human potential

Came across this New York Times obit while poking around my files. Shocking to realize he was only 66 when he died, and that it was all of 22 years ago..

Ken Kesey, Author of ‘Cuckoo’s Nest,’ Who Defined the Psychedelic Era, Dies at 66

By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

Published: November 11, 2001

Ken Kesey, the Pied Piper of the psychedelic era, who was best known as the author of the novel ”One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” died yesterday in a hospital in Eugene, Ore., said his wife, Faye. He was 66 and lived in Pleasant Hill, Ore.

The cause was complications after surgery for liver cancer late last month, said his friend and business associate, Ken Babbs.

Mr. Kesey was also well known as the hero of Tom Wolfe’s nonfiction book about psychedelic drugs, ”The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968). An early flowering of Mr. Wolfe’s innovative new-journalism style, the book somewhat mockingly compared Mr. Kesey to the leaders of the world’s great religions, dispensing to his followers not spiritual balm but quantities of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, to enhance their search for the universe within themselves.

The book’s narrative focused on a series of quests undertaken by Mr. Kesey in the 1960’s. First, there was the transcontinental trip with a band of friends he named the Merry Pranksters, aboard a 1939 International Harvester bus called Further (it was painted as ”Furthur” on the bus). It was wired for sound and painted riotously in Day-Glo colors. Neal Cassady, the Dean Moriarty of Jack Kerouac’s ”On the Road,” was recruited to drive. The journey, which took the Pranksters from La Honda, Calif., to New York City and back, was timed to coincide with the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Its purposes were to film and tape an extended movie, to experience roadway America while high on acid and to practice ”tootling the multitudes,” as Mr. Wolfe put it, referring to the way a Prankster would stand with a flute on the bus’s roof and play sounds to imitate people’s various reactions to the bus.

”The sense of communication in this country has damn near atrophied,” Mr. Kesey told an interviewer from Publishers Weekly after the bus arrived in New York City. ”But we found as we went along it got easier to make contact with people. If people could just understand it is possible to be different without being a threat.”

Then, back in California, there were the so-called Acid Tests that Mr. Kesey organized — parties with music and strobe lights where he and his friends served LSD-laced Kool-Aid to members of the public and challenged them to avoid ”freaking out,” as Mr. Wolfe put it. They were interrupted by Mr. Kesey’s flight to Mexico in January 1966 to avoid going on trial on charges of possession of marijuana. Finally, after he returned to the United States in October and was arrested again and waiting to stand trial, there was the final Acid Test, the graduation ceremony ostensibly designed to persuade people to go beyond drugs and achieve a mind-altered state without LSD.

This was the public Ken Kesey, the magnetic leader who built a bridge from beatniks on the road to hippies in Haight-Ashbury; who brewed the cultural mix that fermented everything from psychedelic art to acid-rock groups like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane to the Trips Festival dance concerts in the Fillmore auditorium in San Francisco; and who, in the process of his pilgrimage, blew an entire generation’s mind.

Yet Mr. Wolfe also narrated the adventures of a more private Ken Kesey, one who in addition to his quests took the inner trips that gave him his best fiction. It is true that by 1959, when he had his first experience with drugs, he had already produced a novel, ”End of Autumn,” about college athletics, although it would never be published. But after he volunteered at a hospital to be a paid subject of experiments with little-known psychomimetic drugs — drugs that bring on temporary states resembling psychosis — his imagination underwent a startling change.

To earn extra money and to work on a novel called ”Zoo,” about the beatniks of the North Beach community in San Francisco, Mr. Kesey also took a job as a night attendant on the psychiatric ward of the hospital. Watching the patients there convinced him that they were locked into a system that was the very opposite of therapeutic, and it provided the raw material for ”One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” One night on the ward, high on peyote, he suddenly envisioned what Mr. Wolfe described as ”a full-blown Indian — Chief Broom — the solution, the whole mothering key, to the novel.”

As Mr. Kesey explained, his discovery of Chief Broom, despite not knowing anything about American Indians, gave him a character from whose point of view he could depict a schizophrenic state of mind and at the same time describe objectively the battle of wills between two other key characters, the new inmate Randle Patrick McMurphy, who undertook to fight the system, and the tyrannical Big Nurse, Miss Ratched, who ended up lobotomizing McMurphy. Chief Broom’s unstable mental state and Mr. Kesey’s imagining of it, presumably with the help of hallucinogenic drugs, also allowed the author to elevate the hospital into what he saw as a metaphor of repressive America, which Chief Broom called the Combine.

Mr. Kesey would ”write like mad under the drugs,” as Mr. Wolfe put it, and then cut what he saw was ”junk” after he came down.

”Cuckoo’s Nest” was published by Viking Press in early 1962 to enthusiastic reviews. Time magazine call it ”a roar of protest against middlebrow society’s Rules and the invisible Rulers who enforce them.” Stage and screen rights were acquired by the actor Kirk Douglas, who the following year returned to Broadway after a long absence to play McMurphy in an adaptation by Dale Wasserman that ran for 82 performances at the Cort Theater during the 1963-64 season. The play was revived professionally in slightly different form in 1970, with William Devane playing the part of McMurphy, and again in 2001, with Gary Sinise in the part.

Even more successful was the film version, which was released in 1975 and the following year won five Oscars, for best picture; best director, Milos Forman; best actor, Jack Nicholson as McMurphy; best actress, Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched; and best screen adaptation, Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman.

But Mr. Kesey was not happy with the production. He disapproved of the script, thought Mr. Nicholson wrong for the part of McMurphy and believed that the producers, Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz, had not lived up to the handshake deal he insisted he had made with them. He sued them for 5 percent of the movie’s gross and $800,000 in punitive damages and eventually agreed on a settlement. But he still refused to watch the film.

Although Mr. Kesey wrote several more books during his life, ”Cuckoo’s Nest” remained the high point of his career. Reviewing the film version in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote that ”the novel preceded the university turmoil, Vietnam, drugs, the counterculture.” She continued, ”Yet it contained the prophetic essence of that whole period of revolutionary politics going psychedelic.”

”Much of what it said,” she concluded, ”has entered the consciousness of many — possibly most — Americans.”

”Sometimes a Great Notion” followed in 1964. It was a longer and more ambitious novel about an Oregon logging family and, in the strife between two brothers, the conflict between West Coast individualism and East Coast intellectualism. Written under the influence of both drugs and Mr. Kesey’s exposure to modern literature — ”an ‘Absalom, Absalom!’ set in Oregon,” one critic called it — the novel received mixed reviews, some impressed by its energy and others annoyed by its wordiness. In 1971, a film version appeared, directed by Paul Newman and starring Mr. Newman, Henry Fonda and Lee Remick. It left so little an impression that when it was released for television, its title was changed to ”Never Give an Inch.”

Initially Mr. Kesey acted undaunted by the negative reaction to the novel’s appearance, which was timed for the arrival of the Pranksters in New York. He told his bus mates that writing was an old-fashioned and artificial form, and that they were transcending it with their experiments in metaconsciousness. A decade later, however, he told an interviewer, ”The thing about writers is that they never seem to get any better than their first work,” and, ”This bothers me a lot.” He added: ”You look back and their last work is no improvement on their first. I feel I have an obligation to improve, and I worry about that.”

Yet he never did surpass his first two books. During the remainder of his life, he published two more novels, ”Sailor Song” (1992), about civilization contending with nature in Alaska, and ”Last Go Round: A Dime Western” (1994), an account of a famous Oregon rodeo written in the form of pulp fiction, with research done by his friend and fellow Prankster, Mr. Babbs. He also published three nonfiction works, ”Kesey’s Garage Sale” (1973), a miscellany of essays by himself and others; ”Demon Box” (1986), a mix of essays and stories; and ”The Further Inquiry” (1990), his own history of the Prankster bus trip, as well as two children’s books, ”Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear” (1990), which he often performed to music, and ”The Sea Lion: A Story of the Sea Cliff People” (1991).

Ken Elton Kesey was born on Sept. 17, 1935, in La Junta, Colo., the older of two sons born to the dairy farmers Fred A. and Geneva Smith Kesey. Early in his life, the family migrated to Springfield, Ore., where he underwent a rugged upbringing. Although following the move his father founded a prosperous marketing cooperative for dairy farmers, the Eugene Farmers Cooperative, and established the family in a comfortable suburban setting, Mr. Kesey and his brother were taught early to hunt, fish and swim, as well as to box, wrestle and shoot the rapids of the local rivers on inner-tube rafts.

These all-American he-man lessons took, at least up to a point. Mr. Kesey developed great physical power; Mr. Wolfe writes that ”he had an Oregon country drawl and too many muscles and calluses on his hands.” He became a star football player and wrestler in high school and was voted ”most likely to succeed” in the graduating class of 1953. At the University of Oregon, where he devoted himself to sports and fraternities, he acted in college plays and he won the Fred Lowe Scholarship, awarded to the outstanding wrestler in the Northwest. In May 1956, he married Norma Faye Haxby, his high school sweetheart. He even considered trying to become a movie star, moving to Los Angeles after graduation and playing bit parts in several films.

 

But his imagination exerted a counterattraction. After graduating from Oregon in 1957 and winning scholarships to Stanford University’s graduate writing program, he moved to Perry Lane, the bohemian section of Palo Alto.

There he met Vic Lovell, a graduate student in psychology who told him about the drug experiments at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park that were paying $75 a session to volunteer subjects. His journey to the interior began.

After the bus trip, the Acid Tests, and a six-month sentence on a work farm in 1967 for drug possession, he moved back to his father’s farm in Pleasant Hill.

Shunning a second Prankster bus trip in 1969, its destination this time the Woodstock rock festival in the New York countryside, he settled down with his wife to raise their children — Shannon, Zane, Jed and Sunshine — work the farm, involve himself in community activities and write. In later years he insisted that he had always been a family man with strong ties to the community.

Over the next three decades, he raised cattle and sheep, and grew blueberries. He joined school boards; helped out several local businesses; ran a Web site, Intrepid Trips; edited a magazine, Spit in the Ocean, which he founded in 1974; and worked on completing the films and tapes of the bus trip. He coached wrestling at several local schools and taught a graduate writing seminar at the University of Oregon, in which he collaborated with 13 students on ”Caverns,” a mystery published in 1990 under the pen name O. U. Levon. He practiced his lifelong hobby of magic, developing a trick in which he made a rabbit disappear. He occasionally visited the original Prankster bus, which he kept hidden in the woods on his farm.

As for drugs, Mr. Kesey’s relationship with them was revealed in an interview last April in The Times Union of Albany. Two weeks earlier, he told the interviewer, Doug Blackburn, he and a few close friends had gone on their annual Easter Sunday hike up Mount Pisgah, near his home. For the first time in more than three decades, he had decided to skip LSD for the event. Having recently taken medication for both diabetes and hepatitis C, he said that an additional substance was unnecessary.

”I felt like I was high enough just walking up the hill with nothing but adrenaline,” he said. ”Besides, I figured I ought to try making the hike at least once without psychedelics. The past few years that’s been the about the only time I’ve taken acid, and even then not much. Just enough to make the leaves dapple.”

He is survived by his wife; his mother; his brother, Joe, known as Chuck; his two daughters, Shannon and Sunshine; a son, Zane (his other son, Jed, died in a car accident in 1984); and three grandchildren.

 

Finally, as a sort of retrospective, this from David Poynter, four years later. (I was again in Britain.)

July 30, 2007

Well, David, another excursion to your homeland. I am going to get a map of the British Isles (or so I tell myself) and mark my various journeys since 1970. I’ve seen some of it now. Any comments on this trip?

Well, you did make it up as you went along, didn’t you, just as I said you would? Yet the outline was there all along, not needing to be worried over.

True enough.

You connected more with people on this trip that you remember. Not only Robert and his friends – though all that went very well – but many casual contacts and kindnesses.

I was not inhibited by ideas of their being different.

You were, on previous trips, to a degree you don’t seem to quite remember.

I had good contacts in 2003.

In 2003, though you were nearly apologetic about being an American.

Because of the war.

Well, because of the war, but because of you. You weren’t well and did not suspect it.

I don’t see the connection.

You were one thing and thought you were something else. Physically, mentally, spiritually. The incongruity between reality and idea left you somewhat off your feet.

As Hemingway was saying –

As you were saying to him. Pretense comes in many forms, and mostly in different levels of seriousness and awareness. It is less harmful perhaps to pretend actively than to pretend to oneself and not quite let oneself know it.

Hmm. Well it is true I have felt very much myself here. Wandering on my own, tramping with my pack on my back and another being carried over my neck or in one hand – walking seemingly endlessly and pretty tirelessly – feeling comfortable being silent and comfortable chatting.

One difference  between Hemingway and you, or van der Post and you, is that you imagined yourself into your future by following a lead from another part of yourself, not from a conscious plan, or from any form of manipulation. Therefore you needn’t wait uneasily for possible exposures of posturings. Your fears would be exposure of who you are inside; there are few external surprises that would interest anyone.

But here I am at 61 – as at every year for half a century, nearly – asking when I am going to write what I want to have written. At 61, one is hardly justified in expecting to inaugurate a new career. The world belongs to the young. Hemingway was in his twenties still when his first book was published – and more to the point he worked all the time he was supposed to work.

If you want to write, write. How many times have you been told that? But you aren’t necessarily here to write, either way. The work you are doing is not meaningless. Now – do that work when you return home. Set it out without notes, just write. The only planning you need to do concerns what you want to say. In other words, set out your topics one by one and set out to write them. After you do what your friend Michael calls a brain dump, then is the time for looking at documents, notes, incidents, etc. to fill-in or buttress.

I can see it in principle, and how many times have I laid out a list of things to write. But at home I dry up.

It isn’t harder to depend upon inspiration for topics than for words. You set out to write about healing and you did that. You set out to write about guidance and you did not do that, at least not yet. Another topic surely is how to contact the other side, which has a whole list of sub topics:

• The structure of minds in the afterlife
• The need for physical cooperation with the other side
• Integration of layers of yourself
• Connections with others as a means of creating structure
• Difficulties and perplexities of the process and of the questions of meaning

All that would be plenty to be getting on with.

Yes it would. Perhaps I can do it.

You can do it. The question is whether you will do it.

 

[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.”