Sacred Tree of Dreaming

    We all need a point of departure and return to embark upon our journeys into the other dimensions of being. If we want to actively enter into the Dreamtime, we need a portal of entry, and there can be many such doors, from your dream images, to vivid memories of magic places we experienced in nature, stories that had amazing trees in them, to a variety of evocative poetic and artistic images. My favorite is to enter the dreaming consciously, intentionally through what the Cherokee call “The Sacred Tree of Life,” and let an adventure of traveling between the worlds begin.

Legends and folklore around the world tell of magic trees, alchemical trees, cabalistic trees, the Trees of Life, Trees of Knowledge, ancestral trees, the Druid Oak, Scandinavian Ygdrassl. The numinosity of the tree-image harkens back to our simian ancestry, the arboreal life in those primordial trees who mothered, sheltered and fed our arboreal ancestors, in a time before humans climbed down and took up dwelling in caves. A rather universal or archetypal theme found around the world is that once there was a time when a Great Tree connected Heaven and Earth. Because humans made some prideful mistake, the Great Tree uniting the worlds fell causing a great disconnection, and giving rise to spirits of disease and to suffering. This produced a great nostalgic longing amongst humans to return to the primordial times of integrated and harmonious living, when Heaven and Earth and all worlds were accessible and harmonious. Through the trances of the shamans passage-ways were found into the Dreamtime where the Great Tree, which stands in the middle of this material world, roots deeply in the lower world, and whose branches rise to the heavenly realms still lives. You can access it through entry into Dreamtime and in coming to experience, know, and align with it come to promote greater harmony within yourself and the world that surrounds you.

If you want to intentionally enter the Dreamtime, and go wide awake on shamanic voyages, a good way is to find through your childhood memory of amazing trees you experienced, or by creative imagination a Great Tree as your portal. This is one time tested and perhaps the most ancient and venerated dream gate reaching far back in human pre-history. You can find a hole to enter, or make a door, “abracadabra” and once you have created this portal, your journeys can begin. For starters, once you have your Dreaming Tree, I suggest you take plenty of time to merge and identify with it, and have a fully body experience of it in your viscera, muscles and bones, in all your “limbs.” Such embodiment will deeply install it for you. Playing a little shamanic drumming track while you do so will help you slow down and keep your focus. This first step will be to simply install, explore, and embody this Tree.

 

Three Steps: Association, Amplification, and Embodiment

Before I lead you on an experiential journey into the Great Dreaming Tree, I will first assist you in finding the image you need, so you can creatively make alterations that support your shamanic dreaming. As with any kind of image work, it is important to make some associations, amplifications, and then to embody it. To make associations ask this: What is a tree to me? You can get the feel of a tree with your felt-sense and then begin writing out different things that trees mean to you personally. For amplification, then you can go to your library and do some tracking on mythological, folklore, and ritualistic use of trees—thus building up your fund of images and ideas. This process of associating and then amplifying is necessary to give imagination its due respect, to hone and specific your dreaming faculties. The next step is to take a little journey, assisted by drumming. In this first journey you will search your memory for trees that have been important to you. Perhaps this will include trees you climbed and sat in as a child, or built a tree house in. Perhaps a large tree you looked at from your classroom window during your school days. Perhaps there will be trees from fairy tales or movies you experienced as a child. Recall and look at them all, one by one, and notice what you feel in the middle of your body. When you feel it come alive there, with this one tree over all the others you have looked at, you can feel how it stands out in your heart. You now have selected the holographic template of your Great Tree. I will share some associations and amplifications to get us going, here, and to give an example of the process you may use throughout journeying. Then we will take a journey into that tree to explore it and set it up with needed modifications, turning it into our Great Tree. We will explore it through embodied imagination, so that we not only ‘see’ the tree in the minds eye, but feel it in the cells, tissues, viscera, bones and limbs—through out the body. We will move through it and experience it all slowly using our felt-sensing capacity.

 

My Personal Associations:

Trees for me have been places of play and imagination, of day dreaming and fantasizing, of climbing—often whenever I played outside it was in the ambiance or shade of a big tree. I have always wanted to live in a forest, and have spent more than a decade in the forest at Crows Nest, where I now live, in the Southwest Michigan woodlands. When I bring trees to mind I think of shelter, endurance, branching out, silent presence, and a dwelling place for many creatures, a roosting place for vultures and raptors. In the forest I observed birds and squirrels using the branches like a system of roads to travel the forest from above the ground. Trees beautify the landscape, calm the trouble soul, and offer shade to relax in on hot days, and sometimes have holes you can nestle inside of.

What do I already know of trees? They have roots, trunks, branches, and leaves. The may stand tall like cedars and pines, or hover lower to the ground to keep cool, like olive trees. They may blossom, and shed nuts (seeds) and fruit, to reproduce, and to feed humans and other creatures, just as they did long, long ago for our tree dwelling ancestors. The trunk can be massively thick and strong, and thin and incredibly flexible, resistant to strong winds. All kings of creature live inside them and feed off them, hence they have a maternal aspect. The tree shows us how from a tiny seedling, something can grow into fullness and maturity, like the human soul. Incessant processes of metabolism of liquid nutrients and transformations of sunlight by photosynthesis seem the alchemical operations natural to a tree. The tree knows how to find a water source, in the darkest and hardest of grounds, and can move its leaves to collect sunlight, shift its branch growing strategy to accommodating alternate sources of light when other trees block it. The roots can shift towards the right or left of an obstacle (stone) on the way to the water sources. Legend says they are wiser than humans, tall, silent, yet knowing things, and generous. We build our homes and books out of trees.

The tree roots are anchors and conveyors of life giving nutrients deep down. They move and grow in the darkness. They support the weight and the forces that act upon the tree. In humans being rooted often means grounded, or connected to ancestral traditions, or depths vs. shallowness. To put down roots means to really settle into something. From my work as a psychologist, I know a tree can be produced in a drawing as an unconscious symbol expressing oneself. People who feel shallow or unsupported or un-solid often have small or lacking root structures. People who are outgoing and have a richness of relationships often reflection this in many branches reaching out, whereas people who are less social may have their limbs staying closer to the trunk, almost protectively. If there are birds or animals in trees, so the theory goes, it can reflect relationships with other creatures, or the longing for such.

All of these descriptions are based on what I already know. By bringing them to mind I review and tap that richness of knowing, it comes more to the fore, and may help me as I set up my Shamanic Tree.

 

Mythological and Symbolic Amplifications

I began this chapter with some amplification about Heaven and Earth being united by the Great Tree, and drew some mythological parallels briefly. I will extend my amplification with a little more description. While the image is always richer than the many symbols that can be drawn from it, it helps to know the various ways humans, across cultures and historical eras have found meanings in an image of a certain kind. By looking a variety of tree symbols, in our case, we can further open up the riches embedded in a symbol, and explore and inquire in fresh ways, and make some decisions about what we will build into this image that shall be a portal for shamanic travels.

 

The Alchemical Tree

Alchemy made the philosophical tree a central symbol of its opus. The tree at once depicted natural life, and the inner alchemy of soul development that follows its own laws. The alchemists knew the Philosophical Tree as transformation symbol, reflecting through the cycles and seasons its transformational process, a cyclic process of dying and rebirth or renewal, and endurance of an initiatory ordeal through the challenges and forces dealt with in the cycles and seasons. They took the natural tree image and made various symbolic alterations in it for archiving the elements of their alchemical craft. The resulting Philosophical Tree became a kind of icon and map, with a painted image of the Philosophic Tree bearing the Sun, Moon, and Stars as luminous gold and silver fruits, with various metals of the planets hanging from its branches. The Tree might also be filled with singing birds and flowers. The Tree became a kind of hologram of the psyche, encoding all the archetypes and numinous forces of the soul with which the alchemists worked their opus.

 

The Cabbalist’s Tree of Life

A similar Tree is that of the Cabbalist’s, the Tree of Life, a kind of holographic library and filing system for all the archetypes they knew and worked through their visionary travels amongst its branches. Often there are ten circles in these images reflecting sefirot. The branches or pathways between the sefirot symbolize the connections of the different levels of the multidimensional cosmos. The lower levels contain the Malkuth, the Kingdom of earthly reality, while above them are the realms of planets and elements, and higher still, the mundus archetypus, the archetypal world, containing the angelic hierarchies, and at the top is the Infinite itself, the “Horizon of Eternity.” The mystical travelers in these realms often explored philosophical questions like: “How the infinite or unfathomable depth of being support and sustain existence? “Or “How does the world arise out of nothing?” As a cosmogram, the Kabbalistic Tree of life is simple enough it could be memorized in a day, but one can easily spend a lifetime traveling it and contemplating it, and working it, for the Cabbalists use far more than intellect. They use their imaginations; enter the imaginal world as a tool for expanding the horizons of consciousness and transformation of their own being.

 

The Scandinavian Yggdrasil

In the mythologies of Scandinavia the great Yggdrasil, either in yew or ash tree form, is imaged as central to the three worlds and as having three gigantic roots that reach into its different worlds. This sacred tree is surrounded with living images. Asgard is the land of the gods and light elves. Midgard is home to the humans, dwarves, giants and dark elves, and Nifheim is the realm of the dead. The branches and foliage protect all the worlds, which were envisioned as distinct flat shaped lands, connected by the three major passageways of the roots. Close by to Yggdrasil live the Norns, those three sisters who spin the web of destiny, and water the Yggdrasil from the sacred spring of Urd. Yggdrasil feeds the animals like deer and goats that nibble on the leaves, and the squirrel, Ratantosk runs up and down this living tree of dreams. On the top perches a magnificent Eagle while at its roots the great serpent Nidhogg gnaws. Eagle and Serpent are symbolic of the lasting tension of balancing the opposites of Heave and Earth.

 

The Cherokee Sacred Tree of Life

The Cherokee, like many North American First Nation peoples valorized the Sacred Tree of Life, as a multiplex symbol that saw its roots firmly planted in the earth, its trunk strong, its roots reaching into the underworld, and its branches reaching to the heavens, and branches reaching out in all directions, filling the medicine wheel of life.[1] Many tribes and nations have found inspiration and wisdom in the Sacred Tree for countless generations.[2] As symbolic it reminded people of their place in life, the need to be rooted but flexible to withstand the winds of change, to branch out to all one’s relatives, human and nonhuman, and to live in harmony and balance with all realms of multidimensional reality. Amerindians generally saw the Sacred Tree as a community gathering place, as a sacred central pole or axis mundi” for the community, and as providing quiet place of contemplation, peace, and centering. It also has forms as a shaman’s tree, used for climbing between the worlds. One of the great symbolic teachings has to do with how our life cycle is like that of a tree which blossoms and spreads leaves in the spring, the morning of life. How it flourishes, grows, expands in summer, the middle of life, how it begins sacrifice and shedding its leaves in the autumn of life, and how it remains wise in the Winter of life.  Each of the seasons a tree goes through are paradigmatic models for our own individual lives and behavior, teaching us about the wisdom of birth, growth, sacrifice, death and renewal throughout the life-cycle.

The Sacred Tree is also a self-symbol, growing from its inward core outward and upward. The inner growth of a tree, engraved in its concentric rings symbolizes the need for inward growth physically, psychologically and spiritually. The outer body of the tree symbolizes the reflection of this growth in the outer life, just as we can see the inner growth of a tree expressed in the exterior of the tree.

 

The Shaman’s Tree

Mircea Eliade suggested that many tribal shamans have selected for their shamanic journey portal the actual Sacred Tree of their tribe and mythological traditions, and inverted it into an inward mystical itinerary or map for their journeys. The Shaman’s Tree being an axis mundi symbol reaches through all three worlds, rooting in the mythological underworld, stretching to the hole in the sky where access to the upper world is possible. The Shaman’s Tree working like a ladder permits mystical descent and ascent. In my own personal version, my shaman’s Tree is a mighty oak, very ancient, yet highly plastic, so that I can add new roots or branches as needed for avenues into new and as yet unexplored domains. I pass through a little hole into the Shaman’s Tree and drop down into the lower part of the trunk, which is hollowed out. There is a beautiful oak door and as vestibule with finally carved branch with acorns made on a wall, where there is a carved out bench for me to sit. I usually pause here to ready myself before descending further. When ready I descend through a central root, long, curved and dark. As I approach the end of it my chief spirit guide meets me, and I then dive through a hole coming out of the root and falling through the night sky of the lower world into a small lake surrounded by a pine forest. This is my safe place, a realm that is hermetically sealed by an invisible protective force-field against any unfriendly or intruding forces, a realm where I can relax, heal, collect myself, and when ready, go into a cave were my chief Guide is waiting by a sacred fire. After offering tobacco and cedar, and a little dancing around the fire to the drum beat, I connect with my Chief Guide and explain my intention on this particular journey. No matter which world I will need to work in, my Chief Guide accompanies me, and often leads the way, and if we need to go to the upper world, we fly up through the trunk together, and up a central branch right to the hole in the upper world, through which we always pass together. I view the Shaman’s Tree much like the Cabbalist views the Tree of life, as a kind of holographic creation encoded for portal to the archetypal and numinous dimensions of the various realities of psyche and cosmos.

 

Searching My Memory for a favorite Tree Image

I grew up on the edge of a forest called Devonshire. From my bedroom window, in the edge of the forest, about one hundred feet away I used to look at this great oak tree that stood in its massiveness in the foreground of the forest awaiting directly behind it. It stood taller than any other tree, its branches the size of most other trees. For some reason, probably because I was a window and roof top gazer, I love to look at this tree and let me fantasies spin around it. In evenings I would often climb on the rooftop to watching the sunset silhouetting this tree. Upon the roots of another large oak in the forest I built a tiny fort amongst its massive gnarled and protruding roots. I laid downed sticks over them and hollowed out a space just big enough for me to crawl in. There was also a larger sycamore above a cave I dug out myself in playtime over a couple of summers. I used to climb towards the top to survey things far and wide. I could see the spire of St Alban’s church about a mile away towering over treetops. I met all kinds of interesting insects and a nest of blue robin eggs, and climbed daily to see them hatching.

 

 

Setting Up Your Shamanic Tree

You will need to clear a space for this journey, free of any kind of interruption. So turn off cell phones and get off the Internet, find a place where you can stand for this journey, and if you can’t stand, then sit upright. Most journeys we lie down but to fully experience the Great Tree and install it deeply as a neuronet as a dream gate we need you to stand as a tree does, rooted in the ground, and reaching above while branching out. You will need some monotonous shamanic drumming music to help you enter the necessary altered state, to slow down and explore, and maintain your focus, eliminating distractions. Read this following journey script through a couple of times slowly, and then put on your drumming music and while standing with eyes closed. Follow along as best you can with the suggestions to fully explore and establish your Great Tree, your inter-dimensional communications connection to the multidimensional “world wide web” of the shaman’s cosmos, connecting to the Internet used by our Paleolithic ancestors.

 

(Journey Protocol to come in future Newsletter)