As we approach the collapse, however soon or far away, the main question is what attitude can we develop to be with what will come. I think Emily Levine's TED talk provides one hint.
My first encounter with the work of James Hillman was in 1962. I was completing my Master’s Degree in human psychophysiology and had stumbled across his book, Emotion: A Comprehensive Phenomenology of Theories and Their Meanings for Therapy. First published in 1960, it was Hillman's doctoral dissertation at the University of Zurich. I was familiar with the literature on emotion in various disciplines, but I had never encountered the voice I heard in these pages. What was it? I couldn’t quite get it, but I did know I wanted to see more work by this author. The next work I found was his essay in Harvest,on “Friends and Enemies,” in 1962, and the next was “On Betrayal,” in Spring, in 1965. By this time, I had studied a good bit of Jung, and entered analysis in 1964. Through the 60s and early 70s, I eagerly devoured Jung’s work as well as Hillman’s and taught both at university and in the analyst training program. It was in 1975, that I encountered Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology. It was clear to me that keeping Jung and Hillman close together would be a feat. By this time I had become a Jungian Analyst, and had begun a friendship with Jim. He accepted my essay, ”Cancer in Myth and Dream,” for publication in Spring in 1977, and he suggested that Spring publish a collection of my essays which was published in 1983 (Words As Eggs). In 1978, I became director of analyst training in Los Angeles, a position he had held in Zurich. Then came his book, The Dream and the Underworld, published in 1979, and it caused the most argumentative time between us. It is a profound work as is much of Hillman’s work to be sure. I delighted in the way his mind worked and his quick silvered tongue. But this book caused me to take issue with him. The main issue in my mind was that the relativity of “seeing through” everything left no solid ground for ethical action in the world--a feature of Jung’s psychology that to me was paramount and essential.” I told him that he left no bridge to the upper world. Our differing views went on for some time. Then early in 1982, Jim sent me a copy of his Eranos lecture, “The Thought of the Heart.” I include a picture of this. On it he had written, “For Russell, returning to this side of the ‘bridge,’ glad you are close to Eureka.” I had moved from Los Angeles to a redwood forest just north of Eureka, California. To get clear on Hillman’s reference to bridge take note that the first chapter in The Dream and the Underworld is entitled “Bridge.” In sending “Thought of the Heart,” Hillman is letting me know that he was“returning to this side of the bridge.” His reference to Eureka was not just to the place. I sorely miss him, but his spirit lives on.
After a long search, I have finally found my favorite performance of Maurice Ravel's BOLERO. Not only is this music in my personal top 10, but this performance is stunning in many ways. The conductor is Daniel Barenboim, long one of my favorite conductors because of his unique approach to conducting. The Orchestra is his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, composed of young Arab and Israeli musicians. Their performance is an inspiration. Watch Barenboim not conduct, in order to give his young players full reign and they respond, almost beyond belief. If this is possible in music, it must be possible in life. Maybe get the politicians out of the way and let these young performers show the way. Give this a listen.
“Caborca” is the name of a town in the Mexican Desert. And in this book, “Caborca” is so much more: this name also refers to something else governing a pattern of events that occurred “randomly” to the author over fifty years. This pattern, or meaning, came into focus only slowly for Paco Mitchell as he increasingly “agreed” to participate in the process of becoming the Paraclete of Caborca. “Paraclete” refers to a spiritual advocate or comforter. Paco thus takes us on a journey of initiation in which one life is swept away suddenly and catastrophically and a new one is born, nurtured slowly, and knitted together into a whole, piece by piece—much like one face preemptively shatters in order to give way to another face that knits slowly together over the years.
This second face is that of the Paraclete who advocates for a reality “looming up” behind the veil of the ordinary. In order for this second face to emerge into real life, i.e. to become actual, the Paraclete needs something from the human being. Drawing from Henri Corbin, Paco describes a process of “feeding the angel with our substance”. What can this enigmatic statement mean, now in the 21st century, in a technological civilisation hurtling towards its last days? This book is a careful, detailed description of what “feeding the angel” means in today’s world.
First, to feed the angel, Paco shows that we need to be able to “see” the angel, or at least his footprint appearing in our lives. This means in effect that we must begin to notice anomalies that occur in our lives in a new way, taking them seriously as “messengers” from a hidden world that interpenetrates our ordinary material world, sometimes in shocking ways, sometimes in more subtle, joy-bringing ways. We may need to undergo, as Paco did, a terrible sacrifice in order to open that eye of “seeing”—a sacrifice made worse by its unconsciousness. Paco literally had no clue of what was coming towards him out of the unknown future, as he set out on a youthful adventure to Caborca as a young man.
Second, it is not enough to only “see” these anomalies, which come to Paco in the form of dreams, visions, and empirical events, over the years. In order to feed the angel with our substance, we need also to act! Concrete action in the real, contingent world, as a gesture of love towards the angel secretly driving one into a destiny, is also required. And this book shows us the human cost in unsparing detail as Paco makes increasingly conscious choices to act in the world on behalf of the Paraclete who wishes to incarnate into the context of an ordinary human life. Through episode after episode we can see the gradual, simultaneous emergence of a spiritual being into actuality and the slow turning of a human being from living a life of “random chance” as Paco says, to one of great meaning and service to the hidden centre around which his life is turning: Most of what was revealed to me took place over many years in dreams and synchronistic events, interspersed with scattered passages read in many books. Thus I use the term haphazard—so much “chance” was involved. It would be up to me to connect the dots, to find the needles of necessity buried in the haystacks of chance.
Perhaps one last word on the manner in which individual human beings are so often drafted into service of the spiritual other. The angel finds entry through the wound, not though any heroic gesture of the will. Paco learned about this necessity in an uncompromising manner during his journey to Caborca. One particularly compelling dream also taught him this lesson, I think. He met “Heron-man” in a dream and this figure demanded to be fed. When Paco refused, “I don’t have anything to give you”, the bird-man struck at his wound. This image clearly pairs woundedness with a calling, as well as the consequences of refusing the call. Pairing wound and call generates a question for me—how can we live with trauma? Our modern world has a collective answer: define yourself as a victim and live your life accordingly! Paco gives us his alternative answer, which he found through the creative living of his life. He raises the possibility of shifting from a life of victimhood to a life of service to the mysterious other who can enter our lives through the trauma and demand “to be fed”. He quotes Jesus:
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
I am pleased to announce the publication of Paco Mitchell’s
THE PARACLETE OF CABORCA: A COLLISION WITH DESTINY.
In September 1963, a few weeks before starting their senior years in college, two twenty-year-old pals, Paco and Phil, decided to take an impromptu vacation by driving from Southern California to Mexico. As their plan took shape, they figured that a beach-and-body-surfing trip to Mazatlán would fit the bill nicely. “It’ll be a blast,” they thought. They didn’t have much money to spare, but Phil’s VW sedan got good mileage, and gas was cheap then. They could save on motels by sleeping on a deserted beach. Plus, they both spoke some Spanish—Paco was even a Spanish major—so it seemed like a natural fit. And why not? Mexico! Spanish! Fun! Before their vacation was over, however, the blast they received was not the one they were expecting. And what got set in motion because of that trip, especially for Paco, is his tale to tell, since he was impacted not only visibly, but deeply, by the adventure. Now, more than half a century has passed. The Paraclete of Caborca tells the story of what Paco experienced over the decades since that fateful trip, in an uncanny series of dreams, synchronistic events and insights, and the deep meanings and purposes that revealed themselves along the way.
Quite simply, there is no other book like this. Anyone interested in the central importance of dreams and synchronicities will experience this book as a guide to finding the patterns of fate and destiny revealed in these often ignored events. The book, published by Owl & Heron Books, a division of The Lockhart Press, is available now at Amazon in both paperback and Kindle versions.
Here is a link to my Foreword:
ralockhart.com/WP/Foreword to Caborca.pdf
My awareness in the dream began with a sense of fiction, with images and words swirling together not on a page as in a book but more as a hologram in motion. There was much to this that was not amenable to description, where time and sequence were liquid in some way. The whole scene was breath taking to my awareness, though I as such was not visible though some sense of I was witness to this fluid geography.
I have may ways of working with my dreams. One way, is to consider the dream as a prompt for story, to embody the dream in some form of narrative. Sometimes, this takes the form of poetry and at other times as fiction as the dream itself suggested.
My method for doing this is not to “think up”a story in any conscious sense, but to enter into what I call a narrative space. In this space, I try to settle into a state of blank mind. Then, I wait. I wait for something to present itself, to make itself known. This may be a sound, a word, a phrase, most anything. And with that I become what feels more like scribe than author, and the fiction begins to flow. What results is nothing I would have come to otherwise.
In relation to the dream describe above, what came was s story entitled, The Museum of Indifference.
THE MUSEUM OF INDIFFERENCE
The Opening of the Museum of Indifference
Sandwiched between a porn shop and a lunch time eatery, the newly opened Museum of Indifference was awaiting its first visitor. Unlike MOMA, the MOI did not intend to acquire items for display. The announcement displayed on a small poster in the window indicated the exhibit, called “Artless Visionary Projection,” was now open and in readiness for “public indifference.”
Joseph Krill stood motionless, pondering whether entering the exhibit would be a violation of its odd intention. Entering would express at least a minimal desire to find out what this exhibit was about. That desire could not be considered indifference. And moving on, would not be indifference either. Straight ahead logic left him motionless not knowing at all what to do. But then, he thought, does his own action need to reflect the intention of the exhibit or exhibitor? Say it was a Matisse exhibit. You don’t have to be Matisse, or even know anything about Matisse, in order to enter and appreciate or not the art of Matisse. There were no requirements for the viewer. So why should he consider there to be requirements here to enter, or not, the Museum of Indifference? Should he not be indifferent to whether it made a difference?
Joseph was known among his associates as a thinker. It was said that he could think himself into a wet paper bag, and delight in the discoveries he made there that had escaped his contemporary’s small minds. Not that this talent helped to navigate the shifting sands of his mother’s incessant demands, or the landscape known as “girls,” nor even the simplicities of balancing his checkbook. But Joseph Krill was an unflappable chap and he gloried in his musings, which prompted him now to step inside the Museum of Indifference.
The walls were covered in an unrelieved flat gray, highlighted in spots by beaming blue-tinged lights hanging from glide rails mounted on the high ceiling. The floor was carpeted in multiple darker shades of gray forming patterns, though of what, it could not be determined. No matter.
His corduroy and muted yellow suit was set off well by the varying shades of gray carpet and light bespotted gray walls. His black boots and what he considered to be his most fetching highlander leather cap were decent finishing touches to his outfit--not that his cap had done much fetching, as of late, if ever. Still. He could not claim indifference to his appearance and was meticulous in arranging himself in presentable ways no matter the occasion.
"Good afternoon Mr. Krill."
The deep baritone voice had no discernible location but turned Mr. Krill full around eyeing for the source of this voice. But no one was there. Gathering himself together after the shock of this strange welcome, he voiced his surprise.
"I'm curious as to how you know my name?" He spoke out into the expanse of the room with as full a voice as he could muster and did not like the edge of quiver that was all too evident.
"Do not concern yourself Mr. Krill with things of lesser importance. Please focus your attention on the light spot on the first panel near the door."
"But there's nothing there except for the light spot."
"Not true, Mr. Krill. You simply have not seen yet. Stay focused on the light until you see."
"Just the light. Nothing more," Mr. Krill managed.
"You are neither poet nor raven, Mr. Krill. We are not in a rush. Take your time."
"It's no use. My mind is going crazy with trying to figure out how you know my name. Besides, it's just a light on the wall. What else is there to see? Why can't you just tell me straight out how you know my name?"
“Mr. Krill does not know the deep character of indifference; does not know the difference between insidious indifference and nourishing indifference. Are you ready to learn, Mr. Krill?”
The female voice that filled the Museum of Indifference was not sultry, nor sensuous. It was more enveloping, a kind of inseeping, as if it was being absorbed by one’s skin. Mr. Krill shuddered as the sensation took hold.
“A clear case of an error of misplaced indifference, my dear,” the baritone voice announced.
“Yes, yes, clearly so. I ask again, Mr. Krill, are you ready to learn?” The woman’s voice crawled all over his skin again and although he was not given to dramatics, Joseph Krill felt the coming of a faint, knees weakening, arms reaching out for something to hold. With nothing to hold him up, Mr. Krill folded and fell, his last bit of consciousness finding its way to the light spot, and as the darkness took hold, he began to see.
The Blue Hippo and the Owl
“Well, Mr. Krill,” resumed the dreamy Voice, bringing Mr. Krill around. His eyes blinked open. Raising his hand to block the flood of light pricking his eyes, he tried to speak but found his words would come.
Are you enjoying the show?”
“Show? What show?” Mr. Krill’s words fell into the room like a lead balloon, his usual easy speaking deserting him.
“Why Mr. Krill you surprise me. Surely you remember what you saw.”
“How the hell do you know my name?” The words came easier now that his consciousness was returning bit by bit. He raised himself to a sitting position, but a dizziness took hold and he made no further effort to stand. His stared at the first panel spot of light.
“Not back to that are we Mr. Krill? What did you see, my good man?”
Mr. Krill closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead as if trying to rub away an ache following a Friday night binge. Not that Mr. Krill ever binged, mind you. In addition to being a thinker, Mr. Krill was a temperate soul, not given to extremes.
“Come on, Mr. Krill,” the woman’s voice carrying just an edge of impatience. “You can remember.” Not so much encouragement as cajoling, almost sweet-talking.
“OK, OK.” Mr. Krill was feeling a bit bullied by this voice that could not be seen. As Mr. Krill continued to rub his forehead, he started to think about whether voices could be seen in any event, then caught himself, pulling himself back from distraction and tried to focus on what he’d seen.
“You remember now, don’t you, Mr. Krill?”
“Do you have a name?”
“Mr. Krill. We do not want you focusing on the irrelevant. What did you see?”
“OK, it’s coming back. It’s just ridiculous!’
“Mr. Krill.” The lady’s voice continued its seeming indifference, but Mr. Krill’s skin was crawling with hints of warning.
“OK. There was a bridge over some water, I think. It was dark but also light enough to see, like maybe the moon was in full shine. Then from the other side, coming toward me was this hippopotamus. It was a strange blue color almost fluorescent. On top of its head was an all-white owl. As the hippo came near the whole scene began to ripple like water and it all went black. That’s what I remember.”
“What about the fish, Mr. Krill?”
“The fish?” I don’t recall any fish.
“Never mind, Mr. Krill. We must turn our attention now to Miss Vandavi. Ah, here she is now,” the woman’s words coinciding with the door opening followed by the appearance of a very tall figure, no doubt of the Indian sub-continent, and carrying a monumental handbag strapped to her shoulder with the eyes of a small cocker spaniel peering over the edge and emitting a low rumbling growl.
Ms. Vandavi Disciplines Mr. Krill
Mr. Krill was lost for thought. His mind going blank was unusual as it always so readily filled up with trivia and inconsequentials. Now that he needed his precious thinking, it had deserted him, leaving him a hapless chap still sitting on the floor of the Museum of Indifference.
“Ah Mr. Krill, your blank stare tells me you are ready for Ms. Vandavi and her special talents. Relax, Mr. Krill.” The bodiless voice filled not only his ears but his lungs as well. She—whoever she was—filled the air he was breathing in. He was panting.
“I still…I still…want to know how you know my name. I need to know.”
“Needs, yes, they are well worth tending, Mr. Krill, but here we find your needs to be a matter of indifference. You may no longer have such a need when Ms. Vandavi and Bitzy have finished your lesson.”
“I think…I will…just leave. I’ve had…enough of your…damn nonsense.” His words came out in lurches as he couldn’t catch his breath. He tried to get up only to discover he was unable. Fear was creeping up on his annoyance.
Bitzy escaped Ms. Vandavi’s outsized bag and made a beeline for Mr. Krill’s trouser leg, promptly treating it as if a familiar fire hydrant, leaving not a single drop on the rich carpeting of the Museum of Indifference.
“Ordinarily Mr. Krill, Bitzy would apologize for this outrageous behavior, but not here in the Museum of Indifference. It’s part of the lesson you see. While you have given up something—as soon as the papers are signed of course—you have now received something in return. Quid pro quo it’s called.”
Mr. Krill found that his thinking had returned, and his breathing had normalized as Ms. Vandavi spoke. Her voice had none of the enveloping qualities of the Voice, it was more as if she was talking at him, throwing her words in his direction. His thinking rolled into gear and he realized at once that he had a comeback to Ms. Vandavi’s no doubt affectational use of Latin.
“But Ms. Vandavi, if I may speak bluntly, quid pro quo means an equal exchange of value. I do not see how the exchange of my dream hippo and owl for your mutt pissing on my pants is an equal exchange. It’s all crazy. My hippo and owl were a dream or hallucination or some damn thing like that—unreal at best—but piss is real Ms. Vandavi, as I’m sure your nose is telling you.”
“My, my, Mr. Krill, you do have your back up! You are not quite getting the lesson Mr. Krill. Bitzy’s urina is quite real to be sure, but you see it’s all a metaphor. What have you pissed on Mr. Krill so that Bitzy needs to make you utterly aware? It’s a living metaphor. Do you know? Say it Mr. Krill and you will be free to go—after signing the papers.”
“Urina? What’s with all this Latin? Are you trying to impress me? This whole idea is ridiculous. I can’t sign away my dream, or whatever it was. Dreams have no legal standing as property—any lawyer will tell you that. Signing your papers is a will o’ wisp.”
Mr. Krill was pleased with himself that this term had floated into his mind and seemed in the moment to describe the situation perfectly—though, if he had to admit it, he wasn’t quite sure what the term meant.
“Ignis fatuus. I assure you Mr. Krill, the Museum of Indifference is not dealing with ‘foolish fire.’ To be sure, the quality of your AVP left something to be desired but nonetheless as the Museum’s first visitor, you must sign away your hippo and owl, not to mention the bridge and fish as well as the qualities of light, and all else contained therein to use the legal description.”
With this, Ms. Vandavi took a piece of green paper from her monumental tote and dropped it in front of Mr. Krill.
“Sign it,” she demanded without hint of any other possibility.
Mr. Krill looked at the green page, looked at both sides. All he saw was a line near the bottom of one side with his name printed in: Joseph Sizemore Krill. But there was nothing else on the page.
“I can’t sign this; there’s nothing on it. You could fill anything you want after I sign it. How stupid do you think I am?”
“Let’s be clear Mr. Krill,” the Voice returned. “Recall you claimed there was “nothing there” on the first panel when you looked. But you were wrong Mr. Krill as you came to know. You are wrong again. You just are not looking in the necessary way. Sign it Mr. Krill and you will be on your way. We have your Hippo and the owl and the other things you saw—even some you didn’t. And you have Bitzy’s urina. Fair exchange, seeing how you have pissed on your own AVP by devaluing it as not real.”
“And Mr. Krill,” the baritone voice added, “we hope you have learned your lesson.”
Mr. Krill Objects
Mr. Krill looked again at the sheet of paper and still saw nothing. What the hell did it mean to sign away rights to his images he saw while dreaming, or unconscious or whatever the state was? He was more than annoyed. He decided to protest.
“Lesson? That’s a crock! Tell me now, right now, what it means to sign away my images?” He was standing now and felt he was being as reasonable as possible—even a bit brusque if he had to put a name to it.
“Truth be told, Mr. Krill, you do not have, and never have had any proprietary claim to such images. They are not yours.”
“What? Not mine? That’s patent nonsense!”
“Well,” the woman’s voice continued, “like most others, you suffer from this common delusion. These images visited you Mr. Krill. And what did you do? You pissed on them. You could have invited them in, welcomed them, befriended them. You cared nothing for them, even denied them any reality.”
The woman’s rebuke was laid out in that voice that made his skin itch.
“So, what if I did. What business is it of yours anyway?” Mr. Krill was shouting trying to gain some solid ground.
“We are not indifferent to how you or others treat dreams. We will not have any proprietary interest in your images, Mr. Krill, even when you’ve signed the agreement. But your signing will allow us to treat your images differently, and if I may say so, with respect. We will treat them in ways you can’t even begin to imagine.”
“You’re insane, that’s what! I’m in some loony bin here! I’m leaving! Screw your damned agreement!” Mr. Krill was in full froth, so unlike his usual mild manner, as he headed for the door.
“If you don’t sign voluntarily, Mr. Krill, then you will not be able to leave. Go ahead, try the door.” It was baritone speaking.
Mr. Krill tried the door and it would not open. Exasperated, he took out his pen, an old Mont Blanc his father had given him. Placing the paper on the window, he signed his name, and as he did so, he began to see words forming on the page, but could make nothing out.
The woman’s voice announced, “You may take it with you Mr. Krill as we now have a copy of your signed agreement.”
“How…,” Mr. Krill stammered.
“Do not bother with inconsequentials Mr. Krill. It is quite unbecoming.” The baritone voice continued, “My dear, tell Mr. Krill what his behavior has prompted us to do.”
“Ah, Mr. Krill, you have inspired us to open the MOPOD as an extension of MOI.”
“MOPOD?”
“Yes, Mr. Krill, MOPOD: The Museum of Pissed on Dreams.”
This is a must listen talk by Dr. Jem Bendell on the coming societal collapse as a result of climate change.
The collapse of fixity and the rise of fluidity puts everyone "at sea" and faced with the consequent loss of stability of most everything. Blog member John Woodcock references this in his comment on the recent blog post by George Mecouch, entitled, "Why Not Ask for a Dream?"
From John Woodcock:
Very interesting dreams to read and also a relief to hear that they are being taken seriously. I have seen some videos of COVID nightmares and the predominant professional advice seems to be how to reduce the nightmares, even stop them, not to seek their wisdom.
The dreams seem to highlight the supreme danger of “fixing” or reifying the source of evil (whether as the COVID or men in suits, wolves of Wall Street, or whatever). “Ellen” is caught in a vicious and violent cycle with “an ancient evil force” i.e. caught in the processes of the psyche until she is stopped by the little girl so that she can be taught “ strategy and math” via the game of Othello,. If you just saw the game without knowing the rules, you would see a very mysterious fluid process of discs flipping from black to white, etc.—a simplified version of what “Ellen” was going through with the “evil force”. She has to learn the rules (make conscious) of being in such a fluid state—they are not the same as the rules of materialism or fixed reality. And I will add we are ALL having to learn the rules of this new mode of being, i.e. with reality increasingly becoming fluid, not fixed—the reality of the imagination, if you like.
The whole notion of evil now has to be reworked but we still collectively and obsessively search for a fixed source of the evil causing the strife in the world (target zero or the virus or Trump’s pathology, corporations, etc.) It may well be that the attempt to “fix” or reify (any aspect of) fluid reality may ITSELF be the source of evil now. “Ellen” pursues this notion of a fixed source of evil and so finds an anvil. The dreamer seems to believe that its putrefying sickness could be strengthened by others (by the habit of reifying what needs to be kept fluid?) so she single-handedly decides to take it up in her arms and carry it away. In doing so she feels its unbearable weight. This dream fact may be a clue or hint for the dreamer and us.
Fixing evil into an “entity” becomes an unbearable weight (of responsibility or guilt?). And of course there is the precision of that image as an ANVIL to consider too. The word springs from a meaning of “beating”—Ellen's “vicious and violent cycles”? Is this what happens when we attempt to fix meaning or reify the psyche? We get beaten on?
Our times point to a breakdown in a fixed stable reality (the reality of opposites) in favour of a more fluid reality that has come upon us and we all must learn its “strategy and math” in order to synchronize with it rather than getting beaten on by its insistence.
Here is a new essay by blog member Dr. George Mecouch author of While Psychiatry Slept: Reawakening the Imagination in Therapy. [This book is available at Amazon using this link: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=while+psychiatry+slept&ref=nb_sb_noss ]
In this essay, the question is posed: Why not ask for a dream? Dr. Mecouch provides rich examples of this approach in relation to two patients.
Why Not Ask for a Dream?
The world is in crisis: systemic racism confronts us with our long-simmering national
shadow, a viral pandemic reveals our naivete in thinking we had the forces of nature in our scientific back pocket, the long-term effects of climate change denial loom in our near future, and out of control political tribalism prevents us from reasonable solutions. Where can people turn for answers? In this day and age, it is often to therapists, who find themselves inundated with patients coming to their office with increased panic, anxiety, depression, and a sense of emotional overload. Most of these well trained and compassionate healers will then use their skills in empathy, active listening, CBT, mindfulness, and breathing methods to name just a few of the techniques in the modern-day therapy arsenal. Some practitioners may even respond to all the new course offering on the internet, hoping to gain further certification in anxiety and trauma work in this time of overwhelming angst.
All the above methods are quite useful and can help many a patient with their personal
struggles and symptoms. But what if there is one bit of training that most of these well-meaning therapists are missing. When patients came to Jung and would ask what to do, he would often state that he knew no more than they did about what the problem needed. Instead, he would say, “what if we turn to the 2,000,000-year-old man or Old Woman of Days and see what they have to say.” Here he meant the ancient wisdom of the collective unconscious that can be revealed through dreams. I would like to tell you about two women patients that I have been seeing in my analytic practice, who when feeling overwhelmed in this current time, listened to my suggestion of, “Why not ask for a dream?”
Ellen is a woman in midlife, who came back to see me after many years, hoping to
resolve issues with depression and anxiety. She had been doing some wonderful depth work but one night found herself emotionally overwrought after days on end with the kids at home from school, sheltering in place and watching the news of black deaths at the hands of police and the countrywide protests in response. Going into her room crying, she sat on the edge of her bed and used the old Asklepion healing technique of incubating a dream. She imagined what she was feeling and asked if a dream might help her to understand these emotions. This was her dream:
I'm in a row house that is centuries old. Outside the house paces what looks like a man but is actually an ancient evil force. I realize that I'm a time traveler that can also change forms, just like the entity outside. I travel forward and backwards through time, changing my forms between man and woman. The entity follows, doing the same. We battle together after each jump. Sometimes it wins and sometimes I do, but it's a viscous and violent cycle that never ends, regardless of time and form. Sally suddenly appears and takes my hand. We are standing in the row house. She says "Stop" and pulls me down into the basement. There are tables set up facing a giant whiteboard. A mixture of unfamiliar children and adults sit at the tables. Their clothing indicates that they are from different time periods. Sally and I sit and look at the white board. A man stands in front of the white board. At times he looks young and vibrant, but then flickers
and looks old and stooped with long white hair and a matching beard.
On the whiteboard are rows of black and white dots, and it reminds me of the game Othello. The man is talking about strategy and math. I look over at Sally and she is drawing her own version of the whiteboard. She hands me a pen
and paper so I can do the same.
The patient asks for a dream to help her with her overwhelming emotions and the Old
Woman of Days says to her, “this is bigger than you. This has been going on for thousands of years, this fight between light and darkness, good and evil, meaning and meaninglessness.” Jung says in Memories, Dreams, Reflections: “the world into which we are born is brutal and cruel, and at the same time of divine beauty. Which element we think outweighs the other, whether meaninglessness or meaning, is a matter of temperament. If meaninglessness were absolutely preponderant, the meaningfulness of life would vanish to an increasing degree with each step in our development. But that is—or seems to me—not the case. Probably, as in all metaphysical questions, both are true: Life is—or has—meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle.” (Jung, 1963, pp: 358 )
So, part of her cure was to realize this was not personal but transpersonal and that she needed to see it from a larger, universal or archetypal view. Next, the dream brings in Sally. A little girl she knows in life with autism and says that she is rarely politically correct when speaking and says just what she feels and thinks. She is very instinctual in her responses. Sally says go inside, down to the basement, and get your own white board and begin to work on your black and white conflicts. This hints that in spite the importance of the protests and civil unrest, the work in the end is an individual work. As Jung says, “does the individual know that he is the makeweight that tips the scales.” (Jung, 1970, para 586) Do we know that by doing our own individual work with our shadow and opposites, that we are performing a world work that can rebalance the scales of the universe? Ellen got immense relief out of this and hints about directions to take in her life.
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Claire, a woman in her late 30’s, came to see me for debilitating panic anxiety. Her work
had been going very well when she too was presented with a dream from the deep unconscious.
I am in a school with a bunch of rooms. Outside the school is a row of portables. I am supposed to be in a class, but I have my pit bull with me. The teacher says that I can bring my dog in and tie him to a desk. When the dog's leash is getting tied to the table, he pulls away. He lunges at the teacher. My dog is being uncharacteristically aggressive towards the male teacher. The dog runs out of the room and outside of the school. I run out after him. He keeps going after men in suits, leaving everyone else alone. All of the men in suits are walking wolves. I am worried that he will get attacked and either he will be hurt or killed. Every time I get close to catching up to him, he runs away. The sun is beating down on the school grounds and there are no trees for shade. The entire area is just dirt, with no vegetation. It is getting too hot for me to be out in this weather. A female in a dress pulls me into one of the cool portables. She has an old-style apron on over her dress. She says, "Let him go, he's following his instincts. Trust him." She makes me a peppermint tea to help me relax but I am so worried about my dog that I find the minty smell makes me nauseated.
Again, even though the dreams can have individual subjective meanings for both patients,
let’s concentrate on its comments about the current state of the world. The dream ego is going to school, learning what the world wants to teach, often the status quo or orthodoxy fitting the spirit of the times. Her dog instincts are tied to a desk, but this arrangement no longer can hold back the animal. He also attacks the teacher, indicating that what is being taught makes no room for him. The dog (a symbol often for the essence of Eros, relationship, love, and loyalty) feels tied down this way….he wants out….what becomes fascinating is that he now only attacks men with suits that are walking wolves. This reminded the patient of the movie the Wolves of Wall Street and her association about these men were high powered businessmen. Symbolically wolves often represent power, greed, avarice.
Does this indicate that what we are being taught, tied down to, indoctrinated into,
represses our instincts telling us that something is terribly wrong? That love, relationship, eros has no place in the world where the ego ideal is money, power, greed, and narcissistic self-importance. As Jung said so famously, “Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking.” (Jung, 1966, para 78) Hillman also comments, in one of his late-life interviews, that greed and predatory capitalism may be inbred in human beings making it hard to wake up to just common sense. As most of us are living, unconscious to our extreme power motives, we can’t see the commonsense realization that we are destroying the water we need to drink and the air we need to breath
This brings us back to Ellen and the dream she had about 3 weeks later in therapy. I
believe this is the most crucial dream in the group and will tie into the wolf and greed motif in Claire’s dream.
I'm walking down a dark hallway made of stone. It's dark and feels like the hallway of an old fortress. The Coronavirus is sweeping throughout the world with no end in sight. It has mutated and is even more deadly now. I'm on a mission to find the source. I pass people as I walk and make sure to maintain social distance between us. In some of the people I can sense an inherent corruption, and in a select few true evilness. Others I sense are puppets that do not realize the true intentions of their masters. I come to a stairway to spirals upward. I climb upwards until I'm in the tip-top rafters of a turret. The rafters are wooden and maze-like. After searching for a while, I find an anvil hidden behind a thick beam. It is black color and the surface looks smooth. However, looks are deceiving and as I move closer, I can see it is marred with dings and cracks.
There is a person, a man, standing behind me who says it is also giving off a sense of putrid sickness. I pick the anvil up and feel the heavyweight in my arms and against my chest. A person in the distance asks if I found anything and I say no. I must find a way to secret the anvil out of the fortress before anyone else can find it and strengthen it. I carry it down the winding stairway. With each step, my arms and chest ache, but I push onwards. Eventually, I come to car outside the fortress. I sit in the front passenger seat and lay the anvil heavily at my feet. My arms feel weak and I can finally draw a full, deep breath. A man sitting in the driver's seat puts the car into gear and drives us away.
She is dealing with the mutating and even more dangerous virus and her association is
that the virus is a metaphor for all that is going wrong in the world. As if nature is attacking us for the lack of care of the earth and all that is occurring socially. Again, there is this sense of evil as per her previous dream. She is looking for the source. Where is it coming from, this evil? It is above, up in the rafters…She must go up to find it. That often means up into the intellect, ideas, beliefs—what makes up the spirit of the times. When she gets there the source is discovered to be a black anvil. She associates black with saying that most anvils are not black, and this reminds her of something dark, ominous, and depressing. An anvil reminded her of blacksmiths and using the anvil with heat and fire to mold metal. We began to talk about the alchemical idea of people having metaphorical metals inside them that needed to be shaped over the course of life into
character. One famous story tells how souls are led from heaven by their daimon and stop for longer or shorter amounts of time at the planets. Each planet is associated with a metal: Venus/ Copper, Mars/Iron, Saturn/Lead, Moon/Silver, Jupiter/Copper, etc. These unformed metals make up a person’s character and are shaped over a lifetime. But what if the anvil that they are shaped on is now comprised of attitudes of greed, avarice, and power at all costs. That love and compassion are left out. What if schools, family, society, and the ego ideals now linked to our current Zeitgeist are shaping human beings. This is the anvil now brought down from above to earth and the realization of its heavy reality. It no longer hides in the rafters, tucked away in our intellectual defenses. It is now visible as the vehicle that drives us and we can begin the hard work of repairing what may be the true psychological cause of the virus. These dreams give us hints about actions we can take, but also put out a clarion call that the bag of tricks that most therapists use for anxiety are not enough. Much of anxiety and depression in this epoch is not about just childhood or biochemical causality; it is about the world in extremis and only the deeper work that dreams allow can heal both our patients and possibly the world.
Bibliography
Inspired by Daniel Burke's recent poems and Maurice Ravel's Boléro, blog member Estela Bourque offers her poem, "Bolero."
BOLERO
The dancer whirls
In staccato rhythm
To the sounds on wood
Skirt swirling round
A union of sound movement
Against the chaotic confusion
Of broken shards
Reflected in a mirror
Of sparkling debris
Round and round
A symphony of souls
Herald the birth
Of something new
From different points of light
The forming of seeds
Responding to the call
The dancer twirls