Sometimes a person has a dream that changes his or her life. I had such a dream. Here are parts of that dream. The complete dream is discussed in this chapter.
I dream that a lady, the mother of a student of mine, comes to the desk in the classroom where I am teaching Spanish and lays a book down on my desk. I glance at it and think the title is The Sheldon-Sam Story, a book about my same-sex relationship with this man, but I didn’t know one existed. Meanwhile I tell the student that he will fail these nine weeks because of missing so many classes. His mother says that they had planned for that.
I average out his grades for the first nine weeks; he gets an A. Since the grade for the last nine weeks will be an F, his average will be a C. I tell the student that whatever he gets on the semester test will average into that. I tell him that he can play around with different grades to see what he can make on the semester average. It is like he can see what his semester average will be by what grade he decides he wants to get on the semester test. His mother asks if he can come in the mornings to get help and make up the class. She suggests twenty minutes. I don’t think that is much time. I tell her that I am at school by twenty minutes to eight. The student doesn’t want to do that. They leave. As they leave, I say, “When one has a conflict of priorities one must follow the heart.”
After they leave, I look at the book she put down on the desk. It isn’t The Sheldon-Sam Story but The Swan Lake Story. This chapter, The Call of the Swan Maiden” is how its reference to the ballet, Swan Lake, provided insight into my same-sex attractions and became the beginning of the story and journey that became this book.
The Call of the Swan Maiden
Five years had passed since the dream where I turned to face the bull that had chased me up a tree to prevent me from returning to the town where I lived. Facing and beginning to integrate the bull energy, that powerful masculine energy from some ancient time that was also somehow connected to the lunar energies of the ancient goddess, had resulted in a slow evolution of consciousness and changes in my relationships in the outer world.
As stated, I ended my same-sex relationships, and my wife and I sold our home in order to free ourselves from the financial burden of the bookstore that we owned and operated. Working with this energy as it revealed itself in my dreams also initiated the journey out of the institutional church and the parsonage consciousness in which I had been raised. The dreams continued to directly and clearly address the importance of the past as to the origins of my life patterns, including my same-sex attractions. They even made a statement about the origin of my homosexuality. The dreams indicated a path forward into a new life, the life of this Other living in my soul.
I dream that
I go to the church in which I was raised to hear the minister preach. He is telling the congregation about his ancestry and heritage. He tells them that he came from the jungles of Africa and that his rejection of the highly emotional African heritage has made him the way he is. I know that he has discovered this because he has been reading a book on how people make unconscious judgments. He has discovered that generations of our heritage still live in and through us unconsciously. His sermon is a confession of that reality to the congregation, a kind of setting things right. I know it is the rejection of his African heritage that resulted in him believing in the theology he believes in. I wonder if I should stop him and pray for the breaking of these unconscious judgments. Instead, I leave without speaking to him. I have come to hear this final sermon before he moves, a kind of farewell. (Journal, 5-16-83)
This dream referenced the ancestry of the minister as being from Africa. One of theories on the origin of the human race states that all humans came out of Africa.112 Did this dream reference such an origin in general or did it simply refer to the origin of this particular man or my own ancestral origin? I do not know the ancestral history of the minister in this dream. But the dream stated that it was the rejection of his “highly emotional African heritage” that caused the minister to believe in a certain theology, in this case a Christian and biblical theology. Theology is the systematic study of the existence and nature of the Divine and its relationship to and influence upon other beings. Was this dream suggesting that this masculine minister part of me believed what he did because he was cut off from the emotional truth of his pre-Christian, more earth- and nature-based African history? This dream also continued the theme of the previous dream wherein I told the minister’s wife that we make unconscious root judgments that affect our lives. The minister in this dream was my former pastor. He represented my traditional Christian training and theology and the evangelical minister in me, the “parson” from the parsonage in which I was raised. This dream showed that this part of me was beginning to alter its point of view about the roles that the unconscious and our past play in our development and beliefs—not just our personal past but the ancestral past as well.
This dream also hinted at the split, the departure so to speak, from our pre-Christian and earth-related connections symbolized by the reference to the “African jungle.” This theme of the influence of our ancestors on our lives was reflected in another dream.
I tell my dad that the beliefs and fantasies that our grand- parents and great-grandparents lived throughout their lives in their work, their religion, and daily living are important in discovering why a person is the way he or she is, why a person has a particular problem, a particular disease, or a particular lifestyle. I tell him there will be a new psychology called “biological archetypal psychology.” (Journal, 7-9-83)
Twenty years later with my journey into shamanism and energy medicine I would discover the truth of this dream—that the stories of our ancestors continue to vibrate in our energy bodies, influencing our lives unconsciously.
Bobby McFerrin, a genius of improvisation and a genre-bending vocal magician who “sings the territory between music, mystery, and spirit” tells the story of a woman who came backstage after one of his shows to tell him that she had just spent a year studying African languages that were extinct or near extinct and she wanted to know how he knew these languages. Bobby told her that he didn’t know what she was talking about, that he just opened his mouth and sang whatever came out, because to him that was a language. The woman told Bobby that she’d heard moments of precise phrasing of extinct African languages in his vocalizations.
Bobby said that incident caused him to start thinking that we are embodied memories of our ancestors. He had his father in him. He in turn was a memory of his father and so on and so on. Bobby wondered if he was accessing some ancestral memory when he sang and, if so, how far back did it go? Maybe a very long way indeed.113
This reflection by Bobby McFerrin agrees with what the Inca shamans teach. We each carry all of our past including our ancestral past in our luminous energy field. Do these memories emerge in our dreams? Do they influence our desires, our interests, and our longings? Shamanism asserts that we can access this information through “imaginal sight.” Imaginal sight will be explored in Chapter 16.
Sometimes when I am doing energy work, I notice a strong urge to vocalize sounds or utterances—what some churches might call “speaking in tongues.” Somewhere deep inside me, out of some space come these utterances, which I then speak. Clients have told me that they have found this “language”—these utterances—very powerful, comforting, and healing. Perhaps they are the memory of an ancient medicine man or woman or healer or perhaps they are the language of the energy itself, the energy in vocal form, which is accessed and expressed.
This awareness and understanding came years after I’d had the dream I mention above. At the time the dream simply caused me to reflect on the stories of my ancestors and to begin to see how the archetypal patterns of my ancestors had influenced my own life’s path. Both my maternal grandparents and great-grandparents were farmers, thus closely associated with the earth, nature, and the rhythms of planting and harvesting and symbolically with Mother Earth and the feminine—the Great Goddess of the ancient world. My maternal grand- father left the farm and went the way of higher education, becoming a teacher and school principal, symbolizing the rise of the masculine and the mind or spirit over earth and matter. As previously mentioned, in his thirties my maternal grandfather experienced a spontaneous healing and born-again experience. The story goes that while he was recovering from an illness at the family farm God instantly healed him from the illness and “saved him.”
After this healing and born-again experience, he began attending church and eventually was called to preach. He became a minister and rose through the ranks to become the district superintendent of the Northeast Indiana Conference. Symbolically this was the rise of the masculine in both his professional pursuits, the masculine as it found its expression in the archetypes of the teacher and the minister-savior. His son followed in the path of the farmer while his daughter, my mother, married a minister and carried on the path of the minister-savior archetype. This minister-savior archetype became dominant, cut off from the archetype of the farmer and its connection to the earth and nature. Financial power came through the maternal great-grand-other’s family who were wealthy farmers.
My maternal grandmother’s family also farmed. It is interesting to me that my grandmother also left the farm to become a teacher. She married my grandfather who had also left the farm to become an educator and eventually a minister. This mirrors the story that my mother lived out in her life, marrying a minister. While my mother says she always wanted to be a teacher or a librarian, she did not pursue either of those paths, but lived her life out as a minister’s wife. The story of the teacher was passed on to me and one of my brothers while my other two brothers followed the path of the minister-savior archetype. I don’t know much about my father’s ancestors. My father’s parents died before my father turned twenty-five and before I was born. I only know that my paternal grandfather was a factory worker and my paternal grandmother a housewife. My father was one of nine siblings. He accepted Christ as his savior at an early age and felt “called to preach” at age sixteen. He became the minister in the parsonage in which I was raised. Given the archetypal stories of these two family lines, full of teachers, ministers, and before that, farmers and earth keepers, it’s no wonder that I would fall under their spell.
The challenge is to become conscious of the archetypal patterns in one’s life and to build an awakened relationship with them so as to not live them out unconsciously as fate. The dream’s reference to a “biological-archetypal psychology” suggested the influences of both biology—the influence of inherited family patterns—and the influence of archetypes—transcendent and universal patterns swimming in the collective unconscious—on a person’s life’s path. This is none other than Jung’s concept of the two-million-year-old man that lives in every one of us, connecting us to the archetypal foundations of all human experiences, back to the hominid, mammalian, and reptilian ancestors who live on in the structures of our minds and brains.114 Not only do we harbor within us this two million-year-old man, we also harbor the universe itself, and beyond that, the divine, which connects us to the “primordial other,” the “indigenous one” of the psyche and its wisdom. This two-million-year-old man “supports our finite existence and animates our dreams.”115
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