As modern humans, we are generally unaware of the every-day-insisted-upon usage of the style of thinking which Carl Jung referred to as “directed thinking”, which Martin Heidegger referred to as “technological thinking”, which Claude Levi-Strauss refers to as the result of having domesticated the natural mind. Jung remarks that this kind of thinking is only a modern acquisition, a new development in the history of the world. Earlier ages thought through myths, or the kind of symbolic thinking exhibited in dreams. As Frederich Nietzsche put it: “As a man now reasons in dreams, so humanity also reasoned for thousands of years when awake.”
Many will agree that humanity has entered a time of collective and cultural pathology, wherein we are destroying the possibility of our own survival on Earth. We have become collectively insane, and barely know how to address the situation. Thomas Berry unequivocally states that we must re-invent the human at the species level.
Recovering the natural mind, reviving dream thinking, remembering who we are as humans before we began this pathology of destruction have become imperative, I believe. This evening will be an exploration of the Two Kinds of Mind, and offer ways to imagine our way into a more sustainable future by re-awakening our innate capacity for Dream Thinking to balance the overdevelopment of the modern Cultivated Mind.
Tayria Ward, Ph.D., lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she has a private practice offering dream analysis, psychological and spiritual guidance to clients from all parts of the world. Tayria has worked intensively with her own and other peoples’ dreams for more than 45 years, and for nearly 30 years has been an avid student of indigenous ways of knowing and being. She has conducted a monthly Global Community Dream Symposium since early 2017 wherein persons from all over the world come to share their dreams and listen to the collective dreaming mind.