Robert Bosnak, "The Phenomenal Power of Asclepian Dream Incubation"

Asclepian medicine began about 600 800 BCE or a little bit after Homer. In the time of
Homer he's still talking about Asclepius as a physician and who had two sons who were
part of the Trojan War. So if we take that as the legend the legendary Asclepius the
great physician then that would be about 1300 BC. Hippocrates who you called himself a
descendant of Asclepius in the 18th generation up until the time of Hippocrates the
Asclepian tradition was still a family tradition. The people who were family of Asclepius
descendants from Asclepius are called the Asclepius and of course the case histories
interests US law interest us a lot because apparently with their treatment they didn't just
treat what we call psychological illness no they treated physical illness because people
would bring to the sanctuaries little statues of what was healed and we see feet and we
see arms and so the healing was a physical kind of healing next to probably also
psychological.

and the big change that he created was he said illness does not come from the gods, the
gods are not the ones who sent the illness. illness comes from nature. so physics
(pronounced fuses) and every illness has its own physics. And you have to find the
natural cause. so he was looking for natural cause. so he threw out much of the ideas of
that have existed before that it was given by the gods. he started to look for physical
causes, natural causes, physical causes because physics means nature. so for natural
causes, physical causes and but the one thing that he didn't throw out the one thing
that stayed and that stayed for over a thousand years was dream incubation.

Dream incubation remained central to Western medicine from about 700 BC to about
500 AD when the Church ended it because they wanted to have the franchise on
Revelation and what was happening was that the Asclepian medicine works by way of
Revelation it works by way of having the imagination reveal, and I will explain to you
what I mean by imagination, having the imagination revealed to you what the healing
where the healing would come from.

so let me explain to you what I mean by imagination. as you've heard the field that I have
explored mainly in my life is field called embodied imagination; the way that imagination
lives as body. this is a field that was directly coming from cg Jung actually describes the
birth of the field of embodied imagination in the red book. Why am I emphatic to call it
embodied imagination? let's go back to the red book and the way he describes it. so
Jung here is has just split up from Freud he feels very isolated. this is a feeling. there's
not a literal thing. he's surrounded by people. he's surrounded by the Zurich school. he's
surrounded by tons of women. he's surrounded by people. but he feels very isolated and
in this state of isolation he gets all these images that begin to overwhelm him. and here
he is he's professor at [?] which is like MIT and it's a very prestigious position that he's
in.

here he is getting all these visions and they think he's going psychotic and then in
around Christmas he makes a very fateful decision which i think has become important
for all of psychology. he describes it in the following way. he says I let myself drop. so
there is a moment of surrender. that's the first step in the whole work of embodied
imagination is there's a surrender to another world. It is frightening. it is very frightening.
what he describes is I'm falling along a rock face. he describes the rock face. so it is an
embodied presence that he's describing. is actually there but the most important thing is
he says when I land I feel that I'm standing up to my ankles in mud. So the first
experience of being present to this world is not with the head it's with the feet and
standing in mud.
he's standing in a real world. we have to talk about the word real. right the word real in
German of course is very different from the word real as we use it because the word real
comes from rests from the Latin thing so when we use the word real we speak about the
thingliness. that's the translation of reality thingliness. thingliness because the rest is a
thing and when the Germans talk about reality they talk about [?]. [?] is that which has
effects. so it's a very different notion of what reality is that which has effects.

therefore is real and when Jung talks about the reality of the soul he talks about the [?]
about the effectivity of the soul. so much of the stuff has gotten lost in translation one of
the things that has lost gotten lost in translation by Stracci when he translated Freud.
which is the word soul Freud didn't talk about psyche. Freud talked about zaleb about
soul. so in the when it crossed the Atlantic it lost soul. here with reality we lose the sense
of that which has effect and the effect that the of the reality of the embodied imagination
is that it's physical. he can feel it with his feet. not only can he feel it with his feet, with
his body, the mud is embodied. The rock face is embodied. so imagination in its most
pure form and I take dreaming to be the most pure form of imagination.

so I take dreaming in a dream the whole world around us is imagination. Right here
when we sit the world around us yes, is imagination. we are imagining. without
imagination you couldn't organize the world. So imagination organizes this world. But
there's physical reality as well. So there's an interface between physical reality and
imagination. in dreaming there's only imagination. so that's why I take I'm not talking
dreaming from the point of view of the current notions of brain and all that stuff. that's
something else I'm talking about the phenomenology of dreaming. I consider myself an
aspiring phenomenologist.

I try to be a phenomenologist which I think is a very one of the most difficult things in the
world to be, a practical phenomenologist. I will tell you in a moment why that is so. As we
are dealing with imagination through dreaming. Then the first thing that you will notice is
that an image is an environment and that is very central to all my thinking. An image is
an environment in which you find yourself. just think about yesterday's dream. It was not
primarily a story. you were somewhere. and my interest has been to go all over the world
to ask people what do you dream? how do you dream? Very interesting how different
people's dream. and I've been in many different places and there's one answer that
always comes and that to me has become the definition of dreaming; I was somewhere
and something happened. so that is the definition to me of dreaming; an environment
that can scare you, an environment where you can fall in love, an environment where
you can taste food and an environment where you can smell terrible things when you go
to the bathroom.

all these kind of things happen. your whole body's involved and you're living in a world
that is a real world and I call it a wild world. that's why one of my books is called tracks in
the wilderness of dreaming, because that is a world of untamed imagination and
untamed imagination is very frightening because we spend much of our lives to tame the
imagination. that's what Jung did, he tamed the wild imagination with a whole meta-
narrative about anima and animus and self and all these kind of things was a meta-
narrative that he created to tame the wildness of imagination. so I as a phenomenologist
I moved that out of the way and I owe that to James Hillman because he spent his whole
life trying to deconstruct Jung and get rid of the meta narratives that are actually hiding
the wildness of imagination and the creative force of imagination.

when I speak about imagination I speak about a reality. I speak about a reality that we
encounter every night and we encounter it much more than every night we encounter it
all the time. an Islamic scholar called Holly Corbin who I met when I was assistant
secretary to the eronel foundation in the 70s and he always said that there was a great
Cataclysm that happened in Western culture and it happened around the 11th 12th
century and that Cataclysm was that the culture moved from a Neoplatonic tradition to
an Aristotelian tradition. the Neoplatonic tradition takes imagination as a reality as a form
of reality. it's a place it is a place where you can go, in a place where you can have
vision. so it's a visionary tradition. it's a place and it's a third place. there is the
intelligible world which now we would call either spirit or we would call mathematics or
we call mind and then. there is the world of matter and then for the neoplatonist says this
world in between, which is the world of the real imagination. that's a world in between.

that is equally real as the world of the intelligibility and the world of matter it is an in-
between world that is equally real. during the last 800 years it dropped out and as we
became Aristotelian, which is dualism, which has mind and matter which, created the
mind and matter conundrum that we still are dealing with, the imagination became the
opposite of reality. the imagination moved from a reality to disney world. disney
describes it actually. he doesn't like the endings of stories. i don't know if you saw the
movie saving mr. banks. he describes that he doesn't like the endings of the stories. so
he creates imagination to get out of reality and his whole disney world idea is to get a
place outside of reality.

that is the epitome of the Western attitude to imagination as it has developed over the
last eight hundred years. when we look 800 years back imagination was a form of reality
in which you could meet people in which you could meet beings in which you could
encounter what were called the daemones, the beings that live in that world and in many
other traditions, like in the tradition that you were talking about in in Brazil, and many
other traditions. they still have these daemones with which they are conversant in our
tradition. It has either become hallucination or it has become Disney but there is not this
sense anymore that Jung started again and brought back into the culture that there is an
in-between world that is equally real and the question then is can this in-between world
that is equally real to the physical world. I call this the embodied world because they
exist in embodied States. they exist in embodied presences.

can this embodied world have an influence for us or can it lead to us to medical
applications that were similar to the applications that were brought about by Ascepian
medicine and the answer of course is yes. I found that working on images directly
affected my body so I became interested in Zurich in how that works how does it work
when you work on images in an embodied way how does it affect the body
you