Black is my color as seven is my number

2010_5_27 Black is my color as seven is my number
The following is from 1987. I wrote about the dream I called my Magnum Opus, the ‘Big Dream’ after the two Kundalini experiences. I wrote it as a piece of fiction, calling myself Jack Schell.
As soon as he got out of bed Jack grabbed a cup of coffee and the pen and notebook that he was using to record his dreams. He wanted to write while the dream was still vibrant in his head. It was obviously a special dream full of innumerable details—a dazzling accounting of what was opening to him because of his recent breakthrough to new and powerful psychic content. His instant reaction was the dream was a kind of encapsulation of his inner life and showed his preoccupation with Myth and Symbols.
The Tiger was truly awesome and its eruption out of the ground was a film clip that kept playing before his mind’s eye. Naturally, he thought of Blake’s Tiger poem, which was inevitable given his knowledge and fondness for the English Visionary. The Tiger was his new found power and awareness burning bright in the tangle of a dream—another revelation from the deeper psyche. His inner life had increased tenfold since THE INFERNO and the latest Kundalini experience. Things were happening at a furious pace, in his outer life as well as internally. He realized that the gloomy and searing drawing he had done in Vegas was connected to the Tiger’s wrath, only he didn’t know it at the time. There had been a gap in his awareness.
Then he turned his mind to the color black which played such a prominent role in this dream and in many others. Black was present in all three sections of the dream—black dog leaping, black pajamas worn, black airman shot—not to mention the Path of Darkness and black half of the pool—and, to be sure, Jack had regarded black as his color as he regarded Seven as his number. Moreover, thinking back to the first pet he had as a nine year old, it was a black cocker spaniel that he named “Inky.” That name plays curiously with what is going on in his life now—a pen and ink specialist with a passionate involvement with Black (and White.) His family back in the Midwest was fond of calling him the black sheep of the family and they would keep that up until he returned to the fold—to the Catholic Church. In Vegas black was part of a persona he adopted. He wore a black cardigan sweater like a uniform, which he combined with dark glasses. He wore the dark glasses even when he was playing basketball with his university colleagues. They nicknamed him “the Dark One.” He chuckled at that one because his favorite Greek Philosopher was Heraclitus who was known to his contemporaries as “the Dark One,” due to his cryptic aphorisms, like “The road up and the road down are the same,” or “Nature loves concealment.” His favorite author in the sixties was Celine, known for his penchant for “blackening” his fiction, whose novels were a partial inspiration, along with George Grosz, for the savage drawings he started doing in the Las Vegas in response to the Vietnam War, marital problems, and various other social ills. His vehicle to drive to class was a black pick-up trunk. And of course in post-inferno times his signature symbol was a black perfectly round sphere which he tended to put in relation to grotesqueries and chaotic scenes of blood-letting. In those days the color black hung like a grim cloud over his imagination.
Clearly, black is a forbidding color full of negative connotation due to Christian notions of sin and the devil, or at least that is so in the West. The opaqueness of black, so dense light can not get through it, is also a factor. Some people even saw his love affair with black and blackening as pathological. After reading James Hillman he was willing to embrace that idea. It was a promise of liberation, not a neurotic dead end. Actually, Jack enjoyed being a contrarian and going against public opinion. He took delight in telling people that in ancient Egypt they colored statues of Osiris and other underworld figures were black. They understood black as the proper color of the soul, the color of mystery and secrets. Jack preferred that interpretation over the Christian explanation.