The Secret Aqueduct: Reflections on The Process of Individuation

The Secret Aqueduct: Brian Heaton-Ross

During the eighteenth century, JJ Rousseau, the French philosopher, asked a soul-searching question: 'Why, if we are born free, are we everywhere in chains?' Over 2000 years before Rousseau was born, Plato, the Greek philosopher, wrote his powerful allegory of 'The Cave', in which he asked a similar question: 'Why do so many people live out their days enchained within a shadowy reality bereft of Light?' In our current era, many people, suffering from a kind of restless malaise, an absence of any deep feelings of belonging, and a sense of disillusionment with traditional voices of 'authority', are asking similar questions.

Forty years ago, the author had a graphic dream which he named 'The Wasteland'. The dream served as a powerful Wake-Up Call which was instrumental in creating a complete shift in the compass of his perceptions and the landscape of his life. In 'The Secret Aqueduct', he writes about these shifts, using some fundamental blueprints of archetypal perceptions as a loose framework and providing numerous personal examples from his own Journey, including 39 dreams which served as guiding lights during a critical decade of his life.

'The significant problems we have cannot be solved

at the same level of thinking with which we created them.'

Albert Einstein