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[Continuing Robert Clarke’s reaction to my 2003 writeup of my trip to Iona. ]

Dennis seems to be something of a positive shadow figure; mischievous, friendly, though you have to be a little wary of him. The congressman you are working for is probably a representative of the Self. A figure of authority, teacher, doctor, politician (unless you’re dead against him), even an older brother, usually fill this role. Kelly is the feminine anima, and the water meditation you do together is the harmonious work you are doing on the unconscious together.

“Compounded of primary influences that hate each other’s values” are parts of the unconscious that are in conflict (whether including past lives or not, quite possibly so. The material we experience in the unconscious processes covers a vast area.) This is why the mandala is the main abstract symbol of the Self. Although the disagreeing parts cannot relate to each other, each one can relate to the centre, which is the Self. So all find harmony encircling the Self, and there is a Gnostic text where the twelve disciples do a “round dance” encircling Christ at the centre with the same meaning. It is the task of consciousness in the individuation process to achieve this situation on behalf of the Self.

[This part refers to dreams recorded in “Iona (6)”]

Bill Hughes as congressman again seems a representative of the Self, and speaking for him on TV is apparently speaking for the Self. A TV picks up signals transmitted through the air from the station and in a similar way we “pick up” messages sent by the “other reality” of the spirit, or the Self. Earlier David told you not to be afraid to speak your truth, and now you do just that on TV. But it is not primarily your truth, but that of the Self, and ultimately of God, although you share in it. The true priest, true prophet, true saint is the “mouthpiece” of God.

Does John Lennon refer to someone you know? Living by the ocean is very close to the collective unconscious, which can be highly dangerous. Living casually with fire is doing this with the spirit, but his house, his wider psyche, is in danger because the spirit is flammable. Gilgamesh is in a reed house when he is warned of the coming flood that brings destruction –  flood and fire go together. Lennon, or whom he represents, should go back down to the swampy, murky depths of the unconscious where the treasures lie. The spiritual treasures can only be gained by going to the lower soul depths first.

Remember Jung’s patient we talked about, the clergyman who kept dreaming of a treasure on a hill? But he could only reach it by going through a valley first, where there was a lake. This frightened him, so he kept running away. The boy with the dog represents two early forms of the Self, the dog-spirit and divine child. The spigot stops up the gap or controls the flow. It therefore stops the floods from the unconscious that could overwhelm consciousness. Dangerous fire is usually followed by dangerous floods. Lennon may be yourself. Your psyche may have been in danger. You may have been filling your life with things but not getting down to the real work in the unconscious, where it must be done. Consequently the spirit was ungrounded and dangerous, and this means an inundation from the unconscious. But the spigot stops the flow and controls everything, and things are remedied in time. Don’t worry; this sort of thing, danger etc., happens constantly during the processes, and we always seem to make the adjustment just in time. The sand, as said above, was a binding agent in alchemy, and lying on the beach, is in between land and sea, and so unites both, therefore the conscious with the unconscious.

The mantle of Columba is that of the prophet/saint – like that of Elijah, which he passes on to Elisha. It is a very heavy burden that few can wear and carry, and few would wish to if they knew what it entails. If you continue with the work you may indeed become a true prophet and saint, and I think you have it in you to be so, but be very aware of the heavy burden.

The unconscious often uses number symbolism, and much of the time we can’t figure it out. Columba having access to the numbers probably means that he was a very successful adept in the processes. Sunglasses are protection from the sun and therefore from the glare of higher spirit – God is symbolically the Sun, as is his divine Son.

Autistic boy, unable to communicate with others? Anything to do with speaking on TV earlier? A boy in dreams usually means the Self in the first stages. Fish stick, the Fish symbol? Tomato sauce, blood, a symbol of spirit therefore? “Columba had access to information unavailable to common consciousness” you say – except through processes of the unconscious, that is. We can share deeper meaning with these saints, one we understand the symbolism. Tip of the iceberg? The unconscious has provided these words. The tip above the sea is consciousness, the rest of the iceberg below is the total psyche, or even the Self, while the ocean is the collective unconscious itself.

You ask, where is the right path? How is society to be regenerated?  … not by a spirituality so personal as to omit community. Not by reliance on someone else’s interpretation as the final word etc. All very right and true, proving you are on the right path, asking the right questions. But we can only find the answer where it has always been found, through the Underworld/unconscious quest. Gilgamesh asks similar questions, plus why is there death, and why is there life, and what is the ultimate meaning, and so on. So he descends to the lower Underworld, the unconscious, facing and fighting its dangers to eventually ascend a mountain (or seven mountains), where he finds the god Utnapishtim, the Higher Self. This is his individuation process and it always unites matter and spirit, which eventually has its effects on conscious culture.

All over the world, the hero’s development and bringing forth of the Higher Self has meant a respiritualisation of society, if the phenomenon is accepted by the culture. Marduk, Christ, Oannes, Quetzalcoatl, Kwan Shai Yin, Krishna, the Buddha, all undergo the individuation process to highest level, and then institute an epoch of spiritual blossoming. From the human side it is development of the Self, but from the side of the spirit it means the divine incarnation of God.  It is always the same problem basically, of society falling into chaos at the loss of communication with God or the spirit, and the answer is always the same, eventually laying down the common path for all to follow. But the phenomenon must be recognised by the culture.

The dream of the hill and the long, long way down to the water – the mountain and the lake of the abyss in the Underworld again perhaps. And maybe you are way too high up without going down first. The two ladies, representations of the feminine unconscious, fall to those depths, “as though they were angels”. Often in mythology the angels fall to the lower Underworld, though these are usually male – in the Bible, the Nephalim are the falling angels.

Doing construction work in the church, where the woman of authority (of the unconscious) says you have great force. You must do it, or it can’t be done. Now we are coming to it. This says it all. Building the church is building the Higher Self. Solomon building God’s temple means exactly the same. This may mean a divine incarnation, though it all takes place in the unconscious. Remember me saying that David begins the temple but Solomon completes it? Moses begins the Promised Land task and Joshua completes it. John the Baptist begins, Christ completes. Earlier, Osiris begins and Horus completes. The man in your dream begins and you have the chance to complete.

St Francis was told by God to build the church, which he first took to mean the ruin he was in at the time. Then he took it to mean the Church itself. But it really meant building the structure of the Higher Self and this, as said, can indeed lead to a respiritualisation in the outer world. I have little doubt that you could build the structure of the Self yourself, maybe even go all the way. You have the right temperament, the thirst for spirituality, the basic goodness of heart, and the intelligence. I constructed the Self myself for some time, but couldn’t sustain it. It takes superhuman powers, not to rise above and inflate, as Nietzsche mistakenly took it, but rather to deflate in humility and self-sacrifice, to empty oneself of the world. It depends how far one wants to go. But, as said above, it is a very heavy burden that few would take on if they knew the suffering it entails.

Daydreams are the first stage of Jung’s active imagination, where consciousness is lowered and the unconscious rises to a degree. This can provide much rich and meaningful information.

The author of The Cloud of Unknowing says that its techniques should only be used by a committed Christian. This is very wise, for as Jung says, the processes should be done within the protective walls of an established religion that has been founded on the same processes in the first place. The spirit is like electricity and must be channelled by a religious way of thinking that the spirit/unconscious recognises. As the alchemists said, “Not a few have perished in our work.” The Western collective unconscious is Christianised on the higher spirit side, having alchemical symbolism constellated on the lower spirit side, though the former must always dominate over the latter. Love is absolutely essential, of course.

“How can we of another age reconcile the author’s experience with ours?” The collective unconscious, the “other reality” is behind all physical reality. It is timeless and produces the same symbolism across thousands of years, giving the same answers. We can therefore share this same symbolism with the figures of the past because it means the same phenomena to us as it did to them. If you dreamt of a hare, for example, it would have the same meaning as it had for an ancient Egyptian, and for a medieval alchemist or mystic. The hare is a symbol of the lower Self; of both Osiris and Mercurius.

Final word about God’s wrath and anger. In my very first experience of God he appeared in the clouds angry; angry with modern man, who has come largely to deny him to worship all the forms of matter. God certainly becomes angrier as things get worse. Jung says we can love God, but we must also fear him. God is the supreme complexity of opposites, being like man but in a super-super way. If God cannot feel anger but man can, then man in that sense is greater than God. But it is man, who constantly opposes God to go his own way in matter that brings forth God’s anger. In the ancient and medieval worlds, God was likened to an angry rhinoceros that had to be won over by love. This is why Christ brings forth God’s loving side with his own love. Goethe’s Faust, based on an individuation process lasting many years, brought forth God’s dark side, as Mephistopheles.

I haven’t edited this so I hope it makes sense.

Wednesday, June 18 ,2003

Up at 5 a.m., and resolutely back to bed. Up again at 7:30. On days when one might stay in bed indefinitely, there comes a time, pretty quickly, when it becomes impossible. At the terminal, I have a revolting breakfast, buy a two-novel volume of John Buchan, and pass a long tedious time first in the terminal and then in the airplane. Yesterday, a hot day, I wore my only short-sleeved shirt. Today, rainy in Glasgow, cold on the plane, I am wearing my favorite flannel shirt. Good thing.

All the time when I am not eating or reading, I use my sleep mask; and earplugs. I took the aisle seat because it gives slightly more room than the window seat, but the kid on the window chooses to watch the TV in front of him, so keeps the window closed. When the monitor shows that we are passing Greenland, I persuade him to actually open the shade so we can see, and there far off we see the frozen point of Greenland, awe-inspiring. Then he puts the shade down again, to go back to watching television.) It’s a long flight, and seems longer. At 1:15 p.m. eastern time (6:15 Glasgow time) we enter U.S. airspace, the upper reaches of Maine, and we’re down at three. But the flight from Newark to Dulles is delayed by bad weather, so we don’t land till quarter after seven, which means I miss the only bus back to Charlottesville. I call Nancy Dorman, who was going to pick me up, and tell her I’m going to rent a car instead. I’m a little leery about it, but it works out. A nice slow trip, and I’m home at a little after 11. Good thing I slept as much as I could all day. It’s 4 a.m. Glasgow time.

The next day, Thursday, I drop off films, go to work, pick up my photos a couple hours later and put them into an album. I return the rental car at the Charlottesville airport, my daughter Sarah takes me back to the office, and Bob Friedman takes me home. I visit with Rita and Nancy, and pay some bills, including the credit card bill itemizing – already – everything I’d bought on the trip!

On Friday I  get the thought that an article about the lack of future of the churches should include a list of things to be explored about life, including crystals, etc. that they can’t explore because of their own fear.

A possible beginning is to say that when you enter into a new age, even continuing the old ways changes them, because they have to change because it is a new set of circumstances. We’re moving into a new age, and the old forms are breaking down, and the new forms will be created of things that were contained in old forms – plus new perceptions and new ideas. The inability of Christianity to continue in its accepted form is at issue here. Just as the Protestant revolution destroyed the universal Christian western community, because suddenly there were choices among Christians, and it led to wars, and ultimately to indifference, so you have similar processes going on now, and it’s impossible even by choosing to stay with the old, to have the old unchanged, because what does not change when everything else is changing is itself changed in relationship to them.

Of course, if reincarnation and the presence within us of other lives is true, we’re many of us far more connected to the medieval time and middle ages, and monks and priests and abbots, than anyone here would suspect. It is our own inheritance, and can’t be alienated just because it has been taken over by the inheritors of that tradition (i.e. the churches). This, even though those originals monks and priests themselves might not approve.

&&&

A little while after returning home, I wrote up some of my dreams and journal entries and emailed them to Robert. He responded in a long email that I will begin here and finish tomorrow, in the last installment of this long meandering narrative. For ease of reading, I will not put his letter within quotation marks.

Robert wrote:

This is excellent stuff and I hope you develop it into a book as you continue your quest. The latter needs to be more internalised, for that is where the real quest always takes place, i.e. the unconscious. You could tell more about the strange stories surrounding Brendan, Cuthbert, Culumba, and then as you learn more and more from your own inner processes through dreams, go back and explain some of the symbolism surrounding these and other saints.

You need to commit yourself to the inner journey, for that gives you the key to everything and the outer quest then matches the inner one, though the latter must have dominance. Your dreams are telling you that you have great force and can do this, and nothing at all is as important. This is the answer to the needful respiritualisation of Western man, as it was always the answer. Your questions are right, your motivations are right, and your gifts are right, you now need the commitment to gain the keys. At the start of his quest in the Mysteries of the Underworld, the Egyptian initiate would receive the keys from Shu, in this form a type of the Holy Spirit. Jung received them from the spirit Philemon, I received them from Jung.

You need to acquire a few of Jung’s collected works to come to understand the symbolism. What you do is; when you have a dream with certain symbolism, look in the index of the books for the symbol and then turn to the relevant pages. Find out everything you can about the symbol that the dream has given you. For example, one of your dreams is about sand, so look up what Jung says about that. You can also look in The Four Gold Keys for possible further information. As well as religious symbolism, alchemical symbolism has also become constellated in the unconscious and appears in the processes. Jung tells us that sand was a binding agent to the alchemists, because it lies between land and the sea, and therefore symbolically between consciousness and the unconscious, between matter and spirit/soul. As you proceed and learn more, the more the symbolism pours through, but it is ultimately a great religious task, developing the higher Self, which at highest level is Son of God and the World Soul.

Furthermore, it should be understood that as dreams deepen they become a window to spirit/soul reality, to eternity and to God. Jung refused to use the term “subconscious” because it is far too limiting. The unconscious as well as being below is also above and at the sides, surrounding the whole of the physical universe, extending to infinity and eternity. The inner quest is hard and we suffer much through it, having to make sacrifices beyond the normal, but then the rewards are great, in a spiritual way. It depends how far you go, of course, but it means direct experience of spirit and soul, and this is the way that culture is regenerated and renewed.

You could eventually produce a great book out of this, of that I have no doubt, though far more is at stake than a book. I could advise you here and there and now and then if I can –  heaven knows I’m lost often enough myself  —  but the great task must be your own mountain constructed.

Now I’ll make a few comments on your dreams but it’s vital that you get Jung’s books and get absorbed in the processes, if that is the way you want to go. I remember your dream of sailing on the sea, which was followed by a game of tennis. The unconscious was offering you the individuation process, where the tennis ball is passed from court to court, between you and the unconscious, so that rapport develops.

My eye is aching and running and the computer makes it worse, so bear with me while I comment briefly on some of the dreams.

Saturday, June 14,2003

As always, I’m ready way early. I’ve been up, dressed, hung around the pier to get more of my fill of sea and waves and early morning. It isn’t quarter to eight yet and I’m entirely packed and waiting first for breakfast, then for the ferry – which isn’t due til 9:30. Better early, I suppose.

From last night:

1) I was in the middle of a dream. My wife in the dream and I were living separate. She came to me for comfort. I was in bed, under the covers, naked. She came into bed naked, and as she fitted her self against me, backing into my front, like spoons, my body got intensely charged with energy (not sexual energy), my hands especially. One moment I was in the dream; the next, I felt myself move into the waking state, my body remaining unmoving. It was the strangest transition. I think the fact that my body didn’t move made it more tangible somehow. (And now, transcribing this later, I remember that in a Monroe program eight years ago I once transitioned from an altered state to a normal waking state in just that way, and it was just as memorable then.)

2) I thought I was going to retrieve dad – which was confusing, since I’d seen him in Focus 25 in 1995 and had seen later that he was gone. I did go looking but can’t find him. There was something else, but I can’t remember it. In recording these dreams, I get a sense of how actively our internal life goes on with us mostly not aware of it.

Breakfast, then a chat with an Anglican minister who is a prison chaplain, on the bench waiting for the ferry to Mull. Aboard the ferry, I realize that I am very sad to be leaving. I hadn’t fully realized, emotionally, how I would hate to leave it. And all day, as I travel, it will seem to me that I am moving into denser and denser vibrations. Fanciful, probably. It is just traveling, after all. Still –

On the bus crossing Mull to Craignure, I think, “I’ve spent five days essentially in silence, though occasionally chatty enough. I feel (surrounded by talking pilgrims) that it may have sunk in. I don’t know that I want to go back to talking so much. But how many times have I said that?”

Craignure to Oban via another ferry ride, then Oban to Glasgow by train. I find a seat by a table, opposite a man reading a newspaper, and alternate between reading Merton’s journal and writing in mine.

“Reading Merton, it suddenly occurs to me, a difference, if not the difference, is that God is so personal to him, not in the sense that God seems to me – something we are part of, something transcendent yet partaking in humanity as in everything else. It seems as if God is a mere person to him (though I know that statement would have shocked him.) I am reluctant to say this so flatly; it is easy to unintentionally caricature another’s thought and beliefs. Still, I am searching for the key. Here is an intellectual, in a sense that I will never be even if I wished, and he has come to some sense of God that I cannot fathom. Surely it cannot be as simple as I seem to see it? How could he hold so simple – not to say simplistic – a concept?”

“One is – or anyway, I am – so apt to assume that others are okay and it is only I who cannot find satisfaction. But Merton in 1964 was complaining (justly, it seems) that he was spending too much time writing, for occasions too trivial or anyway incidental to his life. And certainly it seems he read far too much, far too compulsively. So to that degree he is a mirror image of my own complaint of producing too little. For if he produced too much, for too little reason, and often from reasons too intellectual and (self-consciously?) “artistic” – I produce too little, for too little reason, for reasons neither intellectual nor artistic, but – inertial? commercial? unorganized?

“Yet one sees that the version of his life we are familiar with was authentic enough, influential enough, regardless what might have been theoretically possible. Perhaps the same can be said for me. It’s just that it seems to have come to so little, and I am already older than he was when he died in Bangkok.

“It might be well if I took what we might call a vow of essential silence; that is, speaking only what is required and appropriate and otherwise just shutting up! How much energy I must waste in what might be called incontinent talking. Is this not what Merton was doing (or anyway accused himself of doing) with his pen? Nor is this the first time I’ve had this intuition. Time to heed it?”

“(2:30) Aha! Here it is. I think that we are coming to a more profound understanding of things than the Christians have. And our newer understanding is crying out for expression and cannot be contained in a simpler, different, understanding. It is not a matter of goodwill but of incompatibles.”

After a while the man opposite me at the table leans over and asks me, diffidently, “Are you Bill Bryson?” A big Bryson fan, apparently; has read all his books. Saw an American with a beard, writing, and hoped. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had read only one of Bryson’s books, and didn’t particularly like it. But I wish I had thought faster and had modestly admitted to being Bryson; it would have made his day. Quite a pleasant man. We get into a theological discussion (what, again?) that goes nowhere in particular. But a nice man.

We reach Queen Street station in Glasgow, and I get the bus across to Central Station, accompanying a blind man who seems to get around just fine. (He had lived for a while in America, and has a girlfriend there, he says.) Then a train to Ayr and a very comfortable wait at the station hotel for Russ and Jill Russell to meet me. I’m sitting there absorbed in Merton when I hear, “Well, there’s a peaceful scene,” and look up to see Russ and Jill smiling at me.

On to their lovely home and garden (and fish pond!), and supper with lots of salad and new potatoes. Difficult not to overeat. I tell them, “This is the house I would have liked to grow up in,” full of books and fine paintings. The evening goes in talk and companionship, left out of the journal, as such times usually are. One cannot live it and record it both.

Friday, June 13,2003

Eight dreams to transcribe.

1) I start to go outside, and a man steps aside for me, and lets me go first, and I go, and he stabs me! In the back. He’s going to do something but instead, I annihilate him with this blast of anger, an amazing thing. He’s literally not there on the field. There’s nothing left. It was a blast of anger, it just flashed. I’m wondering, what was that all about? I had just finished naming the seven deadly sins, of which anger is one. Susan had said I had all sorts of anger that I wasn’t aware of, that I was not wanting to have, because I was trying to be too “nice,” as she put it.

2) Nancy Dorman’s brother and I and somebody else come back from something and we’re going to leave something at her place. There’s a sign on the door that says “don’t knock.” Then we’re listening to her answering machine tape and for some reason we decide something happened to her when we were gone. We knock on the door and she opens it looking very sleepy and exasperated. Her brother says, “Well Nancy, we were worried about you because” [I forget why] and she explains that she had left a note saying not to wake her up, and we had somehow turned it all around. The common denominator there is the strength of my emotion, because I was really concerned, sure something had happened. I remember an unacknowledged sense of almost theatricality about the emotion of concern.

3) I forget the beginning part because I forgot it was a dream, but Susan and I and somebody are looking at greeting cards from the Iona Community and on the back of them it says “Peace, love and joy,” and she says. “Oh, they shouldn’t have joy in there,” and then I realized I was dreaming. (And in fact I didn’t get a sense that she was a joyous person in real life. She seemed to have great integrity, but not necessarily great joy.)

4) I was thinking about something and my hand worked the tape recorder. I was dreaming that I was taping!

5) Great satisfaction in the thought that I was sending her (whoever she was) back to her husband with my sperm in her.

6)  Explaining to somebody that at Monroe all the sessions went on quite regardless of Christianity. It wasn’t a factor one way or the other. There were all these places we’d left.

7) I was running with my cat, or dog, which didn’t usually run off the yard, but ran with me, racing. I jumped over a height from a tree, onto the yard of a neighbor I had when I was a kid. The cat — my favorite cat — jumped, missed, fell, and broke her neck I think. It was ghastly. But then followed a Grin ‘n’ Bear It cartoon, a sweatshirt saying Send Bush to the Moon or something.

8) Saying to dad in some disgust after he had pointed out that what I proposed was impractical, “Well okay, but it was a brilliant idea.”

Between dreams, recurrently, I get the sense that my left arm muscles are all contracted, the arm being pulled in on itself. By concentrating I can help the muscles to relax.

I feel different at breakfast. More at home, chatty for the first time. Afterward, I go walking to Columba’s Bay, using my tape recorder. And when I later come to transcribe the tape, I find dreams I hadn’t written out. But when had I had these dreams?

• [First part lost, perhaps taped over.] I thanked him and said to him and at least one other person that I had never understood how Hitler was able to get away with so much: It was because he manipulated the politicians and the politics of other countries, by owning them or by fear.
• The detective had just cracked the case, and he says to his assistant that he’ll be glad this is the last interrogation in this case, and the guy (who is himself a criminal or ex-criminal) says “Yeah, when you’re in a bad mood you’re really open about how you feel about me.” There was something about an electric burner on a stove. Atop it is an upside-down top of a pan, and on top of that was something, and on top of that was something else. Somehow the guy was going to indicate he was going to confess, by turning on the burner. When they picked up the top two things, they realized that the third one down was hot. That’s when they knew it was going to be all over.
• [__] challenges a man about some piece of theology, and he’s got two pieces of ham that he put on top of his sandwich; one one way and the other at right angles to it. The man said, “Well, you’re just saying that to embarrass me in front of our visitor,” (meaning me) and I said “I’m not going to get involved in it.”
• My wife, I guess, wanted us to join the Catholic church just for the sake of fitting in, even though everybody knew that I didn’t believe what was going on, what it was about.
• Thinking our house was overrun then by these forces, like being in the mountains and seeing something coming down from the mountain like spirit or wind or something.
• Here at the B&B, someone is about to drink something, and I say “it’s a matched cup.” They were surprised I’d recognize even the concept – whatever a matched cup may be.
• At the cash register after a meal, there’s a drawer there and you open the drawer and there’s the books they’re holding for you, if you have any. I pick one up and pay for it at the register. There was more to the dream, but I didn’t record it in time because I was lying in bed waiting to be served!
• Won the battle and lost the war, but what did it refer to? One was a rabbit, I think, and it was wild, and somehow allowed itself to be tamed, for the sake of food, maybe.
• A dog or something sees me up there across the way and comes chasing up after me, through brush. I’m not moving, and it’s expecting to chase me. But there’s something about the spirit in a way.
• Working with wood with an assistant. We have to take time out to find the right screwdriver to unscrew these long thin metal screws from the end of the wood. I had made something and the wood had splintered off, so I need to get my assistant to unscrew the piece that was left so that we can put a new piece on.

Now then, this is what I was speaking into the recorder during the morning hike to Columba’s Bay and back.

“It just came to me: It’s not a bridge from one to the other, it’s a bridge away from all of them. The schoolmen, the churchmen, the sciencemen – all of it! I’m going to ruthlessly steal everything we need, whether it’s theology, example, organization, whatever. Because I’m more confirmed this morning than I was when I went to bed, there’s no building bridges to them. But first I should review everything that’s gone on tonight and see what it looks like.”

Fish and chips for lunch, and a scone for later, and I settled up with the B&B. (Also became  a two-bit hero by using a pair of pliers to fix a loose piece on the toilet so that it would flush correctly.)  Again there will be no boat trip around the island because the swells are too high. So, I walk up to the beach at the north end, and at quarter to three I’m sitting on a park bench looking out toward islands that are followed by the Atlantic Ocean. There’s nothing I have to do, and no place I have to go.

It has been a remarkable four days and four nights: more time, perhaps, than I’ve spent on myself and on my own at least since college. If I had a project I could work on every day, and manual labor of some kind, I could stay here a long time. Imagine living with an ocean on all sides. And, by the way, this is the fifth time in four days that I am sitting in a place where there is no one around, although on this fifth time, unlike the first four, I can see and hear people. But I’m still alone. There were four times, one each day, when there was no one in sight, no one in sound.

My time on Iona is more or less up, and I have to return to the other world. Don’t know that I’m going to go home transformed in any fundamental way.

“There are some things that are required, and one is that any substitute for religion – or for this religion, anyway – must deal with the heart, and not just with the head. Not even primarily with the head. At the same time, it must be as intellectually respectable as we can find. That is, we must do our best with what we have, to make sense of what we have experienced. But the experience comes first. Interpretation comes second, and dogma or theory come a hell of a long way third. And we need to restore the difference between authority and power. Authority comes because someone knows or can do. Power comes because they have the ability to punish or to hurt.

“Since this is a time when everything is coming apart, it is also a time when everything can come together in new forms and packages. Schoolmen system is gone. Same with religious. And science, the religion of rationality, is still disgracing itself. So the question becomes – in what way can science, spirituality, religion, education, and art come back to form an organic, whole, healthy unit. No one today can answer that question.

“And it just occurred to me: You don’t build bridges to shipwrecks. You might throw them a line.”

Thursday, June 12,2003

At six I go up to the Mac and find a large building that very much looks like communal living. Warm enough, inviting enough, but way too big for normal life. Courtesy of Susan’s invitation, I partake in their common meal on the last night of their weekly visitors’ stay. She tells me she is not impressed by the level of spirituality; says it is more like her idea of a church summer camp. There isn’t for her what she had hoped.

After the meal, she and I find a quiet place to talk. I am quite open with her. I tell her I would like to build a bridge between what I call the metaphysical types and the Christians. She says to me – meaning to help – that all my searching is because I am angry with God and haven’t accepted God. This doesn’t ring true to me. (Later I think maybe it was projection: She does not seem to be a joyful person.) She says I need to give up my will and be willing to do whatever God wants. I tell her, I did that years ago. Finally she asks me to answer one question: Have I accepted Jesus as my personal savior.

This question is asked with all good intent. She likes me, she really would like to help me, she really thinks she is giving me the word. The effect is the opposite of what she would have wished, but, oddly enough, it is just what I need. For I realize, as she asks me this question, that there is no responding to it, because the only honest response would to be ask her what the question means. To her it’s perfectly obvious, and she will take any questioning as an evasion or an attempt to play word games.

Quite suddenly I realize, it’s useless to ask what she means, and useless to attempt any bridging across that gulf. With Christians, even discontented, spiritually awake Christians, it always comes down to the same point: Accept Jesus as your personal savior and all else is resolved. For Christians know; they have the key; they cannot learn from you or even from your questions, because they know. Nothing you know of feel or have experiences is of any use to them at all. So, beyond a certain point, there is no dialogue with them; it is like arguing with a communist.

Her well-meant charge to me has the unexpected effect of suddenly freeing me to be who I am. I will waste no more time trying to build bridges. I will say what I know. If Christians want to claim the Bible and God and Christ and goodness and holiness and charity, etc., let them claim all they want. But I will calmly take what is mine, whether they pretend to ownership or not. If there is no bridging over to the churches, there isn’t.

So let us take what we need and lump the rest. The medieval contemplatives and others who strove for what I would call higher consciousness may serve to be our guides. The disputation over facts of existence etc. we can leave to others. Let us leave the Christians alone and be only our truest selves, and if we are good our goodness will shine forth, and we will attract others of like goodness. If we are not good – if we fall into anger, pride, envy, gluttony, sloth, covetousness, lust – we will draw to us what we are. By our fruits let us be known.

Furthermore, and henceforth, let us boldly appropriate whatever in Christianity is good, as in any other religion or way of belief – taking it as our birthright, regardless of apologies or exegesis.

I do believe I may have just gotten what I came to Iona to get. Ironic, isn’t it? My goodness, I’m energized, and liberated! Enough trying to bridge incompatibles! I’m free! We’ll see what it comes to.

So, I read Merton discussing his reading, and think, what is he talking about? (Susan didn’t use the term “the wrath of God,” but she did say that God is angry and getting angrier. She didn’t seem to know that anger is one of the seven deadly sins. Perhaps this is Catholic theology.) So much of Merton’s world depends on God versus the devil, with all these medieval arguments I have no patience with. It is obviously true that I don’t have the background to understand it all – but we don’t need background today, we need the water of life and health, and we are not being given it. Scholarship can go too far, and destroy what it examines.

It will be telling, whether this mood lasts. It would be nice to be really on my feet. What a relief, to look forward to saying just what I think, to one and all, right or not, provisional or not, informed or not. Surely this must have been a great block in my writing? And it stemmed from talking to Susan, which stemmed from her inviting me to supper, which stemmed from my giving her the book, which stemmed, originally, from my trying to give her some energy because she was tired. All but the first cause took place today, right after I came down from the mountains. It feels like some blockage, either in will or in communication, has been blown out.

I decide to try to do two long walks tomorrow, to the north and to the south. I pack, so that I’ll feel I have plenty of time during the day tomorrow, leaving out only what I will use on Friday and travel in on Saturday. I continue reading Merton, still amazed at the time and effort he expended on what seem to me inessential questions – nearly nonexistent, because not really real – that seemed real enough to him and to those whose books he is reading. But then, he was an intellectual and I am not.

Thursday, June 12,2003

At 8 a.m. I record a couple things from the night’s tape recording.

I’m lying here, not dreaming, not asleep, yet all this stuff has been going through my mind generally, gradually. I don’t know where it comes from.

Something very appropriate in my lying here in sleep mask and earplugs. It’s like isolating myself from everything around me for this purpose. But I’ve done that my whole life, without the results I would hope for, and I’m thinking, maybe I need to go more into the world. Perhaps if I could find a proper venue I could write an article about the spiritual nervous breakdown caused by the Protestant revolution and the materialist revolution that followed.

It would be an unusual mixture of elements because it would take for granted that:

• we are many lives joined, and that
• these lives contend within us, and that
• changes in civilization result in parts of ourselves fighting violently or actively or quietly or in whatever manner, against each other, we being the battleground.

Stuff the guys have told Rita and me would be much background on it. And I begin to sense that the book on what they have said has more to do with this than with the fact that they said it. Perhaps the book has lacked a point of application to individuals, and this is it, or part of it.

A view across to Mull

After breakfast I find what I have been looking for: a comfortable bench to sit on; a view of town and sea and Mull ahead of me; sunlight so bright as to require sunglasses for the first time.

But then I find a gate that leads inward toward the hills. A local woman says it is all right to go through as long as I tie the gate firmly behind me. So after a while I am perched looking westward at one more set of hills that overlook the Atlantic. But between me and them is not only a valley but a fence. A good excuse to stop here anyway. Another lovely day. I left Dun I yesterday when I saw clouds coming in. I didn’t want to be caught out in the open with hills to climb and descend in the rain. I suppose I exaggerated the danger  (it’s a small island, after all) but how much space does it take to break your leg or arm – or your neck, come to that. It’s hard, in unfamiliar surroundings, to estimate risk.

An Iona hillside

I have found a spot with no one in sight or sound of me. Just grass, or whatever it is, and rock, and sky — and sheep droppings. Paradise? I invite David to talk into my tape recorder. Nothing. Then a few minutes later I feel him come through:

“If by transformation you think that you mean walking to a place, becoming instantly transformed, and walking away a different man, your ideas are more romantic than realistic. It is as your friend Richard said, you go to a holy spot not to go one person and become another, but to be infected, and by being infected be able to then infect others. You know in a different part of your mind that this is what you’ve been doing at Iona; at Machu Picchu [in 1999]; at Avebury; Salisbury [both in 2001]; at Monticello [various times], for that; at Skye [in 1970], long before you knew what you were doing – nor did you have any part in the planning of it; at Sligo; at Yeats’ lake; at Yeats’ tower; in the Ox mountains; Galway Bay; Connemara particularly [all in 1976];

“If you will remember, every time you went to any tourist place, you attempted to feel your way into that time, and came away always discouraged because you did not feel that you could do it. You wished away the asphalt and the cars, the airplanes, the buildings, all of 20^th  century America – even your fellow people; even to a degree yourself. All of which of course is impossible and undesirable.

“But while your conscious mind was attempting to pretend that it was back in another time, another level of yourself was using the physical locality as a means of re-connecting with another person. Most particularly the time in Wyoming when you were there with your friend and your wife and your sister-in-law and you went prowling around the perimeter of a bygone fort, feeling stirred but not knowing why, wanting to connect and not knowing how, and this I should think would be obvious.

“So on one level you are accomplishing exactly what it is you want to do, because on this island you will find that there is a pattern to be discerned. First you went south, then north, now you’re in the hills in the center. As you pin down precisely where you’ve been – particularly the two hills – you will find a grounding at each place, a grounding in a certain order.

“Now, you will also notice that your unaccustomed silence, your uncomfortable and perplexing silence at breakfast times, is connected with the reconnection with other places and other times. This is not to go into ‘why,’ but it will uncover itself. Your inability to communicate in an easy, human way with your fellow pilgrims, your inability to overcome the “ministership” of one of your pilgrims particularly, will reveal itself as intimately connected with the process that is going on here.

“You seem strange to them. It’s not the kind of strange that repels, it’s the kind that somewhat fascinates, at least interests. Anyone looking at you can see that you’re not (I hesitated to say) entirely here. But after all, you just opened your eyes in the midst of this and found yourself on this rocky crag somewhat to your surprise, as has happened repeatedly. When you first closed your eyes and meditated today, and opened your eyes again, where you are, where you have been, where you’ve not left, seemed somewhat strange to you. You needn’t fret yourself so much about getting something done, or accomplishing something by a given moment. Living and enjoying the moment is [wind noise drowns out the word].”

Then I go clambering around, and after a while I come down near the Iona Community gift shop. I do a little more shopping, and give a copy of my novel Messenger to the woman I’d offered energy to on Tuesday, who I will call Susan. (I had brought it for Robert but somehow hadn’t gotten it to him.) She invites me to supper at the MacLeod Center at six. This I take to be something happening at last.

The 2 p.m. boat around the island again doesn’t go out (conditions too rough) so I decide to sit and quietly read.