When we marginalize one of these levels, we lose access to a great deal of what’s actually going on. We miss the messages. We end up trying to solve problems with only a fraction of the information available to us. When we understand these levels, we can engage with the multidimentional quality of reality with more ease.
Using awareness to recognize how they relate to each other and able to track the way process flows between them. The three levels aren’t a hierarchy where deeper is better. Processwork is, in its own language, deeply democratic toward all of them. it treats them as equally important and equally worthy of attention. As Arnold Mindell writes, “every time you ignore sentient, that is, generally unrecognized dreamlike perceptions, something inside you goes into a mild form of shock because you have overlooked the spirit of life, your greatest potential power.”
The level of shared, measurable experience. The things we can name, point to and generally agree about: your schedule, what country you are in or that such a thing as countries exist.
Most of us have been trained to live almost exclusively in consensus reality, the world of measurable facts, schedules and agreed-upon explanations. But much of what shapes our lives is actually happening on deeper, less conscious levels. It’s in the dreamlike images and feelings running beneath the surface and the even subtler currents that move us before we realize them.
Dreamland is the level of symbol, myth, and archetype. It’s the layer of experience where your mother is somehow in the room with you and your partner, where the boss who criticizes you is also the inner critic you’ve been carrying since childhood. When you get angry, you’re not only angry. You’re also, for a moment, a dragon breathing fire. When you collapse on the couch after a hard day, you’re not only tired. You’re also a wounded animal looking for shelter. Dreamland is where consensus reality meets the subtle energetic realm of active imagination, the personal and collective unconscious.
Dreamland is a window into what Arnold Mindell called the dreaming. The dreaming is the underlying intelligence that runs through every person and every situation. The same intelligence that produces your nighttime dreams continuing to express itself all day long through symbol, image, body sensation, flirts and atmosphere. The dreaming doesn’t only happen when you sleep. It’s happening right now, in the gesture you just made, in the metaphor you reached for when you described your week, in the figure who keeps showing up in your life wearing different faces.
Inner work is the practice of noticing these symbolic dimensions and following them. Letting the dragon speak, asking the wounded animal what it needs, taking seriously that the people and patterns and atmospheres around you are also images carrying meaning.
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Essence is the subtlest level, the one that’s hardest to put into words because it lives just beneath the place where words form. It’s the slight pull you feel moving you towards or away from something. The moment right before something arises. The Taoists called this level the Tao that cannot be said. It’s not a thing you can point to. It’s more like a current moving through people and places. Arnold Mindell sometimes reffered to this as Process Mind, or the grater field structuring what arises.
The essence level is where the dreaming hasn’t yet taken on specific form. Before an experience becomes an image, a body sensation or an emotion, it exists as a tendency, a pre-feeling, a kind of subtle inclination. The dragon hasn’t appeared yet, but something fierce is already gathering. The wounded animal hasn’t shown up, but a quality of softness or longing is already in the air. Working at the essence level means becoming sensitive, attuning to these tendencies and using a depth of awareness to track the deeper quality underneath.
for paying attention to what’s already there. Once you start noticing them, you can’t really stop. And when you engage with them, the world begins to feel a lot more alive, magical, fascinating and workable.
Maraya Karena is a Process Work Diplomate, Counselor and Consciousness Researcher based in Portland, Oregon.
“My passion is to study consciousness itself. To develop tools and models that support us to navigate everyday life. To make the reality we share more reflective of who and what we truly are. To find the pulsing, living heart of this life journey. And to engage with it fully and completely. I explore poetry, dance, embodiment, sex, social issues, futurism, philosophy, mysticism, joy and agony all to learn a little bit more about what is really going on and how we can most authentically express ourselves.”
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