When Jack woke up the next morning his room was nearly dark, for outside his window a huge beanstalk had grown toward the sky, cutting off much of the sun’s light. He went to his window and peered upward. The beanstalk went towards the clouds. He put on some clothes and began climbing the beanstalk.
When he got to the top he was able to walk on the cloud to a huge giant’s castle.
The beanstalk and the castle
How much time has passed while he was climbing? We are not told. In the real life of an adolescent boy we can assume many months, even a year or two, have passed while the boy climbs up the beanstalk to meet the giant who will challenge him to his very soul. The boys we know climb beanstalks in many ways—those little rebellions, those hours spent alone in their rooms, away from family, that time spent with peer groups.
The beanstalk is symbolic in two very important ways. It is certainly a phallic, masculine image. It indicates the boy is exploring the male world very intensely. It is also a symbol for the tree of life. The tree of life appears in some form in most cultures and represents connection with both the realm of perceivable nature, and the realm of the imperceivable, life-giving spiritual world. The tree of life represents the very fullness of life. It is a symbol like milk—utterly nurturing—yet in this context, aligned more with the masculine world than the feminine.
When boys around us climb their beanstalks, they spend more time in the masculine realm. Even when they climb the beanstalk by having sex with a girl—at say, fourteen or fifteen—that sex is not, predominantly, about wanting intimacy with the feminine. It’s mainly about wanting to explore the masculine, what it feels like “to get laid,” to be a sexual male. They are processing their life experience in those early years of adolescence with an almost tunnel vision on what is maleness. Many of our sons climb this beanstalk—spend more time alone, watch action movies, play Cobra Attack, wander with other males, try to have sex with females—without knowing it is a magic beanstalk they are on. They may have started their adolescent masculine journey without meeting the mentor who gave them the seeds.
Every male is going to find some way to climb toward his masculine destiny. The question put to us by a story like Jack and the Beanstalk is, will he be led to see that the journey is magical? If he is not, he will abuse himself, abuse others, abuse the world. It is in his awareness of his own magic, and the magic around him, that he is taught both spiritual freedom and spiritual responsibility.
Jack walks to the huge castle. He knows it is a giant’s castle because it is so huge. He is afraid. In some versions of the story, he also knows that it is a giant who killed his father. In those versions, he is walking not only to his own personal destiny as an adolescent male, but also toward the redemption of his own lost father.
When he gets into the castle, he comes into a room in which a goose is laying a golden egg. He watches the goose, mesmerized, as it lays egg after golden egg. He walks over to it and snatches it up, ready to go back down the beanstalk and show his mother his treasure. But then he hears a sound down the hall, so he pushes more deeply into the castle.
The goose that laid the golden egg
In every growing boy there is this goose. There is in the boy a vision of the world, a set of gifts and talents, an ability to take risks or to play it safe, a way of doing things, core personality, gracefulness, athleticism, wit, intellectual prowess, sensitivity, toughness—indeed, there is in every boy some combination of all of these that will be his foundation for strong self-image throughout his life. When he isn’t sure who he is, he will return to what he knows as his gold. Gold in mythic stories is very often linked both to innocence and to future treasure, as if one’s future treasure always lies somehow in one’s integrated innocence. One must never lose one’s basic trust in oneself. This is innocence. The cynic does not trust anyone else because, at heart, the cynic cannot trust himself.
So every boy’s journey through adolescence must include the parenting and mentoring of this gold. The boy must spend a great deal of his adolescence becoming aware of and learning to manage all his gifts, talents, and personality traits. Except in cultures where he is trained for war from early on, he must learn both toughness and sensitivity in order to trust himself and exist in the world. By learning both, he learns to protect his gold and yet also how to share it. If he doesn’t know how to share it, he will be lonely.
Adolescents show many gifts to parents and mentors. Which are the gifts represented by the goose that laid the golden egg? Only the parents, mentors, friends, and the boy himself can answer. Only those people intimate with the boy’s inner life are qualified to speak. When we look into adolescent boys’ eyes, we must look for that which is core to the boy. Sometimes we recall what we thought was the goose that would give us external success when we were young and we try to impose this gold on our sons. Instead, our sons need us to help them find that energy within themselves that will always make them successful, no matter what blows life hits them with.
There is a very small population of boys whose core is psychopathic, either caused by genetics or in boys who have been so abused that by the time they hit adolescence they are incurably antisocial. Their core self has either become so twisted, or so buried, we can only keep ourselves safe from them. But even most boys in reform school, boys in gangs, boys on drugs, have the gold hidden inside them somewhere. They need us and our social programs to reach inside them, through programs like Tough Love, through treatment programs, through renewed family involvement, to say directly to them: “What is your gold? What makes you tick? What can you base your future life success on?”
Boys who join gangs, boys who learn that money is the only gold, boys who learn that sex, or drugs, or another addiction is the gold that will sustain them—these are boys who have not been taught by intimate elders what their own gold is. These boys look outside themselves for the gold. In mythic stories, every piece of a story is actually a representation of something inside the person. What’s outside is pretty obvious, what’s inside is hidden. So mythic storytellers, who considered themselves responsible for the betterment of humanity, made sure to talk about the hidden stuff, the stuff people couldn’t get at by just looking around. In the same way we are responsible to help boys look inward to discover the gold inside them, which won’t be money or another addiction. It will be true personal freedom.
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