True Dreams, Empathy, and A Baby in Wartime

We are not witnesses. We are full of many lives.

Hello, Friends

Some time ago, I had a true dream.

True dreams confer advice, information, or wisdom that is integral to the unfolding of this incarnation for the dreamer. They have a particular kind of vividness and are often not narrative.

In the dream, I was an infant, maybe a few months old.
I lay on my back outside on the bare ground. I wore only a diaper.

A war was happening all around me.
I could hear explosions and shouting.
Adults were running past me to escape death.

I screamed in terror for my mother.
I couldn’t yet talk, but the feeling of desperation for her to return
was primal.

This was the entirety of the dream.

Many lives

In my spiritual traditions, our lives are the result of many lives that come from elsewhere and coalesce into what we call individuals.

Of course, genetics is an ordinary demonstration of this. Our parents have DNA that recombines to make us. But that DNA is also a recombination of our four grandparents. And that DNA is a recombination of our eight great grandparents. And. . . you get my point.

We are collages, not coherencies.

More recently, we have gained an understanding of epigenetic traits. Events such as living through a war or focusing on spiritual practice throughout one’s life can influence our genetic expression by turning genes on and off.

Epigenetic traits are heritable. Gene expressions of our ancestors can be passed on.

But in my spiritual traditions, each of us is an infinite event not limited to the influences of our direct ancestors.

We come together at the moment of conception from infinite sources at the pleasure of the creativity and playfulness of this alive-aware reality.

We have spiritual ancestors—teachers and communities woven into our unique dimension.

We are touched by uncountable other lives.

The treasury of worms

A friend of mine called the reservoir of normally unconscious life that informs any particular incarnation our “treasury of worms.” This treasury includes segments of past lives wriggling around in us and connected to us somehow.

Worms are humble, hidden beings, each one looking pretty much the same as the rest.

In contrast to self-aggrandizing versions of remembering our past lives (I was a Mayan priestess, etc, etc), when you open up the treasury of worms, you encounter a bunch of fairly uninteresting and fragmentary stuff.

But occasionally, we see or hear or remember something useful.

I don’t know if the infant screaming on the ground in that theater of war is connected to me through my regular old ancestry or some other life.

But among the many gifts I’ve received from that brief true dream is this: I remember, first-hand, what it feels like to be terrified and alone in the middle of an active slaughter.

Empathy is knowledge

Today, many of us have the idea that we cannot know each others’ experience. Claiming we cannot know someone else’s experience is a means of respecting difference. But it also keeps us at arm’s length. And it does not take into account our many-lived dimension.

Another discourse about knowing other people—the discourse about empathy—has also taken a turn lately.

We have historically viewed empathy as a valuable and useful sensitivity to the condition of other people.

Now, in some circles, empathy is being pathologized as an attack of other people’s emotions on someone who is too open and vulnerable. The solution is to have boundaries.

Instead of training people to use empathy to help others, we are positioning others as dangerous and ourselves in need of protection.

This morning

It occurred to me this morning that we might be trying to avoid waking up to the blazing aliveness and intimacy of our shared pain, loneliness, grief, and yearning

The discourses of unbridgeable difference and dangerous empathy keep us suspended between each other, never touching, never really intimate.

Notions about difference and the unalterable experiential gap between self and other arose in Europe after World War II.

The revelations of the cruelty and depravity of the Nazi death camps called into question the nature of the human. If we just didn’t get too close, perhaps we could avoid another holocaust.

So difference and distance needed to be respected and maintained at all costs.

Now, as the world experiences the genocide in Palestine, some of us prefer the language of witnessing to that of embodied experiencing.

And some of us prefer the language of psychologized somatics to that of actual shared and remembered or empathetic experience.

Proposing and trying to maintain a gap between self and others didn’t work. It hasn’t stopped more genocides from happening. It hasn’t stopped the harm of supremacisms.

The only thing that will turn this ship of humanity around is to find within ourselves gateways to actually caring about each other.

Of course, we have different experiences, different histories. But they all contain within them deep reservoirs of shared feelings, aspirations, pain, loss, and love.

Do we have the courage to touch this intimacy and make it useful?

Love letter

I have, because of the genocide in Palestine, started to form a few friendships with Palestinians in Gaza and the diaspora.

I remembered my dream in this context.

And I want to say that those of us outside of Gaza are not just witnesses or receiving the lives of others second-hand. We are not just hearing stories or intellectually finding points of contact.

We are also not individuals having an individualized somatic experience.

There is profound intimacy and the discovery of collectivity and continuity that is possible if we dare to turn toward it.

And I’m convinced that this is the way to making a new life together.

with infinite love,
Shambhavi

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