Embracing Heaven and Earth
by Dr. Hal Stone

CHAPTER 1

EARLY YEARS
The Magical Child

I always had the notion that I remembered very little of my childhood. It occupied a not very significant space in the course of my many years of personal analysis. Yet, when I sit down to think of my childhood and to write about it, I find that I do have many memories. They happen to be memories of a very particular kind. They are all tinged with mystery and with magic.

In the Detroit home where I grew up, we had a full basement with three different rooms and a large attic. My main childhood memories revolve around these very magical spaces. The basement had a recreation room, a boiler room and a room where the laundering was done. This last was also a storage room with a fruit cellar. Here my mother stored the fruit that she canned and here were stored assorted wines. I have some vague recollections of wine casks, a not unlikely possibility since my parents were in the liquor business.

The basement was a primary place of mystery for me. Each time I went down to it, I had the sense of embarking on an adventure. One could enter it through the

kitchen or one could enter the recreation room through the closet off the living room. Even now as I write about it, I feel the sense of fear and mystery I felt all through my childhood. The recreation room was the least fearful. It was fixed up as a play room and it was furnished. My primary recollections are not of playing there with friends, however. They are recollections of aloneness--not loneliness, but aloneness. If I had to summarize my feelings about my childhood in one sentence, it would be that I was a solitary child who lived life much more in phantasy than in reality. The basement was a marvelous place for phantasies.

Next to the basement, the attic was my second favorite place. It had many things stored there, but what was most significant was the fact that I could look out of the window onto the street and watch people walking by without their being able to see me. This was very significant for me, to not let them see me. I would watch for hours. The attic was light and full of sun and so it was a much less frightening place than the basement.

Although, as I look back upon those early years, I always have the feeling that I was alone, I actually had many friends. I also played fairly frequently with my middle brother, Ed. (I was the youngest of three sons; my two brothers were eight and six years older than I.) My parents worked very long and very strenuous hours in the family business and I was left with maids a good deal of the time. In many respects, I was raised as an only child.

I have the feeling that I was loved as a child, loved but not attended to. My closest human contacts were my cousin Herb and his sister Audrey and their family. Herb was four years younger than I, but we were very close and spent many hours together. We drank milk and ate Hostess cupcakes by the ton. (Certainly their success in the world was largely due to the voluminous quantities that Herb and I consumed.) Our other favorite treat was to mix graham crackers in our milk until it was a pasty consistency and then to eat this with a spoon. It was the only way I knew to feed that very lonely inner child. Herb and I remain close to each other even to this day and have played very significant roles in each other's lives.

I have very special memories of playing under the dining room table. My mother had a large tablecloth on the table and so one could be under the table and be quite hidden and could create a make believe world. At Passover, we would always have a large family gathering of over twenty people and there, too, I have delightful memories of crawling under the tables with my cousins and hanging out there as long as we possibly could. The Passover Seders were wonderful parties, short on ritual but very long on food. My father was not particularly connected to Jewish ritual, so he didn't really know much about conducting a Seder. My mother was always somewhat upset that we got to the food and through the food as fast as we did. My mother would have made a wonderful father and I think that my father would have made a wonderful mother.

My parents were committed to doing everything they could possibly do for their children. They worked extremely hard and very long hours. I am amazed to look back and realize how difficult their work situation was. Their lives as immigrants were very difficult.

My mother obviously had great ambivalence about observing Jewish ritual. During all the time we lived in Detroit she kept kosher dishes, and didn't mix meat and milk and generally kept an orthodox home. Whenever we went out to a restaurant for breakfast, she would practically insist that I have bacon or ham. She could never

quite stand behind her orthodoxy. It made her feel too guilty, and so she handled the guilt by seeing that her sons ate bacon when they were out. I don't know what the consequence would have been if I had hated bacon.

In later years, my father told me a repetitive dream he had had all of his life. In the dream, he was on an ocean vessel plying the waters between Europe and America. He could never get off the ship, but had to keep going back and forth. For both my parents, peace was never made between their European/Jewish ancestry and their new American customs. When I think of my father coming to this country alone at the age of 15 and my mother coming at the age of 12 or 13, I am filled with admiration and love at what they were able to accomplish and the opportunities they created for us.

The magical child continued to operate throughout elementary school. I was in a very protected environment and school came very easily to me. I was a very good boy. I was unselfish. I was bright. I was special. My mother said on many different occasions: "Harold is such a good boy. He never asks for anything." In fact, I never did ask for anything and it took many years before I began to sense the problematical nature of this much repeated compliment.

The highlight of my elementary school career occurred in the fourth grade during visiting day for parents. My teacher was Mrs. Hoffman and she and my mother were talking about me. Mrs. Hoffman was telling her something nice about me and she put her arm around me and kissed me on the forehead. I felt absolutely wonderful. Wherever Mrs. Hoffman is right now, I hope the "Great Counter of Karma Points" in the universe will reward her well for the love and kindness and affection she showed to me. I realized much later how little physical affection there was in my family. I have almost no recollection of physical touching or physical contact in general. My father was a sexual man, but a very shy and very unphysical man at all other times. My sense of my mother was that she tried to be more physical, but was not too successful in her efforts. This lack of physical contact from my parents left me feeling somewhat isolated, though I didn't understand the basis of the feeling at that time.

There was another variable in my family pattern that contributed to my sense of aloneness. The closest family tie was between my brother Joe (the eldest) and my mother. She was a brilliant, hard-driving woman, and, born in a different era, she would have been a most successful professional woman. My father was no match for her on many different levels, just as she was no match for him physically. My brother and she developed the strongest bonding. He was brilliant and gifted from his earliest years and in him she had the promise of the success in America for which she so yearned.

Many years later in the course of my analysis I had a dream that clearly set forth this family dynamic. I want to share this dream now because it adds to the understanding of this childhood period.

Dream of Brother and Mother (Dreamt at age 35)

I am exploring my childhood home. I walk down the hallway past my room to the left, come to the end room where my brother Joe sleeps. The door is closed. I know there is something behind the door that I am supposed to discover. I feel frightened of the unknown possibilities. I finally open the door and look in. there is a bed and in the bed are my brother and mother. They are lying there head to foot. I am upset at the realization that they are that close. My brother speaks to me in a very forthright way and he says something approximating the following: "Look, Harold, this is the reality. Mother and I do have this special relationship and you may as well know it and you may as well get used to it. You'll be a lot happier when you do." His words, though very direct, are comforting to me. He makes it much easier for me to accept this reality, and I leave the room crying but feeling much more freedom than I had before.

What became clear to me from a much later vantage point was that the primary bonding was between my brother and my mother. The weaker bonding in my own relationship to my mother probably contributed greatly to the power of the bonding that developed between my analyst and myself many years later. She was analyst, mother, friend, advisor and spiritual guide. She would have been significant in my life under any circumstances, but the lack of bonding to my own mother certainly contributed to what happened later in my relationship to her and to the Jungian community which she represented.

At some point later in my childhood another kind of feeling reached my awareness. I began to feel as though I was a stranger in my family. It wasn't that I thought I was an adopted child. It was just the feeling that I was different from the others. Once I left the safety of elementary school, this feeling of being a stranger in a strange land began to intensify and spread to many other areas of my life.

THE ACHIEVER

The move from elementary school to junior high school was like leaving paradise. All my problems began to catch up with me. From the fourth or fifth grade on I went to summer school every year. By the time I entered junior high school I was already a grade ahead of myself. I was not a physical child and so I didn't get much glory from athletics. I also missed the chance to express aggression through athletics. I would go for long walks, either alone or with a friend, and that was the extent of my physical exercise.

My identification with being a good boy knocked out every ounce of aggressiveness that might have been available to me. I remember one time in elementary school when one of my classmates pushed me into a large puddle of water after a rainstorm. I got up and pushed him into the water and obviously had the better of the situation. I ran home crying and told the story to my brother Joe. He asked me why I was crying since I clearly had won the day. I really didn't know. It was just that any form of aggression was so alien to me.

It is apparent that I was a right brain, intuitive child. Magic and mystery were my natural realm. In elementary school the demands of the left brain were well within my limits. In junior high, everything went wrong. It was no longer magical, no longer a safe setting. Demands were being made on me that had never been made before. My inner pusher had already started pushing in late elementary school. I remember walking to Parkman library, taking out eight to ten books and carrying them home, a distance of two or three miles. I didn't read them, would keep them beyond the time that they were due, and then have to pay fines. Then I would repeat the process. I was establishing myself as an intellectual achiever. I didn't feel like one, however.

In junior high school everything caught up with me. The other children seemed a hundred times more mature than I was. My own emerging sexuality was confined to very secret masturbatory rites and the idea of being able to date girls was impossible even in my wildest imagination. In my first semester I received two "D's," something that was quite unheard of in my family. I remember traveling downtown with my mother to be fitted with braces and showing her my report card. She let me know that my brother Joe would never have gotten a card like that. I felt desolate.

Junior high school in Detroit began in the eighth grade. My emotional life was far behind my chronological age. I was physically not particularly active or competitive. My face broke out with pimples at age 13, a condition that brought me great sorrow and travail for many, many years. I was wearing braces. I was not succeeding academically. I felt alone and isolated. There was no one I could talk to. In fact, the very concept of talking to someone didn't exist for me at the time. Something had to happen to take me out of my misery. I was too vulnerable, too much the victim.

What happened was that there began to develop in me a power side, someone who could play the game. It was a combination of control, power, drive, ambition and pleasing. This part took over and began to do the work for me. My "D's" became "A's." I became a brain. I became a left brain whiz. People began to see me as a brain. I was successful. Everyone was happy with me.

The magical child was laid to rest. I didn't know this was happening, but it was an essential development. The planet Earth is not kind to the magical child. That child is not rewarded. So my child was laid to rest early in junior high school, not to be resurrected until many years later. Now I needed power and, fortunately, the resources were available.

High school went much more easily than junior high school. I had learned the system. I was balancing my emotional immaturity with my intellectual prowess. Deep down I didn't feel that bright. No one knew that, however, and I certainly wasn't going to give away that bit of information. The magical child was well buried and I was preparing for college.

A RETREAT FROM VULNERABILITY

My brother Joe had been stationed on the West Coast during the war. He chose to live there after the war. My parents decided to fallow and I moved to Los Angeles in 1945 after taking one semester at Wayne University in Detroit. For me, life began after I moved to L.A. I loved it here from the first moment I arrived. I loved the climate. I loved the freedom. I loved the sense of lightness that I felt. I would take long drives along the ocean and on many of my dates I would drive to Santa Barbara or San Diego, just because I loved the ocean so much. I felt in some way as through I had come home on some level. The ocean has always been very good to me.

At UCLA I became a pre-medical student. My older brother had become an attorney. My middle brother had become an accountant. It was perfectly natural that I would become a physician. It went along with my desire to be powerful, to impress people, to please people who were close to me.

The problem was that I hated the science classes. I hated most of the courses that were germane to becoming a medical student. My mind simply didn't function in the areas of Chemistry and Advanced Mathematics and Vertebrate Embryology. I kept plugging away, however, and became more and more miserable as I did more and more poorly in these classes. I got a D in Organic Chemistry and then I repeated it and got a C. I failed Vertebrate Embryology and repeated it and got a D. My power side wanted medicine and my life was going sour because I couldn't listen to the reality of my feelings.

Finally, for some reason, I got the message. Medicine was not for me. I switched to a Psychology major and suddenly the world opened to me. Three years of accelerating misery came to an end. I was now majoring in Psychology. I didn't know what that meant, but I was taking classes in social sciences and psychology that were of great interest to me. I was with a group of people with whom I felt more compatible. From the time I made this switch, my academic life was in high gear and I was never derailed again.

When I finished my B.A. degree, I decided to get a teaching credential. Since I had so many credits in the physical sciences, I didn't need too many more to fulfill requirements for a general secondary credential. It still had never occurred to me to go ahead into the field of psychology as a career.

Because the school system was so short of science teachers, and despite all my protestations, I was assigned to a ninth grade class in junior high school in the physical sciences instead of the social sciences. I was teaching Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy and one or two other science fields to an extremely bright group of students, the majority of whom knew much more about the subject matter than I did. I was teamed up with another student teacher who was a science whiz. This semester was not a high point of my professional life.

I am everlastingly grateful that God had angels (science angels) watching over me and everything I did, and protecting those students from catastrophic incidents that might have occurred out of their experience with me as their teacher. They survived and I survived and I realized that there was no way I could become a teacher. It was at this point that I decided to enter the Psychology graduate program and work for the M. A. in Psychology.

My work in Psychology went very well. I had credits to make up from my old science courses and I did this with hard work and relative ease. I was at home academically and things were coming easily to me. When I decided to take the qualifying examinations for the M.A., my major professor suggested that I take them at the Ph.D. level. It just meant taking two more fields and if I failed at that level it simply meant that I would receive the M.A. I prepared for the exams for three months and then waited three months for the results.

I remember the total sense of exhilaration and freedom I felt when I heard that I had passed. I never before believed that I would become a Psychologist. Nothing fit for me professionally. Suddenly, I was home again. I had won. I had done it. I had a place in the world. I still knew nothing about Psychology, but that didn't matter. I was in the right place for the first time since childhood.

I started to work harder and harder. I had taken my own apartment and was earning money doing educational therapy. It was as though I got on a success track and I had to keep going faster and faster. I had passed the exams, but I knew deep inside that I wasn't that bright. Everyone around me seemed much smarter, and smart was the game. I was 19 years of age when I got my B.A., and now I was 22.

I remember one morning standing in front of the bulletin board at Franz Hall and my major professor was standing next to me. He turned to me and said: "Harold, there's something I don't really understand. I don't know if you are the brightest graduate student that we have or the least bright graduate student that we have." I knew the answer to that question. It was my most deeply held secret. He was still in doubt. My way to keep my secret was to do even more than I had been doing. So I became his research assistant. Thus, I tried to move even farther away from my vulnerability.

SOME THOUGHTS ON VULNERABILITY

We are born into this world as vulnerable children. We must be taken care of just like any other member of the animal kingdom. Like any other member of the animal kingdom, we must learn to be able to take care of ourselves. We must become empowered. The empowerment process is the process that we call the development of personality. Strange as it may seem, the development of personality is, to a large extent, a defense against our basic vulnerability. We must become strong in order to survive on the planet Earth. Otherwise we live as victims, a not very comfortable situation. The sad part of this personality development is that our vulnerability is the basis for the experience of essence-level being. Essence-level being is that way of being in the world that is without armor, without guile, without the need to distort the spontaneous ways of living; it is the being and thinking so natural to the child before the armor or personality is developed.

I do not mean to describe this personality development in simply negative terms. It is an essential requirement for living life on the planet. A strong personality means an opportunity to be successful, to have available one's natural instincts and assertiveness and, generally, to feel confident about one's chances of being successful in life's endeavors. The problem side is that the loss of vulnerability, the absence of essence level connections in our personal relationships, has a very destructive effect on the whole sphere of activity that surrounds human relationship. I had reached a point in my life where the split between my inner vulnerable self and the outer high-achieving self had become too wide. I was lucky. I developed a strong anxiety reaction at a young enough age where I could do something about it. How many of us go on for year after year suffering from this excruciating split, not even knowing much of the time that the split is there.

THE VOYAGE OF RE-DISCOVERY

At the age of 21 I was a graduate student in Psychology at UCLA. I was doing very well academically but, as I have mentioned, I was feeling quite overwhelmed. Difficult as it is to imagine in this day and age, I hadn't yet discovered that psychology had anything to do with human relationships. Concepts such as transformation and personal process had not yet even occurred to me. Then one day there was a departmental meeting of all graduate students. The faculty let us know how competitive a program this was. We were told that a large percentage of us would not be around at the end of the year (quite true). At the end of two years even fewer of us would be present (quite true). It was a most intimidating and depressing affair.

The last speaker of the morning was Bruno Klopfer. I had heard about Bruno but had never met him personally, nor had I ever heard him speak. He was famous for his work on the Rorschach Test and I knew he had a Jungian background. Bruno said a great deal that morning, but only one part of it stands out in my mind. "I want you to know that if any of you have any personal problems, the need to share your personal concerns with anyone, I'm here and my staff is here and available to you."

I sat there stunned. That was the beginning of my journey. I was touched at my deepest core to finally make the discovery that my choice of psychology as a career really had something to do with human relationships, with helping people, that there was some meaning to what I was doing. My deeply buried intuitive, vulnerable, magical child could hear faintly that he might one day be returned to a position of importance in my life.

Six months later (I can almost remember the exact moment), my anxiety neurosis came to the fore. I had gone on a trip around the country with three friends and we traveled about 11,000 miles. We had driven north, toured Canada, come back across the United States and ended up in Las Vegas. Everyone lost what little money he could afford, except me. It was the only time I ever won money in Las Vegas. On the way back to Los Angeles I felt the anxiety take over. I remember the dream I had that night. In the dream, my father was driving the car and I was sitting next to him; I was six years old.

My father was indeed driving my car and I was living in this infantile condition. The six year old in me, the vulnerable child, could no longer be denied. My father could never develop his life and focus in the United States. He remained a stranger between continents, never able to adjust to either one. I had shared his dream of plying the waters back and forth between the United States and Europe, never able to get off the ship. He was indeed a homeless wanderer. The fact that I was soon to return to the insanity of my life at school, where my vulnerability was equally homeless, no doubt precipitated my anxiety reaction at this time.

I tried to tough it out for a while. One of my friends on the trip was Harvey Mindess. Harvey was a graduate student in Psychology and we were good friends. We decided to attend one of Bruno Klopfer's Rorschach workshops at Claremont Graduate School. We went together and I remember the sheer terror I experienced lying in bed one night. I didn't know what was happening, but I new that I was in trouble. That night I dreamed of being in the desert and watching huge tornado funnels gradually moving closer to me. They were dark and powerful and menacing.

The unconscious had turned against me. I had turned my back on it long enough. I had disowned my feelings and my instincts. It was now going to get my attention. I was one of the lucky ones. I listened and acted. When I returned to UCLA I contacted Bruno's teaching assistant, Winafred Lucas. Winafred is today a well-known and active teacher in the consciousness movement. At that time she made contact with the Jungian group in Los Angeles and a number of graduate students, myself among them, began their Jungian analysis.

It is amazing to think of starting analysis and knowing so little about the theoretical system of the analyst I was seeing. Aside from Bruno, my only other contact with a Jungian analyst was with a man whose name was Max Zeller. Max had an advanced law degree from Germany and decided to go to UCLA so that he could work towards a degree in Psychology. He stayed a short time, but in that short time he deeply impacted many graduate students. Max was like a breath of fresh air. He was warm and loving and had a delightful sense of humor. He and his wife, Laura, had small groups of graduate students over to their home and talked to us about Jungian psychology. He took a fair amount of abuse from the academic faculty on his theoretical position, but that just made all of us feel closer to him. Max was one of the analysts who began to see a number of students at this time.

The analyst who chose to work with me and a number of graduate colleagues was Jay Dunn. Jay was an analyst and physician and he worked with me at a very reduced fee. All of those analysts who took us on at that time have my everlasting and undying gratitude. The beginning of analysis for so many of us was the beginning of a life of meaning.

My unconscious exploded immediately and suddenly I made the amazing discovery that there was within me, and within those around me, an inner life of the most amazing complexity and mystery, of the most amazing texture and color and meaning. It was like being born, quite literally. This was, in fact, one of my very early dreams in analysis. I was giving birth to a child and the child I was giving birth to was myself.

It may seem strange to hear that on a conscious level I knew nothing about Jungian or Freudian psychology. It is obvious that I was drawn to what I would now term the vibration that men like Bruno Klopfer and Max Zeller represented. Consciously, I had no idea of this. It was however, the perfect choice for the magical child. He felt safe. My dream life began in earnest and has been with me ever since that beginning, except for a short period of time. I continued my academic work. I actually began to enjoy it more. It was quite subsidiary to the real task and the real challenge that I had embarked upon, the exploration of my inner life and the psychology of the unconscious. This was in 1949. The first dream I had in analysis gave me a very real picture of my personal situation. Initial dreams oftentimes lay out a clear picture of the psychic situation.

 

The Coke Bottle

I am living in my parents' home. A coke bottle is being heated on a hot plate and there is soon going to be one hell of an explosion.

Coke is the great American drink. It jazzes you up. It's sweet and syrupy and, for me, was associated with fast living. Though I wasn't actually living at home at this time, I was psychically still there, not separated from the parental psychology. I had certainly learned to live in the fast lane. I was a creature of the contemporary American culture, coke and hamburger variety, and my mind was filled with the ideas and feelings and thoughts of this society. The unconscious could have given me no better image of the danger I was in at that time.

INITIATION RITUAL-THE OPENING OF THE HEART

I took to dreams very quickly. Each night was an adventure. To be quite honest, there followed a period of years when what happened during the night was much more important than what happened to me during the daytime. Very early in my work I had my first initiation dream. Such dreams essentially portray rituals. These rituals help to move us into a different condition of consciousness, exactly as outer rituals are supposed to do.

In Western culture, we have lost our relationship to ritual. We have no real puberty rites. We have no power rituals to help young men and women in their transition to adulthood. War might be such a ritual, certainly not one that we would choose. The Bar Mitzvah is a rather pale ritual, its power obscured by the multitude of gifts and an emphasis on social conformity. It rarely creates anexperience to help the young man move into manhood. Probably the closest we come in our culture to a puberty ritual is an experience like Outward Bound, an experience that provides physical and psychological challenges that cannot help but shift consciousness to some degree.

The unconscious has not forgotten about ritual. It contains the repository of all of our past history and something even of our future. So it is that in the course of the transformational process, over and over again are created dream images of rituals of initiation. These initiation rites are rites of passage, sometimes dangerous, sometimes benign. My first initiation dream was as follows:

Dream of Initiation

I was in a flower garden. There was a man in the garden with me, someone who would be a combination of Bruno Klopfer and Max Zeller. Everything felt dark to me; nothing was clear. The man picked a fresh rose from the garden, came to me and pressed the rose into my heart so that it was imprinted there. I awakened feeling a great peace and harmony.

 It was a very beautiful dream. I didn't understand the dream. I just knew that something significant had happened. In those years, being a very good boy and a very good analysis and, I always looked at my dreams to see whether they were good or bad. It took years before I could have the proper appreciation of the unconscious and how it operated. What I have discovered is that the unconscious rarely rewards us for good behavior. Once it is constellated, it pushes us along with unrelenting energy, always wanting the next step to be taken.

I was an advance scout for the army of Caesara Borgia and we were invading the new world. I was far ahead of the regular army and hence in a position of great danger. One other advance scout was with me. The dream shifted and I was in my childhood home and we were being attacked by American Indians. I awoke from the dream in an anxiety panic.

 I have always been amazed and awed by the dream symbols the unconscious presents. I am awed by their artistry, their visionary capabilities and by their oftentimes exacting appropriateness. In retrospect, Borgia was a perfect symbol for the intense power drive that was motivating my life. The more a man is identified with power, the more the vulnerability is being disowned. The power side that began to grow in me at the start of junior high school, when my vulnerability and sweetness could no longer serve me, developed as a way of survival.

DANGERS OF THE INNER PATH

Dream of Choosing a Path

I was walking on a forest path. To the right was a large body of water. To the left was a dense forest, more like a jungle. I came to a turning point where I had to make a choice of turning left into the jungle or continuing right and following the body of water. The right hand path was clearly one that was marked and known to a much greater extent than the path on the left. I chose the path to the right and continued my journey.

In dream symbolism the choices of left and right come up with considerable frequency. Generally speaking, the right side conforms to the way that is better known, more familiar. The left corresponds to the way that is less known, less familiar. So it is that the left is often associated with the way of the unconscious and the right with the way that is more conscious. My unconscious had literally exploded with the beginning of analysis. The un-conscious has great power and is a source of remarkable intelligence. It can also be a most seductive jungle.

During the decade of the sixties, many people took the left-hand path before they were ready. The yearning for the symbolic life, for the deeper emotions, and for spiritual experiences led many people into deeper and deeper experimentation with the unconscious through drugs and a general movement into internal or altered states of consciousness.

Experiences of this kind require an ego that can handle them. To go into the jungle of the unconscious before one has developed some grounding, some stability in life, can be a dangerous process. It is like listening to the sirens. I was getting very close to the sirens with the extensive work I was doing. Once one is lured into this world, it is not always an easy matter to come back to earth and to pay attention to the ordinary requirements of living. Many of the most adventurous youths were lost there. Others spent so much time in the jungle that their subsequent development was impaired.

I was fortunate at that early age and in those years to be able to tap into the unconscious but not be seduced into taking the left-hand path before I was ready. I can only thank the therapist I had, the general Jungian climate which supported me, and my own common sense. The right-hand path was my choice to take the Ph.D., to marry, to have children, to live in the world. I have continued to struggle with those opposites of left and right, of the world of reality and the symbolic transpersonal reality, all of my life. This dream marked my first real choice point.

Approximately fifteen years later, when my son was 13 years old, I had exactly the same dream. At that time I was married, with two children--a son and a daughter. In the dream the two of us, my son and I, were walking along the same path. We came to the same choice point, where the path led to the right around the water. This time, however, the jungle had been cleared away. It was a lovely forest now and a path led through it. We were both dressed warmly and were wearing heavy hiking boots. We walked through the forest and began ascending a path leading upwards and to the left.

It would appear that I had done my homework. The path was clear now. The jungle growth had been cleared away and the left hand path no longer represented the danger that had been there before. The intervening years were years of establishing myself in the world and doing a great deal of work that was necessary for my grounding process. I wanted to stress this dream to show the meaning of this pair of opposites. So many people are struggling with them. I especially want to awaken younger people to the dangers of artificially opening themselves to the energies of the unconscious without proper guidance and without an ego that has sufficient awareness to handle the experience. There was yet another dream during this period of discovery that has always remained with me.

Dream of Age 56

I entered a room in a strange setting, possibly a cave of stone. There were bookshelves lining the walls and my attention was drawn to a series of volumes, twelve in all and very large, written in Hebrew, on the subject of Africa. I couldn't understand them at the time. A voice spoke to me and said: "In your 56th year the meaning and knowledge of these volumes will become available to you."

I have never forgotten this dream and, as I complete my 56th year, I wait to see the meaning of that prediction. Here, too, I was clearly meant to wait many years before the process that was already underway would reach a level of completion. There was much more preparatory work to do.

PREPARATION FOR THE INNER WORLD

At the time World War II ended I was still under draft age. The draft, however, was always breathing down my neck. I received several exemptions for student status during the late forties but came very close to being inducted at the beginning of the fifties. It was at that time that I decided to do something about the uncertainty of military service. One day, while glancing at the bulletin board in Franz Hall at UCLA, I found an announcement of a Senior Psychology Student Training Program. I was an advanced graduate student at the time, so I was eligible. I would receive a one year internship in Clinical Psychology at a major army hospital and I would have the rank of Second Lieutenant. Then I would receive a year at school to complete the Ph.D. During this time my rank would become First Lieutenant. I would then pay back with three years of duty as an army psychologist. For me the advantages were immense. My draft problems would be solved. My financial problems would be solved. I would have an intense period of good clinical experience. I could do some traveling and, not least of all, the idea of being an army officer appealed to me. (This was before the days of the Vietnam war when military appeal went out of style.)

I entered the program and it turned out to be a very wonderful experience. It did give me a good internship, and it greatly reduced the time required for me to complete the Ph.D. because I could work on my psychological training full time. My first clinical assignment at Fort Bliss, Texas, gave me a year and a half of extremely valuable clinical experience. It was my first ongoing practice as a psychologist and I used and enjoyed the experience to the fullest. I would see ten to twenty men a day and became quite proficient in diagnostic work. We had an excellent staff and began to develop highly innovative treatment programs. We developed a training company of soldiers with emotional and physical handicaps and we were allowed to do special training with the officers and training cadre of the company. This act alone endeared us to the base command more than anything else that happened while I was there.

My final assignment was at Madigan Army Hospital in the state of Washington. I spent two years there and had what amounted to two years of private practice and the opportunity to work very deeply with a variety of wonderful people.

By the time I began my first military assignment in El Paso, Texas, I had completed three years of Jungian analysis. I was at this point a rather confirmed Jungian, moderately messianic, and I had begun to do some teaching for the first time. My life was working quite well. I was married and had a son and was successful in my professional life. There were personal issues in my life, but I was handling them.

Each leave period I would return to Los Angeles and, during one of these times, when Jay Dunn was out of the country, I began working with a new therapist, Hilde Kirsch. From the beginning, our work went into a very deep space. She was a spiritual guide of the most profound type. She was the giving mother I never really had. She was a gifted therapist who saw me through many trials and tribulations. In this way, during my army years, my professional life flourished and my inner process deepened. It is this deepening that I wish to describe now.

My work with dreams and the creative process had connected me to the reality of the symbolic life that existed within me and, potentially, within all people. I clearly felt the Intelligence that guided the dream process and that seemed to have some end in view for me-some end that even then I could only describe as a deeper consciousness.

There was also a difference, even at this early stage, that I felt between my Jungian colleagues and myself. My experience with the unconscious had been a positive one. I had learned about my "shadow side," the disowned energy patterns that were unacceptable to my conscious self, but I knew that at some deeper level there was a primitivity in me, a darkness, that went beyond what the others felt or knew.

My first experience of the primitivity had come when I was 19 or 20. I was working as a hospital attendant on the violent ward at the Brentwood V.A. Hospital in Los Angeles. One afternoon a black catatonic patient went berserk and we had to subdue him physically because he was harming other patients. there were only two attendants available. We called for help and then tried to bring him to the floor and hold him. In that process he hit me very hard several times. I was never much of a physical person and fighting was alien to me, but after being hit hard several times, some switch flipped in me and I, too, went berserk. I absolutely lost consciousness and found myself on the floor, some time later, hitting this man and screaming at him-"You goddamn nigger."

I cannot tell you what a profound shock it was to awaken from this fugue state and hear myself screaming those words. My whole identification was that of being a liberal, understanding, non-racist human being. I was born into the Jewish religion, and though I wasn't particularly identified with being Jewish, the liberal and non-racist aspect was of deep significance to me. Now suddenly I caught a glimpse of what lay under this veneer of civilization. I never forgot it, though it would be a number of years before I began to deal with issues of what I was later to call daemonic energies.

copyright 1983 by Hal Stone, PhD.