Everything Craves to Become Gold
“This is why alchemy exists,” the boy said. “So that everyone will search for his treasure, find it, and then want to be better than he was in his former life. Lead will play its role until the world has no further need for lead; and then lead will have to turn itself into gold. That’s what alchemists do. They show that, when we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.”
Last night I received a dream where I drove right past a huge house on fire. Everything became white light and I felt an enormous amount of heat all through my body.
An essential quality of all alchemical processes is the necessity for heat - heat brings about change by firing up the animating spirit lost and sleeping in matter. It is my perspective that for humans to go through profound change and expansion, heat, often in the form of suffering, has to happen.
I am completing a three year training program in Embodied Imagination®, which uses dreams as the raw material. Through working a dream we use techniques based on the art of alchemy, which make it possible for us to stew in a state of multiplicity until we witness emergent phenomena that are entirely fresh and have profound implications for change. Change is most profound when heat/pressure is allowed to build through the process of working the dream. Through this process we become refined, increasingly more subtle, resilient and adaptable.
When I was excitedly sharing the wood firing process with my teacher, Robert Bosnak, he likened it to an alchemical process where we, over a period of 54 hours, feed the fire so as to build up enough heat/pressure inside the kiln for unearthed material to harden and undergo profound transformation. Through this process we fire up the animating spirit lost and sleeping in matter and the vessels we gather out of the ashes are infused with a vibrant living essence.
Alchemy, as a process of movement,
Green ~ Black ~ Dark Blue ~ Light Blue ~ White ~ Yellow ~ Red
has become a metaphor system that I experience through dreams, clay/ceramics and my own clay body in my quest to understand how everything craves to become gold.
Inside this clay jug there are canyons
and pine mountains, and the maker of
canyons and pine mountains!
All seven oceans are inside, and
hundreds of millions of stars.
The acid that tests gold is there, and
the one who judges jewels.
And the music from the strings
no one touches, and the source of
all water.
If you want the truth, I will tell you
the truth:
Friend, listen:
the God whom I love is inside.
Kabir
