Niān huá wéi xiào – pick up flower, subtle smile
Vernal Equinox March 20, 2020
As I lay in bed, immersed in some dream I can’t recall, my cat stirred me from my dream, while shaking his head intensely, ringing the bell on his collar. The sound and shaking effect, shuffled my dreams like a deck of cards. Each card flipping by was a thin reality of other dreams. I landed in a dream in black and white, where an old man wearing speckles held out a colorful bright pink origami lotus flower in his palm, while looking at me directly and smiling. – Dream ending.
A lot of energy was held in that small bright pink lotus. I paused to feel the heightened crisp energy in the dream space between black and white, past and present, and the colorful seed of awakening I was being offered.
It was held in the hand of Carl Jung. I felt he was offering a symbol from the collective unconsciousness about spiritual unfoldment, synchronicity, dreams, and multidimensional reality. I woke up immediately to record my dream in a dream journaling app on my phone. But instead of writing my dream down immediately, as I would normally, I found myself scrolling through previous dream reports.
I landed on a previous dream I had recorded about Carl Jung and Synchronicity. There’s that dream shuffle again. I was amazed when I found it, because it was as if I was looking for it unconsciously. I could feel the energy of the lotus from my dream, now surrounding me in my physical space, in the form of synchronicity. I knew I was being sent an important message.
Dream Lecture and Synchronicity News – March 8, 2020
I pull out a newspaper from the trash can, and it has a long article about synchronicity on the front page. The headline is in large bold letters, but very long sentences. I take the paper over to a group of women meeting in a building of a co-working space. I have a book on dreams by Carl Jung in one hand, and a newspaper article on synchronicity in the other. I join their meeting and begin talking about the topic of dreams and synchronicity. I do so by example of finding this newspaper article on synchronicity in the bathroom trash, right before coming to give this lecture on dreams. – Dream ending.
In the potent energy held in the Archetype, Jung reaches across time and space to send me messages in dreams and synchronicity. This is a fascinating study in consciousness. The Pink Lotus itself is an archetype associated with the Buddha and nirvana. In some Buddhist traditions paper lotus flowers are created and burned as ancestral offerings or for those who have crossed over, or as a kind of spiritual currency, offering appreciation for blessings, and invoking good fortune of prosperity and health (Shih-Mou).
Zen Buddhism is rooted in the wordless transmission of the Flower Sermon, where the Buddha holds up a Lotus Flower with a smile, and is received by a smile from Mahakashyapa, who then becomes his entrusted successor (Dumoulin, pg. 9).
Jung writes, “One day the Buddha silently held up a flower before the assembled throng of his disciples. This was the famous “Flower Sermon.” Formally speaking, much the same thing happened in Eleusis when a mown ear of grain was silently shown. Even if our interpretation of this symbol is erroneous, the fact remains that a mown ear was shown in the course of the mysteries and that this kind of “wordless sermon” was the sole form of instruction in Eleusis which we may assume with certainty” (Jung, Kereny, pg. 179).
Now this connection comes with the arrival of my dream on the Vernal Equinox, a time when the Elysian Lesser Mysteries took place, in preparation for the Greater Mysteries in the Fall, as referenced by Jung in the image of harvested grain. As the fates would have it, I did take part in journeying into the Lesser Elysian Mysteries, weeks after having this dream, when I participated in an online class series by Robert Moss on Shamanic Dreaming with the Goddess.
In my journey, it is revealed that as Demeter the Mother, I enter the underworld in search for Kore. I present her with a white flower.
Dreams are a path of direct experience, and wordless transmission, through the potency of archetypal energies. Synchronicity is the transmission of messages from the world behind the world, which may include written words, or words of speech overhead, or a song that comes on the radio, or a dream image showing up in waking life, accompanied by a larger energy of recognition that may feel other worldly. The mysteries of the collective unconscious are a place we frequent in dreams. In my dream, Carl Jung presented this to me as a pink paper lotus and a smile.
Written by Valley Reed©2020
Sources
- Dumoulin, Heinrich (2005). Zen Buddhism: a history. p. 9.
- Jung, C. G. & Kerényi, C. (2005). Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis. Routledge; 2 edition. Routledge, p. 179.
- Shih-Mou Kou, Shu-Chi Chao, Chi-Hsiung Tseng, “The Construct and the Symbolic Meanings of Paper Lotus in Taiwan” Department of Visual Communication Design National Yunlin University of Science & Technology.
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jssd/60/0/60_67/_pdf/-char/ja
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