Primal Dream: The Infinite Potential Source Dreaming Itself!

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It’s been more than fifty years since the night that started this whole train of thought, but the memory is as vivid as ever. I share it now not as a doctrine or a final answer, but as a set of possibilities — questions I’m still asking myself.

Back in the 1970s, I had a dream. Not just any dream, but one so real, so textured, that even as I woke up I could hardly believe it hadn’t actually happened. In the dream, I walked barefoot across a thick, dark-green carpet. The fibers were deeper and softer than any I’d ever felt in waking life. I ate a slice of birthday cake — tasted the sweetness, felt the fork in my hand. I talked with people, even touched someone’s arm.

When I awoke, I knew with complete clarity that during the dream I had not known it was a dream. I’d been fully immersed, with no sense that there was any other reality. And then a thought came rushing in: if that could happen in a dream, could my waking life be the same kind of thing? Could it be that I am living inside a larger dream — one dreamed not by me alone, but by the Divine Mind?

That question has lived with me ever since.

So back in the 1970s, long before I had words like panpsychism, animism, idealism, Hermeticism, or process philosophy, I carried a strange intuition about reality. It did not come to me through formal theology or academic philosophy. It came through silence, wonder, imagination, and an almost haunting sense that existence itself was alive. Even then, something deep within me resisted the idea that the universe was merely a machine made of dead matter moving blindly through empty space. The stars did not feel empty to me. Trees did not feel lifeless. Mountains seemed to possess presence. Rivers carried atmosphere. Animals radiated mystery. I sensed participation everywhere, though I lacked the language to explain it.

Looking back now, I realize that I leaned toward a kind of animism before I even knew the term existed. But I do not mean animism in the dismissive way modern civilization often uses the word, as though indigenous humanity was merely primitive or scientifically ignorant. In fact, I have gradually come to believe almost the opposite. I now think the ancient indigenous intuition that the universe is alive may have been one of humanity’s deepest spiritual insights.

The early indigenous soul often sensed something modern humanity forgot. Reality was not experienced as separate fragments competing in a cold universe. It was experienced as relationship. The rivers, forests, winds, animals, stars, and seasons all belonged to a living whole. Humanity was not standing outside nature observing it like an engineer examining machinery. Humanity was participating within it.

That sacred participation is what I now see as the foundation of what I call The Primal Dream.

Years ago, I wrote a poem by that title. Most of it has been lost over time, but fragments survived in memory. Even in those fragments, I can now see the seeds of almost everything I would later come to believe. I wrote about thought and energy being inseparable. I wrote about hydrogen clouds swirling and condensing until stars ignited. I wrote about exploding and condensing, the rhythmic dance that eventually birthed planets, life, consciousness, and humanity. Even then, I sensed that the universe was not static perfection frozen outside of time, but living perfection expressed through movement, contrast, and experience.

Over the years I explored Christianity, mysticism, the Nag Hammadi writings, Hermeticism, Taoism, idealism, and process thought. Yet beneath all those systems, the original intuition never really changed. It only gained new language. I came to believe that consciousness itself may be the deepest foundation of reality. Matter is not separate from mind. Matter may actually be condensed thought, condensed possibility, condensed consciousness expressing itself through form.

At the center of existence, I imagine something like infinite consciousness or infinite potential. Not perfection in the rigid moral sense often described by religion, but fullness beyond limitation. Pure being. Pure awareness. The eternal source. Yet there is a paradox hidden within infinite perfection. Perfect stillness alone cannot create experience. Without contrast there is no story. Without limitation there is no becoming. Without movement there is no dance.

And so consciousness pours outward into manifestation.

Thought becomes energy.
Energy becomes substance.
Stars ignite.
Elements form.
Worlds emerge.

The universe unfolds through rhythm and polarity. Exploding, condensing. Exploding, condensing. Galaxies swirl into existence. Planets cool. Oceans form. Life begins reaching upward through endless experimentation and transformation.

But this is where I differ from many traditional religious and philosophical systems. I do not believe life emerges into a dead universe. I believe life emerges within a living universe. Animism, to me, is not merely one primitive stage of human development. It is the sacred foundation underneath all stages. The rocks participate. The rivers participate. Trees participate. Animals participate. Stars participate. Everything belongs to the unfolding experience of consciousness.

In this sense, indigenous humanity was not lesser than modern humanity. Indigenous consciousness preserved something precious: the awareness that existence itself is relational and alive. Modern civilization gained extraordinary knowledge, science, technology, and complexity, but often at the cost of alienation. We learned how nature functions while forgetting how to belong to it. We learned how to measure reality while forgetting how to stand in awe before it.

Yet perhaps this, too, is part of the journey.

The primal dream unfolds through expansion. Consciousness explores itself through increasingly complex forms of experience. From elements to minerals. From rocks to flora. From flora to fauna. From fauna to humanity. Humanity then expands into civilizations, philosophies, religions, sciences, art, conflict, love, longing, and self-awareness. The journey outward is not a mistake. It is the exploration of infinite possibility through lived experience.

And still, the old animistic truth remains underneath everything:
the universe is alive.

The material world itself is not fallen or corrupted in my view. It is perfect for what it is. Stars explode perfectly. Gravity functions perfectly. Seasons turn perfectly. Ecosystems balance themselves perfectly through life, death, decay, and renewal. Even chaos in nature often hides deeper harmonies beneath the surface.

The imperfection we experience most intensely belongs to the emotional and conscious realm. Human beings suffer because finite awareness moves through limitation while carrying some instinctive memory of wholeness. We long. We fear. We grieve. We become attached. We seek permanence in a world built upon change.

Yet even this condition may be part of a larger perfection. Without sorrow, joy could not be experienced as joy. Without longing, reunion would lose meaning. Without uncertainty, discovery would disappear. Without limitation, growth would cease. The emotional turbulence of existence is not proof that reality is broken. It may actually be part of the architecture through which consciousness experiences itself.

Eventually the soul grows weary. After countless experiences, identities, loves, losses, and incarnations, there arises a longing not for conquest, but for rest. And so consciousness turns inward again toward the center. Toward silence. Toward unity. Toward reintegration with the All.

But I do not believe the story ends there.

Many systems imagine union with the divine as final dissolution, the end of individuality and experience forever. Yet I suspect something more cyclical. I believe that after profound rest, after reintegration into infinite consciousness, something new eventually stirs. Infinite potential awakens again. Curiosity returns. The longing for experience rises once more.

And so a new cycle begins.

Not as punishment.
Not as imprisonment.
But as eternal creative exploration.

Each soul begins again uniquely. New worlds. New experiences. New forms. New relationships. The dance continues eternally beautiful, eternally unfolding, eternally alive.

This is why I no longer see existence as a fall from grace. I see it as God’s dance. A dance requires movement, rhythm, tension, release, expansion, and return. No great dance consists of standing perfectly still forever. The beauty exists in the motion itself.

As I grow older, I feel less interested in rigid certainty and more interested in harmony. I no longer need existence to fit neatly into dogmatic systems. What matters to me now is the overwhelming intuition that reality participates in itself, that consciousness permeates existence, and that the ancient animistic perception of a living cosmos may have been one of humanity’s most sacred insights.

The universe feels alive to me.

Not a prison.
Not a fall.
But a play of love.

The primal dream.

God’s dance.