Shaboom ShaboomSometimes there are dreams which may or may not
have surfaced in material reality. I remember something happened but I'm not
certain if it really happened, or if it was a dream. It doesn't matter. I know
that it's the same thing.
The first time I heard this story I didn't quite "get" it: A man told Jung he was fooling him because the dreams they'd been discussing were just things he made up. Jung said, "Yes. You made them up." When Brugh Joy said what I remember and tell other people can be read just like a dream, I still didn't quite "get" it. But when I said to myself, "Life is but a dream, shaboom shaboom," I got it. Here is a dream, or something that happened in a
session ... I'm not sure ... I think it is from a night
dream:
I am standing over a client who is on the table, in a deep trance. I cannot recall the dream as it happened, only the key element of it, which was a demonstration of "re-specting." I was also in trance. Normally when I work in trance it takes the client into trance, so that there is no particular need for a verbal induction, though it's always nice to give a few suggestions as a reminder of how to become receptive to an altered state of consciousness. So the gist of the dream is that I am demonstrating how he can re-spect himself. I explain that it is a matter of dividing his point of view between his position in space, and that of the person with whom he is engaging. By doing so he re-spects himself, which means that he views himself also from the position in space occupied by the other person. This morning I began to play my guitar and sing one of the songs I made up. I observed that one of the things I felt was an unrelenting disappointment in me, but that it comes from an external perspective. But there's nobody else here, so what is the external perspective? Because I have some abstract reference for the feeling in the devouring parental complexes, I can connect the feeling with the intellectual frame. When the feeling comes up there is a frame which can contain it and hold it in consciousness, so that it doesn't act as unconscious suggestion anymore. The analogy often used for this process is shining light into the darkness. It's hard to do this until the parental and sibling relationships can be distinguished from an objective view of the psyche. To do so is to understand why Christ said his mother was not his mother and his father was not his father. "My father is in heaven." He is talking about moving the allegiance to the abstract, just like Don Juan talked about it to Carlos. Only the child personalizes the process to the actual parents (no matter how old the child gets). As Don Juan expressed it, the Sorcerer dates his birth from when he shifted his allegiance to the abstract. The source of the information isn't the critical element. The information itself is the critical element. (To expand on the previous link this article is helpful.) It took me a long time to escape from the Southern Baptist conservatism with which I was gifted at birth, and which I now consider to be cult induction. I am not using "cult" in a particularly negative context. I think of it more as a container in which people feel safe, and which defends against outsiders. It is a safe place carved out from the confusion of the world. When my daughter was little we used to watch a children's movie called, "The Boy Who Drew Cats." It was one of those without animation, just the story told over the book illustrations. The boy's mother told him to keep to small spaces at night. It was good advice. It took a long time and a lot of cat drawings before the cats the boy drew could kill the giant rat. (The dream image of a giant rat is the shadow of the past.) To teach people they should never leave small spaces displays a devouring affection for them. "You talking about my mama?" The devouring aspect of the father is particularly hard to integrate, precisely because it is separated off from the nurturing and understanding father, and so has a particularly negative emotional charge. Last night Linda had a dream which she thought was creepy. She was at an event where George Bush was mingling with his ilk, and she felt disgust at hearing the banal conversations. But as she passed him she realized that he was, after all, her father, and she gave him a hug. I told her I had a similar dream with Reagan, in which I was in his office, and told him: "Every day I learn something from you." "It is shadow integration," I said. "Somewhat difficult shadow integration." In my conscious thinking, I agree with Gerald Ford's assessment of Reagan as a good orator with no real grasp of anything below the level of the oratory. He was a public relations man, the personification of a product called "wholesome bread." Had his software been installed in a homely mainframe he wouldn't have gone anywhere in politics. Pat Boone could have repeated his success if Elvis hadn't punched him out on camera. "And who do you want to be, young man?" "The one who got the girl." We are integrating the shadow material, and making space for the negative father. We accept at a human level those whom we find to be unfortunate choices for leading the entire collective. Because they are confined inside relatively narrow parameters, they can't contain the collective and thus tend to foster divisiveness, seeing those like them as virtuous and those unlike them as a threat. "Maybe a little force would do the trick?" "Shaboom, shaboom." What tries to come to consciousness isn't always easy to capture in words. For example, when I was playing my guitar today, what came up was that I keep feeling bad that I don't do better than I do. I "should" play better and sing better. But if I think back to when I started, I would have traded Robert Johnson's soul to just do as well as I'm doing. So which of the seven deadlies am I dealing with? Envy comes to mind; so does lust. The lustful part wants to gobble up all the love from the world and with it rise like a new star in the east. What the fuck; Linda would still give me a hug and call me daddy. ; ) "Shaboom shaboom." Posted: Mon - November 5, 2007 at 11:20 AM |
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