Saturnian Father, Personal & Transpersonal - Some Stages & Phases Thru Three Decades of An Analysis Leading to a Son's Pardon

Take air away and even fire falls —Richard Hugo 

You were young, a bomber pilot 
dropping heavy kisses backed

up in the bomb-bay —W. Falcon

Dad, the WW2 Army Air Corp Major, 

in advanced Alzheimer's in advanced 

old age. Bit o spark in his face tho

Fear was my father. Father Fear —Theodore Roethke

Father, father, where are you going

       O do not walk so fast.

Speak father, speak to your little boy

       Or else I shall be lost,

The night was dark no father was there

       The child was wet with dew.

The mire was deep, & the child did weep

       And away the vapour flew. —William Blake

Many years,

much is forgiven
or lost in cloud,

I've no idea still what
the inside of my father's
bomber

looks like, how
it smells laden
with fear

perhaps passed
off as gun powder, fuel,
flak flame

and smoke so
black and deep in the
pores

it stinks a lifetime.

Yours. Also mine by blood.

Still, your son
is proud though fear is
the meal

you often fed
dutifully eaten with sliced
bread so

white white
light in the shaking
hand,

dread was
the tarnished knife and fork,
simple

instruments to
quell the terror in you
served up to sons,

at least one
of them.

I know now your fear
made mine, yet, many
years in the making, this:

Dessert is a son's pardon. — W. Falcon

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Psychoanalyst: "Warren, your father could not do anything to stop his violence and compulsions, the storm is archetypal, is bigger than personality, is larger and more powerful than he is, than his ego...if you can begin to get this, to comprehend it, that he was and is gripped by a transpersonal force beyond his capacity to control and curtail then you can and will heal the father in you, yourself, and perhaps even your father in some deep way while he's wasting away with Alzheimer's, and this hurricane is that mythic one of Falcons who came west from Spain, the Canaries, entered the Gulf of Mexico like a hurricane, and settled in Louisiana, if you can heal this enough in you then you begin to depotentiate it, make it smaller, and also literally redeem your ancestors." - excerpted from below about how I healed my father wound.

>><<

Here's Dad, the brown-eyed handsome man, charming what, and his 3 youngest sons, I am on dad's immediate right (I remember my loving that shirt I'm wearing), dad's holding Leonard, my youngest brother, and brother Richard, missing some front teeth, is to the (photo) left of dad.

We're on my grandfather's front porch, my dad's dad, Simon Felix Falcon, middle name Felix is that of the ship captain who sailed the first immigrant Falcon brothers from the Canary Islands to New Orleans in the early 1800's when Louisiana was owned by Spain and called New Iberia (New Spain). Grandpa's house was formerly a popular dance hall before he purchased it for his bride and the soon to be ample brood of mostly boys, jeez, how many, what, 12 of them (with several stillborn or dead soon after birth and therefore uncounted), only 2 girls amongst the very hornery boys but one would not mess with those girls as they were fierce, had to be what with all the brat-boy energy running amok...Oraline, the brood-mother, my grandmother, whom I never knew because she burned to death before I was born by catching her long skirts on fire while trying to warm her rear end in the cold uninsulated cajun-style house (some suspect it was a suicide since she had been very depressed), she was a heavy handed force along with Simon, keeping the wild herd mostly on track, at least when said herd or some of them were in plain sight.

I was terrified of those uncles, loud, mean, violent, prone to just thwack (cajun kids were for thwacking) a kid just for the hell and power-over of it. I learned to keep wide berth of them. Then though, there was the herd of cousins (Catholic families = brats a-plenty) some (too many - more than a handful doing time in prisons) who were just as hornery, mean, cruel and violent as their fathers. I tried to keep wide berth of most of them too. Something dark there is in those swamps, those old world customs which (my family of) immigrants brung with them (some with their slaves), mostly uneducated though methinks the two Falcon brothers who bore their seed and brood to the New World and New Iberia were plenty educated. But that apparently didn't matter much back then. Even some poor immigrants managed to own a slave or two. None too proud I am of this history. Ugh.

We moved to South Carolina when I was in the second grade and it was a relief to be shod of daily/weekly "family" time with that scary bunch. South Carolina was another kind of darkness. But that's for another photo and some other time to tell. But I can declare here that my salvation there was the deep woods, those sighing pines, the large oaks and poplars, the sycamores and the holly with their fierce bright berries red red, and the foxes, the crows, the cardinals (!!!), scores of them bright as holly berries guarded by sharp pricks on light green shiny leaves, the rabbits, their stillness in the dew wet front field at dawn with layered fog low over the hay and garden, the bee hives already at work where nearby so still the wild and shagged hare proudly crouched (rutting time), I crept silently down the drive so as not to disturb his meditaion, the fishing lake down the hill, catfish as large as (I shit you not) a bathtub, and so many good though lonely nights on a spread blanket beneath the stars with my star maps, books on astronomy and constellations, and my emergency flashlight signalling into the night sky for what seemed hours, years, SOS SOS SOS.

Painting by Matt Gibson

Now, looking back, I did have solid signs, no, hints, big solid magical hints, of some help that fueled my unthought hope-enough that there was some vague sense in the madness, an early Fall morning alone at the foot of the drive waiting for the school bus, the rust colored lake, Carolina red clay its banks and its hue, wearing steam brightly lit by the just dawning sun, I notice about 10 yards from me, as the light gathers, something nearby in the middle of the road, something alive and animal, and feathered. Blinking to make sure my eyes are seeing what they are seeing, and the animal blinking widely/slowly back at me, an owl! We gaze at each other for awhile. I gather courage (fueled by curiosity) to approach it fully expecting it to take fright and fly away. But it does not move. I get closer and it does not fly away. It's head turns up toward me, keep me in its gaze. I back away, find a broomstick-sized stick, and again approach the miracle in front of me. I lower it to the pavement and, again dumbstruck, the owl lightly steps onto it. This is too easy, too good to be happening. I carry (not sure I breathed for at least 5 minutes) my miracle up the drive, behind the house to the barn, open the heavy door and place the stick and owl in the trailer dad used to haul things in, and taking a last look at the owl that keeps me in its long gaze, I slowly close the door then run screaming excitedly through the back door of the house where my mother is distractedly drinking coffee while standing at the kitchen sink (this stance at the sink was a "thing" for her, I never understood what she was doing there looking out the small window over the driveway, the septic tank, into the always shadowed woods). I tell her what has just occurred, she's only slightly interested. "You can't keep a wild animal," she says after a sip of coffee, and my silent retort is, "then why do you goddamn keep dad around?"

Back from school up the drive I run bypassing the house, straight to the barn where I stand for a moment catching my breath and hoping I will find my treasure and it is really real and not some wild hallucination too good to be true. I slowly heave the heavy door open wide. Late afternoon light, pretty dark inside. In the trailer where I had left it is the stick. Only the stick. On no! please! please be real. My eyes adjust to the dark interior and then, sigh of relief and joy, there it is, the owl's perched on a top shelf where dad keep his tools. It gazes at me. Awe. I gaze back. I say in a whisper, "Hello." Happy. Mystified. Enthralled. Here's a visitor just for me perhaps somewhat like an alien, a UFO, certainly out of my blue morning at the bottom of a hill, in the middle of a road, beside a lake eerie with its own steam cloud rising high brightly glowing with new sunlight - fright, joy, wonder. Just for me. Then. A silent flight in slow motion from the shelf, over the trailor and just over my right shoulder, it glides toward the woods but lands on a low limb of a dogwood my dad had planted, owl looks back at me, its body facing the woods, its face/head facing me. A long communion, joy rushing through me, my bones electric. According to some inner timing all its own, not human timing, never, I want it to be never, it just elevates/floats (it seems) up through the trees, circles a few times over the barn and me and then is gone. My own private UFO of sorts, in retrospect.

It was enough for me. Had to be. And it was grace sufficient unto the 12 year old or so boy who would eventually forget the entire incident until a dream during my analysis jarred the memory vividly awake and, not too often in those early analysis years, I wept for joy. A kind of soul retrieval long before I'd heard of such. I began to tentatively "believe" and this a few years before this dream recalled just below.

Alas, owless, still living forlorn on the Carolina hill, the space ship never come to my rescue though I did have a dream of it years later in NYC while in Jungian analysis going through requisite anamnesis (not to be confused, as I once did, with amniosentesis though I could have used a numbing shot at times while in analytical recall trying in angst to give re-birth, even perhaps first psychological birth to myself as a human, not just the scream which survives the electrocution that I felt myself to be so early on in consciousness - I borrow this image Mike Eigen, psychoanalyst/writer extraordinaraire - while revisiting all this childhood/adolescence stuff there was this one apocryphal heartbreaking dream in which I was back home alone in the family house still on the never changing hill, Sorrow Hill, though dad called the place Cardinal Cove for all the cardinals in the woods all around. South Carolina 1960s days/years of sore and yore when in the daytime, this night dream, of a bright light and whooshing roar surrounds both me and the house inside and out. I just know it is THEM finally come to fetch me at long last! I am frozen with excitement/fright, the moment of rescue/salvation come at last, I cannot move when I so want to, to run out the front door arms raised me screaming, All praise to stars and ships! Get me the hell outta here!!!! but I cannot budge at all (I'm in the kitchen, I just now remember, at the sink like my mom, peanut butter sandwich in hand, a glass of milk freshly poured on the countertop), then, alas, at some point the light fades, another whoosh very loud then growing fainter then, soon after, a torrential downpour with thunder and lightning, rain that will not stop, I cower on the kitchen tiles. I have been left forever behind. No mulligans. No second chances. I awaken as the dream storm seems to invade the actual room I'm in. It's the din of West 142nd Street, the neighborhood revved and roaring. "The world wags on."

B.H, my Jungian analyst, after I share this dream, says to me, I remember tears in HER eyes which scares me, moves me, future paces me,

"Warren, the storm is all the emotions you could not afford to feel in your family, now they are finally able to surface, to be felt and released, the dream tells me and you that you are ready for this part of the work, the solutio, the water phase, the dissolving of old, tired, worn out defenses which must go so that you may feel it all and in feeling heal and thus regain your more authentic self...this is an arrival of the work you are doing and now this storm, hard as it is, is actually a good thing...you see, an unfelt-but-present in the body/unconscious storm keeps one trapped in the past-as-present, and also trapped in who you know yourself to be which is mostly adaptation, an adapted self you had to grow around the trauma and deficit of your early years...

"...You may not understand this now but thank god the UFO didn't take you away. I would have been very worried had it done so...The UFO represents wholeness that has been in safe-keeping in the depth of the unconscious, your conscious wholeness is also actually nascent within the very feelings of abandonment and forsakeness, it can rightly be called abjection [a new word for me], now you may more consciously experience those feelings no longer alone, a part of you may begin to bear witness and stay present with that weeping boy...and me too, I'm here to bear witness with and for you, to hold and keep you in that both easy, and by that I mean that the feelings are like river rapids flowing wild in your emotional body, and hard, meaning that such feelings are very difficult to bear in the overwhelming currents of release in the necessary dissolving of defenses that kept your emotions frozen now but now, now they are melting into surrender and shudder like an unshuttered and unfiltered typhoon."

Some weeks pass, difficult days of tsunami-filled night dreams and accompanying waking dreams of emotional storms, sobs, gut-convulsing cries, and shaking literally leaving me exhausted physically and emotionally. I call in sick at work often, would drive my van into mountains. I hiked, napped on rocks, listened to cascading streams and falls and at times soaked in or beneath them letting the chill currents flow through me. I haunted the comidas restaurant between West 139th and 140th (alas no longer there) to wash in odors and flavors of grease, pork, yellow rice, black and red beans, platanos, fried yucca, cafe con leches sixty cents a cup, the music loud full of heat and passion, humor and hips, the owners calling me Jack because they thought at first that I was Jack Nicolson (I kinda sorta looked like a thin Jack from the long jogs so...). The marvelous hold in El Flor de Mayo provided relief to the the grief work unleashed in me.

Some few months after my "salvation abandoning me" dream, I shared a dream with B.H. where my father was a massive hurricane, I could see it/him from above covering the entire Gulf of Mexico and bearing down upon southern Louisiana just about to make landfall at New Orleans, I could see that there was an infant with my father's face curled around the storm's eye which turned very slowly. End of dream.

B.H. says upon hearing the dream,

"Warren, your father could not do anything to stop his violence and unrestrained compulsions, the storm is archetypal, is bigger than personality, is larger and more powerful than he, his ego...if you can begin to get this, to comprehend it, that he was and is gripped by a transpersonal force beyond his capacity to control and curtail it then you can and will heal the father wound, and yourself, and perhaps even your father in some deep way while he's wasting away with Altzheimer's." B.H. is thoughtful for awhile, then says, "This...this force, this hurricane is also that mythic one of Falcons, generations of them before those who came west from Spain, and the Canaries, entered the Gulf of Mexico like a hurricane, and settled in Louisiana...this is important for you to begin to understand into integration, that as you can heal this massive ancestral inheritance enough in you then you begin to de-potentiate it, make it smaller, and to literally redeem those ancestors...

"Warren, as you emote the storm with witness, and learn to comfort that young boy by showing up, by being present to your and your ancestral grief, then it is no longer sealed into the muscles and cells of your and in the collective family body. There is much meaning and correctness in all this now emerging consciously in you, that felt storm of grief and rage developed ages before you or your father ever came to be...Warren, this is when wholeness really arrives, through the felt and witnessed strom, believe it or not. At some time the eye of it becomes pure sky and the storm is no more. Well, there are always storms but the storms are then smaller and more doable. And the Earth can hold storms of all sizes so there's a helpful thing to know and you can go to HER, the Good Mother Earth who knows the sense of storms, and she can help you hold their tumult and overpowering forces. You see, storms are HER children too. Perhaps you are, you were, born of Her and Her children of storm and you are indeed one of Her much-loved and accepted storm children, you're her storm child and that makes your suffering all the more poignent and beautiful..."

Moved. Shaken. My body undergoes palpable sensations never felt before, something deep in my gut burns, expands, radiates out from me, both energy and pain course through my limbs, my eyes are clear fire seeing with such clarity that I know I had never really seen colors before this moment.

I believed and didn't believe B.H. but I knew intuitively, and I felt my body's knowing, a "knowing," that Christopher Bollas, psychoanalyst/writer, aptly calls "the unthought known":

"'The unthought known' refers to the ways in which individuals may organize their lives around an event or a traumatic pattern of experiencing that, although at some deep level known, can only with difficulty be claimed for conscious thought. It was the complex modes of disclosure in some of the sculptural works that really made their juxtaposition with Bollas' phrase productive." 

Now that which was unthought is turned into conscious cognitive thought and recognition, is affect born witness to and also born as weight and wait and is consciously suffered; B.H. shares that the word "suffer" in its root meaning means "to carry" "to bear" "to undergo" also "under carriage". In this and all her wise words, B.H. was spot on and welcomed my own Lear storm, she could contain it AND me, a child of the Great Mother of all storms. I had come to trust her much and she was correct again for as much as I resisted (and how could I not try, it being too too much for a man-child to bear?!) these inevitable and long overdue emotional storms they did come upon me, from where? from inside? from outside? hard to tell but in full bore they arrived and sometimes I literally held on to the walls of the big city for support, out of the blue a storm would suddenly mug me and I had to undergo it, suffer and surf it best as I could. Scary, yes. Embarrassing, much (and the kindness of strangers proved itself over and over, again and again). And the city walls did still stand tall, not fall, as eventually, gradually would I, stand, this it, not fall, but straighten up tall enough, not grand, gum on my shoe, a sharp dream in my dream's eye making me cry but not out of cruelty or having an indulgent wallow in Victimland, Same Old Iberia.

"Take a stand," B.H. in time would often enough say. "Stand up." But before the unsought torrents came and I was just sharing the storm as father/father-as-storm dream, I could only feel that abandonment-trance.

I remember B.H. once saying, "Warren, family is a trance".

Soundtrack 1981, my UFO gone away forever, "Last Chance Texaco", Rickie Lee Jones, though her song is about an abandoning lover, a love stalling as does a car, traffic buzzing indifferently by as she turns into cries echoing the sound of indifferent cars roar pass...but it still works for me, this song, as my long sought and hoped for salvation via rescuing space ship had me forever fled, and my last chance for transcendence teased me once then veered up and away, had come and gone. Hers, Rickie's, was my song, the emotions thereof, and tears.

High school/early college before Rickie, "Wooden Ships" Crosby Stills & Nash, then the Jefferson Airplane version, my life theme song late teens/early to mid-20s then the Starship album, "Blows Against the Empire" soundtracked me through college, the dropping out my last semester till graduation, till my eventual mandatory departing the South, me literally pulling my van over along the interstate in order to dust the odious Southern dirt, symbolic and real, with a whiskbroom off my feet when I finally happily crossed the Mason-Fucking-Dixon line into the good (to me then, better/gooder) North.

Barefoot, back in the car, out the window I flip a comic, perhaps owl-sized, bird all the way to and from Good Riddence and Kiss My As from here to eternity. I am OUT, Yankee grass was greener to me and proved to be true, projections notwithstanding.

I made it into NYC ecstatic, overwhelmed, grateful where eventually other songs would serve the New Land/New World I entered - Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel's "The Best Years of Our Lives" though I was no cockney gangster but the forlorn voice, the defiant cries of Ian Drury, the song's rough and tumble tale, the Birmingham Brit audience singing along in clearly cockney accents on the live album, served as a kind of homing device for what was still in my shadow, anger, rage, passion, sensuality, my ecstasy in intellectual thinking and ongoing learning, POETRY, and my resisted but acknowledged need to belong to some kind of human community of shared alienation. I wound up in Harlem, West 142nd Street pre-gentrification, there I could be a "stranger on this earth" and there begin to bear the burden storm of my father, myself, ancestral weal and woeing.

In my almost old age I'm still lookng to move abroad. Dark Side of the Moon will do as symbolic place and soundtrack. My once and future plans to shine on, a crazy diamond sending SOSs no more but wet kisses sail back home from afar, my home perhaps an owl wing, a home which is/are people, some good few but unexpected beloveds, I shall bray, "How I wish, how I wish you were here..." My once was secret longing to have a place, MY place, here on the earth come home to me at last as tissue and fabric of my very being, Earth my Mother and Lover, storm child holding storm in the palm of my hand, so near to hand a blessing, a pen storm breaking free of the page, overspilling, seeking boundary and place while displacing and remaking both...

...and a poem by Li-young Lee beginning with

"Lie still now
while I prepare for my future,
certain hard days ahead,
when I’ll need what I know so clearly this moment."

This opening in context of the arrival, the incarnation, the returning to terra firma and instincts, body/psyche/ego living in and on the horizontal axis and praxis.

Selah.

Nothing To Lose . . . Rumors Exist of Han Shan's Unfettered Inscriptions of Wind by the author

Even pretty Buddhas pretending eternity
cannot move by themselves alone in need
of human feet and arms. In this way then 
they become like me for I too will be
borne by men or wind to the grave no 
longer able to move on my own.

Nothing to lose, this rag of selves. 
With what glory remains of hungry pockets, 
I skip forward singing, La La La, a willful 
don, a lord of nothing-much, poems a'pocket, 
knowing it's all a shell game but I'm clever 
having learned something from all the dice
rolled knowing that here and there (Heaven)
weight matters and that there is more to here 
than there. Wised up now I always pack a 
change of draws, a piece of broken mirror in 
my pocket to gaze within practicing my smiles 
to fool the gullible gods who think they are 
smiling at themselves.

If stopped and questioned at the Gate to
Yellow Spring, I'll blame you, old Ghost
of too many former selves, a meandering
rumor still muttering the old hymns, who
grants me permission the entrance to boldly storm.

Between what these final breaths remain and 
the horizon closing in, my fingers still work. 

On behalf of all sentient beings I will plead 
the case. 

I'll write until the quill is taken from my cold hand.

Even then I shall be dirty with righteous indigence, 
only the gods to blame - they love a good 
argument anyway. Why should I disappoint? 

In dying I become human through and through 
which comes from doing. 

Be damned and done with mirrors and pockets, 
a man can curse at the end having earned the 
right to do so - 

a wink and a 
grin rehearsed, 
then come the flies.
Whose hands shall 
shoo them, whose 
hands un-shoe him
and run quickly
into day? 

THIEF! THIEF! 

A ghostly laugh.
I gladly give shoes away, 
no more need at last.


I leave my poems just as they are. 
When I'm gone let the worms correct 
spelling and punctuation. 

Meanwhile beneath willow tips 
I will tease slowly the grasses to laughter 
which is the only horizon I have known.

Dumb Fish, Cheap Grace, Disconsolation To Individuation - Edited/Amended Reprise (first published Sep 8, 2016)

Something in me was defiant and determined not to be a dumb fish. - C. G. Jung

The dream discloses a thought and a premonition that have long been present in humanity: the idea of the creature that surpasses its creator by a small but decisive factor… - Carl Jung

"You start escaping into the other. Gather courage. Take a plunge into your being. Let us be acquainted with our own Center. Let us ask only one question, "Who am I?" All else is meaningless. Unless this question is answered all your love affairs, friendships are all nonsense. Unless this question is answered nothing is answered. Go into your aloneness. Let only one quest, "who am I?" And don't seek consolations because cheap consolations are available. The mind is very clever in supplying them. When you ask, "who am I?" and the mind can supply immediately and answer, and the mind is very clever. Mind says, "You are god. You are a soul, immortal soul." These are the ideas in put by the Magician put in the heads of poor sheep. The magician suggest to a few that you are lions, to few that you are eagles, to few that you are man, to few that you are even Magicians. That Magicians hypnotize the sheep and told them that "you are immortal souls. Nobody can harm you ever. How [can] you be harmed? The Magician suggested [to] them that, "I am for you. I am the best master you can find ever and I exist for you. And I will do whatever is needed and I will do whatsoever is good for you. Even if I kill you I will be killing you just for your sake." You have been given these ideas by the society. Your mind is nothing but a projection of the society. It is society within you. The penetration of the society inside you. It is in the image of society. You have been told things and you have believed...this is not your answer. You have been taught by the Magician. I am not saying the answer is wrong or right. I am simply saying it is not your answer and when the answer is not yours [NOT an induction] it is wrong."

—Osho Bhagwan Rajneesh 

NOTE: Do not dismiss the above - Osho was a mess, humanly, a big hairy (very)  mess, AND he was also a brilliant synthesizer of Eastern mystical thought/not-thought, yogas of mind and body, and perhaps got too entranced (as almost everyone does) by the various manifestations of Consciousness that transcend (or so it appears) every day ego consciousness….so, do not dismiss the above but do what quantum physicists do, as must we, hold that light is both particle AND wave…you ask, as do quantum folks, how can it be both…and they/we don't know (yet) but the physicists give it a very functional word that serves - complementarity - meaning light and particle are side by side…not opposed or opposites but stand as they each both are and one as light but side-by-side aka complementary….same with OSHO and his massive contradiction, a man of Eastern culture and consciousness and religion - subtle states of consciousness - who was mugged by Western hero worship, wrist watches, limousines, POWER.  He got mugged by what Jung calls "the POWER Devil" (that tempted Jesus in the wilderness at the beginning of his ministry (which was all of 3 years).]

Nada guru but age & mountain 

humidity while "warrentining" 

during covid, I could pass as one

of those wandering sadhus but,

covid done, back in NYC, daddy's

godda new para flip flops which

accurately describes my inner and

intellectual life - based on strife

(endlessly) - but mind ripe n ready

to find steady gaze while deter-

miining abyss from void with glad

moments of "instacy" cuz Imma

introverted intuitive betimes Lear-

lost, whose storms cost me plenty 

but renders a peripatetic perpetual 

destiny mine on, seeking a path in 

the path-ology…so sue me

or chant

SO

SOO

 MIIII

Now I have known me some master Magicians - or those with some subtle energies who mistook the energies for themselves thus the mug-gurus and cartoons they become, to be appropriately parodied and these days (2026 as I edit this essay writ in 2016) they are legion they who channel and woo to the woo doo doo - sog gurus). 

I confess

I have trained and sat at their entrancing feet, fed on their every entrancing word and I have been altered but, alas, after years of perhaps wasted time there I have not been, dare I say NEVER been truly, altar-ed but to give meaning to my attempts 

poet renegade Artur Rimbaud summed it, does still, f

or me when I first read the line in the late 1970's:

"AH!  I am so forsaken I will worship at any shrine impulses toward perfection." — from The Drunken Boat.

[Note: perfection means completion/complete as in the ripening arrived at at the end of a process of seed, sprout, growth, maturity, and then, inevitable and golden part of the process, decay and death…much like a "drunken boat" drifting, undercurrents push/pulling to some, perhaps, arrival, a water fall, a cove or shore or rocks to nigredo (to crush) a form into primal matter….tis alchemical though the end goal is, of course, the gold, the diamond, the Agua Permanans, the Pearl of Great Price - in the midst - recall "complementarity" meaning as given above - LIFE.]

A hard lesson: states of mind can be easily altered but what a true mystic, Paul of Tarsus says, renewal and transformation of the mind and is not easy and without Grace it is not to had much less lived. Superfluous, glib manipulations of already entanced inductees via their own projections upon the entrancer serves more ill than good in terms of individuation lest it be a wake up emerging out of group/guru trance into clear adult, mature perspectives arriving from personhood and not the "sheep"-hood Osho speaks of in the above quote.

SO, imperative, one must discover and own one's sheephood :

where does one most want to be led, to give over one's own questioning and critical intellect, one's own authority? Where is one most likely to get "mugged" by one's dependency needs, dependency projections? where, and HOW, does one most want to regress into Innocence and long for a "return to the Garden," pronouncing that one's Fall is an illusion and propaganda of power grabbing religions? where is one to be most seduced into "return" to an imagined sinless beginning and who is offering such a return? Regression is hard-wired in our nervous systems and when there are appeals and promises of return via meditations upon fire, air, water, earth, or some individual or other who has transcended then one must be most awake. One is in perilous territory and one is also prone to entrust oneself and mind to some other who may or may not be worthy of such trust and surrender.

I am no authority in this matter but from my own experience and hard lessons, humiliating lessons derived from so many wasted hours, days, years being an unwitting sheep at the feet of profferers of power all the while disguised in "god or spirit talk" I have learned that no matter the god before one, the entrance into sacrality, one must not sacrifice one's ego and mind en toto to that which presents.

A dream of Carl Jung's recorded in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, illustrates what I have just said. From Michael Vannoy Adam's summary of Jung's dream:

"In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung (1963) recounts a dream ...what I call the “Millimeter to Spare Dream.” In the dream, Jung and his father enter a house that has a room that is a replica of the council hall of Sultan Akbar, the Muslim emperor of Mughal India. In that room, Jung’s father prays in the Islamic style. “Then he knelt down and touched his forehead to the floor,” Jung says. “I imitated him, likewise kneeling, with great emotion. For some reason I could not bring my forehead quite down to the floor—there was perhaps a millimeter to spare” (p. 219). Jung interprets the dream to mean that “things awaited me, hidden in the unconscious.” He says: “I had to submit to this fate, and ought really to have touched my forehead to the floor, so that my submission would be complete. But something prevented me from doing to entirely, and kept me just a millimeter away. Something in me was saying, ‘All very well, but not entirely.’” What was this something that prevented Jung from complete submission? “Man always,” he says, “has some mental reservation, even in the face of divine decrees. Otherwise, where would be his freedom?” 
Jung goes on to say, "Something in me was defiant and determined not to be a dumb fish...Man always has some mental reservation, even in the face of divine decrees. Otherwise, where would be his freedom? And what would be the use of that freedom if it could not threaten Him who threatens it?"

Adams continues:

To submit to God without any mental reservation is for the ego not to engage in free, critical conversation with the unconscious. In this respect, to practice prayer—or active imagination—is for the ego to exercise the freedom not to accept the opinions of the unconscious as dictates but to assess those opinions and either accept or reject them. The purpose of Jungian psychoanalysis is not for the ego to capitulate, or surrender unconditionally, to the opinions of the unconscious but to relate to them effectively—that is, freely, critically—through dialogue and negotiation. Prostration of the ego before the unconscious may be the Islamic [and other religions] style, but it is not the Jungian style. Dialogue or negotiation with God (or the unconscious) is very different from submission to God."

Jung goes on to say this of this millimeter to spare:

"These were the things that awaited me, hidden in the unconscious. I had to submit to this fate, and ought really to have touched my forehead to the floor, so that my submission would be complete. But something prevented me from doing so entirely, and kept me just a millimeter away. Something in me was saying, "All very well, but not entirely." Something in me was defiant and determined not to be a dumb fish: and if there were not something of the sort in free men, no Book of Job would have been written several hundred years before the birth of Christ. Man always has some mental reservation, even in the face of divine decrees. Otherwise, where would be his freedom? And what would be the use of that freedom if it could not threaten Him who threatens it?" (Jung, 1963, p. 220)." Adams, 2002

Adams helpfully explicates Jung in regard to someone becoming what Osho calls an "entranced "sheep", and what Jung calls a "dumb fish" swimming around in, unconsciously identified with, the water one swims in, water being a symbol of the unconscious.

Jung in his "millimeter to spare dream" seeks to preserve the freedom to choose, to be in conscious relationship to others, to spiritual teachers and systems, to that which is called by many names but is essentially unknowable but definitely experiential.

Spiritual teaching East and West value and require complete submission to their Deity, and to the teachings regarding the spiritual relationship, and ultimate salvation, enlightenment and transformation. Jung's dream seeks to preserve human freedom to consciously engage with, argue with, disagree even with even the Creator. This is not strange to religions. The Jewish Torah and other sacred books give many accounts of prophets arguing and reasoning with 

G-d. When Moses argued with G-d he was not allowed to enter the promised land but G-d loved him and wept when He too Moses breath from him (killed him!). Moses preserved something human in the face of Divinity and Divine Decree which outlived him and lives on in humanity. Although at times he functions as a Magician with his staff and decree bringing about many plagues, even parting the Red Sea, he was essentially a Mystic who was shown G-d's presence, was ushered into it, and in the face of That Presence was utterly altered and altar-ed. One can say a conversation was begun and continued until the breath was gone between Moses and sacred reality. In this conversation and relationship even sacred reality was changed and forced to grow, to become more just and compassionate, to enter the "broken world" and "to trace" what poet Hart Crane calls the "visionary company of love," a love presented in and through the breaks, the cracks, the dusty instinctual world upon which even G-d depends for G-d's own continued evolution via vital relationship to all of Creation.

Human freedom furthers evolution, risks dissolution but always seeks some way of knowing which affects one's being and ongoing becoming as response. Becoming aware of trance, of the abuses of trance (an occupational hazzard of consciousness), and how easily it is to shape shift into many lenses which shape or "create" one's experience of reality, profane and sacred, is essential human activity, it is what we as a species do besides make things. I personally believe that Mysticism precedes or should Making. Magicians are makers of frames of reality. They presume to act for and on behalf of Sacred Reality, are often inflated believing that they are the Creator Itself.

I have rediscovered that I am more inclined to the Mystic's path and not that of the Magician (the shaman, sorcerer, who must with impecability, at least in the attempt of that impossible state, not misuse the powers available to she/he who is initiated and, now with good enough depth psychology, aware of the clever seductions and manipulations of power.. Temperamentally I am more inclined to the former than the latter though I realize that the shadow lies in the Magicians path and have been forced upon it for the sake of some wrenching, humiliated and ultimately humbling encounter with shadow and the shadow of power and power of shadow."

This is all I have so far but I hope the a-muses will assist the next 2 days in making the above into an informative cautionary tale, a promo for Jungian analysis or its equivalent which advocates continual shadow work in order to remain grounded and uninflated by the powers which are all too easily available. Just look at advertising agencies and focus groups. Just watch "The Century of the Self" with Adam Curtis on google video and one will be horrified at the subjectivity of consciousness and "truth" and the abuse of trance states to sway individuals and groups into illusions/delusions of "freedom" and "autonomy"...none of us are free for trance seems to be wired in us...trances seem to be hardwired, capacities for trances...and thus the 10,000 things flourish...with this in mind a Buddhist or mindfulness practice which exposes the subtleties of trances in the "focus group" manipulations of religions/spiritualities/viagra and soap sales, et.al. or, eyes wide shut in the grip of ayahuasca or one's own self-aware/induced horrors make absolute sense…

SELAH

Nada guru but, rather, garrulous am driven 

by genetics, yes, critter of my time, while 

"spelled" by the possibility of timeless-nest

As a post-script, here below is an essay that greatly influenced me long before I got involved and work through and out of psychological inflation as Healer, guru, et. al.  I'll leave that to the masses, the best-seller spirality hordes now "dime-a-dozen/jillion - O O O Pig-malion rehearsals/reversals". I bow to Winquist and to Dominic Crossan who gave me, no, who clarified my "marching orders":

from The Epistemology of Darkness: Preliminary Reflections by Charles E. Winquist.

"We do not mourn that we see through a glass darkly, we now rejoice in the dark loveliness of the glass. (Dominic Crossan,1975: 39)"

To 'rejoice in the dark lovelinss of the glass' is an alteration of values that suggests that we can know the darkness, think in the dark, or think darkly. The concept of epistemology of darkness is an experiment with this suggestion. Paradoxically we are seeking to illumine the possibility for thinking darkly. The heliotropic metaphor central to a familiar understanding must itself arrive at the strange configuration of an illuminating darkness.

Learning to see in the dark is learning to bring darkness to the light, that is, learning to see the light arkly. We are now in the heart of an epistemology of darkness that acknowledges that part of language 'has a completely unfathomable unconsciousness of itself' (Gadamer,1976: 62) . Can the darkness of language work on the transformation of consciousness? We cannot decide in advance of the experience whether it is possible and what it means to move the familiar and habitual world into the context of the imaginal world.

The task at hand is to replicate for seeing the light and familiar world of daily life in the shadow of the imagination. The world that we already know can then be known in the dark. We thereby teach ourselves to see in the dark so that we can live in the middle. This strange exercise is a taking hold of life. It is a valuation of where and who we are. The whole process is a work within a semantics of meaning and is a function of consciousness.

The immediately available paradigm for seeing the light and darkly is the common experience of dreaming. Dreams take daily life into the underworld, and the dream-work is exemplary of downward thinking (cf. Hillman,1975) . In the investigation of what it means to see darkly, it is not the interpretation of dreams but the interpretation of the dream-work that will be the via regia. This work will be hermeneutics of the second order. We are interpreting a process that is itself a process of interpretation. That is, the dream-work is an interpretation of the waking world that blurs the focus of a monocular vision and drowns the clear ring of univocal speech in a cacophony of metaphorical voices. The meaning of the manifest dream content is a psychological enigma, and the meaning of the dream-work is an epistemological enigma. Analysis of dream content and analysis of dream-work are both interpretations of a secondary order, and both of them are distinguishable from the primary interpretation that is identified as the dream-work.

— from The Epistemology of Darkness: Preliminary Reflections by Charles E. Winquist.

Anima, too, especially, has a viewpoint - I call Her, after a dream of Her

The Empress of Contrails Writes Upon Darkness - Anxiety of Influence


I, on the other hand,

have lain down with

countless thousands.

My tent is worn out.


Stains mark love-cries,

some blood where tongues

are ground down to root,

utterance hard pounded,

soft tissue torn letter by letter,

tender verbs opened to pain,

that which is paid for more

than alabaster embraces

and this strangling of waists.


My tent has drained more

of love's body than a mortuary.

Spikenard scented oils taint

fabric folds and flesh. Rote,

worn pillows are daily, sometimes

hourly turned where I half expect

to find teeth or coins,

hoping still for one true word

for love without name flies,

moths repelled instead by flame,

pillows revealing nothing

but I turn them still.


Have I not spoken of tears

subtle parentheses of blame,

brine outlines punctuated,

thinly silked, easily taken

for wing-laced salt maps,

tongue lick sighs grown

weary with enunciating.


Nightly misspoken the wine

flagons are tossed down.

Pleading echoes the tents

are packed. Forgiving camels,

commas nailed to each hoof,

tread into cool unread darkness

with all that is within it -

a history of wax seals,

once important names,

broken pledges, lies still smooth,

their nuance-scripted smiles crisp,

as predictable as riffled pages

intent on cool gain upon

desert's shifting floor.


Oasis and cloaca,

love birds parched,

now moves caravansary

toward Heart's always

edited horizons.

There are many redactions

before the sun rises.


Perhaps my name goes

before me, my 'press',

Empress of Contrails,

peacocks, accountants

in tow trailing tallies,

unsettled scores,

arrivals, departures,

ejaculations, rejections,

all faces hands have held

and, yearning beyond possibility,

hesitant dawn's mourning doves.


Men cry for my return yet burns

no desert impervious to heat of

all kinds, even human, excepting

the heart, its capacities to startle.

Its dunes in vast stretches beat,

beat for what moonlight cannot

index but only suggest.

Their secrets ride East

as many as there are

desert grains, confessions'

cyphers uselessly written,

recoiling from pathetic,

endless recounting of causes -

neglect, curses, justifications,

worst cases all, just 'tent talk' to

scorpions scribbling in silver shadows,

pitying serpents smug in their ability

to recite every skin they have shed

without regret unlike the men in veils.


For them profane winds,

lightly perfumed, do their

work of erasure well,

absolving memory.

What lies ahead shuffles in

cursives of sound confusing

the ear, a solitary traveler

compulsive for solar winds,

tumbles it's own way.


I feel no pressure for accuracy

nor to lose plume and ink

hiding what cannot be unwritten.

A trail of brocaded skulls in time

returns to sand. One cannot see

this hand waving its goodbyes,

the other concealing tint and quill.

I have written upon human vellum

through ages, through cycles unending

and same doing what heart heat bids

though I also write, perhaps best, upon

darkness, eyes closed, tent flap opened

to all thirsters who may, supplicant,

come wandering in. 

END for now but want to just paste as it, the Jung text below did not copy as it reads in his autobiography so it will take some time and tedium (much worth the effort) to re-aligh the text into readable form and presentation. But here tis for the moment. Will set to the task chortle-ly:

Jung's passage regarding the dream referred to above:

The problem of Job in all its ramifications had likewise been
foreshadowed in a dream. It started with my paying a visit to my
long-deceased father. He was living in the country I did not
know where. I saw a house in the style of the eighteenth century,
very roomy, with several rather large outbuildings. It had originally 

been, I learned, an inn at a/spa, and it seemed thatmany great personages, 

famous people and princes, had stopped there. Furthermore, several 

had died and their sarcophagi werein a crypt belonging to the house. 

My father guarded these as custodian.

He was, as I soon discovered, not only the custodian but also a distinguished scholar in his own right which he hadnever been in his lifetime. I met him in his study, and, oddly enough, Dr. Y. who was about my age and his son, both psychiatrists, were also present. I do not know whether I hadasked a question or whether ipy father wanted to explain something of his own accord, but in any case he fetched a bigBible down from a shelf, a heavy folio volume like the MerianBible in my library. The Bible my father held was bound inshiny fishskin. He opened it at the Old Testament I guessed that he turned to the Pentateuch and began interpreting a certain passage. He did this so swiftly and so learnedly that I could not follow him. I noted only that what he said betrayed a vast amount of variegated knowledge, the significance of which I dimly apprehended but could not properly judge or grasp. I saw that Dr. Y. understood nothing at all, and his son began to laugh. They thought that my father was going off the deep end and what he said was simply senile prattle. But it was quite clear to me that it was not due to morbid excitement, and that there was nothing silly about what he was saying. On the contrary, his argument was so intelligent and so learned that we in our stupidity simply could not follow it. It dealt with something extremely important which fascinated him. That was why he was speaking with such intensity; his mind was flooded with profound ideas. I was annoyed and thought it was a pity that he had to talk in the presence of three such idiots as we.

The two psychiatrists represented a limited medical point of view which, of course, also infects me as a physician. They represent my shadow first and second editions of the shadow, father and son. Then the scene changed. My father and I were in front of thehouse, facing a kind of shed where, apparently, wood was stacked. We heard loud thumps, as if large chunks of wood were being thrown down or tossed about. I had the impression that at least two workmen must be busy there, but my father indicated to me that the place was haunted. Some sort of poltergeistswere making the racket, evidently.

We then entered the house, and I saw that it had very thick
walls. We climbed a narrow staircase to the second floor. There
a strange sight presented itself: a large hall which was the
exact replica of the divan-i-kaas (council hall) of Sultan Akbar
at Fatehpur Sikri. It was a high, circular room with a gallery
running along the wall, from which four bridges led to a basin

shaped center. The basin rested upon a huge column and
formed the sultan's round seat. From this elevated place he
spoke to his councilors and philosophers, who sat along the
walls in the gallery. The whole was a gigantic mandala. It
corresponded precisely to the real divan-i-kaas.

In the dream I suddenly saw that from the center a steep
flight of stairs ascended to a spot high up on the wall which
no longer corresponded to reality. At the top of the stairs was
a small door, and my father said, "Now I will lead you into the
highest presence." Then he knelt down and touched his forehead
to the floor. I imitated him, likewise kneeling, with great
emotion. For some reason I could not bring my forehead quite
down to the floor there was perhaps a millimeter to spare.
But at least I had made the gesture with him. Suddenly I knew
perhaps my father had told me that that upper door led to a
solitary chamber where lived Uriah, King David's general,
whom David had shamefully betrayed for the sake of his wife
Bathsheba, by commanding his soldiers to abandon Uriah in
the face of the enemy.

I must make a few explanatory remarks concerning this dream.
The initial scene describes how the unconscious task which I
had left to my "father," that is, to the unconscious, was working
out. He was obviously engrossed in the Bible Genesis? and
eager to communicate his insights. The fishskin marks the Bible 

as an unconscious content, for fishes are mute and unconscious.
My poor father does not succeed in communicating either, for 

the audience is in part incapable of understanding, in part 

maliciously stupid 

[NOTE: I, my shadow, love this phrase as it is utterly 

descriptive of so very many willfully stupid people ]-. 

After this defeat we cross the street to the "other side," where poltergeists are at work. Poltergeist phenomena usually take place in the vicinity of young people before puberty; that is to say, I am still immature and too unconscious. The Indian ambience illustrates the "other side." When I was in India, themandala structure of the divan~i-kaas had in actual fact powerfully impressed me as the representation of a content related to a center. The center* is the seat of Akbar the Great, who rules over a subcontinent, who is a "lord of this world," like David. But even higher than David stands his guiltless victim, his loyal general Uriah, whom he abandoned to the enemy. Uriah is a prefiguration of Christ, the god-man who was abandoned by God. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" On top of that, David had "taken unto himself" Uriah's wife.

Only later did I understand what this allusion to Uriah signified:

not only was I forced to speak publicly, and very much to my
detriment, about the ambivalence of the God-image in the Old
Testament; but also, my wife would be taken from me by death.
These were the things that awaited me, hidden in the unconscious.
I had to submit to this fate, and ought really to have touched my 

forehead to the floor, so that my submission would be complete. 

But something prevented me from doing so entirely, and kept 

me just a millimeter away. Something in me was saying, 

"All very well, but not entirely." 

Something in me was defiant and determined not to be a dumb fish: 

and if there were not something of the sort in free men, no Book of 

Job would have been written several hundred years before the birth 

of Christ. Man always has some mental reservation, even in the face 

of divine decrees. Otherwise, where would be his freedom? And what 

would be the use of that freedom if it could not threaten Him who threatens it?

Uriah, then, lives in a higher place than Akbar. He is even,
as the dream said, the '^highest presence,'* an expression 

which properly is used only of God, unless we are dealing 

in Byzantinisms.

I cannot help thinking here of the Buddha and his relationship

to the gods. For the devout Asiatic, the Tathagata is the All-
Highest, the Absolute. For that reason Hinayana Buddhism 

has been suspected of atheism very wrongly so. By virtue of 

the power of the gods man is enabled to gain an insight into 

his Creator. He has even been given the power to annihilate 

Creation in its essential aspect, that is, man's consciousness 

of the world. Today he can extinguish all higher life on earth 

by radioactivity. The idea of world annihilation is already sug-

gested by the Buddha: by means of enlightenment the Nidana 

chain the chain of causality which leads inevitably to old age, 

sickness, and death can be broken, so that the illusion of Being 

comes to an end. 

Schopenhauer's negation of the Will points prophetically to 

a problem of the future that has already come threateningly

close. The dream discloses a thought and a premonition that 

have long been present in humanity: the idea of the creature
that surpasses its creator by a small but decisive factor."

**

HERE IS AN EXCERPT IN FULL BY JUNG AND THE DREAM ALREADY WRITTEN ABOVE.  STILL, THIS HOPEFULLY CONVEY'S EVEN MORE JUNG'S POINT AT LEAVING SPACE BETWEEN HIS FOREHEAD THE FLOOR BEFORE HE ALTAR HIS FATHER AND FATHER'S FRIEND KNELT BEFORE.  JUNG, TOO, KNELT BUT LEFT FREE SPACE, A "MILLIMETER" ABOVE THE FLOOR BECAUSE HE "DID NOT WANT TO BE A DUMB FISH." 

From Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflection, page 217-220 in Chapter VII The Work

. . .

"The problem of Job in all its ramifications had likewise been

foreshadowed in a dream. It started with my paying a visit to my

long-deceased father. He was living in the country-! did not

know where. I saw a house in the style of the eighteenth century,

very roomy, with several rather large outbuildings. It had

originally been, I learned, an inn at a spa, and it seemed that

many great personages, famous people and princes, had stopped

there. Furthermore, several had died and their sarcophagi were

in a crypt belonging to the house. My father guarded these as

custodian.

He was, as I soon discovered, not only the custodian but

also a distinguished scholar in his own right-which he had

never been in his lifetime. I met him in his study, and, oddly

enough, Dr. Y.-who was about my age-and his son, both

psychiatrists, were also present. I do not know whether I had

asked a question or whether my father wanted to explain something

of his own accord, but in any case he fetched a big

Bible down from a shelf, a heavy folio volume like the Merian

Bible in my library. The Bible my father held was bound in

shiny fishskin. He opened it at the Old Testament-! guessed

217Memories, Dreams, Reflections

that he turned to the Pentateuch-and began interpreting a

certain passage. He did this so swiftly and so learnedly that I

could not follow him. I noted only that what he said betrayed

a vast amount of variegated knowledge, the significance of which

I dimly apprehended but could not properly judge or grasp. I

saw that Dr. Y. understood nothing at all, and his son began to

laugh. They thought that my father was going off the deep end

and what he said was simply senile prattle. But it was quite

clear to me that it was not due to morbid excitement, and that

there was nothing silly about what he was saying. On the con·

trary, his argument was so intelligent and so learned that we

in our stupidity simply could not follow it. It dealt with some·

thing extremely important which fascinated him. That was why

he was speaking with such intensity; his mind was flooded with

profound ideas. I was annoyed and thought it was a pity that

he had to talk in the presence of three such idiots as we.

The two psychiatrists represented a limited medical point of

view which, of course, also infects me as a physician. They

represent my shadow-first and second editions of the shadow,

father and son.

Then the scene changed. My father and I were in front of the

house, facing a kind of shed where, apparently, wood was

stacked. We heard loud thumps, as if large chunks of wood were

being thrown down or tossed about. I had the impression that

at least two workmen must be busy there, but my father indi·

cated to me that the place was haunted. Some sort of poltergeists

were making the racket, evidently.

We then entered the house, and I saw that it had very thick

walls. We climbed a narrow staircase to the second floor. There

a strange sight presented itself: a large hall which was the

exact replica of the divan-i-kaas ( council hall ) of Sultan Akbar

at Fatehpur Sikri. It was a high, circular room with a gallery

running along the wall, from which four bridges led to a basin·

shaped center. The basin rested upon a huge column and

formed the sultan's round seat. From this elevated place he

spoke to his councilors and philosophers, who sat along the

walls in the gallery. The whole was a gigantic mandala. It

corresponded precisely to the real divan+kaas.

In the dream I suddenly saw that from the center a steep

flight of stairs ascended to a spot high up on the wall-which

no longer corresponded to reality. At the top of the stairs was

a small door, and my father said, "Now I will lead you into the

highest presence." Then he knelt down and touched his forehead

to the floor. I imitated him, likewise kneeling, with great

emotion. For some reason I could not bring my forehead quite

down to the floor-there was perhaps a millimeter to spare.

But at least I had made the gesture with him. Suddenly I knew

-perhaps my father had told me-that that upper door led to a

solitary chamber where lived Uriah, King David's general,

whom David had shamefully betrayed for the sake of his wife

Bathsheba, by commanding his soldiers to abandon Uriah in

the face of the enemy.

I must make a few explanatory remarks concerning this dream.

The initial scene describes how the unconscious task which I

had left to my "father," that is, to the unconscious, was working

out. He was obviously engrossed in the Bible-Genesis?-and

eager to communicate his insights. The fishskin marks the

Bible as an unconscious content, for fishes are mute and unconscious.

My poor father does not succeed in communicating

either, for the audience is in part incapable of understanding, in

part maliciously stupid

After this defeat we cross the street to the "other side," where

poltergeists are at work. Poltergeist phenomena usually take

place in the vicinity of young people before puberty; that is to

say, I am still immature and too unconscious. The Indian

ambience illustrates the "other side." \Vhen I was in India, the

mandala structure of the divan-i-kaas had in actual fact powerfully

impressed me as the representation of a content related to

a center. The center is the seat of Akbar the Great, who rules

over a subcontinent, who is a "lord of this world," like David.

But even higher than David stands his guiltless victim, his loyal

general Uriah, whom he abandoned to the enemy. Uriah is a

prefiguration of Christ, the god-man who was abandoned by

God. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" On top

of that, David had "taken unto himself' Uriah's wife. Only

later did I understand what this allusion to Uriah signified:

not only was I forced to speak publicly, and very much to my

detriment, about the ambivalence of the God-image in the Old

Testament; but also, my wife would be taken from me by death.

These were the things that awaited me, hidden in the unconscious.

I had to submit to this fate, and ought really to have

touched my forehead to the floor, so that my submission would

be complete. But something prevented me from doing so entirely,

and kept me just a millimeter away. Something in me was

saying, "All very well, but not entirely." Something in me was

defiant and determined not to be a dumb fish: and if there

were not something of the sort in free men, no Book of Job would

have been written several hundred years before the birth of

Christ. Man always has some mental reservation, even in the

face of divine decrees. Otherwise, where would be his freedom?

And what would be the usc of that freedom if it could not

,threaten Him who threatens it?

Uriah, then, lives in a higher place than Akbar. He is even,

as the dream said, the "highest presence," an expression which

properly is used only of God, unless we arc dealing in Byzantinisms.

I cannot help thinking here of the Buddha and his relationship

to the gods. For the devout Asiatic, the Tathagata is the AllHighest,

the Absolute. For that reason Hinayana Buddhism has

been suspected of atheism-very wrongly so. By virtue of the

power of the gods man is enabled to gain an insight into his

Creator. He has even been given the power to annihilate Creation

in its essential aspect, that is, man's consciousness of the

world. Today he can extinguish all higher life on earth by radioactivity.

The idea of world annihilation is already suggested by

the Buddha: by means of enlightenment the Nidana chainthe

chain of causality which leads inevitably to old age, sickness,

and death-can be broken, so that the illusion of Being comes

to an end. Schopcnhauer's negation of the Will points prophetically

to a problem of the future that has already come thrcatingly

close. The dream discloses a thought and a premonition

that have long been present in humanity: the idea of the creature

that surpasses its creator by a small but decisive factor."

**

You may read the autobiography free online at this link:

https://ia600503.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/26/items/the-collected-works-of-carl-jung-complete-digital-edition/Jung%2C%20Carl%20Gustav.zip&file=Jung%2C%20Carl%20Gustav%2FMemories%2C%20Dreams%2C%20Reflections%2FJung%2C%20C.%20G.%20-%20Memories%2C%20Dreams%2C%20Reflections%20%28Vintage%2C%201965%29.pdf