Essentials from Other Worlds

On the Fourth of July 1978, I bought a blue exercise book with the intention of recording my dreams.

The year before, I'd begun to study Comparative Religions at Adelaide Teacher's College in South Australia. The first year previously had been an astounding journey through the Religions of the World, Ancient, Modern, World, Tribal, Secular, Theistic, you name it.

If that seems to be an unlikely field to cover in one year, I must add that we had a stunning teacher, Dr Norm Habel. Norm's work was extensive even before he began to teach Comparative Religions. He'd started out as a Pastor in the Lutheran Church, and then as an Old Testament Scholar, he went on to publish many works, most notably a commentary on The Book Of Job.

My previous years had been a time of Breakdown, Turmoil and Bad Medicine, during which time my daughter was born in early 1973. It was also when I completely lost faith in Government Processes, The Media, My Christianity and You Name It.

Crawling gradually into a new reality and reading the works of various mystics, I was astonished to find the words of the Gospel coming into my mind constantly...'Judge not lest you be judged' etc etc. The words of Jesus had a new startling impact, but over time, I found I could not longer relate to the Church of England, my old well-beloved Religion.

(Much later I tried, but they'd changed the Service the week before and the Service was a shambles.)

In the years following my Religion Studies, I felt my daughter should have some experience of a Spiritual life. We were living by then in a small country town and I took her to the Methodist Church. They were without a Pastor for the first year and the services were gamely taken over by the members of the congregation. It was wonderful to hear these simple hearted people struggling to communicate aspects of their faith using examples drawn largely from television. The Folk Religion stopped when they got a stern Pastor and I left the services to attend to my studies.



The Religion Studies course, well, I heard about from a friend who passed on a pamphlet he'd picked up in the Theosophical Bookshop.

Out of curiosity, I turned up at the Teacher's College that first week of term, taking my small daughter along. She wanted to play, she needed my attention and eventually I went outside and listened through the door and I found myself to be hooked.

Norm Habel is a most extraordinary speaker, a rhetorician in the old sense, a story teller and one of the most charismatic and knowledgeable performers I've ever encountered.

In terms of learning, it was as if I'd come across a cache of precious jewels.

Fortunately the receipt of the pamphlet coincided with the introductory lecture.

As a result of that inspiration, I found baby sitters from my circle of friends and began to attend Adelaide Teacher's College twice a week. Even the notebooks I still have from those times sparkle with astounding phrases and poetic summaries of the various philosophies. It was almost too much to be virtually converted to a new Religion twice a week, but it was also too exciting to avoid. Norm was able to speak from within all these different aspects of human spirituality and communicate the world view, the rituals and living reality of culture after culture.

I knew that I'd got hold of something important, a way of understanding with a great potential to heal.

The following year offered another brilliant teacher, Dr Basil Moore. We began with Religion and Philosophy, and again the atmosphere of excitement and challenge was inspiring. The following term's Religion and Sociology seemed more mundane and I skipped a term, impatient for the third subject of the year, Religion and Psychology.

One of the most exciting books of that year had been Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. Like most of his class, Basil was fascinated by the experimental teaching techniques suggested by author Robert Pirsig. Basil therefore decided that the term's work should be driven by the class. Accordingly, he set a list of theoreticians on the subject and included himself in a programme whereby each of us would prepare two papers relating to an aspect of Psychology and Religion and we would then read our papers to the class.

(Basil would take this further in a later year by not simply grading our essays for us, but dividing our marks between his grading, the average suggested by classmates and the grade we'd decided for our own work. The final mark would be an average of all three. I recall that I was the only student whose classmate averages hovered between the barely passed and the high distinction.)

When it came to Religion and Psychology, I fell into disadvantage, or so I thought, almost from the outset.

When it came to the second date, I couldn't attend. I can't recall why. Either my daughter or myself had fallen ill. I only remember my frustration that the class was going ahead without me.

Whatever was wrong was righted by my attendance for the second week, but my pleasure in attendance received a severe blow. All of the proposed papers were taken except two.

The two papers left for me to puzzle through were both to be on the subject of Carl Gustav Jung and that was strange. The previous year I'd missed a class where topics were shared out also. My fellow students and even Norm had suggested I might be interested in Ancient Egyptian Religion and I'd said 'No way', (having previously encountered a few maniacs who were obsessed by the same).

Back then, I missed a class or I was late, and yes, I ended up doing my paper on Ancient Egyptian Religion and it was totally fascinating.

The same people I'd come to dislike with regard to strange ideas of Ancient Egypt were also mad about Jung.

I decided then and there with all the arrogance of youth, that I would do my utmost to disprove Jung.

Hence the Blue Notebook.

The first dream, as I predicted, was mish mash, the most important factors being that I was on a road, I got stuck in sand and was embarrassed and upset. At the end, perhaps the most important point, 'I'm looking for my family.'

I'd studied Freud for awhile during my University years. The University time had been disrupted by a breakdown and wrongly prescribed largactyl as well as several distressing confusions. I didn't think that Freud had all the answers even though the conception of the Unconscious was a fascinating idea. What more could Jung say?

I managed to write the more general paper which dealt basically with Jung's theories and his time and place, but when it came to the second topic, I was stuck. "What was Jung's influence on Modern Science." OK, I'd read overviews of Scientific Theories, I looked at Scientific Magazines in the library and I'd never given up on my interest in Biology, but as for the 'influence' on Science by someone I perceived as more mystical than Freud ever was, I was stuck.

I managed a kind of presentation for the class outlining the ideas of how Science was seen in the Nineteenth Century and quoted Jung's allegations that he too was a Scientist, but it wasn't much. I complained to Basil that Jung's work seemed to range too widely for me to summarise his influence on anything (if he had influence at all) and if he didn't have an influence, then why?

Ah, Education was a brilliant force in my life back then. My teachers decided that the third year of Religion Studies would include a 'Special Topic' subject where the student could put together a thesis on a topic of their choice.

Although Basil taught Educational Psychology, he felt that he wasn't expert in the area of Religion and Psychology and the following year, the Department hired an American expert on Jung who also knew a lot about Hinduism. That was very exciting until the moment I met the new chap. Yes I checked my notebook since I wrote all this. Stephen Gadsen was his name.

We were introduced and we found that we had not one word to say to each other. Other staff and most specifically, the expert on Indian Religions found themselves in the same boat. It turned out that he hated our College, he didn't like us and he loathed Australia. Where his dreams lay we had no idea because he was out of there in a few weeks. Some things don't work out. I never even dreamed of him. Should I google him?

In the end it was Basil, the hard headed Marxist who supervised my Thesis, which turned out to be no end of a Good Thing.

Unwillingly, I'd launched myself into a sea of Jungian information which I still felt to be profoundly irrational. I continued to write out my dreams and along the way I gave up any idea of disproving Jung.

When I brought my work to Basil, I was running it by a Logician with an enormous knowledge of Philosophy and philosophies. Basil helped me to phrase many notions I found irrational so that at least the intentions of the statements were clear. That year also, I noticed that there would be an Australian Association For The Study Of Religions Conference hosted by our College. Recklessly, I put my name down to read my glimmer of a Thesis toward the end of the year, plenty of time, as I thought.

That's another story.

I write of all this because I recently contacted the AASR again and am now again on their mailing list.

I write of all this too to explain the work with dreams. Last year, for the first time I stopped writing my dreams and the loss of that particular habit felt very strange to me indeed.

The last dream written in the mauve book was recorded on 28/9/08. It involved the former Principal of the Teacher's College, the person who eventually amalgamated all the Teacher's Colleges into The South Australian College Of Advanced Education.

Occasionally, from time to time, I've stopped writing the dreams, sometimes for six weeks or so, but never for this long. I should add that in December last year, I was seriously ill from Dental infections, a phenmenon which has become something of a national illness in Australia since the Howard Government removed the major proportion of funding for training in the Dental area.

I hadn't quite imagined that I would stop writing the dreams. I'd bought a new pink dream book long before I ran out of the mauve book and I kept opening the new book wondering if it would stay unfilled. The dreams in the mauve book had been sagas, many of them exhausting. Somehow it had all become too much.

Then, on the 9th of May this year, (the anniversary of my little sister's death in 1994), I dreamed that I was with my now adult daughter who was reciting Wordsworth.

Suddenly we were both surrounded by a group of very wonderful people who were concentrating their strength onto us and I decided that that dream was a pretty good one with which to begin anew.