Saint Nicholas & Jesus


I had a great five days with all my friends at JJ-4, which was about thirty people of different ages, faiths, social strata and sexual inclinations formed around our good friend and mentor, Brugh Joy, to become a family for awhile. The last evening is dedicated to good food and wine. There was Zelie with her ukulele and a voice as good as mine. Of course I keep mine locked up in a safe place whereas her's is right out there for everybody to share. And we did.

John played my guitar, which is the best thing that's happened to it lately, because they had so much fun together, and we had such a good time with them. He began a rhythm and then went around the circle of people with his laser guided attention, making up a verse about each one, with backup drumming from Holla, who is a yoga teacher.

I drank too much wine and had to excuse myself for some aspirin and a little more sleep after the morning meditation on Wednesday, and I asked myself, What kind of spiritual seeker are you, man? Dragging your ass to sacred space with those bloodshot eyes and dry mouth, and Brugh Joy looking at you like an owl looking at a rodent. Eyes like sniper scopes.

But when you're hung over you're hung over, and there's only one thing I had to give Brugh as he left out into the world for parts unknown, and that's friendship. I've reached some level of parity now.

By that I don't imply that I have his gifts, because nobody I've ever known has his combination of abilities as a teacher. He can bring people together and organize them around a center, which is the first thing you need to do to teach people anything. If you can't do that you have no unity in the mystical body, as he would call it, but somebody else might call it a family or tribal bond. It is the sublimation of the personal to the collective energy, so that for a little while you can have an objective view of yourself that you don't usually get. It's like when you travel to different parts of the world you can see your own society, but if you just stay inside of it all the time you cannot, just like a fish can't see water until he jumps out of it and splashes back.

Brugh manages to design a combination of ritual, dream analysis, depth psychology, bodywork practices, meditation, and partying which avoids let me give you the sacred word on everything while at the same time holding a space that is safe for almost anything to come up to be subjected to depth analysis. He is a Master Teacher and we will miss spending time with him while he's gone into pilgrim mode. He understands that no matter who he might be, most people don't see him. They see their projections.

What we most often project on a teacher like Brugh is a kind of magical ability, without reminding ourselves that one person's magic is another person's knowledge, and that the knowledge he's gained required a lot of practice. He's been doing his work for many years, and before that he was working at UCLA in internal medicine. He went beyond the auspices of the AMA and became a healer. All of us have some area in which we practice, whether it's in business or pleasure, and where, with time, we achieve mastery. By the time mastery is achieved it's just everyday knowledge to the master.

There are things Brugh says that I don't agree with, and I'm sure there are things I say he doesn't agree with, but we do know what each other are talking about. That's why I realize I have moved to a place where I don't need the projections anymore. When you don't know things you project your inner teacher onto a teacher in the world, and then, when the time is right, the projection is withdrawn. That's when the teacher becomes more humanized, and more capable of error. That allows the breaking of the mentor relationship, and for the student to move past the teacher.

Namaste.

I wanted to give Brugh a gift for his journey. I was going to sing a song that I wrote but I was too hung over, and in that came the revelation of what I really wanted to give him, which is hope for humanity. It hangs by a thread when it's a wine hangover, especially. I have noticed that as he has gained in experience and understanding, he has come to the conclusion that war is necessary, and that mankind is not evolving. I agree that would be true if one forgot about the Swiss, but there they are in those funny shorts blowing those big horns and boiling chocolate.

The gift I would give him would be eyes like those big radio telescopes that search the universe for signs of intelligent life, taking in everything and searching for patterns. But he already has those. Behind the eyes I would place a drop of blood from the lion lured forth from the Saturnine mountain. That is of course a literary reference, and what the other people in my group thought about me was that I have a lot of references. John was doing a comic imitation of me: "In this book, by this person, on this page, down in the lower left I think it was ..."

So if that's what other people notice about me when I talk, is that most of what I think about can be referenced, then maybe that's the source of my gift for Brugh. I could remind him of a story -- because I'd bet money he already knows the story in some form -- that gives us some hope for humanity. In this story, humanity can only evolve past war and genocide when we resolve the conflict between Jesus and St. Nicholas.

Some people joke about this because they think St. Nicholas lives at the North Pole with elves and with a kind of bland woman rumored to be his wife, getting away in the summer for a tryst with Snow White, who lives in the woods with dwarves. Her only other casual affair was a huntsman and she got him murdered. Some women are like that. Use a pig heart; she won't know the difference. And hurry back, snookums.

The real St. Nicholas is Swiss, and he is the reason Switzerland remained neutral when all around her the world blazed with war. St. Nicholas of Flue, also known as Brother Klaus, appeared to the Swiss guard as a vision in the sky, his arms spread to protect her, when Hitler was threatening invasion. Yet he lived and died back in the 1400s. Some people have cosmic significance. He is one of them.

Brother Klaus was a married man who began suffering severe depression, and set off as a mendicant monk. But when he would get close to the border he would have warning dreams and visions that would send him back. So he became a hermit and moved into a little cell in a ravine near the home where he was in earlier years husband and father. Now he was a visionary, and there were hundreds of people waiting for an opportunity to speak with him. In 1487 the cantons of Switzerland were about to break apart, and a runner was sent to ask him to speak to the parties who were threatening hostilities.

He said no, I'm a hermit and I have to stay here, but here's what I want you to tell them. This is the message I'm sending. And his power was so great they took his counsel. He was not like Jesus, as he is taught, because Jesus is missing the dark side. It's split off and thrown into the abyss and called evil, or personified as a great devil, or it is seen as failings and repented against. Always it is on the outside looking in, like a one eyed cat peeping in a seafood store.

But this rejected piece is like any rejected piece; all of the negative quality arises from it's not being integrated into the larger whole. And this was what Brother Klaus did; he managed to integrate the missing animal spirits with the god spirit, so that what seems incompatible opposites combine into an extraordinary wholeness.

The blood from the eye of the Saturnine lion is a description from alchemist Henricus Khunrath of the blood that comes from the philosopher's stone. It is in this blood that the soul of the stone is hidden. Brother Klaus saw this blood flow from a magical vision of Wotan, the berserker god. In the vision he at first appeared as a traveler, and asked Klaus for a coin, which was put into his hat. He came from where the sun rises. With the introduction of change in his hat (!) he transformed into a young nobleman, and then personified truth, in the light of which the sickness of egotism was starkly visible. The people ran to hide from him because they could not stand the light of the truth in their compromised condition.

Then he changed again, revealing his animal nature by appearing in a bearskin. As he walked away the bearskin began to shine, and when the stranger turned back to Brother Klaus the love which flowed from him to Klaus was the elevated love which is the blood of the stone. It flowed like honey. He had revealed the elevated love only possible when egotism ends, and the animal nature is finally reunited with the Christ nature in the evolution from a passing age into a new age.

War is going to happen so long as the world is bound by that egotism Brother Klaus saw in the light of the personification of truth, because what has to be owned is not Christ nature. That's no problem, What has to be owned is what is left out when Christ nature is imagined, and the shadow slips off into the caves and cracks in the earth, like Gollum, stealing the ring and holding it in his underground hiding places until he is finally lured into the fire at the center of the earth, where there is unity of all the opposites.

And when that day comes we can go back to the Shire and tell our tales of adventure or our isolation, and we can sing and dance together in the desert night.

I will miss all of you, but I know some of us at least will get together. If you like the story about Brother Klaus, you can find a much expanded analysis of him by Marie-Louise von Franz, in, "Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche."

Posted: Thu - February 1, 2007 at 11:59 AM