(For Doug, Helen and Carrie, who taught me to trust myself.

And for Brian.

The ocean looks beautiful tonight.)

When we read religious texts (including the Bible) archetypally and mythologically, they become *more* meaningful, true, applicable and real – not less. It does not diminish a text to call it myth – it exalts it. It sets it on the pedestal of shared imagination, it lays it out as a smorgasbord and invites all to feast on it. It cracks it open in ways that may have been unimaginable beforehand. It makes it meaningful and meaty and relevant in any dimension, timeframe, religious context or epoch of time. It welcomes deep engagement with other fields and disciplines, because an archetypal and mythological framework has holographic and multidimensional meaning-making devices – eliminating surface level divisions on the minutiae of issues like transmission, translation, and doctrine.

One of the many reasons I am still so awestruck at the cross of Christ, is that it cuts to the marrow of what it means to be truly free. For this reason, I believe that current approaches to biblical literacy and scholarship can only take us so far, because the inherent mysteries around the cruciform pattern can only be entered into experientially or holographically.

I lie in the flickering dawn light taking all this in, letting it settle deep into my heart space as I allow room for wonder and exploration. I hold the dream like a stone in my hand. Putting it in my pocket as I pry my tired body up out of the bed and shuffle sleepily to the kitchen to tend to the kids, brew coffee, kiss my baby nephew who is gurgling away happily in his highchair in the middle of the bright yellow kitchen of the holiday home I’ve rented with my sister.

Mythology is replete with stories of goddesses and mortals alike, who called on their divine right to shapeshift, often to escape something shameful or violent or in response to unbearable grief. This shamanistic wisdom predates written histories by a long shot, practiced and understood by wise ones inside every civilization that has ever walked the earth. Great literary works like the Iliad and the Epic of Gilgamesh feature shapeshifting, as does much of Roman, Greek, Geltic, Norse, Indian, African and Asian folklore and mythology.

I am absolutely convinced by the universal law of free will, that no one can ever make us do anything that insults our soul. That we are all completely sovereign beings. When I connect with someone’s higher self, I am deeply connected to the root of their own sovereignty. There, the muddy waters which can sometimes swirl between a client and a practitioner, things like power dynamics, transference, countertransference and projection have very little impact. No one for a hot second is allowed to put me on a pedestal, or to substitute my own framework for their own, or divest their authority to me. Not even a tiny bit. Their higher self won’t have it. Neither will mine. So when I relate to them like this, it is inherently empowering for them, and it constantly reminds them of their own grace, dignity, belonging and agency.

When we say ‘I am afraid of the unknown’, what we are really saying is ‘I am afraid of what I am currently projecting out from my own field of consciousness into the quantum realm.” Those are two very different things, in point of fact. What we project into the ‘unknown future’ is largely a function of our family of origin, our trauma-patterning, our religious or cultural conditioning and our deepest fears and insecurities. Future-gazing is, in fact, an epic exercise in projection. Projection, far from being something we should avoid doing, is – in fact - a powerful tool at our disposal, which we can use to co-create our reality.

This is what Jesus meant when he talked about dying to ourselves. This is what it takes to have the mind of Christ. Which is why so very few people who call themselves Christians will ever have it: because post-modern evangelical Christianity is one of the strongest pillars propping up the Kingdom of Empire, which has literally nothing to do with the Christ Consciousness. The two are diametrically opposed. So much of what happens in churches these days is like a weird cocktail of superstition, tradition, leadership seminars and group therapy.

The prize for the narcissist, is the self-hood of the other. Narcissists are interested in supply, not connection. They have two modes of relating – total enmeshment (which they think is intimacy, but which feels to the other person like being consumed by a black hole) or absolute rejection. They don’t know how to have middle ground, which is friendly and well-boundaried connection.