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Photo by Barun Patro
“I believe I will never quite know
Though I play at the edges of knowing
truly I know
our part is not knowing.”
- Mary Oliver, from “Bone”
I wrote my last post in response to a vivid dream in which an analyst who works with dreams helped a friend of mine who suffers from a serious illness. Last weekend, I attended a conference where this same analyst, Robert Bosnak, lectured on and demonstrated his method of dreamwork. It was incredibly powerful stuff.
I was not really familiar with Bosnak’s work at all at the time of the dream, but when I wrote about it, the dream seemed connected to the idea of not-knowing. This turned out to be the cornerstone of Bosnak’s work, an idea he emphasized again and again throughout his talks. We never really know what a dream “means,” or even, actually, who the dreamer is. To attempt to “know,” we reduce a dream (and truthfully, most experience) to a readily understood message or interpretation, a process by which we lose much that is of value. It reminded me of Zen Master Seung Sahn, who said, “I don’t even teach Buddhism. I only teach don’t know.”
I must have needed to hear this in a big way. My dreaming mind could not even wait for Mr. Bosnak’s lecture but had to dream a preview first, as if to say to my waking mind, “Hey, you, pay attention!”
Kathryn, I, too, was enthralled by Bosnak at work on a dream. Setting aside the interpreting mind that thinks it knows, and working with the body and the emotions as they are located in the body as the dreamer experiences and reports them. I saw integration and synthesis happen before our eyes. Remarkable.