Dreams and the dreaming: out-of-body awareness and the legacy of Jung and Steiner

Dreams and the dreaming: out-of-body awareness and the legacy of Jung and Steiner

2011-12-01 00:00:00

In this symposium I want to show how Jung and Steiner both came to understand their own ‘dreaming’ consciousness. This is the same consciousness that Indigenous Australians describe as their ‘dreamtime’. This dreaming consciousness, which I call ‘out-of-body awareness’, was common to all our remote human ancestors prior to written history, and still plays a vital role in bringing us health, insight and enlightenment. Carl Jung and Rudolf Steiner were fellow Austrians born around the same time who understood the significance of this dream-time awareness. They were mystics with a deep interest in the future wellbeing of humanity. Both left an enormous legacy that goes far beyond psychotherapy, in education, agriculture, and, above all, to our spiritual understanding. They had an understanding that dreams opened the portals of spiritual enlightenment by enabling individuals to grow in understanding of themselves and their connection to the universe. The dream-time consciousness known to Australian Indigenous people (described in ‘Dark Sparklers’, by Bill Yidumduma Harney and Jim Cairns, 2004) has many parallels with the dreaming consciousness described by Jung and Steiner, which we can explore further. Both Steiner and Jung showed us how we can monitor our spiritual progress in our dreams as Jung did in his description ‘On Life after Death’.

Speakers: Dr Kay Thomas
Conference: Demo
Areas of Interest / Categories: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health
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