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Shen Heyong
Dreams of Xixindao
An introduction by Robert Bosnak
Washing the heart: A Passion for Dreams
Ten years ago, early on in our friendship, Shen Heyong took me to Tai Mountain. As we went up through the clouds I realized that the mountain actually looks the way it is portrayed in Chinese brush paintings. Suddenly, above the clouds, there was sun and a monastery. We heard the monks chant. When we followed the sound towards the temple we realized it came from a recording. We spoke how symbolic this was for current China, that the sounds of the Chinese spirit on the sacred mountain of Confucius were electronic. We spoke of the Cultural Revolution and the dramatic attempt to alter the course of cultural history. We spoke how the ancient spirit had not died and about where to re-find it, besides in a recording from past spirit. I was moved to hear my friend tell me the dream of his father, still vividly alive after over a decade. It washed over my heart. We share a passion for dreaming.
Dreams embody profound intelligence. In our current day we make little use of this dramatic human resource, beyond asking them to foretell our future, a task they are as ill equipped to accomplish as is our waking mind. Dreams foretelling the future are even rarer than a correct prediction of the future of the stock market.
Why be involved with dreams? Professor Shen explains this to us. He tells how his passion for dreaming has changed his life and has guided him in directions that have carried their fruits far into Chinese society. Without his dreams, many of the young victims of the Sichuan and Yushu earthquake would not have had a chance to find their way back to resilience. Because of his dreams, many orphans in China were nourishes in a "Garden of the Heart & Soul". Since 2007 his dream has helped create such "Gardens of the Heart & Soul" to help the psychological development of the orphans in 23 cities in the mainland of China. His dream calls for 100 cities by 2013! I have been deeply touched by his efforts to reach out by way of the healing imagination of dreaming.
The spirit of China has been vividly alive for thousands of years, long before the current version of Chinese society. It lives on in contemporary dreams of ordinary people, unsuspecting of the treasures they carry within.
One of the great pioneers of the Western psyche, C.G. Jung, found that the world of images is as real as the world of matter. Just very different. This world presents itself as physical to the unsuspecting eye of the dreamer who is fully convinced that he is awake. So he mistakes the apparent physicality of dreaming for the physical world. And so the many bizarre dramas of the dream world unfold.
Finding out the laws of this real world of imagination, and reconnecting to its intelligence has been a science in the West since 1900, when Sigmund Freud wrote his momentous book on dreams. Since then his craft, psychoanalysis, has spread the world over. But the science of imagination is bound to the place where it evolves.
A Viennese or Swiss exploration of the dreaming imagination will fit China only partially, and not very well even at that. China needs to develop its own contemporary science of imagination, its own particular understanding of the intelligence of Chinese dreaming.
With the arrival of neuroscience, the value of dreaming and its clinical value has come back to the foreground. We know now how dreaming is lived by the brain. But dreaming is more than just brain activity. Dreaming is a world that surrounds us entirely for more than 10 years of our lives, while we dream our existence. The latest dream research shows that we may be dreaming more than 3 hours every night, 1/8 part of our whole lives, more than 10 years! It is world of rich minerals, veins of intelligence that can be mined like gold.
No longer is materialism and dreaming at loggerheads. We now know that spirit is always embodied and that the meaning response in humans has a direct effect on our health. Science increasingly bears this out. We are in a new era in which matter and spirit belong to an ongoing process of continuous embodiment. In this new world -- utterly unknown to the people who lived long before us and who bequeathed us their world views -- the electronic voice of the contemporary spirit encased in matter can learn new chants to contain its new meanings. The future is now.
Shen Heyong leads the way in China. And we are all grateful for his efforts.
Robert Bosnak
Past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams
Founding president of the International Society for Embodied Imagination
Santa Barbara, California, June 2010
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