Dreams and Visions in an ultramaterialistic Society,

          For ages the artist has been seen as inspired and having a God-given gift. Yet, in the last few decades art has markedly deteriorated. It started way back in the Renaissance when the human became the center of the universe and of his creativity. Less and less creativity was seen as something given by God. That trend, as it continued to develop over time, unfortunately had some side effects. Humans became ego centered, arrogant, because after all they thought that this genius was all inside; some just have more of it somehow tucked away in their cells. Before this ego centeredness, the artist was fairly humble. In their humility they knew their creations were a God-gift. With that thought they not only could not take all the credit for their superb creations, it also let them off the hook when things didn't turn out quite so well. It most likely staved off depression which now artists are quite prone to.¹

          The current self centered attitude serves materialism well. The fingers of exploitation are reaching into the arts. The new idea taught in art school is that the artist comes up with some creation, a concept, and the most important thing they then learn is to convince the viewer that the product is what they claim it to be There is no talk of inspiration. Selling concepts has taken over the art world to a large extend. Talent is not necessarily needed. In the same vein someone with money who has an idea can hire an artist and have them produce that idea. The person with the idea gets hailed as artist. The real artist has been degraded as pure laborer. That is the trend.² What is also quite sad is that some art students take drugs or deprive themselves of sleep in order to produce hallucinations so that they have a source of inspiration. These young people have been starved and deprived of inspiration by a society who claims there is no such a thing a God-given inspiration. ³

          Einstein said: “Logic will get you from A to B, Imagination will take you everywhere.” It is this imagination that comes from God-inspiration. Some artists can still be viewed as inspired. While on one hand there is a trend in the arts that moves toward a dark pit, there is also a dawning of the arts that is bringing in the light of a new dawn. Akiane Kramarik, a prodigy, God inspired to paint since the age of four is one on the small list of such inspired artists. Since Visions, Dreams and Imagination are suspect, there are voices raised in an effort to discredit her art no matter how amazing and genuine it is. No matter the voices, however, she is one of the leaders of truly inspired art.

              Architecture tells us also the story of a people. We have no more front porches, which in itself is remarkable. Instead we have garage doors which close behind the car and show an almost industrial “keep out” facade. The front door is often hidden. We make sure there is a fence around the yard. The front lawn is shaved clean; drowned in chemicals. A uniformed green lawn is an interesting symbol, for the frequently shown 'pretend happy' face we put on. We have no patience for the wild, like wild flowers or for animals. They are trained to live within human confines, we pick up their poop so that it does not mess up our pristine lawns that contain our domesticated flowers. All houses look like tightly closed up boxes. However, even that is not enough. Some people have a vicious dog in their yard to keep strangers away and signs on their door: “No soliciting.” Nothing can come in, nothing can come out....that is, nothing human and natural....although there is plenty coming in  through Television and media.

              A friend of mine who build a house in a nice neighborhood, chose to leave some of the trees up and build carefully as not to destroy too much of the natural habitat. Trees, vines and beautiful plants surround her house. Since she has to abide by neighborhood regulations, her yard has to meet certain standards; so many feet toward the road has to be green lawn. She was abiding by all those rules. Although her plants are not subject to removal, people are still calling the city and she gets citations because she has a natural habitat which others feel is unacceptable and is disturbing to the image of their neighborhood.

           Writing and Journalism has also been an inspirational art. However, writers can bring inspiration or they can lead us down a dark trail. The novels of Ayn Rand for example are leading this country through a  kind of dark mist while for example Jim Stoveall's books are the opposite, a gift of inspiration.

          Music is another art that has changed drastically, as has the attitude toward it. Many symphonies have money trouble or had to close down. Music opens the soul, and what speaks to the soul cannot be understood with a rational mind. Hence the musicians need to serve now as translators because the current Music education is not adequate or in some instances missing all together, and the audience has trouble understanding the music performances.

          Then there is another type of music that is being created. Lately there have been songs composed which have a certain whine to them. If you listen carefully it is almost like people are crying and screaming. I think our souls are crying. A Sufi visionary said of Jazz that it is a music for the body and the material plane. Indeed this confirms what I felt listening to Jazz. I don't know if all Jazz is supporting the material plane,  and it could very well be that each plane needs its specific music. However, to much of one thing can still tilt the balance. The deterioration of the arts shows that we have disconnected from our source, and that we are in disregard of inspiration and revelation.

          Again, reiterating that I am speaking about the mass trend, there are the exceptions. One such exception is a composer, Mark Hayes who writes beautiful sacred music. However, do not misunderstand me, it is not necessarily sacred music, or sacred art alone that can be inspired. Inspired  art comes from our deepest essence, a God-given essence that is within all humans. I  pray that the few inspired individuals in our time will have the power to raise the arts back up. At the Opera house at my hometown there is a saying: “With the arts a nation will rise or it will fall.” The question is, will more artists allow inspiration to take hold of their creations and acknowledge that there is a creative force larger than them that guides them?

1Part of this idea came from Elisabeth Gilbert's TED talk “The elusive creative genius:

2From a conversation with artists who graduated within the last 3 years

3From a conversation with artists who graduated within the last 3 years

Freud's, Jung's and Marx's influences on the acceptability of Dreams, Visions and Things of the Beyond

There was in the 19th/20^th Century an Austrian neurologist, Sigismund Freud, who created an “explosion of interest in dreams.”¹ His idea about dreams was that they bring into consciousness some issues in the psyche that a person needs to work out. Freud was a rationalist and assumed that the unconscious thinks rationally and wishes to communicate in this way through dreams. (His thinking was much along Aristotle's idea that gods only talk to intellectual people). Much of his dream work he related to sexual desires and the pleasure principle. Freud goes on to prove that images we see in dreams are from our childhood or some source we have gazed upon whether we were conscious of it or not. All material in Freud's opinion comes out of forgotten memories or bodily sensations and according to him, all the ancient people have been primitive thinking dreams were divine messages, and did not have enough science to figure out what dreams are.²

He comes up with four different ways dreams might come about. Interestingly he says that other dream-sources of a psychic nature of dream are not known...but admits that one cannot dismiss the doubt as to ‘whether they appear without any impulsion from organic stimuli.'³ Freud's attempts might have been a good start to make people think about dreams again; however, it was not enough to bring us to that which a dream connects us to; the divine. This was because Freud did not believe in such a thing. What little Freud contributed was still laughed at for quite some time.

Other medical men who valued dreams in almost every age from Hippocrates down wrote about them, but most failed to see dreams as psychic reality instead of just a physical functioning of the brain. When Mortin Kelsey writes in her book: God, Dreams and Revelation,: “after the Freudian explosion one would think that the church would take a fresh look at its rich tradition on the subject of dreams and vision”, the author counts out the serious hang-up the church has with sexuality, something Freud spoke of so freely. Strangely enough, a clergyman, Canon Burnett Streeter in his work Reality in 1927, set out to prove that religion was scientifically acceptable and that biblical dreams were Freudianly acceptable. He thought that a normal person might become so preoccupied with religion that they may find it represented in their dreams. He even thought that this was what happened to Peter at Joppa (Acts 10). 'Peter’s dream-trance was merely his primitive way of dealing with his conflict over having to eat with Gentiles'. ⁴ Streeter not only looks down on Augustine and Origen but he also says:

                       “In the modern world the mental balance of a seer of visions is

                       suspect and, in general, not without good reason. The primitive

                       mind thinks in pictures, and in pictures it reasons and resolves,

                       but the intellectual tradition of Europe for the last four centuries has

                       trained the race in conceptual thinking.”⁵

Streeter also thought that people who had dreams or visions had a less vigorous mind than people who used reason alone. This was just one unfortunate example of how church became plagued by the need to fit into its culture, rather than bring God's gifts to the culture. The church also was much too afraid to carve out it’s own road. Throughout history, visions were often moments of supreme illumination for the most vigorous intellects and most creative wills, yet, for some reason that is almost forgotten now.⁶ A Spanish Jesuit, Pedro Meseguer expresses on the subject that “it is simply not done to look for the supernatural or direct contact with God in dreams.”⁷ Of course, that makes sense, since there was so much suspicion around dreams for such a long time, particularly in the church.

           One work has been written, however, that recognizes in dreams the striving of the individual soul to find God, in the book: Dreams: God's Forgotten Language,” by Rev. John A. Sanford. There are only few theologians who wrote in this vein.

           Shakespeare, Goethe and other writers spoke of “knowledge that human personality has deeper levels of being and a deeper purposiveness than is revealed in our conscious awareness. It appears that the greater the stature of the author and thinker, the greater his understanding and knowledge of his realm of being.”⁸

            Carl Jung's idea was that dreams are a tool to know oneself. He also said: 

                             “No one who does not know himself can know others.

                             In addition, in each of us there is another whom we do not know.

                             He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he

                             sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore

                             we find ourselves in a difficult situation to which there

                             is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that

                             radically alters our attitude-the very attitude that led us

                             into the difficult situation.”⁹

Jung also states that he sees the language of dreams similar to Jesus' parables. They, like dreams touch the deepest level in man, the substance of his life. He suggested that the constraining forces of time and space do not limit the unconscious as they do the conscious mind. It seems that, while the conscious mind is limited and circumscribed, the unconscious is not constrained within the boundaries of either time or space.¹⁰

As important and inspiring as Jung's work is, it could not curb the one-sided rational trend that was thriving under  Darwin, Marx and Freud. However, it may have prevented people from disregarding dreams all together.

            Charles Darwin, Karl Marx just like Freud ( 19th and 20th century) portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry and the environment. ”¹¹

 

Since you can read about Darwin in my prior blog entry, let us move on to Karl Marx.

Karl Marx wrote, “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.”¹²

According to him religion perpetuated the sense of oppression giving the person illusion as the only way out of his condition.

This thought did not stay in Europe, it traveled to other places, including to the United States and was there 

slowly infused amongst others by the philosopher and creator of Objectivism, Ayn Rand. All her writings 

speak about this materialistic happiness. Particularly in “Atlas Shrugged”, we encounter serious criticism of 

biblical values with the very Marxist intention to belittle them as illusions. In “Atlas Shrugged”, page 1011, 

her character John Galt says: 

“For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that your life belongs to your neighbor – between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven (God, angels) and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents (children of God) on earth.” 

This one sentence alone (and she has many of this kind) shows how little respect she has for that which 

is beyond and of knowledge that does not belong to reason alone.

I never want to claim that reason is not highly important. However, if we make reason a religion, as we seem 

to do now, we harm ourselves by disregarding other knowledge and wisdom which is essential to our

growth as human beings.

SOURCES:

1Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, and Revelation, (MN, Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 181.

2 Robert Maynard Hutchins, Wallace Brockway and Adler J. Mortime, Editors, “The Major Works of Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams” in the Great Books of the Western World, (USA: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.) 145-155.

3Robert Maynard Hutchins, Wallace Brockway and Adler J. Mortime, Editors, “The Major Works of Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams” in the Great Books of the Western World, (USA: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.) 154.

4Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, and Revelation, (MN, Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 181.

5Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, and Revelation, (MN, Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 182.

6Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, and Revelation, (MN, Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 182.

7Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, and Revelation, (MN, Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 182.

8Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, and Revelation, (MN, Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 193.

9Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, and Revelation, (MN, Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 203.

10Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, and Revelation, (MN, Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 210.

11Http://sensuouscurmudgeon.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/darwin-marx- (accessed 5/19/13)

12Www.atheism.about.com/od/weeklyquotes/a/marx01.htm (accessed 6/10/13)

  

How some of 19th and 20th Century Theologies and Thoughts affect the knowledge of Dreams and Visions

Friedrich Schleiermacher,  an early 19th century theologian, argued the relevance and essential need of theology for human nature. He expressed that there is a human feeling of total dependence on God, but others disagreed. Ludwig Feuerbach, philosopher, anthropologist, atheist and materialist, claimed on the other hand that theology is anthropology in disguise. He saw the claims about God as mental projections of theologians making idols in the image of man. He argued that it would be better to focus on attainable needs in the temporal world. It was Karl Barth, a powerful theologian of the 20^th century, who challenged Schleiermacher's influence and answered Feuerbach's challenge with theology that showed God’s revelation in Christ, or 'from above, ' rather than man's consciousness or some human feeling. It seems, he all but severed the human realm from the God realm and in some unintended way supported the influence of' 'the Enlightenment ideas which have seriously challenged the place of religion in the public square. Even Romanticism, which emphasized self expression and human feelings against rationalism, still perceived religious dogma and moralistic authority as a hindrance to 'authentic freedom.'¹

Obviously Feuerbach could not see anything beyond the temporal and God as human projection, and Barth? Barth claimed three forms of revelation to disprove Feuerbach:

a) Divine word has became incarnate which we also know as Jesus of Nazareth

b) Prophetic witness of Scripture
c) In the preaching of the church

My issues are with the second and third claims of Barth. Although I highly value the integrity of the Bible and its validity, some parts of scripture have been translated too often, as well as mistranslated to be a truly divine revelation. You have probably seen, in one of my other blog entries, my stand that God did not write the Bible, but inspired humans. I do think that Biblical Scripture is an inspired text, which guides us and teaches us about God. Nevertheless, we also must use our brain and see that not all is perfect. The other issue is that Barth further, in his writings, puts the church on a divine level if the preaching of the church is a revelation. Pastors are obviously inspired as they prepare for their sermons and pray for enlightenment, however they are human.  How that revelation exactly happens he does not make clear, particularly since Barth's God is so far away. Revelation is not confined to only one form, such as preaching. It happens with the help of the Holy Spirit, and in various forms, something Barth does not say.

Barth's claim, 'The power of God can be detected neither in the world of nature nor in the souls of men. It must be confounded with any high, exalted, force, known or knowable”  expresses a strange contradiction. He acknowledges that humans have a soul. Soul has always been seen as an essence that connects us to God. Yet Barth claims God cannot be detected in it. With this Barth makes a total separation between God and God's creation. “Even when God reveals himself to a man of faith, still that man with faith will confess God unknown to us.”³ It seems Barth puts the word “faith and reveal” in like a wedge into what should be described much more in depth such as gifts from the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, whatever revelation there might be, it seems Barth gets us stuck on the very thought that man just cannot know God; Finito, end of discussion.  All his claims are vague and distant. “In the Resurrection the new world of the Holy Spirit touches the old world of the flesh, but touches it as a tangent touches a circle, that is, without touching it. And because it does not touch it, it touches it as its frontier – as the new world.”⁴  So does it touch it or not? Here Barth uses his dialectic approach (yes and no), even though hailed by some, it shows that he just really did not know  but was eager to prove his position which I am not sure was even clear to him.

Barth never uses the word “experience.” his language is always illusive such as 'revelation' which he never defines or 'divine confrontation' which in itself is a paradox since God is not knowable according to him. It is true one cannot know God with the outer senses. One can only know God through inner senses, which is through the gifts given to us, may they be visions, dreams, the ability to heal, prophecy or others.

“Martin Luther King Junior points out that we can find in Job 11:16 'Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection'? No, but we can know God imperfectly.  Exodus 33:20 states: 'Thou canst not see my face' but 'thou shalt see my back.' God is revealed nonetheless even if we can only see part of God or a glimpse. Scripture mentions in various ways that we can know God to some degree. Some of this knowledge is shown to us through the experiences of the minor and major prophets. The questions needs to be asked: 'How did Barth know so much about an Unknown God?'”⁵ Do not get me wrong, Barth was a great theologian and thinker, but as with all great thinkers, philosophers and theologians we make the mistake to just rehash and swallow over and over what they told us instead of asking questions, dissecting their ideas and then listen to our own insights which often come through prayer as well as the intellect.
              Let me move  on  to a couple of 19th/20^th century theologies which also in their own respect did not help much to further the acknowledgement of dreams and visions as God's gift. Liberation theology was a radical movement and answer to great injustices particularly in South America. That's where this movement started. Its stand was that the church should act to bring about social change and should ally itself with the working class. Priests and ministers got involved in politics, trade unions as well as violent revolutionary movements. Pope John Paul II disagreed with these movements and saw it as a fusion of Christianity and Marxism. He closed Catholic organization that taught liberation theology and rebuked the movement’s activists. He did not mean the Church was not going to be the voice of the oppressed. However, it should not do it by partisan politics or revolutionary violence. I think ministers need to be the voice for the poor. However, getting engaged in violence amongst other things shows that we are taking the claim that we are Christ's feet and hands too far, namely thinking that it doesn't matter what we do, Christ will agree because we are trying to help. I disagree with that notion. Since dreams and visions were disregarded now for so long, they were not considered, no one even probably asked. Had there been divine visions and revelations anyone would have taken seriously, some of the reasoning in liberation theology just might have  been different all together.

Now, I have no way to substantiate what I am going to say except by my own gift of vision. However, when we are stuck in one awful thing or another our short sightedness does not leave us any option but fall into despair or resort to violence. Moral training will keep us most likely from becoming savages. If we are religious people, a belief in God and  prayer is the one thing that will get us unstuck even if we have no other way to know what will happen. However, there is a vaster vision, God's vision, and sometimes God will show a human that vision. Once privy to such insight a person gains more understanding and can act differently having seen the larger picture. However, since dreams and visions are disregarded they cannot guide humanity at large now. Those who have visions will not be believed. In desperate situations, persons will engage in unwholesome acts if there is no source to draw on. God-given visions and dreams can be an important guiding source.

          Another theology disregarding revelation is natural theology. It seeks knowledge of God, the soul, immortality, and natural law through reason and the observation of natural processes unaided by revelation. I am not convinced that reason will be able to prove the existence of God, divine purpose and the soul. “A modern view of natural theology suggests that reason does not so much seek to supply a proof for the existence of God, as to provide a coherent form drawn from the insights of religion to pull together the best of human knowledge from all areas of human activity. In this understanding, natural theology attempts to relate science, history, morality and the arts in an integrating vision of the place of humanity in the universe. This vision, an integrating activity of reason, is religious to the extent it refers to an encompassing reality that is transcendent in power and value. Natural theology is hence not a prelude to faith but a general world view within which faith can have an intelligible place.”^.6 Therefore, religion up to now was not intelligent? Natural theology pulls everything together under the sun within reason. However, it does so by leaving out any other (transcending or supernatural) wisdom and knowledge. It declares that which humans pulled together under this system, a religion. Encompassing or not, how is it transcending without acknowledging our Creator? Transcending because we evolve? I suppose, if we think that reason is the only thing that makes us intelligent, then that is all true. Natural theology might have its place, namely to make sense of religious claims in the world of reason. However, there are more ways to be intelligent than reason alone. God's revelation can and does use other intelligences to break into the human world. Reason seems to be closed to such intelligences.

 SOURCES;

1Http://www.scribd.com/doc/30276734/Karl-Barth-Neo-Orthodox-Revelation (accessed on 7/2/2013)

2Http://www.era.lib.ac.uk/handle/1842/5524 (accessed 7/09/2013)

3Http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol12/520102BarthsConceptionOfGod.pdf (accessed 7/09/2013)

4Http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol12/520102BarthsConceptionOfGod.pdf (accessed 7/09/2013)

5Http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol12/520102BarthsConceptionOfGod.pdf (accessed 7/09/2013)

6Www.giffordlectures.org/theology.sap (accessed 7/03/2013)