Collecting, Digesting and Honoring the Harvest of Inner Work
An evening with Tim Lyons: September 3, 2021
“To recognize and know your ambitions and your greed, to gather your craving, to cultivate it, grasp it, make it serviceable, influence it, master it, order it, to give it interpretations and meanings, is extravagant.” C.G. Jung, The Red Book
In this evening’s talk we will examine how creating a special collection of our most impactful dreams and nightmares, rapturous visions and imaginings, from both the night and day, can open us to our highest potentials. Recording and getting to know these experiences intimately, can help us embody our evolving personal myth and live more vitally in the present. But, paradoxically, becoming too attached to these experiences is “extravagant.” Ultimately, we need to be able to dissolve our attachment to these patterns and the identities that have created obstacles to our health, individuation, and liberation. In order to accomplish this dissolution, as Jung wrote in the Red Book, “I cut down to the marrow, until everything meaningful falls from me, until I am no longer as I might seem to myself, until I know only that I am.”
Most dreams are best interpreted from the standpoint that their appearances are generated from within. If they do reflect an outer event, earlier seeds of premonition or warning can be recognized when we compare our inner record with our current outer experience. If we discover synchronistic connections to the present, their numinous energy can refine our direction. Through dreams and regressions, we may also discover unlived lives and past lives. By studying the genealogy of our inner and outer lineages which have created patterns of intergenerational transmission, we can identify the sources of our traumas and empowerments. Whether real or imagined, these, perhaps, phantoms of the soul’s evolution, give us essential insights about our present state of individuation.
The next stage of the process is learning to choreograph rituals to honor this inexhaustible harvest. Using wisdom from alchemy and other traditions as Jung modeled, we can develop our own experimental rituals to honor and dissolve these identities, from the darkest painful demons to the brightest ecstatic gods. Then, as if awakening lucidly in a dream, we can perceive that all experiences can be learned from symbolically, and we can avoid acting out our projections. By letting go of our myths of identity, we can break the habits of self-limiting behaviors, and use the reclaimed energy for living our creativity in the present.
Timothy Lyons 