Chapter 9 – Changes and Choices

Sacrifice

It’s several weeks later now, and he’s back in the mountains, another solo trip. This time he’s up at Lodgepole, in the San Gorgonio Mountains in Southern California. He’s finally beginning to know what he’s doing in the woods. He remembers how ignorant and scared he was that very first time with Jonathan.

He has been in a bad place these past few weeks, ever since Dinky. He’s become stagnant, as if he has somehow lost his soul. His dreams are showing this too. His hope is that, while he’s here, he’ll be able to straighten out his life so he can move ahead again.

Finishing school is his single biggest problem. And he’s beginning to see that he can’t work on his Ph.D. and be stoned all the time. His dissertation is floundering, and he keeps getting stoned and not dealing with it. He has been running from this realization for a long while now. It may be difficult at first to come back down to earth and do all the work that he needs to do, but he has to do it.

He has to stop smoking. He has to make a sacrifice now, and grass is going to be it. He has already quit Jungian analysis, and now he’s going to quit grass. He just wants to live a normal life. He doesn’t want to always be going further. Can’t he just stop as he is now and live out the rest of his life? He’s tired of this heroic quest for Self. He just wants to relax and see who he is all by himself, without analysis or grass or anything else.

Anyway, he is quitting grass now, and he can already feel the powerful energy flowing from his decision. Grass isn’t really important. What is important is him and his newfound strength. Fear of hard work has had him beat, and he’s been using grass to avoid dealing with it. But watch him move ahead in his life now. He’ll get the work done. He’ll continue coming to these mountains, but for now his work towards his doctorate is where his strength is.

It isn’t that grass is bad. She has taught him how to be more of an animal, how to be more human and to have feelings too, and especially how to love and live. But then, when he began to feel that he couldn’t do any of this without her, he became dependent.

His decision to quit grass is his rock. He’s building his new life on this decision – and knowing that he’s doing so too. If he can stick with his decision – and he will – he’ll become productive again, with plenty of masculine ego strength. It’ll be easy for him to earn his Ph.D. and finally finish school then.
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Choices

From up here at Lodgepole, he sees two paths before him. On one path, he would be a quiet and effective healer, living in the city still. He would buy a big house in a quiet neighborhood, where he could hide, like Pamela and her new husband have done, coming out only to go to his nearby office. He would let the rest of the world go by, feeling that God would take care of His, if he would just take care of himself and his.

On the other path, he would follow the Native American shamanic way. He would be like Castaneda’s Don Juan, a solitary medicine man living far from the city and other people, at home in the wilds and one with all of life. He would ramble in the woods all his days, enjoying the feeling of being a body in this beautiful world. He would use medicines to speak with God and to understand the mysteries, and he would definitely share responsibility for the whole.

Who is he? Which path is his? He’s drawn to both. There is definitely something of himself in each, but he’s not together yet.

Will he ever be? It’s his same old Gemini conflict – between Pamela and Karen, between the Jungian way and that of Castaneda’s Don Juan, or between the city and the mountains. The split has always been within him.

Right now, he’s pulled both ways. If he could, he would follow both paths at once. He really doesn’t want to choose between them now. He wants to keep each way open, at least until he has finished his Ph.D.

It’s a spiritual choice really – between following the old way of dreams and Jungian analysis that he has been on these last few years or following this new, strange and mysterious way of the shaman. Should he return to that safe Jungian harbor, where he has always felt so snug, although somewhat bored, or should he follow instead this new and exciting way, exemplified by Don Juan and other shamans?

A voice, that of an old black woman, suddenly speaks up, saying, “You don’t really need to choose. What you need is a new way of putting these two old ways together.” Her voice is so strong and clear that he starts and looks about for her. Then he realizes that she is speaking from within him. He marvels at that. He has an old black woman inside himself! Makes him wonder again who he is really.

Listening to her, he realizes that he can relax now, that he really doesn’t need to choose. He just has to find a unique way of putting together the best of each path. He understands this now and finally lets go of trying to control and predict his future. He’s just going to see who he becomes.
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His Soul

He’s still at Lodgepole. He’s tripping on acid now and feeling really good, sitting here on his sleeping bag and reflecting upon himself and his life. Gypsy’s asleep, still tired from all their running around earlier. She’s lying by his left side, and there are these beautiful purple flowers, nodding in the breeze, by the head of his bed. It’s so beautiful here!

He feels so good, yet he is crying, remembering again that he’s never alone, that his soul never leaves him. No matter what, she will always love him, will always be here to care for him. He cries out to her now, “please help me with my fear and my pain.”

For a moment, he’s quiet within, realizing that it all comes down to whether or not there’s a solid core of self within to build upon. All other considerations are secondary.

He’s so driven in his life, yet he doesn’t even know where he’s going. He’s so hedged in, yet he’s afraid of any freedom. Who is he? Free from all fear and bullshit, who is he really?

Right now, touched by the loving presence of his soul, he has become a young boy again. He feels just like he used to, like Jonathan must still always feel. Now, who will he be and what will he do when he grows up? It’s so simple really, so beautiful.

As that young boy, he wants Karen for a friend. And, of course, she’s being friends with Jonathan right now, down in the city. He also wants to live out of doors as much as he can. He remembers when he was a young boy, how he wanted to be a forest ranger when he grew up. Even then, he always wanted to live outside. John Muir got to him early, long before Jung ever did.

In addition, he wants to have plenty of money so he doesn’t have to work in the city. He wants respect for his intellect and wisdom too. He’s realizing that if he wants all this, he’d better get started on it now.

Over the years, ever since he grew out of being that little boy, he has almost forgotten how to play. He never wants to forget again. He always wants to be able to come to these mountains and be this young and playful boy that he has been today.

His mommy soul has been good to him today; helping him to understand and letting him have a good cry on her earthly breast. He is very happy. He’s watching a cute little bug now, crawling among the flowers, a mommy bug herself.
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Changeling

He dreams he’s a kid again, living with his parents. He’s hanging out with the other kids in the back room, waiting for his mom to cook dinner. But now his parents’ friends Edith and Terry come by. They’re out in the living room now, visiting with his dad.

After awhile, He goes out to the kitchen to ask his mom about dinner. She says she isn’t going to start cooking until they leave. She hopes they hadn’t expected to be invited for dinner. He wonders why his folks don’t invite them.

A little while later, Terry comes back into his room and starts talking with him in a way he never has before. Terry says that he really likes and respects him and would like to help him in any way he can. Hearing this, he’s surprised and very moved. He only wishes he had known all this years ago.

Edith and Terry have been friends with his mom and dad for as long as he can remember. They usually get together for dinner and cards. Terry is loud, funny, and always certain he’s right. Terry’s what he would call extroverted. He’s very friendly and always seems to notice what’s going on. Terry’s the polar opposite of his dad, who’s actually quite shy except when he’s being the boss at work.

His mom and dad are both very introverted. They’re very quiet and into themselves. They aren’t very warm and have very few friends. His brother’s like this too, although he was more out there and friendlier when he was younger.

He’s a changeling. He knows this now. In his dream, his folks are so closed that they can’t even open up when their best friends drop by. They can’t even be spontaneous and invite them to dinner. Yet, in his same dream, Terry seeks him out and shares how he feels about him. He even offers to be his friend and patron. The contrast between his parents and Terry is stark.

On a deeper level, Terry is an image for an aspect of himself, one who is ego friendly and who seeks to help him to be himself. Terry is the extroverted side of himself, offering to help him out in any way he can. His dream shows him still stuck in his old identity as his parents’ son, still living within them psychologically. But his dream also shows him a way out of this, by introducing him – through an image from that earlier time of his life – to a more outgoing, supportive, and friendlier side of himself.
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Quitting Work

He dreams he’s at the child guidance clinic. He’s sitting at one end of the long conference table. Dr. Myden is at the other end. Everybody else from the clinic is here, as well as many of the Jungians he knows from private practice.

He sits back and listens to them for a while. They’re being shallow and dishonest, mostly from trying so hard to impress one another, so he stands up and confronts them. Dr. Myden interrupts him to say he’s fired. He can see that most of the others are glad to see him go too. He sees Walt, one of his work friends actually hiding from him. He turns and asks Walt if he was going to be fired anyway, but Walt won’t even look at him.

He tells them that the real reason he’s being fired is because he won’t let Dr. Myden supervise him, not under any circumstances. Dr. Myden has always been very negative towards him and his young clients. Dr. Myden retorts, being honest for once, that yes he was definitely going to be fired and that he merely precipitated it himself by confronting them today.

He picks up his things and leaves. On his way out, he grabs Myden by his head and pushes him over backwards. When Myden gets back up from the floor, he’s very upset and says he wishes he were younger so he could call the police. He laughs and asks Myden if he is afraid he’ll kiss him too, then he walks out.

Karen’s outside waiting for him, and, like two kids, they wade through the deep pool of water surrounding the clinic and then head for home together. He’s telling her all about what he has just gone through and how he’ll have a lot of time now to finish his dissertation. He’ll finish really soon now. He’s happy and excited – finally free!

Then he dreams that he’s alone, walking north. It’s been crazy in the south, but he knows it will stop once he’s further north. Eventually, he gets to a far place where some men are fishing. He joins them.

In both dreams, he’s cutting his ties with the craziness of LA and his work here. He is going to quit work soon, hopefully before they do fire him. Knowing this releases a great deal of energy. He hadn’t realized just how much energy it has taken for him to continue working with the Jungians. Now he sees that, as soon as he finishes his own work, he can get out of there.

His second dream even gives him a healing glimpse of his future – of when he will have finally left LA – reassuring him that he will find others like himself then, companions with whom he can still stay connected to the inner life.
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Two Doors

He dreams that he’s walking by himself in the city when he hears some rock music coming from this building. He goes inside the front door to hear better, staying close to the entrance, not sure yet if he wants to pay the price of admission and go all the way in. For now, he feels comfortable just hanging out here in the lobby. He may go inside later though, perhaps during the intermission.

While he’s waiting for the intermission, he wanders around the rest of the building. He finds a closed and locked door at the top of the stairs, and, when he looks in through the small window in the door, he sees a group of business men in suits, sitting around a conference table.

He goes back downstairs now and stands in front of the open door to the room with the music. The hippie bartender is very friendly and tells him that he can come in any time. “If you like the music, you can come all the time. It only costs a dollar.” It feels good, being welcome somewhere.

This is what the dream is about – being welcome somewhere. Because of who he is becoming now, he’s no longer welcome in the straight world of men in suits – if he ever was! Their world is a closed circle, open only to those who know the secret password – and he has never known it!

However, the door leading to the world of the hippie culture is open to him. It is open to all really – to anyone who can afford a dollar. In his dream, the friendly hippie bartender is even inviting him in. He’s beginning to see that he no longer needs to stand here part way in. He no longer needs to hold himself back. It’s time for him to enter all the way.

Until now, he has only gone part way in, mostly because he hasn’t quite finished with the world of men in suits. He has to finish there before he can let go of it and go all the way into the hippie world. He has to see that that door is really closed to him. He’s certainly seeing this in his life now, and this is making it much easier for him to drop out – just as soon as he has earned his Ph.D.

There are millions of people in the world today already living the hippie way. They aren’t all insane – and neither is he. A new and more viable culture is being born into the world these days, made up of folks a lot like himself. And this new culture is saner and healthier and certainly much more fun than that old and worn out one of the men in suits.
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Chapter 10 – Further Adventures

The Hummingbird in the Toilet

We have all heard people talking about their dreams, saying that they’re silly, that they don’t mean anything, or even that they’re stupid. They could not be more wrong. Each and every one of our dreams comes from God and is a meaningful message, sharing with us the deeper meaning of our lives.

For example, he dreams that he’s in a bathroom. He looks into the toilet bowl and sees a little, blue hummingbird in the water, swimming to the surface. Soon she’ll reach it and fly away.

That’s all there is to his dream – just this powerful and striking image. There’s barely a story. She’s swimming towards the surface and will fly away when she reaches it. Nothing else is said, nothing of why she was there in the first place or where she will go when she leaves.

Nevertheless his dream manages to say a great deal. In his life now, he’s not in his natural element either, and he too is struggling to rise to where he can be himself. It’s easy for him to identify with this beautiful hummingbird. From his mountain man perspective, LA could aptly be characterized as one big toilet bowl. Certainly there’s a great deal of unconscious shit going down in the city.

Perhaps too her way back to herself involves, as his does, rising out of the toilet bowl that is called life in the city.

Let’s watch her now. See, she’s reaches the surface. Let’s watch what she does now. First of all, she dries her wings, and now she’s looking about for nourishment. She tells him she’s the Spirit of body, that she’s his luck. He feeds her sweetly. Then she leaves to head north to the wild country. He follows her. Time is different now, and they are able to fly around it. Soon they’re home together in the high mountains.

Becoming a Man

He dreams that he and Jonathan are walking on the long road north. When they come to a fence across the road, several people standing nearby tell them not to go on, that it’s too dangerous and unknown ahead. He has heard this before. They go on. They have to. Their destiny is before them. He’s taking Jonathan to live at a school far away from the city.

Further down the road, they’re ambushed by a band of robbers. However, they have stayed alert and manage to kill two of the robbers and drive off the rest, using the powerful submachine guns they are carrying.

Eventually, the long road becomes a path. Following this path now, they arrive at Jonathan’s school. It’s a good school, here deep within the woods. Jonathan is already well on his way to being a man. He proved that on their way north. The school, with its strong leadership, will finish the job.

He returns home now, to Whidden’s old place, to where he lived when he was Jonathan’s age. He seeks out his dad to tell him about his and Jonathan’s experiences on the road. He tells him about the school. He’s especially excited when he tells him about the main thing that happened – how, when they had left, he had had a hunch and had taken the two submachine guns, with full cartridges, and how, when they had been attacked, he and Jonathan had each killed themselves a man using them.

He tells him that Jonathan is a man now, a warrior. He has proved himself. As he’s saying this, he has an image of himself as a big, wild, aggressive man, bragging to his elderly father that his young son has become a man himself.

His dream is responding to his longtime feelings of never being a man himself because his dad could never see him as one. His dream is also telling him that the woods are the best place in the world for the child within him to learn and to become a man – at Dinky or Lodgepole or any other of their free and wild mountain camps.

Whenever he’s in the woods, especially whenever he’s doing medicine, he becomes a boy again, a young boy a lot like Jonathan. As this young boy, he’s back in school now, learning about himself, about becoming a man, and about the mysterious world that he lives in. He knows he’s almost there too. He just has to continue coming back to this school at the end of the path that begins at the end of the long and lonely road. He has to do this until he is a man and knows that he is. Then maybe he’ll be able to wander upon other roads too.

Peyote

He got into this adventure last night purely by accident. He was sitting at home in Venice, when Steve and his brother Tom came by for a visit. Steve had a few old, dried peyote buttons and suggested that they smoke them. They crumbled some of them up and put the resulting powder into a pipe, along with some grass. Then they each took a few hits. They also each took a bite or two out of the leftover buttons. None of them noticed anything while they were together, although they hung out for several more hours before going off to bed.

That was around eleven o’clock last night. It’s nine now, the next morning, and he’s still wide-awake. It’s been a very weird night. He’s been awake for all of it, yet for many hours he was also in a dream-like state. The images were all very clear and sharp, yet unlike anything he has known of in this world. It was more than a dream though, because he could stay with it. He could move in and out of it at will. He could wake out of it and look around and even get up and go to the bathroom, but then as soon as he closed his eyes again, he was right back in it. This happened for most of night.

The main image was of these four groups placed around the now empty center. There was a spiritual vacuum at this center, created when the old religions had all lost their connection with Spirit. Each of these four groups was a different spiritual way that wanted to become the new center in the spiritual world of today. It was that time. Each wanted to be the one chosen. He was with one of the groups, the only one that was connected to their source, to Mother Earth. The other three groups were all city oriented and would lead them more and more into a debilitating dependence upon machines and towards an increasingly artificial life.

Even after this powerful dream state ended, he still retained a depth and clarity of consciousness that he has never before experienced. Each thought, it’s source and direction and all its connections, was completely clear. He wondered what would happen if folks into medicines and Spirit were to take Peyote and move among others, while still maintaining this depth and clarity? They would certainly have a great influence for good. Peyote is very powerful!

He would like to do it again, maybe alone in the mountains next time. It may have been an accident last night, but if so, it certainly was a fortuitous one for him.
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Life and Death

It’s late fall now, and all of his magical camps in the high mountains are already under many feet of snow – and will be until next spring, months away. He’s going to have to walk on the beach a lot this winter if he wants to stay high and in his body while he’s still is the city.

He’s out walking on the beach today, rediscovering Venice and the other folks like himself who live here because they love the beach and the ocean. The best part of the city, of any city really, is its people. And he’s seeing again today that he does have to keep some sort of connection with the city – for the people, if for nothing else.

He notices these two older men while he’s walking down by the water. The first one is just shuffling along, a broken and defeated drunk, oblivious to anything but whether or not an old bottle might still have a drop or two of alcohol in it. He isn’t at all in his body. He’s just dragging it along. He has rejected body and life a long time ago. Being a coward though, instead of killing himself cleanly, he’s slowly drinking himself to death – and avoiding life while doing so.

The other man, although older than the first by quite a few years, comes by, running proudly and flashing him a wide grin as he dances through the surf. This older man stirs up something deep within himself – so much life still, yet so near to death in years. This man hasn’t avoided body and life at all. He’s fully into it, knowing that he’s going to die, yet, because of this, really enjoying the life he still has.

Right after seeing these two men, he sees death itself – a dead cat washed up on the beach, its fur mostly intact but its head just a skull, with its eyes still attached and staring right at him, as if to say, “you too someday.” It’s very strange. The message is clear though – death is real and exists for everyone and actually stares each of us in the face every day.

How folks relate to death, especially their own, determines the worth of their life. If he avoids looking into the eyes of death, if he avoids body and life because he’s afraid of death, like that first man he saw today, that shambling wreck of a man, then his life will become empty and without meaning. If instead he embraces body and life, like that second man, that joyful running man, then his live will be overflowing with love and joy and meaning. He knows that it’s his choice to make and a most relevant one for where he’s at in his life now. As always, his inner teacher’s timing is impeccable.
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Realities

He was very scared when he was coming onto the acid earlier today. He even felt physically threatened, as if he were going to be torn apart. And God, was he cold! He felt he would never be warm again.

He also went to places that he had never been to before, places stranger than anything he could have ever imagined. He went to other worlds, to other realities even, yet he always saw them with great clarity.

Sometimes he was two or more people at a time. He was always the person lying in the bed in the house in the canals, yet, at the same time; he would also be walking through another house or maybe rambling about on the beach or in the woods. He was in all of these realities at once. It was only when he focused upon a particular reality that it would take on a greater life than the others.

One such time struck him in particular. He was lying in the bed in the house in the canals. He could clearly see the walls and the ceiling and all the furniture. Yet, when he shifted his gaze ever so slightly, he could see another room in this same space. It too was furnished with a bed, walls, a floor, a ceiling and all. He could see this room just as clearly as the one he was in. He could see both rooms at once. It was only when he concentrated upon one of them in particular that it would take on a solidity and a feeling of permanence at the expense of the other.

While lying in the bed in the room in the house in the canals, he found that he could actually move the other room’s furniture and even the walls and windows and doors around with his gaze. He could look at a picture upon one of the walls in that other room and move it with his mind to another wall entirely, once to the ceiling on a whim. He could even change the image in the picture to another.

This other room was normal in overall structure and form. Like the room in the house in Venice, it was essentially a box, with doors and windows that looked out upon ordinary scenes. The doors and windows could open. He tried them to see. The furniture and everything else seemed just as real and normal as that in the room in the house in the canals.

The only difference that he could see between the two rooms was that in the other room he could move anything within it about with just his consciousness. But he still couldn’t do that with the room that he was lying in. He wondered though if someone in that other room ever did acid and moved the things in his room around with his or her mind?