EDUCATION

In those uneasy teenage years, thanks to a scholarship, I had the good fortune of attending Concord Academy, a private, mostly day school for girls. Ultimately, I completed my higher education at the University of Munich, Germany doing a doctorate on the breakdown in Western Civilization of the metaphysical meaning of ‘value’. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, that would be the beginning of a lifelong dedication to probing the multi-faceted breakdown of our 2,500 year old patriarchal cultural paradigm.

What I am exploring is the discipline and manifestation of the masculine, rational dimension of consciousness, what Jung would call the animus … together with the collective archetypal masculine symbol of the horse. My first conscious experience of the animus came after a dream I had at the height of philosophic inquiry, from Heraclitus to Heidegger. My head felt like it was exploding. In the dream, a great stallion was chasing after me. I jumped onto a balcony and when he leapt after me, I pushed him so hard he fell backwards hitting the ground. The next day, on a flight to London, I kept seeing his beautiful body below us as if I had actually pushed him out of the airplane. Astonished, I realized my dream was revealing exactly what Jung meant by animus, the archetypal symbol of the masculine in a woman. The I think therefore I am had pushed me to the breaking point like the figure of the Centaur with a broken wing!

Recently, a full half century later, I dreamt that I was riding an equally beautiful stallion bareback across miles of open meadows. With the decades long influx of Eastern Thought, indigenous wisdom and half a century of meditation, I wondered whether the dream was saying that the feminine dimension of consciousness in me, the yin embodying wisdom of the earth, had finally reached some equilibrium with the intellectual grandeur of the Western-oriented, masculine dimension of consciousness… possibly had even found a fertile both/and between East and West, between himundher, equals of opposites? Or is that not also a dream?