

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Since the seventies, past life regression has been widely practiced and many books – some  impressive and well-documented – have been published on this subject.  It is therefore  surprising that dreams were not examined for past life residues as well.  After all,  it stands to reason that if past life memories can be accessed under hypnosis and in altered states of consciousness, they have to be present also in our dreams. Several  factors must have contributed to sustaining this blind spot in our field of vision. Dream researchers must have avoided the subject out of fear of professional ridicule. Jungians must have felt threatened by the idea that past life selves might be entitled  to some of the space in the unconscious that had previously been occupied by the archetypes . And for the average dream worker  it would have been perfectly normal to stay within the “neuro-net” of traditional  methods of interpreting dreams.

What shook me out of my “neuro-net” twenty-nine years ago was  a dream that was “different”. Before I had this dream,  I had never given reincarnation any thought.  But during five years of a Jungian analysis in London, I had come to know my dream-world  like the back of my hand.  And this particular dream  was not part of the dream-world I knew.  It seemed to belong to another  identity,  another country, and another time. Moreover,  it was completely devoid of symbolism, which  – as we know – is the alpha and omega  of the dream language.

In this dream,  I am a man; I am standing with my back against a barn-door in a medieval  European town  while an angry mob is pelting me with stones. I am terrified and in pain. To get away from my tormentors,  I say I have to urinate. They let me step inside the barn so that I can relieve myself in private.  I am still aware of taking my penis out of my pants. Then there is a blank. Next  I am being driven on an ox-cart through town,  surrounded by jeering crowds. A red-robed priest is taking me to the court of the Inquisition. I have collapsed on the waggon-floor, sobbing uncontrollably, while deeply ashamed of my lack of composure. For until the public mood had changed,  I had been a celebrity in this town.  While in this man’s body, I had been aware of his distinct personality, his sensitivity, and the complexity of his feelings. This disqualified him as an archetype, which, according to Jungian theory,  is a “type”, rather than a person. From that moment on I became convinced of the existence of reincarnation and was on the look-out for more past life dreams.

At the Jung Institute in Zurich where I started to train a year later,  I met two analysts who had dared to venture into this borderland of the psyche,  knowing full well that it was politically the wrong thing to do.  One, a Dutchman,  Erlo van Waveren,  had been a personal analysand of Jung who,  in the fifties,  had worked  with him on his past life dreams under the seal of secrecy.  In 1978 – seventeen years after his analyst’s death – van Waveren had finally plucked up his courage and published a book about his experiences entitled Journey to the Rebirth. The second rebel was Dr. Elisabeth Ruef, a highly respected senior training analyst at the Zurich Institute and the co-editor of Jung’s Collected Works. She gave a  public lecture series on past life dreams in the wake of van Waveren’s book publication. But while van Waveren – as a patron of the Jung Institute – got away with the heresy,  Elisabeth Ruef was later crucified for it by her colleagues. This taught me that it was not safe to discuss my past life dreams in analysis, and my process went underground. It was kept alive by its own dynamics, by information obtained from an exceptionally gifted past life reader, and by whatever  strange energies I osmotically absorbed while translating Jane Roberts’ book Seth Speaks into German. When this unconventional  part of my training was over, most of my important past lives were integrated;  in addition, I had learned to identify past life dreams and was ready to work with them therapeutically.  After my graduation from the Jung Institute in 1987 I went into private practice in Santa Fe without  ever  advertizing myself as a past life therapist. But those who needed to integrate their past lives through dreams found me anyway.  These people were drawn to this work not by curiosity – as is sometimes the case with those seeking past life regressions – but by an urgent inner necessity. Their process, which was  initiated and timed solely by their own unconscious, was  often painful and lengthy,  but almost always life-changing.
Five years ago, so much extraordinary past life material had accumulated in my files that I felt obligated to leave a record of it. Thus I embarked  on the daunting task of writing a book about it. Many things became clear to me only while I was organizing the dream material.  I discovered the “bloodlines of the soul” – the character traits and individual life themes that run like red threads through our incarnations.  I also observed the relentlessness with which we reap what we have sowed in previous incarnations. This moved  karmic responsibility into the foreground of my awareness.  The book never let me go,  even  in my sleep.  Information filtered down  in my  dreams like the “dew of heaven” of the Kaballah. And when during the day I turned on the television,  I noticed that  “other lives” were creeping into the vernacular. This made me wonder if the archetype of reincarnation, which I was trying to capture in my writing, was beginning to stir in the collective unconscious, too. Still, I had been working in such isolation, that  I had no idea how my book  would be received  when it was finally published in April. A Jungian colleague had predicted that it would be ignored by other analysts. This had taken the wind out of my sails. Consequently, when I made a submission to this year’s IASD conference in Berkeley,  I expected it to be rejected by the dream researchers as well. And when it was accepted,  I still thought that nobody would show up for my presentation.  I was stunned when more and more people filed into the room to hear what I had to say about past life dreams. I was grateful, moved , and a bit overwhelmed  by the enthusiasm with the new information was received. However,  what really got my attention was an e-mail I received two weeks after the conference. It came from a stranger in Istanbul who identified  herself as an IASD member who had not been able to attend the conference. She said she was the leader of an internet dream group of 160 Turkish speaking members,  and lately past life dreams had been very much on their minds. She might even  have  had such dreams herself. Would I please send her a copy of my presentation?  She would read it very carefully.

Then I finally realized that I had been all along part of an international network of dreamers  who were becoming conscious of the past life phenomenon at the same time. What this growing awareness might mean and what effect it might have on human attitudes is difficult to assess at this early point.  It might be a sign that the Aquarian Age is finally dawning on us with a trail of new ideas and greater awareness.  It might also help the peace movement  in our troubled,  hate-and- fear driven world. For who would want to make war on the enemy “out there” knowing that you become what you hate and despise  in one of your next incarnations? And who can afford to look down on members of another race, creed and gender when the evidence for having been all those things ourselves can be found in our own dreams? This throws a new light on Bill Stimson’s inspired statement who founded the Dream Network  over twenty years ago: “To work with dreams in the deepest sense is to be a leader in the revolution of human consciousness.”  (Published in DreamNetwork, Vol. 24 No. 3, Fall 2005 & http://DreamNetwork.net)

Kala speaks with Sabine Lucas about her book Past Life Dreamwork: Healing the Soul through Understanding Karmic Patterns on The Explore Your Spirit with Kala Show. Interview coming in August 2009

More about Sabine Lucas….

Sabine Lucas was born and raised in Germany and educated exclusively in European countries. She holds a Ph.D. in German and English literature from Heidelberg University and a Diploma in Analytical Psychology from the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. While living in England, she taught German language and literature at Reading University and worked for BBC London as a language consultant. Later, as a student in Switzerland, she supported herself by translating Jane Roberts’ books Seth Speaks and The Nature of Personal Reality and Jung’s English correspondence and lectures for the German Collected Works edition into German. Dr. Lucas pioneered dream groups and dream workshops in Switzerland and Austria in the seventies—a time when they were still a novelty. After moving to California in 1983, she worked part-time at the Mental Health Clinic in Mariposa, California, while training future mental health professionals at the California School for Professional Psychology in Fresno in dream analysis.

Since 1987, Sabine has been in private practice in Santa Fe, where she is licensed as a Professional Mental Health Counselor. Although her interest in past life dreams and the concomitant self-exploration goes back to 1976, it has been part of her clinical practice only for the last fifteen years. In the course of this time, she has been able to develop her own unique method of working with past life dreams and of integrating past life material in such a way that it enriches and empowers, while keeping the person balanced and grounded.Dr. Lucas is a member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology, of the Association of Graduate Analytical Psychologists of the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich, and a diplomate of the American Psychotherapy Association. More info at: www.pastlifedreams.com

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