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“Our local zoo had for years one of the biggest African lions I’ve ever seen. A huge male, nearly five hundred pounds, with a wonderful mane and absolutely enormous paws.

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Panthera leo. The King of the Beasts. Sure, he was caged, but I’m telling you the bars offered small comfort when you stood within six feet of something that in any other situation saw you as an easy lunch. Honestly, I felt I ought to shepherd my boys past him at a safe distance, as if he could pounce on us if he really wanted to. Yet he was my favorite, and whenever the others would wander on to the monkey house or the tigers, I’d double back just for few more minutes in the presence of someone so powerful and noble and deadly. Perhaps it was fear mingled with admiration; perhaps it was simply that my heart broke for the big old cat.

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This wonderful, terrible creature should have been out roaming the savanna, ruling his pride, striking fear into the heart of every wildebeest, bringing down zebras and gazelles whenever the urge seized him. Instead, he spent every hour of every day and every night of every year alone, in a cage smaller than your bedroom, his food served him through a little metal door. Sometimes late at night, after the city had gone to sleep, I would hear his roar come down from the hills. It sounded not so much fierce, but rather mournful.

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During all my visits, he never looked me in the eye. I desperately wanted him to, wanted for his sake the chance to stare me down, would have loved it if he took a swipe at me.

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But he just lay there, weary with that deep weariness that comes from boredom, taking shallow breaths, rolling now and then from side to side.

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For after years of living in a cage, a lion no longer even believes it is a lion…..and a man no longer believes he is a man.”[1][2]

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.A pride of lions has a primeval character about it; sort of like an ancient tribe of hunter-gatherers. The male does virtually no work; he just breeds the females, plays with the cubs, and drives off other males. The lionesses do most of the work. For a few short years, he survives this way; king of his own kingdom. Then, some younger, more powerful male defeats him and drives him away. And his reign is over.

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Lions and men have a lot in common. When we are young, we have a kingdom to found, a pride to create. The dream lies before us. The dream happens, or our chance for the dream passes, and then it is over so quickly. Society though makes it all too easy. The tribal way is not man’s way but woman’s. In a way, both society’s roles and man’s family roles turn out to be cages instead of dreams. There is something bred into men and lions—something fierce…passionate…wild…that dies in these cages. Sometimes, boys are drawn out into gangs and wars by that wild need. Sometimes, it is repressed by mothers and wives and children who need his attention and ‘protection’ and sometimes it is stamped out by years of routine, repetition of meaningless work in the work place.

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Lion symbolizes the heart, masculine strength and courage, yet the real lives of men seem a universe away from the desires of his heart. What does he want? He wants a reason to be. He wants a purpose. Without a great battle in which to live or die, the fierce part of his nature goes underground, into his unconscious mind, and simmers there in a sullen anger that he can’t explain. Each year that passes drives another nail into his feet, like Jesus on the Cross, as he sacrifices his need to “be something” for others.

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Men past forty

Get up nights, look out at city lights

And wonder

Where they made the wrong turn

And why life is so long.

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What is it that is wrong? Most men don’t even know. We only know that we are restless, discontent, angry about the way our lives have turned out. We pursue the things we’re told are the marks of success: power, wealth, fame, the most desirable women. But once achieved, they turn out to be not enough. The heart is not satisfied with these goals.

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Ancient sages classified the masculine as “sun beings.” And the sun is the domain of individuality, ego-consciousness, which is separate and self-satisfying. The feminine, on the other hand, are “moon beings” which are tribal, collective, and group satisfying.

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Faced with the danger of life in the wild, the tribe comes first. Faced with the dangers of economic ruin in modern society, so too does the tribe come first. Men want to make a difference as an individual. They require a sense of self, a sense of personal pride, the feeling of being self-reliant and independent. That is not possible if one is to be a success in an organization or in a family. Woman want bonding, unity, domestication, collective identity, joint responsibility, and mutual dependence.

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Wives see that “making a difference” is a collective issue: raising a family, raising and caring for children, providing for the family unit. And it is! And in the modern workplace, the individual ego has no lasting place; it is the preservation of the collective organization that matters. Only the “top cat” in an organization can act the part of King of Beasts. Other males must circle and watch from a distance. They never win their Pride.

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A man must do.

He must disengage from the mother

And find his way of “doing,”

Which is a way of pain.

A woman has only to be.

.[3]

Losing their pride causes men to feel they are not men. Beneath their “public face” such men know they are a sham; they feel weak; they feel a failure. And they hate their weakness and insufficiency. Their frustrated passions turn dark. They become distant, abusive, controlling, angry at the wives and children, wander off into affairs, or lose themselves in strong drink. Or their self-hate turns them into hyenas, slinking around, hating themselves and their lives.

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Sometimes, men’s wives emasculate their self-doubting men. Women are often attracted to the wilder side of a man, but once having caught him, they set about domesticating him. If he gives in, he’ll always resent her for it, and his passion for her will fade.

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So society “puts men in a cage” to control them. Wives do too. Employers do too. Why?

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Because there is something dangerous, unpredictable, and unreliable about the masculine in a tribal society. Like a male lion, there is an instinctive violence in the masculine soul that is there for a reason. Nature puts it there. As a warrior or a hunter, he may be required to die for the good of the tribe, and he must have a natural fierceness of heart that leads him to face death with a sense of joy that he has discovered his purpose and meaning in nature. Ninety percent of all incarcerated felons are male for a reason. Women seldom commit the violence against other people as do men. Men never fully escape the restlessness that seethes within them, that keeps them from finding peaceful acceptance of society’s branding.

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Modern society, employers and families have no need for such fierceness of intent. Instead, they have a need for eunuchs: workers or providers without spirit, sense of self, or desire to rebel, who can be depended upon to work year after year without individuality. Equality is not the rule of the King of Beasts; dominance is. Equality is the rule of matriarchy. Women’s rule castrates men, as bureaucracy castrates its male employees; and in many cases, so too do wives their husbands. Those who survive rely on cunning, politics and lies to make their way through the corporate or bureaucratic forests they inhabit.

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Men’s mid-life crisis is a wake up call to such men. They are still tied to their mother’s needs. They are called to become the men they had never chosen to be. Wives, alarmed at the uncharacteristic behavior and feelings of rage and resentment their husbands experience at this time, panic and try to hold onto them, to bring them back into accustomed roles. And so end many marriages to wives who never understood the animal they married nor the male energies within themselves.

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When the old lion has lost his pride, there is little more that he can do but wander off to be alone, as so many men do: retiring early, turning away from careers, families, humdrum lives, dead dreams, to discover who they are and what is missing in their lives. What they are missing is feeling alive, knowing who they are, having a sense that their masculinity has made a difference, feeling that their purpose in nature has been fulfilled. While many receive some measure of satisfaction knowing that they were good fathers, good husbands, good employees or team members, most still remain unsatisfied, feeling that they were never good enough!

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When a lion, or a man for that matter, cannot love himself, he never gets his needs met sufficiently to be well with his life or himself.

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Of course, women being true to their own nature cannot be held accountable for this.

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They too have their individuality and need for true partnerships, for the voyage of married couples through life is hazardous as well and needs a steady hand at the tiller and a dependable crew. It is as though Nature arranged our lives, not for our individual happiness, but for the survival of the species. We are each perpetually in conflict yet need one another to be well!

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Men, and women, play their roles in their youth, coupling and procreating, raising young, and then coming back to their unfinished business. Society meanwhile expects them to continue on in the pattern established early in life. But the unfinished business of life calls us to find out what remains to us after the duties to society and procreation have been met. And the only way this can be met is to turn away from society and family, their expectations, their needs and demands, and attend to oneself.

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“Going in search of oneself” becomes the remaining task. And afterward? What can be started in old age? What might society make room for when an old lion is too old for the business of business, for raising families, for paying taxes and other adventures?”

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Perhaps nothing, but to retire and wait. Perhaps everything has been completed. And men will lie in their cages, waiting to be fed, and Nature—no longer interested in us—turns to younger lions and lionesses to begin again the cycle of birth and dying.

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John Eldridge, Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul (Nelson Books: 2003), p.40.

Ed Sussman Quote.

Diane K. Osbon, ed., Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion, page 228.

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Lately, I’ve been feeling kind of stuck. You know how it is. Doing the same things, everyday, until the routine begins to take the joy out of living. Sometimes, I need new things to be; and then again, sometimes I need to go back out into the woods where I can feel at peace again. So Grandfather came by and suggested we go back down to the river, where we could fool around, have some fun, talk about life.

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We drove down Highway 64, crossed Jordon Lake, and then turned off by Pittsboro. The Haw River crosses 64 a few miles outside Pittsboro. We both like the river there. The river bed is filled with huge rocks perfect for just sitting, or fishing, or spotting birds. I see Great Blue Herons there all the time, an occasional eagle. But yesterday, the place is rocking with kids. The State declared the area as a North Carolina State Park recently, and now the river banks and waters are likely to be full of kids, fishermen, kayakers and canoers. With all the racket, it takes much of the pleasure out of the park experience.

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Wildlife gets frightened away. You know how it is?

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I was getting hot and sweaty—it was 95 degrees and sunny—and began to think about heading back to our (air-conditioned) car. Grandfather wasn’t quite ready yet, and pointed upstream with his chin.

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“Let’s go up that way a bit,” he suggested.

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I thought about the sweat rolling down my sides under my shirt, and said, “Okay.”

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So we walked back through the woods and crossed over under the highway bridge. It wasn’t long before we noticed that there were no people up river. We began to hear bird calls, squirrels scrabbling up the pines, a Great Blue Heron startling up out of the water and winging further upstream. The spaces under the trees began to cool our heated skins, and I began to relax at last.

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Further upstream, we encountered scattered stones pushing their way above the river surface, and I began feeling childlike, wondering how might it feel to venture out onto the river’s surface, high wiring across from stone to stone. When I was a kid, I wouldn’t think twice about it. But I’m 62 now, and a slip on the mossy stones could shatter an elbow or break a hip.

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But those stones looked inviting, and I began to feel like trying it. It felt “dangerous!” Exciting. If I fell, what would most likely happen is that I would simply get wet! Grandfather said nothing; he just watched me looking at those stones like a kid and smiled to himself.

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The first stones were easy—low to the water, well grounded in the stream—but of course, as I got out into the river, the rocks required step ups and downs, and some of the rocks looked treacherous. I had to begin making choices. There were easy looking paths that went waaaaaaaaay around, and there were direct paths which looked more unsuitable. I had to think about what criteria was right for choosing a path. Finally, I decided that common sense made a good criteria: take the long path if it was the easier. I wasn’t in any hurry to get across the river, so take the easy way I decided. I figured that said a lot about the kind of decision-maker I was, but at the same time saw that there wasn’t a “right” nor a “wrong” answer. It was just who I was.

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Then, there were the looong steps to the next rock, and the small rocks where footing looked tenuous, and the rocks with no footing in the stream--which would turn under my foot if I didn’t step upon them at exactly the right angle. So I’m calculating as I go, balancing like a high wire artist; then in the water I go. Thankfully, the water doesn’t go over the top of my loafer, so I’m really thanking the gods, or somebody out there, for helping me stay upright.

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I’m beginning to see that my little river adventure is really a lot like life: I’m learning about life by trying to walk across the river!

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There are times when you just have to take a longer step than you feel comfortable with, and with some of those, you’re going to end up in the river. But if you are enjoying the adventure, it doesn’t hurt nearly so much. So I’m reviewing in my mind what is it that makes the difference: if you take your time and see it as fun, the mistakes aren’t nearly so painful or so often because you’ve thought them out ahead of time and took your steps with a smile and a dare. You can’t guess right every time, of course! And you don’t have to be perfect in your steps from rock to rock to successfully navigate the river. The rocks won’t move, you know. Just you decide when to step and where you’re going, and it gets easier. Don’t step before you’re ready. Don’t take silly risks unnecessarily. Take as long as you need. Don’t rush. There is really no point in it. The important thing is to enjoy your journey and don’t take silly risks for no reason.

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So I catch a glimpse of Grandfather behind me. He’s just stepping calmly from stone to stone like he was walking in the woods. His balance seems perfect! I’m wondering how he makes it look so easy, and I feel a hot rush of resentment. He is far older than me! He’s showing me up. Ignoring a handy rock handhold, I step across a long stretch, lose my balancing and windmill wildly from stone to stone to the far side. Embarrassed, I look back at Grandfather, but he’s just watching the river slide past his perch. Chagrined, I think I just got another lesson. Don’t show off. Don’t ignore a friendly helping hand just because I want others to see how hot I am.

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Finally, on the other side, I revel in my adventure. It has been 50 years since I did anything so foolhardy and adventurous! Grandfather sits beside me and we enjoy a few moments rest. A small flock of geese are watching us warily from a short distance, and I can see a small creek that winds off into the woods. Someday, I think, I’m going to follow that branch off through the forest and see where it leads.

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“That was fun!” I say. “Yup!,” he says, and smiles.

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I’m thinking now about my car back at the parking lot. In order to get back, we’re going to have to go back across the river and retrace our steps back through the woods. Just like life, I’m thinking. I’ve spent my whole life getting here, and what does it mean. I’ve worked my way across a river, and I’m only on the other side of the river. Am I better off? No, I’m thinking. I’m just on the other side of the river. Both sides of the river look exactly the same. I spent my whole life working my ass off to get to retirement. The real question is, have I enjoyed the journey? Did I enjoy the company I shared, the friendships, the lovers. I realize how I spent most of my own life struggling to get ahead, worrying about promotions or people who seemed to be getting ahead of me, jealously guarding my turf or prerogatives, trying to hold on to what I had. I figure that was really pretty stupid of me.

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I gave Grandfather a hug, thanked him for walking beside me as teacher and friend, and told him I loved him.

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“Let’s go home!,” I said. And off we went again

"When we inquire into [psychologist Carl] Jung’s contribution to our culture, one virtue appears to me to stand out. Jung gave a distinct response to our culture’s most persistent psychological need—from Oedipus to Socrates through Hamlet and Faust—Know Thyself. Not only did Jung take this maxim as the leitmotif of his own life, but he gave us a method by which we may each respond to this fundamental question of self-knowledge. It is to this how, the art or method of proceeding with oneself, which is as well the grounding impetus within all psychology that we can especially learn from Jung.

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You may remember how this began: it is told by Aniela Jaffe in Jung’s autobiography. Jung was deluged by “an incessant stream of fantasies,” a “multitude of psychic contents and images,” In order to cope with the storms of emotion, he wrote down his fantasies and let the storms transpose themselves into images.

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You remember also when this took place: it happened shortly after the break with [Sigmund] Freud—so much so that Stanley Leavy has suggested that the Salome in the vision which I shall soon come to is none other than a disguised Lou Andreas-Salome, and the Elijah none other than Freud. At this moment, Jung was spiritually alone. But in this isolation he turned neither to a new group, not to organized religion, nor to refuge in psychosis, nor to security unconventional activities, work, or family: he turned to his images. When there was nothing else to hold to, Jung turned to the personified images of interior vision. He entered into an interior drama, took himself into an imaginative fiction and then, perhaps, began his healing—even if it has been called his breakdown. There, he found a place to go that was no longer Vienna, figures to communicate with who were no longer the psychoanalytic circle of colleagues, and a counselor who was no longer Freud. This encounter with these personal figures became the first personifications of his mature fate—which is also how Jung speaks of the personifications we meet when we interiorize to Know Thyself. It was in this time, during which the dove-maiden spoke to him in a crucial dream, that Jung found his vocation, his psychological faith, and a sense of personality. It is from this point onward that Jung becomes that extraordinary pioneering advocate of the reality of the psyche.

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We have looked at how and when, now the what and who. What was the content of the first visions and who did Jung meet? The autobiography says:

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In order to seize hold of the fantasies, I frequently imagined a steep descent. I even made several attempts to get to the very bottom…It was like a voyage to the moon, or a descent into empty space…I had the feeling that I was in the land of the dead…the other world…I caught sight of two figures, an old man with a white beard and a beautiful young girl. I summoned up my courage and approached them as though they were real people, and listened attentively to what they told me.

I cite this passage in detail because it is the key to the method; we can take it as an instructor’s manual.

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The figures whom Jung encountered were Elijah, Salome, and a black serpent. Soon Elijah transformed into Philemon, of whom Jung says:

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Philemon was a pagan and brought with him an Egypto-Hellenistic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration…Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life.

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The cosmos brought by Elijah, Salome, the black serpent, and Philemon—the
Egypto-Hellenistic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration”—was the very one that could sustain the act which Jung was performing. I can hardly stress this enough: the figures Jung first met and who convinced him of the reality of their psychic being by extending to him personal relations with the powers of the psyche, these figures who Jung first met and who convinced him of the reality of their psychic being by extending to him personal relations with the powers of the psyche, these figures derive from the Hellenistic world and its belief in daimons. (Daimon is the original Greek spelling for these figures who later became demons because of the Christian view and daemons in positive contradistinction to that view.)

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Jung’s descent to the “land of the dead” presented him with his spiritual ancestors, who, through Jung, ushered in a new daimonology and angelogy.

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Know Thyself in Jung’s manner means to become familiar with, to open oneself to and listen to, that is, to know and discern, daimons. Entering one’s interior story takes a courage similar to starting a novel. We have to engage with personas whose autonomy may radically alter, even dominate, our thoughts and feelings, neither ordering these persons about nor yielding to them full sway. Fictional and factual, they and we, are drawn together like threads into a mythos, a plot, until death do us part. It is a rare courage that submits to this middle region of psychic reality where the supposed surety of fact and illusion of fiction exchange heir clothes.

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Just to remind us what a radical, shattering move—theological, epistemological, ontological-Jung’s personifying was, let me merely pronounce the usual judgment upon daimons that is part of our Western religious psychology. Whether Eastern Church or Roman, whether Old Testament or New, whether Protestant or Catholic—daimons are no good things. They are part of the world of Satan, of Chaos, of Temptation. They have been written against by major Christian theologians down through the centuries, associated with the cult of serpent worship in the midst of Christian Europe, and they are, according to the authority of Matthew’s Gospel, the source of possession, sickness, and magic.

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Who indeed are these figures that they should be so menacing? If we look into the world before and parallel with the rise of Christianity—first to Homer, then to Plato and the dramatists, then to Plutarch, Plotinus, Iamblichus, and then to the Renaissance—the daimons were figures of the middle realm, neither quite transcendent Gods nor quite physical humans, and there were many sorts of them, beneficial, terrifying, message-bringers, mediators, voices of guidance and caution (as Socrates’ Daimon and as Diotima). Even Eros was a daimon.

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But the dogmatic, crystallization of our religious culture demonized the daimons. As a fundamental component of polytheistic paganism, they had to be negated and denied by Christian theology which projected its repression upon the daimons, calling them the forces of denial and negation. Thus Jung’s move which turned directly to the images and figures of the middle realm was a heretical, demonic move. His move into the imagination, which had been forced upon him by his fantasies and emotions, had already been prejudged in our religious language as demonic and in our clinical language as multiple personality or a schizophrenia. Yet, this radical activation of imagination was Jung’s method of Know Thyself.

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His move between the two orthodoxies of theological religion and clinical scientism re-established in experience the middle realm which he was to call “psychic reality.” This psychic reality discovered by Jung consists in fictive figures. It is poetic, dramatic, literary in nature. The Platonic metaxy speaks in mythical fictions. Freud’s fictioning appeared disguised in his case histories and his cosmogonic theories. Jung’s appeared overtly in the history of his own case. Freud entered the literary imagination by writing about other people, Jung by envisioning himself as “other people.” What we learn from Freud is that his literary imagination goes on in the midst historical fact. What we learn from Jung is that his literary imagination goes on in the midst of ourselves. Poetic dramatic fictions are what actually people our psychic life. Our life in soul is a life in imagination.

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We have already been given the clue in the instructor’s manual as to how this third realm traditionally called “soul” can be re-established—and by anyone. Jung says he treated the figures whom he met “as thought they were real people.” The key is that as though, the metaphorical as-if reality, neither literally real (hallucinations or people in the street) nor irreal/unreal (mere fictions) projections which “I” make up as parts of “me”, auto-suggestive illusions). In an “as-if” consciousness they are powers with voice, body, motion, and mind, fully felt but wholly imaginary. This is psychic reality, and it comes in the shape of daimons. By means of these diamonic realities, Jung confirmed the autonomy of the soul. His own experience connected again the realm of daimons with that of soul. And ever since his move, soul and daimons imply, even require, each other.

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Source: James Hillman, Healing Fiction (Spring Publications: Putnam, CT), pp. 53-56.

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In these ancient tribal teachings of the Dreamtime and ‘the dreaming’ lie hints of the lost Paradise of Eden. We hear echoes of our ancient animal past as well in the conversation between the apprentice, Carlos Castaneda, speaking to his Mentor, the Nagual Don Juan, in the teachings he spoke of in his books of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Carlos was expressing to don Juan his observation that he was kind and rational. Don Juan replies that Carlos is only noticing his impeccability and that in fact he was not rational at all. He was not something modern and new, but something very old.

The task of becoming conscious is our part of our spiritual journey here on Earth. It is what we are here for, yet so many assume that their limited conscious mind is all there is, their conscious awareness is complete, and that they are as good as anyone is in this regard. The truth, if there is any such thing, is quite different. We are conditioned beings, in essence living the same lives our parents did, and caught in negative emotions and indifferent to the needs of our bodies, minds, and spirits. And yet we deny this, fearing that our self images might be humbled if we admitted that we don’t understand the lives we are living, we don’t see our conditioning, and mostly spend our waking moments struggling to survive from day to day.

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As Carl Jung observed, we don’t know our selves at all, but we deny that fact. We mistake who we have been taught we should be with who we really are. And we don’t accept our selves as we are. Not accepting our selves the way we are, we reject who and what we are, trying to be someone else. We restlessly and constantly worry about how to become better and change our lives.

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Becoming conscious involves becoming aware of those parts of ourselves of which we are unconscious.

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The Journey to your own Self requires a journey into the Unconscious Realms of mind, need and human nature.

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We are often forced by personal crisis into this task of “individuation”, to delve into our shadows to bring our repressed memories, beliefs, and self concepts into the conscious mind; to heal our neurosis and pathology, and balance our inner masculine and feminine energies. Less obvious is our task of repairing the fragmented or damaged sense of self most of us possess. Our life task to “individuate” implies that we finish “growing up” before coming to our deaths. We are naturally pushed psychologically along toward a maturity of self as we enter the final quarter of our life cycle.

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For some, the Path goes through the revealing of Nature as our true source, becoming re-acquainted with our basic animal and instinctual nature; into the causes underlying personality issues like neuroses and pathological attitudes and behaviors; then on to the Soul level, where we begin to know ourselves as energy patterns and flows; then on to the Genetic level where we get our needs assembled and see ourselves as bundles of needs defined, of course, by the Spirit of our Universe; and (perhaps) finally on to our Sense of Self as "Higher/Lower" needs as Love versus Negative Values. In summary, the Path goes into our nature as a physical being and then into personality and finally into our essence as spirit itself. For most of us, these are the domains of the Unconscious Mind.

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These are strange paths for most of us. Few know how even to begin to consider such topics. But the Ways have been walked by many over the Ages. The Path is not found without--even in Churches such as those we now attend or on the couches of psychotherapists--but into our very innermost realms. The Way is found through Inner Work: through dreaming and the understanding of dreams, through active imagination, through strengthening and relying on our intuitive nature, and through alertness to the domain in which we live and breath--the world of Nature.

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For those who feel they are ready to venture into their great Unknown--the Unconscious Mind--there are books and "allies" who will help. There are others--both material and etherial--which may deceive for their own reasons. Belief is your enemy. As beings who have been socially and religiously conditioned to believe in certain truths, we are often not open to reality as it is. We are overwhelmed by moral and social judgments which channel our thinking and awareness into habitual channels and directions.

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Our unawareness means that we too often start off in the wrong direction. The Universe is Here Now, all around us, demonstrating to us how things work, exist, and function. Yet we are locked in our own beliefs, opinions, rules and habitual concepts, unable to see, or hear, or feel the truths surrounding us. So many of these beliefs, opinions, rules and concepts we insist upon are lies that it isn’t really helpful to hold on to any of them. When you don’t know which are true, you might as well drop them all and start over. We stop expressing or relying on any opinions we have evolved, and we stop being swayed by the opinions or beliefs of others. We drop all rules about life we were taught brought happiness or led to success. We drop all ideas we may have formed about the necessity of being a "good person" because we sense that living our lives by "shoulds and oughts" has led us into dark waters, self-repudiation, and self-dislike. We decide to relearn these issues directly from life experience, Spirit, and Nature.

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Without these habitual patterns of thought to anchor us in social reality, we feel naked and vulnerable, for now all Life has become a mystery and an Unknown. We no longer feel we understand the answers to life, relationships, or success. We no longer know what a successful life is. Without beliefs and opinions and rules for defining how life works, we find ourselves standing on thin air, not knowing what to do or say or be. Here, for the first time in our life, we are ready to be taught; we are open and not closed to new ideas or points of view. When everything is in chaos and we realize that we really know nothing at all, we are ready to align with Spirit and begin to let our egos go. We are ready to work with our Sexual Soul Force energy--the Spirit of Life itself--which knows which is the Way for us.

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We need an Ally to help keep us honest with ourselves, to show us the way when things become so complicated and lost we can’t begin to love ourselves enough to trust the inner voices and signs all around us. So we pray and invoke the aid of Self, Holy Spirit, Higher Self, Jesus Christ, your Power Animal, or any other spiritual force willing to come to our aid. Here, faith comes in. Faith is necessary to accept that, even though our personal experience may have shown us otherwise, the Universe is a kind and loving place for us. And so we watch and listen for the unexpected, coincidence, the impossibly improbable to intervene and show us the way. CG Jung called this synchronicity: communication of the Unconscious with you, or even intervention of the Unknown into our lives.

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The Elders have always taught that the World attempts to communicate with each of us constantly. But locked in our reasonableness, our taught worldviews, our beliefs and self concepts, we disregard the signs, omens, coincidences and symbols thrown up to us daily in our lives and by Nature. Our culture assumes that cause and effect behave in a predictable and orderly fashion, and that coincidence means only that some random event has occurred. In fact, cause and effect do not operate as we understand them. And since everything is connected to everything else, nothing is coincidental.

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For most of us, it has been a long time--since childhood perhaps--since we took any notice of the world in a friendly way. But my experience at least is that the world is waiting for us to notice it and waiting to speak to us. We must learn again how to listen and how to be in relationship. Dennis Genpo Merzel, an American Zen Master, reminds us that we must learn to "see with our ears and hear with our eyes" when awaiting the teachings of the 10,000 things. We must learn to pay attention and to see the mountains speak in the language spoken by the mountains. We must pay attention so that we can hear the river dance in the way the the river dances. What does he mean? Our senses are the senses of the world for perceiving itself because we are conscious. When we pay attention, we enter relationship of the most intimate kind with the earth. That intimacy of relationship is "felt", seen, heard, tasted, smelled.

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We must pay attention, get out of our own way so we can be receptive, so we can enter into an intimate relationship with the earth. The Earth and its five worlds then greets us in joy and begins a dialog with us, teaching us, leading us, waiting for our understanding of its need to be in our life--for through us, the Earth awakens and speaks and talks with other beings, and sees its beauty, and hears its many voices. We become aware of the livingness of the mineral world, the plant world, the animal world and the world of the ancestors. We become aware that, within us, there are allies as well who are attracted to our need to know ourselves. We become aware that it has always be we who prevented us from enjoying truly intimate relationships with other human beings, and we begin to learn--some of us for perhaps the very first time--how to be in relationship.

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Awake at last, we begin to notice our own nature, our own bodies and how they work, how they feel, and behave even when we are not consciously commanding action or aware of how the body feels or is acting. The body begins to appear as if it has a life and intention of its own, and we learn how to relate to this new ally in our Earthwalk. From our body, we learn about femaleness and maleness, and finally recognize how this is true of all beings and objects about us. The feminine and the masculine define all things and are sacred principles of creation.

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From the body, we begin to notice the movement of energy within, the feel of energy moving as if it knew us and knew what we needed without any intention on our part. And then, we notice the movement of energies all around us, as the unknown needs of the aura and its symbiotic minds, begin to work on and with our inner most need to exist.

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The unconscious parts of ourselves announce themselves in dreams and unconscious behaviors which we finally begin to notice. And so we begin to learn how to work with those levels of Mind which are normally invisible to us. This first level of work is with our personality. Working with the personality means going back to the beginning of our lives and seeing ourselves the way we truly were as children, adolescents, young adults, and finally elders. We recall our lives darkly, as characterized by victimization, weakness, lies of others, and distrust of others. We see others to blame for what has happened to us. This must change so that we can see ourselves as responsible for our past lives and responsible for ourselves now as well. So we learn to recapitulate and to find the light in the darkness of our old stories about ourselves. We learn that our story must be rewritten and retold from a new more positive perspective--a perspective that reveals the wonder of our life as a learning experience for everyone involved.

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Shadow work defines much of this work. Discovering the "why s" of our existing attitudes that trace back to soul loss in childhood and youth, forgiving others and forgiving ourselves for what happened that caused those losses, overcoming our losses of self love by learning again how to love those lost parts of ourselves who want to come back to us and be a part of our current lives. Shadow work means we are using dreams and other techniques to peek into our personal unconscious where the lost parts of ourselves, the rejected aspects of our being since beyond the birth experience, have been shut away, reviled, or judged unwanted. Now is the time we ask them to come back and be with us in life. This is the time of learning that man is both light and dark, and that both have their place in life and need. And so those lost parts of ourselves come, tentatively sometimes, because they always wanted to be in us but they too must learn to trust us, open their hearts and open to the possibility of loss.

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We are begin to see ourselves as a spirit of spirits--as a collective being with many levels of consciousness, feelings and mind. We learn to accept our potential for violence, our primitive instincts and needs, our losses, our need for love, and our need to be accepted by others as human and good. We come to see our vulnerability as precious even though it leads us into pain, and we recognize how Beautiful it is being human. We learn that Everything that is arises from Basic Goodness, and that our nature is Basic Goodness.

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We are learning to love ourselves at last. At the same time, we are learning to work with fear, with loss, with issues of power and manipulation, and with love.

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We are constantly seeking knowledge, asking questions, and finding answers which are not necessarily the ones we once accepted. Yet at the same time, those answers are only alternative points of view in life’s movement and illusions. The mind for a long while grasps at these answers, hoping for a definitive response from the Universe which, once and for all, will explain how things work, why has our life turned out the way it has, what more is expected of us, what should we do next?

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Finally, the seeking mind collapses, exhausted by its seeking for answers and solutions where there are none but ourselves to decide, to do, to fail, or to try. The lesson over and over is that you are the One to choose and live, not as others--even any god or love lesson--might desire you to live. You get to choose and to lose (or win) if that is your own need.

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Freedom is this. We are human. We are empowered by God, or the Universe if that is your point of view, to live His needs. When we learn in life to deny our needs, we suffer. When we are able to learn to accept those needs back and to live them, we find peace and, perhaps, joy or love. So we try to meet these needs long denied. Our attempts might fail, so losing is one possibility. Winning is also another possible outcome. But we learn how winning carries within it losing, and losing often holds within it the seeds for longer term growth. It needs to be seen how losing in one sense is also winning from another. Nothing is clear or unambiguous. We learn to find the light within the darkness, and to recognize the darkness within the light.

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Our experiences move in spirals, leading us back to knowledge we disregarded or missed or misused so that we have new opportunities to integrate that knowledge. We are asked to be here now, "being present" is Spirit’s requirement to notice It is here too, within us, being us, asking us to be well so that it may help us be one with it.

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Know that this is a highly personal journey you can choose to make. No one can tell you the way. You choose it and then walk it. Choose then. And see what you happens.

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Consider the following reference materials to get started, if that is your wish:

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Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams & Active Imagination for Personal Growth (Harper Collins Publishers: 1986). 

Once upon a time there was a miller. For years, he had been patiently serving his family and community by grinding out flour from grain brought to him by his neighbors and in return, earned an honest living. His horse pulled the great stone wheel around and around and slowly the corn was ground into soft, white flour. For many years, he lived in peace and harmony with his wife and innocent young daughter.

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One day the Devil appeared at their door and told the miller, "For a fee, I will show you how to grind your grain with much less effort and much faster." The miller, intrigued, made a bargain with the devil, thinking, "anything that takes less work and gives greater out-put would make our lives much easier."

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"What is your fee?", the miller asked.

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"That which stands behind the mill," replied the Devil.

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Recalling that the only thing which stood behind the mill was an old tree, the miller quickly agreed.

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The Devil then showed the miller how to build a water wheel, create gears, and build the supporting infrastructure so that the flowing river did the work of turning the heavy grinding wheel. The delighted miller found that he could easily grind much more flour than before and the wealth of his family increased. Life was so much easier and all his family members had more leisure time to enjoy their lives. Neighbors all admired the creativity and resourcefulness of the miller for his new invention, and he recognized how he had become so much more important in the community.

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One day soon after, the Devil appeared again at the miller’s door and demanded payment of his fee. Together, the two walked through the mill, passing through the back door to the mill. There, the miller encountered his young daughter standing beside the old tree. The Devil, to the miller’s horror, claimed the daughter as his fee. The miller was disconsolate, but was unwilling to give up the expanded productivity of his mill or his important new status in the community, so he reluctantly gave his daughter to the Devil. The Devil chopped off her hands and carried them away. His daughter stood and said nothing.

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For some time, the handless maiden was content with her situation and did not complain. After all, all her needs were met and everything was done for her. There was enough money to have servants in the household, and she did not have to do anything that would require hands. Gradually however, she grew unhappy, depressed and withdrawn. Her mechanically served life became less and less pleasant, until finally, she began to weep and could not stop. Her parents could not see what she had to complain about; they now had their work and community projects and felt life was definitely better.

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Finally, one night while her parents and all the servants were sleeping, she slipped out of the house and fled into the forest. Deep in the forest, scratched by the briars and bruised by her flight, she began to learn how to survive on her own. Gradually, she learned how to care for herself and at last found peace and solitude in the quiet naturalness of the Woods.

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One day, during her daily walk through the Woods, she encountered a swamp. Struggling through the mud and pools of still water, she stumbled upon a beautiful landscaped garden. Hungry and weary from her struggle through the wasteland, she sees within the garden a pear tree. Without hands, she was only just able to reach one pear with her teeth and satisfy her hunger. Feeling she should not take more than she needs, she ate only one. Tired by her journey however, she stayed in the garden for several days, eating one pear a day to survive.

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Unknown to her, her beautiful garden was the king’s garden. One day, the king’s gardener noticed that someone had been eating pears from the tree and tells the king. Both men then waited in hiding nearby to see who was taking his pears. The two saw the pathetic sight of the handless maiden struggling to eat her single pear of the day, and the king fell head over heals in love with her.

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The king took the handless maiden home with him and made her his Queen. She implored him that she could not possibly be his Queen without her hands, but he assured her that he will take care of her and she will not need her hands.

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She found nevertheless that it was very difficult to be Queen without her hands. She had to at least be graceful and beautiful, and greet and entertain guests at royal occasions. So the king called his magicians and commanded them to create a pair of silver hands for his queen. With her new silver hands, she became the talk of the court, and the fame of her grace and beauty spread throughout the land. But within the heart of the Queen, something was deeply wrong; she found that she felt isolated somehow, alone, purposeless, useless. She felt that other people lived, but she did not; she only watched from a distance.

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In time, the Queen bore the King a son. Without real hands of course, the Queen could not care for the infant, but with all the servants, there was really no need for her to work. As she watched the servants care for her child, the Queen began to weep and could not stop her tears. She wanted to care for her own baby, but could not. So silently, in the dark of night, she wrapped her arms about her baby and slipped back into the forest.

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During her flight through the forest, the Queen found that she must ford a rapidly flowing stream. In crossing, she faltered, and her baby slipped from her metal hands into the water. Panicking, she cried to her servants to save her child, forgetting for an instant that she was alone. But realizing that there was now no one else but herself to save her baby, she plunged her useless silver hands into the stream to grasp at the child. Somehow she found the strength to hold the child, and when she drew the child from the water, she saw that a miracle had occurred. Her useless silver hands had been transformed into hands of flesh and blood!