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Issue 55 –

Part 4
Disowning Instinctual Energies

by Hal Stone

With this dream my analysis was over. It may have lasted a few more months, but it was really over now. I had disowned my own dictatorial, power-oriented nature. I had disowned my sexuality. Whatever it is that we disown is projected outside of ourselves. It is projected onto other people, things, political parties. What is the image of Satan that occurs with such frequency in people’s dreams? Satan is a mythic image of what has been disowned in contemporary culture. Western culture has been forced to disown, to bury, a great deal of its natural instinctive apparatus. For civilization to evolve it has been necessary to curb our natural appetites such as aggression, sexuality and power. The curbing of these instincts forces them back into the unconscious where they undergo a change. The more they are bottled up, the more unfriendly to us they become. We refer to these energies as daemonic. The image of Satan comes up in dream material as the carrier of much of this disowned and buried instinctual material.

My Jungian years had brought me great riches. I had developed my symbolic and spiritual energies to a very high degree. The artist in me had been born. My creativity was flourishing. What I had not tapped into was the instinct life. I had very little connection to my power side outside of the Jungian community. I did not have access to my aggression, nor to my sexuality. I had little sense of money, business and finance. My Jungian psychology continued to nourish the areas of myself that were already highly developed. I couldn’t see this at the time, so the unconscious brought my brother to me to help me to separate from Hilde. He was really introducing me to my sensuality, to my Dionysian and Aphrodite nature. The later dream of the Satanic completed the job. I could no longer project my power, my sexuality, my daemonic energies. I had to take responsibility for them myself.

People get frightened when they hear such words as daemonic and satanic. All I am describing are instincts that have become repressed. They go sour. If you disown aggression, it goes sour. If you disown sexuality, it goes sour. It goes sour because it cycles back into the unconscious and there it festers. At this point we call it daemonic because it is capable of behaving in very destructive ways.

I would like to try to clarify this for you with a further example. A ten year-old girl has the following dream:

Child’s Dream of Evil
There is a large machine that is run by a bad man. The machine has a net on the bottom and the bad man presses a button and catches animals, friendly animals, who are playing on the street. The animals go into the machine and there something happens to them. They turn bad. The hero comes along and when the bad man sees him he presses a button and releases the animals that have been locked up and changed. The animals come out of the machine and they attack the hero. The question posed in the mind of the dreamer is as follows: Is the hero going to know that the animals are really good and that they are just acting bad because of what the machine did to them-or is the hero going to think that the animals are really bad and try to kill them?

This remarkable dream of a ten year old child gives a vivid picture of what I have been describing. The machine is the machine of civilization that captures the animal side, our instincts, and buries them, sometimes very deeply, sometimes not so deeply. The instincts go through a process when they are buried. They become infused with even more energy and they go sour. They come out attacking or in extreme ways. When they come out negatively, we take this as proof that instincts are dangerous, that they must be blocked at all costs. We, like our hero in the dream, do not realize that the animals are really good, and that they have been made to act badly by the repressive requirements of our civilization.

Satan, for me, was the mythic, symbolic personification of certain tendencies in me that had been repressed for many decades. They had been projected into people all around me. I could no longer do that. I had to now meet Khrushchev and Satan and recognize that they were really a part of me. The concept of the shadow was now to become a living reality, not a matter for my theoretical understanding. My childhood innocence was ending.

How had all this come about? How had I come to disown so much of my instinctual life? How had the “bad man” caught so many of my animals in his machine and transformed them into negative energies? I want to summarize this process, at the risk of repetition, because it seemed to be so critical an issue for so many of us.

Each of us is born into the world totally vulnerable. We discover very early in life that being vulnerable is not a particularly safe or easy way to be while living on the planet earth. We learn that we have to take care of ourselves, to meet other people’s expectations. We learn to control our environment so we won’t be hurt. We develop a part of ourselves that

Issue 54 –

Part 3
Jungian Years – Further Development of Spiritual Energies

by Hal Stone

The next period of years was very intense and very fulfilling for me. I officially entered the Jungian training program in Los Angeles and the next four years were busy ones filled with the establishment of a private practice and a great deal of study and work at the Institute. My primary analyst during these years was Hilde Kirsch. It was again an immersion into the unconscious. Hilde was a deeply spiritual woman and a very fine analyst. Her strength was on the symbolic and spiritual side, and so it was that these parts of me deepened and other parts re-mained unconscious and disowned. The problem was that I didn’t know what was disowned. Again, I didn’t have in those years my understanding of disowned selves and so I couldn’t read the signs that were really quite obvious.

At this point in my life I was a full-blooded Jungian. I disliked, sometimes intensely, all other forms of psychotherapy. I especially disliked the Gestalt and neo-Reichian systems. It seemed to me barbaric that people would have to make all that noise, do all the crazy things that Gestalt work demanded, or lie on tables in their underwear and breathe, as Reichian work demanded. I rejected group work and encounter work. Nothing really made sense to me other than the Jungian approach. I lived in a particular wave band, a particular energy frequency call Jungian.

One of my very early dreams in my analysis with Hilde was as follows:

Dream of the Sexual Goddess

I was in a field and I came across a gigantic, primitive statue of the Great Mother, but in the form of a sexual Goddess. She was on her knees as though she were in the midst of some sexual fertility rite. In the dream she was forty or fifty feet tall and I was quite in awe at the sight of her.

Hilde’s response to the dream was that I was being given an opportunity to see a powerful archetype in action. I also needed to understand that this figure was an archetype configuration and that I mustn’t confuse it with her personally. I began working with this image in creative ways. I did painting and sculptings and it led to a very powerful upsurge of creative and scholarly energies. I began to study and read about the great mother. I began what today I would call a Jungian process. I don’t mean to say that every Jungian would have proceeded thusly. It simply would be a kind of approach that would be natural to the Jungian process. If I had been in psychoanalysis, I suspect the analyst would have been dealing with my personal phantasies and nothing would have moved in the direction of my understanding of the world of archetypes.

I want to make clear from my vantage point today that I do not feel judgmental about these things. It seems to me important to understand these different processes, why they happen, what is disowned in each process. For me, the process accelerated my spiritual and symbolic growth, but never dealt with my phantasy life. The sexual side and the part of me that had to do with personal power simply were given little energy. Being spiritual meant being nice and loving. Since I was born nice and loving, it was not hard for me to act nice and loving. It seemed to be my natural style.

Everyone in the community acted the same way, so there was a great deal of reinforcement for behaving in this way. I became so one-sided on the spiritual side, that I once wrote a very scholarly paper on sexuality and why it was really not necessary in contemporary society. For-tunately, I never tried to publish it and I am pleased to say that I have subsequently changed my mind.

I had an intensely personal relationship with Hilde. She was the mother who was always there for me. She was the spiritual guide. She was a friend who was always available. Since we never dealt with any of the sexual and power issues, there were whole arenas of material that we couldn’t go into. I never expressed negativity towards her, nor did I ever deal with the phantasy structure in me in relation to her. A separation was inevitable and ultimately it came.

I completed analytic training in 1961 and then became active in the Jungian Society in Los Angeles. The problem was that I was beginning to become aware of certain things that I hadn’t been aware of before. I began to realize that I didn’t feel like a man, and kept wondering when I was going to feel like a man. The men in other psychological disciplines seemed to feel like men. They didn’t have my understanding of dreams and fairy tales, my connection to the world of spiritual reality, and they weren’t as loving as I was, but they felt like men. Furthermore, I was beginning to feel that I would gladly let go of some of the good things I had in order to feel like a man. Banks terrorized me and I was really a child in the world of money. I was beginning to realize how sexually immature I was. I was beginning to become aware of a negativity that was in me.

I had been working for years with my “shadow,” but it seemed to have nothing to do with me in any real sense. I sensed again that primitive energy that had gotten loose in the mental hospital. I was beginning to feel not so nice. In my personal analytic work, every time I would lose control emotionally, I accepted the concept that this was my anima in undeveloped form. (The anima in Jungian terms is the man’s feminine side.) I literally had stopped being emotional because I saw emotionality as my undeveloped feminine side. I began to examine these ideas.

THE AWARENESS LEVEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The questions about life, about myself, and about my work continued to multiply. I didn’t realize it, but my unconscious was gradually gathering momentum for a new leap forward. This leap forward would eventually mean leaving the comfort and security of the Jungian community and going forth to explore other, heretofore neglected, areas of psychology. I remember clearly the first moment of separation between my Jungian thinking and the new Awareness level that was beginning to emerge in me.

I was sitting in my office conducting a regular analytic session. I was talking about a dream that the client had related to me when suddenly my awareness separated from the me who was talking. It was an eerie experience. There was a Jungian me who was talking, quite brilliantly I might say, about the client’s dream; and on another level, I was watching this whole transaction in amazement. I realized at that moment that all the knowledge and language that was coming out of me had very little to do with me. It was like discovering a computer program. I didn’t say anything to the client, but I knew that something irrevocable had happened.

The separation from an organization or a body of ideas goes on for a long time in underground channels before we are ready to deal with it in a more conscious way. The painful thing about separation is that there are always people involved. My relationship with Hilde had been central in my life for about ten years. Now, something was beginning to change. I had a critical dream around this time in 1964 that clearly marked the turning point in my relationship with Hilde. It showed quite clearly why I had to separate from her. First, let me review some back-ground so the dream may be better understood.

I am the youngest of three brothers. My older was, eight years older and my middle brother was six years older. Joe, the eldest, was very much my opposite. He was a powerful, successful attorney, very much oriented to the real world, well traveled, very much at home in the realms of power and sexuality. I was the youngest brother of the fairy tale. I was the dreamer. We were for many years disowned selves of each other. The longer I was with the Jungians, the more intense was the support for the disown-ing this “Joe” in me. I had become aware of many aspects of the disowned archetypal patterns that he represented. He now appeared in my dream in a very significant way.

Separation Dream
I’m sitting in an analytic session with Hilde. She is talk- ing to me when suddenly the door opens and my brother Joe is there. His wife is with him and they take me away from the analytical session and they also make sure that Hilde can’t do anything to interfere with their plans for me. They do this by locking her in another space. They then proceed to take me on a tour of all the night spots of L.A. The purpose of this tour is to show me that sex- uality is all right. They take me to strip joints and dance halls, to any and every place where the female and male anatomy is being shown. This goes on all night long. It ends finally with them showing me billboards of women’s bodies and then saying to me- “You see Harold- It’s all okay. It all belongs and it’s all all right.” After this last statement they return me to the analytical session and release Hilde and the dream ends.

This dream was in 1964. My analysis lasted for a while longer, but it was essentially over. A few months later I had the following dream:

Dream of Krushchev and Satan

There had been a long war, one that had lasted for many years. It was finally over. The war had ended. I was standing facing “no man’s land.” Across from the other side were coming our former enemies. They were cross- ing “no man’s land.” It was my brother Joe. He was however not one person but three persons. He was himself, he was Khrushchev and he was Satan. They came into our lines and joined with us and we began talking.

Issue 53 –

Part 2
OPENING TO THE INNER WORLD:

by Hal Stone

Zurich – The Process Deepens

From the time I first entered military service to the time of my discharge was a period of six years. In every way it was an outstanding experience. I was planning to return to Los Angeles and our second child was due toward the end of July in 1957. I had applied to the Bollingen Foundation for a grant to study in Zurich for three months and the grant was approved. I took my family to Los Angeles and got them settled and then left for Zurich. I spent the next three months working analytically, attending the Jung Institute, studying, painting and sculpt-ing.

The time in Zurich was very precious to me-three whole months to devote just to myself. I lived to a large extent like a monk, socializing very little. Three days a week I was working analytically and doing an amazing amount of personal work on my dreams and on myself in general. On one level it was anything but a balanced life. On another level, I was literally exploding creatively and personally and my horizons were expanding in so many marvelous ways that my head was spinning. After all, one didn’t go to the Jung Institute in Zurich to lead a balanced life. One went to immerse oneself in the unconscious, and immerse myself is exactly what I did.

During this time in Zurich I had a number of remarkable dreams. The unconscious opened up at a deep level in response to this separation from family and responsibility. The opportunity to work solely on myself and my process was a very special kind of experience. There were few outer distractions and my energies had the chance to express from within, with complete freedom and exuberance. The disadvantage of this kind of experience was the danger of losing touch with the outside world. The re-entry into society from the rarefied atmosphere of Zurich could be quite difficult. That came later, however. Now was the time to soak it up.

My first dream in Zurich was simple and to the point.

Dream of the Powerful Wind
There was a giant wind that blew through Los Angeles. It blew through the campus of UCLA ad leveled it totally.

This was a wonderful initiatory dream for me to have. It meant of course that UCLA, the citadel of rationality, was being destroyed by the winds of spirit. I was obviously going to be experiencing new kinds of energies and I looked forward to my three months with eagerness.

The second dream I want to share concerns my father. My relationship with my father had always been rather problematical. He was European, as I have mentioned, and we had nothing in common. As the years moved along I felt more and more negative toward him. I wanted a strong father, someone who would talk to me, who would be a role model. I wanted someone who would in-spire me, someone whom I could admire. Instead, there was my father-silent and brooding and simple; a coarse man, and a heavy drinker. I realized at a fairly early age that he was an alcoholic. He was an extremely strong man physically and was built like a wrestler. He and my mother had owned a beer garden in Detroit and I remember him carrying hundred pound kegs of beer with the greatest ease. His physical power and earthiness did not impress me at all. He was always disappointing and somewhat alien to me and, as my developmental process became more spiritual, he seemed like someone who should be left behind and forgotten. That is, until I had the following dream during my first weeks in Zurich.

Dream of My Father and Jung
I was on my way to see Dr. Jung for a personal appoint- ment. (I actually had one scheduled a few weeks down the line.) The problem was that my father was with me and I could not get rid of him. I did everything I could think of to make him leave, but he seemed stuck to me like glue. I finally got to the home of Dr. Jung and my father and I were ushered into his waiting room. I was feeling terribly uncomfortable and self-conscious. I was ashamed of my father, and here I was about to meet the great man, himself, and I had so many things I wanted to talk about and ask him about. I heard footsteps coming down the stairs and the door opened and there was Dr. Jung. I stood up to walk over and shake hands with him. To my great surprise-shock would be a better word-he ignored me completely and walked over to my father and they embraced. Then, to my amazement, they started talking animatedly together in Yiddish. Jung put his arm around my father and they walked out of the room together, walking up the stairs toward his office. All this time they were continuing to carry on this remarkable conversation in Yiddish, a language which made me feel extremely uncomfortable. I followed them as they walked up the stairs, realizing that there was something very significant to learn here.

It has always amazed me, and never ceased to delight me, to watch the unconscious in action when it wants to make a real point about something. Whatever this amaz-ing Intelligence is that lies behind the dream, it has an ordering function. It establishes priorities. It oftentimes displays the most amazing sense of humor. When it wants to get our attention, it has the capability of pursuing us with relentless precision. It also does not seem to be in the business of giving rewards for good works accomplished.

As soon as one piece of work is done, it is ready to start on the next piece of work. I once heard a dream of a woman who was walking on a path in a forest and, as she walked, the trees were closing in behind her so there was no turning back-a beautiful image of this inexorable forward move-ment.

These qualities of dreams are not always present for everyone. They seem to come into operation when someone becomes open to dreams, to the unconscious, to the whole transformational process. The unconscious behaves just like you and I do in certain respects. When we are loved and honored and given time by those who are close to us, we blossom and give off wonderful aromas. When we are rejected and ignored, when we are not honored, we become angry and sour and revengeful. The work of consciousness is like digging in a garden, constantly planting new seeds, digging, and watching things grow. The unconscious responds to this process in the most amazing ways. It blossoms when we attend to it.

My father was my disowned self. What is a disowned self? It is a part, or parts, that are negated in our growing up years. They are usually parts of which we are ashamed. We grow up identifying with certain parts of ourselves because of our family and cultural patterns. I had learned to identify with the mind, with achievement and, at a later time, with spirituality. I had disowned my physical power and sexuality. I had almost no relationship to my physical body. I had always been a dreamer, not related to earth. I hadn’t known this for many years, but it was becoming abundantly clear to me at this time. My father was earth. He was totally non-intellectual. His job was to see that his sons got what they needed to make it in America. This may not have been a conscious thought for him, but it is the reality that he lived.

There was another disowned energy that was brought through in this dream and that concerned my relationship to being born Jewish. What I began to realize with this dream was that I had serious issues with what it meant to be a Jew. I was quite accepting of the intellectual, cultural and mystical aspects of Judaism, but there was something about Yiddish itself that bothered me. It was an issue I was to work on for many years to come. Yiddish for me was associated with Europe and earth.

I never knew my grandparents, a rather sad thing really because grandparents help tie us back to our origins. My origins were badly in need of being appreciated. Jung was carrying the energy of the new consciousness that was emerging at that time. This new level of awareness gave me an understanding of the real meaning of my father in my life and the kind of balance that it would give to me when I learned to honor him. The spiritual pull in me was then, and always has been, extremely powerful. My father’s energies were the balance. He was the earth in which a spiritual process could safely blossom.

Jung himself carried that earth. He was physically strong and vital. When I actually saw him I was struck by his earthy peasant quality. When I sat down for my in-terview with him, he was filling his pipe and he asked me what I wanted. I realized that he had probably never read the long letter I had sent in order to secure the interview. So I told him that I didn’t want to work on personal issues with him, that I just wanted to see him. He leaned his pixie face forward, within inches of mine, and said in a loud, booming voice: “Well, take a good look!” He certainly knew how to “talk Yiddish.”

One of the keys to the transformational process is the development of an Awareness level of consciousness that can learn to recognize and honor all the parts. This is not the easiest task in the world. We are identified with some parts and we don’t know that we are identified with them. Other parts, we have disowned with no knowledge that we have disowned them. There are clues, however, that can help us in this process of discovery. The people we don’t like, the people who push our emotional buttons, the people we judge, the people we over-value-these are the direct representations of our disowned selves.

In those years, assuming I knew then what I know now, it would have been clear to me that my father was one of my disowned selves. Fortunately, there was a part of me that recognized this and gave me the opportunity of seeing this heretofore unknown reality. The working through process took many years. I might almost say that it goes on to this very moment in lesser form. It is the age-old problem that all of us have who embark on the trans-formational journey-the need to embrace heaven and earth, the need to embrace both spiritual and instinctual energies.

There was another dream I had in Zurich that came later in my stay there. It was on the same theme, but the approach was from a different direction.

A very profound spiritual opening had begun to take place in me from the very beginning of my analysis. With the religious experience I had in military service, this spiritualization process became much more powerful and much more accelerated. This was compounded during my time in Zurich because of the intense involvement I was experiencing with my dreams and creative process gener-ally. The unconscious, however, was not just bringing me spiritual dreams. The unconscious was bringing me dreams to balance a spirituality that was far too one-sided. The dream of my father was one of these dreams. Another one is described below.

Church Dream
I enter a beautiful church. It has a strong Catholic feel- ing. It is empty of people, but an organ is playing the “Te Deum.” It is magnificent music in a magnificent setting. I walk slowly from the rear to the front, behind the lectern, and there lying on the floor, are two women, a mother and her daughter. As I watch, the daughter slowly sits up and very languidly and very sensually stretches her arms over her head. As she does this, she says as if to herself-“I’m tired of waiting for the Christ experience.”

Once again the unconscious was moving me towards the balance. My father was the carrier of instinctual energies to a certain extent, and there was now awakening in me a new feminine principle that had been sleeping (unconscious). What was it awakening to? We don’t know exactly, but we might surmise that it was awakening to life and to the sensual pleasures of the everyday world.

It is difficult when one has touched deeply into the spiritual reality not to yearn for more of it. It is difficult when one has lived a deeply symbolic reality for long periods of time to come back to what feels like a very mundane world. Personality level issues do not seem very exciting when one has been touched by God in some way.

It is a paradoxical situation. On the one hand we need the reality of spiritual energies. We need to know God, by whatever name we want to use or are comfortable using. Yet, this very experience creates an imbalance on the other side and we are then forever thrown into the conflict between heaven and earth, trying to balance them, trying to honor them appropriately. When we don’t, the unconscious helps us to see the imbalance, if we are willing to listen.

The Zurich experience was pure gold for me. It was made possible by a grant from the Bollingen Foundation and I am most grateful to the people who established that foundation. They helped so many students study in Zurich at a time when the world seemed like a spiritual desert. (The memory of this experience is one of the factors that inspired me to create The Hermes Foundation to help students pursue the study of consciousness, wherever this may take them.)

I have shared just a very small piece of my Zurich experience. It was an opportunity to immerse myself for three months in dreams and the creative process. I began to paint during this time and did my first sculpting. Incidentally, I had shipped at least thirty volumes of books to Zurich and they were waiting there for me on my arrival. After a few abortive attempts at reading, I never opened another book in all the time I was there. My academic, scholarly pusher had gone into hibernation. He didn’t disappear, of that you may be sure, but for those three months he went underground. It was time a time for pure experience.

There are dangers to such incubatory experience. One is working so intensely on the inner plane that it is necessary to have considerable solidity to be able to withstand the powers that are unleashed. I remember one evening when I was painting. I drew a picture of a bird, a huge bird, that was flying upwards. I was focusing on that bird in a meditative way and I began to feel myself ascending with that bird. The energies being released were enormous and I knew that I was in some danger. I stopped the meditative process, put the painting down and went out for a walk. I realized at that moment I could have gone into a space that would have been very destruc-tive for me. I realized that I had no outer life to balance the intense introversion. I simply paid attention after this to any signs that signaled an overloading of the inner circuits.

The other problem with such intense, ongoing, in-cubatory experiences is that the re-entry into ordinary life is very difficult. One’s regular life feels terribly ordinary. I returned to Los Angeles after three months in Zurich to my wife and son and about to be born daughter. I had no money. Within three months time I had two jobs and had started private practice. Both jobs required driving long distances, at least seventy miles a day. In five months I had pneumonia, no doubt a symptomatic reaction to the problem I was having adjusting to the very different realities of my inner and outer worlds. The contrast be-tween the magic of Zurich and the daily requirements of life in Los Angeles was almost too much for the body to bear.

Issue 52 –

Part 1
OPENING TO THE INNER WORLD:

by Hal Stone

Transpersonal Reality

In Tacoma, while in military service, I had my first totally religious experience, one that might be called cosmic consciousness. It was to change the whole direction of my life. I had gone to bed and was sleeping when it happened. It was about 3:00 A.M. when suddenly, while in a combination of sleep and a twilight waking state, I experienced a tremendous infusion of energy. It was not an ordinary energy. It was as though a million volts of electricity were going through my body. It was an all-destroying, all-consuming energy that could not help but kill me.

I knew it immediately as the power of God striking me from within and without. If I didn’t surrender to it I would die. There are no words that can convey the nature of such a transpersonal experience. Experiences of cosmic consciousness are varied, but one thing is common – words cannot describe their quality. This experience came to me in a frightening and death dealing form. They generally don’t occur this way.

I am reminded here of the man who had taken years of training in the handling of donkeys. He goes out on his first field trip and the lead donkey balks and won’t move. He reads his training manual and tries everything to get the donkey to move. Nothing helps. Finally he sends for the dean of the training academy. When he arrives, he surveys the situation. Then he gets a strong branch from a nearby tree and hits the donkey on the rear as hard as he can. The donkey starts to move. The young student is quite shocked and protests the physical violence after all the psychological training he has had to prepare him to be a proper donkey driver. The Dean nods his head in agreement and then says: “All that you have learned is true, my friend, but first you have to get his attention.”

My sense is that divinity required my attention. Divinity required my surrender and surrender I did. In the midst of this experience, still in the twilight state, I said: “Please, Dear God, please take this from me. Thy will, not mine, be done.”

Not only was I not a Bible student in those days, but I had no relationship to Christ and the meaning of Christ.

If I had ever heard those words, they certainly had fallen on deaf ears, though obviously not a deaf soul. Those powerful words of Christ at Gethsemane have become some of the most significant words in our heritage having to do with our relationship to divinity. It is the ancient conflict between will and fate or surrender. “This is what I want of life, and this is how I want it to turn out; but Thy will, not mine, be done.” It seems to me, from this vantage point, to be the healthiest possible connection we can have to divinity; the assertion of our will and the surrender of our being, at one and the same moment.

I went back to bed for the third time and immediately the energy came in again and I repeated the same words and the energy stopped. This time I remained awake, though I can’t imagine that a fourth experience would have been necessary.

Something very decisive had happened to me. It was not something I could speak about. It was a private matter between God and me. I didn’t worry any more about the word God. I had experienced God. I had no more issues with the nature of God and what God was or wasn’t and on and on. I knew. That is what an experience of cosmic consciousness gives to us. We know.

The direction of our lives cannot help but change, because this level of experience and surrender shifts the very basis of our consciousness process. It is not the end of free will. I live my life and make many choices and use my will in many way. Always, however, beneath the will, is the dictum-Thy will, not mine, be done.

Life has a way of always requiring new surrenders. We give up the phantasy that we are in total control of our lives, a silly phantasy at best. We gain the power that comes from surrender. It is difficult after such experiences not to feel the desire to live one’s life in a relationship of service to mankind, to help other people come to these experiences and to the realizations that grow out of these experiences.

It is easy to understand evangelists and how they get trapped. These cosmic experiences are very heady, but we must remember that they do not solve all of life’s problems. They also do not solve the problems relating to the use and abuse of personal power. Such experiences bring us new levels of energetic awareness. If, however, we do not solve the personality level issues of our lives, then this new energy can be misused. More specifically, what we need always to be aware of is the issue of power and how we use it in our lives. Then we are in the best possible position to take full advantage of such cosmic experiences.

The three energetic experiences all came on the same night. The next night I had another dream.

Dream of Being Driven to My Knees
I was leaving the bedroom area and walking into the living room of our home. As I was under the archway separating the bedroom area from the living room area, I was again hit by the energy. This time it came from above and as it hit me I was thrown to my knees. I awoke from the dream with the feeling of being on my knees.

In the first experience, the energies were coming from within and without me, invading my whole chest region. In this experience they were clearly coming from above and forcing me to my knees. I did not have the feeling of death this time, just that I had to continue the process of surrender that had been started. I had never prayed in my life, but at this point I began a fairly active prayer life. I had no compunction about getting on my knees and praying. Someone up there wasn’t fooling around any more and neither was I.

The third night I dreamed again, the last of the series.

Dream of the Cross
I was standing in the bathroom looking at my face in the mirror. The doorbell rang and someone answered the door. Entering the room was Malcolm Dana, a Jungian analyst from Los Angeles. (Malcolm was very related to the mystical Christian tradition.) As he entered the living room, I again felt the energies strike me on the head from above. I was knocked to my knees. When I got up and looked into the mirror there was, etched into the acne scars on the right side of my face, a cross. I awoke at this point.

If Martians had landed on earth it could not have been more alien to me than this image of a cross etched into my face. The Jewish tradition has a difficult time understanding and appreciating the meaning of Christ consciousness, just as the Christian has a difficult time appreciating the qualities of the Hebrew desert God. I was obviously being moved towards a new experience and understanding of divinity, and specifically of the meaning of Christ consciousness. I didn’t understand it all at the time, but certain things impacted me very profoundly.

I had suffered terribly during my adolescence. My acne condition had been excruciating for me. It lasted for almost six years and pimples and their eradication became almost a mono-maniacal concern. To see that cross etched deeply into my face suddenly gave me a very different perspective. I felt the meaning of the suffering. I felt that what I had gone through had not been just happenstance. It had meaning; it had purpose. I understood then a fundamental tenet of Holistic Medicine-that symptoms are not simply aberrant conditions to be eradicated, but are opportunities for changing consciousness in new and different ways. I could view the awfulness of the pimples as a kind of initiatory rite of passage that helped temper me, to sensitize me, to create the man I was to become. (I also do not want to overdo the effect that this had on me in relationship to all those years of suffering. When all is said and done, if I have any choice in regard to my next incarnation on earth, I’m putting my bid to come in after adolescence rather than before. Needless to say, “Thy will, not mine, be done.” If I do come in before adolescence, please have a lovely conscious dermatologist or nutritionist living next door to me.)

The experiences that took place over these three nights redirected my life. My personal problems and issues were all still there, but there was imprinted upon me, just as the rose had been imprinted years before, a spiritual vibration that gave my life a new and deeper sense of meaning and purpose that has been with me ever since. This energy that I surrendered to then, I have continued to surrender to, even though there have been times when I have had difficulty understanding who inside me was saying what.

Following these experiences I did a great deal of studying in the spiritual realm. I immersed myself in Bible studies, Jewish and Christian mysticism, Jung’s writings, mythology, fairy tales -literally anything I could get my hands on. And what was fortunate for me was the fact that at the same time that I was exploring these most delicious aspects of the soul, I was getting intensive practical clinical experience through my army assignment. It was certainly this intensification of my persona and academic process that led to my decision to go to Zurich to study and to deepen my persona analytic process at the Jung Institute.

Issue 51 –

From Hal and Sidra Stone – On Judgment

From time to time we like to send you responses that Hal or Sidra have written to a particular question from one of their readers. The following dialogue took place initially between Hal and a woman – both a therapist and a writer – who had a question about someone that she was interviewing. Sidra and Hal then used the content of Hal’s letter and expanded it into this somewhat longer article. All names used are fictitious so that the actual identity of the writer is protected.

 

The Letter

 

Dear Hal and Sidra,

 

My interest in the last therapy system I discussed with you is ebbing after lots of responses and dialogues, and I am in the midst a new project, as I approach an interview with Marshall Rosenberg regarding his “Nonviolent communication”. Going into the method deeply, I find I have some serious questions. And, like the last system I studied in depth, I have the feeling it represents a primary self system – this one is a combination of the vulnerable child and an inner lawyer which translates and expresses this vulnerable child’s needs to the world.

I even suspect, having shared some of his work, that Marshall Rosenberg is, for many, the big eternal father figure who allows them for the first time to experience recognition and acknowledgment of their inner children.

I meet many judgments (such as what is good/ and bad in communication) and what I am missing is the recognition about internal inner father/mother selves who can take care of the child’s needs, as well as many other selves with a nurturing energy. I also miss the difference between dialoguing our needs from aware ego vs. dialoguing from the inner lawyer (for the child’s needs).

 

Personally I feel very sad, that all of our instinctual energies are so strongly judged as fundamentally threatening in this method, the name ‘violence-free’ itself raises big questions within me.

I would very, very much love to hear your understanding of this method vs. the Voice Dialogue Process.

Warmest wishes,

Anne

 

The Answer

 

Dear Anne,

 

All approaches to consciousness gain success mainly because someone comes along who has created a system that is based on certain selves. In the beginning Big Mind was based on selves that were more on the spiritual side. This is changing now and is being broadened to use more of the selves in the teaching and training.

 

In the beginning, however, the wide range of selves were not really taken seriously. Is this bad? We don’t think so at all. Genpo Roshi is a Buddhist Teacher of a very high order. He is not a psychotherapist nor is he interested in becoming one. He is a Zen Master, a Roshi, who is interested in the most passionate way of expanding the scope of Buddhism – of re-thinking and re-configuring the whole base of Buddhist training and learning while still remaining connected to the basic roots of the work. He is having a remarkable impact on the Buddhist community and the consciousness of the world.

 

“Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus” had a huge popularity for a few years. It was based on a few selves that have defined males and females in western culture and it hit a chord for many people. Is it bad that John Gray didn’t include all of the other selves? Not at all. He knew what he knew and he did what he did. And he deepened people’s understanding of different selves.

 

Jung knew very little about relationship work. It simply wasn’t his interest. His connection to the feminine and to vulnerability was fairly minimal. It just wasn’t the world that he traveled in. He lived and taught the Symbolic Life and paved the way for the journey through the unconscious that so many of us are embarked upon. He was a genius – a giant of an intellect. But I would not want to have been the woman married to him.

 

Which brings us to your question about what is missing in violence-free communication . We would redirect your attention to yourself and why you ask this question – we would look at your judgments of this method and of the man who developed it. This is not the first person who has fallen short of your expectations. You always seem so disappointed when you discover that some leader/teacher has created an effective system of work but that something has been left out – that selves are missing.

 

In each of the instances above, if you were to write an evaluation of a man or woman who has started a new system or a new approach to consciousness work, you would be able to find “the flaws.” Generally however these aren’t flaws. It just means that the pioneer of the work has a primary self-system and that he or she has created a system of work on the basis of those primary selves.

 

Why be disappointed that someone doesn’t have all the answers? Why move into a judgmental mode and move into an attack because someone left out this or that and you – as a writer – have a keen eye for discovering these things that are missing? We would say that moving into this place of judgment gives a glimpse of your own primary self-system, of the set of rules carried by the selves in you that run your own life. It would suggest that your primary selves require a certain amount of perfection.

 

The really great thing about judgment is that when you learn how to work with it you make the most astounding discovery one can possibly imagine. You discover that the core energy of what we judge always is a reflection of one or more of our disowned selves. What a remarkable discovery and what a huge opportunity for ongoing change and redemption. The idea isn’t to kill your judgments – or to transcend them – but to hear them, to listen for them and to be separate from them. Then you have a chance to make the most astounding discoveries.

 

In the development of the Aware Ego process we learn to surrender to all energies. We learn to worship all the Gods and Goddesses. We learn to embrace all of the opposites that exist within us – though this might take a few incarnations. It goes on forever this process of embracing the selves and learning how to work with them.

 

When I, Hal, studied Aikido I bowed deeply to my teacher each time I was on the mat and I really meant that bow on the deepest possible level. I bowed to his mastership of the Aikido process. I didn’t need him to be an expert in relationship, nor to know about dreams, nor to be an expert in mythology, nor to be knowledgeable about body-work.

 

So we suggest to you – and to other writers who evaluate peoples’ work – that that you learn how to bow to these mini-masters and to learn from each of them what you can. Let go of the fantasy that they should know more. They know what they know. They experience what they experience of life and their system is built on that.

 

In this way you learn to appreciate mastery in a certain area, something done in a special way. And then one day – based on all of these experiences and your own life experience – some day you will begin to formulate your own system of thought and work. But it won’t be built on ideas that are against other people. It will be based on your experience of them as masters – some bigger masters and some smaller masters – and so your own intellectual and emotional architecture will not be based on what is wrong with others but will be an outgrowth of all of your life experiences. And you will be enjoying yourself in all of this, because it is clean rather than rebellious. And you will be enjoying yourself and not taking everything quite so seriously because you won’t have to know everything either. You will know what you know – and you will not know what you do not know.

 

As we like to point out to anyone who will listen, it isn’t what we say and write that matters the most in the world. It is, instead, who in us says it. The judgmental self that writes or speaks is a very different part of us than someone who writes or speaks from a place of consciousness that is not identified what is wrong with someone or something.

 

With our very best wishes,

Hal and Sidra Stone