Earth Spirit Dreaming: Shamanic Ecotherapy Practices - Elizabeth E. Meacham 2020

Magic, Imagination, and the Quantum Self
Dream-Connecting: Creating New Stories in Vibrational Reality
Dream-Connecting Practices

Some of the energies, sensations and experiences that arise through a return to knowledge and experience in vibrational reality often feel ancient and dramatically wild. These can include fundamentally nonlinear incidents and encounters that feel outside of time, or existing in radically unusual and reordered experiences of time and space. Moving beyond the mechanistic-Cartesian and industrial belief systems, we find our way to knowing beyond time and space as many of us know it. We discover that communication is possible across immense distances, and the edges of “objective” shared reality are porous and fluid. We merge into quantum reality, sense the holotropic nature of the cosmos, experience that each part is contained in the whole. We discover that we are in the whole and that the whole is in us; the universe seems to reside in a starry sky accessible by falling through and into the gateway of our own hearts.

When we step beyond the limits of reason, it is our imagination that becomes the path to shamanic experience. At first, and often after, we may doubt ourselves and wonder if we are “crazy.” Perception and events are beyond synchronicity and can only be described as magical. A kind of meta-synchronicity draws us into a vast network of consciousness that we now know is there, but that we can no longer fully understand or conceptualize to its outer reaches. We only know that we are nodes on a vast web; we are distinct yet fully merged with miraculous interwoven rivers of vibrations. I now realize that while we cannot understand why or how vibrational reality exists, we can foster relationships within vibrational reality. While the limits of our human minds cannot conceive this vast matrix of light, our hearts can access and interact with vibrational reality through love.

Shamanic practitioner and teacher Sandra Ingerman emphasizes the importance of imagination to access the energy fields of the shaman: “Imagination is another key element in performing the miracle of transmutation. We must be able to envision an environment that is pure and clean and which supports all of life. With the power of imagination, we have the ability to sculpt the world we live in.”⁸⁴

As Ingerman, and so many others, remind us, we are “dreaming the wrong dream.” We believe that we are separate from nature; thus we make it so through our thoughts, actions and inherent creative nature as light beings. Our own imaginations are so atrophied through our culture, and lack of connection with Earth and Spirit, that the visions we come up with from our place of separation are anemic at best, and dangerous and destructive at worst. Ingerman continues; “These illusions are seeds that grow into plants of fear, anger, hate, despair, and darkness. We need a new dream to create a new earth.”⁸⁵

The imaginal realms are where we leave the boundaries of reason and concepts and enter into symbolic reality. Shamanic experience, the place of visioning, intersects with the journey of science into the underpinnings of life and the heart of the cosmos, discovering knowing beyond the limits of innate mental structures, seen in the ability to become aware of the structures themselves.

In An Encyclopedia of Shamanism, ⁸⁶ Christina Pratt captures the journey of Western science to find our way back to the fundamental nature of reality; a world of vibrations, visions, dreams, stories and the matrix of cosmic consciousness:

We live in interesting times. Our foremost scientists, to whom we have given the task of explaining the material nature of our universe, are now describing a universe that the shamans have been describing for thousands of years. The scientists have arrived there through fact and experimentation and the shamans through their experiences in altered states of consciousness. We are coming full circle. It is as if the shamans have stood still and the developed world has gone around the circle the long way, through rigorous scientific exploration, and arrive where humanity started, in the shaman’s universe.⁸⁷