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AWAKENING

by

Sidra L. Stone. Ph.D.

This is the story of my “awakening”: my first direct awareness of the mystery, my first experience of the existence of energies or dimensions other than our own, my first sense that there were unseen forces beyond my control that could substantially impact my life. It was – in short – the first step in what I later came to call my “journey of consciousness”. Up until this time, I was convinced that everything could be explained by science and that it was only a matter of time – and rather a short time at that – before all the questions of the ages would be answered definitively.

“Awakening” is an excerpt from our NEW book: THE FIRESIDE CHATS with Hal & Sidra Stone . It is my story as I told it to a group of colleagues at the informal gathering described in that book. The commentary in italics is the voice of Dianne Braden who created a book out of the stories we told and the thoughts that we shared at that very special moment in time.

Sidra : It was forty-one years ago. It was in nineteen sixty-eight and I was on a trip to see some Mayan ruins. I had been to Tikal and I had heard that you could get to Copan from there. It was the end of the rainy season and I was told that the road leading from Guatemala City down in through Honduras into Copan would be passable. I was always reading about things to do, so I said, “Let’s go!”

I was traveling with my then husband, who was an MD. I always felt very safe having a doctor with me. We had met another couple; he was a physician, too, and she was a nurse. She had grown up in Argentina and spoke Spanish, so I felt pretty safe, really. After all, we’re just going from here to there and there was a road so I thought we could do it. We’d had a huge dinner the night before, so we sort of skipped breakfast and we bought a few things at the market and set out, the four of us, in a Land Rover we had rented. It all seemed very sensible.

We started driving only to find that it took much, much longer than we thought it was going to. We drove down the Pan Am highway for a little bit. Then we turned off onto a road that was somewhat less well maintained. It was still paved, so we continued, and it was getting a little bit later. Then we came to the border crossing into Honduras and there was nobody there. It was just a shack with some chickens and pigs running around. No one at the border crossing seemed bothered by us, and they just kind of waved us on. So, we kept driving.

It was the beginning of a three-day holiday for them. It was a very special holiday that falls at the beginning of December. We headed on into the mountains and came to a town that looked like it was out of the movies. It was very, very primitive, with just a church. They were getting ready for the holiday and people were coming in from all over. It was a little bit scary, really, and then a priest came out of the church. He looked like something out of one of those movies about priests who go “feral” — and you really didn’t want to be in that town.

So, we went through and out the other side of the town and now we were on a dirt road and we really needed our Land Rover. We had a few things with us, but we saw we were going down a dirt road that was quickly turning into a gulley. We had also picked up a hitchhiker and when he didn’t answer our questions, we realized people didn’t even speak Spanish here. (We had thought we were fine, because the nurse with us spoke Spanish.) Instead, the people there spoke Quechua . To make matters worse, the hitchhiker we had picked up was sitting there with a big machete across his knees, not speaking a word of English or Spanish. We were getting deeper and deeper into the jungle and it was getting late now, about four or five o’clock in the afternoon and no one’s eaten since the night before.

We came to a river that was supposed to have been fordable and, well, it wasn’t. There was no place safe to cross. The only place to go back to was the really scary little town we’d just left, which we weren’t about to do.

So, we left the Land Rover there and paid some kids to watch it. We took a dugout canoe across the river and the man in the canoe told us we’d be able to get animals to ride just the other side of the river. He called them “ bestias” and we thought that meant they were horses. They turned out to be something else … not exactly horses. So, we crossed the river in this canoe, with very little with us. I had on a sweater, we had our money, our passports, and I think some Binaca … a girl’s got to have fresh breath …

 

Sidra smiles in that Aphrodite way that pricks the feminine in the room and laughter floats up and around. It’s surprising how a little touch of adornment, that little guarantee of readiness to be close, gets on the list of essentials. When I trained horses for a living and filled my days with grooming and cleaning stalls, the concession I made to the Goddess was the careful and colorful manicure of my nails… revealed with some ceremony, I might add, as I took my gloves off to teach. It made me feel utterly feminine in the masculine world I worked in; and I nod in understanding with every other woman in the room, still laughing as she continues.

 

So, we crossed the river and got off on the other side. Everybody else walked across it. The men took their clothes off, put everything on their heads and walked across the river in water that was about shoulder height. But we went across in our dugout canoe and the man with us was going to show us where to go. When we landed, he took off because he was going to take us to the place where the transportation animals were. He started walking very briskly and we followed him—very briskly. Now, we were still waiting to get to where we were going and we walked for about another hour and a half. Then he said, “Well, down this road… this is where I live. And down that road is where you will find the place where they have the animals. It has a little tin roof.”

So, we went a little bit further. We had flashlights, thank God, and we were wearing boots. We went down the road and just as it was getting really scary again, like in a movie where it’s getting really dark, we came to a widening in the road with a little store on one side and a barn on the other; the place where we were supposed to get the animals. But the people there said, “You can’t take them tonight. You can go tomorrow. You can stay in the barn.” (Sidra pauses to let the groans die down, and continues without so much as a hiccup.)

Okay. So, of course, we were afraid to eat anything there. They had some beer that was at least clean and bottled, and some bananas we thought were safe. So, we had a couple of bananas and some beer, and went over to sleep in the barn.

 

I take a minute to privately calculate the number of beers it would take for me to abandon my car, cross a river in a dugout canoe, walk in the dark to an unknown location, sleep in a barn overnight to retrieve animals on the morrow I couldn’t identify even in daylight … Add to this the benefit to be found in adding bananas to the beer … a touch I wouldn’t have thought of. I’m thinking I can’t probably drink as many beers as it would take, while Sidra goes on, laughing now.

 

We went to sleep wrapped in grain sacks that said, “Gift from the People of the USA.” So, there we were. We were wrapped in these burlap sacks and we had a few candles we’d bought. We really didn’t know each other but we talked and joked that it was a good thing there were four of us, because as couples alone, we’d have killed each other for having gotten ourselves in such a predicament.

The next morning, they brought us our “bestias” . There was one donkey, one mule and two horse-like things, wearing these funny saddles that looked to me like equipment the Conquistadors must have used. They sent a young boy with us to bring the animals back and told us again, “It’s just down the road!” Everything was “just down the road!” So, we rode for another hour and a half and arrived in the town of Copan.

By the way, there was no other way to get into Copan in those days: no railroad, no paved road, just this trail to ride on. The ride itself was otherworldly. We were in the Cordillera, so the altitude itself was a factor in creating this feeling of unreality. The colors were so intense! I’d never seen anything quite like it.

Poinsettia trees grew as high as this ceiling. Orchid trees, which I’d never seen before, were in bloom and the colors were exquisite. The sky was totally blue and by now, I was feeling like a million dollars.

So we got in and it was the second day of the festivities. I was a little bit high from being hungry. We hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours. But the whole place was so gorgeous – it still seemed otherworldly. We rode into town, pulling ourselves up like John Wayne, and went down the main road. There were people stretched out, their feet in the road and their heads propped up along the sides, looking quite drunk or in altered states of consciousness from whatever they had been doing in the festival. But we rode in anyway, coming to a little two-story hotel that was near the ruins. We got off our horses, and grabbed our things. I went to sit down and the other woman went into the hotel “office” to arrange for rooms.

When she returned, we walked into a courtyard and there were stone steps going up to the second floor where our rooms were. I started to walk up the stairs and the next thing I knew, or the next thing I felt, was the earth pulling at me; pulling me down, and then … nothing. And the last thing I remembered was that I was getting to the top of the stairs and I could see across the sun-dappled stone floor of the second story.

They later told me I had gone totally stiff there on the stairs and I just fell forward (not crumpling and not trying to break my fall with my hands), hitting my chin on the stone step in front of me, splitting my chin open and breaking my jaw. The next thing I knew was that I was up here, (pointing) , in a corner just below the ceiling, and looking down at my body lying on a bed in the opposite corner of a strange room. My three companions were hovering over the bed saying, “There are no vital signs. She’s not here anymore,” and they were getting very upset. Now, these were two MD’s and an emergency room nurse … they should know when to get upset!

So, I was up at the ceiling, experiencing this incredible feeling of literally being a point of consciousness. I felt the entire universe extending outward; I mean, there was just no separation. I was still me, but I had no edges. I was in absolute bliss. Everything was light and I was trying to say to them, “I’m fine. I’m fine. I’ve never felt this free. I’ve never felt this wonderful! This is an exquisite experience!” Many years later, I recognized this as a “near death experience”.

Then I had that sense that my husband needed me, and my children needed me, and I literally felt the pull, felt myself come back down through a sort of damp, mucus-like thing and back, it seemed like, through the top of my head into my body. I can still remember the feeling of coming in and having to squish down to fit into it. I felt the constriction, the relinquishing of the joy and the feeling of absolute peace and bliss. As I came to, I was really crying. They didn’t realize that what I was crying about was losing that magnificent expansion and coming back to the constriction of the physical world.

The story, of course, goes on from there. My chin was split open, there was blood running down my clothes and my jaw was broken. I was in Copan with no way to get home. When I realized what had happened, I knew I couldn’t go back the way we had come. There was just no way I could make that trip. But it turned out there was an army plane, a Honduran army plane there, again because of this holiday. The pilot had brought in a bunch of muckety-mucks, special people from the army to see the ruins. He explained that a couple of days earlier his plane had been strafing the trail we came down. Communist insurgents from Cuba were coming in through Guatemala and Honduras using that trail, so it was kind of a narrow escape. We were lucky we weren’t killed from the air while traveling.

My husband talked our way onto the plane and we got to Tegucigalpa, and they flew us back. It would have been the only way out for me. It was a ghastly trip because it was really uncomfortable. Not only was I not feeling well, but they also had us in the seats like the stewardess had. So the two of us were facing these very together, well-dressed people on holiday, and I was just trying not to throw up. I was covered with blood with my chin gaping open and I wasn’t not feeling well at all. Finally we landed, but the airport was closed, so we had to wait a day to leave. But somehow we were able to find a clinic and a wonderful nurse, a nun who spoke English. She called in a Spanish-speaking doctor and he sewed up my chin.

The next day we were at the airport and I had what I’d call a spiritual awakening, only I didn’t see it that way at that time. This was not only a near-death experience, but it was also really the beginning of my sense that there was something more than our adaptability, more than our brains, that was working here. I had the sense that there were other forces at work. As I lay across some chairs in the airport in Tegucigalpa and looked at the mountains in the distance, I thought, “You know what? It wasn’t our cleverness that got us out of here. There was something else that’s been protecting us through this one, protecting me; and there was something else that was pulling me to fall down. There was something going on with the earth here.”

It was an amazing experience, and because of it, I really don’t feel afraid of death. It was beautiful. I’m not in a hurry, mind you, but it was such an exquisite experience, such freedom. It was like riding on the mist; like being a drop of moisture and riding on the mist. So basically, the reason I wanted to share the experience was because it demystified death for me. I don’t have fear about it now. I’m comfortable.

The experience fundamentally changed me. I’ve always felt a little awkward about the word spiritual but the result of this change was that I started to read things like The Way of the Hopi and books that had a more mystical feel to them. I wanted exposure to books dealing with the mysteries of life, the unseen dimensions I’m now fascinated by. Up until then, I had been incredibly pragmatic. My husband and I both were, and thought everything could be worked out by the mind. Unseen dimensions only meant something that we scientists hadn’t gotten to yet; dimensions that hadn’t been studied, understood, and demystified. And after this experience, I started being drawn by some of other kinds books – books I hadn’t read in years. I was drawn back into some of the authors of my youth, like Herman Hesse and Nikos Kazantzakis. It was as if I could feel my essence and it was joy.

I drift out again, into the past when I discovered Hesse, the novelty and mystery he opened for me. But I didn’t come to the kind of freedom Sidra’s describing for many years and I trace my slower journey as I enter the atmosphere she creates. Although she had to endure a death experience to get this, I quietly envy her, and covet the joy she’s sharing and reliving in the telling.

Sidra :     It was an experience of pure joy – just joy and love. And I really knew it. I didn’t have to learn it, or figure it out, or prove it. That experience simply threw over my whole way of being in the world. Actually, I had that happen again later with Hal – as our explorations led to major changes in consciousness for both of us. (Turning to Hal). That took a lot of courage but if I hadn’t had that earlier experience, I never would have been able to follow where you led, into the inner realms; because it really started then in Honduras.

Her shift in focus to include Hal reminds me I’ve always wondered how it was that Sidra even got to know Hal. I know their relationship quickly became momentous, but I didn’t know what precipitated it. I ask how that first meeting came about.

Issue 59 –

VOICE DIALOGUE

Discovering Our Selves

by

Hal & Sidra Stone

 

From Gary Zukav’s Website

When Hal & Sidra Stone

were his Soul Guests

  

We each knew all the answers to most of life’s questions when we met over thirty years ago. They were often opposite answers, but we were in love and this didn’t seem to be a problem. Instead, we were fascinated by our differences, and, as two seasoned, mature clinical psychologists, we were curious to explore them.

 

As a matter of fact, we were so in love that we wanted to know everything that we could about one another. So it was that we talked about our lives, our feelings, our dreams and our imaginings. We meditated and prayed together. It was a truly profound interaction, but there were no real surprises. We each still knew what we knew, we still did not know what we did not know, and we did not move very far beyond those boundaries.

 

And then one day we discovered our “selves.” We had been talking about vulnerability and Hal suggested that I (Sidra) move over to another part of the room and become the vulnerable child instead of talking about it. I trusted Hal and so I left the couch I’d been sitting on, sat on the floor next to the coffee table, put my head down on it and suddenly everything changed. I became absolutely quiet and experienced the world around me differently. Sounds, colors and feelings were more intense than before.

 

The sophisticated, rational, articulate woman with all the answers was gone and in her place was a very young child. I was extremely quiet and very sensitive to everything in my surroundings. I responded to energies rather than thoughts. I felt things I had not felt in decades, and knew things that were not known by my everyday mind. I knew, without question, the realities of my soul. After about an hour, Hal asked me to move to my original seat on the couch and I returned to my previous way of being in the world… but my little girl was still with me and I would never lose her completely again.

 

This experience was a surprise to both of us! I (Hal) knew that something extremely important had just happened, that we had moved into another dimension of consciousness. I had played with talking to parts, but they were never real to me. Now they were real people. This was indeed a little girl – it wasn’t a concept or a complex; she was a real person with rules of behavior, feelings, perceptions, reactions, and a history of her own.

 

This was the beginning of Voice Dialogue, or the dialogue with the family of selves that lives within each of us. It was conceived out of a genuine curiosity about another human being and was born in love. Embracing Our Selves: The Voice Dialogue Manual gives the details on how Voice Dialogue works.

 

We were very excited about our discovery. We saw that our psyches were not unitary but, instead, were made up of many selves and we set out on what has proven to be an unending journey. We went on to explore a vast multitude of selves. We spoke with pushers and critics and pleasers and perfectionists. And we spoke with beach bums, slackers, and manipulators. We spoke with feeling selves and unfeeling selves, with vulnerable, playful and magical children. We spoke with heroes and villains, matriarchs and patriarchs. We spoke with visionaries and cynics. The range of selves is amazing; it seems to be limitless.

 

We spoke to our “primary selves” which were very well developed. They ran our lives or, as we liked to put it, they drove our psychological cars. They were the ones that made up our personalities; the selves that “knew all the answers” when we first met. Then we went on to learn about our “disowned selves.” For each primary self there were opposite disowned selves, that were buried or repressed so that the primaries could keep control of our lives.

 

The primary selves were familiar and we were comfortable with them. It was easy to get them to talk and to tell us how cleverly and successfully they ran our lives. The disowned selves were unfamiliar and threatening to our primary selves. Each primary self felt that the disowned self on the other side was a potential destroyer of our wellbeing. For instance: “What happens if you really let go and learned to ‘be’ instead of to ‘do?’ You might never want to work again!” would be the Pusher’s concern.

 

When we talked with these disowned selves we felt as though we were living in a house with endless doors waiting to be opened with new rooms to explore. These selves carried new ways of looking at the world, new information, and creative solutions to old problems.

 

Then there were the areas in which one of us had a primary self that was the disowned self of the other. For example, Sidra had a strong “What will people think?” self while Hal’s was the opposite: “I do what is right for me.” Hal had a deeply spiritual self while Sidra’s was more pragmatic. Hal was the Introvert while Sidra was the Extrovert. Sidra had a Financial Conservative while Hal had a Financial Liberal. Hal was a fearless explorer of the world within and Sidra was a fearless explorer of the world outside. And so it went.

 

These opposite primary selves presented a challenge. They added a new dimension to our relationship: judgment. Each of these disowned selves was one of God’s little heat-seeking missiles that impacted us where it hurt the most. In our relationship! When we examined this phenomenon, we discovered that our judgments were not bad, they were simply signs that we had something to learn. Each time one of us judged the other, we were facing a disowned self.

 

In the past we had tried hard to avoid judging others. We felt that we were too mature and spiritually evolved for this. Now we learned to use our judgments. Each time we felt a judgment, it gave us the picture of a disowned self that needed integration. So we looked at the judgment, clarified it, and found the disowned self. For instance, Sidra might have judged Hal to be too free with money. We would look at this, determine that her primary self was a financial conservative and then work with the opposites of big spender and financial conservative in her.

 

We went on to discover how these selves interact in relationships. Relationships, we discovered, are the interactions of not just two people, but two groups of selves. These interactions follow simple predictable patterns. To move beyond the automatic, unconscious relating of these selves, we entered a new area of exploration and understanding.

 

As a way of learning about ourselves and others, Voice Dialogue is completely accepting and non-judgmental. It simply looks at what is. Some have called it a Western meditation because , as each self is explored, an awareness of that self develops. This awareness is separate from the self and acts as a witness. It carries with it a memory and an ability to recognize this self as it operates in our lives.

 

But that is not all that happens. Yes, it is important to have a witness that is aware of a self, but a witness just witnesses. We live in the world, however, not in an ashram. Who lives life? We saw that after we had separated from one of our primary selves, there was a qualitative change in the way we lived our lives. In the deepest spiritual sense, we were separating from who we thought we were and allowing a new process to emerge. We named it an Aware Ego.

 

Voice Dialogue is about separating from the many selves that make up the human psyche and creating this Aware Ego. We do not discard anything. We embrace the selves that are already ours and we add to them those we have disowned. It is as though we were living in ancient Greece and worshipping at the shrines of all the gods and goddesses. We can have our favorites, but we take care not to neglect any of the others.

 

And as we embrace all that we are, we naturally become more fully human and more compassionate. We don’t have to learn compassion, it just appears. After all, everything out there is within each of us.

 

We feel that the Aware Ego is an evolutionary step forward . This Aware Ego blends awareness with an experience of selves. It moves beyond duality by carrying the tension of opposites and, because it does so, it allows us real choices in life. It enables us to follow – safely – our unique paths.

 

As someone wrote to us recently: “There is something built into the method you have seeded which reminds me of a desert proverb: ‘Listen to the path… it is wiser than he who travels it’.”

Issue 58 –

What is the role of free will?
Don’t we have the ability to make free choices?

by

Drs Hal & Sidra Stone

The idea of free will and choice is a fantasy based on being identified with one’s primary self-system that does not allow the individual to see other selves – or views – as valid.

A young man chooses to go to law school and he sees himself as making a very clear choice as to his career. In fact, there is no choice. It is a group of selves he has grown up with – and that runs his life – that has made this decision and this group of selves is quite convinced that this is truly what the young man wants.

We do not make judgments about this. It is just the way decisions are usually made and it is perfectly natural and normal. It is rare, however, that this is a matter of free will.

Free will – or real choice – only happens when we can feel in ourselves the conflict between existing opposing selves or self-systems.

Let’s look at the law school choice in another way. Ben is interested in law in some way and he certainly loves the security it would bring to him. But he also loves his musical studies though it is harder to picture what form this interest in music might take. He also would like to have some time off. Jumping into graduate studies feels somewhat onerous to him after so many years of school. When Ben becomes aware of these very conflicting feelings in him and begins to take them seriously as different voices/selves to be honored, then he begins to move into the realm of conscious choice and free will.

Real personal freedom, from our perspective, does not occur by doing what you want or by following your heart. It occurs by feeling the power of the heart and the power of the mind and the power of whatever other selves are competing for attention. In this way of living we learn how to stand between opposing value systems and live with the tension and heat of this process. It is from this kind of “sweating of the opposites” that real choice and free will begin to emerge in our lives.

Issue 57 –

Part 6
Leaving The Nest

by Hal Stone

 

The period from the mid-sixties to the late sixties was a time of professional and personal expansion. In addition to my Jungian activities, I was beginning to branch out and do teaching in other places. On the personal level I was getting in touch with my emotions, particularly my anger and rage. The nice guy was dying and in his place appeared someone who was very new to me. I was constantly arguing and fighting at professional meetings. The situation got worse and worse because the angrier I got the more quiet everyone around me became. They were in the place I had been and the expression of anger was not considered appropriate.

In fact, what was happening was that I was shifting into another archetype without the awareness that this was happening. From the archetype of the spirit, where I had lived for so many years, I was moving into the archetype of the daemonic. I would come home from meetings and have dreams that my EKG was showing a heart problem. I was literally out of control. Over a period of four years it was as though I had moved from Christ to Satan.

One of the seductive things about rage and anger is that they fill us with a great deal of energy. I was filled during these years with a great deal of energy. The other seduction is the righteousness that one feels when one is angry. It is like a blindness and one keeps pounding one’s opponents, feeling completely justified in what one is doing. People were afraid of me, and for good reason. However, through this whole period, I felt like the man I was becoming. I was no longer waking up and wondering when I was going to feel like a man. The man had arrived.

During this time I had a number of dreams that had to do with the integration of the more primitive and instinctual energies. I want to share these dreams because this is such a critical step in the transformational process.

Dream of Integrating Instinctual Energies

Dream #1: I am lying in my bed looking out at the tree in the garden. There is a cat in the tree and it is about to pounce on a bird to kill it and eat it. I cannot stand the thought of the cat doing this and so in the dream I arrest the process. I stop it from happening. In doing so, I interfere with the natural process of nature. The cat starts to swing around the tree out of control, as though it were the victim of some centrifugal energy. I awaken with the cat swinging around the tree, out of control. This feeling of the cat swinging remains with me the whole day.

Dream #2: A mother cat has given birth to a litter of ten cats. Then I watch the mother cat begin to eat her young. I realize there must be something wrong with the litter and this is why she is doing this. I realize also that I am being forced to watch a natural process of nature, a process that is very difficult for me to accept.

What message was the unconscious trying to bring to me? I needed to become more related to nature, to the natural instinctual laws that govern the animal kingdom. I was having restored to me, much against my will, my natural instinctual heritage. As nasty as I was being in my outer life, at some deeper level a very important transformation was occurring. There then followed the next two dreams.

Dreams of Mongol Warriors

Dream #3: I am in my home when suddenly I become aware that California has been invaded by a horde of Chinese Mongol warriors. They are primitive and bloody and I am separated from my family. I start to run out of the house to find them when I am stopped by a man who is the leader of the invasion. He is a white man, however and he forces me to sit down at a desk. The essential thing is to use the experience well and to write and not to panic. I begin writing.

Once again the unconscious brings to me the power of the instinctual energies. Starting with my father in the Zurich dream, to Krupnick and his men, to the cat energy and now to the Mongol warriors. Invasions such as this break the form of the traditional civilizations. They break the form of the consciousness in which we are living. The form of my life was being destroyed and the people around me were paying the price. There followed one additional dream that I want to share.

Dream #4: I am wrestling with a powerful Chinese Mongol. It is a battle to the death and we both know it. He is very powerful, but I know I am powerful too. The battle rages on and on, neither of us able to gain the advantage over the other. I sustain an injury to my left hip but it does not deter me. We are finally exhausted and we begin to rub oil on each other. We embrace and neither is the victor and both are the victors. I am aware of the injury to my hip.

Both of the Mongol dreams were very powerful experientially and both have stayed with me over these many years. The Mongol is such a perfect personification of primitive earth energies. The Mongols were powerful; they were cruel. They were masters and they were conquerors. In the wrestling dream I finally came face to face with the energy that I had fought so hard to disown for so many years. Through the years, however, I had become stronger. Neither of us could vanquish the other.

The hip injury has other associations. It brought to my mind immediately the image of Jacob wrestling with the angel of God at the ford of Jabbok. Jacob also suffered an injury to his hip in this encounter. Could my Mongol opponent be likened to an angel of God? Would this be blasphemy? It would not be blasphemy if we think of each of our disowned energy patterns as being an aspect of a universal energy that has to be integrated by each of us.

The intelligence of the universe was again acting through my unconscious psyche and giving me a series of dreams to help bring a greater order to my life. This Intelligence is a mathematician. It has a sense of harmony and balance. It sets priorities. It seems to have an end in view for each of us. It wants us to be aware of all the patterns, to honor all the gods and goddesses. The power side was being integrated, for what outer purpose I knew not.

I have described how impossible I had become with associates during this period. I had also met and become friendly with a psychoanalyst, Ernie White. We began meeting regularly on Monday evenings and, in effect, he was psychoanalyzing me and I was doing Jungian analysis with him. This work was extremely important to me for several reasons. Since I had begun my separation process from the Jungian community, I had been feeling more and more isolated professionally. I had become increasingly aware of my lack of friends, of how much I had played the professional seer and wise man. In this relationship we were equals. I began to deal with the phantasy structure that I had never touched in my Jungian work. I went back to the original dream of the mother goddess and started from there to deal with the personal material that I had previously neglected. It was a healing experience.

My naughty boy days ended one morning when I was driving to my office in Westwood. I was making a right turn and an old man was crossing the street, using a cane because of his infirmity. Waiting for him to pass, I started swearing at him to hurry. At that moment I awakened from my archetypal slumber. Living identified with an archetype is like being asleep. I had been asleep at some level. My awareness now witnessed the voice of the daemonic, just as it had witnessed at an earlier time the voice of my Jungian training.

I didn’t understand everything at that moment, but I understood enough to realize I had to leave this scene, to get away and have time to think. I had turned from Jesus Christ into Satan and enough was enough. That morning I booked airplane passage to London and then passage back on the S. S. France to New York. Three weeks later I left for London and the next stage of my journey had begun.

I have always loved the ocean, and a real crossing is an amazing journey for me. I was seated with a lovely group of people and we all became quite friendly over the next few days. On the second or third day out they showed the newly released film version of Romeo and Juliet. For me, it was just what the doctor ordered. About half-way through the film I began to cry and I cried non-stop for about four hours. It seemed as though every bit of hardness had melted from me.

When it was over I felt a clarity I had never known before. I saw where I had been and from where I had come and I felt free. I returned to Los Angeles and it was clear to me that I could no longer remain affiliated with the Jungian community. It was no longer a question of anger, though I was not fully freed of that. It was just not my home any more. At that time I was president of the L.A. Society. I completed my term of office, another two to three months, attended the last business meeting, and my connection was finished.

I have subsequently learned many things. One of the significant lessons is that sustained anger always has something underneath it and behind it. One need only to look. I have never been an easy person with endings. My tendency has been always to chop, and I have not been too graceful. For that I am sorry. On the other hand, these were major shifts in consciousness that were taking place in me and there were not a great many people available for support.

Shortly before my final decision to leave the Jungian Society, I had a dream that I was living in a house of death, and that if I didn’t get out, I would die. The dream made my decision irrevocable. I realized that it was talking about a state of consciousness and, for me, separating from the group was essential for my leaving that condition of consciousness. The hardest, the most difficult aspect of the transformational process, is the working out of relationships as we move through major changes in our lives.

For my Jungian years I am eternally grateful. The richness and the texture that they brought to my life were, and remain, invaluable. It was becoming clear to me that I couldn’t be identified with anything. Being a member of the Jungian community felt like a form that stopped me from going wherever it was I had to go. On a psychological level this was a time of death, a time of endings and new beginnings.

Issue 56 –

Part 5
Integrating Instinctual Energies

by Hal Stone

 

One of the first areas that came up for me to deal with was the area of my physical body. I was never a physical child. I suspect that this had to do with the fact that I lived so much in phantasy as a child.

The educational process places a great deal of emphasis on competitive sports, especially in the upper grades. This works for some children, but it doesn’t work for children who are more introverted and who live more out of their phantasy life.

I solved this problem in high school by joining the R.O.T.C. program, and I did the same thing during my first two years at U.C.L.A. There was a period in college when I bought some weights and I used to work out with my friend, Harvey Mindess. We took it quite seriously for a time, but I let it go fairly early down the line. My warrior energy was totally lacking.

My choice of profession was not one that enhanced my physical body. There can hardly be a more sedentary profession than the practice of psychotherapy. The uncon-scious, however, was beginning to prepare me for the dis-covery of a new disowned self – the reality of my physical being. My spiritual and symbolic development, along with my developing scholarship, was also moving me far-ther and farther away from my physical body. I started private practice in 1957.

Somewhere about 1964 or 1965 I began to develop pains in my lower back and legs and a variety of other places. I was convinced that I had cancer. My father had died of cancer in 1963 and these were my cancer years. Later I graduated to heart disease and a wide range of other symptomatic possibilities.

My experience, in hindsight, with these kinds of fears is that they are a function of blocked energies. I certainly had a wide range of blocked energies. The concern about cancer finally drove me to my physician where I had a complete physical, including upper and lower G.I.s and a wide range of other medical tests. When all was finished, I was found to be totally fit, except for what might be some slight arthritic spurs in the back area. He gave me some stretching exercises to do once or twice a day. These I did religiously for one week and then promptly forgot about. After all, as long as I didn’t have cancer, why would I worry about a back that was hardly bothering me?

About two months passed and then I had a dream that once again marked a major turning point in my life so far as my physical body was concerned. I was born in Detroit, Michigan, and I went to a high school known as Central High. It was a school that was predominantly Jewish and it had a reputation for being a school of many brainy kids. On the other side of town was a community known as Hamtramack and there stood Hamtramack High School. It was known as the school of brawn. When the two teams played football, which they did every year, the score (on a good day for Central) was 75 to 6. This is the context of my dream.

Dream of Krupnick
I was sitting at my desk in my study doing some work. It was a place at which I spent a great deal of time. The study faced the street. I heard a car pull up. It was a foreign car, possibly a Volkswagen. Out of the car stepped four gigantic Polish boys, probably in their late teens. They looked huge and powerful. They stood by the car in a position that looked like they were forming a square. Then from out of the car came their coach and he stepped into the middle of the square. His name was Krupnick. They marched to the front door and began banging on it. It was more like they were smashing on it. I was very frightened and I timidly opened the door. They grabbed me and said-“You’re coming with us.” There was no argument. They pulled me out of the house and I awoke from the dream.

The means by which we disown parts of ourselves is truly amazing. Once we become aware of a part, we wonder how in heaven we could have spent so many years without this awareness. I can remember watching joggers run and they all looked so silly to me. Belonging to a gymnasium made no sense. I was identified with my mind and spirit and the controller was behind them and they represented what I thought was my ego. They were the parts of me that were negating my physical body. I was again being separated from my introverted nest. My Hamtramack cronies and my new coach Krupnick have been with me ever since that dream. I joined the YMCA the next day and never since that time have I been sepa-rated from my body. As the years have gone by, I would say that I have taken it more and more seriously. Krupnick is a living entity in me, a good advisor on matters of my physical being.

Illness can be a very powerful teacher in our lives. It all depends on the attitude we take toward it. If we become ill and see the illness in purely symptomatic terms as something to be eliminated, then we do what we can to eliminate it. If, however, we see illness as a natural pro-cess of life, as an opportunity to become aware of certain energetic imbalances of blockages, then it becomes an amazing teacher. We begin to look at the things we eat, at our emotional blockages, at the thought patterns that constitute our belief system about living. We think about the sense of meaning and purpose of our lives and whether we have any or not. We begin to view our environment differently, and our relationships – where we feel free and where we feel trapped. The concept of illness as teacher is one of the most significant ideas that has emerged from the holistic movement in contemporary medicine.

In the same way, when we have fears of illness or dreams of becoming ill, these experiences can also be looked at as potential teachers. How are our energies not in balance? Where are they being blocked? What am I doing that I don’t want to do? What do I want to do that I am not doing? Our so-called symptoms, illness, dreams of illness, and phobic reactions about illness are all wonderful opportunities for new awareness.

The beginning integration of my body was really a continuation of the process that started with the dream of my father in Zurich. My relationship with my father had changed considerably through the years. He still was a man who talked very little, but gradually a love developed between us that was there until the very end. When he became ill in 1961, it was my mother’s preference that he not know that he had cancer. This was not something I agreed with at all, but I felt the need to honor her wishes. He had cancer for two years and remained at home until about ten days before his death.

One afternoon my mother called me in something of a panic, telling me that my father was hallucinating. I got to their home as quickly as I could and my father was having a persistent vision of “death” trying to enter his room through the back door. He was quite frightened, but after a few minutes became more calm. He looked at me and posed the question I could no longer deny – “I’m dying, aren’t I?” I nodded my head to indicate that this was so. That was the end of the hallucinations and within a few days he was moved to the hospital. He died shortly thereafter.
It is not a pleasant thing to die without knowing that you’re dying. It is not pleasant for the dying person. Everything becomes forced and artificial and the beauty of the death process is denied to all concerned. We can all be grateful for the work that has been done on death and dying because it has changed the climate so much in relation to the death process. Now it is the rare experience to find someone who is dying who is denied that knowledge. We think we are protecting the dying person when in fact we are protecting ourselves from our own tears and sadness.