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Dream Gates

Leymah Gbowee, the 39-year-old Liberian peace activist, told NPR that she launched her movement in 2002 when a voice in a dream told her to “gather the women of the churches to pray for peace.”  She shared this year’s Nobel Peace Prize with Liberia’s woman president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Yemeni democracy activist Tawakkul Karman. Gbowee’s…

Quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli declared that dreams were his “secret library”. He recorded dreams and shared detailed reports with Jung over the quarter century before his premature death.  Einstein, Niels Bohr, Kekule – and Newton in his own day, and Hypatia in hers – were all dreamers. They drew inspiration from sleep dreams and developed…

Mark Twain was a lifelong student of meaningful coincidence. In 1878, he gathered some of experiences and experiments in a most interesting article he titled “Mental Telegraphy.” He waited 20 years to publish it, fearing ridicule or incredulity. When public interest and scientific research (notably the investigations of the young Society for Psychical Research in…

The cardinal navigational law of serendipity is this: You can only get to the magic kingdom by getting lost. You get there when you think you are going somewhere else and fall off the maps. Take the case of Mark Twain’s search for fortune in Brazil. He wasn’t yet Mark Twain. He was young Sam…

 Dreams and twilight states of consciousness have inspired great scientists, inventors, musicians, writers and liberators of human possibility throughout history. Here are some examples: Scientist Otto Loewi dreamed the experiment that enabled him to prove that nerve impulses are chemically transmitted, a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize. Beethoven composed a canon in his…

  We learn from fairytales the importance of knowing the name of the demon that is on our case. Remember Rumplestiltskin? One of the most horrible demons that besets modern lives nearly succeeded in erasing his name from our minds. The word acedia was once pronounced obsolete by the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary.…

One of the many forms of healing that becomes available to us through dreams is the healing of our relations with our ancestors. Sometimes this reaches far back through the bloodlines. Let me share the story of Aine, a woman of Irish Catholic descent living in my native Australia. Going through old documents relating to…

 I am with a group of friends. Then I see him and my heart leaps. I run and jump all over him and receive the same passion in return. It’s my husband, but he looks like Brendan Fraser. He is insisting we go to the beach. When we get there he shows me the painting…

Awen – inspiration – was, as Caitlin Matthews reminds us, “the supreme preoccupation of Celtic poets, especially among those who had inherited the ancient prophetic and visionary arts of the ovate or faith – probably the earliest form of Celtic shaman.” [1] The word awen derives from the Indo-European root -uel, meaning ‘to blow’, and is kissing cousin with the Welsh, awel meaning “breeze”. In…

I recommend getting to know Death, and approaching life’s choices with the clarity that the presence of Death brings. Saint Ignatius Loyola, the warrior-father of the Jesuit order and no slouch at visualization, recommended the following means of making a sound decision:  Suppose I am at the point of death. What course of action would…
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