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“I Fell Asleep Under the Tree”

The diversity and Twinness of the Forked Tree is Natural and gives Power to the Human to endure in every kind of circumstance and challenge. When the Power of either of the two branches of the Great Tree is suppressed or ignored, the Tree will die.

—Hyemeyohsts Storm, Lightningbolt (1994)

The Missing Link

Ten years ago my mother lay in a hospital bed, dying of cancer. My father and I kept a constant vigil by her bedside as we struggled to accept the inevitable end. At one point, Mom leaned closer to me. In a conspiratorial stage whisper, she confided that she saw someone standing at the end of her bed.

I looked, but saw only the blank wall and the plastic bin for recycling medical waste. The tone of her voice told me she understood that this someone wasn't “really” there.

“Don't worry,” she said, as she patted my hand in reassurance, “it's not Jesus!”

We both laughed at the joke. Even on her deathbed, Mom retained her sense of humor and unflappable composure. Dad and I marveled at her bravery.

“It's Ben Casey,” she added weakly.

Doctor Ben Casey, from the old television show. He was a brash but talented neurosurgeon who never gave up on a patient, a super-doc with compassion. Intuitively, I understood why Ben was making his rounds at my mother's bedside. Her own doctor had fled the scene, conveniently slipping out of town to attend a medical conference. He would not return until after she died, early the following morning.

Next to his Hollywood prototype, the flesh and blood doctor was a pale imitation. In spite of my anger, however, I realized that this was not entirely his fault. Something is very wrong when a society's healers can no longer perform their sacred task and their only recourse is to throw up their hands in resignation or hide under the nearest rock. Something much larger than one man's character is amiss.

The situation is analogous to what happened to the American Indians when they were hit with smallpox, influenza, and other hitherto unknown European diseases and plagues. All their tribal shamans could do was shake their heads in disbelief. Healing—the art of making a person whole again—was no longer possible. Balance could not be restored. The world had shattered into broken bits and pieces.

Nearly fifty years ago, in the shadow of Hiroshima and the Holocaust, the English philosopher Bertrand Russell predicted that if the West did not overcome its own cultural and social fragmentation, we would bring ourselves “only nearer to irretrievable disaster.”1 Russell was a man of strict logic and science; his faith lay in reason. Yet he despaired that knowledge alone is not enough. (Surely mere data—our own deity of the hour—is not enough either.) What we need is the wisdom to use the knowledge (and data) properly for humane ends, and to get this wisdom, we must experience the world and ourselves as a whole. We have to be able to see the connections between means and ends, just as a great eagle can survey a vast territory from high above in the sky. Not only that, but we have to be able to feel the unity of all things. Absent this mystical sense, Russell warned, we will destroy ourselves.

This is an old story. An ancient Greek myth says that when Zeus, the king of the gods, created humans, he grew worried that he did too good a job. Eventually, we might become too powerful and overthrow the gods. So Zeus split us right down the middle, like a ripe cantaloupe (see the speech of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium, sec. 191 a). Each of us is only half a self. Sadly, we aren't even aware of our infirmity. We've forgotten what it is like to be whole. Afflicted with a strange longing we cannot even name, we yearn for our lost integrity, our missing other half.

This story is more than a quaint old tale. I see it as a useful metaphor for the dangerous path we have been treading for the past several thousand years in what we proudly call “civilization.” Our own jealous gods of religion and science have cut us off from our natural bonds to Earth and Spirit. We have lost touch with both our inner world of dream, imagination, and intuition and the outer world of nature—the animals, plants, and elementary forces that sustain us. Indeed, this is no accident; to become alienated from the one is to become estranged from the other, for they are ultimately one and the same.

Our fate is to feel at once disembodied and dispirited, floating in a nowhere zone. We are detached from everything outside the narrow rut of our increasingly meaningless and empty daily routines of commuting, computing, and consuming. We have been reduced, as the philosopher R. G. Collingwood lamented, to mere “wrecks and fragments.”2

So what, exactly, is the missing link?

As Bertrand Russell understood, our heart life has not kept pace with the growth of our intellect. We are exceedingly clever but lack the wisdom that comes from feeling a part of life. How else can we explain the collective madness of recent genocides, from Rwanda to Yugoslavia? Daily we commit the unspeakable crime of geocide, murdering entire species of animals, plants, and perhaps even Mother Earth herself. The evidence of our heartlessness lies all around us, from school shootings, terrorist bombings, and “holy” wars to the pathetic dishonesty and corruption of our political, business, and religious “leaders.”

It's an awful mess, as anyone can see.

I'm afraid that the only way out of this mess is for each of us to confront our own personal craziness, to experience it and suffer through it, firsthand. Only when I did this could I come to see my own misery as a symptom of a much larger imbalance. Only then was I ready and able to receive the gift of insight: The real connection is never lost.

It all began for me more than twenty years ago, during my first few months of graduate school, when I was slaving away on my doctorate in philosophy….

“So, You Want to Be a Wise Man?”

The cold, grey Chicago autumn was rapidly slipping into an even colder and greyer Chicago winter. Having only recently moved there from the East Coast, the city and the university campus were still new to me, and it all felt strange. I had worked hard in college. While my friends were partying, I was in the library, studying. I had been determined to get into a good graduate school. Now that I was there, I felt ill at ease. Something was wrong, though I could not put my finger on it. I felt like the poor fool who had climbed to the top of the ladder, only to discover that it had been placed against the wrong wall.

One afternoon after class, I stopped by a campus coffee shop located in one of the academic buildings. With its dark wood paneling and carpeted floor, the room resembled my fantasy of the dining room of a private club. Groups of students were congregating around tables and benches, smoking cigarettes and chatting away over steaming mugs of coffee and greasy doughnuts. I saw several familiar faces and went over to say hello.

Someone introduced me to Josh, whom I knew by reputation as a brilliant scholar far along in his graduate studies. Josh was sitting cross-legged on one of the wooden benches. With his curly black beard and half-lotus posture, he looked every inch a combination of Zen master and Hasidic sage. He smiled warmly as we shook hands.

“So, you want to be a wise man?” Josh asked, nodding.

I realized, of course, that he was referring to the literal meaning of “philosophy,” the ancient Greek word for “the love of wisdom.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I replied.

Josh threw back his head and exploded into hearty laughter.

I joined in, to pretend to my own knowing cynicism—the accepted posture of intellectual sophistication. Yet I had answered truthfully. I wanted something more than a mere degree or an academic position. But I was reluctant to say so. Perhaps I felt naïve. By mocking the idea that we were in pursuit of real wisdom, Josh and I were being astute aspiring professionals. It was all a kind of game. Only this game was no fun.

Not long after the incident with Josh, I was sitting in the class of a world-renowned philosopher. Professor Scott, as I'll call him, combined intellectual precision and rigor with an easygoing manner. His battered brown Volkswagen sported an ‘'I'd Rather Be Sailing” bumper sticker. And you could almost believe it. He was gifted with a rich, soothing baritone voice, not to mention a deft, dry sense of humor. He was a campus star.

On this occasion, someone had asked the professor if he agreed that human beings were basically intelligent “meat machines,” as a professor from M.I.T's famed artificial intelligence laboratory had recently suggested. And what if the silicon-based machines could eventually outthink the meat variety? Did that mean they would be superior to humans?

“Hell, give them the vote!” Professor Scott quipped merrily. He leaned back and basked in the boisterous eruption of approving laughter that greeted his clever remark.

A student in the back of the room timidly raised her hand. Helen, as I'll call her, was a shy, quiet person who hardly ever spoke in class. Professor Scott, grinning broadly, nodded in serene acknowledgment of her question. All eyes turned to Helen.

“But why would we we want to think like that?” she asked earnestly.

The room grew eerily silent. Time itself seemed to slow down, like when you're in a car accident and it feels as if events are unfolding in super-slow motion inside of a soundproof cocoon.

At last Professor Scott appeared to be saying something. Oddly, his mouth was moving, yet no words were coming out. It took me a moment to realize that he was not winded, but rather, quite uncharacteristically, stuttering.

“Wwwhhhyyy?? Bbbbeeeccccaaauuuse it's TRUE, that's why!!” he spluttered.

Like so many before him, when challenged by a real question, Professor Scott could only retreat into a stubborn affirmation of the unquestionable articles of his (philosophical) creed.

To cast off the solid moorings of accepted answers means departing the security of familiar shores and sailing into uncharted waters, the open sea of questioning. Beliefs are like broken pieces of clamshells and driftwood washed up on the beach. At best, they're the tacky souvenirs of someone else's trip to the seashore, snapshots of yesteryear. People wind up fighting over these worthless trinkets. Answers are possessions, the cause of divided hearts and partial perceptions. They inspire pride, envy, fear, and righteous indignation.

Real questions force us to undertake our own voyage into the wild heart of an undiscovered country. Why should we think of ourselves as mere meat machines? Is the Earth really flat? Is Jesus truly God? Why should I give away all my personal power to a guru? True inquiry is a magical act, directly linking us with the living source. It is what the late physicist-philosopher David Bohm called “the dance of the mind.”3 Our dance partner is reality itself.

Professor Scott, alas, was not a dancer; he was a collector. I could see that on that day in class.

Helen was silent. She asked no more questions (at least not out loud). I, however, began asking myself many questions.

That'll Be Five Senses (Only), Please

I soon came to understand that it was an unquestionable article of faith among my professors that philosophy must be scientific. In practice, this meant it was inconceivable that humans might be something more than mere “meat machines” that happen to think. Professor Scott could no more question his belief than the pope could question the unique divinity of Christ. What was an obvious fact to Professor Scott was, in Helen's more fertile imagination, only a mere possibility—and a dismaying one at that.

But according to scientific philosophy, it is precisely the fertile (or rather, fevered) imagination that gets us into trouble. It lures us away from “hard fact” and on up into the airy clouds of fantasy and speculation. Ironically, here scientific philosophy agrees with its mortal enemies, the defenders of religion. For example, Saint Augustine (354–430 c. E.), the medieval Catholic thinker, condemned the imagination shorn of dogma as a prostitute that leads the faithful astray.4 The English writer Edmund Gosse observed that his mother, a strict Protestant fundamentalist, refused to allow any kind of storybook or fictional work into the house out of fear that young Edmund's mind might be stimulated beyond the authoritative bounds of the Bible⁵ (just as today's fanatics burn Harry Potter books and crusade to have The Wizard of Oz removed from public libraries⁶). No thinking outside the metaphysical box allowed! That is the great bogey of dogmatic religion and science alike.

I discovered that the bible of sorts of the scientific philosophers was a book entitled, appropriately enough, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951), by Professor Hans Reichenbach Professor Reichenbach bemoaned the way that thinkers from Plato to Hegel had been seduced by “an imaginary world of pictures, which can become stronger than the quest for truth.”⁷ True scientists resist all so-called extralogical motives. They stick to reason, whose job is to process incoming data provided by the five physical senses. Those who believe that mind or consciousness (or “soul” or “spirit”) is something apart from measurable brain activity are like the poor deluded rube who took apart his car engine hoping to find the tiny galloping horses. Just as “horsepower” is only a colorful metaphor for engine performance, so “mind power” refers to physiologic brain function. Reality is what can be seen with our eyes, felt with our fingers, heard with our ears, and so forth.

Most, if not all, my teachers tacitly assumed something like this. Yet I realized that Professor Reichenbach was doing much more than presenting a rarefied philosophical theory of interest to only a handful of academics. In fact, he was articulating some of our basic cultural assumptions, including those that inform our systems of education.

Many years later I read with great interest and empathy New York artist and psychic8 Ingo Swann's account of his struggles growing up in what he derisively calls “the Age of the Five Senses Only.”⁹ In the 1970s, Ingo Swann was a pioneer research subject in remote viewing, which is clairvoyance at a distance performed under controlled conditions, whereby an individual can acquire information about a physically distant object, place, or event by means other than the ordinary physical senses. ¹⁰

But even as a child, Ingo knew things that others insisted he could not know. On occasion he had inklings of future events. Also, he could sense what he calls “invisible ‘energies' and ‘thought-forms' flowing or jumping between people, animals, plants, and even buildings and geophysical objects.”¹¹ To young Ingo, the world was a single, living, breathing form of energy-consciousness.

As time passed, however, Ingo learned that such perceptions were socially awkward. So, little by little, they ceased occurring to him. One such “learning experience” occurred during his Sunday school class when he innocently asked his teacher how it was possible to know the future:

She held up a Bible and thunderously and fearsomely exclaimed in front of the Sunday school class, and in the best Salem witch-hunt style, that seeing into the future was the work of the devil. “Do you want to become a minion of the Devil?” she asked with visible emotion. Indeed, I did not, and I was nearly frightened to death of the possibility—as well as being mortified in front of my Sunday school peers. ¹²

Like the young Ingo Swann, I, too, had my share of “unorthodox” perceptions before they went underground (see chapter 2). I therefore knew from my own experience that the premises of so-called scientific philosophy were false. There are most definitely nonphysical senses. But “empiricism” was a fraud in any case. No one, least of all my teachers, was interested in hearing about my personal experiences. In truth, there was no such thing as the culture of the Five Senses Only. We were not taught to base our reasoned conclusions on our own direct sense experience; we were taught to accept someone else's interpretations of other people's ideas of their sense experiences. In other words, we were being indoctrinated, pure and simple. Think for yourself—only do it just like me. Too much of our educational system is little more than a propaganda machine.

To educate one's senses, it is necessary to exercise them—outdoors. But children are housed all day long inside stuffy classrooms. When I attended primary school, anyone caught dreamily staring out the window at the trees or sky would incur the wrath of the teacher. (I can still hear my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Ludlum, screaming at poor Jeffrey Brown at the top of her lungs.) But at least we had recess! Today there is pressure to eliminate recess and make school days longer and more numerous. There is no time for our overscheduled, pressured kids to loll around by the local creek catching frogs, as I did with my friend when we were young. The solitude and leisure essential for inner (and outer) development are viewed by the competitive overachiever mentality as a waste of time.

In contrast to the lip service of our own culture, the indigenous inhabitants of this continent made the proper training and development of the physical (and, of course, the nonphysical) senses a real priority. “We could feel the peace and power of the Great Mystery in the soft grass under our feet and in the blue sky above us,” said Chief Luther Standing Bear (1868–1939), a Lakota Sioux Indian.¹³ Bear Heart, a contemporary Muskogee Creek Indian shaman, says that one of the first acts of an Indian mother is to take her newborn and introduce the baby to the elements—as his own mother did with him when he was but three days old. Mother Earth, Grandfather Sun, Water and Fire, Moon and Stars—all these became intimately known, and respected and loved, as relatives. Bear Heart reflects:

I had a sense of belonging as I grew up because of my people's relationship with these elements, and I imagine that's why most of our people related to the environment so easily. We recognized a long time ago that there was life all around us—in the water, in the ground, in the vegetation. Children were introduced to the elements so that as we grew up we were not looking down upon nature or looking up to nature. We felt a part of nature, on the same level. We respected each blade of grass, one leaf on a tree among many other leaves, everything.14

You cannot learn how to relate to the elements in Bear Heart's way by studying the periodic table in a classroom. Perhaps that is why I never fail to enter a state of delighted astonishment whenever my wife and I visit Sebago Lake in Maine. To walk through the woods and smell the pines and hear the birds is a tonic. At sunset, when it is so quiet that it feels as though the entire Earth has been covered over in a cozy blanket of silence and tucked in for the evening, I well up with indescribable emotions. I feel as though I have a ringside seat at Creation. Listening to the eerie cry of a loon in the middle of a still night punctuated only by the rhythmic lapping of water at the lake's edge never fails to send shivers down my spine. Sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing—these cannot be reduced to cold formulas or rigid protocols. Nor can they be cultivated and brought to flower by lectures and slides.

Our system of education teaches only the clever manipulation of abstractions and the willy-nilly ingestion of indigestible pseudo-facts provided by authorities both fleshy, and now electronic, with the ubiquitous presence of televisions and computers in every classroom. There is no room in the narrow confines of this cultural prison cell for the full experience of our senses, let alone imagination, inspiration, dreams, feelings, or intuitions.

The “culture of five senses only” turns out to be a culture without any sense at all.

The eminent American philosopher (and veteran psychical researcher) William James (1842-1910) observed long ago that it would be more nutritious to eat a single raisin than to ingest a menu of the most elegantly described gourmet food.15 Yet we perversely seem to prefer to chew on cardboard rather than taste the food of reality itself. Why is this?

Perhaps it is because we can more easily control and manipulate our cardboard abstractions, whereas raw experience offers something spontaneous and wild. “The Indian tried to fit in with Nature and to understand, not to conquer and rule,” Chief Standing Bear lamented.¹⁶ We are grim emperors without clothes, suffering from a severe case of metaphysical malnutrition. Skinny and naked, we starve for a mouthful of real experience.

No wonder, then, that three months into graduate school I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Not that I knew it then, but I was just a canary in a leaky coal mine.

How long would it be before I was lying still and silent at the bottom of my cage?

Rabbit Speaks

I stood motionless before the stainless-steel sink in the kitchen. Bright sunlight streamed in through the window, glinting off the silvery metal. Inside the sink I beheld three newborn baby rabbits, their white fur still glistening with the fresh moisture of their mother's womb. I felt joy. Then my attention was drawn to the back door of the kitchen, a “Dutch” or double door. The top portion of the door was wide open. I stood at the half-open door, looking out at a maple tree in the backyard. Beside the tree was a fourth rabbit, a buff-colored adult, sitting up on its hind legs. It was the newborns' mother.

“I fell asleep under the tree.”

The words formed in my mind. The mother rabbit was speaking directly to me, mind-to-mind, telepathically. Her tone was sad, mournful. I knew that the tree in question was the old maple, split at its trunk. Half of the tree had been cut down, many years before.

I awoke, bathed in perspiration, my heart pounding wildly. I could not tell if I was exhilarated or frightened (or both). The dream was preternaturally vivid. It had felt every bit as real as everyday waking reality—if not more so. The ancient Taoist sage Chuang Tzu said that he once dreamt happily of being a butterfly. His dream was so powerful that when he awoke, he was not sure whether he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man, or a man who had dreamt that he was a butterfly.

Which was the illusion, and which the reality? Like Tzu, I was ambivalent. The colors in my dream were bright and intense, almost psychedelic in hue—quite different from the monotonous, dull, grey gothic buildings of the university campus. My emotions in the dream had been sharp and strong. By contrast, during the day, I felt virtually nothing, as if I had been anesthetized. The atmosphere in the dream was suffused with an air of ripe expectancy, of incipient revelation. My classes, on the other hand, were uniformly uninspiring, leaving me bored, listless, and impatient—not to mention both irritated with, and envious of, those of my fellow students who could sincerely muster, or at least feign, a degree of ambition.

The dream was an intrusion on my misery. I could not stop thinking about it, even when I wanted to, even when it frightened me. The late science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick once defined reality as “that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away”17 No matter how much I tried to tell myself, “Look, it was only a dream,” it wouldn't go away.

But what did it mean? I had no clue. It was as if I had received a message marked “Urgent!” only to discover on opening the envelope that the note inside was written in incomprehensible hieroglyphics. Furthermore, I had no key, no psychological Rosetta Stone, to help me decode the gibberish. Certainly all my years of schooling had not prepared me to deal with—of all scandalous things—my own dreams! I was frustrated by my own ignorance even as I was haunted by the talking rabbit's cryptic message. Why a talking rabbit, of all silly things? I began to wonder if I was going crazy.

Under the circumstances, I did the only thing that seemed reasonable at the time: I tried to forget about the strange dream and the powerful emotions it aroused. All questions were put on hold. I gritted my teeth and dutifully churned out my term papers.

In the meantime, I had dinner with a woman I'll call Julie. She was an assistant museum curator and also, as it happened, a former Catholic nun. She had left her order after growing frustrated with the authoritarianism and antifeminism of the Church.

After listening intently to my passionate attack on the “meat machine” view of human nature, Julie asked me if I had any contact with the Jung Institute in nearby Evanston. The institute, she explained, was dedicated to the exploration of the ideas of the Swiss psychologist, Carl G. Jung. When I said no, I hadn't, she went and retrieved some literature from the institute and gave it to me.

“You should get in touch with them,” Julie stated emphatically.

Trying to appear interested and grateful, I thanked Julie for her suggestion. Inwardly, I cringed. Jung? Wasn't he a charlatan? I knew only a little about him. I knew that he believed that all human minds were somehow connected at a deep level, which he referred to as the “collective unconscious.” I also knew that these supposed connections manifested as “archetypes,” which he alternately spoke of as inborn patterns of behavior, energy systems, or symbolic images appearing universally in the dreams, visions, and fantasies of all people in all times and places. Though I was not sure how to judge these theories, I thought for sure I'd heard somewhere that it was all bunk. (Although my undergraduate mentor had spoken of Freud's work with great respect, he had expressed deep reservations about Jung, whose ideas he criticized as ambiguous and slippery at best. As for my graduate school professors, they mostly ignored maverick thinkers like Jung altogether, except to dismiss them as “mystics”—a pejorative term synonymous with “wooly-minded,” “unscientific,” and “unphilosophical.”) More to the point, I was afraid that any interest I might show in him would ensure the spread of that taint to me. What if my professors found out? For gosh sake, Jung wasn't even a real (professional) philosopher; he was only a mere psychologist!

All this sounds pretty silly to me now. Clearly, I wasn't exactly thinking for myself back then. I was stuck regurgitating secondhand opinions and absolutely terrified of others' opinions of me. So I promptly filed Julie's suggestion in the dead-letter office of my mind, trying my best not to feel like too much of a coward in the bargain.

Jung, at Heart

Perhaps a month later, I was casually browsing in a bookstore when I spied the fat spine of a book with the intriguing title of Mysteries. I don't know what made me reach for the book on the shelf. Curiosity, I guess. The author, an Englishman named Colin Wilson, was not then known to me. (Though years later we would correspond, and eventually I would have the privilege of meeting him in the flesh.) As I flipped through the 650 pages of the book, however, I was hooked.

In part, I was only rediscovering many of the topics that had fascinated me as a child. When I was ten years old (in the 1960s) and most of my friends were busy collecting baseball cards, I was reading mass-market paperbacks on topics like telepathy, mediumship, ghosts, and apparitions. Not Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, but Susy Smith, Raymond Bayless, Hans Holzer, and Nandor Fodor: these were my childhood heroes. Of course, that was before I self-consciously put such books on the forbidden reading list.

But the exciting thing was that the author was conversant with genuinely philosophical ideas. He was a bona fide thinker who took paranormal phenomena seriously, and this was a new concept to me at the time. It was as if I had found the Holy Grail.

I can't say precisely how long it took me to read almost halfway through the book. But eventually I came to a chapter in which the author examines the theories of, yes, C. G. Jung. My attention was riveted by the following section, which describes the genesis of Jung's early formulation of the archetype concept:

In the same year [1906], Jung read an account of the discovery of a cache of “soul stones” near Arlesheim. No details were given about the stones, but Jung suddenly knew that they were oblong, blackish, and had the upper and lower halves painted different shades. At the same time, he recalled a forgotten event of his childhood he had carved a small wooden figure from the end of a ruler and made a cloak for it. This figure was kept in a pencil box, together with an oblong stone which Jung had painted in two colours, and the box was carefully hidden on a beam in the attic. During school hours, Jung wrote coded messages on tiny pieces of paper and periodically stole up to the attic to place these “scrolls” in the pencil case. It now struck Jung that his little wooden man was like the cloaked figure of Telesphoros, the guardian spirit of convalescence, who is often seen on Greek monuments reading a scroll to Asclepius, the god of healing, and that he had been instinctively performing some primitive rite connected with the release of the creative impulse. (Years later, he saw a similar ritual performed in Africa by natives.) Describing the event later in his autobiography, Jung tells how “there came to me, for the first time, the conviction that there are archaic psychic components which have entered the individual psyche without any direct line of tradition.” He called these “archaic components” archetypes.18

I now recalled a forgotten event from my childhood. There had been a small wooden matchbox that I kept in my nightstand drawer. Inside the box was a small oblong stone figure that had an upper and lower half. From a small strip of cardboard, I had fashioned a bed (or throne, as I imagined it) for the stone. Next to the stone, I placed the figure of a tiny spaceman that I had cannibalized from a plastic rocket-ship model. Around the man's shoulders, I placed a cloak that I made for him out of a corner of facial tissue. This setup was the basis of a game of exploration. I imagined that the two strange figures were secretly connected, fast friends. While the special stone never left the box, the little spaceman would go on all sorts of adventures and report back to his superior, the stone.

Just as an individual personality in time might relate to his soul?

Oh, yes, I still had the matchbox, figures and all, in my possession. For some strange reason, I had kept it all those many years. (I have it still.)

Instantly, I realized that Jung was right, after all. We are indeed all connected at some deep level. What's more, it seems that the secret access door to this underground chamber is none other than our old friend, the hated—and feared—imagination.

Play is the key.

The importance of a playful imagination cannot be overemphasized. Many years after this event, I read about Dr. Brian Weiss, a psychiatrist who believes that many psychological problems may be traced to unresolved traumas of past lives. (I discuss my own reincarnational dreams in chapter 2.) Dr. Weiss was giving a workshop when, out of the blue, one of the participants asked him how mediums gather information about the dead. Instead of giving a formal explanation, he spontaneously did a little role-playing.

Playing the starring role of medium, he gave an example of a “reading.” He spun a tale involving a young man named Robert who was killed in a car accident, and a leather jacket that the deceased had wanted to be given to a friend named Gary. The questioner seemed satisfied. But after the workshop was over, another woman participant, tearful and visibly distraught, approached Dr. Weiss and asked him where he got his story.

“I made it up,” Weiss said.

“No, you didn't,” the woman replied. Then she explained that after her twenty-year-old brother Robert had died in a recent car accident, she felt him communicate to her that he wanted his friend Gary to have his favorite leather jacket hanging in the closet.19

Simply by pretending, Dr. Weiss had accidentally activated his own innate ability to tap into the collective psyche, where all information is available. The young Carl Jung had done a similar thing and found himself enacting a healing ritual that went back to Stone Age Europe and out to the environs of tribal Africa. Just as I had inadvertently done.

An incredible coincidence, to be sure.

From Colin Wilson, I learned that Jung was obsessed with such coincidences, which he called “synchronicities.” Jung began by noting these strange events as they occurred in his own life and in the lives of his patients. The weirdest, most improbable coincidences would typically manifest at very stressful moments in a person's life, at the exact moment when inner change was either possible or even necessary for that person's development.

For example, one day, a female client whose therapy was not going particularly well was telling Jung about a recent dream she had had of a scarab beetle, an ancient Egyptian symbol of rebirth. Jung tried to focus on the woman's story, but became distracted by a persistent scratching noise at his study window. The doctor excused himself and walked over to the window to investigate. As he opened the window, he realized with annoyance that he had inadvertently let in a flying insect.

What struck Jung was that the bug turned out to be a particularly rare type of scarab beetle that should not even have been around Zurich that time of year. When he pointed this out to the woman, she was struck by the preposterousness of the coincidence. What Jung termed her “cold rationalism” suddenly melted like ice cubes on a hot stove. Touched by this magical and wondrous event, she opened to her own inner world, including her feelings. After this, her therapy went well. She was indeed reborn.

Jung cited this episode with the scarab as key to the development of his idea of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence.

When I read this, I recalled something else. My little stone in the matchbox was not an ordinary stone after all. Actually, it was a gift given to me by a childhood friend.

The gift was a reproduction of an ancient Egyptian scarab, the symbol of rebirth!

I began to feel very peculiar, touched by the uncanny. It was as if, in spite of myself, I were being guided by some mysterious power to the very people and ideas I needed to encounter in order to answer questions I had not yet even consciously formulated. The dinner with Julie, finding a helpful book by “accident,” and now this odd business with Jung—it all seemed bizarre. How many more mysteries were there?

And Now for Great Rabbit's Next Trick…

I soon picked up a copy of Carl Jung's autobiographical work Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961) to confirm what I had already read and, more importantly, what I now knew by my own experience. As I dug further into Colin Wilson's book, however, I came upon an account of a British Jungian analyst named John Layard. He had treated a patient who had a dream that proved to be a transformative and healing experience at a crucial point in her analysis. The main character of her dream was, of all things, an intelligent and self-sacrificing hare. (Though different in some behavioral and physical respects, hares and rabbits belong to the same biological family of mammals, Leporidae—leapers.)

Now my interest was piqued.

Intrigued by this image, John Layard did some investigating.20 He was astounded to find stories of magical hares and rabbits all over the place, from high culture myths to the popular legends and folklore of peoples in Ancient Egypt, China, Africa, India, modern Europe, and pre-Columbian North America. The Easter bunny, the white rabbit that leads Alice down the hole to Wonderland, and even tales of Br'er Rabbit also seemed to fit this universal archetypal pattern. There were certain common recurring themes among all these stories. The exceedingly prolific hare/rabbit was naturally associated in people's minds with creativity, and also with what Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame would call “sudden leaps of logic,” that is, the intuitive, mystical, or psychic side of our natures: our innate sensitivity.

How did this association of the rabbit and “magic” come about? Hal Zina Bennett, Ph.D., is a writer, editor, and longtime student of shamanism who has written five books on earth-centered spirituality. In his recent book, Spirit Animals and the Wheel of Life (2000), Hal relates an experience he had when he was sixteen years old that set him on his future path as a follower of the natural way. It also may offer an explanation as to how the rabbit came to be thought of as a guide to the mystical side of life.

Hal was out hunting in the woods near his home in rural Michigan with his .22 rifle. He spotted two rabbits and bagged them both with a couple of well-timed shots. While skinning one of the rabbits, he inadvertently nicked his finger. Soon he was suffering from a high fever that would not go away. His distraught parents rushed him to a hospital where he nearly died. Or, perhaps he did.

“That evening,” writes Hal, “I had the sensation that I had little, if anything to do with my body any more. In fact, I was certain that I had left it entirely”21 He was no longer lying in a feverish daze on his hospital bed. Rather, he was outside the building entirely, looking down on the roof from above. He could see everything inside the hospital, including his body on the bed, in perfect detail. He could also see all around him in the landscape, wherever he looked, with the same amazing clarity and detail. There was no pain or fear. He felt wide-awake.

Then, suddenly, Hal was in a strange new environment, where he was confronted with a stark choice:

I stood at a crossroads, indicated by three paths of light and color. I was standing with my back to the road upon which I'd come. To my right was the road to death, and perhaps a hundred feet away was a tunnel. I was certain that once I entered this space, my life back on Earth would be finished. Though I could not see much beyond the tunnel, what I saw was a very different kind of reality, one that I can only describe as formless and invisible but definitely not Nothingness. What I sensed there moved me deeply, excited me, and part of me longed to move into it, if only to satisfy my curiosity.²²

At that moment, he saw his father sobbing in grief in the hospital room. Feeling son for his dad, Hal decided to return to his body instead of taking the path to the afterlife. Subsequently, his fever broke, and he slowly began to recover. His doctors later told him that he'd been in a coma, and that they'd been afraid he might die.

This happened in 1952, more than two decades before the term “near-death experience” (NDE) would be coined and become part of our common cultural currency However, the out-of-body experience, feelings of bliss, expansion of perception, dark tunnel, the sense of passing to the Other Side, and the decision to return to physical life are all familiar motifs to students of the NDE. Hal would not know to call it that for many years afterward. But it changed his life and sent him on his course of spiritual inquiry.

Moreover, it turned out that the trigger for the entire episode had been the rabbit Hal skinned when he cut his finger, for Hal's doctor informed him that he'd been suffering from tularemia, or rabbit fever, an infection that can be passed from rabbits to humans. In the days before wide-spectrum antibiotics, tularemia was serious, often fatal. If the victim survived, he or she might have a story similar to Hal's to tell, having been brought to the brink of death. The inhabitants of early tribal cultures may have had many such accidental encounters with the Other Side due to hunting infected game, and lived to tell the tale. This may explain, in part, how rabbit acquired its reputation as a mystagogue, a guide to the mysteries.

To the Algonquin Indians of the Great Lakes region (where I was living at the time of my rabbit dream), this mystical creature was called Manabozho or Michabou, Great Rabbit or Great Hare. He was known as a sly trickster, a crafty shape-shifter who could easily change from human to animal form, then back again. The Ojibways said that he was the first Medicine Man, or shaman, and that he was responsible for giving humans their spiritual knowledge. Sometimes cited as the creator of Heaven and Earth, Great Rabbit was usually associated both with the dawn and the moon, the two natural forms of illumination and symbols, respectively, of rebirth and intuitive (lunar) knowledge. Great Rabbit was the master of the ethereal, nonrational (notice that I don't say irrational) side of humans: creator, psychic, healer, clown, and master shaman. So this was no Bugs Bunny!

Now it finally dawned on me just who, and what, had fallen asleep under the tree.

It was obviously the part of me that had found no place in the culture of logic and “fact.” No wonder that the tree under which my telepathic rabbit had fallen asleep (symbolic of lapsing into unconsciousness) was a split maple, half of it cut down. Half of me had been cut out, so I could at least pretend to fit in. But it had never quite worked. Now I understood that. I couldn't pretend any longer. I had to reclaim the rest of me.

I had to wake up—and fast.

There was at least a slim ray of hope. In my dream, the trio of baby rabbits in the sink (womb) held out the promise of rebirth. Something was already waking up, stirring to life once again, not just in the backyard (unconscious), but also in the kitchen. Why there?

As the Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz explained,23 the kitchen is where food is prepared and cooked. It is the symbolic place of inner transformation, of alchemical transmutation. It's where the heat is: the inner hearth, the fire of love—the passionate heart.

Well, now I knew this. But it was still just intellectual knowing, of course. I was too thoroughly enculturated—too far gone into what the poet Robert Bly calls the sickness of “the rational thing”—to grasp that I had to do something with this knowledge. I had to figure out how to forge it into wisdom.

Not that Great Rabbit gave up on me, mind you. But, as the saying goes, before I could get better, I had to get worse. Much worse.

A Sickness unto Health

Rock bottom came for me one afternoon at the university library where I was doing research for a term paper. Suddenly, I began to feel very peculiar. My heart raced uncontrollably and perspiration dripped down my back. I was overcome by feelings of claustrophobia, as if I had to get out of there or—I didn't know what. I was afraid I was either going to have a heart attack or go crazy (whatever that meant). The more I focused on the strange physical sensations I was experiencing, the more frightened I became, until I couldn't stand it one more moment. I panicked.

Hastily gathering together my books and notes, I stuffed them in my briefcase and sprinted down the steps, past the front desk, out into the parking lot. Once outside, I felt somewhat relieved. I could breathe again. I felt as if I had been held down under water. I was still shaken up. Somehow, though, with hands trembling and thoughts racing, I managed to drive several blocks to my apartment, where I felt a bit better.

The panic attacks continued. I kept attending classes but stopped writing term papers. Sometimes I slept, but most nights were one long, sweaty seizure of fear punctuated by fitful lapses into troubled sleep. Finally, after months of this, I went to see a therapist. I figured if I was going to fall, I might want to work with a net.

My therapist listened as I conjured up complaints about my childhood and failed relationships. But it always came back to my writing block. I wanted to quit graduate school, yet I did not want to give “them” the satisfaction. I couldn't quit! That would be a waste. It would haunt me, and I might not finish anything ever again. Reason had its place, after all. But I couldn't just go on like before, either. I was stuck between the proverbial rock and the hard place, feeling more squeezed with each passing day.

Exactly how and when I began to tread the path toward sanity, I am not sure. The panic attacks gradually subsided. Certainly, I began to trust my instincts more. I started taking my books to the small park just down the street from my apartment. After reading a few pages in a desultory fashion, I would sit and enjoy being out of doors. I felt guilty lolling around on the park bench, watching the birds collect crumbs. But it made me feel better, so I continued.

I began to trust my hunches more where people were concerned. At a party, for example, I was introduced to a fellow graduate student. With a handshake and smile, he struck me as someone I would want to avoid. It was as if there had been a red light on his forehead flashing, “Stay away! This one is trouble.” In the past, I would not have heeded such warnings. I would have ignored my gut feelings. As it turned out, however, my first impression proved to be accurate. Peter (as I'll call him) was brilliant, a rising academic star. But he was also a cagey opportunist who tended to use people to his advantage. Although I was unable to avoid Peter completely, I wisely sought to minimize my contact with him.

My intuitive sensitivity was slowly returning to life in other small ways as well.

Sometimes at night, lying awake in bed, I would sense baseball-sized spheres of differently colored lights zooming about near the ceiling. I didn't exactly see this with my physical eyes; it was more like an inner mental impression. Whatever these pulsating globes were, they were conscious, intelligent, and aware of me. They felt like old friends checking to make sure I was all right. I found this oddly reassuring.

Another important stride toward health (wholeness) was taken when I heeded my girlfriend's advice and got a couple of cats for company. This made a big difference.

As Hal Zina Bennett notes, there are times when the appearance of animals in our consciousness is a symbolic gesture, telling us something about the state of our psyche—as, for example, in my dream of the telepathic rabbit, which represented a neglected part of my inner self. However, he adds, there are other instances in which one has a transpersonal experience with a living animal presence (in body or spirit). In such cases, the meaning is not symbolic but literal: “The person is convinced that they have communicated with the animal on a profoundly deep level and there is nothing to analyze or interpret.”24

In other words, learning to appreciate the wisdom and healing power of animals is facilitated by having them around us, or being around them. This was a point taken for granted by indigenous peoples who were surrounded by (and reverent of) the animal kingdom, but it is sometimes lost on modern humans whose encounters with animals are often limited to watching nature programs on television or the occasional trip to a park or zoo. My communication with the cats may not have been as profound as that of some mystics, but we did connect; this I know. (Years after their deaths, I still have vivid dreams of them from time to time. Our reunions are always joyous.) Having them around helped me in several ways.

For one thing, they helped restore my humor, which had largely atrophied. I laughed, especially when I watched them at play. One of their favorite games was to chase each other up and down the hallway in my small apartment. On the hardwood floor, two small cats managed to make quite a ruckus. My girlfriend said that it sounded like a miniature herd of stampeding horses. I felt sorry for the neighbors on the floor below.

They also taught me about affection. The female was a svelte, triangular-faced Siamese with a lilac-grey mask. She was the more loving of the two. There was not a mean bone in her body. If I rolled her on her back and scratched her belly to provoke a reaction, she might start kicking me with her hind legs. But then she would stop suddenly and catch herself, as if she had not meant to play rough. Purring loudly in apology, she would lick my hand. Her unconditional devotion, along with her natural gentleness and sweetness of temperament, was highly therapeutic.

Then there was the male, a somewhat larger, square-headed Siamese with dark, seal-brown markings. He was a clever devil. He made plans. For example, one of his favorite games was to get me out of bed in the morning. He would leap onto the dresser and stand up on his hind legs. With his right paw extended, he would push the picture that hung above the dresser until it banged so loudly against the wall that it would sound as though it were going to come crashing down. I'd yell at him to stop, and he'd look at me, then paw the picture even harder. Finally, I'd get up and pretend to chase him, and he'd have gotten his way. He taught me that animals think. Humans do not have a lock on reasoning things out.

Those cats touched me, and opened me, in many ways. Many years after they died, I came across the words of the nineteenth-century Pawnee, Eagle Chief (Letakots-Lesa):

In the beginning of all things, wisdom and knowledge were with the animals, for Tirawa, the One Above, did not speak directly to man. He sent certain animals to tell men that he showed himself through the beasts, and that from them, and from the stars and the sun and the moon should man learn .…all things tell of Tirawa.25

Feeling this truth in my bones, I wept. I will always be grateful to my furry friends.

Oh, yes. There was a funny little incident with the female cat that I must mention.

One afternoon, when she was still a kitten, I took her to the veterinarian for one of her booster shots. At that early stage in her development, her darker markings had not yet come in fully, so her fur was still a brighter shade of creamy white. While I sat waiting to be called in, a little girl with dark hair came over to me. She pointed at my cat curled up in the rear of my carrier and said something I didn't understand. So I smiled. She giggled. Her father called her back to where he was sitting, and they briefly conversed in what I guessed was Spanish. Then, in heavily accented English, the man addressed me, pointing at my cat cage.

“My daughter, she says you got a booney rabbit in there,” the father said with what sounded like a trace of suspicion in his voice.

“No, it's not a bunny rabbit,” I replied. “It's a cat.”

“Well, she says it's a booney rabbit,” he insisted.

“No, really, it's a cat,” I said, feeling somewhat exasperated.

The man just shrugged, while his daughter, forgetting about my rabbit-cat, busied herself with a toy.

From that time forward, the female cat's nickname became “Booner”—as in “booney” rabbit: a little white baby bunny. Just like the ones in the sink, in my dream.

As I said, Great Rabbit had not deserted me. And s/he had a sense of humor.

Well, all of these baby steps toward balance at least got me moving in the right direction. But I knew that if I were to pull myself out of the hole I'd dug, I'd have to confront my past in a new way There was a part of my childhood that I did not talk about, even with my therapist. It was a secret past, a lost world. To find it again, I would have to journey back there and confront my deepest fears.

And I'd have to do it alone.