Adventures Under The Iceberg
- Brainz Magazine
- Dec 3, 2021
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 25, 2024
Written by: Bill O'Brien, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
All of my life, even from the age of seven, I had wanted to be a Jesuit priest. I became one and was happily a part of the Jesuit Order for twenty years. At the age of forty-two, suddenly and unexpectedly, my Jesuit-ness began, of its own volition, to slip away. I asked my superior if I could go into Jungian analysis to try to understand what was going on. I was granted permission.
When one begins analysis there is often what is called a threshold dream. It’s like the overture or theme for the rest of the time in analysis. I thought maybe mine would be a visitation from an archangel or a vision of Jesus.
Instead, this was my threshold dream, and I am quoting directly from my journal, “There is a large estate that forms the setting for the mutual stalking of good and evil forces – a gang of thugs and a group of good guys who seem like detectives, like Eliot Ness. This time the good guys have won and they take the bad guys to a house on the property – past a garden – and there they prepare what seems to be an elaborate execution setting – some are strung up, others are covered with kerosene. They are mocking and cursing each other as they are prepared for death. I wake up.”
It would be some years before I learned what this dream meant. Someone placed a book in my hands called, “Spiritual Emergencies: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis”, a series of essays edited by psychologist Stanislav Grof, Ph.D. She lent it to me for my opinion about a chapter on the Hero’s Journey but, while browsing through it, I came upon a description of my threshold dream. I believe it was in Chapter Five.
It said that a dream like mine, of massive destruction, was an indicator that the dreamer’s entire worldview had to change and if it did not, the dreamer’s spiritual growth would be stunted. By this time I had left the Jesuits so this synchronicity was very validating of my decision.
Curiously, when people would ask me why I left, I would say that I hadn’t left the Jesuits, it was more like my Jesuit-ness had left me. Then I would add, “It was like a snake shedding its skin.” At the time I did not much like that image because I still had snakes mainly peddling apples in the Garden of Eden. Later I would learn that a snake shed its skin when it’s outgrown it.
The incident of being handed the Grof book for unrelated reasons is an example of synchronicity in which the outer world illuminates the inner without human intention or direction, apparently by “accident”. This too is a Jungian concept.
Finally, I want to share with you two rebirth dreams. In one I am in a prison cell with three other people. We escape successfully by crawling to freedom through a thin underground pipe. Here the pipe is the birth canal. I do not know who the three people are.
My analysis lasted for nine months – a gestation period before my birth back into the world but in a far different place.
About a week after I left, I had another rebirth dream. I quote, “I am pounding on the glass of a satellite return shell (that is, a nose cone but I wrote “shell”). I am hopeful of getting out of the shell. I imagine myself overjoyed just to break the glass and get oxygen even though I will still be marooned at sea. The shell keeps going down under the water and back up again. I have to break the shell while it is above the surface. I will, I will. As it rises for the third and what I know will be the final time, I break through the glass, stick my head out, and give a huge shriek of inhaling oxygen”. I am reborn. I wake up.
So, when I left the Jesuits, as awesome a group as they are, I woke up in more ways than one. The Unconscious is an infinite field of possibility inside us. Like the iceberg in the picture, the much larger part of our psyche is under the surface.
Bill O'Brien, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Bill O'Brien has decades of experience helping individuals and groups expand their awareness of the capacities of their inner selves, their full, or divine, potential. He utilizes a range of methods to expand consciousness from meditation to self-knowledge techniques to guided imagery to shamanic healing methodologies such as Illumination and Soul Retrieval. With his Consciousness Coaching, experience is the touchstone. The goal is drawing up into conscious awareness the infinite contents of the individual unconscious. Bill spent twenty years in the Jesuit Order before launching out on the great adventure of the discovery of the Self. His Wisdomkeepers reach a worldwide audience. He is the author of "Wise Guyde: The First Forty-Five Columns" available on Amazon. His mission: feeding the spiritual hunger of the world by healing and elevating human consciousness.
