by Marc Bregman and Christa Lancaster
Amsterdam
The Girl in Anne Frank
Christa
When we went to Milan a year ago, we made a pilgrimage to Mary in Da Vinci's The Last Supper.
In Amsterdam, we did not know what we were here for. Yes, we came to talk at the Dutch International Dream Conference. But there is always more.
We arrived in Amsterdam and I began to feel a sadness rise up in me. I did not know why.
I am feeling Mary in Amsterdam.
I have been in the chrysalis, incubating the Mary in me.
I have not been ready to break out. Till now.
Dream:
I am with my black labrador Ajax, in the ocean in Bermuda. We are at Coral Beach. Marc, Bob, Bill and Sue are on the beach throwing balls to Ajax. He goes to them and back to me over and over again, the way he did when he was alive. Suddenly, I realize it is dusk, the time the sharks come up to feed. I am scared they will attack me.
When we speak in public I fear the attacks that come.
I want to learn to hold steady in the heart of love when the dart of fear and hatred comes at me.
Mary held fast, went to France, was not defeated by the attacks of hatred and violence.
She kept going in the Occitan. The heart of the feminine continued.
Not the man-hating feminine-ist. Not the feminine masking male power.
The feminine who loved the man, who was in partnership with the man, who knew her own, equally strong purpose and connection. The deep aquifer of the feminine face of god. The liquid state of the love beyond all love. The feminine that holds the world, humanity in her arms. She holds the love in the face of evil.
The three women, including Mary, hold the love amidst horror when Christ is nailed to a wooden cross. Mary holds the love at the tomb.
I am learning from Mary how to hold onto the love under attack. The sharks come up, will come up, as they always do. The world cannot tolerate the high beams of great love. It reacts with aggression, like a shark rips flesh.
I cannot defend against attack. I am learning to stand in the heart of Mary.
Fragile, strong. Valkyrie. Val-kyrie. Kyrie eleison. Kyrie.
I need you Mary, in Amsterdam.
***
When we arrived in Amsterdam, at 5:30 in the morning, we go straight by cab in the pouring rain to the Memphis Hotel and fall into bed by 7am. We sleep in our quiet courtyard facing, sensibly appointed room.
I dream:
I am with my friend from Bermuda on tour for her new music CD. She and I are staying in the hotel and shopping at a wonderful lingerie store. She is delighted to have found a lacy bra and camisole that I find incredibly beautiful and very feminine.
I look for bras in my size. No such luck. The woman salesperson says she has some for me. She knows where to look. I feel cared for.
Mary knew she was cared for. In the dream, the Mary Anima is tending to me. I do not expect to be cared for. My hurt is not being cared for. My flesh feels slashed when I am not cared for, when I am attacked, not seen for my intentions of love and giving care. I need the healing of my slashed flesh so I do not retreat into myself when the sharks attack. I need to find Ajax when the sharks come. Ajax is the protective face of god.
He stays with me riding the waves. He goes for the ball and then he returns. Loyal love, strong and protective, like a father, like god.
Mary knew such protection, such strength amidst sharks. She did not retreat into trauma. She held the love in the moments of hell and violence and hatred. If the dreams are a path to realization, my dreams are helping me realize the Mary in myself. Mary of Magdala, the tower of strength in love.
I felt how daunting it is to stand and speak from my heart in public. How the memory of attack lives in me.
***
We came home after an Italian meal. I wrote about Mary while Marc worked with two clients.
Accidently, Marc erased what I written about the consciousness of Mary. I felt so disappointed. He felt so terrible.
We went to sleep and both had dreams, he about living under tyranny, me about living in a devastated landscape, looking for Marc but not able to connect with him. We spent a hellish morning; Marc pulled into a dark vortex of paranoia, me reacting to the darkness overtaking him.
Finally, I started talking about Anne Frank and the museum of the canal house she and her family were hidden in during the Nazi occupation. I told Marc I felt the paranoia he was experiencing was related to the dark history of the Jews in Amsterdam.
As soon as we identified the source of the malaise, our energy shifted. We recognized the voice of the girl in the darkest of times. As soon as my meeting with my client was complete, we hailed a cab and headed to the Nine Canals district, where behind the large church on the canal, we joined a long line to enter the Anne Frank Huis, wedged between an Italian mother and her daughter, and a young English family.
Anne feels and speaks the longing of the girl. She writes she wants to dance, run free in the wind, write stories. She wants to feel love, desire, hurt, joy, need, devotion. Through the heart of the girl, she is who she is.
Through dreams we are taken, ultimately, to the heart of the girl. The problem is that no one wants to live the heart of the girl, to feel all that she feels. The girl, like Anne, sees and feels it all. We do not want to feel that much. Too vulnerable, too dangerous.
Marc
We know that it is dangerous because we have lived in danger – as most of history reports a malaise of tyranny in most cultures throughout the world.
Now, we live in a time of increasing democracies. The girl has a chance to emerge in each of us if we could solve the mystery of our traumas, recall the mystery of the past and how we lost our innocence through the debasing power of others. If we remember how the girl receded from our consciousness and how we are left, life after life, attempting to be, and trying to control trauma reality so that it will never happen again.
Our dreams rail against this notion and the ego that developed for the girl does not need our protection, despite the tragedy. She is always innocent and eternal, the spirit of her that we project onto Anne Frank, who is the girl in us all who waits in innocence, feeling the Divine love.
From there she carries this consciousness in herself which is in all of us, waiting to be felt again. In dreams, when we control by making it okay, rescuing or taking care of a child, we are still not the child. Caring for the child is not being the child. Caring for is having power to protect the child whilst being the child one must trust and feel in the Divine protection. When we claim this peace, we descend into the trauma of the past and find there was love in midst of devastation.
Christa
On the walls of the Anne Frank Huis, the girl who is Anne has a voice. All who enter the shrine are touched. Anne opens our hearts, for a moment, to see evil through the girl’s eyes. Through her feelings, we feel. Before one of many black and white video clips, a young man slumps with his head in his hands. His father places his hand on his bent neck for support.
When we enter the museum. I am crying. I am feeling the heart of the girl in me. I feel the Anne Frank in me, the Anne Frank in each of us that is deep down under the layers of the ego, largely defended by the tyranny of the pathology.
We cannot live the heart of the girl in us until we are freed from the tyranny of the ego. To be freed we need to feel, feeling opens up, eventually to the heart of the girl. No one trusts the girl’s heart because it means feeling sorrow. How do you trust sorrow will take you through to the girl’s heart? Instead, we choose to live in the “safety” of our separation from the love that runs through her veins, the blood of the holy grail of self.
We wend our way up and down narrow stairs, from the front of the warehouse into the secret annex where the Frank family hid with another family and a single man. We look upstairs to the attic through glass where a well placed mirror shows the skylight through which Anne and Peter, the boy in the other family, can look at the sky, see seagulls and pigeons, watch the chestnut tree move in the wind. All the while, she recorded her inner life, trapped in the prison of their hiding place in the dark of her father’s warehouse.
Anne is an analogy for our own hidden girl hearts imprisoned. When we leave we stop in the bookshop and buy two postcards, one of four black and white portraits of Anne, the other a shot of her red and white plaid diary. We walk out into the evening, feeling the molten magma of the pain, searing, changing us back into a state of love. We wander along the canal looking for a place to eat. My new shoes pinch. We are spent. Finding a taxi, we head south to our hotel neighborhood, back to the Sardegna, the Italian restaurant we fell into last night, drunk with jet lag. They greet us like long lost friends. We sit and talk.
Marc
We say we want to be loved, but to receive love we have to be the girl. Only she is vulnerable enough to understand the power of her nakedness, her raw, jaggedy longing and passionate desire for life.
In our dreams, when He comes to love us, we often say, “Not for me.” We refuse the love because it is too terrifying. It forces us to face our wound but even beyond that it allows us to be the girl. Our ego tyranny refuses to let us be her and we allow this because we believe that vulnerability will mean devastation. Therein lies the conundrum.
Real potency comes from the girl feeling His love. But false power protects us from bad things. Being her, however, we cannot control our fate. There are times when the world will cave in on our souls and we will be crushed, but the girl, knowing always the love, stands outside that moment of the crushing blow. She is always there in every wound, filling us with the hope of the love that never left us. And she wants back in, back in us, back in the world that suffers the loss of her.
In The Red Book, Carl talks about meeting the girl; she comes to him crying because he will not listen to her. He is having a waking dream but does not want to believe it is real. He accuses her of being an illusion or part of some sick melodrama.
How could such a divine entity come in a form as fragile and full of feeling as she. She tells him that she is a prisoner of her father who keeps her in a castle. She is a prisoner because he loves her, she says. He reminds her of his mother and wants to see no harm done to her. In this moment, Carl is to understand that he is the old man, perhaps in the Archetypal illusion of the “Wise Old Man” who knows everything and wants to protect what is innocent.
But he is innocent. That is, his innocence is in the form of the girl in front of him who pleads to be listened to. In the end of the first meeting, she is satisfied that he finally does acknowledge her as real and says, “At last, a human voice.” She has confronted him in his castle and he heard. Armed to the teeth with intellectual knowledge, he finally does allow for something his mind cannot accept.
The girl speaks against all reason. Her whole existence smacks of a heresy in the bowels of the pathology that it has killed all of the followers of the feminine. Mary Magdalene’s army, driven by the consciousness of the girl. She wants to be heard.
Earlier in The Red Book, Carl confuses joy with the devil, does not understand the deeper joy that the girl possesses. The skipping joy of a consciousness that knows God’s presence, joy and love. The mind sees this as childish, banal, frivolous, does not understand the grandest maturity that is possessed by this small creature that is all of us. She says, “I will tell Salome that I met you.”
From The Gospel of Thomas, 61-62:
Jesus said, “Two will recline on a couch; one will die, one will live.”
Salome said, “Who are you, sir? You have climbed onto my couch and eaten from my table as if you are from someone.”
Jesus said to her, “I am the one who comes from what is whole. I was granted from the things of my Father.”
Salome responds, “I am your disciple.”
“For this reason I say, if one is whole, one will be filled with light, but if one is divided, one will be filled with darkness.”
Of course, Jesus is referring to Carl’s dilemma, the dilemma Salome knew well - that Carl must die to become the girl. Carl’s intelligent knowing separates him from the girl, deprives him from the girl’s knowing of the Divine love that would lift him from the joyless state and darkness he lives in.
Carl’s plight is our plight. We are all Carl lost in our intelligence. The mind claims to be enlightened by claiming a role as the wise old man, but that is illusion that is the hero that must die – we can only be children.
When we are children in our dreams, we may sit at the feet of the master. Salome in The Red Book is the Anima, the mother to the girl who waits.
Ironically, we can only understand dreams through her intelligence. Carl talks about scholarly knowledge being irrelevant to the understanding of dreams. Only one who can claim the consciousness of the girl can understand what dreams are for others. She has the heart of the knowledge of the human condition. She is the one who can see through the blind spot of the mind, the false heroics, sees through our ideas of being in control and finding safety in the world.
The father has a hand on her shoulder and she knows all support, all safety comes from him. She knows that all human efforts to protect oneself or others are folly and absurd. She knows what Salome knows, what all the enlightened ones knew and she comes to us now though our dreams if we would only be as naked and vulnerable as she is we would become conscious. She would awaken and come through her eyes and we would feel and see ourselves as her.
Christa
Today at ROC, the art and design school which housed the Dream Conference, the girl was the theme of our presentation. This morning, Marc woke with a dream in which he and I were naked, making love in a group of people. Before the hour came to open the group, we stopped at the Concert Hall down the street to grab a bite to eat at the cafe.
When Marc told me the dream, I knew we must be that naked and vulnerable. Our experience with Anne Frank took us to another level of understanding the voice of the girl in the darkness of the world.
We came to the group open and receptive. Our colleague Annie brought her dreams about the girl, including a dream when she experienced the visitation of the girl, Anne Frank.
Each of us brought our own version of the heart of the girl’s knowledge.
One woman spoke of the incredible warmth and love she felt in the room all afternoon. As so often happens, those who were ready for this embodied light and love stayed and basked in its raw pain and beauty.
Those who were not, left and did not return after the short break. While some drew closer, quietly at first, and then, opened up, revealing tender feelings and observations, others grimaced and withdrew.
The girl was in the room for those who were ready and willing to know her and the loveliness of her heart of knowledge.