|
| |
A Spiritually Enlightening Online Magazine. January's Theme: "Path"
Volume 4 Issue 2 ISSN# 1708-3265
|
Index
Meet Our Staff
Free Subscription
Donations
Come Shopping
Advertising
Archived Issues
|
   |
LifetalksMerging Paths: Shark and Human with Dawn Baumann Brunke For many years I have been interested in merging consciousness with other beings so as to learn more about the incredibly varied ways we all experience the world. Although in the beginning, these 'mergings' were limited to very short episodes of momentarily seeing through the eyes of an animal - lion or raven, dog or dolphin - my interest and enthusiasm for this unique way of interacting with others began to spill over into other aspects of my life. The following dream experience happened during those early days of exploring dual consciousness. Looking back at it now, I see it as a significant event in which two paths crossed and came together for a short time. Each path was unique, holding its own individual form of conscious experience in the world, yet it was only by sharing and merging the two paths that a larger experience of knowing was found. The Dream Begins… One night I dreamed I was a shark. That is, I had the consciousness of both a human and a shark. Newly born and thus new to my surroundings, I began swimming in a grayish green area where there was not much to distinguish - simply a fluid openness in which I felt my body move. As a human, I wondered where the mother shark was, but there was a sense this didn't matter to the shark as it did to us humans. After swimming for awhile, I began to notice some lines. These lines were not visible, but made of light. They made sounds which could be followed. As a human, I thought they were related to electricity. As a shark, I felt the sound-lines through my belly and all the way through my body to my spine. When I swam over or along the top of the lines, it was as if they sang, vibrating in a high-pitched squealing sound, which was not unpleasant. As a human, I had the idea these lines were maps - but maps of what? Would they lead to the mother shark? Were they created by other sharks? As a shark, I followed one sound-line which vibrated very strongly for awhile, then somehow lost it - or perhaps it faded - and I turned back round in a circle.
As a human, I tried to access the deeper consciousness of the shark, to see what I could learn. I found it wasn't much. For, as a shark, I didn't have much idea who I was or what I was supposed to do. I operated out of instinct, though this instinct was not in the way some humans regard it. The shark instinct was not dumb, without awareness or consciousness. Rather, it guided the shark; it had a life all its own. Time passed as in the oddly familiar time-lapses which are often found in dreams. The shark was older now, had been around and knew more things. As shark, I was more confident of my abilities. I ate fish mostly, sometimes live, sometimes dead. Once I traveled north to colder waters and came up from beneath the waters to eat a seal. The seal was on the fringes of a group of seals. I swam below it and then lunged upwards to eat half of it in a gulp. As a human, I began to converse with the shark, asking if it had spoken to the seal before it ate it, or offered a prayer to the seal, as other predator animals have told me they do. The shark consciousness did not know this idea of asking first, nor was prayer a real thing to this shark. But neither was there any personal feeling about the seal - there was no revenge, no sense of destruction or anger. Rather, the shark showed me how it was led to the seal, how that seal was "open" to be taken. "Some animals are open to be taken and others are not," the shark told me, explaining that some animals had a different purpose and could not - or should not - be taken. The shark's awareness was now very open to me, and I wanted to know more about the history of sharks. As I sunk into the shark's consciousness, I did not find an orderly history of any sort. Rather, there was a vague sense about sharks, a familiarity about sharks which seemed to exist behind this shark's everyday conscious awareness. At this point, the shark also became curious, as if my presence and questions had awakened that curiosity within him as well. We swam. We swam very far, in fact, and came again to the grayish green place where the shark was born. From there we turned and followed the sound-lines of light, swimming quite farther still until we came to a cave which really wasn't a cave at all. It was more the idea of a cave and, as both human and shark, we realized we had entered a different sort of water. As a human, the cave reminded me of the entrance to a brain - not a human brain with its mass of curved folds, but a sharper, more angular brain - perhaps something like a cubist painting of a shark's brain! The Enfoldment We entered this cave, which we later learned was called The Space of Enfoldment. It was here, within this place or state of consciousness, where sharks came to learn more consciously about their history. Although we understood this upon entering the cave, that was not what held our attention. Rather, it was the calmness, the silence of the place. We suddenly realized how noisy it had been in the waters outside, and how noisy it had always been throughout the shark's life. We recalled the multitude of sounds we had heard since our birth: the squealing of the electric lines; the sounds of so many fish; the songs of whales and other creatures; and the deep humming which was ever-present, so much a part of us that we didn't even realize it until now, when suddenly it was gone. We swam in the cave, which was empty - following the long, sharply angled walls, and we noted again that it was not really like a cave at all. We swam and waited, not sure what we were waiting for. As a human, I expected there to be a lesson, perhaps some kind of teaching or holographic movie with a message. I suddenly recalled a shark dream I once had in which I found myself in a classroom, being shown a film about human-shark evolution. However, this wasn't like that at all. Rather, the "Enfoldment" that was now taking place was like a distant remembering. Recognition was not orderly 1, 2, and 3. Instead, it came both suddenly and slowly - like some immense whole picture gradually yet all at once revealed. It was more feeling based than intellectually oriented, as if something dim was enlightened, becoming brighter and brighter. And then we both knew everything about sharks: from our beginnings to our connections all over the planet, all over the cosmos. We were now a special shark because we held conscious knowledge of this, and we understood not all sharks are opened in this manner. We understood that, like with humans, enlightenment about who we are and who we may become, is exciting information which also carries the weight of responsibility. And now, we would never be the same. ~ ~ ~ Dawn Baumann Brunke is the author of Animal Voices: Telepathic Communication in the Web of Life and Awakening to Animal Voices: A Teen Guide to Telepathic Communication with All Life. Both books explore the deeper nature of our relationship with animals, nature, each other and ourselves. For more, see Dawn's website.
Be sure to read the reviews of her books in our May 2005 Issue and our January 2006 Issue.
|
Copyright (c) 2006 by Timeless Spirit Magazine. All articles are the copyright of the particular writers and cannot be reprinted without their expressed permission. All rights reserved. International copyright laws prohibit reproduction of or distribution of this page by any means whatsoever, electronic or otherwise, without first obtaining the written permission of the copyright holder. We retain legal counsel to protect our copyrights.
Any advice given is for informational purposes only.
