Chapter 3 – Conflict

Gone for Hours

He dropped some acid earlier this afternoon. He almost decided not to, feeling it was too late in the day. But he went ahead with it anyway. And here he is now, hours later, still coming on.

He keeps losing it…. Or does he? He’s seeing that he puts on a fucking show all the time. No, He’s seeing…. God, it keeps coming too fast to write it down.

The Main Thing: The two darts that always seem to land outside the circle are the important ones. No matter how well he puts himself together, there will always be those two darts outside the circle of his known self. And they’re the only ones that really count! It’s from them that all new growth will come. What are they then? (SCREAM!!!)

He sits back from his patients. He’s too old and decrepit, too clumsy and cowardly. He is so – even if he doesn’t want to be. He should jump on his patients – or shit on them. What is he writing? He can’t mean any of this.

Ha! A laugh that says, “oh, yeah?” A laugh that sees always behind the staged scene
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He likes who he is right now – this chaotic, confused welter of everything. He’s everything all at once, constantly and kaleidoscopically changing. His way, if there were such a way, would be to always be as he is right now.

Now he’s remembering back to earlier in the trip, when he was literally out of his head. At first, he was in a room with big glass windows all around, a lighthouse. Suddenly, a fierce wind came up, breaking through all the glass, and then he was no more

For several hours, until Karen came home, he was an animal, eating and being eaten, fucking and being fucked. He was at the molecular level too and inside his genitals, feeling it all from the inside. He wallowed around in his body for hours, enjoying it immensely. He didn’t exist at all. There was no ego, no mind, no focused consciousness, not for hours – just awareness, sensations, hungers, fears, and desires.

As the windows fell inwards, the glass shattering about him, and he left his mind behind, he wondered briefly if he would ever return, if he would ever be himself again. Yet here he is, and although he has changed, he’s still himself.

He did return. Why not go again?
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The Guide

He’s still tripping. He’s still very high.

Earlier, even before he began, he decided that he needed an inner guide, an image of masculinity, one other than his father that he could relate to in order to develop his own masculinity. He has been reading Nikos Kazantzakis, the author ofZorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ. He has also been reading Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Both of these men are rebels who have managed to transcend the limitations placed upon them by society. Kesey, in addition, is very much into acid. He’s really attracted to both of them, especially to their energy and their style.

Now, at this midpoint in his trip, he’s seeing that he does, in fact, have an inner guide. He can feel him within himself. Let this inner guide loose. Let him tear wholes out of the old, renting it out for the new that’s coming. There’s a wild man loose within him, a joyful and powerful one. That’s for sure. What will this wild man do? What will he do? He certainly won’t just copy Kazantzakis or Kesey. He won’t do what they have done. He won’t make the mistake of imitating Christ, that sort of thing. He’ll just be himself.

He’s also seeing how he’s all of it, not just Kazantzakis and Kesey. He’s Nixon and Reagan too, all those frightened and controlling ones. He really has trouble now acknowledging this side of himself, yet it is him too.

All his life, he’s been hungry, but he’s never known for what. Then something happened. He felt powerful waves of it coming with Stan when he visited, back when in the days when he was still with Pamela. He felt powerful vibes then from the longhairs and acid and Haight Street. Ever since then, he’s been striving to connect to the source of this wild, primordial flow.

He’s doing so now. It’s not really Kesey or any of the other acid hippies. They aren’t the source. The source is acid itself, God’s magical way of transforming consciousness, of bringing to life all of the reality that is within a person. Kesey and the hippies are just mirrors, letting him see his own wild, untamed, animal masculinity.

He’s been afraid of taking acid very often. Today though, his inner guide, looking somewhat like Kesey, says that it’s really okay to take it whenever he wants. “What would happen,” his guide goes on to say, “If you took acid whenever you want? What would happen? Do you know yet? If you don’t know, try it and see.”

His inner guide is asking him to ignore his fears and instead to be in touch with himself, to do acid whenever he feels like doing it, trusting himself. This is a new concept for him – trusting himself.
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Granny

He is like Kazantzakis and Kesey, but he’s also like Nixon and Reagan. There’s an old, old side of himself that’s still very frightened and needs to control. He hates this side of himself, this controller that’s always keeping up appearances. He calls it Granny. Fuck you Granny!

Fuck you. Remember what that means, Dickey boy. Do you fuck? Ever?

Oh, it’s so easy for him to let it slide out there to tricky Dick and Ronald land. But it’s the controller, the stager within himself, who’s always worried about how he should look and act. He separates himself from this controller now and looks at him, looks at Granny, the controller, worried about how he looks. And how it’ll look on this page too. Granny has had power over him for such a long time. He looks at him there, the controller, the stager. He can’t trust him at all. He comes on automatically, whenever he’s not fully conscious.

In the bathroom mirror, all he sees is battle. He’s a warrior, tearing himself apart fighting Granny. He worries about money and Granny comes, comes whenever there’s fear, is fear itself, incarnate, comes saying, “but you should be scared, you’re broke and have a lot of bills. It is all really depressing, all this real life mess, but somebody has to deal with it, you know.” All this fear and upset over money, is it real or is it just the red herring that Granny uses to gain power over him?

The battle rages on. He’s stretched thin, each fingernail and claw trying to keep it all together between his newly found, wild, animal acid side and his frightened and controlling Granny side.

Earlier, when Karen came home, he was still completely out of his head; yet the stager within him took over and put on a sane show for her, actually pulled him out of his acid wanderings and back into ego. He even faked how he was with his new dog Gypsy, instead of just playing wild and playful with her, as he’d done when they’d been alone.

The root image for Granny comes from his father. As soon as he was old enough to notice these things, he saw that his father had gotten his fear and his need to control from his own mother, from Grandmother Minerva. And now he and she have merged and become a voice inside his head, always commenting on what he’s doing and on what he should rather be doing. Whenever he’s not fully awake, she takes over and stages what she thinks others want of him, rather than allowing him to be himself.
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The Unlikely Marriage

During this magical acid trip, he has come to see, in bits and pieces, how he can put his acid and his Granny sides together into a sort of unlikely but necessary inner marriage.

All day, he’s listened to them talk in his head. On the one side was his acid head, saying “go for it man, drop big and often, whenever you want.” On the other side was Granny, saying, “well, maybe you’d better slow down and control yourself here. You never know…. .”

He’s in the middle, torn both ways, although identifying now more with his wild and unafraid acid head. He worries though. There are dangers. One is of falling into the unconscious and not coming out. He seems to be avoiding this so far. Anyway, he didn’t fall in, he dove in.

The other danger is of scaring Granny. He’s very close to his acid side now, so he has to watch out for Granny trying to take him over again because she’s too afraid. He has to keep a conscious connection with her. If he doesn’t, she’ll get behind him and work through his unconscious.

“The world is crazy! Stop trying to fit me into it,” he yells out. He goes on, “Read any newspaper. The world is insane, and Kesey is sane. He’s living out the archetype of the overthrower, the one who stirs everything up. In his book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he’s telling us that we’re all insane really, all living in this insane asylum called society.

He decides to take acid as often as he wants. His only real consideration is that he get his Ph.D. and soon. To do this, he’s going to form an inner coalition government, one that will please and further both the acidhead and the Granny within himself, one that will allow them to get along with each other and leave him alone.

He wonders how to bring this unlikely pair together. Then he realizes just how easy it is. All he needs to do is allow for an ego in which his wild acid side can freak and explore edge city as much and as deeply as he wants and in which his Nixon and Reagan and Granny sides can rest assured that law and order – which on this level means sanity, that is, a sufficient connection with consensual reality – will always prevail.

License with control
Acid with his Ph.D.
Both ends of the book
A whole book
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Chapter 4 – The Transcendent Solution

Karen

Karen is his lover. The second time he did acid, he did it with her. They were in Venice, tripping at her place. He remembers them taking a long walk on the beach. He really liked tripping with her. He really liked her.

They’re living together in Venice now, in a big old two-story house in the canals. They each have a room of their own and share a bedroom as well. They’ve even fixed up another room for Jonathan to have as his own when he stays with them.

He and Karen are graduate students at UCLA, studying to be psychotherapists. Most of their friends live nearby, in the canals or down by beach, near where the two of them first lived together. They’re becoming part of the hippie community in Venice.

The other day, while they were working in the garage, he accidentally dropped the door on her shoulder. It hurt her. He waited for her to be angry. Instead she cried like a little girl. He was so moved and felt so much love for her then that he asked her to marry him. Before Karen, he has only known women who have been frightened and angry inside, women who would have yelled and made him feel bad for dropping a garage door on them.

Maybe he has always been attracted to scared and angry women because he has been that way himself. Maybe Karen represents a whole new side of his emerging feminine. He would really like to be more like her, more open and loving. Maybe he will be more like her just from being around her.

She’s really into her body. She is her body. This worries him sometimes. He wonders if he can be body enough for her. It challenges him though, more than it scares him. He knows he is becoming one with his own body anyway, racing as he is into wild and uncharted territories with his friend the black man. Being Karen’s companion and lover can only help. She has already helping him really, especially now as he’s getting more and more into acid. She’s helping him to stay grounded in his body and in the here and now of life.

She’s a true friend, a wonderful lover, and a wise and inspiring woman. He’s looking forward to his life with her. When he asked her to marry him the other day, she said yes.
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The Jungian and the Hippie

He dreams that his friend Stan is leading a seminar for some Jungians, upstairs in this old building. He goes up. Stan is there already, wearing his blue work shirt and sitting on the floor with some of his hippie friends. He goes up to him, holding out his hands. Stan takes them and lets himself be pulled up. They hug, and now he takes Stan into the center room that’s being used for the seminar.

Everyone’s there already. Actually, they’ve all been waiting for over an hour. Stan apologizes for being late, says he doesn’t have a watch. He’s not really prepared for a lecture and just sits there. It’s going to be very informal. A woman asks if he is a Jungian. He says no. She wants to know why he’s teaching a Jungian seminar then. Stan answers her, but without responding to the feelings behind her questions.

Watching this interplay, he waits for Stan and the woman to deal with it themselves, but when they are finally about to begin the seminar, he realizes that they’re not going to do so without his help. So he stands up and says that they need to recognize some feelings in the room before they start. If they don’t, these feeling will mess up the seminar. He begins by focusing upon the woman and her feelings about Stan not being a Jungian, hence not worth listening to.

He has been in Jungian analysis for over seven years now. He’s new to the hippie world. He’s still just a weekend hippie, being in school and working hard the rest of the week. The Jungian and the acid hippie ways of looking at consciousness and reality have been for him, from the very beginning, total opposites with almost no common ground, beyond perhaps a shared love of Spirit.

His dream shows him in conflict. There’s the Jungian woman, that part of himself who knows that Jung’s way is the way. She can’t understand his need to seek wisdom elsewhere. She’s hassling Stan with her questions, although she’s not in touch with why she’s doing so. She’s not dealing with her feelings at all. Then there’s Stan. They’re in graduate school together, him and Stan. Stan’s another genius. Stan is also that part of himself who’s into acid, the hippie life, and Spirit. Stan’s that part of himself who’s without a watch – who’s not tuned to common time.

He sees that his job in all this is to get the woman and Stan to talk with one another. His job is to start a dialog between his Jungian and his acid hippie sides so that they can learn and grow from one another – so that he, who is both of them really, can be whole.
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Pamela and Karen

He dreams that he’s taking a bath at Pamela’s house. She keeps saying she wants to come back to him. She’s tired of waiting for her new husband to give her what she wants. He’s tempted to take her back, even though he knows that he and Karen are getting married soon.

Now Karen’s there. Just before she arrived, he had decided to let the two of them figure out what he should do. He’s very confused himself. He just knows that he wants both of them and can’t decide between them – although he does keep imagining what it would be like to make love with Pamela again, now that he knows what lovemaking’s really all about. He certainly wouldn’t feel like a man with her, not like he does now with Karen.

He knows that the two of them represent differing aspects of his own inner femininity. However, there’s always a danger here of confusing his inner Pamela with the woman out there in the world, now happily married to her new husband. His dreams seem to assume that he can tell the difference. He usually can, but still it’s hard on his feelings.

In his dream, both Pamela and Karen are anima figures. As his Jungian inner woman, Pamela symbolizes the inner life that he began while he was still with her, that he’s now leaving for a life of body and adventure. In his dream, Karen represents living in the outer world, being earthy and playful and body, yet still following a spiritual path.

Pamela and Karen each represent opposing sides of an inner split in his feminine. He knows this. With his inner Pamela, he’s on a deep inner spiritual quest yet very uptight about dirt and body and life. With his inner Karen, he’s learning to live in the here and now of the outer world, in a very instinctive and primal way, and with much animal and child about. With his inner Pamela, he’ll never be animal or child. With his inner Karen, he certainly won’t be as inner directed as he was

The dream shows him undecided as to which way he wants to go. But he’s not undecided now. He knows that when he relates to his inner Pamela, he becomes a magician, with an inner connection through her to the world of images and magic. He also knows that if he were to go back to that side of himself, he would lose his newfound masculine potency, his body, and his new and adventurous relationship with outer reality. He would rather not lose all this. He’d rather be body and live in the world. After all, he is a body, and he does live in this world. Anyway, he already knows his inner Pamela’s trip, and he would much rather marry his inner Karen – as he’s marrying the outer – and learn new ways of being feminine and spiritual in the world.
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The Dog and the Stone

At this time of his life, he’s going through his changes very quickly. In order to stay conscious throughout these changes, he’s doing a lot of active imagination, or visualization. He has two reoccurring images, one of a yellow dog and one of a red stone.

In the beginning, the yellow dog is a stray, a female like Gypsy, who comes into his house wearing a collar and dragging a chain. He plays with her and decides to keep her. He remembers coming out of his fantasy yelling, “my dog,” as if someone else might want her too. Another time they meet on the beach and go for a long walk together. Another time she protects him from the wild dogs.

At first, the stone is an ordinary red brick, worn smooth and tossed upon the sands by the ocean. In a second fantasy, he places it upon his altar in his room. Soon after this, while walking on the beach, he actually does find a red brick, worn smooth as a stone. He brings it home and builds an altar around it.

Meditating upon these images – of the yellow dog and the red stone – he has come to see that they represent the same pair of opposites as what Karen and Pamela have represented in his dreams, pointing however to a much deeper level of meaning beyond that conveyed by their images.

Like Karen, the yellow dog symbolizes the body. On a deeper level though, the dog represents the consciousness, the spirit of the body – like that of a witch’s familiar or of that talking dog in Goethe’s Faust. The dog thus represents the instinctual wisdom of body, accumulated over our long history as an ever-evolving animal species.

The red stone symbolizes the eternal, that which has existed without change forever. In particular, it’s the philosopher’s stone, for which the alchemists were ever seeking. The red stone symbolizes the Self, in Jung’s sense of the word – the most stable and inclusive, the truest aspect of ourselves.

Because he now has these deeper and more relevant images – of the yellow dog and the red stone – he no longer needs to focus upon whether he should be with Karen or Pamela. He has only one body and can only be with one woman. And he has already chosen Karen for his wife. He couldn’t be with Pamela again anyway, even if he wanted.

However, he can be one with both the yellow dog and the red stone, with both the spirit of body and the spirit of eternity. He can be both – a body in the world yet still whole and wise in the ways of Spirit.
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The Transcendent Function

He is trying to resolve this inner conflict between two major and differing aspects of his feminine consciousness. The image of his ex-wife Pamela represents his connection to the inner world of imagination and magic. The image of Karen, his present lover and future wife, represents his growing connection to the outer world of body and life.

This conflict has other images too – the Jungian as opposed to the acid hippie and the red stone as opposed to the yellow dog. All these seemingly disparate images are saying basically the same thing, saying that he’s not unified and whole but is split into two opposing and seemingly irreconcilable ways. One way leads inwards, to his soul. The other leads outwards, to his life.

He knows of no sure way of putting these two ways together, of ever becoming whole. Sometimes he worries that medicines will prevent the necessary transformation from ever taking place, will do so by not letting the psychic energy inherent in this conflict to ever build sufficiently enough to induce change. Other times though, he thinks that medicines are the only way he’ll ever be able to heal this seemingly insoluble conflict.

He remembers Jung calling the solution to such an insoluble conflict “the transcendent function,” one that can bridge and bring together two separate and seemingly disconnected realities. Jung noticed too that this term is also used in higher mathematics, in that context to denote the sum of a real and an imaginary number.

This transcendent function certainly seems relevant and meaningful for his apparently insoluble conflict. Following the metaphor, the solution to his conflict will involve the union of his inner, imaginary world of soul with his outer, real world of life. It will involve him being both a Jungian hippie and a hippie Jungian. It will involve his inner Pamela and Karen growing together and becoming one. It will involve the mysterious alchemical union of the red stone and the yellow dog. It will involve his soul entering his life and his life entering his soul.

The term itself, transcendent function, also suggests the intervention of Spirit in the resolution of this conflict. No ego can ever be large enough to contain the opposites necessary for healing such a split. Only Spirit is inclusive enough to contain these opposites and allow them to come together into a meaningful whole.