['El Sentido De La Tierra' - The Sense Of The Earth. Painting by Juan Esteban Calderon. Click on the image to enlarge it]
[NOTE: If you have clicked onto the blogspot from my Learning For Life Group essay and wish to read the transformative dream I mention you may scroll down to the subtitle in bold, A Transformative Dream.]
A Golden Compass
Forget every idea of right and wrong
Any classroom ever taught you
Because an empty heart, a tormented mind,
Unkindness, jealousy and fear are always
The testimony that you have been completely fooled.
Turn your back on those who would imprison your
Wondrous spirit with deceit and lies.
Come join the honest company of the king’s beggars,
Those gamblers, scoundrels and divine clowns and
Those astonishing fair courtesans who need divine
Love every night. Come join the courageous who
Have no choice but to bet their entire world that
Indeed God is real. Let me lead you into the circle
Of the beloved’s cunning thieves, those playful
Royal rogues, the ones you can trust for true guidance
Who can aid you in this blessed calamity of life.
- Shams al-Din Hafiz
C.G. Jung repeatedly pointed out that, whenever a bright psychic content becomes lodged in consciousness, its opposite is constellated in the unconscious and tries to harm from that vantage point. The physician becomes a charlatan precisely because he wants to heal as many people as possible; the clergyman becomes a hypocrite and false prophet precisely because he wants to bring people to the true faith; and the psychotherapist becomes an unconscious charlatan and false prophet although he works day and night on becoming more conscious.
-- Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig, Power In The Helping Professions, pgs. 31-32
"What I call transformation is at bottom a question of fate. Although we may wish to keep within our own limits, or to overstep them, it is never to be done by wishing but only by happening. Only when it happens to us that we overstep our limits can we be sure that we have overstepped them and that it had to be so. In the end there is no legitimate having-to-go-beyond-ourselves. Hence I would not recommend anybody to wish to go beyond himself. Moreover this expression is false; we cannot go beyond ourselves but only deeper into ourselves, and this self is not identical to the ego because in this self we appear wondrously strange to ourselves."
C.G. Jung, Letters, Vol. 1, pgs. 192-193
Mana is a Melanesian word referring to a bewitching or numinous quality in gods and sacred objects. A mana-personality embodies this magical power. In individual psychology, Jung used it to describe the inflationary effect of assimilating autonomous unconscious contents, particularly those associated with anima and animus.
Mana-personality is a personified archetypal image of a supernatural force.
The mana-personality is a dominant of the collective unconscious, the well-known archetype of the mighty man in the form of hero, chief, magician, medicine-man, saint, the ruler of men and spirits, the friend of God.[C.G. Jung, "The Mana-Personality," CW 7, par. 377.]
Historically, the mana-personality evolves into the hero and the godlike being, whose earthly form is the priest. [Ibid., par. 389.]
The ego has appropriated something that does not belong to it. But how has it appropriated the mana? If it was really the ego that conquered the anima [or archetype at hand], then the mana does indeed belong to it, and it would be correct to conclude that one has become important. But why does not this importance, the mana, work upon others?...It does not work because one has not in fact become important, but has merely become adulterated with an archetype, another unconscious figure. Hence we must conclude that the ego never conquered the anima at all and therefore has not acquired the mana. All that has happened is a new adulteration. [Ibid., par. 380.]
-- from - http://www.nyaap.org/index.php/id/7/subid/53
"Elsewhere [Jung] notes that spirit can mean simply "God" as opposed to all that is not God. But he also contrasts spirit with nature, matter, and instinct. When its meaning "is restricted to the supernatural or anti-natural," writes Jung, then the concept loses "its substantial connection with psyche and life." When this is done theologically ["metaphysics" popularly understood is a theology] it means that the reality of God is removed from life. Jung himself favours a conception of spirit which is neither separate from nor reducible to the material...In accordance with this view of spirit as integral to life, Jung points out that in primitive times spirit was experienced as external to man, whereas historically the trend has been towards locating it "in man's consciousness." Jung is concerned not so much to oppose this trend as to remind man of the origin and autonomous power of the spirit, which approaches consciousness from a depth beyond it. Jung's point here is that though modern man may be becoming more conscious of the immanence of spirit he must never lose sight of its overwhelming power relative to ego consciousness. Even when deprived of an external and transcendent origin, spirit retains its power to possess man rather be possessed by him, and when man is possessed he enters into a dangerous state of inflation and one-sidedness...Besides the many meanings the term ['spirit'] can have, Jung is also aware of an ambivalence or duality within the function of the spirit itself. The spirit can be dark as well as light, of the devil as well as of the divine. Here Jung sounds a theme that runs throughout his work: the need for man to face and to integrate the essential ambivalence of life if he is to be whole...experience of the spirit tends to lead one away from collective values...The spirit is also endowed with the power to grip, so that the person influenced by it feels moved to act in accord with it. It is thus accompanied by emotion. Jung describes spirit in this sense as the "image of a personified affect." -- John P. Dourley, C.G. Jung And Paul Tillich, The Psyche As Sacrament, Inner City Books, 1981, pgs. 79-80
*******************************************************
In a letter by Carl Jung to the Islamic scholar and mystic, Henri Corbin, Jung concluded with a phrase, "the misdeeds of our dreams." Upon reading this phrase I had an immediate understanding of the power of dreams to reveal that which is concealed, unwilled, disallowed, and purposefully, willfully repressed. Consciously and seriously entertaining the often disturbingly accurate messages about ourselves and others delivered to us unbidden in the dreams is too disturbing and inconvenient to our egos, our outer lives, with their varied self-serving agendas, especially those overtly "spiritual ones", the "self-improvement ones", be they derived of official revealed religious doctrines and dogmas or one's own revealed adulterations for etherically sweet, blissful, prescriptive dodges of our "all too humanness" tempting us to go beyond ourselves via transcendent fantasies of escape from these primal givens of existence. As Jung says in another letter, "We cannot go beyond ourselves [transcend ourselves] but only deeper into ourselves."
Dreams indicate some other order in which humans participate but not at all as equals. Dreams reorder humans out of hubris and inflation into purposeful disorientation in order to reorient us "dream-order-ward" to deflate, land, and ground us differently, restoring/revisioning a right relationship of ego the the Self, that Greater Orderer, resulting in genuine human humility before It. In dreams day values are devalued, re-valued and trans-valued without gentleness or caution unless the dream deems these the needful modes which may re-order us toward that which the dream is staking out for confrontation, hopeful integration and lived expression.
Dreams deliver vantages and messages unexpected and often unwanted. One willfully ignores them at their own peril. Willfully ignoring dream messages imprisons one in hermetically sealed belief systems which become amd function as vast defensive systems diminishing/eliminating life energy and growth potential. Fixed ego and persona (masks) become stultified. Libido (life energy) is choked, riven toward and through old, secure pathways (usually with chapter and verse from sacred scriptures or other revelations to justify the calcified "ways") but no new creative, dangerous ground is opened. In the imagistic language of fairy tale and myth, the king and queen become barren, the masses depressed, the land frozen and incapable of growing food, the livestock infertile, the kingdom a wasteland while the wild, wild wilderness teems with encroaching vibrancy depicted monstrously, savagely keen to render and ravage new life into riots of shuddering creativity and nowness bringing about a revivified kingdom.
Fairy tale images of being imprisoned in high towers by powerful witches, gingerbread houses and ovens "witch-ruled" and more, depict archetypal defenses against full participation in more of life, including that "filth and rejecta" spurned and punished by social and sacred guilds, the morally ambivalent, the outright failures of character, the dangerous emergence of "life wanting more of life", shadowy selves forced to hover gargoyle-like on fixed ledges of allowed persona and consciousness captivating undeveloped, arrested, innocent/infant-child selves locked in protective bunkers guaranteeing safety but spurning any move toward fresh and life affirming development, preventing the flow and grow of muddy life, taking no heroic risk toward fertile, ferocity engendered from and within lived suspect, conflicted humanness from and within both the bold and the gray givens of existence.
It takes very little effort to see that many religions and spiritualities, once vital responses to Being and Existence, are now reduced to calcifying bunkers, towers, gingerbread houses entrancing both protected innocent part-selves and world-soiled, fractured adapted-selves via purist fantasies of transcendence; for who among us can stand to live in the moral and metaphysical/experiential ambiguities of life as it is, the vicissitudes of self and other/Other, where the opposites of our own split nature, and of Nature, and of our deities, reign supreme thus deeming all human creativity to be used for enduring much less thriving in the muddy, bloody fields which circularly chase those striven-after, regressive "Fields of Ambrosia", Edenic and oceanic, but which like Robert Frost's "gold", cannot stay for they have never grown into fullness, encircled, too, by Nullifying Rings of Fire forbidding entrapped inhabitants to partake of the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil?
I like so many others, perhaps every human past, present and to come, have occupied the remote towers, the gingerbread houses, the ovens, the ledges, sedges, edges and Primal Gardens of safety-imitating-transcendence sucking at one proffered spiritual teat or other out of infantile dependency needs in tandem with the fantasy of becoming the Power portended, pretended, projected and extended into and upon said teat and he/she who wields it, who insists it out of their own vampiric dependency needs for the life blood of sucking others harvesting from their symbiotic larders--spiritual community and family, congregation, mystery school, training program, sacred orders and guilds rendered to no more than food stores for ravenous spiritual leaders and those wannabees sycophanting on knees at teats secretly reaching for the Ring of Power. Sinister, what? Indeed, when seen unmasked by the "misdeeds of our dreams."
I have lived in the muddy, bloody fields all the while refusing the battles there preferring, as I had been taught, saintliness and milky-white purity of higher, spiritual values, believing those tempting, bewitching towers and bunkers, are/were the better collective alternative, at least, in appearance. I have also dwelt, dug in, poured concrete and planted flags in regressive Edenic Parentheses in seas of stormy, violent, ambivalent human relationships of all kinds, particularly in religious institutions, spiritual schools and congregations with their transcendent agendas, would be "shelters from the storm"; alas, life crushing bunkers all. My own fate which has determined my own growth by any means necessary which by nature includes distortions and imperfections, malfeasance/malformations, veritable flaws and abortions of all kinds, has been and so far remains that of expulsion and exile for the supposed "good of all concerned", sometimes self-imposed but mostly imposed from without by sanctimonious scapegoating boards, spiritual authorities (self-proclaimed and self-ordained mostly), high priestess presbyteries of Protean pretenders, hippie-dipping kow towers with "peace and blessings" all the way to Hell's Holy Handbasket served by their corralled, currying castrati who do the dirty work of "the Teacher" and his/her inner circle so that they may appear to remain morally and chastely clean, spiritually pure--a dream and scream of impossible transcendence if ever there was.
This continual theme and experience of my life, in spite of Calvinistic New Age claims to be so, are not just of my own creation, consciously or unconsciously. This messy "spiritual soup" that I and all others live some version of and swim within while trying to avoid the eventual Spoon of Fate scooping, scooping at us all, indeed, is Archetypal, is born of primal patterns inherent in human relationships guaranteeing ongoing Cains slaying Abels, Jacobs wrestling angels, at Gehennas, Gethsemanies and Golgothas leading to psychological Goths disguised in spiritual garb, shadow-ridden and projected collectives ruled by some spiritually pretty potentate or other who has a foot and other inseminating parts up the all-too-willing asses of their castrati curriers and couriers, mind-controlled molls carrying out sacred accusations against and excommunications of those heretics who will no longer suckle at the withered dyspeptic dugs of paranoid Prophets/Prophetesses ringed about by predicated, predictable, encircling lambs of the First Church of Jerry Springer now and forever more. Amen.
Thus, I have learned the hard way from waking and sleeping dreams which have come. I listen to them now for methinks, or I have enough hints regarding the matter, that the Spoon of Fate is perhaps stirring the contents of the Bilious Heironymous Bosch Bowl around so I may see and ponder what order/disorder is being effaced, erased, displaced, replaced, and traced which may be attended to in a more meaningful, though often messy, fashion (for dreams care not one wit about cleanliness, light, the Good and saintly order. Chaos, says Wallace Stevens, is an order. Certainly true of dreams) all the while all/us/we be dog-paddling, side-stroking, belly flopping into some part of the Soup, the Scoop of looping circular Being's Spoon filling with and as the "Wheel of Fate" which is the most difficult "Meal of Fate" to be faced, swallowed and assimilated. With any luck I/we may at least accumulate a distinct flavor, a spiciness of Being, contributing to the Taste before or as the Big Swallower slurps and gulps me/all/us/we gulletward.
I have lately learned to pitch only a small tent with stakes not too deep in the spiritual "Fields of Ambrosia" offered by humanity and, if believed, Deity. I have also learned to keep a pooper scooper, spray painted gold, actively handy when at the "feets n teats" of those opportuning teachers, ministers, healers, channelers, gurus, priests, priestesses, rabbis, et.al. and more who are identified with some sacred teaching or other, their agendas and strategies yanking us toward their visions and versions of perfection. I have wondered how I might have a small golden trowel charm made to wear on a chain around my neck, my "crucifix", my "mala" to wear, the accumulation of my daimonic, wily wisdom, wankering hard won - my own fault, too, - in and among the Malarkey Mills of Transcendent Turn-key Side-Talkers/Mawkers/Mutha-Fakirs of the Fakred Sacred Stooges. This little amulet would serve more to remind me of my own marlarkish attempts to escape and transcend the cosmic soup of material being, attempting to gold-plate the gutsy givens, the exacting exigencies, vestigial harmonic amniotics not-withstanding.
A Precautionary Dream of Spiritual Teacher/Follower Relationship As Vampiric
One of the most disturbing yet helpful and continually precautionary dreams depicting spiritual dependency needs and projections of the follower with a clear hint as to those also of the spiritual teacher came after my exile from a Calvinist Christan college with their cauterizing covenants canopied in corpulent caucasoid-filled churches. A teacher there at the college, the only authentic mystic I have ever met, took me under his more than adequate wing seeing my broken wingedness clearly, understanding that the college would eventually not turn out too well for me and my mental well-being. It didn't. But he - "Doc", I called him - did. I have recounted more about him below if the reader wishes to read of him fleshed out more, his great and positive impact upon me. The account is titled in bold, Midscript: "Thoughts On Doc" - An Account Of How We Met In August, 1970,
Time passed. I fled Farout Mountain's shadow where the Calvinists loomed and loom still in their castle at the summit. I retreated troll-like to lick my wounds and confusion having fallen, or so I felt, out of the safe Calvinistic "frying pan into the sure fires of hell" (as one angry theology professor predicted out loud would be my fate in class my final day at the college). I eventually found my way to the gentle hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a little cabin amongst the rhododendron beside a sibilant stream. There I tended my wounded self and the fast growing trail of my accumulated broken "deities" and "gurus" on my own broken but earnest back and knees from mountaintops to valleys, reading far and widely from philosophy to poetry, from history to hermeneutics, from world religions to current recipes for transcendence and/or existential persistence in the cosmic blender of life with only one setting available, "High Frappe" -- no guarantee for "transcendence" though dissociation and halliucinatory kingdoms crown our suffering days narcotically neurotically.
In my hermit cabin on Dismal Creek Mountain some five years or so since I had last been with mystical "Doc", or heard from him, and two or three years after his death, I dreamed that I was being held in his arms holding my head in his lap as I reclined looking up at him in absolute love, devotion and surrender, like a child in the arms of his protective father. Suddenly, Doc's loving face transformed into that of a vampire, fangs exposed and stretching toward my open, vulnerable neck. I awakened in shock and horror. "Not Doc?!" I cried in protest to the cabin walls, frozen rhododendron leaves rattling menacingly just out the windows.
"Doc" was dead so I had no access to information about his own personal history other than the many personal stories he had told of his boyhood as twin in upstate farmlands of New York, of a cruel fundamentalist Christian father, of deep introversion and keen intellgence singling him out for abuse from peers, of many lonely hours hiking the hills, collecting flower and plant samples, the beginning of what to become his first P.H.D. in botany. He had uplifting mystical experiences in the woods reading sacred scriptures which he loved in spite of the conservative fundamentalists he knew. What he read and experienced did not at all match with his personal understanding and experience of what he not only read but in his mystical encounters with Nature and Spirit. A manuscript I have of his which was never published is called, "Thoughts on Spirit, Thoughts on Nature", and also another, "Thoughts on Angels". He reported that these "thoughts" began in his boyhood which he even then knew to write down for furture work and meditation.
I knew nothing very specific of his psychological life other than what he reported except for some early confusion as to his sexuality. He ultimately met and married a lovely woman, had a daughter, both of whom he openly adored and loved. I can still hear him calling his wife's name from the woods as we walked down the foothills toward his Virginia home where he had retired after being let go from the Calvinist college where we had met. His wife, "Mumsy", would respond from the back porch, "Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!" "Hoo" was what the initials of his name spelled and thus she called him affectionately, Hoo! I called him as did other students, "Doctor Hoo" or just, "Doc", sometimes "Da Ku". We would arrive at the house with flowers gathered from our walks and long talks of mystical and scientific things. I more than once heard Doc hooting loudly in excitement on excursions calling me or a small group of us to come quick as he had discovered something which obviously greatly pleased and excited him. I remember seeing him standing ecstatically in a wide spread of "bluets", tiny delicate blue flowers low to the ground and plentiful. He literally giggled with pleasure in their living midst. He felt their energy and made joyful praises to them and their Maker. Once I saw him literally hug a tree and he was not a hippie. He wept for joy when he embraced it. I was confounded by such displays of emotion, of glee, of tears, from what to me was still mere woods and plants. I longed to live where Doc lived inwardly which he could also evidently live and experience outwardly or was it the other way around? Whatever it was, I wanted to get to where he lived internally. He took no claim for wherever he may have arrived except that "it was all the work of God, of Spirit, of Grace" by multitudinous means of the Holy, mostly prayer and adoration. I was "sold" and a hungry congregant (ah, the vampire will out) for whatever it was he could convey to "dull old me".
Thus I have returned to and worked this Doc-as-vampire dream and similar for many years in my Jungian psychoanalysis. My love for Doc has not diminished even though dreams and experience have taught me that not even good old "Doc" was exempt, and he never claimed, ever, to be, from all human foibles. I've not dreamed of him since the vampire dream though I have daily thought of him and occasionally read one of the manuscripts which are written in the peculiar style of his voice and speaking. This brings his "music" and perhaps his "Muse of Spirit" close to me.
With the vampire dream I have had to explore deeply and work with difficulty yet fruitfully my own vampiric, driven, dependency needs and dependent projections. I have also come to see these dreams as revelatory of the dependency needs of those "mana personalities" (see definition and explanation preceding this essay) who so often move to the forefront as sat gurus, high priest and priestesses, channelers, big chiefs and elders of spiritual groups, official and unofficial, large and small, religious colleges and training programs, medicine wheels and more.
Doc certainly had "mana" (or perhaps "mana" had him) but was not at all inflated so far as I could youthfully see by what he lived daily in terms of a vibrant connection and communication with some sacred reality I've not been in the active presence of (that I know of) since my last week in the Virginia hills standing in a field of bluets with a "contact high" from Doc's genuine ecstasy in their midst. I have been in the presence of many since "Doc" (see the immediate account below) who claimed "presence" and demonstrated "wonders" of psychic powers and abilities but not one of them can match the unpretentious, quiet presence of Doc and the Presence one was in (which he continually referred to) when with him.
Another Misdeed Dream - Enter The New Age Nazi High Priestess
"In fighting for their aims they are really fighting for their sanity." —-Erich Fromm, The Anatomy Of Human Destructiveness
"Prophets are natural actors...the leader appears sensitive and concerned...others find him nourishing to be around. Yet the leader astutely registers the needs and vulnerabilities of the people he meets, subtly implying that he can fulfill those needs. The cult is set up (at least in part) to satisfy the wants and exploit the vulnerabilities of the followers, who find, once they have joined, that it is hard to challenge the leader because of the large number of needy members who depend for their well-being upon him."
—Len Oakes, Prophetic Charisma, The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities, 1997, pg. 15.
When I eventually succumbed to my spiritual loneliness, post-Calvinists and Doc now gone, disoriented, I began a round of servitude at the feet of a North Carolina New Age high priestess in my youth seeking to go beyond myself, to transcend rather than go deeper into myself (what John Wellwood calls "spiritual bypassing", going up instead of deeper into personal history to confront, heal and grow forward from inevitable wounding accrued from childhood, culture and family), I immediately had dreams where the priestess and her followers were Nazis. In one memorable and disturbing dream the priestess sported a Hitler mustache while driving a densely black Volkswagon, a car designed, I'm told, by Adolf himself, the "folks wagon", the people's wagon. I was tied up in ropes and duck tape in the back seat while her husband, one of several at once, in the front passenger seat wore a large baby diaper and an infant's cap marked with a black swastika surrounded by little piglets. Wha'? I was greatly disturbed by this and similar dreams with the Teacher/Priestess cast repeatedly as a Nazi commander, working them as best I could in and out of my various psychotherapy stints and eventual Jungian analysis. What became gradually clear, for I am obstinately naive and slow in seeing things as they are, were that the dark shadow dynamics of power and the "will to power" were immediately being depicted in the dreams at the get-go of my relationship with her.
The dreams revealed not only my unconscious power drives and dynamics but also those of this, in retrospect and venom, "New Age Hodge Podge Pirated-Spiritual Porridge Priestess" and the "wannabe her" followers. The temptations of spiritual power (one of the temptations of Christ was by the "power devil" at the advent of His ministry) were clearly there, inflated, "light-identified," though the priestess was good at "shadow talking," consolidating her power and primacy in her own mystery school which entranced, enchanted, and ensnared mostly sincere, dependent, searching acolytes sucking at her promising, all good, "transcendent," yet withered dugs. Perhaps I was the worst, though sincere, of the licking lot.
My skillful psychoanalyst at the time uncompromisingly and persistently took these dreams seriously, insisting repetitively-like the repetitive nature of the dreams-that I, of course, must excruciatingly "face my own music" in the dreams about my own dependency needs, my own dependent projections upon her and the mystery school, my slowly realizing that the "power devil" unconsciously looming and acting out is to be found in spiritually aspiring individuals and groups no matter their overt "spiritual" or other "positive" intentions; it takes not only "two to tango" but also "two to tangle". When I, surprisingly, made it into the inner sanctum of her "Temple of One" though appearing to be comprised of many, the dreams became even more explicit revealing a heavy, occluded, primitive, underworld Reptilian Lurker drooling just out of site but very much present and active not only in myself but in herself and the encircling castrati, who carried for her her very own disowned reptilian primitive self and energy with her massive dependency needs. Not at all flattering but I had to face it, my own "Grendel", so named for John Gardner's "Grendel" in his novel telling the story of Beowulf from the viewpoint of the monster with whom I very much identified. Like Grendel's attempts to undo himself, I could not no matter how hard I tried be turned into a Christian Saint or New Age "namaste"-tourretting accoutrement for a spiritual teacher who consigned one and all to the bleachers of her bestowing blessings and bewitchings, her need to feed upon and to be fed paramount to one and all.
It all turned overtly ugly as the psyche will out by any means necessary.
Dynamics of "spiritual dependent personality disorder" transform only with conscious recognition (owning), reckoning with disowned, dependent projections and dependency needs of not only obsequious followers but of ravenously dependent spiritual teachers whose followers must carry and express those needs, greeds and gluttonies for them, that gluttony of "power-over" the most evident of all.
In my own little "sacred community" compound in the Blue Ridge hills, I could no longer disguise myself in spiritual or psychologically-articulated self-righteousness nor, frankly, did I want to. Why should the "righteous ones" be spared a dose of their own disowned and projected shadows? I was not going to blow sandalwood- and saffron-flavored smoke up my or their saintly asses any longer. My "job description" now changing—no more mindless compliance to the Priestess—gatherings became deranged as did she and her leaders, her supplicant followers spouting calumny and calamities upon those (me) who were no longer compliant and "of the Fold", who no longer "loved" the Teacher. I now understand that the Teacher confused genuine love for a completely-merged-with-an-other state called "object love", an infant developmental phase in which the child and the mother (the object) merged for good and for ill. A negative merge with a mostly negative mother imprints the child who ultimately seeks the positive, good-enough merge with others to compensate for the earlier negative merge with the mother. When the Teacher merged with a devotee, it was completely on her terms, though she had no comprehension of the early childhood developmental issues compelling that "hermetically sealed, dependent merger" with others. When that other or others began to emerge, individuate, separate and become independent from what became suffocating and damaging in terms of hyper-control and fear from massive abandonment fears she/he was accused of no longer loving the Teacher, of some form of apostasy or discordant with the group mores aberrant behavior, thus beginning the machinations of gossip against the "apostate betrayer" leading to ultimate excommunication. Individuating followers were forced into hatred for the Teacher as a psycho-logical consequence of her insistence upon complete merger with and dependency upon her which she wrongly called "love".
Once my expulsion sans exculpation inevitably proceeded, the sanctimonious calculating leader, her Reptile at work, and her sweet spiritual savants having secured her and their power in terms of her, I dreamed a most auspicious dream which guides me still, orients me as to my stumbling 'Pilgrim's Progress' no longer seeking entrance into what turns out to be mostly Caucasian "spiritual temples" be they of official religions or those bizarre "Baby Boomer" branches which entertain infantile, narcissistic, middle and upper class "Boomers", spiritually-entitled/elitists ongoingly selling and plundering world religious symbols and indigenous sacred techniques purloined and perverted to their own egoic, spiritually materialistic purposes. Harvey Cox calls all this accurately "the New Gluttony", "Spirituality-Lite" having become a best selling commodity in corporate-driven, focus group determined American culture.
My dreams certainly, and justly, accuse me of participation in this adolescent jingle-jangling, this corporations-driven "spiritual" juggernaut partly propelled initially by childhood wounds yet exposed eventually to be naked power drives determined toward propaganda-priesthood and prophesy (Intuition has been turned into a religion) and the ultimate profit of bucks and now a five second sound bite of fame.
A Transformative Dream
I am on the ground floor of the "Great Hall" in the New Age Center of the Teacher and her followers. I stand before an altar, enormous, which takes up an entire wall of the Center. It is a bleacher, it's levels laden with images, amulets, statues, gems, crystals, calligraphic scripts, power objects of world religions, official and unofficial, from animism to the present. The altar/bleacher is on the very verge of collapse. It sways precariously. In a panic I try to find a way to prevent its collapse, to secure the altar but it is too large and too heavily laden. I am helpless to prevent what is happening. Resolved, I seek some object or image or other from the altar to redeem. I know that the collapse will be total. In the final portentous sway before collapsing I see two objects, a beautiful, peaceful head of the Buddha, serene-faced and still, and a small tourista souvenir of a beer stein from Switzerland called an 'alpenstein', the kind of cheap chachka one finds when traveling.
As the altar collapses, without thought, I impulsively grab the Swiss beer stein as I watch with sorrow the Buddha head fall into the dusty rubble of crowded, collapsing symbols and images, now resembling a mini-9/11 "Ground Zero". Gripping my beer stein I see the Teacher and one of her molls enter, rolled yoga-mats strung over their shoulders trailing a silver slime like slugs on a sidewalk. They see me there in front of the rubble, the rising dust cloud, lift up their noses pretending not to see me and walk on by. I wonder at how in the world I could have wasted so many years with these two and the other psycho-phants. I feel humiliated by and angry at my own gullibility, my dependency needs, my willful "not-seeing" beneath the donut sugary gauze/glaze of New Age "ava-tar and angel feathered-ness" (Nazi, now a pun for "not see"). I then notice that I am clad only in underwear, briefs. I proceed to the front door to once and finally leave never to return. I say to myself, "It's over now. Now I must get some clothes on," as I exit the building. I wake up resolved, relieved and clear. Finally, a human being. END OF DREAM.
Clearly a Jungian path is indicated by the choice, the unthought grab, of the Swiss beer stein. C.G. Jung is Swiss after all. It is also a Western Path which is chosen. My unconscious did not go for the Eastern path, the Buddha head as the altar collapsed. It salvaged, rather, a simple, small, cheap souvenir, the alpenstein, impulsively chosen. The little temenos (Greek for "vessel, container") is for beer, a distilled, fermented drink. My path is that alchemical path of individuation which Carl Jung explicates extensively in his life and writing.
The word "souvenir" means "that which serves as a reminder; a remembrancer; a memento; a keepsake" to which I associate the method of psychoanalysis, to remember one's personal past and, in a Jungian psychological view, to "remember" the ancient archetypes, those primal patterns which do unconsciously shape our lives personally and collectively which we may become conscious of and live in conscious relation to which is what Jungian psychology seeks to do. This is called "individuation". Jungian psychology does not seek occult powers, healing wonders, entertaining spiritual sideshows and flatteries. It is a serious calling to go deeper. Not beyond. Not a transcendence imitated or imposed from the top down.
My first and immediate association to the alpenstein, meaning, alpen =white + stein = stone is to the "whitening process of "albedo" in alchemy. The white of the swiss alps is snow, white "dust" if you will. This association plus the white clouds of dust when the altar collapses in the dream associates to the whitening phase in alchemy called "albedo" with its "fine white ash" (derived from the burning called "calcinatio" in alchemy) of substances reducing them to a "fine white ash"; according to Edward F. Edinger, "This [fine white ash]...signifies despair, mourning, or repentence ['metanoia'in Greek which means a complete turning around]. On the other hand [ashes] contain the supreme value, the goal of the work [which is what the alchemical process is called, the work]. The ash is the incorruptible "glorified body," which has survived the purifying ordeal." White, then, associates to death, mourning and loss as well as an everlasting substance, white ash also representing that thing of greatest value rendered from the death process.
The stein or stone often symbolizes the Self, that archetype and dynamic of the central organizing factor within the psyche, that greater reality in which the ego is derived and yet is not the totality of. This little egoic vessel, a cup for holding beer (usually), is what is rendered from the crushing collapse, mourning and despair in the inevitable Fated withdrawal of dependent projections upon mana personalities, spiritual organizations (religions, spiritualities) and activities designed to "save," enlighten, and redeem the givens of earthly existence. That I am almost naked, reduced to bare self, symbolizes both death and rebirth. I leave the grandiosity of the Self (Atman) Project which is religion, art, culture and the ego (see Ken Wilber's excellent, The Atman Project, to study this primary projection born at the birth of human consciousness of the ego and nascently, the Self/Atman. As in all projection, something, the Self/Atman in this case, is outwardly projected into and upon things (Atman, in Sanscrit, a Hindu term for the god of gods beyond knowing but only imaged). These Self projections become reified, concretized, symbol is reduced to a sign which is mistaken for that which the symbol refers to and connects one to. Alfred North Whitehead calls this the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness." With calcifications comes eventual crushing destructions of rigidified systems, psychological and otherwise.
To reiterate, the dream indicates a major collapse (withdrawal) of dependent projections upon religion and spirituality, a collapse not willed by the ego but Fated, if you will, by the Self. A process of mourning and loss ensues. One is naked, stripped of ego adapations (clothes), and must go about the business of getting dressed in clothes most appropriate to what has been lost and what has been or is to be gained in the new life emerging from the white ashes. In relation to this Jung's quote at the beginning of this essay bears repeating:
"What I call transformation is at bottom a question of fate. Although we may wish to keep within our own limits, or to overstep them, it is never to be done by wishing but only by happening. Only when it happens to us that we overstep our limits can we be sure that we have overstepped them and that it had to be so. In the end there is no legitimate having-to-go-beyond-ourselves. Hence I would not recommend anybody to wish to go beyond himself. Moreover this expression is false; we cannot go beyond ourselves but only deeper into ourselves, and this self is not identical to the ego because in this self we appear wondrously strange to ourselves."
C.G. Jung, Letters, Vol. 1, pgs. 192-193
My dream certainly is personal and referent to my own process. It is also transpersonal, meaning, it refers also to a process going on in the collective, in culture. This process and collapse of the old order, of central containing symbols and archetypes has been ongoing since the renaissance increasing in rapidity in the 19th and 20th century with the industrial age and consequent Pandora cyber-world we now find ourselves barely in control of. The old meanings (the altar with all world symbols, large and small, accumulated through the ages) collapses. What remains? What new meaning, what new archetype of meaning which can contain humans meaningfully will emerge or is emerging? We are undergoing a major transition, the kairos, the falling of one star of meaning, and have yet to see the new star of meaning clearly which is coming. Individual dreams can hint at it but as Jung once indicated that the foundation of the new "temple" or edifice of meaning globally is only just being laid by people the world over, each particular flavor of clan and culture, working on some part of the foundation. People will regress to the old structures and find some meaning and yet the old shall be assumed into the new. Fundamentalisms of all kinds, from scientism to atheism to religions, are bunkers which preserve but do not foster life anew. They are defensive. The New Age is no exception.
As my dream indicates each must receive his/her symbol and go out humbly, "naked", in the world undergoing major transformation and reorientation of values (meaning). Each must cloth themselves according to their symbol, their little white stone container, foregoing grandiosity, psychological egoic inflation (identity with an archetype), and serve the Self as best one can.
Another understanding of albedo is helpful here which amplifies this reorientation of the ego toward the primacy of the Self and the new meaning evolving now at the turn of the age from Pisces to Aquarius. In meteorology albedo is defined "as the ratio of the intensity of the outgoing radiation to the incident radiation. Put simply it is how much sunlight is reflected by surface material. For instance, albedos of typical materials in the visible light range are from up to 90% for fresh snow, to about 4% for charcoal, one of the darkest substances" (wikipedia).
The scientific meaning of albedo, "the ratio of reflecting of sunlight by surfaces" may mythopoeically allude to my work of further psychic transformation whereupon the light of the Sun, an symbol of the Self archetype, that central organizing and dynamic archetypal factor in the psyche in which the ego participates is to be reflected by me, the little stone remembrance vessel, the ego, the personality of Warren. Since the altar is a world altar this also applies to the collective at large.
I am not that Great Light of the Sun and Its antecedent Darkness. I reflect it and both. Ditto for all individuals and groups the world over.
It is a humble image with neither inflated or deflated grandiosity. One has only to stand in a mountain valley or strive to reach a high mountain peak to become immediately and concretely aware of how little and insignificant one is in relation to such towering majestic upward looming masses supported by deeper foundations unseen but alive and active. My contribution is, has been, and shall be small, a meaningful token in the evolution of consciousness in which Jungian psychology participates. My little cup can hold only what it holds though it may symbolize something greater, the Self, than its little chachka self. No more striving to be other than what I always/already am, one flawed human, one more "bozo on the bus" (Firesign Theatre) stripped of pretensions toward greatness, toward guru-ness, forming my own church or spiritual klatch and clutch, no more suckling at mana mammaries costing me nothing less than everything to noonie at. Been there. Done that. Wiped the milk from my upper lip and now move on with tooth and nail, my little stone "pail" to limn the broken world in rarified visionary company, a human vision. Not of angels and light. Day and night and the eternal rounds of cycles suffice.
Of stein/stone Jung (and Edward Edinger in his excellent book, Ego and Archetype)have written much, an image of the Self. Can my little stone reflect the sunlight of Self such as it is? Is it the humble stone which may contribute to some greater edifice of understanding and awareness?
Years ago, freshly plummeted from Lookout Mountain's Calvinistic Kingdom, living in the mountain's shadow, choking on my own shadow and the shadow of God and His followers, I wrote a poem about a cracked coffee cup, white and stained, which a dear poet friend, cracked too and mad for poetry, purloined from the local diner, from which I still drink my daily cup of coffee, a souvenir of my friend, those good/terrible days, a remembrance to all the striving in spite of shadow, shit and shinola and all the future dugs I had to pull at until the final resounding collapse into and embrace of my "all too humanness" :
The Cracked Cup
Could I but hold within in spite of crack the strength of flavors sending
vapors up for sweet telling orders at once of earth, of loam, of comet;
In my form though cracked could I but mold the world unfurling before
me its viscous flag, whirl it round, a jelling wind in love with sorrow;
Could I but borrow this shape though marred and gather all morrows to me,
their bitter drafts drink down to make merry marrow sink stars to their
knees hissing remiss secrets to us below, their entwining gases rehearsing places in black heaven's burning, star-graced flashing mystery full,
cracking the Vault above, vanishing soiled to reappear here, apparitions in insubstantial hands,
this cup, this man, this room, all one and same but claiming separate faces;
Could all this be true I would hasten the Potter to His sharpening art,
take this bell-kissed form and, rift, singing,
depart.
Midscript: "Thoughts On Doc" - An Account Of How We Met In August, 1970
After a nervous breakdown--in retrospect and reframe, a psychospiritual crisis--I fled from the Christian college where it had occurred. As an earnest Christian student I applied myself to the theology and practice of spirituality expoused. I took this on whole-heartedly but, to my deepening despair then, my efforts ended in great failure since the Grace spoken of, preached about and ostensibly demonstrated by some teachers and students was just not, apparently, available to or efficacious for me. I could not get it to work and, so counseled by plentiful well-meaning spiritual advisors from peers to faculty, I could not NOT work at it and just receive it. I went through myriad spiritual gymnastics knowing that according to Protestant Christian teaching from Luther on that "saving grace was "not of works but faith" and that "faith was a gift of God." The gymnastics were about my NOT working and trying to have faith even the size of a "mustard seed." Alas, to no avail. I could not but wonder if I was one of those "elected to Hell and Damnation" no matter how sincere the desire to be otherwise.
Thankfully, truly, there was one amazing professor there (actually there were other great professors at the college, brilliant and accessible, of whom I shall most likely write about in another account, from whom I learned much of great value), an authentic mystic, a humble, brilliant scientist and theologian who did not, it appeared to me, fit in with the Calvinism of the Presbyterian college who without any fanfare or self-promotion had healing and intuitive powers. Fragmented and lost soul as I was it is indeed a grace that he discovered me my first night at the college frightened and isolated almost beyond my capacities to remain stably sane.
My first evening at the college frightened and in panic I fled campus blindly in to the darkness down a mountain road under brilliant moonlight, my reflecting telescope in my arms, a childhood treasure/totem, a telling transitional object for me if there ever was one. I found a dirt road to my left, veered onto it without thought, desperate to escape and be alone. At some point I saw a large clearing ahead of me, a sports field of some sort lit up by the moon. I slowed to a walk and stopped at the edge to breathe and to see where I had arrived. As I calmed down I noticed there was a human figure in the middle of the field, a soccer field, something shining in front of the figure reflecting the moonlight. To my shock I heard an odd male voice calling, "Yoohooo!" and saw the figure waving at me to come toward him. I hesitated for quite awhile. The figure waved again calling to me, ""Friend! Friend!" There was a comforting tone in this voice so I decided to risk my fear and walk toward him thinking that I could use my telescope as a weapon if I needed to defend myself.
As I approached the figure I made out in the dim light a tall, thin, bald man wearing thick black-rimmed glasses giving him an owlish appearance. Dressed warmly for the cool, late-summer mountaintop field I saw his eyes light up when he saw my telescope at the same time that I saw his, a 7 foot long refracting telescope pointed at the moon. Shocked by this beauty I approached in reverence, my hand extended out to it, ready to touch gently and caress it. I heard the man with his odd voice chuckle and say, "So you are an angel watcher, too." I looked at him intently, my mind a blank, not comprehending what was happening to me.
"Angels?"
"Oh yes. I see them patrolling the skies of the earth."
I blink at him, look at his telescope which he had built himself, then to the sky where he had pointed. Nothing but magnificent stars and a full moon.
"Oh, they're there. Feel them here now. They led you here."
I blink more, not comprehending.
His voice was calming, an odd timbre to it, his presence like no other human I have ever been in the presence of before or sense. Who? Wha'? Huh? was about all my brain could synapse.
He reached out his hand to shake mine.
"I'm Harvey Omar Olney. You can call me Doc. I teach biological sciences at the college. Nice to greet you here in the presence of angels and of Whom they serve."
I reached out reflexively having been an avid church goer since second grade elementary school three times a week and then some with much hand shaking going on before and after services. When I gripped his hand I felt a powerful electric current jolt through my hand and arm with an accompanying white light exploding in my brain. I gasped. He supported me as I swooned.
I woke up, my face wet with tears, reclining on his coat looking up at his telescope, the moon in a lower part of the sky than when I had first arrived at the field. Doc knelt beside me where I heard his voice softly, earnestly speaking but not to me. As my mind cleared a bit I realized he was praying over me, "this dear one", in such a tender voice that tears streamed down my face. I didn't know where I was, who I was with or what was going to happen to me but I felt completely and utterly safe and at home, something I can honestly, categorically say that I had never, ever felt in my life.
I heard the approaching putt-putt of an engine which did not disturb Doc in his prayers over me. The putt-putt approached closely then stopped just a few feet from where I lay. I sat up to see what was going to happen next in this most extraordinary night of my life. I saw another tall man, young, thin, looking puzzled at me and Doc and standing beside the motorbike he drove onto the field. I looked at him. He smiled and put his finger to his lips in a shushing gesture, then pointed to Doc and nodded.
Bewildered, I sat until at some point Doc stopped praying. He looked at me with his eyes full of tears and smiled.
"I think you've come to the right place," he said, patting me on the shoulder and the young man stepping in to grab my hand and pull me up.
"Tim," he said, "I'm Tim. Nice telescope you've got there. Seen any angels tonight?" suddenly twisting his head up to the sky and squinting.
Blink. Blink. Speechless. Searching for words, wondering, "What's the correct answer to this question?"
"Uh...not sure. Just got here from South Carolina. Not sure I'd know an angel if I saw one," I stammered.
Both men laughed and then fell to my telescope with many technical questions I could not answer. I viewed the stars poetically, in awe, not, alas, scientifically as Doc and Tim obviously could and did but with plenty awe. They were, after all, angel watchers, patrollers of the Patrollers in outer space above the earth.
So began my relationship with the most extraordinary man I've ever known, a genuine mystic, a masters in botany with at least two p.h.d.'s in botanical and biological sciences plus a doctorate of divinity from, of all places, a conservative Baptist theological seminary in the south although he was from upstate farmlands of New York. There is not time nor space in this essay to give account of the experiences I witnessed when in Doc's presence, his study groups, prayers groups, angel watchings on and off the soccer field on the mountain top. I never saw one but Doc was enough to witness, a human being, extraorinarily so.
In spite of being able to consistently be with this amazing, authentic mystic (a protestant one, at that! I thought they were all Catholic!) my own deep emotional/psychological wounds did not yield to Grace, defined or otherwise, and once Doc left the college (after officially retiring although the real reason is that he was too much of an "odd bird" for the theologically conservative Calvinists who controlled, or wanted to, the miraculous side of their exclusive corner of "Spiritual Truth" and so they quietly "let him go" in that Christian -- and as I was to find in other so-called "spiritual" and "psychospiritual groups -- passive, "guiltless" way of blood-letting) I, too, felt an urgent need to leave in spite of being near graduation.
Flash forward almost ten years after Doc and the Christian college. I had moved to the Blue Ridge mountains of Western North Carolina working at a psychiatric half-way house for schizophrenics which was also a non-medical alcohol detox program for alcoholics in a "dry county" where no alcohol was sold beside beer. On the "grave yard" shift I read all night, journaled, wrote my fledgling poems, trying to "figure out shit from peanut butter" from God to "god amighty".
In my high school years I had discovered the writings of Thomas Merton - a Merton book literally falling off the shelf in front of me in the book store. I learned quickly to keep such reading secret from the Calvinist preacher of the church I was a member of and regularly attended. Now tending as best I could to my psychospiritual wounds without Doc or church, the latter by "choice" or Fate, in a secluded cabin on Huckleberry Mountain (a cabin where Eleanor Roosevelt had slept while visiting this mountain community of artists and crafters living and working working together in the '30's and 40's), Merton became even more of a spiritual mentor for me for he was a poet, a mystic, an intellectual (a growing rarity in the anti-intellectual 1960's and '70's)), a trouble maker while being, ironically, a Trappist monk turned hermit in the Kentucky hills.
I also worked nights part-time at a psychiatric hospital owned and run by Duke University, one of the most innovative in the world in terms of treatment of mental illness including art therapy, hiking and camping out in the Carolina woods. Working there and at the half-way house I began to receive a vicarious therapy along with my readings of Merton and many others who became safe and close soul companions. I had also begun to read Memories, Dreams, Reflections , Carl Jung's autobiography which began to have a profound impact upon me although I understood little of what he was writing about except for his account of having both a number 1 and a number 2 personality, number 1 being the ego personality who lived in the finite, concrete world of details, taxes, sickness, secular concerns, and number 2 being an infinite awareness and witness in touch with and living in the timelessness of eternity. Jung, as am I, was more predisposed to number 2 being a profound introvert and found life in the number one world a crucible of great suffering. I greatly related to his account and begin to study Jung in earnest and do so up to the present. In the cabin, in the quiet half-way house and hospital nights I began to write down my dreams.
I greatly missed Doc who had died unbeknown to me when I was traveling in South American for 6 months. I had made immediate plans to visit him on his farm in Virginia upon my return to the U.S. from a six month trek to and through Western South America only to find that he had died during my travels. I went to the journal I had kept during my travels and found a long passage I had written about Doc while riding a bus through the high Andes. I had felt he was with me on that ride in the rugged majestic heights and it was then that I decided I would immediately go live with Doc for awhile once I returned from my journey. I felt more ready for what he had to impart than ever before. The passage I wrote was dated the day he had died of cancer. Shocked at this synchronicity I deeply mourned his passing and missed him terribly. Still do. Alone in my own little Huckleberry Hermitage, without a living teacher, I was shocked when I had the following dream:
I am with Doc. I am like a little boy (though in my late 20's in waking life then) loving and needing him so very much. Doc sits on a couch and I recline on my back beside him, my head in his lap looking up at him with absolute love, devotion and surrender in great longing to do so even more. Doc looks lovingly at me. He lowers his face closer to mine and then to my horror his face distorts, his eyes become dark sinister red-rimmed slits, he opens his mouth and reveals vampire fangs readying to sink into my openly exposed throat. I wake up in terror and shock. What can this mean? Not Doc! No. Not Doc.
After this dream my despair deepened though I derived great comfort from Merton, my poetry studies and writing, my widening readings of philosophy, world religions, art, literature, history and some psychology, mostly Jung. For all my spiritual efforts and practices (fledgling as they were) my deep core wounding could not be touched in any sustained and healing transformative way. I had a growing understanding of my woes, from whom and whence they came but this understanding had not lead to transformation. I was later to learn and to experience what Jung had discovered, that it is the symbolic image which is a living reality itself which transforms coming from the irrational unconscious. I realize now clearly that as initially wounding and terrifying as this dream image of Doc was it eventually lead me into greater transformation for it propelled me, compelled me to seek help, psychological help, eventually, in New York City with a Jungian analyst.
After moving to New York City I worked the dream in my initial sessions with my Jungian psychoanalyst so very much wanting to understand why Doc had been imaged as a vampire ready to feed off of me who loved and trusted him so much. My analyst wisely realized that I was yet able to comprehend a sophisticated Jungian approach to this much less an object relations approach so spoke as if to a child (I was) about human dependency needs, about projections and expectations upon persons, mother, father, other caretakers, and especially religions, of a completely present, containing, unconditionally loving force where one can be forever supported, sustained, fed, soothed and saved. At some point this must and will end. Paradise shall be lost, projections withdrawn and integrated into oneself and one matures, grows up managing at home enough in the external and internal world. That was enough for me to begin to chew on and understand so early on in my analysis. I had projected upon Doc the loving Father God in compensation for the tragic emotional and psychological failure of my personal father, god love him, so in need, too, of what I was compelled by psychological wholeness to experience. Both Thomas Merton and Carl Jung also carried these archetypal projections (which are really real) of the Father archetype, the positive side of It. I had steeped in the negative side of the archetype which had become encoded in my psyche and personality and indeed needed to experience the Loving Father side. It was no wonder that William Blake's moving poems spoke deeply to me, their singing my song of "The Little Boy Lost", "The Chimney Sweeper", and most favorite of all, "The Little Black Boy", these particular poems filled with great cries of longing for the unitive, protective, kind, supporting Father:
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but oh! my soul is white.
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black as if bereaved of light.
My mother taught me underneath a tree,
And, sitting down before the heat of day,
She took me on her lap and kissed me,
And pointing to the east began to say:
"Look on the rising sun, -there God does live
And gives his light, and gives his heat away;
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.
And we are put on earth a little space
That we may learn to bear the beams of love;
And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.
For when our souls have learned the heat to bear
The cloud will vanish, we shall hear his voice
Saying: `Come out from the grove, my love and care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice!' "
Thus did my mother say, and kissed me;
And thus I say to little English boy:
When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy,
I'll shade him from the heat till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our father's knee;
And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him, and he will then love me.
I was identified with the little black boy of the poem seeking reconciling union and acceptance by the Father.
At some point in my analysis when my dreams indicated a beginning readiness to understand and work with the new messages from the psyche to be worked, my analyst began to look anew at the dependency needs of the teacher, the guru, the minister, the spiritual monk/hermit/director, "human. all too human". I had begun to sit meditation at Dharma Dhatu, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation center in New York City, at the recommendation of the analyst who sat, too, and was a disciple of Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche, the guru teacher reknowned for his wise and accessible books about Tibetan Buddhist practice. I began to have dreams, disturbing dreams, which I intuitively knew were not just about my own projected dependency needs and hopes for salvation/enlightenment, inclusion in some "awakened" spiritual fold. My analyst did not like my questions about the guru, what she knew of him, his personal life and had he had any psychoanalysis, etc. Her continual deflection of my questions and suspicions alerted yet confused me since I had trusted her with my psyche and individuation process. Now the analyst appeared in my dreams as a beautiful ocean woman with whom I lived, a sweet boy with golden hair who swam with her easily, like dolphins among and beneath the ocean waves, cavorting happily with creatures of the depths living there. She and I lived in a wonderful thatched hut, large, open to wind, sun, the music of the breezes through palm leaves, the aroma of surf and sand, a most magical and marvelous place. We sat at a golden wooden table where meals and talks and creativity flourished. The floor beneath our feet was made of two creatures of the sea, dolphins and sharks, a dolphin beside a shark and then another dolphin, then a shark and so on, these living "planks" were smooth foundations upon which my "mother" and I lived and worked. The only problem is that the boy could not speak. He lived in this magical kingdom by the sea but could not speak. The scene changed and the boy was on the beach with his wrists tied tightly together by the Mother. A man stands with the boy who is now standing over a large beach jelly fish which the boy intently and repeatedly looks down at. He lifts his bound wrists repeatedly up to the man to be freed. The man cuts the bindings and the boy suddenly grabs a sharp spear-like stick and begins to stab the jelly fish violently while shouting loudly with each stab, "Yah! Yah! Yah!" I awakened from this dream knowing that my analysis was coming to an end with my woman analyst whom I now have tremendous gratitude for she had her work/toil cut out for her when I showed up in her office. I began seeking a male analyst who could untie the mother bonds, put the boy in touch with his masculine aggression and spine (the spear piecing the gelatinous spineless mass of jellyfish).
WORK IN PROGRESS - TO BE CONTINUED
No comments:
Post a Comment