“Dreams allow us to experience the internal roots of self-awareness, call it the Self, Soul, or what you will, and so receive the reassuring touch of what does not die, and with it a meaningful existence.” (Sri Mathava Ashish,2007)

“The Open Window Approach” of working with dreams, draws attention to a much neglected aspect of dreams, as a source for spiritual experience and guidance. This approach of working with dreams was proposed by Sri Mathaba Ashish (1920-1997), who for many years was the head of a remote ashram, Mirtola, in Northern India. He was a spiritual teacher, whose teachings transcend conventional spiritual and well as psychological categories. Born in Edingborough, he came during the Second World War as an engineer to India. While traveling in India after the war, his search led him to Sri Krishna Prem, a Cambridge English professor, who had become a Vaishnava monk. Sri Mathava Ashish and Sri Krishna Prem worked together to integrate tradition and modern thought, Eastern wisdom and Western analysis. For over 50 years the both of them worked with countless students’ dreams, and wrote a number of articles and books for international publication.

The above quote of Sri Madhava Ashish points to his most important contribution: to the work with dreams which reaches beyond the personal, collective or world unconscious. Even though he uses skillfully and deeply intuitive the process of personal association in service of deciphering links to a person’s personal history, in addition he dives deeply into a realm psychotherapists are not aware of or do not dare to enter. About most modern psychology he says: “Having succumbed to the materialist and rationalist world view, these modern psychological schools are automatically restricted to treating their patients as if successful adaptation to human society, as it is now, is the highest goal a human being can aspire to.” (Sri Mathava Ashish,2007). He continues: “The inner work can be divided into two parts, namely, on the one hand to work on the personal nature, on the other hand the spiritual part of the work.” Mathava Ashish points out that one of our human challenges is that we cannot see to the depth of our being, as what we “seek at the root of our being, is by its very nature, something that cannot be taken out and looked at, for it is itself the very thing that looks.” But, he says “there is a mirror that reflects many of the qualities of this unseeable source of awareness – our dreams. This happens because, as he puts it, “dream can turn to vision and vision can turn to understanding.” (Sri Mathaba Ashish, 2007).

Ashish considered spiritual practice, such as meditation, as a way to calm one’s mind and bring one’s thoughts under control. About the necessity to do so he says: “Since we cannot hope to transcend the mind without passing beyond its surface, and cannot get past the surface while it is churning with thoughts, we would welcome any means by which thoughts can be controlled.” As much as meditation is helpful in quieting and calming the mind, so that we can be more present in the here and now as well as for the deeper layers of existence, he feels that many feelings, conflicts and complexes need to be seen and understood more in depth, so that we can become free of them and find more peace and energy to live our life with awareness. Personal conflicts as well as archetypal principles find their expression in the images of dreams. Therefore dreams can be an invaluable tool for both self-understanding, and quieting the mind. Within Ashish’s understanding of dreams, “the power that shapes the symbols, the artist of our dreams, is the Self, the Soul, the Atman.” He concludes “that the dream is not only a royal road into the psychology’s cauldron of repressed sexuality, or even into oceanic symbols of the collective unconscious. It is also, more importantly, an open window into the inner kingdom of the Soul.” (Sri Mathava Ashish, 2007).

Madhava Ashish sees “Big Dreams” or mystical dreams, as dealing directly with the spiritual part of the work, yet he feels that we also need to integrate these dreams into our waking life. He writes, “Anyone can have higher states of being, but if those states cannot be related to the here and now, they cannot be integrated within the normal awareness of this world and the cognitive aspect of such experience will be lost.” According to Ashish, “Big Dreams are less concerned with the dreamer’s psychology than they are with instructing him in matters concerning the human state, man’s relation to the universe and cosmology”. In terms of understanding of Big Dreams and “Higher Questions” “always the emphasis falls on the importance of asking the right questions. He feels, though, that many of us are afraid of direct inquiry fearing that the answer might “show us the falsity of the security we believe our physical existence gives us.”

In common with the dream work of James Hillman, Stephen Aizenstat and Robert Bosnak, Madhava Ashish emphasizes the impact a dream has upon a dreamer. He warns that “instead of translating symbols into words, we often risk the danger of de-potentiating the image, turning it into a intellectual concept and so diminishing its power to continue to affect the dreamer. “ For”, he relates, “the image has an inherent wealth of meaning, which will unfold only over a long period of time. Our interpretation must not restrict its significance to a single meaning, even if we believe that to be the most important one.”(Sri Mathava Ashish, 2007). Madhava Ashish brings together an understanding of psychological work and spiritual work by saying “All the work on dream analyses, which has previously been described, taken along with meditation and other exercises, are designed to heighten self-awareness. Heightened self-awareness enhances the degree of presence one can maintain in both the worlds. The more awake one is, the more one understands the nature of the ordinary waking world, and the more one can distinguish between dream images and the reality which underlies them.”

Mahatma Ashish died in 1996, and therefore did not have an opportunity to become familiar with either Dreamtending or Embodied Imagination. I imagine he would appreciate the respect that these approaches give to the image and the de-emphasizing of premature interpretation. I imagine that the practices of both of these new approaches would have integrated well within his expanded cosmology. I think, however, that Hillman, Aizenstat and Bosnak, might have had some difficulty with Ashish’s going beyond a truly phenomenological approach. However, in my view, assuming a collective and a world unconscious is just one step away from assuming the existence of the deep ground or sea of being beneath or within.

The “Open Window Approach” also complements meditation as a way to calm and explore the processes of once mind, as well as to touch the “deep stream of being” through direct and vivid experience. “Mindfulness Meditation” and the “Open Window Approach” work in a synergistic way to help a person to know her inner processes in a very deep way, to reflect upon and untangle inner complexes and wounds, as well as to transcend the psychological aspect of Inner Work by touching into a universal, spiritual dimension. By doing so, a different, much broader dimension is added and insight from a deeper place can be accessed. As the person is experiencing herself as resting on a deeper ground than provided by her personal history, a different flavor of spaciousness, of trust and of self-empathy can start to penetrate her experience of life.

References:
An Open Window, Dream as Everyman’s Guide to the Spirit, Sri Mathava Ashish, Penguin Books India, New Dehli, 2007. Embodiment, Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, Robert Bosnak, Routledge, New York, 2007 The Wise Heart, A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology, Jack Kornfield, Ph.D., A Bantam Book, New York, 2008.

Radhule Weininger, MD, PhD, trained as a physician in West Germany and as a clinical psychologist in the United States. She has worked as a psychotherapist in private practice in Santa Barbara for the past 13 years, after practicing for 7 years in San Francisco and Berkeley. She sees adults and adolescents with a variety of problems including depression and anxiety, especially in times of relationship crises and major life changes. You can reach her at Radhule@cox.net.