THE DOG AND THE STONE

      At this time of his life, he's going through his changes very quickly. In order to stay conscious throughout these changes, he's doing a lot of active imagination, or visualization. He has two reoccurring images, one of a yellow dog and one of a red stone.


      In the beginning, the yellow dog is a stray, a female like Gypsy, who comes into his house wearing a collar and dragging a chain. He plays with her and decides to keep her. He remembers coming out of this fantasy yelling, "my dog," as if someone else might want her too. Another time they meet on the beach and go for a long walk together. Another time she protects him from the wild dogs.

      At first, the stone is an ordinary red brick, worn smooth and tossed upon the sands by the ocean. In a second fantasy, he places it upon his altar in his room. Soon after this, while walking on the beach, he actually does find a red brick, worn smooth as a stone. He brings it home and builds an altar around it.

      Meditating upon these images - of the yellow dog and the red stone - he's come to see that they represent the same pair of opposites as what Karen and Pamela have represented in his dreams, pointing however to a much deeper level of meaning beyond that conveyed by the women's images.


      Like Karen, the yellow dog symbolizes the body. On a deeper level though, the dog represents the consciousness, the spirit of the body, like that of a witch's familiar or of that talking dog in Goethe's Faust. The dog thus represents the instinctual wisdom of body, accumulated over our long history as an evolving animal species.

      The red stone symbolizes the eternal, that which has existed without change forever. In particular, it's the philosopher's stone, for which the alchemists were ever seeking. The red stone symbolizes the Self, in Jung's sense of the word - the most stable and inclusive, the truest aspect of ourselves.


      Because he now has these deeper and more relevant images - of the yellow dog and the red stone - he no longer needs to focus upon whether he should be with either Karen or Pamela. He has only one body and can be with only one woman, And he's already chosen Karen for his wife. He couldn't be with Pam again anyway, or with both of them either, even if he wanted.

      However, he can be one with both the yellow dog and the red stone, with both the spirit of body and the spirit of eternity. He can be both - a body in the world yet still whole and wise in the ways of Spirit.