This book is about how one’s relationship with his or her dreams and other non-ordinary experiences can influence the direction of one’s life, who we become and how we live. Sometimes one dream will refer to some future event that is at the moment unknown and remains unknown until one day you find yourself in a situation that reminds you of the dream and, in fact, fulfills the dream’s message. This chapter, Looking in the Mirror, tells of such a dream.
My dreams continued to indicate that my same-sex desires and attractions were not only about having sex with a man. Rather they were about what wanted to come into consciousness in me through the creative union of these energies in my soul that I projected onto and sought for in a man. I dream that I tell someone that the Atman is the true self. It is necessary for some men to project this aspect, the Atman, onto and search for him in another man. (Journal, 2-15-86)
Atman refers to the innermost essence of each individual, the supreme universal self. It is Sanskrit for breath and soul. According to Hindu philosophy, Atman refers to the non-material self that never changes, one’s real self or essence. This again is “the treasure hard to find” that the earlier dream suggested stood behind my homosexuality and same-sex attractions. But what was my real self or essence? How did it wish to manifest? Who was this Atman? A symbol points to something unknown and mysterious and is often the precursor to a transformation.232 Therefore the man that attracted me was a symbol that carried this projection. But what was the meaning? What was this essence that was projected onto this other man? What was it that wanted to come into consciousness?
As I meditated on this question, the word coyote suddenly came into my awareness. Why the word coyote? Coyote comes from coyolle and coyotl, which mean a “prairie wolf,” and is related to the wolf. I recall the active imagination I did with the boy in the dream that I released from the parsonage that a later dream identified as my homosexual self. In that dream the boy also took the image of a green snake and a wolf all in one. (See the introduction.) In that work the green snake-wolf-boy identified himself as instincts, drives, needs, my younger brother, my other self, my primitive self, the part of me that desires the masculine.
The animal is also the symbolic carrier of the Self, one’s true self and essence.233 As such the animal becomes a symbol for the Atman. Coyote is a trickster figure, appearing at times as the Creator himself. At other times he is the messenger, the culture hero, and the fool with the ability of the transformer. In some stories he is a handsome young man. In others he is an animal. Yet others present him as just a power, a sacred one.234 As a transformer, the coyote is a demiurge, a skilled workman and creator, a lunar animal, and the spirit of the night. As such he has a dual nature. On one hand he is a culture hero and imparts knowledge of arts and crafts and secures fire and sun. On the other he is a bullying, licentious, greedy, erotic, and fumbling dupe. The wolf is the companion of the coyote and his beloved brother. Could it be that the wolf in me sought his companion and brother, the coyote, in my same-sex attractions and desires? But what was this coyote-spirit that I sought?
The trickster is the first rudimentary stage in the development of the hero myth in which the hero is instinctual, uninhibited, and often childish. The fundamental goal of initiation lies in taming the original trickster-like wildness of the juvenile nature. There are three kinds of initiation. First, there is the arousal and violence of a Dionysian Thunder Act such as a violent uprising of the unconscious. This one might be experienced with a serious illness. A second initiation is a submission to a religion, and a third initiation involves not integrating oneself with any religious doctrine or secular group consciousness, but rather liberating oneself from any state that is too rigid, too fixed, or too final. This third way is marked by a transcendence of any confining existing patterns, and a segue to a more expanded and mature stage of development, resulting in a union of conscious with the unconscious and the realization of the transcendent function by which man achieves his fullest potential and the Self.235 It appears that the third way is the way of my initiation—to choose one’s destiny or purpose. The symbols of transcendence, of which the phallus is one, are the symbols that represent man’s striving to attain this goal. These provide the way for the unconscious to enter consciousness.
The symbols are manifold but at the most archaic levels of this symbolism is the trickster figure. But now he is no longer the lawless would-be hero, but the shaman, the medicine man, a primitive master of initiation.236 The coyote is the shamanic spirit whose magical practices and flight of initiation symbolized by his antics stamp him as a primate master of initiation. Here I also connect the swan maiden of my work on Swan Lake. A swan maiden is also known as the shaman’s spirit wife—intuition working through a medium—an individual who is capable of obtaining knowledge of distant events of either the future or the past. This confirms my initial hunch that the coyote was the shaman. He was my shamanic spirit, the shaman in me.
The trickster is not only sexual but also the messenger, a god of the crossroads, and finally, the leader of souls to and from the Underworld. His phallus therefore penetrates from the known into the unknown, seeking spiritual messages of deliverance and healing. The shaman’s spirit first entered my consciousness in the form of the coyote as I reflected on the meaning of the Atman—my true self and essence—that I project onto a man in my sexual desire for him. Could it be that my homosexuality on the spiritual level was my desire to seek this spirit in me, to penetrate the unknown, the unconscious, seeking messages of deliverance and healing? But how could I bring this unconscious Other into consciousness? How could I embody this other man rather than seek him in the body of another?
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