Chapter 23 – The Healer

Expectations

He is thinking about the workshop that he’s going to lead this coming weekend. Recently, he has been afraid to share himself and his work in public, except of course, for his ongoing work with his individual clients. Being reborn and new still, he has been quite shy lately. But now, especially with Karen and his friend Larry helping him with the workshop, he knows he can do it.

He is certainly not going to do acid while he’s working. He’s not even going to smoke. He’s going to do it all on his own, relying only on his inner connection with Wanderer.

When he asks the I Ching now about the workshop, it advises him to “work unselfishly to bring about general unity.” Then, “his work is crowned by success, and everything is as it should be.”

Besides helping each and every member of the group to connect more deeply and more honestly to both themselves and the group through sharing their dreams, he may even share a few of his own, especially those that have led him to offer this workshop. The mute boy of his recent dreams may finally be brave enough to speak out.

He is being really loose in his associations now. He can see this. This looseness is usually associated with being spaced, with being crazy even. Maybe he really is crazy, in some sense of the word, whenever he’s stoned or on acid, and he’s getting closer to it now in his ordinary life too. But it’s a good, a healing kind of crazy.

Maybe being Wanderer is just living his craziness without the fear. Maybe being Wanderer is just letting his thoughts and his life wander wherever they will.

Being open and honest and staying connected with the other person – that’s what he is doing best with the folks that he is seeing these days in his private practice. He’ll just do the same at the workshop. Karen and Larry will help too. They can both be very open and honest themselves.

The workshop will be a simple ritual. After introductions and a short, opening meditation, they will go around the circle, with one person at a time sharing his or her dream. Everyone will listen intently with their inner ears to each dream. Then everyone will share their insights and feelings about it, sharing what they see the dream is saying about the dreamer and, if relevant, what it is saying about all of them working on their heads together.

By sharing their dreams, their most personal possessions, they will hopefully come to trust and perhaps even to love one another, as they dive together ever deeper into the spiral of consciousness and conscious relationship.
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The Workshop

The workshop is in a big, old farmhouse in Bolinas, north of San Francisco. They have the whole house to themselves for the weekend, and everyone is going to sleep over. It’s early Saturday morning now, and the three of them have just come over from Berkeley. The participants will be along in an hour or so.

He’s nervous, although he knows that everything will be okay just as soon as they begin sharing their dreams. While they’re waiting for the participants, he meditates to calm his body and empty his mind for the work ahead.
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When everyone has arrived, they form a circle and begin with a group meditation. Then, when everyone is calm and present, they begin the introductions, asking each person to share who they are and what they want from the weekend. There are ten of them, including himself and his two helpers. They are a good group. He can feel it in the air.

They begin sharing their dreams, going around the circle, going clockwise towards consciousness. As each person shares his or her dream, the feeling in the room changes, becomes more relaxed, more receptive, yet with a growing excitement too. They go around the room slowly now, each dream taking as much as an hour to tell and relate to properly.

This first time around, the rest of them listen to the dream being shared. After the dream is shared, they ask the dreamer what he or she may have thought and felt about it. Then after listening to the dreamer’s associations and insights, they share their own understandings and reactions. This first time around the circle takes hours. Neither he nor Karen nor Larry share this time around, although they still might later.

After finishing this first round, they break for a meal. When they begin again, they go even more deeply into each dream, using visualization and active imagination. They all feel the group head deepening as they go around the circle this time. They finish this second round late in the evening, sharing a meal afterwards before heading off to their dreams.
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When they wake in the morning, they share their dreams of the night, most of which further yesterday’s understandings. A few of the dreams speak to them as a group. All are relevant and appreciated.

In the late afternoon, they close with a brief ceremony. At the beginning of the workshop, they had each tied a knot in the long rope that they had circled about themselves, as they all sat there together for the first time. Now, after each has untied his or her own knot, there is still one knot left, one that has somehow been tied by the group consciousness itself, tied as they sat together, listening intently to the wisdom of their dreams.
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Coming Down

He can’t stop reading people now – reading where they’re at and the patterns they’re in. He’s been like this ever since the workshop. The healer in him has taken over, and he can’t shake him loose.

He knows that he has been identified with the healer for a long while in his life, although never to this extreme. He first became identified with this healing aspect of himself when he began his own healing journey. .

He is a healer, but that’s not all there is to him. He remembers Edith, Jonathan’s old therapist, who once told him that she too had become a healer because she needed healing. She said she found out that once she had been healed, she didn’t want to continue working as a healer for a long while.

He knows that folks who are seriously and consciously on a healing journey are higher and closer to their centers than most. And they attract those who aren’t but want to be. However, he realizes that he’s more than a healer. Being higher and closer to his center also leads him into doing other things with his life, simple things like riding his bicycle along the boardwalk in Venice.
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He dreamt last night of coming down from a tall building and being glad that he hadn’t fallen while he was at the top. That tall building was an image of himself being inflated, being unconsciously identified with the healer, even more so than he had thought. He is definitely coming down hard from the healing high of the workshop. Nothing else is going right in his life now, and he can’t even get along with Gypsy and Karen.
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If he can become conscious of his identification with his inner healer, and if he can separate himself from this side of himself without rejecting it completely, then perhaps he will have found a useful and rewarding way through life. Otherwise, he definitely doesn’t want the grief of identifying with the high, especially when there’s all this pain of coming down.

If he can get a conscious handle on his healing energy, he may have found a vocation, one he can use anywhere without having to be formal and professional. He won’t need an office or even a phone. People will feel his energy and seek him out. He will have his calling.
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Whidden’s Barn

He dreams that he walks over to Buzz Whidden’s house to ask him about using the barn for another workshop. When he gets to the door, he’s shy and almost walks away, but Buzz sees him standing there and comes out. He feels like he would be imposing, but, when he ask him about it, Buzz says he would be honored if he would use the barn again.

When he was in the fifth grade, his dad went broke. So they moved from their big, two story house that his dad had built on Fulton Street when he was three years old to the back of Whidden’s small farm. His dad rented the back part and built us a small house there under some walnut trees – and later a full sized baseball field too.

They lived there for years, until he finished high school, until he went into the Air Force really. It was a paradise for a young boy growing up, what with corn fields and walnut groves surrounding them, and eventually a regular sized baseball field too. And of course there was the barn itself.

It was two stories tall. Upstairs was the hayloft with its little windows to spy from. Downstairs were the stalls that had once housed the horses and the milking cows. The barn had been modernized somewhat since those days of horses and cows, with part of the ground floor made over into a garage, with even a concrete lined pit for working under the cars. There was a side room downstairs too, one they entered from the outside. It was where his dad kept the feed for the thousands of chickens he raised for meat and eggs during their lean years.

It was an ordinary, wooden barn, kept up and somewhat modernized to fit the times, yet still filled with memories. He could always feel the old times still living on in the barn. Maybe those memories were part of the barn’s magic, but there was more. That old barn itself was the seat of some powerful magic. He never once played in it without its magic coming to life for him.
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He’s doing another workshop up north soon. It’s been on his mind a lot recently. Although he has never actually done a workshop in Whidden’s barn, he just did one in that old farmhouse in Bolinas – and they did use the barn there for part of their work. Something in him noticed this when he was there and has wanted him to see the connection, to see that somehow the magic he knew as a young boy in Whidden’s old barn lived again in their workshop – and will live again and whenever, just as long as he can be that young boy, playing with that magic in Whidden’s barn again.
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Chapter 24 – End Game

Steve and Simone

Of course, now that they are about to leave Venice and move to Berkeley, he and Karen meet a couple they really like. A couple who live in Venice. It’s odd how they meet them just as they are leaving, but maybe the moving process itself has opened them up.

For one thing, he hasn’t been so much into himself lately. He hasn’t spent much time with his dreams and his writing lately. These days, he’s much more into hanging out with others and having a good time. He’s learning that life shouldn’t be all work, that it should be fun and play too.

Also, a lot of their friends have been aware that they will be leaving soon and have wanted to see them one more time before they go. Last night, some of them invited him and Karen to a great party. That’s where they met Steve and Simone. Actually, it was their party. And after everyone else had left, he and Karen stayed behind. All four of them really liked one another a lot. When they finally did say goodbye, hours later, he invited them to do acid with him and Karen the next day.
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And today they’re all up at Boney Ridge, the four of them, plus Jonathan and Gypsy and Simone’s two girls and their two dogs. They’re feeling like a family already.

In the middle of their trip, when he’s off by himself for awhile, he realizes that he would do anything to stay as he is now. He has become so much freer and wilder and tougher without having really noticed it until now.

Later, before they all return to Venice, he shares his vision of a healing place in the high mountains, where they could teach people how to grow in awareness from their dreams, how to use visualization to aid this process, and how to integrate medicines into this healing way.
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It’s several days later now, and he is realizing that all four of them have fallen in love. He feels their magical energy, and he knows that they are all feeling this same strong love that is growing between them.

After his healing group tonight, he stops by on his way home and visits Steve and Simone. He really loves them both, realizing though that his feelings are strongest for Simone. It’s scary. It’s one thing for Karen and him to love them as a couple, but it’s something else for him to have fallen in love with Simone, especially now that he’s leaving. But he does have to follow these feelings. He just has to make sure he stays centered and conscious through it all too.
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Saying Goodbye to His Old Life

In his life now, because he’s moving north to Berkeley soon, he’s saying goodbye to a lot of old friends, to a lot of old places and ways too. On a deeper level, he’s saying goodbye to all his old inner connections that have kept him in LA for all these years.

His deepest connections have been with the Jungians. He and Pamela were in analysis for almost seven years. In his dreams and fantasies, Pamela has always symbolized his anima, his connection with his inner life, while their son Jonathan has always symbolized the new that has been growing within him as a result of his increasingly conscious connection with the anima.
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He had a dream last night that seems relevant to this. In it, he dreams he’s on a bus with Glenn Foy and Al Kreinheder. Glenn was Pamela’s first analyst, and Al was his. He talks with Glenn briefly, and Glen is friendly enough, although he’s still somewhat shy and cold outside his work.

Now he talks with Al. He asks him about the Jungians. Al tells him that they have freely chosen to follow Jung, to worship him even, and that unless he also chooses this, he should leave now. He gets the message. He’s sad, but he doesn’t want to follow, let alone worship anyone.

In his dream, the scene changes and now he’s visiting Jonathan. While he’s there, he gets a phone call from Jim, Pamela’s old analyst and her new husband. Jim is concerned about Jonathan visiting him when he’s living in Berkeley. Jim begins lecturing him, especially about being careful not to expose Jonathan to anything harmful or dangerous. He already knows this and politely tells him so. Jim finally hangs up, deflated. He realizes that Jim was being obnoxious on purpose and was thrown off balance when he couldn’t get an argument out of him.

As he is taking his leave of Jonathan, he asks him which way he should go to get back to his own place. Jonathan tells him that he already knows the answer. He realizes that he does.

He sees the sun setting through the western window in Jonathan’s room and realizes that it’s easy; all he has to do is follow the sun home. He hugs Jonathan now for the longest time and then leaves, finally finished with his past. He runs down the stairs, taking them two at a time, almost flying down the three long flights to the ground level and outside to where his car is waiting to take him away.
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He has said goodbye to his past. Now he’s going home!

The Fly in the Ointment

He wakes up in the middle of the night and looks over at Karen sleeping next to him. He has the strongest feeling then that there is something dreadfully wrong between them, this feeling coming perhaps from a dream still felt, although no longer remembered.

He has felt this way all year really, ever since she was at that classical music festival in Idyllwild, especially after she told him about the other woman who had cheated on her man, with one of the musicians there, and how it could have been them. Was that her way of telling him that it had been them?

Ever since then, it’s been very difficult for him to trip with her, as if there has always been something left unsaid. Ever since then, his life has gone awry, and nothing has gone as planned, as foretold by his dreams. Ever since then, everything has become much more problematic and difficult.

Ever since then, he has been having dreams of her being with other men, of liking someone else better than him, once even of her leaving him for someone else. He has been trying hard to see these dreams as reflections of his lack of confidence in himself and his way, seeing Karen as symbolizing his self-confidence and her leaving him in his dreams as symbolizing it’s loss.

But which came first? Perhaps he has lost his confidence because there truly is something wrong between them. He knows from his Jungian studies that whenever someone like Karen, who is very real and very close to him, is in one of his dreams, it is saying something about that person or, at the least, something about his relationship with that person. And his dreams have been saying, over and over again lately, that she doesn’t love him and is already with someone else or wishing to be.

He knows he could ask her directly, but what if he’s wrong? He doesn’t want to hurt her feelings or let her feel he doubts her love. He would like the truth, but he would like it to come unbidden from her.

He remember his recent dream, one of a young man who found him and his brother trying to sneak away from their past. He wonders if that young man was his secret fear that Karen doesn’t love him and has been lying and unfaithful to him. He wonders if, in that same dream, he went to the wedding in a black suit because he was in mourning for his own marriage.

This is a hell of a way to begin his new life – with a woman he wakes up next to in the middle of the night, knowing in his deepest of hearts that there’s something seriously wrong between them.
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Vampire

He dreams that he’s in Venice. He’s running from this vampire that’s hunting him. The vampire wants to kill him and take Karen to be his woman. He knows he’s not as strong as the vampire, although he does have his pocketknife and will use it if it comes to a fight. Right now, he’s running from the vampire.

He knows he can defeat the vampire if he can get to his big hunting knife that’s in his backpack at the other end of Venice. He’s exhausted from running, but he starts out after it. It’s his only chance. He decides against using the boardwalk and goes by way of the alley instead. He can hide better here. At first, he so exhausted that he’s even crawling on his hands and knees. He keeps looking back to see if the vampire is still following him. He’s afraid the vampire will somehow get ahead of him. He can hear him though, back there, following behind him still.
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He makes it to the other end of Venice! He gets to his pack. He pulls his big knife out of his pack and puts in on. Now he becomes strong and fearless. There are several other vampires around too, but he’s not afraid of any of them. He hears them saying that the vampire who has been trying to kill him has already taken Karen, that she has even had a child by him.

Now Karen and the vampire are here. He watches them together. She looks happy. Maybe he just needs to accept what has happened. If she is happy with the Vampire, who is he to interfere?

He goes over to her, lying next to the vampire on the big bed in the middle of the room. If she doesn’t want to be with the vampire, she will be able to give him a sign, using her elbow. The vampire won’t be able to stop her. He asks her if she wants to be with the vampire, and she answers yes with her mouth but signals him no with her elbow. He knows now that she’s not here with the vampire of her own free will. He pulls his knife from its sheath and stabs the vampire in his heart, killing him instantly and freeing Karen of his evil spell.
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It’s easy for him to see the vampire as a part of himself. For a long while now, he has been living in the night world of dreams, ever since he got into Jungian analysis with Al Kreinheder. He has long been afraid of the daytime world of men. And lately, he has been mean, grumpy, and a plague upon all the folks living around him. He certainly hasn’t been very nice with Karen either.

The vampire represents his fear – realized and finally confronted – especially his fear of ending up where he is now, trying to move north, still broke, with no sure income, unsure of his marriage, and with nothing really to count upon except himself and his newfound clarity.

The vampire is fear. That’s the main thing, and with his knife, with the clarity that has come from his wise use of acid, he is finally overcoming his fear. With his knife – and with his connection to Wanderer with his hunting and gathering consciousness – he knows now that he will survive whatever life brings him. He’ll do this, as Carlos did, by going upon an outer world journey that is at the same time an inner one.
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His hunting knife is his new spiritual gift – the clear knowing of the way of the journey into self. He feels very holy now. He has walked through an archetype. He has won a battle for his soul.

With his knife, with his newfound clarity of consciousness that has come from the mountains and from doing acid, he has killed the vampire. He has opened the belly of the whale and is kicking his way back to the surface of life. He’s alive again!

He thinks of wearing his hunting knife all the time now, a reminder of who he can and will be. He’s going to do it.