THE JUNGIAN AND THE HIPPIE

      He dreams that his friend Stan is leading a seminar for some Jungians, upstairs in this old building. He goes up. Stan is here already, wearing his blue work shirt and sitting on the floor with some of his hippie friends. He goes up to him, holding out his hands. Stan takes them and lets himself be pulled up. They hug, and now he takes Stan into the center room that's being used for the seminar.

      Everyone's there already. Actually, they've all been waiting for over an hour. Stan apologizes for being late, says he doesn't have a watch. He's not really prepared for a lecture and just sits there. It's going to be very informal. A woman asks if he is a Jungian. He says no. She wants to know why he's teaching a Jungian seminar then. Stan answers her, but without responding to the feelings behind her questions.

      Watching this interplay, he waits for Stan and the woman to deal with it themselves, but when they are finally about to begin the seminar, he realizes that they're not going to do so without his help. So he stands up and says that they need to recognize some feelings in the room before they start. If they don't, these feeling will mess up the seminar. He begins by focusing upon the woman and her feelings about Stan not being a Jungian, hence not worth listening to.


      He's been in Jungian analysis for over seven years now. He's new to the hippie world. He's still just a weekend hippie, being in school and working so hard the rest of the week. The Jungian and the acid hippie ways of looking at consciousness and reality have been for him, from the very beginning, total opposites with almost no common ground, beyond perhaps a shared love of Spirit.

      His dream shows him in conflict. There's the Jungian woman, that part of himself who knows that Jung's way is the way. She can't understand his need to seek wisdom elsewhere. She's hassling Stan with her questions, although she's not in touch with why she's doing so. She's not dealing with her feelings at all. Then there's Stan. They're in graduate school together, him and Stan. Stan's another genius. Stan is also that part of himself who's into acid, the hippie life, and Spirit. Stan's that part of himself who's without a watch, not tuned to common time.

      He sees that his job in all this is to get the woman and Stan to talk with each other. His job is to start a dialog between his Jungian and his acid hippie sides so that they can learn and grow from one another - so that he, who is both of them really, can be whole.