Quotes from Robert Moss

Our earliest poets were shamans. Today, as in the earliest times, true shamans are poets of consciousness who know the power of song and story to teach and to heal.

We can ask for a dream of guidance on any issue that is facing us, and when we're lucky the dream can take us out of the boxes of the everyday mind's approach to that theme.

There is a place of imagination, and it is entirely real.

The important things usually prove to be very simple. They are also open secrets in the sense that no one is hiding the knowledge from us except ourselves.

Australian Aborigines say that the big stories — the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life — are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush.

If you have fairy blood, even in the tiniest degree, you must live close to Fairy Land, and eat a little fairy food, or else you will always be hungry.

The only time is Now. All other times - past, present, and parallel - can be accessed in this moment of Now, and may be changed for the better.

Find your myth. As Joseph Campbell observed, "Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.' A myth we requicken in our minds and our lives brings creative juice, for every living myth "bears within it, undamaged, the seed power of its source.

The human animal needs meaning as well as food and air and sex and water. The sense that life is meaningless is at the root of a great deal of depression, aggression, and addiction, which can only be addressed by a restoration of the sense that life is meaning-full.

Highly creative people have a gift for connecting supposedly unrelated elements and ideas. They cross borders without regard for customs posts or No Trespassing signs. They throw suspension bridges across great distances. These elegant and unexpected combinations flow together beautifully in the twilight zone, where metaphor and resemblance rules in place of logic and classification.

Our children remind us, if we let them, that there are not only many types of dreams but many levels of dreaming, that we do not have to go to sleep in order to dream and that when we imagine something vividly we are doing far more than 'making things up': we may be punching a hole in the world, opening a path into a larger reality.

The new approach to health care will feature the healing power of story. In the clear understanding that finding meaning in any life passage may be at the heart of healing, our healers -declared or undeclared - will help people use the power of dreaming to move beyond personal history into a bigger story that contains the juice and sense of purpose to get them through.

If we deny the wishes of the soul, then soul will become disgusted and withdraw vital energy from our lives. We'll become prone to illness and misfortune. Following the secret wishes of the soul, on the other hand, can return us to the natural path of our energies and restore vitality, good health and good fortune. The process can begin right away, in a round of dream- sharing, when we make room to move with the energy of a dream instead of just talking about it.

Dreams are part of our human survival kit, part of what has kept us going, and evolving on this planet. Across history most people have valued dreaming for two reasons beyond all others: because dreams enable us to see into the possible future, and because they put us in touch with sources of knowledge and wisdom beyond the ordinary mind.

In my dream, the Angel shrugged and said, "If we fail this time, it will be a failure of imagination." And then she placed the world gently in the palm of my hand. — ERICA JONG

When you are gripped by fear in the face of an experience that will take you beyond your comfort zone, you may be at a point of supreme opportunity. You can either break down or break through.

Good analysts and therapists can help us to recognize parts of ourselves we have repressed and denied. The shamanic concept of soul loss reaches further. It recognizes that soul healing is also about retrieving pieces of soul that have literally gone missing and need to be located and persuaded to return and take up residence in the body where they belong.

I wondered what a man I had encountered the day before on the plane en route to Chicago's O'Hare airport would have made of this. As he tried to push through a crowded aisle, he said loudly: "Life is never easy. And it's never pleasant." I couldn't let this go. I looked up at him from my seat and said, "I do hope life gives you cause to change that opinion. Otherwise you may find that opinion walking ahead of you, giving you more and more reasons to believe it.

The power of healing comes through the wound. If the physician is healed, he will lose his power to heal others.

Everything that enters our field of perception means something, large or small. Everything speaks to us, if we will take off our headphones and hear a different sound track. Everything corresponds. We travel better in the forest of symbols when we are open and available to all the forms of meaning that are watching†and waiting for us.

Conscious dreaming allows us to fold time and travel into the future or the past, as well as explore other life experiences. Beyond all of this, it may allow us to be present at the place of creation - the plane on which the events and circumstances of physical life are born.

I believe that, seven generations beyond us, those who look back on our time will find that it was the cry of the trees that helped to restart the dreaming and foster the understanding that we must dream not only for ourselves but also for our communities and for all that shares life with us in our fragile bubble of air.

The role of the animal messenger in the dreams of modern city-dwellers is often to recall us to our wild side, and the natural path of our energy.

The struggle inside the cocoon between the defenders of the worm state and the agents of winged possibility is one that I was still living, one that many of us surely experience in times of spiritual emergence. We may find ourselves pounded into mush, hanging upside down from whatever we can cling to — and yet have the possibility and destiny of becoming much, much more.