When I was thirteen, I
had a wonderful dream. The dream was quite complex and involved, but here are
the main elements. I was in a huge arena, which I came to understand in the
dream was the “arena of the world.” There was a large crowd of people walking
up stairs into the arena, but I was walking down a set of stairs away from it.
I walked down many flights of stairs, and came to an underground passageway. I
entered the passageway and I saw a door ajar with a golden light coming from
it. I opened the door, and inside was a beautiful woman, giving off a radiant
golden light. We exchanged no words, but I felt a great joy in her presence.
The dream was so
beautiful and powerful, that I wrote it down when I woke up, so I was able to
remember many of the details. I had never heard of Jung at the time, but years
later, when I read Jung, I immediately recognized the woman as the Jungian
anima. While I know a Freudian would quickly read such a dream in a youngster
at the age of puberty in sexual terms, there was nothing sexual about the dream.
Many years later, at the
age of twenty-two, I had a dream that contained the following: I was on the
North Shore of Lake Superior at a place like Gooseberry Falls. There was a gas
station built out on the rocks by the water, a Mobil station. I stopped in the
station and went into the bathroom. There was a stairs leading down into a
lower level, and men were walking up the stairs. I walked down. When I got to
the bottom there was a woman there lying naked in a pile of rags. Semen was dripping
out of her vagina. I looked at her and I knew she was the same woman I had
visited in that earlier dream.
A few years before this
second dream, I set about living the hedonistic life style. I wanted to explore
every avenue of pleasure and maximize the amount of pleasure I could have.
Being the early seventies, there was a great opportunity. I lived the sex,
drugs, and rock and roll scene to the maximum. I had a great time, but after a
few years, I felt like ashes.
It was at this time that
I had the second dream. It had a very powerful effect on me. I understood
immediately the connection between the two dreams. The first dream was a
calling, and the second told me I was failing in my calling. Recognizing this,
I put an end to my pursuit of hedonism, and went back to my Zen Buddhist
practice that I had abandoned. (The Mobil station and the North Shore are
personal elements of the dream — my earliest sexual encounter is associated
with a Mobil Station, and the North Shore has always been for me a sacred, holy
place.)
The encounters with the
Anima, the Goddess, did not end there. The most recent was a few years ago on
an October night at Gooseberry Falls on the rocks by the Lake. I was meditating
in the moonlight. During the meditation, I had made a commitment towards a
certain course of action in my life. But as I was getting up to leave, a female
voice said to me, “No, that is not the way it is to be,” and then told me the
way it was to be. From the distance of a few years, I can now see that the
course of action I was told to take was both wise and also aligned with that
original calling.
Now, I understand if at
this point the reader thinks I’m simply crazy. It is very un-modern to hear
voices and heed them. I write all this only to give a concrete example of how
the archetypes can operate. I do not believe that the Goddess I have so wonderfully
met exists as an entity out in the world, but nor is she something solely in
“my” mind. I do not think she belongs to the supernatural, or is in violation
of the dictates of naturalism, but I do think she challenges any simplistic
understanding of dreams or the nature of the unconscious.
While I’m not sure what
level of reality all this occurs on, I do know that through these dreams and in
this calling, I feel deeply blessed, and I wouldn’t trade that blessing for
anything.
Afterword
I wrote this piece several years ago for the Humanistic
Paganism website. I am now in my early sixties, and it amazes me the degree to which this dream from my youth speaks so much about my life.
There are many different callings in life – a life of
leadership or service to the community, to scholarship and research, to the
arts and crafts – to name a few. There
is not one best way, but for each individual I would suggest that the best way
is to find and follow your true calling.
I was called to be a mystic or what in earlier times would
have been a shaman. There have been
cultures and times when this was a respected calling, but ours is not such a
time. There have also been cultures and
times when the Goddess -- the divinity of the earthly, dark, and soulful -- was
the main object of human veneration. Our
time is also far removed from those.
Because
our times are the way they are, it has been a prerequisite of this calling to be
an outsider (to walk away from the arena of the world); that has its costs, but it is a small price to
pay for the deep abiding joy comes from fealty to those eternal inner values the Goddess symbolizes.
