After the Work was closed, I asked the man I was sitting behind if I could share a vision I had.  I told him about the Spirit and the intuition that this was a possible indication of drug use or abuse.  He said, “that would be me, all my life, one thing after another.”  So I told him that all drug addiction therapies focus on using addictions (processes as well as drugs) to numb the pain.  He agreed.  That made perfect sense to him.  “And usually that can be traced back to childhood.  Can you remember what was so painful that you had to numb it your entire life?”  Immediately he responded.  “That was my birth.  I was adopted and ten years ago I met my birth mom.  She told me that as soon as I was born, they took me away from her.”  “So the infant never bonded, he felt abandoned at birth.  Can you feel that now?”  He said he could, but what could he do about it?  “Well that baby is here, he’s inside of you right now.  You could tell him you love him and that you will hold him and companion him from now on.  If you want to, I’m not saying you should.  It’s a life-long commitment to raise a child and be his daddy.  But there’s no one else who can do it.”  He looked curious and said, “you mean I can go back to my birth and re-write the script?”  “Something like that.  Yes.  I am acknowledging your inner child’s pain, I am witnessing it right now.  You can do it too and give him a loving companion instead of the fearful abandonment he felt at this birth.”  He was amazed and said, “Thank you.  That’s profound.”

I learned with my work with another medicine, the peyote of the Native American Church, that it is important to check out one’s “visions” with the person upon whom the vision is imposed.  This is usually best done indirectly and with tack, especially if you don’t know the other person.  Fortunately I had already established trust and rapport with this “brother”, so I could openly share my vision.  I think the appearance of the insight was designed to show me the importance of the drug dependence and its unhealthy nature, sort of “demonic” in the Western Catholic tradition.  It would have been easy to claim that I, as a medium, had witnessed the visit of a Spirit without taking some responsibility for the vision myself.  It was a teaching vision for sure.  One could say it was a honing of my mediumship skills, which are unique to me.  My lineage is of the White Eagle of North America.  I am learning from the Daime how to use its teachings, its visual gifts, to kindly and compassionately help my brothers and sisters heal.  We all need to do it.

What do you call a tall, demon in green?  A Fearie?

The terror of bombs and exploding buildings tie all three generations together.  The grandfather, played by Max von Sydow, has Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.  He is continually running away from relationships.  He is the father who abandons his wife and family.  The abandoned child is Oskar’s dad, played by Tom Hanks, who tells his son that he doesn’t know anything about his father.  The absent father and his son, the ideal (over-compensating) father, are destroyed by fate and the grandson is trying to make sense of the whole thing.  We get to experience the incredibly brilliant mind of Oskar with all his fears and schemes, his deceptions and private self-inflicted wounds.  Those of us who have loved and lived with people with Asperger’s syndrome can appreciate the parents’ worries and over-involvement.  And hopefully there will be people like Oskar’s mom, masterfully played by Sandra Bullock, and his grandmother, who persevere in their love and acceptance.  They make all the difference.

Recently Krotona’s School of Theosophy hosted Stephan A. Hoeller, the Hungarian immigrant, baron, LCC priest, researcher for Manley Hall, Gnostic Bishop, author, and Jungian Scholar. His topic was CG Jung’s Red Book and Prophecies. The entire Great Hall was filled with people to hear the grand old man speak. Our hostess and director of the School invited us all to join the residents in guided meditation before the next day’s lecture. I remembered Jung was critical of Theosophical meditation and today found the passage, when I opened my copy of Mysterium Coniunctionis, one of the texts prefigured in the Red Book. Jung was discussing alchemical meditation and its psychological application, a process he called Active Imagination, where the images of dreams are actively encountered in an interactive way, as if the images were “real” people who will respond to us provided we let them. Jung’s procedure is essentially the same as the Medieval Achemists’ meditation (CW vol. 14, pp.487-496). In the following section, entitled Self-Knowledge, Jung’s comments are interesting.

Active Imagination or Alchemical meditation brings the seeker or dreamer into relationship with his or her Shadow. The conscious personality does not see itself reflected in its opposite, the Shadow. This creates a lot of tension and compensation on the part of the unconscious. Jung says that, “confrontation with the shadow produces at first a dead balance, a standstill that hampers moral decisions and makes convictions ineffective or even impossible. Everything becomes doubtful, which is why the alchemists call this stage nigredo, tenebrositas, chaos, melancholia. (p. 497)” But if we persist in this process and honor the images, as Jung did in the painting of his Shadow (above), the unconscious finally produces uniting symbols. Jungian analysis is the only place one can find the alchemical process of meditation used interactively with dream imagery. And here’s his criticism of theosophy.

“If the ancient art of meditation is practised at all today, it is practised only in religious or philosophical circles, where a theme is subjectively chosen by the meditant or prescribed by an instructor, as in the [Jesuit] Ignatian Exercitia or in certain theosophical exercises that developed under Indian influence. These methods are of value only for increasing concentration and consolidating consciousness, but have no significance as regards effecting a synthesis of the personality. On the contrary, their purpose is to shield consciousness from the unconscious and to suppress it. They are therefore of therapeutic value only in cases where the conscious is liable to be overwhelmed by the unconscious and there is the danger of a psychotic interval. (p. 498)” And this I have found to be true as well. My Jesuit friend was having psychotic episodes and could use meditation to hold back the unconscious contents long enough to consult his Jungian Spiritual Advisor. My experience with Theosophical meditation before every lecture at Krotona is not therapeutic, nor is it intended to be, it is a practice of quieting the mind in order to be in a place of receptivity. What we do with the information presented can be therapeutic, provided we discuss it with a qualified counselor. We cannot go any further down the path of Individuation than our guide has travelled.

First I started with my young friend Shiva, who is now 30 years old. I have written about him earlier in these stories.  He was raised in the Krishna cult in Hawaii where he was abandoned by his mother and his schizophrenic father at 5, who gave him into the care of a male cult member, while the dad took a 3 month “vacation”. The care-giver raped the boy, who required emergency rectal stitches.  He then began traumatic re-enactments of abandoning/victimization/sexual molestation which has continued for the rest of Shiva’s life.  I met him just before his 23rd birthday.  Try as I may over the past 7 years to help this beautiful young man, who wasn’t sure whether he was Krishna or Shiva, to heal by giving him unconditional love, compassionate listening, empathy, and all the Jungian counseling skills in my kit bag, I was unable to affect his core issues.  In some ways I supposed I was able to modify the intensity of the Vampire’s bite, but Shiva’s belief that he was unlovable, unwanted, and damaged has remained strong and resilient.  That experience taught me many profound lessons about unconscious processes and how they can and cannot be affected.

Before meeting Shiva my wife introduced me to Barbara Hort’s work, Unholy Hungers: the Psychic Vampire in Ourselves and Others back in 1997.  She pointed out the chapter on Dorian Grey and said, “that’s you Michael”.  After knowing me for 35 years, she felt validated in finding an authority whom she trusted, someone who articulated the particular kind of archetypal energy with which she had been living since our marriage 30 years before.   I had been molested as an infant by my ignorant, immature parents and again when I was 4 years old by a family friend.  I call this the Vampire’s bite, as it informs the unconscious behavior from that time on.  The body is trying to exhibit the wounding situation by acting it out, in the hope that some enlightened witness will notice and hold space for the inner child to express his/her pain, hurt, tears, and rage.  Alice Miller’s work will help anyone understand this process.  And I kept on acting out the initial wound throughout my life.  No one with the necessary skills noticed what I was saying unconsciously, so I continued to leave a swath of suffering as I stumbled through the first 55 years of my life.  Thanks to Athena the pattern was finally named and I started working on the problem with my therapist.  We have done years of work on this problem.  But the archetypal energy resisted every modality I tried until now.

So, as I was saying, I began by bringing Shiva into my inner imaginal world with the help of the Daime.  Then I explained that, in order for him to heal, I was going to recount the ways the archetype had impinged upon my relationship with him, my family, and myself.  I brought my sons into that imaginal realm and explained to them what we have been living with for centuries, how our noble Scottish ancestors, the Kings of Scotland and of England, have been harboring a Dark Angel.  Their Greek grandfather had a similar character in his ancestral line, so my children have been impinged by both their grandfathers and me.  Now that I felt the love of my peyote and Daime families, I had the strength to invite the Dark Angel into the scene.  Since I no longer feared him, having San Miquel’s protection and guidance, I explained to Him/It that He was one of Creator’s beloved manifestations and that He no longer had to continue what He’s been doing for thousands of years.  All He had to do was acknowledge His actions and their affects on humans and other creatures, decide to let go of those patterns of behavior, and FREELY choose to fly home to the Source, into the Light.  After some reassurance that God loved all his creations, including Vampires, our ancestral Spirit lifted off and flew toward the Light.  Just before He disappeared into the White Light, I turned my gaze back to earth.  I wanted his choice to be totally free, and if He changed his mind at the last minute and decided to incarnate again, I would recognize His energy, if it were to approach me.  In that case I would know not to trust His familiar energy, but could respect his free will and be glad of the lessons I learned working on this family karma.  I now feel completely free and believe my family can feel this freedom too.

Strictly speaking any Church which can trace its lineage back to the Apostles is part of the Apostolic Succession.  Their members have the right to call themselves Catholics.  Back in the 1970s, when Chuck Smith founded Calvary Chapel in Orange County, California, there was renewed interest in the ancient Greek language, since the early Christian Scriptures were written in Greek.  Chuck told me that his interest in the meaning of Greek words stemmed from his struggles in Baptist Seminary over the Greek text of the New Testament.  That’s why he chose to focus on Agape, the Greek word for Love.  In the late 1970s Chuck gave a guest lecture in my “Life and Times of Jesus” class at Golden West Community College.  Since I had studied New Testament Greek in college and was married in the Greek Orthodox Church, my wife’s tradition, I was sensitive to the influence of the Greek world view on the early Church.

One upshot of the Protestant Baptist’s interest in ancient Greek was to question the foundation of the Baptist Church.  Could those who revolted against the Church of Rome, the Protestants, find a re-connection with early Christianity?  Oddly enough that became the search for several ordained ministers in our Southern California Baptist community.  These Baptists sought acceptance with all of the independent Orthodox Bishops, feeling they should bring the Eastern Orthodox tradition into their American Church.  All of the Orthodox Bishops told them they would recognize the Americans, provided they would attend Orthodox Seminaries, so the Bishops could feel certain these new priests understood the Orthodox tradition.  The Baptists were discouraged.  But there was a political solution to their problem.

The Greek Orthodox Church claims all of North and South America.  The Russian Orthodox Church also has a claim in the New World.  The solution had its roots in the Middle East, where Alexander the Great (335 BCE) installed his generals as kings in Syria and Egypt.  The Seleucid Greek kingdom of ancient Syria has been reduced to a fragment of what it was 2300 years ago.  But those once powerful genes long for an opportunity to rise again.  The Baptists approached the politically impotent Syrian Orthodox Church in Damascus, the Church of St. Paul, for acceptance.

This makes sense.  Their Church was founded by a man who never met Jesus, but whose testimony of the inner reality of the Christ spread the new religion throughout the Greek-speaking Roman Empire.  With Paul there was a clear precedent that God ordains those who “know Christ as their Lord and Savior”.  Paul changed his name from “Saul” the murderer of Christians to “Paul” the messenger bearing the Good News.  He founded most of the early Churches and his writings to those communities have become part of the New Testament.  Paul was a Jew who morphed into a Christian, so why couldn’t American Protestants do the same?  And there was a political advantage.  The Syrian Church could get a foothold in their rival’s territory.  The Archbishop accepted them.  He took the entire group of Baptist ministers “as is” into the Orthodox priesthood.  How do I know this?

First of all our twin sons were Baptized by a Syrian Orthodox priest, who later tried to tell my Greek Orthodox wife she was mistaken in her interpretation of the Holy Eucharist.  His superstitious, fundamentalist ways got him thrown out of our house with the admonition to never come back.  Athena was furious!  Thirty five years later I was drawn to attend services at St. Herman of Alaska Russian Orthodox Church.  There I encountered one of those Baptist Protestant Ministers.  He was the priest.  I suspected something was wrong with the picture, when I observed his relationship with his wife, who was subservient in they way many Protestant wives are.  But I have never encountered an Orthodox Presbytera who wasn’t an empowered woman.  Then there was the fundamentalist Protestant interpretation of Scripture in the priest’s sermons.  Eventually I asked him about his past and he confirmed my suspicions.  He was ordained in the Baptist Church and part of the group who were accepted as Orthodox priests.  This guy was a walking oxymoron.  Which brings us round to the starting point.

The old Catholic Church of Holland’s Bishop ordained the English Anglican priests in London at the turn of the 20th century.  That established the Apostolic succession.  During the first World War the English old Catholics renamed the Church Liberal Catholic.  They were for the most part Theosophists, who believed there was no higher religion than truth.  The truth needs an atmosphere of free inquiry.  So the paradox was written into the name of the Liberal Catholic Church and can be experienced every time the Holy Eucharist is performed.  The Doctrine is sung as part of the Mass.  You don’t have to accept it to take communion, all are welcome to receive if they approach the altar in a respectful manner.  But the basic teachings are woven into the Liturgy, just like they are in the Eastern Orthodox Divine Liturgy.  So we get to have our cake and eat it too.  Well, wafers aren’t exactly cake, but symbolically they represent the mystery of the Christian message.  We take in the Blood and Body of the Christ, which in turn evokes the Christ within each and every one of us.  Our Creator made us immortal. The Greeks knew that in ancient times.  They told the story of Psyche, the soul, and her Divine husband Eros, Love.  Isn’t that the essence of paradox?  The immortal soul is married to Divine Love.  No wonder the Greeks could embrace St. Paul’s message.

The history of Western Civilization is in many ways reflected in da Vinci’s work.  The Great Goddess of the ancient world is the platform for an elevated feminine in the form of the Virgin Mary of Christianity.  The Law of the nomadic Hebrews is first transcended by John, the Baptist, who tells people they don’t have to literally fulfill the rules of Temple sacrifice.  They need only make a ritual cleaning off, a letting go of damaging ways and attitudes, in order to be redeemed.  Their guilty consciences can be cleaned up by cooperative action.  John is the older transformer, Jesus the younger and more radical one.  John baptizes Jesus.  That is the start of the short mission of Jesus as the Christ, which ends in the death of both men.  The Baptist’s influence goes on in perhaps the strangest way imaginable, winding up in the Grail Legend of the Celts and the story of King Arthur.

According to Professor Norma Lorre Goodrich in her Celtic history of England called Merlin (1987), the Celtic Christian Church originated with Joseph of Arimathea, within whose tomb the crucified Christ was laid and resurrected.  According to the Grail Legend it was Joseph of Arimathea who took the Holy Chalice, the cup used at the Last Supper of Jesus, from Jerusalem to the Celtic world of France, Brittany, and Ireland.  He founded the Christian Baptist tradition aligned with James, the brother of Jesus, first Patriarch of Jerusalem.  These Celts were not aligned with Rome, which was their conqueror and enemy, hence they did not recognize St. Peter as the first Christian Bishop of Rome. The Celts followed the practices of John the Baptist and the early Church Fathers. The Celtic Church in England was the last of the independent, Catholic Christian Congregations to capitulate to the Roman Church in the 9th century AD. We know how power corrupted the Catholic tradition and eventually led to revolution and reformation.
It is now eleven centuries later.  The Roman Catholics lost Spain and Portugal to Islam and then regained it, sending out the Conquistadors to ravish the New World.  Ironically, in the heart of Roman Catholic dominated Brazil, the Celtic tradition sprouted anew.  There the cross of Joan of Arc was again elevated and the time of John the Baptist re-lived.   Sounds unbelievable doesn’t it?

Tibet has taught us to open our minds to the doctrine of reincarnation.  Most of the world knows about men who remember their past lives, men like the Dalai Lama, who is both the political and spiritual head of his people.  Another example of this phenomenon is Sebastiao Mota de Melo, who was able to remember one of his past lives.  He told his Teacher, Mestre Ireneau, that he had been John the Baptist.  Sebastiao went out into the wilderness of the Amazon forest to start a new sustainable community, where he and his followers could drink the holy sacrament, the blood and body of Christ, in its ancient form, which we call Daime (ayuaska).  The sacrament heals and teaches, just as Jesus did 2000 years before.  Sebastiao lived out the Baptist’s pattern as a “voice crying in the wilderness: make way the path of the Lord”.  People who knew Sebastiao believed his claim.  He spoke with authority and founded the Santo Daime Tradition which is now becoming a world wide religion.  If the Dalai Lama can do it, why not John the Baptist?  Perhaps this is what people mean by the Shift in consciousness predicted for the New Era.  We are considering letting go of some well entrenched doctrines and replacing them with ones which Work.  Perhaps we are experiencing the Second Coming of Christ and don’t recognize it has already arrived, within each and every human who is willing to acknowledge the Divine within.

I have recorded this dream and discussed it in some detail back in 2010.  It used to be called the Blue Lady, but I renamed it Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, because that is what dreams do.  They mirror our present situation.  The paradoxical aspects in the dream call our attention to them.  They shock us out of our customary awareness and tell us things, show us things to which we need attend.  Often our cultural consciousness looks at the dream images, which are paradoxical and seemingly self-contradictory, and because of that absurdity, judges them as meaningless.  Our modern rationalism rejects them.  We treat them like Scrooge in Dickens’ Christmas Carol, as “a piece of undigested meat”.  We dismiss them.

But if we do that, we miss the point altogether and set ourselves up for a fall.  We allow our ego to rule the moment and arrogate qualities of the gods to ourselves.  We become (inflated) arrogant in thinking we know what is real and what is fantasy.  If we think too well of ourselves, we are inflated and arrogant, and like Icarus of Greek mythology, our wings melt and we fall into the sea. If we looked at the dream as a metaphoric statement, as a story telling us about our situation, we could learn a great deal.

Each image in a dream has a personal meaning for the dreamer.  Sometimes there is a deeper meaning, when the image or symbol is timeless and universal.  That is when knowledge of mythology is helpful, because the Dream Source often communicates in mythological ways.  It has a world-wide collection of stories with which to illustrate our lives.  That’s why we study mythology.  To be prepared to receive the messages from the Divine and understand them.

Throughout my blogs I illustrate dreams and their interpretation.  My dream just before 9-11 was set in the underworld of faeries.  There was the old crone with her infinity symbol on her long pink dress and her conical hat.  There were elves in the garden, one old and one young.  And there was the faerie princess, whose dress blended that of the crone with vines of leaves.  She was the living embodiment of magic.  She protected me and told me that “the ninth, tenth, and eleventh will be very good days”.  From the perspective of the faerie folk this was true prophesy.  There were no airplanes or chemical trails in the atmosphere anywhere over America during those days.  I told my youngest sons my dream on September 11, 2001, and my son reflected the quiet of the night, the silence above us, and the stars which could clearly be seen over Napa California.  Sometimes dreams are prophetic, but they always give us things to think about.

When I was a teenager 50 years ago, I connected with a man who had integrity and followed through with his promises.  He was committed to his mission and his community in India.  John was an impressive contrast to my parents, who were unable to walk their talk.  Father John R. Cole gave me the support and love that passes all understanding in the few weeks I spent with him in 1961.  As a parting gift he gave me a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, which launched my spiritual quest.  I recently discovered that he died in 1995.  Saturday I put his name on the list during the Cura.

Although I am relatively new to the Daime Tradition, I am an elder and know how to support the community.  This was the third Work since getting my star and I was asked to serve as a Guardian near the end of the Work.  I had done my own processing in a profoundly deep way and was somewhat relieved to be able to care for the needs of my brothers.  As I covered people with warm blankets against the cold temperatures, I began thinking of a hypnotic regression my grandson had done with me.

Two years ago, my grandson Matan had shared Michael Newton’s book, Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives with me, which profoundly challenged my assumptions about the nature of existence.  I felt there might be a way to access the unconscious and find the experiences which I was repressing, the memories which were the keys to my need for family and desire to please.  We had been talking about my early childhood memories and a block between my head and my heart, how I retreated from trauma by becoming more and more intellectual.  I felt a regression might release the blockage and heal a dissociation.  So Matan helped me drop into trance.

Although I expected to find the problem in this life time, when Matan asked me where I was, I answered.   “Tsarist Russia.  My mom and dad are dead.  It’s their funeral.  I am five years old.”   “Is your spirit guide there?” he asked.  I looked around the scene and answered, “Yes, he’s here.  Father Nicholas.  He adopted me.  He taught me everything I know.  I lived with him in the orphanage until the Cossacks killed him.  They shot me in the arm, right here.”  I was feeling pain in my right arm above the elbow, where my arm, during the week before the regression, had been hurting me.  I recognized John Cole was the same soul, the same spirit guide, as Father Nicholas in that former incarnation.

Back in the Santo Daime Work, I started opening drawers looking for a candle to replace the one which was about to go out.  There was nothing in the first two drawers.  There was only an old book in the third drawer.  I took it out into the light and discovered it was a copy of Kahlil Gabran’s The Prophet.  That felt like a direct communication from John Cole and the spirit world.  When I called my spirit son yesterday and told him this story, he was amazed, saying, “my mom just pulled her copy of The Prophet off the bookshelf and told me someone had given it to her when she was a girl.”  To my son the Raven this was another sign that the Spirits were actively supporting our work together with the relatives.

After my conversation with the Raven, I went to dinner here in Ojai, California at another spirit son’s home.  There I met a man named Keith, who was surprised I knew the meaning of his name.  “Keith is my brother’s name.” I said, “He was named after my uncle Keith Melville.”  Now he was really curious.  “Were they from Utah?”  “Yes”, I answered, “why?”  “Well my dad’s best friend was Keith Melville, an Air Force Pilot of a B-17.  They were stationed in Naples together during the second world war.  Keith and Ruth used to come out here to visit us.  I was named after him.  In fact you have the same voice pattern as my dad’s friend.  Did you know that?” I remembered being identified with my uncle Keith, the professor of political science at Brigham Young University, and Bishop in the Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints.  “It’s amazing.  He was my favorite uncle, the one (spiritually) whom I was most like, although I looked exactly like my dad, John Melville.”  So I told my new friend Keith McDaniel about my Santo Daime experience and my work with/for mom, dad, and John Cole. All of our parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents are in the spirit realm with the rest of our ancestors.  We talked about freeing them from their patterns by changing those patterns in our own lives.  I was “blown away” by the synchronicity of our meeting and finding a kindred spirit in Keith.  This wasn’t a coincidence.  As they say, God works in mysterious ways.  Isn’t it fabulous?

And then there’s the strange fact that my twin sons are named Nicko (after Athena’s father) and John (after my father).  Their saint’s days in the Eastern Orthodox calendar are St. Nickolas, December 2nd and St. John, January 7th.  These feasts are like bookends which remind me of my spirit guides, Father Nicholas and Father John Cole.  I am sponsoring a Native American Church Ceremony for my 69th birthday on the Saturday following my birthday.  This is the first time I have ever celebrated my birthday in the Tipi.  Hopefully my relatives from the Santo Daime Tradition will come sit up with us.  Evidently the ones in the spirit world have already made plans to attend.

That is the situation of the hero in the twelfth century Grail Legend.  An opportunity appears out of no where.  The directions are easy.  Go down the road, turn left and cross over the bridge. But once he is in the Imaginal Realm, everything depends upon his asking the right question, he fails and is all alone again.  He continues the life of a knight for the next 20 years; wife, family, conquests, friendships, contests until he finds it all meaningless.  Nothing has the excitement of adolescence anymore.  He is depressed to the point of suicide, and in that moment there is a shift.  An opportunity arises to enter the Castle again and this time he asks the question his heart wants answered.  And that makes all the difference.  It breaks the spell and heals the ailing Lord.  The Holy Grail appears and the Lord is able to reach for it and drink.  This heals the wound which would not heal.  The Lord, Amfortas, which means “without power” or “impotent one” lives for only three days and then dies.  But the Grail King does not.  He is the mysterious Old King in the Castle.  In some stories the knight Parzifal becomes the new Grail King.

How is this myth relevant for modern man?  Since the time of the troubadours this story has been told.  It is the problem of Western European manhood.  We get the vision of our destiny in adolescence but are unable to hold it, we are wounded.  We can neither live nor die.  Life seems without purpose.  Modern man is Amfortas, who needs the folly of youth to come into relationship with him, to heal him.  But he cannot command the healing.  He must suffer the pain of his situation until the youth appears.  And then he can only give him the directions.  Amfortas is the intellectual thinker fishing in the waters of the unconscious for an answer to his suffering.  He recognizes the solution when it appears, the young fool, the instinctive inner child.  But the youth has to want a heart to heart connection.  He has to be able to express his feelings openly and honestly.  Without that enthusiasm there is no healing.  He fails the first time, but in mid-life he gets another chance.

Actually the way is always available.  Just keep doing what you are doing.  Keep on traveling down your path and in a while there will be an opportunity to turn away from consciousness, the right handed path.

Parsifal

Going that way toward planning, analysis, building and accomplishment will just create more of the same old same old.  Don’t go that way.  Turn left, toward the unconscious, toward the Spirit Realm, the Imaginal world of dreams and fantasy.  Cross over into the Inner World, the Kingdom of the Grail Castle.  There you can interact with that which is not the ego, the unconscious dimension.  That is its realm, where it plays all the parts of all the characters, the scenes, the action.  But the hero can ask for information and express him/herself.  The interaction can fail or it can heal.  And if it doesn’t work the first few times, perseverance in Active Imagination and/or Dreaming will eventually heal.  The ego will have to take on a different role however, not the narcissistic center of the world as it had believed itself to be, but rather the role of the servant of the Self, of the Grail King.  That is the message of the legend.

Keep on trying and you’ll get help.  It comes in strange forms, sort of like messengers and messages sent from the Spirit World.  Ultimately the hero discovers the real center of the universe is not the ego.  That Source, that Center, dwells within each and every one of us humans.  Carl Jung called it the Self.  It is an ordering principle.  Aristotle called it the Telos, the End toward which all things strive.  It is an interactive Source, a Divine Intelligence with plans for each and every creature in our drama.  We can modify the drama to some extent, but only when we are willing to serve the Self, when we realize it has always been there authoring the synchronous magic in our lives.  That is when the Shift takes place.  And that is the end of the world for our powerless old ego selves, the Amfortas consciousness, which must die if we are to be reborn.  This is a good thing.  Now there is hope.  Now we are whole.  Now we are home.  What do we do?  Continue down the road, turn left, and cross over into Imagination.

I am indebted to Joseph Campbell and several Jungian analysts for the material in this essay, especially Emma Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, and Robert Johnson.

Irene Claremont de Castillejo

In her eighties she wrote a book called Knowing Woman: A Feminine Psychology (1973).  It is a classic text by an Elder.  In her chapter entitled “What Do We Mean By Love?”, Irene says:

“Parents spend their lives trying to save their children from making mistakes.  And yet, when we look back over our own lives, we can all see how fruitful our mistakes have been.  The mother who prays daily for her son’s welfare is still playing her protective role, still trying to be a breakwater.  She is giving in excess of his need and the love between them vanishes.  If she could only be content to pray that nothing be allowed to divert him from his true destiny, whatever strange course that might take, then I believe he would be strengthened and not shackled by her prayers, and love might remain between them.
If on the other hand the mother errs in the opposite direction, her son may feel cast out and lost, and again love vanishes.  Our modern overstress on independence may be one cause of the number of lost young men wandering about today.
To strike the balance and give enough, yet not too much is immensely difficult.  Perhaps trust is all a woman can safely give her children.  Trust may be one of the vital conditions wherever we would have love stay.” (p.121)

I wonder what would happen if we were to pray for our children,
that nothing be allowed to divert them from their true destiny, whatever strange course that might take.

Having made that prayer, would we have the faith and trust to let Creator take care of it for us?

Or would we be like the parent who continually prays that Creator keep drugs and other bad influences away from her/his children?

Trust, what an interesting concept, can you trust me to keep my word, even if it doesn’t come in the time frame you want it in?  Can I trust Creator to heal me in His/Her OWN TIME?  Can I trust the Medicine to open me up to Self Healing?  And can I trust Creator, if I pray that nothing be allowed to divert me from my true destiny, whatever strange course that might take?