Randomomy


I met with the plumber because we're trying to figure out where to put a bladder tank under the house, so that we can increase the water pressure with a pump. The house is built out over a cliff that reclined just slightly enough for some steep trails frequented by coyotes, javelina, and one fox if he's still surviving. Cats don't have a long life expectancy here. Sometimes a big coyote comes walking right down the street with somebody's cat in his jaws. Everybody's got to eat, I guess.

In other words, it's steep slope under the house, which rests entirely on concrete pillars, and looks out onto an expanse of scrub oak and granite boulders leading down to the creek where the coyotes sometimes party at night, their ecstatic yelps and howls flirting with the moon which sometimes, like yesterday in the late afternoon, turns red. It was a red Kaiser blade. Some call it a sling blade.

I was picking my way across the bank to where we have to put the tank, and I realized I was going to kill myself if I didn't take off my glasses. I haven't worn glasses that long, but Linda points out I'm in a better mood since I got them, and can see menus and directions and screw slots and things like that. They are graduated to compensate mightily for closeup reading and just firm up the edges of the midrange. I don't need them to watch the moon coming up over the mountains on the other side of town. Town is outside the big window in the living room.



the big window is on the left

The glasses aren't even noticeable now, most of the time. I forget I have them on. They're rimless with titanium frames, so that if you drop them in some brush you'd better know where you dropped them, because they will do a vanishing act. "Do you have a metal detector?" Craig asked.

"Titanium."

"It won't pick them up?"

"Not unless it's designed to."

Where the glasses are really noticeable is when I am need to move from one good foothold to another. Suddenly my feet are way down there, six feet below my head, sort of dissociated or something. It's hard to describe the sensation, but my balance feels a little off. I can take them off and even though I can't see where I'm stepping with much focus, I suddenly shift to a more kinesthetic mode, and move without any problem. I stuck the glasses in my back pocket and of course, when we got back up from under the house, said, "Oh, man; I dropped my glasses."

I knew pretty much exactly my path and could retrace my steps. It was just dirty and rock until the bottom of the house met the ground, where vines and wild shrubbery were growing over the granite boulders at the edge of the down slope. I had to go up through some branches on my way out so of course the most likely place the glasses fell was someplace in the growth of ivy lacing together the small boulders. For about an hour I studied every place I'd stood or walked, but I couldn't find them.

"Were they just readers?"

"No, they cost a bunch of money."

"Better find them I guess."

Craig took off to do some work at the house he rents from us, where we've got a truckload of tile showing up today. I went inside and found a pair of old reading glasses and I cleaned the lenses. Then I went back out and searched one more time, mentally preparing for sharing this information with Linda that I lost my new glasses. But then another voice said, "I know where they are." It wasn't an auditory hallucination or anything, just one of those inner patterns that has worked through the problem and is delivering the answer. It was in contrast to another voice which said, "You'll never find them," one which habitually solves a problem by surrender, as winning requires something it doesn't have: optimism.

The area where I was searching was open ground for the most part, and I knew the path I'd picked to walk in and out along the steep bank. So looking for them there was like Nasrudin, searching for his keys under the streetlight, not because he lost them there but because there was more light there. They had been brushed out of my pocket by the branches when I went through them. So I climbed back up and lay belly down on a flat rock. Then I began to examine the foliage growing around it, carefully moving my hand through it to detect them by touch.

There they were.

When something is lost there is a different relationship to it. There is suddenly the realization that ownership depends entirely on paying attention. When I took the glasses off and realized there was no pocket in my t-shirt, I could have taken about three steps and put them on a deck that runs under part of the house. Sure, it's odd to have a deck under the house, but it's a cool place. The cooler hangs out there, and there's a cocktail table and a couple of chairs.

In fact, there is always a voice that tries to stop me from doing stupid things, and I'll bet it's the same voice that doesn't give up looking for something if it believes it knows where to look for it. This voice approaches it as a logical problem, not an accident without at least theoretical vectors. I remember once when I was working and suddenly had this thought that somebody was breaking into my truck. Because it wasn't logical that I could know that, I ignored it. And of course when I got back to my truck, the window had been knocked out and the stereo was gone.

A few months ago I gave my daughter a twenty dollar bill, and it disappeared. We looked all over for it but it was gone. The only time she had been out of the house was to walk the dog, so I said, "I'll bet you lost it out of your back pocket somewhere on the street. Let's go look for it."

"If I dropped it on the street somebody found it by now."

"There's just the people in the neighborhood, and how many of them do you see out walking?" There is only one street into the subdivision, and so there's no thru traffic.

Still, because she didn't really think she dropped it out of her pocket, and was convinced that if she did somebody saw it and picked it up, she wasn't very upbeat about finding it. I was more so. I had a girlfriend for a long time who had a lot of negatives in our situation, but she was somebody for whom nothing was lost if she was still looking for it, and she was the spawn of Javert. When you are very close to somebody and then separate from them, the things you liked in them begin to flower in yourself.

I think a lot of relationships flower because there is an exchange of energy that takes place, but beyond it, there is no foundation for a long term situation. One of my clients told me the other day, "You know, Dan, you gave me the best advice I ever got about dealing with men. You said, 'Take what works for you and leave the rest of it for somebody who can use it.' You know, Dan, that is so true.'"

I tend to be fascinated by the reality of there being a shadow that is in contradistinction to my ego, and that when I pay close attention I can watch them interact. One of my favorite examples of the shadow compensating the ego attitude is this video of a narcotics officer in front of a classroom. He has sued the government for allowing him to be humiliated by people around the world. Join us won't you please?

So I have begun to see the shadow side of the pessimistic attitude that things are too difficult, or just not possible, and so there's no use in trying. It is focused on solving the problem. My daughter and I walked around the streets following the original path she took with the dog. I have a habit of following events like this with the dreaming mind.

Brugh Joy told a group I was in that you can always look at what somebody tells you about what happened to them as a dream. It will have the element accentuated that compose the dream, and will reveal the pattern underneath. When I first heard that I didn't understand it fully, but I got what he was saying, and I began to observe it. After awhile I realized he was right. It reminded me of the man who was in analysis with Jung, and told him that he had played a joke on him. Instead of writing the dreams, he'd just made them up. And Jung said, "Yes, you made them up."

It didn't make any difference, because they would reveal the same patterns either way. The guy was too smart by half.

As we climbed the last hill back toward the house my daughter had given up on finding the twenty, which was laying right beside the mailbox post, in front of the house. If we'd gone the other direction, we would have found it instantly. But we did not. I considered what this dream meant, of losing a twenty and then finding it in that way. I won't bore you with analysis of it, but will mention that cash money is energy in a dream, and the number is significant. In a dream everything is significant if there is the understanding to grasp the significance.

Sometimes you lose something right in front of your house, and you have to take a winding path around the neighborhood before coming back to it. I recall (maybe correctly) Neumann, in the Origins and History of Consciousness, writing about the wholeness and beauty of the unified consciousness. All children have it, he said, and some of them never leave it. They have natural psychic ability.

But some do leave it and they develop the critical intellect, and come back to wholeness with the combination of psychic ability and rational understanding of it. For example, a good psychiatrist can see the patterns in the unconscious and tell you their (the patterns with which you are identified) future, because they are one trick ponies. But she won't do that. It isn't the goal. The goal is to recognize the patterns and stop the unconscious identification with them.

Sometimes you can't see until you finally focus in on the place where the information is located. The most common way to avoid integration of the shadow is by having a negative hallucination for what you don't wish to see in yourself. Some things are so frightening that an entire culture represses them, and almost universally proclaims them unforgivable. What cannot integrate is projected onto a person who in some way invites it, much like Jesus, and who is then destroyed in order to remove the shadow energy from the group.

To avoid taking on these projections, the darkest parts of the psyche are typically avoided in oneself. It is a dangerous business when Beowulf goes down into the swamp to battle Grendels's mother, or her spawn, Karl.

Posted: Wed - August 22, 2007 at 11:08 AM