“So people just refer to you as ‘the boy’?” asked the professor.
“Yes, they do, or at least many do, and I like that because Rev. Welles says that we should all go through the whole course of our lives staying a little childlike, keeping connected with the child within us all, like Jung wrote. That’s our true self, the self that isn’t beaten down by disappointments and loses the mirth and joy of the child. Plus, I look a little more boyish than some in maybe a slightly mischievous, half-Irish kind of way, and as I grow older I want to stay a little immature to balance out aging. Even when I am an old man, I will still be the boy, and that is how I want it. I don’t want to grow up if that means losing the boy. I almost think of growing up as an illness and aging as a disease, just because look at what happens to people, all bent over and stuff! I still like old folks a lot, but they have hard times ahead.”
The students all smiled and discussed this inner child, and they said that if he could stay spiritually young all his life it would be great.
Rev. Welles chimed in, “You just have to put aside all the pressures of life and look deep into your soul and remember yourself as an innocent happy child and connect with that image. We all are only here a while anyway, and we are spiritual children so long as we don’t get completely bogged down.”
“And that drop of the Mind within us that we talk about in philosophy class that is beyond time and place, that is really the child within,” offered the boy.
Professor Dittes was, like Rev. Welles, a Jungian, so he understood the boy. The boy was fun for all the Yale folks, and he helped them reclaim their souls in a way that all their theology books could not. He liked to challenge people to reclaim their souls, and that’s why he spoke of the dream when he might just have easily pretended that he never had it. Being a blue angel dreamer does not quite pack the resume like hockey does, and it is no way to begin a college interview.
After a couple of hours, the professor thanked the boy, saying, “Well, some dreams happen for reasons we do not know. We are all connected in the collective unconscious, which Jung thought was the core of all spiritual experience and symbolism. So for next week, everyone, write a little reflective essay on the boy and his blue angel dream.”
“Yes, we are connected,” added the boy. “I mean, Alan Watts says even physically. Look at my glasses—thousands of people helped make these. Someone gathered the sand and melted the glass, and someone made the machine to do it with, and someone had to mine iron ore to make the steel to make the aluminum frames, and someone drove a truck to deliver these but there has to be a road and workers and it just goes on and on and on. We depend on the kindness of countless others for every detail of our lives. But, Professor, what I believe is that we are also all connected spiritually, all part of the divine Mind and so all kinds of spiritual connections are possible that completely go beyond the limits of time and place. The problem is that we think we are more separate than we are, so bad stuff happens.”
“Do you think anyone will ever prove that this God, this infinite Mind, is real?” he asked the boy.
“Well, Sir, I would like to be more certain of it myself. And that is what the dream may be about. So I am inclined to follow it…who knows where, but west, somehow. I almost want to go on a westward pilgrimage, but I have no real idea of where to. Otherwise I might.”
Then the whole group walked down the hallway to an early evening chapel service. The boy played Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring on his classical guitar, and Rev. Welles gave a little sermon on how the pelican is a Christian symbol of love because it plucks its breast vein if it has to in order to feed its offspring. The pelican is the school symbol at St. Paul’s for that reason, explained the Rev. Welles. Finally, they all had dinner in the dining hall before the boy and his teacher drove back up Route 91 to New Hampshire.
Sometimes at the start of his philosophy class, where the boys read about psychology and religious experience that can shift emotions toward tranquility beyond time and place, Rev. Welles would ask, “How real does that dream feel?”
“Well, like more than just any dream. It has a glow to it, and it feels real enough to puzzle me. It calls me, it pulls me,” the boy answered, to the delight of his accepting peers. After all, the boy had visited Yale Divinity School and taught the students there about universal Mind, which to them was kind of wacky but also impressive. They wondered why the boy did not want to apply there for college, but he didn’t want to. Nothing Ivy would do.
“It feels a bit like I am actually headed west to do something. It’s only a dream, and I don’t really believe in angels, and then I wake up and it’s gone, but I remember it clearly. It’s hard to explain. It’s like I am sleeping but not really, kind of in some special zone. Sometimes I think this is infinite Mind telling me something that I don’t understand yet, something that I have to discover and not give up on, because in the long run I might find out where I am headed. Guys, you know you are all trying to get to someplace or other like Harvard or Yale, but not me. If I have a goal, I am going to be lured to it by divine Mind, because it isn’t coming from me. Goals are desperate detours from destiny.”
The other boys were not at all surprised to hear this, because they knew the boy. “Well, if you are into this infinite Mind stuff, who really needs school?” one asked.
The boy answered, “Good question.”
There was a beautiful life-size bronze statue of St. Paul outside the chapel, and the boys would pass by and touch its outstretched hand with a smile on their way to dinner at the Upper.
“For luck,” they would exclaim, but the boy had read enough Jung to reply, “For synchronicity, not luck.”
“Hey, whatever floats your boat, Babylon!” his classmates said. “So where does Jesus fit in?” they asked in class.
“Well,” answered the boy, “we are all sinners and can’t get to high goodness on our own, but there is a power of goodness in the universe that we could all draw on and use if we let it come our way. Something needed to happen to close the gap. Jesus had complete God consciousness, and this explains his amazing healing and creativity and love; it made his sacrifice very special and far more spiritually transformative than anything anyone else could do to open a window into the divine. I don’t recite Creeds much in church, but I believe that Jesus had the unique spiritual calling that got him betrayed and nailed to a cross while maintaining the dignity of perfect love and forgiveness, so that God could overlook the fact that human nature is not a pretty thing and cherish us all anyway despite ourselves. The test for infinite love is the manner of response to infinite adversity.”
In the library, the boy read spiritual classics and Frankel and Huxley and Bly and Kerouac. At Rev. Welles’ suggestion, he devoured the ancient philosopher Plotinus because he was into the One, the infinite Mind and its continuity with every human mind. He dug into scriptures of the world’s religions and wrote essays about how material things, competition, and glory do not constitute success, but that an awareness of our connection within the divine Mind can spring from sensing the emptiness of it all.
“Thoreau-like,” his English teacher, Mr. George Carlisle, called him more than once. “The boy is a good kid, but not in a very useful sense.” Occasionally, instead of going to watch the teams play soccer or hockey on a Saturday afternoon, the boy would wander the wooded paths up at Turkey Pond, pondering some passage from a book by whichever mystic he was reading that week. And he would read while walking around the library pond, uplifted by the magnificent fall colors or the snow, sometimes tripping on a rock. His good friend, the poet Ned Perkins, who edited the literary magazine and whose grandfather Malcolm