Editors’ Introduction:

Bridging Worlds

Karen Jaenke and Jürgen Werner Kremer

The contributors to the issue “Bridging Worlds” find their socio-cultural location within the Western world, yet they seek to bridge to sustainable Indigenous paradigms. Indigenous cosmologies are relational ethico-onto-epistemologies, which matter ever so urgently as the Western reductionist and materialist metaphysics acts out a repetition compulsion of failure to care for all beings on this Earth. Westerners who make forays into Indigenous ways of knowing and being obviously cannot claim Indigeneity in the sense of living or having grown up in a world dedicated to radical reciprocity and implicit or explicit values of sustainability. Yet folks of Western mind can intentionally adopt certain transformative practices (personal, communal, and activist) that potentially shift the well-boundaried masterful individualistic self, enshrined in the West and centrally implicated in its poly-crisis, towards more a porous way of being in intimate and deep relationality and conversation with Life. Reversing the conquering, masterful attitude to a receptive listening one offers an initial step towards remembrance of relationality and interdependence in the profound Indigenous sense, as it is lived to this day by aboriginal peoples all over this world. It asserts the continued presence as well as the remembrance of a decolonial imaginary that manifests in various acts of resistance to the dominant modern narrative and its practices.

The authors of this issue adopt different touchpoints, or “preferences,” that serve as bridges into more permeable or relational ways of perceiving and being. Cultivating a relationship to one’s preference is a way to acknowledge our ethical socio-ecological responsibilities in the co-creation of the realities we live in. According to some traditional teachings, we each are naturally drawn to certain “preferences”—something in this world that calls to us, activating our interest and even fascination. Within physics, preferences are like the “strange attractor” of chaos theory, or within the language of analytical psychology, “the call of the soul’s desire”. The preference is something that gives one a sense of purpose; it acts as a motivating force, naturally bringing pleasure or fulfillment. By attending to our intrinsic preferences within the socio-cultural world we live in, and by developing consistent attentional practices within relationality to tend to that aspect of the world that calls out to us, we can begin to find our way in a traditional manner, that is, in the way of reciprocity and balancing ourselves in the web of life.

So our authors followed a trail of breadcrumbs, leading through the forest into an ancient way of knowing that is embodied by Indigenous peoples the world over to this day. Ultimately, the trail leads us to revise the story of modernity and its twin colonialism (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) and address the imbalances and calamities we presently are confronted with. The underlying principle is: by attending in a disciplined manner to the specificity and depth of one’s preference, a complex world of interconnections may be revealed. A single thread in the web of life can become a sacred calling that leads into the intricacies of the entire network! In other words, the underlying patterns of relationships central to the workings of the universe reveal themselves through a single thread when followed with consistency and relational reverence. Thus, through the specificity of a single deeply-held preference, the circuitry of the whole can be known.

When a deeply respectful stance is adopted towards one’s preference, living presences in nature become communicative partners. When adopting profound respect for the intelligence dwelling within nature—whether the elements of earth or water; or the minds of plants and animals; or the archetypal spirit world of dreams, visions, and ritual—then this respect becomes a bridge into ecological intimacy and entanglement with the web of life. Following one’s preference, then, becomes an initial foray into the relational and interdependent world of Indigenous peoples, bringing shifts in attentional awareness and consciousness processes, while restoring our human calling to be critical caretakers of biodiversity. This is a remembrance of our interrelational capacities, as it were, the remembrance of indigenous roots.

The authors represented here embody different preferences—dreams, plant medicine, the element of water, ritual practices, and the dreaming body—as pathways of personal wisdom. One’s preference can also manifest as all-encompassing passion to understand some facet of the universe, including the psychological universe—such as the difference between the way the Western self is constructed and inhabited, and the formation of self in native contexts.

The practice of attending to one’s preference, in all its consequence, offers a methodology for people of Western mind for returning to and remembering indigenous ways of knowing and being. The consequence of attending deeply to one’s preference includes reaching for a rational-emotive receptivity that opens into processes of relationality. But to offer a wider framework for why this approach and its fruits are significant, we broadly consider three distinct processes, or configurations of human consciousness throughout our human presence on the planet. While these processes are commonly placed into linear evolutionary schemata in Western thinking (implying the exceptionality and superiority of modernity), the emphasis and assertion here is on structures or processes of consciousness that may be either active or hidden as potential.

Three Onto-Epistemological and Ethical Positions

Drawing on Owen Barfield’s seminal work (1957), Jurgen Kremer (1994, 2008) identifies three significant qualities of human consciousness, which constitute broad onto-epistemological positions, or basic ways of perceiving and being-knowing, i.e., ways of co-creating reality and being in the world; they also entail ethical commitments. The three worldviews are: indigenous consciousness of past and present Indigenous, shamanic, tribal, or aboriginal societies and civilizations; modern consciousness, the imagination built upon colonial moves (together with its postmodern internal critical strands); and recovering indigenous consciousness, i.e., attempts to make indigenous beingknowing that had been left behind, present again (for a more detailed tabulation and discussion see Kremer, 2008, pp. 148-149).

Barfield’s critical move is to clearly separate the “unrepresented” from “the world we accept as real…in fact a system of collective representations” (Barfield, 1957, p. 20). Sixty years later, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman (2019) makes the same distinction when emphasizing that there are no public objects sitting around out there and that whatever we perceive serves survival and reproduction—whatever is out there almost certainly does not look like the perceptions we generate.

Inspired by Barfield’s original participation, and Lévy-Bruhl’s and Jung’s participation mystique, Kremer’s term ‘indigenous consciousness’ carries less historical baggage, hinting at past and present decolonial communal and relational indigenous presences. Indigenous consciousness and attention is embedded in nature, woven into the web of life, experienced both in intentional and habitual ways as nature/culture. The center of experience, the self, has permeable boundaries that allow for intimate intra-actions and reflective consciousness in mythic stories, ritual instructions, and ethical obligations expressed in teaching stories, prayer, and ritual proceedings. This synthetic type of consciousness affords an intimate, systemic connection with the world one is embedded in. Perception and beingknowing are woven into a process understood as co-creation, a process in which human obligations are seen as critical. This includes attention to the living presence of mountains and rivers, the human community amidst animal and plant relations, and the world of archetypal or spiritual presences. “Indigenous consciousness” does not point to some Edenic past, but is a painstaking, at times hazardous, way of caring for balance in the web of life. Attentional shifts, such as in religious trance, facilitate encounters with the numinous or the sacred, also known as the depths of indeterminacy in the terminology of quantum theories or Bohm’s implicate order (1980). These types of experiences are accorded great importance in indigenous consciousness and they are relatively common and easily accessed both in individual as well as collective pursuits. The inclusion of somatic, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions of knowing, a synchronization of left and right hemispheric processes, of reasoning and felt senses, gives rise to a holistic way of sensing and perceiving, the result of intimate intra-actions in the world, i.e., the co-creation of reality.

By the seventeenth century, during the Age of the Enlightenment in the West, the center of perception and thinking had shifted, such that the Western mind severed itself from its intimate connection with nature and its awareness of the co-creation of reality. Selfhood came to be experienced as a boundaried, separate entity, becoming increasingly individualistic. This can be described as dissociative move, a severance from subtle aspects of reality that naturally reach into the experience of Indigenous persons, a self that sees itself responsibly implicated in the process of maintaining balance in the web of life. In this second onto-epistemological process, called lost or “unconscious participation” (Barfield) and “modern consciousness (Kremer), the relationship with nature becomes increasingly severed and oppositional. The collective representations of modernity are mistaken for reality itself and thus they have become idols, to use Barfield’s term, appearing natural and inevitable.

Ancient myths, ritually in-spirited and renewed, that once organized cultures and imparted an ethics and meaning structure, come to be devalued as irrational and recede from consciousness, displaced by mechanistic and materialistic science as the new modern myth of progress and control, the idol of modernity that seems all too natural. The egoic personality structure that now predominates is rigidly-boundaried, focused on left hemispheric processes (McGilchrist, 2009, 2021), reducing reason increasingly to one-dimensional rationality (Marcuse, 1960) which is prized as the singularly most important human achievement. As a result there is a tendency to devalue not only emotions, body, and spirit, but the complex richness of reason. Indigenous consciousness is dismissed as ‘primitive’ and individuals in unconscious participation are severed from the awareness of reality as co-created, from the sources of creativity and regeneration. This severance means that they are also largely insulated from ongoing access to the collective unconscious, what Jung called the unus mundus and what quantum theories would call the space of indeterminacy—something larger and more complex than what one-dimensional rationality can grasp. Although in modern consciousness there is no longer collective access to the archetypal layer of the unconscious, individual access can be gained through dreams and other practices facilitating experiences of the imaginal realm.

The various strands of postmodern thinking, now sensing the losses and strictures of this construction of self and consciousness process, represent an internal Western critique; they reach to overcome the increasingly apparent limitations of the paradigm of modernity, yet without, ultimately, leaving its boundaries. In the face of the continuing onslaught of the forces of modernity/coloniality (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018), indigenous consciousness persists in contemporary Indigenous societies and, importantly, remains an active potential for modern individuals, now with increasing frequency inspiring reconceptualizations and activism.

The third onto-epistemological process, recovering indigenous consciousness, or future participation, is a position of hope, ultimately potentially leading to decoloniality in the West and other societies impacted by its paradigm. It envisions that people of Western mind regain participation in the world of phenomena, with recovered awareness of the co-creation of reality. This would be the recovery of relationality, the resurgence of indigenous consciousness in the Western mind that remains as potential to this day. It would mean the establishment of socio-cultural practices that facilitate relational presence, whether in education, psychological practice or other arenas. Tending the access portal to the visionary realms of archetype and spirit, together with an appreciation of the presence of mind in nature, of plant and animal intelligence, will facilitate deepening engagement with the complexities of the web of life. Kremer (1994) defines some of the anticipated coordinates of recovering indigenous consciousness or relationality and the sense of self it entails. Human beings of Western mind may once again experience themselves as an integral and intimate part of nature and dedicate their knowledge to create and maintain balance with nature. They would intentionally participate in cycles of nurturing and being nurtured, a process of intra-actional intimacy and relationality (instead of the separation that interaction implies). Technology would serve ecology, producing sustainable systems. Traditional ecological knowledge and mythologies of surviving indigenous traditions will emerge as pivotal inspirations in this process.

This is not a nostalgic return to Western ancestral origins, it is an existential confrontation with the anxious moments that arise from the demise of one cosmovision, or worldview, the moment before a new one arises. For example, in the Old Norse descriptions of ragnarök (Kremer & Bjarnadóttir, 2000), even the gods don’t know, there is nothing but uncertainty. “Unconsciousness reigns / on the midnight breath; / Thought fails / in tired beings” (Titchenell, 1985, p. 268). New cosmologies may arise out of this unsettling moment. Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme (1992) and others are calling for new mythologies, and these may arise through various sources—individual and communal dream work; the wisdom and visions generated through individual and collective use of trance processes; imaginal depth work with the myths of old for their renewal; and through communal dialogues in which felt sense, critical reflection, and integrative imagination come together. Once-forgotten mythologies and rituals, now renewed and, as needed, revisioned, may re-emerge as a revitalizing force within communities. Psychedelics as a path to relationality and healing have received increasing therapeutic and research attention in recent years, documenting healing neurological processes that facilitate neural interconnectivity rather than dissociative processes (e.g., Carhart-Harris, 2018). The recovery of broader access to the collective unconscious and the deeper sources of creativity, to the generative forces of vision and indeterminacy, will allow a shift toward personality structures that are no longer individualistic structures as described in Western personality theories. Instead, the personality will attain a supple dialogical fluidity, moving with a certain ease between permeability to the web of life and the collective unconscious on the one hand, and more clearly-boundaried holistic cognitive processes, centered in an individual as carrier of relational knowledge on the other. The unus mundus will be integrated into a process of perception and action that encompasses emotions, body, mind and spirit. All aspects of the human being are valued in this process of presencing, as body, emotions, mind and spirit jointly contribute to an integral and relational knowing and being process.

Bridging Articles

Applying this framework outlining three broad qualities of consciousness, the articles in this issue represent efforts to transition from modern consciousness into recovering indigenous consciousness. Several articles focus on dreams (Gomes and Brekelmans, Jaenke, Kremer), since for modern persons, dreams hold a pivotal place in regaining access to the realm of archetypes, or, in an indigenous worldview, the realm of spirit. Dreams form an essential bridge to an integral way of sensing and perceiving. They are the primary means by which the collective unconscious, the psychological realm of archetypes or the metaphysical realm of spirits, can be experienced and known by modern persons.

In “Dreaming of a Plant Spirit,” Mary Gomes and Victoria Brekelmans demonstrate how dreams can bring healing knowledge of plant medicine. These authors present two of Victoria’s dreams that aided her in addressing a chronic health condition, fibromyalgia, resistant to Western forms of treatment. The imagery in the two dreams provided new insights into her medical condition and possible treatment. The pair of dreams offered imagery of a specific plant medicine—thistle—of which the dreamer was previously unaware, but which significantly reduced her symptomatology. The use of dream imagery for the treatment of health issues is resonant, for example, with plant spirit medicine practices of Amazonian shamans.

Sandra Alstrand’s path to recovering indigenous consciousness came less through a preference than through necessity. In “Healing From Natural Disasters With Ritual,” she documents her personal journey with multiple natural disasters—earthquake, fire, hurricane and destructive volcanic lava flows. Through these four encounters, it is as if Mother Earth is chasing her down to wake up her consciousness. This series of experiences leads her to create a healing ritual for survivors of the 2014 Hurricane Iselle and 2018 destructive lava flows near Pahoa, Hawaii. She assembles and leads a small group of fellow survivors in an earth-based ritual, seeking to heal spiritually from the trauma of natural disasters. The ritual was designed to help survivors come to terms with feelings of loss, and the fear and anger harbored toward the elements and the earth herself. Alstrand concludes that ritual aids us in making disaster torn lives holy again, rekindling kinship with nature, and discovering the building blocks to restore a sacred and honoring relationship with our planet.

Michelle Boyle’s article “Holy Water: An Autoethnography of Learning From Water on a Transformative Path,” undertakes an ethnoautobiographical and terrapsychological healing inquiry in her ancestral homelands of northern Italy, focusing on the element of water. She traces the development of her relationship with water, which functions as her “preference” or gateway leading her on a healing journey. For her, water serves as a transformative vessel for spirit. She weaves personal experiences around psychospiritual healing, social justice, intergenerational trauma, history, and geography into current discourse on water and spirit as well as mythological material. Through sharing her process in relationship to the element of water, she demonstrates an approach to rebalancing consciousness in response to our ecological predicament.

Karen Jaenke adopts practices of working with the dreaming body as a pathway to heal Western dissociation. Adopting a disciplined practice of attending to the dreambody erodes the egoic self, allowing for the emergence of a more porous ecological self. Through the dreambody’s mediating and merging functions, the perceptual gap between mind and body and self and world, can be bridged. A primary practice for accessing the dreambody is attending to Eugene Gendlin’s (1985) “felt sense” immediately upon waking, as dreams tend to leave in their aftermath strong openings to subtle body sensations. By consciously reconnecting with these subtle body sensations of the dreambody, Western dissociation can be progressively healed.

Karen Jaenke reflects on the intra-psychic origins of violence, now a normative dynamic in Western cultures, finding its roots in the unhealed psychic splitting that follows trauma and dissociation.

In the final article of this issue, Jurgen Kremer asserts that engaging with the phenomenon of dreaming challenges the prevailing reductionist and materialistic metaphysics and, ultimately, calls for a qualitative shift in perspective, i.e., cultures and individuals of Western mind need a different cosmovision, a different narrative. He discusses how recent scientific developments have brought us to the edge of remembrance of how we humans are intra-actively, i.e., intimately, woven into the web of life. Notions of the culturally prevailing individualistic sense of self are now at odds with the relationality that is foundational to quantum theories and Indigenous science. Dreamwork is one of the ways that allows us to attend to the other half of our self, the part of the self that normative dissociation has split us from (and that digital cultures move us further from natural access to), the part that in earlier times naturally took the integrative lead (McGilchrist, 2009, 2021). Recovering active engagement with this part of our selves seems critical for healing our polycrisis as well as personal suffering. The eclipse of the imaginal realm after the Renaissance has ultimately changed our sense of self to the realm of data, of clicks and likes. Using dreams to explore the shimmering edges of our selves can help us transgress into the realms of imaginal knowing. Kremer discusses one of his own dreams that provided an injunction to explore the ancestral depths of his self. Dreams may help us grasp the deep structures of time. Lucid dreaming and dream telepathy are among the extraordinary phenomena challenging Western notions of self. Emergent practices of communal dream sharing and interpretation are examples of the power of imaginal knowing. “Dreams are one of the important avenues to establish de/colonial islands in the minds of ‘the West’ and in the embodied practices of ‘the West’.” The article concludes with a discussion of dream messages calling for a shift in cosmovision.

The articles by Mary Gomes, Victoria Brekelmans, Sandra Alstrand, Michelle Boyle, Karen Jaenke, and Jurgen Kremer present illustrative examples of ReVision’s mission to explore “the leading edge of transformative and consciousness-changing thinking.” These are contributions that bridge toward the future of humanity in their reach to catalyze our imagination of sustainable worlds and nurturing conversations.