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Slaying Dragons
By Bud Harris, Ph.D.
When I was a boy reading
the stories of "The Knights of the Round Table" and other
adventure tales of knights, ladies, and evildoers, my friends and I were
inspired and spent many afternoons playing heroes and villains. In the
woods of our backyards we went on many daring excursions, faced serpents
with crested heads, and dark and wily villains, and emerged victorious.
Knights and dragons are primary themes in our Western heritage. The power
of these stories still fascinates; and though they often take new forms
such as Star Wars, the patterns are the same.
In the Western tradition
there are two kinds of dragons that require a heroic effort to overcome.
The first one kidnaps maidens, who represent the archetypal symbol of
life. The second one collects and hoards gold. In either case the dragon
usually stays close to or in a cave, where it guards its booty
jealously.
The first dragon represents the state of our childhood dependencies that
we must overcome in order to win lives of our own, to become adults. The
second dragon represents the ways we are bound to the initial identities
we develop and the values and conventions of society. These dragons are
like forces holding our potentials captive.
We must free ourselves of this bondage in order to live as people in
society, serving our values rather than compulsively following those of
our culture. Slaying dragons becomes a metaphor for how each of us has to
free ourselves from childhood dependencies, and from the bonds of our
identities and society. We will see a number of examples in the following
pages of men and women developing their voices and inner authority.
When I got married in
college and later went into business I was doing so to force my way into
adulthood. Even though I had little awareness of what I was doing, I was
following an archetypal pattern and slaying the dragon of childhood
dependency.
Later in my thirties when I went through another passage and career
change, I was confronting the second dragon -- the limits of the identity
I had established and the conventional values of our society. Dragons
don't die easily. They fight to keep us dependent and tied to them. The
struggle is worth it, but there are no easy paths through them.
You may recall that in
chapter 1 I discussed how we grow in consciousness. I said that we grow
from simple consciousness to complex consciousness, then to individual
consciousness and finally to illuminated consciousness. Simple
consciousness begins at birth and lasts until late adolescence. It's a
period of developing our identities and the skills necessary to live,
work, and have relationships in the world and outside of our
families.
To move from simple to complex consciousness, to become adults, we have
to muster the strength to overcome the dragon of dependency. Because our
society no longer has effective initiation rites, this quest is as lonely
as a knight's.
Complex consciousness is
the period of consolidating our identities and using our skills for love
and work in adult life. In other words we have established our islands
with their rules of order and assumptions about life. To move beyond our
adult identities into individual consciousness means we must slay the
dragon guarding the gold of our potentials, enter the cave of our
unconscious and begin the search for
its contents.
In individual consciousness
we are opening the boundaries of our islands -- our previous identities
-- and freeing ourselves of society's mind-sets in order to live from our
hearts rather than impulsively serving the claims of an imposed
system.
Growing into the area of individual consciousness begins with knowing
more about our shadows, the parts of us that have been denied and the
families and social systems that caused these denials. Growing into
individual consciousness will give us the inner strength and confidence
to let go of the familiar beliefs of our culture and to live
authentically. It is this process that we will begin to explore in the
following pages.
Growth means change, and
facing the choice of whether to change or stagnate is one of our greatest
challenges. It is hard and scary to shake free of the support of what is
known when we can't be sure of what's ahead.
There is an understandable fear there will be nothing there, a void, or
something alien or disappointing. But as the men and women we will
encounter in the following pages show us, there is more. And that more --
the recognition and embrace of illuminated consciousness -- makes the
demands of the journey worthwhile.
It's the place we reach when we finally realize our unique personhood and
the existence of our greater Self as an image of the divine within us. We
sense the purpose and the pattern of our lives and their importance. And
we realize that we live in two worlds, our own world and that of the
culture outside of us.
We live in society without allowing society to dictate how we should
live. The journey beginning with individual consciousness takes us on a
road that may sometimes feel rutted and bumpy, but it is a straight one.
It only asks that we make a serious commitment to honor our inner lives
in order not to double back onto the old road, and its ways of living and
thinking.
Excerpted from the book Sacred
Selfishness: A Guide to Living a Life of Substance by Bud
Harris, Ph.D.; � 2002 by Bud Harris. (November 2002; $24.95US;
1-930722-12-5) Published by Inner Ocean Publishing.
____________
Dr. Bud Harris has a Ph.D. in counseling psychology and a
degree in analytical psychology, finishing his postdoctoral training at
the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. He has over thirty years
experience as a practicing psychotherapist, psychologist, and Jungian
analyst. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina.
For more information,
please visit Bud Harris' Web Site.
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