VERITIES 8: Dark Night
Journal of Dragon Heritage
VERITIES is an Open Access Journal. One key request of researchers across the world is unrestricted access to research publications. Open access gives a worldwide audience larger than that of any subscription-based journal and thus increases the visibility and impact of published work. It also enhances indexing, retrieval power and eliminates the need for permissions to reproduce and distribute content with credited "fair use". Verities is fully committed to the Open Access Initiative and provides free access to all articles as soon as they are published.
Learning Objectives:
Discovery, Awakening, Integration, Implimentation
1. To compare traditional, contemporary and dragonkin thinking about
symbols, myths and themes and their place in the dragon heritage;
2. To analyze the creation, use and misuse (exploitation; coercion) of symbols in cultural and personal life;
3. To create symbolic meaning and describe its impact on individuals and culture;
4. To describe symbolic processes and expression in individual and group transformation;
5. To critique new conceptualizations of our historical symbols and the creation of symbolic meaning.
Learning Objectives:
Discovery, Awakening, Integration, Implimentation
1. To compare traditional, contemporary and dragonkin thinking about
symbols, myths and themes and their place in the dragon heritage;
2. To analyze the creation, use and misuse (exploitation; coercion) of symbols in cultural and personal life;
3. To create symbolic meaning and describe its impact on individuals and culture;
4. To describe symbolic processes and expression in individual and group transformation;
5. To critique new conceptualizations of our historical symbols and the creation of symbolic meaning.
Verities Issue 8: Dark Night of the Soul
GOING DOWN
Dialogue of a World Weary Man with His Ba
Dancing Barefoot through the Valley of the Shadow of Death
The Dark Night of the Soul: Grief, Dissociation, & Alienation
Jung's medicine for depression: "I would raise animals and plants, & find joy in their thriving. i would surround myself with beauty--no matter how primitive...objects, colors, sounds. I would eat and drink well. When the darkness grows denser, I would penetrate to the very core and ground, and would not rest until a light appeared to me." -CG Jung, the Medicine Man
Don't Take Either the Red or Blue Pill
Sufferers of depression are often forced to endure, in addition to their pain and energy loss, the stigma of being told that they are 'ill'. Yet depression is a problem not to be eliminated, but one that has value, meaning, or purpose. From a soul-centered perspective, depression is not primarily another word for unhappiness; nor a 'mental illness.' It is, rather, often a response to soullessness (or what shamans call 'soul loss'). It includes the soullessness of the materialist medical model which 'treats' depression as a biologic illness, band-aided with damaging drugs.
We need more people who are not ashamed of, or embarrassed by their pain, but who can instead respond to their own and others' unavoidable suffering with love, patience, sympathy, nurturing and respect. True happiness doesn't exclude sadness, but embraces it within the living paradox personal wholeness demands. Not all happiness is positive - and not all depression is 'bad'. Don't take either mind-bending pill or drown at the bottom of a bottle; learn how to do it without drugs. When the 'solution' becomes the problem, it masks the underlying depression but adds another dimension of intractability to it, which must be peeled off before the depression can be addressed.
Depression is a natural human response to an endless variety of circumstances and states of unresolved suffering, or tension within the psyche. While it can be debilitating (for example, in cases of repressed conflict, extreme crisis, or forgotten childhood trauma), it can also have a creative outcome. Some depressions are caused by a lowering of consciousness in order to retrieve needed wisdom, or creative and healing gifts from the unconscious. Dramatized as myth, the hero or heroine must go through a symbolic death and rebirth. Examples include Dionysus, Osiris, Christ, Demeter and Persephone, Orpheus and Eurydice. Such myths provide imaginal context for soul's journey through depression. Depression is never the end of the story. There is always a rebirth at the end of the journey. (Roberts)
Practice & Service
Each of us can help ourselves, by trusting our intuition, by reclaiming our personal power and right to control our own lives, by avoiding whoever and whatever makes us feel ill, uneasy, or bad about ourselves, by remaining close to Nature, and by following our hearts - wherever they lead us. Though we walk 'through the valley of the shadow of death' (= depression), we need not fear. In the end, the unshakable radiance of joy comes only through a life of integrity, ruthless honesty, meaning, detachment (from joy and pain), kindness to all, and the selfless service of the World that arises from each of us following our unique 'path with heart'.
There is joy in serving truth, sorrow and pain. Heartfulness reconciles all opposites. We live and breathe an inseparable blend of joy and sorrow, death and life, dark and light, since at this level, we empathize compassionately. Such empathy, or ability to feel another's pain as if it is one's own, is the 'passion of com-passion', which means 'to suffer with'. As the truth of love, compassion is inseparable from the love of truth. To become a balanced, content and healthy culture we must, replace the 'mental illness' lie with the truth and needs of soul. Learn how to do it with spirit tech, intentionality and creativity, instead of self-sabotage and escapist drugs that block the process. Ancient journeys echo many methods of soul retrieval.
"Right at the beginning you meet the dragon, the chthonic spirit, the devil or, as the alchemists called it,
the blackness, the nigredo, and this encounter produces suffering..." ~ Carl Jung
"I am an infirm and weak old man, surnamed the dragon; therefore am I shut up in a cave, that I may become ransomed by the kingly crown...A fiery sword inflicts great torments on me; death makes weak my flesh and bones...My soul and my spirit depart; a terrible poison, I am likened to the black raven, for that is the wages of sin; in dust and earth I lie, that out of Three may come One. O soul and spirit leave me not, that I may see again the light of day, and the hero of peace whom the whole world shall behold may arise from me..." ~ Aurelia Occulta Philosophorum
the blackness, the nigredo, and this encounter produces suffering..." ~ Carl Jung
"I am an infirm and weak old man, surnamed the dragon; therefore am I shut up in a cave, that I may become ransomed by the kingly crown...A fiery sword inflicts great torments on me; death makes weak my flesh and bones...My soul and my spirit depart; a terrible poison, I am likened to the black raven, for that is the wages of sin; in dust and earth I lie, that out of Three may come One. O soul and spirit leave me not, that I may see again the light of day, and the hero of peace whom the whole world shall behold may arise from me..." ~ Aurelia Occulta Philosophorum
Apocalyptic Whirlwind
Depression is ordinarily a subject we don't want to confront, filled with uncomfortable material and issues we like to leave buried in the unconscious, but which rear their head in the mandatory passages of life. From birth-trauma and postpartum depression to abject grief, to self-sabotage and addictions, star-crossed lovers, to suicidal tendencies these archetypes exert their fatal fascination by drawing us into the seductive depths of despair. "Going Down" has multiple metaphorical meanings, ranging from sexual to bottoming out. You can 'hit bottom' in self-destructive behavior or find the primal groundstate through self-affirming techniques that help your resilience emerge.
You can choose emergency or emergence, expanded reality, living your gift. When it comes to adapting to our environment, our response can either be based in self-organizing emergence in the face of chaos, or non-adaptive breakdown which creates emergency. Adaptive challenge is what leads to critical states to which we either succumb, or rally with a new sense of self-image, a new higher level of self-organization. This holds true whether the challenge comes at the physical, emotional, intellectual/moral, or spiritual level. Some have a frustrating pattern of choosing "emotionally unavailable" people, repeating childhood issues. At "rock bottom", you've "been down so long it looks like up," but paradoxically, it is the best time to begin mining the vein of gold in the unconscious.
Indifferent to the body, the soul becomes weary of yearning for delight in the inhospitable wilderness and cries out for surcease. Life becomes dry and precarious. There are losses we feel we cannot live with. Souls full of pain and anguish do succumb to the undertow of deprivation or self-loathing and give up. The cheerful heart is gone and only wrong roams the earth and death hovers near the face. When life is a drag some crave the grave. But we can also consciously enter the subterranean realm of the unconscious, instead.
Falling Apart
Self-annihilation, or at least fantasies about it, may seem the only solution to unrelenting misery, the existential impasse. But the Ba or soul says "love me here, having put aside the West," or realm of death. The "higher" transpersonal components were associated with the "ba" (its body and the shadow of the latter) and the "akh", or divine spark. This soul was the hidden dweller, caught as prey like fish in a net. The physical body is closely connected with the double, while the "ba" was ethereal.
Akh, ba, and ka are the three spiritual light principles. Akh is at the outset of all becoming. It is the light proceeding from the darkness presupposing darkness containing the light and the cause that held both in potential. Akh is the spiritual birth of light in matter revealing itself and demonstrating three aspects. Ba is the “soul”, which is birthed with the individual, the “astral body”, which is the animating breath of all that lives, constituting the world and its final perfection. Ba is the natural soul in bodily form, subject to cyclic rebirth. Ka represents the higher self and is one of the five subtle bodies. Ka is the connection to the higher subtle bodies. Its reflective essence in the khaibit causes initial connectivity to all the subtle bodies. The ka is the assemblage point in the physical body and mind and point of access to universal memory.
The task of the "ba" (true individuality) was to guide the person during life and to fly with the deceased to the sky, to the heaven of the stars. The "ba" dwelt in the heart, the receptacle of the higher components, but only in the heart of those who spoke and practiced Maat -- balance. Those established in their humanity would see their heart as the permanent abode of the soul. They are "in their middle", in their true nature and mastery of the passions. Those who have a sick heart carry their burdon with them as a load of heavy stones. The words of their soul do not reach them. Hence, they lack rejuvenation and are stuck. However, the soul is a trustworthy guide who always remains, encouraging a return to the middle of life.
Fixing to Die
This material naturally resists being brought into the light of consciousness. Feeling like killing oneself is condemned by society as a criminal act, which may compound the sense of guilt. Such encounters and the soul-searing experience of depression can end in ultimate despair or transformation. The world-weary spirit seeks to leave the body through the "relief" of dissociation, suicide or spiritual flight. But the psyche tends to appear as "other" and malevolent alters may replace the displaced ego.
The retrieval or recovery of the soul requires its return to its rightful owner. Our time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition.
The unknown author of the Egyptian scroll, the Berlin hieratic papyrus 3024, lived more than 4,000 years ago when that ancient country was in an unsettled state, with erosion of ethical values and uncertainty for the future. From the papyrus, it seems the author faced a decision between two philosophies or paths: one involving the inner life of the individual and the other, contending with it, focused on the hedonist enjoyment of the present, with little thought of the future and immediate pursuit of pleasure.
This World Weary man engages in an internal discussion with his Ba, or soul on the relative merits of his life and his compulsions and yearning for death. Egyptologist Jacobsohn interpretes this ancient man dealing with his Ba (soul) as the center of his individuality and inner power. He feels the tragedy of helplessness and wrestles with the problem of suicide.
Self Harm
Depression is soul loss -- soul-searching. Did the weary Egyptian suffer from mental illness such as DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder)? People with trauma disorders reportedly attempt suicide more often than people who have major depression. Research also shows that people with trauma disorders have more serious medical illnesses, substance use, and self-harming behaviors. Early and continuous stress leads to the simultaneous development of dissociative tendencies (including indifference to the body and pain) and heightened vulnerability to stress. These dispositions may facilitate suicidal behavior in the face of mounting intolerable stress, helplessness, and hopelessness.
Ours is a cautionary tale to not allow the Dragon to devour you alive. The dragon also hides underworld treasures. We can draw on the ancient Light of Egypt and Jung's depth psychology to understand the problem and its solution better. The transformative process can proceed through initiations or stall out in any phase, to the detmiment of the individual who fails to reach their potential, even due to circumstances beyond their control. The choice is simple, you can serve the dragon, or it will eat you. Psychosis or suicide are real possibilities. But the potential of prepersonal structures fuels spiritual development, too.
In devastating experiences is not clear from one day to the next whether one wishes to be alive, or even is still alive. Face-to-face with the darkness, immersed in it, hardly a spark of life, out of touch with anything meanigful, one seeks the "ground of being", but in a nihilistic way rather than through spiritual means.
The more spiritual light we experience, the more we are confronted by our own darkness, which may wreak havoc on us as well as on others if it is unconsciously projected rather than contained and transformed by the burning, sealed, alchemical retort of consciousness. It is the uncomfortable confrontation with the constant interplay of opposites within the crucible of consciousness which reveals that the ‘ape’ and the ‘angel’ in us can enter into a mutually enriching relationship. Numinous archetypes do indeed ‘wobble’, teleologically, ‘between transrational glory and prerational chaos’ (Wilber 1983).
Underworld Passage
Each era has its version of the same depressive malady. The ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna and her descent into the Underworld reveals a series of profound psychological and contemporary messages, including the concept of a higher self, the abandoning of old values and artifacts, and the ultimate empowerment of voluntarily making the descent. Inanna embodies a wholeness pattern, of the feminine beyond the merely maternal. Our own descent into Hades is a form of spiritual initiation: a seeking of wisdom and growth and the shedding of illusions, like the Dance of the Seven Veils. Our world and society may be in the process of making its own descent, releasing traditional paradigms in preparation for a period of “accelerated growth”.
The underworld journey of depression is a passage that pushes us down deeper, a state which we must enter into and pass through. Mythologically speaking it is an underworld journey. It is associated with stagnation, rotting, suicidal-wishes and morbidity. But it is also a universal pattern of self-reorganization. The final stage takes each of us into the mystical and metaphysical realm, where we encounter our ultimate understanding of self and identity and its universal connections. All descents provide entry into different levels of consciousness and can enhance life creatively. All of them imply suffering. All of them can serve as initiations. Meditation and dreaming and active imaginations are modes of descent. So too are depressions, anxiety attacks, and experiences with hallucinogenic drugs.
Being able to not care about relating to an external other, nor to the collective society or its paradigms can initially be very frightening because it cannot be validated by the collective from which one is releasing themselves. But the act of letting go, being able to not care, can provide the possibility of a totally fresh perception, a creative perspective in the form of Enki reacting to the needs of the moment, a new pattern and a never ending exploration. What mass consciousness may fear as chaos, monstrous or ugly, is hard to endure. It implies the elimination of our defenses, a sacrifice of easy collective understanding, the dashing of hopes to look good and safely belong, and the giving up of being agreeable to a patriarchal paradigm. It involves hitting bottom, but a bottom where all the “assets” that have been given up, lost, or taken, become irrelevant. (Perera)
Depression is a narcissistic injury. We have to enter deep into it to recover self-esteem. Part of us may succeed, even while part remains trapped in hungry depression. Narcissistic injury can cause a vertical split, with grandiose fantasies/hopes on one side and a profound feeling of worthlessness on the other. The injured person clings tenaciously to grandiose hopes, and may become enraged if he or she is forced to give them up, even by positive growth. Creative work steals distinction from the unconscious, overcomes the devouring force and brings it back to consciousness. Narcissism and creativity are closely related. To heal a narcissistic injury one often must develop creative expression. Crafting a distinctive work of art protects one from the compulsion to be a person of distinction, better than, or worse than, or more important than others.
Narcissistic injury sometimes causes a horizontal split. Here the person is depressed, shamed, and acutely sensitive to criticism. Grandiosity is not gone but it is repressed or displaced - perhaps onto the person's children. We may call the person “thin-skinned”. In both horizontal and vertical splits the injured person’s sense of self is identified with the split. Of necessity the person tenaciously resists giving it up. In a horizontal split the depression has a stubborn, tenacious quality which is different from a creative depression or a depression due to abandonment.
Indigenous cultures describe the initiation of the shaman or spirit-doctor as a descent into the underworld of the dark spirits where a death and dismemberment experience takes place. After this dismemberment the helpful spirits arrive to help patch the initiate's body together again. Next is a journey to the sun or upper world where a vision is received before returning to the earthly realm to fulfills one's responsibilities. This shamanic rite of passage mirrors the process of depression. As we go down into a depression we are torn apart, slowly we regather ourselves before we rise from out of the depression with a whole new perspective on life. After depression we are often elevated into a state of realisation, of vision and inspiration.
Hunger & Healing
Understandably we act to avoid depression, but mining the soul deepens it, as in the alchemical axiom, VITRIOLUM: "Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem Veram Medicinam" ("Visit the interior of the earth, and by rectifying you will find the hidden stone which is the true medicine.") In alchemy the process must pass through the Nigredo or Mortifico (the blackening and death phase) before the Albedo (the whitening). After the Albedo comes the Rubedo (the reddening and return to life). Depression becomes the gateway to a deeper and fuller relationship with one's Self. As Dante illustrated in his The Divine Comedy the passage through hell and purgatory leads directly onto heaven.
We fear depression's impact not only upon our being but also on our social life, our relationships, career, families and finances. A state of depression is a demanding experience. The downward dimension is neglected, judged. The upper world is associated with light, freedom and inspiration, the underworld is a dark and heavy place but is also considered a place of transformation and regeneration. In this depressive state we either find ourselves, a new direction, a solidity and integrity or a previously untapped creative capacity. In the depths of depression wisdom and a greater relationship with one's Self is forged.
Psychologically speaking, the underworld is the rich depths of our interior being. This withdrawal of energy may also be viewed as a retreat demanded by the unconscious. The unconscious only doubles its efforts if we fight it. The shame, shyness, apathy or sadness are all cues to pull back from life. If we consciously acknowledge and honor the need for retreat psychological symptoms ease. Embracing a depression we 'let go to psychological or ego-death. In limbo the true work begins. The old has fallen away and cleared a passage for the new; we piece ourselves and our lives back together. Without really knowing we prepare ourselves for new life. Meditation schools advise us to prepare for death and life by "dying daily" in the process of meditation.
Sick King
In the Arthurian legends, this was the "sickness unto death", the never-healing wound. When the King suffered, so did the Kingdom. A sick king means a weakened and vulnerable society. The King embodies the whole situation, symbolically and actually. If he is spiritually impoverished, so is the kingdom. The Heir is the final result of human genesis: a spiritual, indestructible form of life in which the soul is exalted. The image of this blissful state is haunting this desperate mind. Despair is blocking the way to his spiritual evolution. Unable to overcome this despair he tries to shortcut it.
Earle observes, "chiefdoms are states of mind [and] chiefs rule not because of their power but because of their place in a sacredly chartered world order -- the world order of alters and their containers. The more kings appropriated maternal alter power—her mana—the more they had to go through seasonal cleansing ceremonies, including ritual abasement and even "killing of the king," in order to punish themselves for their hubris.
In these ceremonies, the king was ritually called "a turd [who] has come to save us," hit in the face with a sword, and only then invested with his portion of maternal mana. But everyone in antiquity knew where his power really came from: the vaginal maternal crown. It was addressed by the king as "O Red Crown, Let there be fear of me like the fear of thee." The throne was called the "mother" of the king, and the sceptre, "a branch from the placental Tree of Life."
T. H. White wrote in The Once and Future King aboutyoung Arthur'sdepression, his dark night of the soul. He sought counsel from his mentor Merlin, the magician. Merlin tells Arthur, "The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies. You may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins. You may miss your only love. You may see the world around you devastated by evil lunatics or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it, then: To learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you."
Self Healing
In the midst of death, there is life in learning.More than information, it's about healing, wholeness, empowerment, liberation, transcendence and reclaiming the vitality of life. When you can't work, and can't connect with others, you can begin learning what is within yourself by groping around in the darkness to see what and who is there. Thomas Merton called it true self. The Egyptian Ka represented the world-creating power of a god or king and the life force in every human being. The Ba is an aspect of the soul, connected to the uniqueness of the individual. The Ba is an immanent component of everyone, comparable to the concept Atman also representing the innermost center of the individual and as Atman Purusha -- the all-embracing Deity.
The daimon knows the future and is at all times in touch with the world-spirit, with the Logos or spermatic pneuma of the universe. Masculine and feminine merge in this androgynous symbol of wholeness. This archetypal image, like the lapis in alchemy, unites the opposites of masculine and feminine in one figure (Von Franz).
The Ba, or soul is a power to be reckoned with even during this life, a power that men cannot escape by any conscious act of will and cannot entirely grasp by conscious understanding. The Ba has something to do with the incarnation of a god -- his individual forms of appearance on earth -- or represents an immanent component of a human individual. The Ba is prepared to witness against consciousness; it voices a personal, individual truth. It is a real power with claims of its own, capable of opposing the conscious intentions of those who take for granted that one is united with it.
Ba is not interested in what is conventionally considered good; it obviously wants something else. Ba chooses the symbol of unborn children to express still unrealized potentialities. Ba cautiously leads the world-weary man to the real goal. The sense of at-one-ment with the Ba is newly gained through self-knowledge and restoration of the wholeness of personality, now consciously experienced as the result of transformation. (Jacobsohn).
Neumann has commented on the various soul-parts in Egyptian religion in his classic, The Origins and History of Consciousness. He links Osiris with the heart-soul, or Ba, and notes that the hieroglyph for "hear" and 'thought" are identical. The ka soul has a particularly important part to play in this process [of transformation and unification of soul parts]. It is extraordinarily difficult for us to understand what is meant by the ka...the Egyptians conceived it as a man's double, as his genius or guardian angel, as his name and as that which nourished him.
When the ka and the body are purified and united -- the king -- like Osiris before him and every individual after him -- is a complete being who achieves perfection. Through this union of soul parts the king becomes a ba, a heart-soul who dwells with the gods and possesses the breath of life; he is now akhu, a perfect spiritual being.
The Ba represents paradoxically, both the unconscious personality complexes of an individual, but also the indwelling of the Self. On the other hand, the ka describes the pranas, or vitality of the life force, genetic heritage, and environmental effects on personality.
According to Plutarch, Isis and Osiris are very great "daimons" but they are not gods. Therefore they represent something which is trans-subjective but which is closer to the human than to the gods, something which can be experienced inwardly in certain states of strong emotion. (Von Franz, Projection and Recollection in Jungian Psychology)
Images of the Self appear spontaneously throughout the entire transformative process. It appears in all symbols from the highest to the lowest. At the beginning of the great work it appears in animal forms, such as snakes, birds, fish, horses, or beetles. It shows through the plant forms of flowers and tree symbolism. It progresses through metaphors of sexual union into human and mandala forms.
The symbols of the Self in human forms may be contaminated with other archetypes, since pure forms are rarely seen outside of mystical meditation. For example, if one's image of the Self were contaminated with the anima/animus, the vision would be of a vibrant, solar woman whose aura radiates like the sun. Contaminated by the shadow, one might experience a magical creature like Mephistopheles or the demonic.
In the Timaeus (90B-90C), Plato theorizes that every human being has a divine daimon that is the noblest component of the psyche. Whoever seeks wisdom and seriously concerns himself with divine and eternal things nourishes his daimon, whereas worldly trivialities abase and mortify him.
The capacity for transcending the self through art arises from the creative process, an altered state of consciousness facilitating the occurrence of anomalous events such as precognition and interior visions that appear to be outside the spacetime of waking life. Frustration can trigger the far-from-equilibrium conditions necessary for creativity, while inspiration may seem as if its source is exterior to the artist, and the experience of flow, like a trance state, can produce an altered sense of time. Archetypes in the creative process link a single mind to the collective unconscious and works of art become self-opening worlds that create an expanded reality.
Dark Mood
The black hole of depression conceals deeper meaning. Severe depression shakes emotional stability and equilibrium. It is a long, difficult, and trying period, or a series of cycles. This model places suffering and pathology within a larger paradigm of spiritual unfolding. Symptoms provide a larger meaning. Alchemy provides a larger framework. A crisis or a Dark Night of the Soul precedes spiritual awakening and also describes the quantum leap in consciousness some mystics call Crossing the Abyss.
Regeneration of spirit is a potential, not a promise. Today's "cure", the antidepressant pill, can be the very "poison" that pushes some over the brink of suicide, while "talk therapy" has been proven just as effective without the fatal side effect. Without one's angel, genius or daemon there is little chance of successful regeneration, for general deterioration and contraction of the personality ensues with compulsivities, fixed ideas, projective rage, and obsessions. Even the higher mind does not contain the capacity to transcend itself, within itself. It must rely on Grace..
Suffering is a natural part of spiritual unfolding, a necessary part of the process which is not shameful. It is not uncommon to go mad with grief. What is lost or repressed is retrieved in the process of a larger psychological reorganization. It is marked by withdrawl, then either rupture or rapture, emergency or creative emergence. Depression is significantly inversely related to self-transcendence and positively related to death anxiety. Self-transcendence is significantly related to health promotion behavior and negatively correlated to death.
Ken Wilber’s Cool Structured treatment of the Dark Night of the Soul leads to a significant distortion of Teresa’s testimony. He argues in his earlier essay ‘The Spectrum of Psychopathology’ (1986) and in Sex, Ecology and Spirituality (1995) that the Dark Night of the Soul is a psychopathology or disorder belonging to the psychic stage of development, and he defines it as a profound depression in response to God’s abandonment of the soul (see Wilber 1986, p. 121; 1995, p. 296).
‘The Dark Night’, he says, ‘occurs in that period after one has tasted Universal Being, but before one is established in it. But there are other aspects besides Absence of God: (a) psychic fatigue in reaction to the strain of mystical lucidity; (b) mental chaos; (c) intellectual impotence; (d) loss of volition; (e) emotional chaos; (f ) loss of self-control; (g) self-naughting; (h) spiritual poverty; (i) acute sense of worthlessness, guilt or imperfection; (j) the pain of God, or dark ecstasy (see Underhill 1961, pp. 380–412).
The purpose of the state of the Dark Night of the Soul is the completion of the purification of the self begun in the earlier spiritual stage of purgation (see Underhill 1961, p. 395). It is clear that the Dark Night of the Soul is not a pathology or disorder of another spiritual stage of development (the psychic), but a separate stage of spiritual development which, Underhill suggests, ‘normally intervenes between the Illuminative and the Unitive Life’ (Underhill 1961, p. 388. From Wilber’s perspective, the self or self-system cannot establish itself permanently at the subtle level prior to the Dark Night of the Soul.
Hot and Cold Spirituality
Pro-active traditions include the following: (a) esoteric, cryptic, disturbing, initiatory knowledge, revealed (granted) piecemeal, often miraculously (see Rawlinson 1997, pp. 106, 114, 129), which is in sharp contrast to the openness or transparency of the revealed knowledge; (b) the emphasis on ecstasy rather than on enstasy, and the tendency to attract unpredictable, shape-changing, ‘crazy wisdom’ practitioners); (c) most significantly, the microcosm/macrocosm homology (based upon the image of the human body) and the emphasis on Hot magic: the manipulation of the laws of the cosmos in the service of self-transformation (see Rawlinson 1997, p. 106).
Clearly, these traditions embrace a magical worldview, concerned with the recreation of the cosmic in oneself. Thoth taught that there exists a vertical connection to the cosmos through which the true seeker can pass and witness the thoughts of the divine mind becoming reality. Having seen how to change reality by traveling to its source Above, the initiate returns to the physical world and participates in the creation of the universe according to the divine plan, which is to make the Above and Below One, to make all matter conscious, to make all darkness light. It was what Akhenaten called “living in truth,” and the Cosmic Code Book containing that formula is the Emerald Tablet.
Each model of spiritual development has strengths and weaknesses, and none can be elevated above all others. Models conjoin or disjoin prepersonal and transpersonal development and experience, shown by their contrasting judgments on the relationship between spirit and psyche. Cool traditions discriminate between prepersonal, psychological experiences and transpersonal, spiritual experiences and stages of consciousness and regard the pursuit of the prepersonal as obstructive or at best irrelevant to the attainment of the transpersonal. Hot traditions tend to interpret prepersonal, psychological experiences teleologically, as an expression of transpersonal, spiritual development, either because they are perceived to be a gift from God or because they possess a Hot, magical function of transformation of the self and the cosmos, illustrating the mysterious, microcosm/macrocosm homology.
Jung's Hot Structured teaching includes the following: (a) archetypal images are numinous and ‘wholly other’ (having their own life) to the ego; (b) cryptic, initiatory knowledge is granted by these inner images, in Jung’s case by Elijah and Philemon; (c) the inner cosmos is a labyrinth, and liberation from the powers/beings in it, created by the archetypes, is effected by images which function as esoteric passwords; (d) expansion away from a point is triggered by the practice of active imagination, producing leaps in understanding; (e) the danger of the journey towards individuation is psychosis; and (f) both the withdrawal of psychic projections from the world and the experience of synchronistic links between inner and outer events serve the cosmic purpose.
Either way, the dark life passage can lead to empowerment or self-negation. Self-defeating and self-destructive tendencies are slow-motion suicide. Severe dissociation, personality disorders, or addiction stops the process, stops the flow cold and freezes the emotions. Alcoholism is often an intimate partner of depression. What is really demanded is not just the regression but evolution of the ego toward transcendence -- interiority, rather than guilt or cosmic engulfment.
Chapel Perilous
“Chapel Perilous [is] that vortex where cosmological speculations, coincidences, and paranoia seem to multiply and then collapse, compelling belief or lunacy, wisdom or agnosticism.” ~Robert Anton Wilson
The global psyche veers dangerously toward the deserted ruin of a soul-searing Chapel Perilous Bar & Grill, a collective Dark Night of the Soul, where the Utopian collides and maybe even colludes with the Draconian. Paranoia is the only sane response to the current sociopolitical situation -- full spectrum dominance, total surveillance and erosion of human rights.
Hermes prophesized in The Perfect Discourse in Asclepius: “In that day men will be weary of life, and they will cease to think the world worthy of reverent wonder and of worship. This whole good thing, than which nothing was or is or will be deemed better, will be threatened with destruction; men will think it a burden, and will come to scorn it. They will no longer love this world around us, this incomparable work of God, this glorious structure, this sum of good made up of things of many diverse forms. Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life; no one will raise his eyes to heaven; the pious will be deemed insane, and the impious wise; the madman will be thought brave, and the wickedest will be regarded as good. Only the evil angels will remain, who will mingle with men, and drive the poor wretches by main force into all manner of reckless crime, into wars and robberies and frauds, and all things hostile to the nature of the soul. Then will the earth no longer stand unshaken, and the sea will no more be navigable; heaven will not support the stars in their orbits, nor will the stars pursue their constant course in heaven; the voice of the gods will of necessity be silenced and dumb; the fruits of the earth will rot; the soil will turn barren, and the very air will sicken in sullen stagnation.”
Chapel Perilous balances on the precipitous edge of disaster, teetering toward catastrophic avalanche. We don't just think harm is occurring; we know it. The collective hubris is heading for a pratfall of collective ego death. Today's paranoia is neither irrational nor delusional. Political paranoia is not phobic but the only congruent response to the post-Postmodern environment with its shadow side of social irresponsibility and denial. All the spiritually eclectic fantasies of ascension can't hide the dry rot in the infrastructure of our society. The power of distraction competes with the Law of Attraction.
We're all shellshocked by the collapse of modern society and the impending transition of the Ages. "Shock often produces a sense of limbo, floating feelings and an overall disconnectedness. Depending on how traumatic the shock is, we'll enter into anything from 'spaciness' to the permanent vocation of psychosis. Shock temporarily disconnects the soul from the body and sends it to Chapel Perilous to learn the lesson of the sermon." (Wilson)
The legends always say if you go into that realm without the sword of reason, you will lose your mind, but at the same time, if you take only the sword of reason without the cup of sympathy, you will lose your heart. You walk the razor's edge of unpleasant realizations which makes your humanity that much more important. If you approach without the wand of intuition, you can stand at the door for decades never realizing you have arrived, resting your head on the pillow of paranoia.
Depression is ordinarily a subject we don't want to confront, filled with uncomfortable material and issues we like to leave buried in the unconscious, but which rear their head in the mandatory passages of life. From birth-trauma and postpartum depression to abject grief, to self-sabotage and addictions, star-crossed lovers, to suicidal tendencies these archetypes exert their fatal fascination by drawing us into the seductive depths of despair. "Going Down" has multiple metaphorical meanings, ranging from sexual to bottoming out. You can 'hit bottom' in self-destructive behavior or find the primal groundstate through self-affirming techniques that help your resilience emerge.
You can choose emergency or emergence, expanded reality, living your gift. When it comes to adapting to our environment, our response can either be based in self-organizing emergence in the face of chaos, or non-adaptive breakdown which creates emergency. Adaptive challenge is what leads to critical states to which we either succumb, or rally with a new sense of self-image, a new higher level of self-organization. This holds true whether the challenge comes at the physical, emotional, intellectual/moral, or spiritual level. Some have a frustrating pattern of choosing "emotionally unavailable" people, repeating childhood issues. At "rock bottom", you've "been down so long it looks like up," but paradoxically, it is the best time to begin mining the vein of gold in the unconscious.
Indifferent to the body, the soul becomes weary of yearning for delight in the inhospitable wilderness and cries out for surcease. Life becomes dry and precarious. There are losses we feel we cannot live with. Souls full of pain and anguish do succumb to the undertow of deprivation or self-loathing and give up. The cheerful heart is gone and only wrong roams the earth and death hovers near the face. When life is a drag some crave the grave. But we can also consciously enter the subterranean realm of the unconscious, instead.
Falling Apart
Self-annihilation, or at least fantasies about it, may seem the only solution to unrelenting misery, the existential impasse. But the Ba or soul says "love me here, having put aside the West," or realm of death. The "higher" transpersonal components were associated with the "ba" (its body and the shadow of the latter) and the "akh", or divine spark. This soul was the hidden dweller, caught as prey like fish in a net. The physical body is closely connected with the double, while the "ba" was ethereal.
Akh, ba, and ka are the three spiritual light principles. Akh is at the outset of all becoming. It is the light proceeding from the darkness presupposing darkness containing the light and the cause that held both in potential. Akh is the spiritual birth of light in matter revealing itself and demonstrating three aspects. Ba is the “soul”, which is birthed with the individual, the “astral body”, which is the animating breath of all that lives, constituting the world and its final perfection. Ba is the natural soul in bodily form, subject to cyclic rebirth. Ka represents the higher self and is one of the five subtle bodies. Ka is the connection to the higher subtle bodies. Its reflective essence in the khaibit causes initial connectivity to all the subtle bodies. The ka is the assemblage point in the physical body and mind and point of access to universal memory.
The task of the "ba" (true individuality) was to guide the person during life and to fly with the deceased to the sky, to the heaven of the stars. The "ba" dwelt in the heart, the receptacle of the higher components, but only in the heart of those who spoke and practiced Maat -- balance. Those established in their humanity would see their heart as the permanent abode of the soul. They are "in their middle", in their true nature and mastery of the passions. Those who have a sick heart carry their burdon with them as a load of heavy stones. The words of their soul do not reach them. Hence, they lack rejuvenation and are stuck. However, the soul is a trustworthy guide who always remains, encouraging a return to the middle of life.
Fixing to Die
This material naturally resists being brought into the light of consciousness. Feeling like killing oneself is condemned by society as a criminal act, which may compound the sense of guilt. Such encounters and the soul-searing experience of depression can end in ultimate despair or transformation. The world-weary spirit seeks to leave the body through the "relief" of dissociation, suicide or spiritual flight. But the psyche tends to appear as "other" and malevolent alters may replace the displaced ego.
The retrieval or recovery of the soul requires its return to its rightful owner. Our time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition.
The unknown author of the Egyptian scroll, the Berlin hieratic papyrus 3024, lived more than 4,000 years ago when that ancient country was in an unsettled state, with erosion of ethical values and uncertainty for the future. From the papyrus, it seems the author faced a decision between two philosophies or paths: one involving the inner life of the individual and the other, contending with it, focused on the hedonist enjoyment of the present, with little thought of the future and immediate pursuit of pleasure.
This World Weary man engages in an internal discussion with his Ba, or soul on the relative merits of his life and his compulsions and yearning for death. Egyptologist Jacobsohn interpretes this ancient man dealing with his Ba (soul) as the center of his individuality and inner power. He feels the tragedy of helplessness and wrestles with the problem of suicide.
Self Harm
Depression is soul loss -- soul-searching. Did the weary Egyptian suffer from mental illness such as DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder)? People with trauma disorders reportedly attempt suicide more often than people who have major depression. Research also shows that people with trauma disorders have more serious medical illnesses, substance use, and self-harming behaviors. Early and continuous stress leads to the simultaneous development of dissociative tendencies (including indifference to the body and pain) and heightened vulnerability to stress. These dispositions may facilitate suicidal behavior in the face of mounting intolerable stress, helplessness, and hopelessness.
Ours is a cautionary tale to not allow the Dragon to devour you alive. The dragon also hides underworld treasures. We can draw on the ancient Light of Egypt and Jung's depth psychology to understand the problem and its solution better. The transformative process can proceed through initiations or stall out in any phase, to the detmiment of the individual who fails to reach their potential, even due to circumstances beyond their control. The choice is simple, you can serve the dragon, or it will eat you. Psychosis or suicide are real possibilities. But the potential of prepersonal structures fuels spiritual development, too.
In devastating experiences is not clear from one day to the next whether one wishes to be alive, or even is still alive. Face-to-face with the darkness, immersed in it, hardly a spark of life, out of touch with anything meanigful, one seeks the "ground of being", but in a nihilistic way rather than through spiritual means.
The more spiritual light we experience, the more we are confronted by our own darkness, which may wreak havoc on us as well as on others if it is unconsciously projected rather than contained and transformed by the burning, sealed, alchemical retort of consciousness. It is the uncomfortable confrontation with the constant interplay of opposites within the crucible of consciousness which reveals that the ‘ape’ and the ‘angel’ in us can enter into a mutually enriching relationship. Numinous archetypes do indeed ‘wobble’, teleologically, ‘between transrational glory and prerational chaos’ (Wilber 1983).
Underworld Passage
Each era has its version of the same depressive malady. The ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna and her descent into the Underworld reveals a series of profound psychological and contemporary messages, including the concept of a higher self, the abandoning of old values and artifacts, and the ultimate empowerment of voluntarily making the descent. Inanna embodies a wholeness pattern, of the feminine beyond the merely maternal. Our own descent into Hades is a form of spiritual initiation: a seeking of wisdom and growth and the shedding of illusions, like the Dance of the Seven Veils. Our world and society may be in the process of making its own descent, releasing traditional paradigms in preparation for a period of “accelerated growth”.
The underworld journey of depression is a passage that pushes us down deeper, a state which we must enter into and pass through. Mythologically speaking it is an underworld journey. It is associated with stagnation, rotting, suicidal-wishes and morbidity. But it is also a universal pattern of self-reorganization. The final stage takes each of us into the mystical and metaphysical realm, where we encounter our ultimate understanding of self and identity and its universal connections. All descents provide entry into different levels of consciousness and can enhance life creatively. All of them imply suffering. All of them can serve as initiations. Meditation and dreaming and active imaginations are modes of descent. So too are depressions, anxiety attacks, and experiences with hallucinogenic drugs.
Being able to not care about relating to an external other, nor to the collective society or its paradigms can initially be very frightening because it cannot be validated by the collective from which one is releasing themselves. But the act of letting go, being able to not care, can provide the possibility of a totally fresh perception, a creative perspective in the form of Enki reacting to the needs of the moment, a new pattern and a never ending exploration. What mass consciousness may fear as chaos, monstrous or ugly, is hard to endure. It implies the elimination of our defenses, a sacrifice of easy collective understanding, the dashing of hopes to look good and safely belong, and the giving up of being agreeable to a patriarchal paradigm. It involves hitting bottom, but a bottom where all the “assets” that have been given up, lost, or taken, become irrelevant. (Perera)
Depression is a narcissistic injury. We have to enter deep into it to recover self-esteem. Part of us may succeed, even while part remains trapped in hungry depression. Narcissistic injury can cause a vertical split, with grandiose fantasies/hopes on one side and a profound feeling of worthlessness on the other. The injured person clings tenaciously to grandiose hopes, and may become enraged if he or she is forced to give them up, even by positive growth. Creative work steals distinction from the unconscious, overcomes the devouring force and brings it back to consciousness. Narcissism and creativity are closely related. To heal a narcissistic injury one often must develop creative expression. Crafting a distinctive work of art protects one from the compulsion to be a person of distinction, better than, or worse than, or more important than others.
Narcissistic injury sometimes causes a horizontal split. Here the person is depressed, shamed, and acutely sensitive to criticism. Grandiosity is not gone but it is repressed or displaced - perhaps onto the person's children. We may call the person “thin-skinned”. In both horizontal and vertical splits the injured person’s sense of self is identified with the split. Of necessity the person tenaciously resists giving it up. In a horizontal split the depression has a stubborn, tenacious quality which is different from a creative depression or a depression due to abandonment.
Indigenous cultures describe the initiation of the shaman or spirit-doctor as a descent into the underworld of the dark spirits where a death and dismemberment experience takes place. After this dismemberment the helpful spirits arrive to help patch the initiate's body together again. Next is a journey to the sun or upper world where a vision is received before returning to the earthly realm to fulfills one's responsibilities. This shamanic rite of passage mirrors the process of depression. As we go down into a depression we are torn apart, slowly we regather ourselves before we rise from out of the depression with a whole new perspective on life. After depression we are often elevated into a state of realisation, of vision and inspiration.
Hunger & Healing
Understandably we act to avoid depression, but mining the soul deepens it, as in the alchemical axiom, VITRIOLUM: "Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem Veram Medicinam" ("Visit the interior of the earth, and by rectifying you will find the hidden stone which is the true medicine.") In alchemy the process must pass through the Nigredo or Mortifico (the blackening and death phase) before the Albedo (the whitening). After the Albedo comes the Rubedo (the reddening and return to life). Depression becomes the gateway to a deeper and fuller relationship with one's Self. As Dante illustrated in his The Divine Comedy the passage through hell and purgatory leads directly onto heaven.
We fear depression's impact not only upon our being but also on our social life, our relationships, career, families and finances. A state of depression is a demanding experience. The downward dimension is neglected, judged. The upper world is associated with light, freedom and inspiration, the underworld is a dark and heavy place but is also considered a place of transformation and regeneration. In this depressive state we either find ourselves, a new direction, a solidity and integrity or a previously untapped creative capacity. In the depths of depression wisdom and a greater relationship with one's Self is forged.
Psychologically speaking, the underworld is the rich depths of our interior being. This withdrawal of energy may also be viewed as a retreat demanded by the unconscious. The unconscious only doubles its efforts if we fight it. The shame, shyness, apathy or sadness are all cues to pull back from life. If we consciously acknowledge and honor the need for retreat psychological symptoms ease. Embracing a depression we 'let go to psychological or ego-death. In limbo the true work begins. The old has fallen away and cleared a passage for the new; we piece ourselves and our lives back together. Without really knowing we prepare ourselves for new life. Meditation schools advise us to prepare for death and life by "dying daily" in the process of meditation.
Sick King
In the Arthurian legends, this was the "sickness unto death", the never-healing wound. When the King suffered, so did the Kingdom. A sick king means a weakened and vulnerable society. The King embodies the whole situation, symbolically and actually. If he is spiritually impoverished, so is the kingdom. The Heir is the final result of human genesis: a spiritual, indestructible form of life in which the soul is exalted. The image of this blissful state is haunting this desperate mind. Despair is blocking the way to his spiritual evolution. Unable to overcome this despair he tries to shortcut it.
Earle observes, "chiefdoms are states of mind [and] chiefs rule not because of their power but because of their place in a sacredly chartered world order -- the world order of alters and their containers. The more kings appropriated maternal alter power—her mana—the more they had to go through seasonal cleansing ceremonies, including ritual abasement and even "killing of the king," in order to punish themselves for their hubris.
In these ceremonies, the king was ritually called "a turd [who] has come to save us," hit in the face with a sword, and only then invested with his portion of maternal mana. But everyone in antiquity knew where his power really came from: the vaginal maternal crown. It was addressed by the king as "O Red Crown, Let there be fear of me like the fear of thee." The throne was called the "mother" of the king, and the sceptre, "a branch from the placental Tree of Life."
T. H. White wrote in The Once and Future King aboutyoung Arthur'sdepression, his dark night of the soul. He sought counsel from his mentor Merlin, the magician. Merlin tells Arthur, "The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies. You may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins. You may miss your only love. You may see the world around you devastated by evil lunatics or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it, then: To learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you."
Self Healing
In the midst of death, there is life in learning.More than information, it's about healing, wholeness, empowerment, liberation, transcendence and reclaiming the vitality of life. When you can't work, and can't connect with others, you can begin learning what is within yourself by groping around in the darkness to see what and who is there. Thomas Merton called it true self. The Egyptian Ka represented the world-creating power of a god or king and the life force in every human being. The Ba is an aspect of the soul, connected to the uniqueness of the individual. The Ba is an immanent component of everyone, comparable to the concept Atman also representing the innermost center of the individual and as Atman Purusha -- the all-embracing Deity.
The daimon knows the future and is at all times in touch with the world-spirit, with the Logos or spermatic pneuma of the universe. Masculine and feminine merge in this androgynous symbol of wholeness. This archetypal image, like the lapis in alchemy, unites the opposites of masculine and feminine in one figure (Von Franz).
The Ba, or soul is a power to be reckoned with even during this life, a power that men cannot escape by any conscious act of will and cannot entirely grasp by conscious understanding. The Ba has something to do with the incarnation of a god -- his individual forms of appearance on earth -- or represents an immanent component of a human individual. The Ba is prepared to witness against consciousness; it voices a personal, individual truth. It is a real power with claims of its own, capable of opposing the conscious intentions of those who take for granted that one is united with it.
Ba is not interested in what is conventionally considered good; it obviously wants something else. Ba chooses the symbol of unborn children to express still unrealized potentialities. Ba cautiously leads the world-weary man to the real goal. The sense of at-one-ment with the Ba is newly gained through self-knowledge and restoration of the wholeness of personality, now consciously experienced as the result of transformation. (Jacobsohn).
Neumann has commented on the various soul-parts in Egyptian religion in his classic, The Origins and History of Consciousness. He links Osiris with the heart-soul, or Ba, and notes that the hieroglyph for "hear" and 'thought" are identical. The ka soul has a particularly important part to play in this process [of transformation and unification of soul parts]. It is extraordinarily difficult for us to understand what is meant by the ka...the Egyptians conceived it as a man's double, as his genius or guardian angel, as his name and as that which nourished him.
When the ka and the body are purified and united -- the king -- like Osiris before him and every individual after him -- is a complete being who achieves perfection. Through this union of soul parts the king becomes a ba, a heart-soul who dwells with the gods and possesses the breath of life; he is now akhu, a perfect spiritual being.
The Ba represents paradoxically, both the unconscious personality complexes of an individual, but also the indwelling of the Self. On the other hand, the ka describes the pranas, or vitality of the life force, genetic heritage, and environmental effects on personality.
According to Plutarch, Isis and Osiris are very great "daimons" but they are not gods. Therefore they represent something which is trans-subjective but which is closer to the human than to the gods, something which can be experienced inwardly in certain states of strong emotion. (Von Franz, Projection and Recollection in Jungian Psychology)
Images of the Self appear spontaneously throughout the entire transformative process. It appears in all symbols from the highest to the lowest. At the beginning of the great work it appears in animal forms, such as snakes, birds, fish, horses, or beetles. It shows through the plant forms of flowers and tree symbolism. It progresses through metaphors of sexual union into human and mandala forms.
The symbols of the Self in human forms may be contaminated with other archetypes, since pure forms are rarely seen outside of mystical meditation. For example, if one's image of the Self were contaminated with the anima/animus, the vision would be of a vibrant, solar woman whose aura radiates like the sun. Contaminated by the shadow, one might experience a magical creature like Mephistopheles or the demonic.
In the Timaeus (90B-90C), Plato theorizes that every human being has a divine daimon that is the noblest component of the psyche. Whoever seeks wisdom and seriously concerns himself with divine and eternal things nourishes his daimon, whereas worldly trivialities abase and mortify him.
The capacity for transcending the self through art arises from the creative process, an altered state of consciousness facilitating the occurrence of anomalous events such as precognition and interior visions that appear to be outside the spacetime of waking life. Frustration can trigger the far-from-equilibrium conditions necessary for creativity, while inspiration may seem as if its source is exterior to the artist, and the experience of flow, like a trance state, can produce an altered sense of time. Archetypes in the creative process link a single mind to the collective unconscious and works of art become self-opening worlds that create an expanded reality.
Dark Mood
The black hole of depression conceals deeper meaning. Severe depression shakes emotional stability and equilibrium. It is a long, difficult, and trying period, or a series of cycles. This model places suffering and pathology within a larger paradigm of spiritual unfolding. Symptoms provide a larger meaning. Alchemy provides a larger framework. A crisis or a Dark Night of the Soul precedes spiritual awakening and also describes the quantum leap in consciousness some mystics call Crossing the Abyss.
Regeneration of spirit is a potential, not a promise. Today's "cure", the antidepressant pill, can be the very "poison" that pushes some over the brink of suicide, while "talk therapy" has been proven just as effective without the fatal side effect. Without one's angel, genius or daemon there is little chance of successful regeneration, for general deterioration and contraction of the personality ensues with compulsivities, fixed ideas, projective rage, and obsessions. Even the higher mind does not contain the capacity to transcend itself, within itself. It must rely on Grace..
Suffering is a natural part of spiritual unfolding, a necessary part of the process which is not shameful. It is not uncommon to go mad with grief. What is lost or repressed is retrieved in the process of a larger psychological reorganization. It is marked by withdrawl, then either rupture or rapture, emergency or creative emergence. Depression is significantly inversely related to self-transcendence and positively related to death anxiety. Self-transcendence is significantly related to health promotion behavior and negatively correlated to death.
Ken Wilber’s Cool Structured treatment of the Dark Night of the Soul leads to a significant distortion of Teresa’s testimony. He argues in his earlier essay ‘The Spectrum of Psychopathology’ (1986) and in Sex, Ecology and Spirituality (1995) that the Dark Night of the Soul is a psychopathology or disorder belonging to the psychic stage of development, and he defines it as a profound depression in response to God’s abandonment of the soul (see Wilber 1986, p. 121; 1995, p. 296).
‘The Dark Night’, he says, ‘occurs in that period after one has tasted Universal Being, but before one is established in it. But there are other aspects besides Absence of God: (a) psychic fatigue in reaction to the strain of mystical lucidity; (b) mental chaos; (c) intellectual impotence; (d) loss of volition; (e) emotional chaos; (f ) loss of self-control; (g) self-naughting; (h) spiritual poverty; (i) acute sense of worthlessness, guilt or imperfection; (j) the pain of God, or dark ecstasy (see Underhill 1961, pp. 380–412).
The purpose of the state of the Dark Night of the Soul is the completion of the purification of the self begun in the earlier spiritual stage of purgation (see Underhill 1961, p. 395). It is clear that the Dark Night of the Soul is not a pathology or disorder of another spiritual stage of development (the psychic), but a separate stage of spiritual development which, Underhill suggests, ‘normally intervenes between the Illuminative and the Unitive Life’ (Underhill 1961, p. 388. From Wilber’s perspective, the self or self-system cannot establish itself permanently at the subtle level prior to the Dark Night of the Soul.
Hot and Cold Spirituality
Pro-active traditions include the following: (a) esoteric, cryptic, disturbing, initiatory knowledge, revealed (granted) piecemeal, often miraculously (see Rawlinson 1997, pp. 106, 114, 129), which is in sharp contrast to the openness or transparency of the revealed knowledge; (b) the emphasis on ecstasy rather than on enstasy, and the tendency to attract unpredictable, shape-changing, ‘crazy wisdom’ practitioners); (c) most significantly, the microcosm/macrocosm homology (based upon the image of the human body) and the emphasis on Hot magic: the manipulation of the laws of the cosmos in the service of self-transformation (see Rawlinson 1997, p. 106).
Clearly, these traditions embrace a magical worldview, concerned with the recreation of the cosmic in oneself. Thoth taught that there exists a vertical connection to the cosmos through which the true seeker can pass and witness the thoughts of the divine mind becoming reality. Having seen how to change reality by traveling to its source Above, the initiate returns to the physical world and participates in the creation of the universe according to the divine plan, which is to make the Above and Below One, to make all matter conscious, to make all darkness light. It was what Akhenaten called “living in truth,” and the Cosmic Code Book containing that formula is the Emerald Tablet.
Each model of spiritual development has strengths and weaknesses, and none can be elevated above all others. Models conjoin or disjoin prepersonal and transpersonal development and experience, shown by their contrasting judgments on the relationship between spirit and psyche. Cool traditions discriminate between prepersonal, psychological experiences and transpersonal, spiritual experiences and stages of consciousness and regard the pursuit of the prepersonal as obstructive or at best irrelevant to the attainment of the transpersonal. Hot traditions tend to interpret prepersonal, psychological experiences teleologically, as an expression of transpersonal, spiritual development, either because they are perceived to be a gift from God or because they possess a Hot, magical function of transformation of the self and the cosmos, illustrating the mysterious, microcosm/macrocosm homology.
Jung's Hot Structured teaching includes the following: (a) archetypal images are numinous and ‘wholly other’ (having their own life) to the ego; (b) cryptic, initiatory knowledge is granted by these inner images, in Jung’s case by Elijah and Philemon; (c) the inner cosmos is a labyrinth, and liberation from the powers/beings in it, created by the archetypes, is effected by images which function as esoteric passwords; (d) expansion away from a point is triggered by the practice of active imagination, producing leaps in understanding; (e) the danger of the journey towards individuation is psychosis; and (f) both the withdrawal of psychic projections from the world and the experience of synchronistic links between inner and outer events serve the cosmic purpose.
Either way, the dark life passage can lead to empowerment or self-negation. Self-defeating and self-destructive tendencies are slow-motion suicide. Severe dissociation, personality disorders, or addiction stops the process, stops the flow cold and freezes the emotions. Alcoholism is often an intimate partner of depression. What is really demanded is not just the regression but evolution of the ego toward transcendence -- interiority, rather than guilt or cosmic engulfment.
Chapel Perilous
“Chapel Perilous [is] that vortex where cosmological speculations, coincidences, and paranoia seem to multiply and then collapse, compelling belief or lunacy, wisdom or agnosticism.” ~Robert Anton Wilson
The global psyche veers dangerously toward the deserted ruin of a soul-searing Chapel Perilous Bar & Grill, a collective Dark Night of the Soul, where the Utopian collides and maybe even colludes with the Draconian. Paranoia is the only sane response to the current sociopolitical situation -- full spectrum dominance, total surveillance and erosion of human rights.
Hermes prophesized in The Perfect Discourse in Asclepius: “In that day men will be weary of life, and they will cease to think the world worthy of reverent wonder and of worship. This whole good thing, than which nothing was or is or will be deemed better, will be threatened with destruction; men will think it a burden, and will come to scorn it. They will no longer love this world around us, this incomparable work of God, this glorious structure, this sum of good made up of things of many diverse forms. Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life; no one will raise his eyes to heaven; the pious will be deemed insane, and the impious wise; the madman will be thought brave, and the wickedest will be regarded as good. Only the evil angels will remain, who will mingle with men, and drive the poor wretches by main force into all manner of reckless crime, into wars and robberies and frauds, and all things hostile to the nature of the soul. Then will the earth no longer stand unshaken, and the sea will no more be navigable; heaven will not support the stars in their orbits, nor will the stars pursue their constant course in heaven; the voice of the gods will of necessity be silenced and dumb; the fruits of the earth will rot; the soil will turn barren, and the very air will sicken in sullen stagnation.”
Chapel Perilous balances on the precipitous edge of disaster, teetering toward catastrophic avalanche. We don't just think harm is occurring; we know it. The collective hubris is heading for a pratfall of collective ego death. Today's paranoia is neither irrational nor delusional. Political paranoia is not phobic but the only congruent response to the post-Postmodern environment with its shadow side of social irresponsibility and denial. All the spiritually eclectic fantasies of ascension can't hide the dry rot in the infrastructure of our society. The power of distraction competes with the Law of Attraction.
We're all shellshocked by the collapse of modern society and the impending transition of the Ages. "Shock often produces a sense of limbo, floating feelings and an overall disconnectedness. Depending on how traumatic the shock is, we'll enter into anything from 'spaciness' to the permanent vocation of psychosis. Shock temporarily disconnects the soul from the body and sends it to Chapel Perilous to learn the lesson of the sermon." (Wilson)
The legends always say if you go into that realm without the sword of reason, you will lose your mind, but at the same time, if you take only the sword of reason without the cup of sympathy, you will lose your heart. You walk the razor's edge of unpleasant realizations which makes your humanity that much more important. If you approach without the wand of intuition, you can stand at the door for decades never realizing you have arrived, resting your head on the pillow of paranoia.
Darkness, Darkness
Be my pillow
Take my head
And let me sleep
In the coolness of your shadow
In the silence of your deep
Darkness, Darkness
Hide my yearning
For the things I cannot be
Keep my mind from constant turning
Toward the things I cannot see now
Things I cannot see now
Things I cannot see.
Transformative Crisis
Each of us face such a dilemma no matter what era we live in when the yawning chasm of the deep self opens and we go into freefall. The dragon is primordial chaos and also the dynamic ground of consciousness -- the paradoxical transcendent imagination and undifferentiated potential of spirit. Chaos is the universal solvent, which always demands that the old self dies before the regenerate self can be reborn from its ashes. Not all souls can bear the pain, and some do not make it through life unscathed by deep longing for death and release. Such an obsession leads to profound dissociation. If there is love in such a life, it cannot be felt because numbing feelings and pain has become the goal in itself.
The Egyptian man wants to end his life. His Ba tries to dissuade him. The Ba threatens to leave the man and probably cries out the man will have to answer for the offense of taking his own life. Payment will be asked for by those who are unpartial, namely the 42 judges of Osiris. In fact, at the beginning of the extant text, the Ba seems, from the perspective of the man, to have left him. On the other hand, when it is around, the Ba nurses the pain of life for the man and tries to bring him to other thoughts.
Apparently, the man does not wish to end his life without the approval of his Ba. He realizes that without his Ba he will be lost in the afterlife (total annihilation) and so he tries to persuade his Ba to participate in his auto-destructive sacrificial act, for he does envisage immortality or resurrection. He ends by saying life is too painful for him. The Ba succinctly replies that the man should be ashamed of himself and stop complaining. His Ba will never help him with anything else than the just course of events. To die before death comes is rejected by the Ba.
The Ba again questions the attitude of the man. The Ba urges the man to listen and to follow the day of his jubilee (namely his birth, the beginning of life) instead of worry. The man denies his name, the others & life. He glorifies death and reverses the highest values. The Ba is not impressed at all and suggests the man to throw away his complaints and set aside his longing for death. As long as he is alive, the natural course of events will not be hampered. It is unknown whether the man decides in favor for his Ba.
A great variety of interpretations of the 'World Weary Man' are possible, including as an ancient example of Active Imagination. In 1978, Bika Reed translated the text from the perspective of the initiatic experience. The evolution of consciousness is symbolized by the Solar Barque moving through the Duat. In this context the "hours" of travel represent stages of development. Bika Reed states that at a certain "hour" the individual meets the "Rebel in the Soul," that is, at the "hour of spiritual transformation." And translating from the scroll Reed gives: "the soul warns, only if a man is allowed to continue evolving, can the intellect reach the heart."
But it is also a life-pervading curse that can be very difficult to impossible to rise above. Add alcohol or drugs and you flammbe the soul, becoming the living dead, or the 'abomination' of the 'possessed'. A transformative crisis can take the form of a psychosis, leading to very serious mistakes. A man takes a drink until the drink takes the man. The soul flounders cut off, dissociated from the roots of its sustenance. Auto-destruction or slow suicide is embodied in the addictive path which subverts spiritual transmutation.
The man who wrote the papyrus felt his own despair at what seemed to him the collapse of his familiar 'world,' and thought of suicide. This situation has a modern ring. The protests of youth surfaced directed against the emphasis in our civilization on luxury and the search for the comfortable life, and the neglect of principles that should govern human conduct. Talk of 'end times' and other eschatological fantasies, economic collapse, tyranny, and civil unrest have landed on and squashed the American Dream, turning it into a nightmare. It presents unprecedented adjustment challenges and a future riddled with uncertainty and fear, even for the emotionally secure.
Ancient Depression & Dissociation
The daily life of the narcissistic personalities of antiquity was filled with projected alters, from the evil spirits, devils and dybbuks that Jews were constantly exorcising to the bloodthirsty female spirits, serpents and demons that Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans tried to ward off with their various religious fetishes. "At every corner evil spirits were on the watch…there was also danger from the spells of numerous witches, in whom everyone believed implicitly."
Even supposedly rational Greeks were, as Gouldner put it, "deeply concerned about their capacity to go murderously berserk." Egyptians regularly talked to their avenging alters, as the "world-weary man" talked to his "double," his Ba, about suicide, making "suicide so common that the crocodiles in the Nile could no longer cope with the corpses."
Every detail of the worship of Mother Goddesses has its origins in actual traumatic childrearing experiences of antiquity.
Most "Terrifying Mothers" had divine sons who were forced to commit actual or emotional incest with them. The earliest civilizations uniformly worshipped vampire goddesses who were devouring maternal alters. All were what Jungians term "Dragon Mothers" —from Lilith, Nin-Tu, Hecate and Ishtar to Moira, Shiva, Gorgon and Erinyes. They were usually called by their worshipers "Terrible Mothers," usually had serpentine features and were called terms like "cruel, jealous, unjust, her glance brings death, her will is supreme" by worshippers. Since contemporary multiple personalities also sometimes hallucinate gigantic serpents as alters, one must believe the witnesses in early civilizations when they insist they really saw these serpent-goddesses.
The Dragon Mother Goddesses accurately embodied the infanticidal "infinitely needy mother who cannot let her children go because she needs them for her own psychic survival…giving her child the impossible task of filling her limitless void [and] engulfing them to prevent them from claiming a separate life for themselves." One of the earliest Vulture Goddesses can be seen on the shrine walls of the Neolithic town of Catal Hüyük, a bloodthirsty Goddess with wings of a vulture who is shown eating headless corpses. Corpses of people were actually thrown into the fields nearby so vultures could eat them in sacrificial rebirth rituals.
Statues of these bloodthirsty goddesses were set up in ziggurats and temples all over the world, daily washed, dressed, fed, talked to, and heard to speak their commands,140 so hallucinatory was the power of the alters. The statues were such bloodthirsty maternal alter fetishes that often priests would take the blood of the sacrificial victim and anoint the face of the idol so She could drink of it. "Divinely-induced madness"-- as in the Dionysian rituals of ancient Greece -- would sometimes even cause women to become possessed by their Terrible Mother alters and act out the killing of the victim, especially when they were experiencing post-partum depressions.
As Euripides describes them: "Breasts swollen with milk, new mothers who had left their babies behind at home…clawed calves to pieces with bare hands [and] snatched children from their homes." The fetal origins of early religions were everywhere evident. Actual human placentas were often hung on trees, worshipped and offered human sacrifices. Goddesses like Tiamat were referred to as "poisonous wombsnakes," Sumerians and Babylonians worshipped "placenta-ghosts," and even the Hebrew name for Eve (Khawwa) meant "the Serpent Lady." Peruvians used to place their actual placentas into the womb of their religious statues,145 just as most nagual worshipped in ancient Meso-American religions were real placentas.
Hippocrates confirmed that Greeks often experienced "convulsions, fears, terrors and delusions," and physicians in every country of antiquity were expected to treat possessions, hallucinations, frenzies, lycanthropies and other symptoms of dissociated personalities (melancholy in Greek meaning "furor.") The average Greek acknowledged that his emotional life was constantly controlled by his alters, which were given names like psyche, thumos, menos, kardia, kradie, etor, noos, ate, and so on. Dodds says that Homer describes ate, for instance, as "a temporary clouding or bewildering of the normal consciousness…a partial and temporary insanity…ascribed to an external ‘daemonic’ agency."
But the depressed and alienated Egyptian had a numinous dream in three segments, in each of which his soul told him a parable. Dr. Helmuth Jacobsohn, an Egyptologist as well as a Jungian, translates the scroll as "The Dialogue of a World-Weary Man with his Ba. (See also The Report About the Dispute of a Man With His Ba, Papyrus Berlin 3024, by Hans Goedicke, published by The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore and London, 1970.
Rebel in the Soul, a sacred text of ancient Egypt, trans. and commentary by Bika Reed of the Berlin Papyrus 3024, 1978; pp. 10, 114, was first translated by Adolph Erman (into German) in 1896 as "A Man Tired of Life in Dispute with his Soul." He concluded that the author of the text rejected suicide rather than taking that course as some Egyptologists had claimed. Written in the hieratic or priestly language, Dr. Jacobsohn indicated the scroll was really about the unio mystica or "mystical union" of the soul with a god. Bika Reed perceives the scroll to be an "initiatic text."
It is clear that in the Discourse of a Man with his Ba, Maat is spoken of "a contrario", namely as auto-destruction, dispute, rebelion, ungratefulness, egoism etc. Here death instead of life is glorified. The author experienced a confrontation with his soul (Ba), who instructed him through the three parables not to allow himself to be eddied around by the currents of circumstances. He was encouraged to evaluate the inner life as of paramount importance, to harmonize all the aspects of his character with the soul. Dr. Jacobsohn interprets this event as an achievement of integration of the whole individual from the previous state of dissociation. That is to say, the ancient writer achieved at-oneness with his Ba. Substance abuse can be a response to such a deep challenge and becomes a spiritual emergency, rather than the prospective "emergence" of the reborn phoenix. (see Grof, Spiritual Emergency)
From Spiritual Emergency to Healing and Rebirth
The Chapel Perilous meme is like the "Hotel California": you can check in but it's hell getting out because "we are all just prisoners of our own device," in a No-Exit game The last thing you can do is leave the way you came in. You can never go back to where you were. "Last thing I remember, I was running for the door. I had to find the passage back to the place I was before. "Relax," said the night man, We are programmed to receive. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave." Such a mental prison is all questions with no answers.
Increasing numbers of people involved in personal transformation are experiencing spiritual emergencies - crises when the process of growth and change becomes chaotic and overwhelming. Individuals experiencing such episodes may feel that their sense of identity is breaking down, that their old values no longer hold true, and that the very ground beneath their personal realities is radically shifting.
In many cases, new realms of mystical and spiritual experience enter their lives suddenly and dramatically, resulting in fear and confusion. They may feel tremendous anxiety, have difficulty coping with their daily lives, jobs, and relationships, and may even fear for their own sanity.Unfortunately, much of modern psychiatry has failed to distinguish these episodes from mental illness. As a result, transformational crises are often suppressed by routine psychiatric care, medication, and even institutionalization.
However, there is another perspective... that views such crises as transformative breakthroughs that can hold tremendous potential for physical and emotional healing. When understood and treated in a supportive manner, spiritual emergencies can become gateways to higher levels of functioning and new ways of being.
What is spiritual emergency? What is the relationship between spirituality, "madness," and healing? What forms does spiritual emergency take? What are the pitfalls - and promises - of spiritual practice? How can people in spiritual emergency be assisted by family, friends, and professionals? Within the crisis of spiritual emergency lies the promise of spiritual emergence and renewal. (Grof)
Battle for the Lost Soul
The papyrus has baffled many orthodox Egyptologists who have claimed that the author did indeed commit suicide, basing their view upon what they consider the 'unfinished' appearance of the ending. On the other hand, if he resolved his crisis, why would he pursue the old narrative? Others hold contrary opinions and point to the optimistic tone of the last passages as implying or suggesting a complete change of outlook. Dr. Jacobsohn himself extracts from the concluding portions of the text that, after his remarkable experience, the writer of it did not put an end to that chapter of his life but accomplished an exemplary detachment from stress.
Consideration of the text suggests that he was not without sympathy for others, for he was too sensitive to human relationships to harden his heart against them. He might well have reached that place where he was no longer at the mercy of emotional crises -- a victim -- but could stand resolutely upon his own two feet. In this regard, it might be well to remember that the Ba was generally considered to be the spiritual soul, the human aspect irradiated by an element whose origin is in the celestial world, the universal divine source of all the Bas.
Each of us face such a dilemma no matter what era we live in when the yawning chasm of the deep self opens and we go into freefall. The dragon is primordial chaos and also the dynamic ground of consciousness -- the paradoxical transcendent imagination and undifferentiated potential of spirit. Chaos is the universal solvent, which always demands that the old self dies before the regenerate self can be reborn from its ashes. Not all souls can bear the pain, and some do not make it through life unscathed by deep longing for death and release. Such an obsession leads to profound dissociation. If there is love in such a life, it cannot be felt because numbing feelings and pain has become the goal in itself.
The Egyptian man wants to end his life. His Ba tries to dissuade him. The Ba threatens to leave the man and probably cries out the man will have to answer for the offense of taking his own life. Payment will be asked for by those who are unpartial, namely the 42 judges of Osiris. In fact, at the beginning of the extant text, the Ba seems, from the perspective of the man, to have left him. On the other hand, when it is around, the Ba nurses the pain of life for the man and tries to bring him to other thoughts.
Apparently, the man does not wish to end his life without the approval of his Ba. He realizes that without his Ba he will be lost in the afterlife (total annihilation) and so he tries to persuade his Ba to participate in his auto-destructive sacrificial act, for he does envisage immortality or resurrection. He ends by saying life is too painful for him. The Ba succinctly replies that the man should be ashamed of himself and stop complaining. His Ba will never help him with anything else than the just course of events. To die before death comes is rejected by the Ba.
The Ba again questions the attitude of the man. The Ba urges the man to listen and to follow the day of his jubilee (namely his birth, the beginning of life) instead of worry. The man denies his name, the others & life. He glorifies death and reverses the highest values. The Ba is not impressed at all and suggests the man to throw away his complaints and set aside his longing for death. As long as he is alive, the natural course of events will not be hampered. It is unknown whether the man decides in favor for his Ba.
A great variety of interpretations of the 'World Weary Man' are possible, including as an ancient example of Active Imagination. In 1978, Bika Reed translated the text from the perspective of the initiatic experience. The evolution of consciousness is symbolized by the Solar Barque moving through the Duat. In this context the "hours" of travel represent stages of development. Bika Reed states that at a certain "hour" the individual meets the "Rebel in the Soul," that is, at the "hour of spiritual transformation." And translating from the scroll Reed gives: "the soul warns, only if a man is allowed to continue evolving, can the intellect reach the heart."
But it is also a life-pervading curse that can be very difficult to impossible to rise above. Add alcohol or drugs and you flammbe the soul, becoming the living dead, or the 'abomination' of the 'possessed'. A transformative crisis can take the form of a psychosis, leading to very serious mistakes. A man takes a drink until the drink takes the man. The soul flounders cut off, dissociated from the roots of its sustenance. Auto-destruction or slow suicide is embodied in the addictive path which subverts spiritual transmutation.
The man who wrote the papyrus felt his own despair at what seemed to him the collapse of his familiar 'world,' and thought of suicide. This situation has a modern ring. The protests of youth surfaced directed against the emphasis in our civilization on luxury and the search for the comfortable life, and the neglect of principles that should govern human conduct. Talk of 'end times' and other eschatological fantasies, economic collapse, tyranny, and civil unrest have landed on and squashed the American Dream, turning it into a nightmare. It presents unprecedented adjustment challenges and a future riddled with uncertainty and fear, even for the emotionally secure.
Ancient Depression & Dissociation
The daily life of the narcissistic personalities of antiquity was filled with projected alters, from the evil spirits, devils and dybbuks that Jews were constantly exorcising to the bloodthirsty female spirits, serpents and demons that Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans tried to ward off with their various religious fetishes. "At every corner evil spirits were on the watch…there was also danger from the spells of numerous witches, in whom everyone believed implicitly."
Even supposedly rational Greeks were, as Gouldner put it, "deeply concerned about their capacity to go murderously berserk." Egyptians regularly talked to their avenging alters, as the "world-weary man" talked to his "double," his Ba, about suicide, making "suicide so common that the crocodiles in the Nile could no longer cope with the corpses."
Every detail of the worship of Mother Goddesses has its origins in actual traumatic childrearing experiences of antiquity.
Most "Terrifying Mothers" had divine sons who were forced to commit actual or emotional incest with them. The earliest civilizations uniformly worshipped vampire goddesses who were devouring maternal alters. All were what Jungians term "Dragon Mothers" —from Lilith, Nin-Tu, Hecate and Ishtar to Moira, Shiva, Gorgon and Erinyes. They were usually called by their worshipers "Terrible Mothers," usually had serpentine features and were called terms like "cruel, jealous, unjust, her glance brings death, her will is supreme" by worshippers. Since contemporary multiple personalities also sometimes hallucinate gigantic serpents as alters, one must believe the witnesses in early civilizations when they insist they really saw these serpent-goddesses.
The Dragon Mother Goddesses accurately embodied the infanticidal "infinitely needy mother who cannot let her children go because she needs them for her own psychic survival…giving her child the impossible task of filling her limitless void [and] engulfing them to prevent them from claiming a separate life for themselves." One of the earliest Vulture Goddesses can be seen on the shrine walls of the Neolithic town of Catal Hüyük, a bloodthirsty Goddess with wings of a vulture who is shown eating headless corpses. Corpses of people were actually thrown into the fields nearby so vultures could eat them in sacrificial rebirth rituals.
Statues of these bloodthirsty goddesses were set up in ziggurats and temples all over the world, daily washed, dressed, fed, talked to, and heard to speak their commands,140 so hallucinatory was the power of the alters. The statues were such bloodthirsty maternal alter fetishes that often priests would take the blood of the sacrificial victim and anoint the face of the idol so She could drink of it. "Divinely-induced madness"-- as in the Dionysian rituals of ancient Greece -- would sometimes even cause women to become possessed by their Terrible Mother alters and act out the killing of the victim, especially when they were experiencing post-partum depressions.
As Euripides describes them: "Breasts swollen with milk, new mothers who had left their babies behind at home…clawed calves to pieces with bare hands [and] snatched children from their homes." The fetal origins of early religions were everywhere evident. Actual human placentas were often hung on trees, worshipped and offered human sacrifices. Goddesses like Tiamat were referred to as "poisonous wombsnakes," Sumerians and Babylonians worshipped "placenta-ghosts," and even the Hebrew name for Eve (Khawwa) meant "the Serpent Lady." Peruvians used to place their actual placentas into the womb of their religious statues,145 just as most nagual worshipped in ancient Meso-American religions were real placentas.
Hippocrates confirmed that Greeks often experienced "convulsions, fears, terrors and delusions," and physicians in every country of antiquity were expected to treat possessions, hallucinations, frenzies, lycanthropies and other symptoms of dissociated personalities (melancholy in Greek meaning "furor.") The average Greek acknowledged that his emotional life was constantly controlled by his alters, which were given names like psyche, thumos, menos, kardia, kradie, etor, noos, ate, and so on. Dodds says that Homer describes ate, for instance, as "a temporary clouding or bewildering of the normal consciousness…a partial and temporary insanity…ascribed to an external ‘daemonic’ agency."
But the depressed and alienated Egyptian had a numinous dream in three segments, in each of which his soul told him a parable. Dr. Helmuth Jacobsohn, an Egyptologist as well as a Jungian, translates the scroll as "The Dialogue of a World-Weary Man with his Ba. (See also The Report About the Dispute of a Man With His Ba, Papyrus Berlin 3024, by Hans Goedicke, published by The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore and London, 1970.
Rebel in the Soul, a sacred text of ancient Egypt, trans. and commentary by Bika Reed of the Berlin Papyrus 3024, 1978; pp. 10, 114, was first translated by Adolph Erman (into German) in 1896 as "A Man Tired of Life in Dispute with his Soul." He concluded that the author of the text rejected suicide rather than taking that course as some Egyptologists had claimed. Written in the hieratic or priestly language, Dr. Jacobsohn indicated the scroll was really about the unio mystica or "mystical union" of the soul with a god. Bika Reed perceives the scroll to be an "initiatic text."
It is clear that in the Discourse of a Man with his Ba, Maat is spoken of "a contrario", namely as auto-destruction, dispute, rebelion, ungratefulness, egoism etc. Here death instead of life is glorified. The author experienced a confrontation with his soul (Ba), who instructed him through the three parables not to allow himself to be eddied around by the currents of circumstances. He was encouraged to evaluate the inner life as of paramount importance, to harmonize all the aspects of his character with the soul. Dr. Jacobsohn interprets this event as an achievement of integration of the whole individual from the previous state of dissociation. That is to say, the ancient writer achieved at-oneness with his Ba. Substance abuse can be a response to such a deep challenge and becomes a spiritual emergency, rather than the prospective "emergence" of the reborn phoenix. (see Grof, Spiritual Emergency)
From Spiritual Emergency to Healing and Rebirth
The Chapel Perilous meme is like the "Hotel California": you can check in but it's hell getting out because "we are all just prisoners of our own device," in a No-Exit game The last thing you can do is leave the way you came in. You can never go back to where you were. "Last thing I remember, I was running for the door. I had to find the passage back to the place I was before. "Relax," said the night man, We are programmed to receive. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave." Such a mental prison is all questions with no answers.
Increasing numbers of people involved in personal transformation are experiencing spiritual emergencies - crises when the process of growth and change becomes chaotic and overwhelming. Individuals experiencing such episodes may feel that their sense of identity is breaking down, that their old values no longer hold true, and that the very ground beneath their personal realities is radically shifting.
In many cases, new realms of mystical and spiritual experience enter their lives suddenly and dramatically, resulting in fear and confusion. They may feel tremendous anxiety, have difficulty coping with their daily lives, jobs, and relationships, and may even fear for their own sanity.Unfortunately, much of modern psychiatry has failed to distinguish these episodes from mental illness. As a result, transformational crises are often suppressed by routine psychiatric care, medication, and even institutionalization.
However, there is another perspective... that views such crises as transformative breakthroughs that can hold tremendous potential for physical and emotional healing. When understood and treated in a supportive manner, spiritual emergencies can become gateways to higher levels of functioning and new ways of being.
What is spiritual emergency? What is the relationship between spirituality, "madness," and healing? What forms does spiritual emergency take? What are the pitfalls - and promises - of spiritual practice? How can people in spiritual emergency be assisted by family, friends, and professionals? Within the crisis of spiritual emergency lies the promise of spiritual emergence and renewal. (Grof)
Battle for the Lost Soul
The papyrus has baffled many orthodox Egyptologists who have claimed that the author did indeed commit suicide, basing their view upon what they consider the 'unfinished' appearance of the ending. On the other hand, if he resolved his crisis, why would he pursue the old narrative? Others hold contrary opinions and point to the optimistic tone of the last passages as implying or suggesting a complete change of outlook. Dr. Jacobsohn himself extracts from the concluding portions of the text that, after his remarkable experience, the writer of it did not put an end to that chapter of his life but accomplished an exemplary detachment from stress.
Consideration of the text suggests that he was not without sympathy for others, for he was too sensitive to human relationships to harden his heart against them. He might well have reached that place where he was no longer at the mercy of emotional crises -- a victim -- but could stand resolutely upon his own two feet. In this regard, it might be well to remember that the Ba was generally considered to be the spiritual soul, the human aspect irradiated by an element whose origin is in the celestial world, the universal divine source of all the Bas.
Chapel Perilous is found on the detour to moral obligation. "Pablo" has brought you to the Magic Theatre (Hesse), a phantasmagoria where conservative notions about the soul as self-made construct disintegrate. Pablo encourages relinquishing personality for the duration of the magical journey, whereas, in the past, "growth" has equaled secular salvation.
The Quest is always based on a question. To relieve spiritual dryness, the Grail knight must penetrate the heart of the wasteland and fight the shapeshifting Black Hand to solve the riddles posed. Chapel Perilous is the mythic home of the Holy Grail, but it is also a state of mind -- bunkered siege mentality -- in the midst of an "Astral" test of character. Here in this dangerous place, you can make out with vampires, hungry ghosts and wrathful hosts. You can get intimate, even dirty and bruised in their sadistic embrace. A 'dark night of the soul' is not a psychological syndrome, but a quest for meaning during life's darkest hours. These days, make no mistake, the future of humanity is at stake.
The Quest is always based on a question. To relieve spiritual dryness, the Grail knight must penetrate the heart of the wasteland and fight the shapeshifting Black Hand to solve the riddles posed. Chapel Perilous is the mythic home of the Holy Grail, but it is also a state of mind -- bunkered siege mentality -- in the midst of an "Astral" test of character. Here in this dangerous place, you can make out with vampires, hungry ghosts and wrathful hosts. You can get intimate, even dirty and bruised in their sadistic embrace. A 'dark night of the soul' is not a psychological syndrome, but a quest for meaning during life's darkest hours. These days, make no mistake, the future of humanity is at stake.
Our post-postmodern concept of Chapel Perilous needs to divorce itself utterly from the metaphors of Christian Saviors and even the Utopian dreams of psychedelic subculture, Cyberia or Star Trek and the dystopia of postmodernism and catastrophism. Chapel Perilous needs to get real and only we can make it so. We make soul by pro-actively living life not by retreating into spiritual discipline. Emphasizing the inner soul at the expense of the outer soul fosters the decline of the actual world. We can be that hyperdimensional crossroads, that strange attractor, that archetypal probability cloud, revering the soul.
Perilous Odyssey
"What do these things mean and whom do they serve." was the question of the medieval Grail Quest. It purges us by destroying our assumptions. We veer off our regular orbit with burned wings toward the attractor basin of some cryptic Strange Attractor, some abyssal Black Hole, some newly imagined scenario. We're in a rite of passage with an affinity for the dead and stinking necrotic flesh and decaying bones of nature – a psychic charnel ground.
Lack of acceptance of the unhealing wounds of our individual and national psyches has left many in limbo. Unrealized suffering includes self-delusion, addiction, chronic depression, compulsivity, failed relationships and some physical illness present opportunities throughout life to reconcile and resolve what we couldn't heal earlier.
The word 'resolve' echoes the alchemical maxim of "Solve et Coagula," the liquification and reintegration of essentially frozen psychic energy. Weakness and impatience are deadly in Chapel Perilous. Each of us is limited by our own situation or what Leary and Robert Anton Wilson called "reality tunnels."
Classical metaphors of transformation include: 1) dream sleep to awakening; 2) illusion to realization; 3) darkness (or blindness) to enlightenment; 4) imprisonment to liberation; 5) fragmentation to wholeness (unifying); 6) separation to oneness (unifying); 7) journey to destination (arriving); 8) being in exile to coming home (returning); 9) from seed to flowering or fruiting plant or tree (unfolding); 10) from death to rebirth (renewal, resurrection).
The High Priestess (Anima Mundi) sits in the background at Chapel Perilous. She muses to herself, knowing one thing is missing but says nothing. The High Priestess arcanum is a path through the ego death of Crossing the Abyss, that is the Dark Night of the Soul. You can't go back, so you must go forward, seeking Universal Meta-Syn. How you will accomplish that is questionable. Not all make it out of the "No Exit" pitstop that is utterly beyond conscious understanding alone.
When old defenses no longer work, you must develop new coping skills for developmental challenges. But this initiatory way includes many "deaths" and rebirths. Nigredo, the blackening, isn't always the first stage, but may be one of relapse, eclipse or another incubation stage.
Nigredo is a recurrent cycle of desire and frustration with no real beginning or ultimate end. Your energies are sucked from the outer world and turned in on themselves. Normal life is radically disrupted. When you are paralyzed by life there is nothing to do but let go of your control fantasies. An eclipse of the ego offers a way into the deeper energies of the unconscious.
"The curative or salvational vision of archetypal psychology focuses upon the soul in the world which is also the soul of the world (anima mundi) [...] The artificial tension between soul and world, private and public, interior and exterior thus disappears when the soul as anima mundi, and its making, is located in the world." (Hillman)
After involuntary or voluntary symbolic death, reborn spirit eventually emerges from the rotting corpse of the old self with its limiting worldview. This death is equivalent to the conception of the legendary Philosopher's Stone. Death becomes your ally and advisor. Meditators are advised to "die daily" in their practice. The ego is eclipsed but the Stone is born. These trials nourish the Self. Vision expands, wisdom deepens, self matures.
The Chapel Perilous…cannot be located in the space-time continuum; it is weightless, odorless, tasteless and undetectable by ordinary instruments. Indeed like the Ego, it is even possible to deny that it is there. And yet, even more like the Ego, once you are inside it, there doesn't seem to be anyway to get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought. Everything you fear is waiting with slavering jaws in the Chapel Perilous, but if you are armed with the wand of intuition, the cup of sympathy, the sword of reason and the pentacle of valor, you will find there (the legends say) the Medicine of Metals, the Elixir of Like, the Philosophers Stone, true Wisdom and Perfect Happiness. ~Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, Volume 1
Darkness, darkness,
Long and lonesome,
Ease the day that brings me pain.
I have felt the edge of sadness,
I have known the depth of fear.
Darkness, darkness, be my blanket,
Cover me with the endless night,
Take away, take away the pain of knowing,
Fill the emptiness of right now,
Emptiness of right now, now, now
Emptiness of right now.
It is difficult for any of us to free ourselves from our enculturated, a priori beliefs about existence. When we firmly believe what we say, we sell others a confabulation of our own truths and lies. It is hard to view anything from outside of our own fundamental philosophical, spiritual, and psychological perspectives but it is possible to persuade others and many authors and speakers have staked their careers on it. These theories, dogmas, and experiences condition how we perceive reality. Their influence may be so subtle we fail to notice where our position originated, when the shift occurred. Our viewpoint is relative to our position.
One position is the traditional initiation in the presence of the Grail; another is the mystical initiation into spiritual knowledge. The first, if successful, initiates rebirth through love and sex; the second, self-initiation and rebirth without either. If both fail, the quest fails, or another way must be invented. But a maze of self-doubt, fear and revelation accompanies the dissolution. The problem inflates at the collective level of remaking the world via evolution, repatterning, regenerating society and breaking horizontal and vertical boundaries. Mankind has seized these reins from Nature, morphing reality at a dizzying rate.
The prime expression of beliefs is through spontaneous imagery. We never experience directly, but interpret our experience of our perceptions through imagery. All our input comes through multi-sensory channels. We never directly perceive ourselves, soul, or "God." We don't perceive our bodies directly, only our sensory impressions. But, Jung points out we do have first-hand experience of our body image, soul-image, and God images. That is all we know directly. The rest is pure speculation.
We need a new cultural proving ground, a new paradigm for the potential of the bodymind and the culture for which it is the ground. In our culture, the body and our fantasies about it, have come to represent the lost Feminine element. We have lost touch with our primal femininity, the animating principle (nature, body, instinct). We have become estranged from the body through the Cartesian mind/body split, which is also non-relativistic. We talk a good game about 'wholeness' but don't really connect as much as nostalgically yearn for it.
There is a way that joins spirit and body through the spontaneous imagery of soul. It seeks neither to solve our troubles (pathologies) nor "save" our souls. It suggests direct engagement with images for soul-making or deepening through personal experience. We can see through the nature of apparent reality for ourselves, if we but try. Then we develop our own philosophy, apart from consensus. When it comes to questions of speculation on the unknown, we can either accept what others have said, or look for ourselves.
We seek the lost soul primarily because of the intense degree of wounding in our modern consciousness. This wounding has "opened" us to transformation. We can embody soul by seeing-through appearances to an acute awareness of the archetypal, subjective perception of our experience.
Pillow of Paranoia
A proving ground is a reservation for testing new prototypes and technologies. The purpose of a proving ground is to provide quality scenarios for all players of the mission, the Great Game. What is in peril in Chapel Perilous is your soul, in a mental place in which you learn so much that all your thoughts and belief structures are challenged. As Jung says, "we are not concerned here with a philosophical, much less a religious, concept of the soul, but with the psychological recognition of the existence of a semiconscious psychic complex, having partial autonomy of function, [anima].
That Anima is embodied as The High Priestess arcanum, the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother from the archetypal "usual suspects" of Tarot. She is the embodiment of psyche, the animating force behind all events, images, and material forms.
We can shift our focus from saving the soul of the individual to saving the soul of the world, resurrection of the world, rather than man--a raising of consciousness of created things, the world's psychic reality. The difference between soul and external things no longer matters. Inner and Outer worlds are real. They are One World beyond the deepest layers of the Flux, as in the alchemical Unus Mundus.
The high priestess is the muse lurking behind the pews at chapel perilous. It's not a real place but a virtual outpost, the empty gaps in consciousness between our breaths, deeply informed by the unconscious. It's like the jumptime in your computer when you do a search, the nanosecond between the question and manifold of possible answers. Jumptime is a quantum leap in consciousness into the Uncertainty Principle, a quantum cloud of mutually-penetrating potentialities that describes reality better than any single theory.
The soul in depth psychology is an empirical manifestation of imagination, fantasy, and creativity which is always in the process of becoming--images forming, and dissolving, and forming anew. Even paranoia can be consoling. It is an attempt to self sooth. Imagination is the essence of the life forces, both physical and psychic. These fantasies always permeate our beliefs, ideas, emotions, and physical nature. When the fantasies turn obsessively negative, paranoid or seemingly inescapable, we are in Chapel Perilous.
Dancing Barefoot through Serpents in the Valley of the Shadow of Death
Chapel Perilous is the transfer station for your sanity on the road to wholeness, or not. In Daath (mysterious 11th shadowy sphere of the Tree of Life) we enter into unity. Although there is still a sense of duality between "I" and the Divine, this unity is a felt sense of merging with everything that exists. This is a profound transformation, an integration of the energy body, the Diamond Body, that is realization of one's "true essence."
The Abyss has the same meaning as the veil behind the High Priestess in the Tarot. Crossing the Abyss means a superluminal leap into another realm. This Abyss is a real experience, a void, a profound emptiness of the mind where each thought is annihilated with its opposite.
It's difficult to even imagine going beyond the Illusion. Meaning only comes from deepening the process, as if you could escape the gravity well of Chapel Perilous by reversing your steps. Faith is the key to crossing the abyss between Kether and Tiphareth. But how do you do that when this crossing is exemplified by loss of faith in virtually everything, including the existence of any grounded Reality? The way leads through a gruesome whirlpool of blood.
Chapel Perilous exists in an Otherworld, the dreamworld, or hall of mirrors. We can ask ourselves Parcival's question, "Who do these things serve?" Or we can follow the modern investigative imperative to "Follow the Money. The answer is the same, "the Lord of the land."
The Priestess knows but she remains silent. She keeps dealing Tarot in the back corner of the Chapel, knowing it isn't her Time. Parcival, Jung, Leary and RAW raise a toast with their own holy grails to the Chapel Perilous meme and its new owner - YOU. Being there means you become the person you must be, but don't yet know how to be. The vision of the Grail is often accompanied by a view of the bleeding spear. If the hero asks the critical qestions, the never-healing wound Lord of the land IS healed. In the initiatory process you identify with the healed King.
But in the Chapel events appear to be completely out of our control, nothing is ever what it seems, and the only ways out are to escape, return to your old world, or lose your mind (i.e. drop into a randomly bad reality model). Worse still, you often think you've escaped, only to discover that escape itself was simply another illusion.
Paradigm Shift
The problem is that the reality model we've each built up, around which we base our entire lives, has turned out to be incorrect and we have to find a new, personal model to replace it. The quest is to carve ot an individual identity beyond the cultural myth imposed on us. We are effectively returned to our childhood state, except that now we do not even have many 'adults' to help us. There are two ways out: either allow another person to reprogram you or learn to reprogram yourself.
One traditional method of finding another model is to join an established religion or mystic group through which you can be 'reborn' into another ready-made reality (e.g. 'born-again'). Another is to fixate on another individual and let them tell you what to do, adopting their reality model and effectively creating a substitute parent. Finding your own way out is much harder. No one can advise you but your self.
Paranoia is invasive – it intrudes and worms its way through the psyche like a computer virus. Alienation in extreme cases disturbs relationships and ability to function in daily life. Authority feeds on fear. Yet, paranoia could be the basis of our collective shadow, including our unlived potential for the good.
There is no final correct reading of Reality – a final, definitive, unequivocal one. Tyrannical unification certainly isn't the solution. Reality is too wiggly, too mercurial for that. The tyranny of the one, that single-minded thought, demands struggle on behalf of the ethical imperative to find ways to love together in our differences.
The highlight of any great drama is "the reveal." When we speak poetically, we hint gently at the proposed nature of reality, neither hidden nor revealed. Freedom from desire's materialism and denial's formalism is found in the middle earth of the poetic, the fantastic, the numinous, where things are not “one way or the other.” Things are not meant to be taken literally. Facts have nothing to do with it.
Paranoia is a defense through mobilization, against suppressed anger and depression, the malaise of our age. Giving in to external domination and giving in to internal pressure are equaling threatening. More than delusions of persecution, who doesn’t fear being tricked into surrendering some element of self-determination?
Unseen Order
Can we out-trick the Trickster? Can we use our imaginations to cure the imagination? Can we elude our own delusions? Maybe the veils themselves are delusional. Maybe the whole framed consruct is faulty. Does meaning hinge on our individual view? It may depend on our worldview, our reality filter: do we serve the gods (religion), or become one (New Age), or eschew that in the name of science? Is there a clear distinction between delusion and revelation?
The fervor of sekkers can take on quasi-religious dimensions: revelatory, salvific. Spreading the word takes on a missionary quality. And at the core is the eternal mythic “quest for the Holy Grail,” for the meaning that anchors the soul to life. When life is perceived in the context of tyranny, meaning and freedom are lost, and rebellion is aroused. We may feel we are personally targeted, but aren’t we all the target in the psychophysical (psyops) war that is 21st Century life? Or is all that just a head trip?
Darkness, darkness, be my pillow,
Take my hand, and let me sleep.
In the coolness of your shadow,
In the silence, the silence of your deep.
Darkness, darkness, be my blanket,
Cover me with the endless night,
Take away, take away the pain of knowing
Fill the emptiness of right now,
Emptiness of right now now now
Emptiness of right....
Oh yeah Oh yeah
Emptiness, emptiness
Oh yeah
~The Youngbloods
TALES FROM THE DARK SIDE
Part of the art of alchemy is decoding your own symbolic language. Depression means you have lost your dream and have yet to reconnect with a new one, with the new images or symbols that can pull you forward toward your future. Primal people call it loss of soul. We recognize it as loss of self-worth.
You hurt so much that you may be convinced you are going to die or even wish you would. But the fantasies of death are telegraphing a metaphorical message. Your old self is on its way out. Getting into this morbid state is the point. You have acute awareness of your mortality. The experience of maximum despair is “hitting bottom”. You are a mess. The good thing is there is nowhere to go but up. What do you want your tombstone to say?
You are metaphorically decomposing. This is the paradoxical flip side of ego inflation, toxic narcissism, and shallow self-absorption. It keeps us from responding to even outstanding opportunities. This crisis is an extraordinary opportunity to re-create your life and world. You have to learn how to use your strengths and skills while you meet multiple challenges and stressors. You need to uncover your buried potential and mine the gold of your buried talents and creativity.
This hero’s depression lifts once you embark on your mission with purpose, based on finding your inner vision. Once you’ve heard the “Call to Adventure” you have enthusiasm, passion, intentionality and direction. You determine to persevere through the crisis, but the road has many trials. The devil comes as chaos, suffering or pain. Psychophysical suffering feels like wandering around in fear and darkness – a dark night of the soul, even a journey to Hell.
The ancient Greek vision of Hades was that of a dark, cold, windy, dry realm. This is a good metaphor of all our early traumas of abandonment, hunger, loss, sorrow and shame that are frozen in the labyrinthine halls of psyche. We cannot meet or accept life's legitimate suffering. We can't grieve these ominous shadows so they pile up on us creating blind spots, despair, denial, and wrongful assumptions. The trouble they cause is their demand to be seen for what they are.
This glacial ice cave houses unresolved issues that continue to affect our relationships with self, others and world. It drives our compulsions for achievement and the pain of loneliness. We all carry the burdens of self-doubt and loneliness. We simply remove ourselves from whatever we cannot or will not process, but they remain alive and powerful though buried or frozen, multiplying in scope and weight as we grow older.
Though lack of unconditional acceptance is a natural part of human experience, these unhealing wounds are the hidden focus of our conscious lives. These early losses hang around frozen in time, as if they are still happening. Simply changing their apparent expression, they obstruct the flow of our lives until we recognize and acknowledge them.
The unhealing wounds of unrealized suffering, self-delusion, addiction, chronic depression, narcissistic rage, compulsivity, failed relationships and some physical illness present opportunities throughout life to reconcile and resolve what we couldn't heal earlier. The word 'resolve' echoes the alchemical maxim of 'Solve et Cogaula," the liquification and reintegration of essentially frozen psychic energy.
SOUL RETRIEVAL
Heartache and pain, a persistent sense of failure and inadequacy are core human experiences. We feel a hunger or sense we are missing something. The older we get, the more the fear of death creeps in, feeding the desire to numb out and not feel anything at all. Death tempts and attacks us in this predestined confrontation.
This unfinished business locks us into a distorted "virtual" reality, a false self. When we are out of balance and pursue pleasure at any cost, our old wound is showing. If these deepening shadows mess up our lives enough, we are forced to break free and tunnel out of the cocoon of distortions and self-loathing. This deadly and dreaded challenge to your courage can reconnect you with your lost confidence by drawing on transpersonal resources. It is an unavoidable part of the journey to an authentic life.
Constructive discontent can drive our best thoughts, emotions, and actions. But to get to its root you must enter a tomblike passageway, making a journey to “the center of the Earth,” to the center of yourself to gain the treasure, the cure, the grace. This is engagement with power within.
You can't go back so you must go forward. We have the potential to grow beyond mere personal fulfillment to transpersonal experiences. New information you gain from the unconscious helps you create a dynamic new situation, an ever-widening, self-perpetuating cycle that restores flow.
LIVING TRUST
What if you actually believed you are a capable and worthwhile person? How would building and aligning with greater mental, emotional and physical power within impact all facets of your life and relationships? What would life be like if you really opened a new pathway that helps you live, lead and succeed in your purpose, in your essential nature? What is blocking you?
When old defenses no longer work, you must develop new coping skills for developmental challenges. But this initiatory way includes many deaths and rebirths. Nigredo, the blackening, isn’t always the first stage, but may be one of relapse, eclipse or another incubation stage.
Nigredo is a recurrent cycle of desire and frustration with no real beginning. Your energies are sucked from the outer world and turned in on themselves. Normal life is radically disrupted. When you are paralyzed by life there is nothing to do but let go of your control fantasies. An eclipse of the ego offers a way into the deeper energies of the unconscious.
After involuntary or voluntary symbolic death, reborn spirit eventually emerges from the rotting corpse of the old self with its limiting worldview. This death is equivalent to the conception of the legendary Philosopher’s Stone. Death becomes your ally and advisor. Meditators are advised to “die daily” in their practice. The ego is eclipsed but the Stone is born. These trials nourish the Self. Vision expands, wisdom deepens, self matures.
Conscious alchemy offers a direction, an operational roadmap for realizing your highest potential. It is a psychospiritual path, approached experimentally and spiritually. You make the experiment on yourself. It is a whole brain, whole self process, involving both rational and irrational forces.
Psyche has a regressive tendency. If you block the process of growth, depression will recur, again and again. You will regress anytime your work goes awry, you seemingly take a step backward, or circumstances weigh you down. Each octave of work brings exponential results. Over time, you catch yourself in self-defeating acts sooner in the cycle. But the full weight of the dirty business must be born each time disruption intrudes chaotically into your life.
THE NIGREDO
Even the root of the word “alchemy” refers to the black soil of Egypt. This Egypt is an imaginal realm of Hermetic mysteries, which created the dying and rising god Osiris. This root mystery influenced many cultures, including the Eleusinian rites of ancient Greece. Initiatory rebirth is an awakening into a higher life. It is echoed in the rites of Dionysus, Attis, Adonis, and Mithras. Death and spiritual rebirth permeates all the mystery religions. Hermetic texts influenced the growth of European alchemy.
You must bury your old self in that rejuvinating soil for new life to emerge. The nigredo means seeing all through the bleak eyes of depression but it also means “seeing through” the meaning and value of depression. You may belong to a guild of like-minded travellers, but you walk the transformative path alone. It is a solitary journey.
The nigredo is often called the first alchemical operation but there is no distinct order handed down from tradition. It is the first stage of mortificatio – the killing of the old worn out or obsolete personality. Many people seek a spiritual path because of their existential despair. The old self must dissolve, the neurosis must be liquified and reduced to the primal condition.
Only a purging fire will turn this darkness white. It might be the slow heat of a rotting corpse or fetid compost pile but the inner fire is lit. Like a struck flint, flashes of insight ignite the inner fire which leads to searing visions of the truth of your reality and channel your burning desire toward further transformation that brings clarity.
“Something” in you has already died and it’s beginning to stink. This blackening phase of the alchemical process describes a gloomy time of depression. All the signs seem inauspicious. You feel unlucky, caught in a black mood whose origin may be difficult to pinpoint. This is because your current ego attitudes are outdated.
You feel stuck because you aren’t coping or adapting to present circumstances. These feelings may come into your life due to an overload of stress, financial and relationship problems or clinical depression. Depression is a “no love” script. Love may be there but you have lost the capacity to feel it. You wonder in anguish, “Is this all there is?"
”
There are three main types of clinical depressive disorders: major depressive disorder, dysthymia (mood swings), and the depressive lows of bipolar disorder. Mania is a defense against depression. Self-deception, loss of self-esteem and anger are part of it. Conventional treatment freely dispenses antidepressants. However, that just adds to the numbing and fakeness.
Paradoxically, both depression and its medical cure cause the personality to become “flat,” libido is suppressed. An integrative approach includes psychosocial therapy to focus on the personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal issues behind depression. A wide range of severe side effects make antidepressants alone poor therapy, particularly for seekers in spiritual crisis. The condition must be actively addressed. Medication suppresses self-expression just like addiction kills creativity.
Poison is in the cure. Research has shown that traumatic experiences can change the way the brain works. So can talk therapy, and even more so, process-oriented therapy, which creates flow experiences. Self-regulation can be learned, using resonance techniques, concentration and meditation. The brain undergoes changes similar to those induced by medication but in a positive, adaptive way that arises within.
Whether we speak of normal experience, chronic depression or grief, it is a fact that frustration is deeply woven into the fabric of life. We are riddled with desires and programmed by ideals. Should some of our real or imagined needs be temporarily met, we immediately begin wishing for more.
Chronic dissatisfaction stands in the way of our contentment. Depression has its roots in failure to adjust to lowered expectations of self, others, and a world that doesn’t meet our childish needs. Overcoming the anxiety and depressions of contemporary life requires a drastic change in attitude about what is important and what is not.
MELANCHOLIA
Faust was given power by the Devil on condition that he would never be satisfied with what he has. The advertising myth of the “American Dream” did the same thing to us all. Happiness and satisfaction with life depend on how small a gap you perceives between what you wish for and what you possess. Traditional social shields such as religion, ethnic traditions, patriotism, etc. no longer are effective for many disrupted by the harsh winds of chaos.
Psychic disorder produces conflicting signals that prevent or distract us from carrying out our good intentions. We give this condition many names, depending on how we experience it: pain, fear, rage, anxiety, depression, ennui, anomie, or jealousy. All these varieties of disorder divert and force our attention obsessively into undesirable directions. Energetic flow is blocked.
The new biological explanations of mental disorders as neurotransmitter imbalances make “good stories” but still lack empirical substantiation. Over-diagnosis has led to a “pharmademic” of over-medicated “pod people.” Yet, research shows that talk therapy and self-regulation techniques are as effective as drugs. The cornerstones of psychotherapy are insight and emotional growth.
If you practice alchemy with the feedback of other practitioners, it functions as a process-oriented therapy, allowing for projection and solution of problems. It is one of the most ancient spiritual paths. Spiritual technologies are the intuitive response to depression and the ever-present fear of death.
Many individuals experience a period of melancholia between the ages of 28 to 30 (and again at 55 to 60). Astrologically, this is triggered by Saturn return, the return of the planet to its original position in the natal chart. Classically, it is a time of disappointment, divorce, soul-searching and reassessment of values and orientation in life. It also holds the seed of mastery.
Saturn governs the aging process, since it represents actualization of more and more of one's potential. It presides over lingering death and chronic illness. At its worst, senex consciousness destroys spontaneity, obsessed by its repetitive disciplines into a narrowness of emotions, mental processes, and activities. Saturn has “control issues” and also rules crises situations of life and the mental cravings of “lust for results.”
The planet Saturn puts the accent on responsibility, in this case responsibility to yourself for fulfilling your potential. Finally, you are truly growing up and your destiny begins to take form. You may be pressured into it, even if you resist it, and this is that black mood's positive intent. Suffering becomes a meaningful path.
You may think you are not depressed because your feelings are numbed out or you make sure you stay too busy to notice. You may just be in denial with workaholism, hypochondria, an antisocial personality, substance abuse problem, hyperactivity, compulsivity, oppositional behavior, rage, or other means of devil may care acting out and acting in. You may try many horizontal escapes, but no matter where you go, there you are.
Having lost the sweet savor of life, you may be feeling older than your years, not in a good way but rigid and humorless with a thousand aches and pains. If chronic degenerative disease isn’t enough, there is the continual futureshock of new technology and morphing culture. If you are young, depression masquerades as anxiety, a conflict of opposites, generational and social rebellion, alienation, and angst.
Your behavior telegraphs the underlying depression to those with eyes to see. They know because they have been through it. Often when you are in it, you can’t see it. You might even unconsciously use your predicament to manipulate the sympathy and attention of others. But something’s just not right and you sense it in every fiber of your being.
GOOD GRIEF
Like Charlie Brown with his dark cloud, most of us have felt depressed in greater or lesser degree. Loss is a psychophysical experience. Since everything changes as time flows, and change entails loss, this is not surprising. Sometimes we lose face through shameful behavior, in our own eyes and those of others. There are some things we just need to face directly even if they are scary or painful.
We grow sad and depressed when a person we love dies or a cherished phase of life passes. Grief is universal and normal. In fact, failure to grieve is evidence of psychological abnormality. Staying stuck in grief is not healthy; it suppresses the immune system and élan vital. Process work in alchemy or therapy is a way of moving on. Mourning is work and takes mental effort.
Mourning is characteristically a state of mind, but it is accompanied by a host of painful somatic sensations that are remarkably uniform. In acute grief we experience physical distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath. We need to sigh, have an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and intense subjective distress we call tension or mental pain.
Traumatic bereavement happens in a variety of settings including personal and community violence, even global catastrophe. Traumatic bereavement contrasts experiences of quiet death at home, without mutilation, bodily distortion, shock, threat, horror, and helplessness. Reactions to the traumatic circumstances are different and predict more adverse health outcomes for the bereaved.
Traumatic stress interferes with the grieving process. The emotional aspect of grief is just as painful as the somatic. Inner anguish, loss of interest in a dreary, empty world, isolation from other people, loneliness and feelings of inner emptiness seem to persist for an eternity. In this way, grief mimics clinical depression.
The call to heal and the call to death are ultimately the same call to formlessness, to return to source. Many disorders display symptoms and imagery which represent stalled stages in the natural consciousness restructuring process. We get stuck in our attempts to heal ourselves.
HEALING PROCESS
Alchemy is a creative, synergetic process. It produces the universal medicine because it is essentially a healing process. Healing is a form of creativity. You become aware of previously unconscious emotions and find patterns in your behavior. You learn discernment and to intervene in our own negative cycle by exercising, practicing your passion, thought-stopping and changing your messages to yourself.
This curative power is that of the wounded healer archetype. Conscious alchemy means self-care, self-regulation, and self-help through a philosophical mindbody lifestyle. In an eclectic approach, you choose what works for you. You apply it with a level of intensity that meets or exceeds the compelling nature of the depression. Knowing yourself is true wisdom and mastering yourself is true power. You learn to modulate your own neurochemistry to improve your quality of life.
UNIVERSAL METASYN
What is described as the Elixir or Universal Medicine is a primary goal of alchemy. Those who take this literally might seek it in spagyrics or the "white gold" of Ormus, but it can just as easily be the mobilization of the body's own healing potential through psychoneuroimmunology and/or the placebo effect.
Arguably, the universal medicine is inextinguishable Light. Science has shown that the basis of biophysics is not chemistry but subtle fields and biophotons. Life has a biophotonic nature which is the basis of the energy body or field body. Life is orchestrated by light. Our atoms, DNA and cells emit light which choreographs our biological processes. An ultrapowerful energy potential radiates from zero point. http://myzeropoint.50megs.comhttp://photonichuman.50megs.com The Void exist within us just as it pervades the entire cosmos. Uncountable photons flicker on and off within us and influence the holographic blueprint of the body that is transcribed through our DNA and gene expression. The essence of healing is a return to the unconditioned state, free of all conditioning and full of primordial energy potential. Coherent light and sonic resonance or cymatics are present at the intracellular level. http://virtualphysics.50megs.com
We can take responsibility for our bodies and health, reclaiming our inherent shamanic, yogic and psychosomatic self-healing power. This alone changes our compassionate spiritual relationship to self, others, and universe. Meditation masters of all traditions speak of this primordial inner light and its brilliant healing power - Medicine Light.
The old-yet-new healing paradigm includes non-material but highly effective shamanic, psychic and spiritual tech that can be applied effectively in any cultural context. Mind is more than a powerless prisoner of the body. It has the power of focus, committed attention and intentionality. When you take responsibility for you own healing and well-being, the self-organizing power of your own hyperdimensional organism creates a positive resonance.
Healing fosters our evolutionary potential. Personal stillpoint is the point of release and reconnection. There is catharsis in the void. We touch our source, drink of the wellspring of life, reboot our system. Potentials are the source of all electromagnetic phenomena. To realize our own potential, we need to learn the art of living well, not just living better.
We can root out the disturbances of the past and transform them into assets, or strengths. We can remove the incongruencies of conflicting agendas in our belief systems and their fallout - our unresolved feelings. When we change our attitudes about ourselves and our past, we initiate a cascade of neurological changes that cover all four domains of our being. We can cultivate deeper awareness. The mind can change what "matters" to embody a healthier self.
The symbols of alchemy represent aspects of yourself. As you manipulate them, the attitudes associated with them morph. You start recovering from acute depression and become less vulnerable to depression in the future. We heal in the ground of our being.
The healing comes from deep inside not outside, adding to a sense of personal empowerment, rather than reliance or dependence on a pill or another person or an intangible belief. Suffering teaches us to nurture hope. Healthier lifestyle choices may follow.
Sadness is a clarifying and relieving emotion that helps us move on after losses. On the other hand, depression is a paralyzing short-circuit of self-doubt and self-recrimination. Sometimes people become depressed because they are not appropriately angry or sad over the situation. Self-reported distress includes the experience of headaches, faintness, loss of sexual appetite, trouble remembering things, uncontrolled temper outbursts, blaming oneself, pains in the lower back, feelings of inferiority to others, feeling hopeless and nauseous.
A BITTER PILL
Some lives are structured around a depressive life script. Often someone occupies the Victim role in the drama triangle, but switches periodically into the Persecutor role, or through magical means into the Rescuer role. The timing of the script is “Wait.” The “wait” is for a magical occurrence that transforms the world without requiring us to take an active part to initiate change. This is the secret meaning of “initiation” – it includes practice. It must be experiential. One must maintain a beginner’s mind.
The blocks include negative self-talk: “Don’t Succeed,” “Don’t Think,” “Don’t Be Close,” “Don’t Have Fun,” and “Don’t Judge Others.” Even “new age guilt”: “It’s my fault I’m sick; I did it to myself.” Medications may suppress symptoms, but turn you into a homogenized “pod person.” By themselves, they are never a cure. As such, they should be used only to recalibrate for the real healing process. They don’t deal with issues of guilt or change self-accusatory self-talk.
An experience we think is worthless can turn out to be the portal to healing, deepening and enriching us, funding our compassion for self and others. “Healing” does not necessarily mean a cure or total elimination of all symptoms. It has to do with a subjective process, difficult to describe. Self-expression has a curative value. As you work with symbols to manifest them, they heal you right back. By its very nature, the alchemical process is irrational, totally individual, and yet linked to a timeless and universal experience.
The therapist gives helpful encouragement to integrate new knowledge, or relate to the unintegratable, and accept it. Alchemy also helps us understand what the unconscious is saying directly. This promotes growth according to our own inner laws, allowing the unfolding of the total potential. Alchemy helps you conduct a similar process of self-initiation on yourself. The guide is your higher self, perhaps in some personification, pulling you toward your future.
REVIVAL
Flow helps us to integrate the self because in a state of deep concentration consciousness is unusually well ordered. Thoughts, intentions, feelings, and all senses are focused on the same goal. Concentration and ritual are forms of meditation – in alchemy, the meditatio. Experience is in harmony. And when the flow episode is over, one feels more “together” than before, not only internally but also with respect to other people, the world and cosmos in general.
Ultimately, it matters little what complex mechanisms help us mobilize our own inner capacity for healing. The fact that we enter the healing process with commitment and intentionality is far more important. Taking the journey toward healing means we recreate the archetypal journey of the hero or heroine, who is neither helpless nor hopeless, but approaches fate with determinism and courage.
NEW SELF-IMAGE
Is pain, grief, depression, fear, anxiety, guilt, relationship or career disappointment, rejection, alienation, inner conflict, victimization, resentment, superstition, rage, self-doubt or procrastination holding you back? Perhaps your old view of your self has become confining, obsolete, role-bound, or you just feel stuck. Are you afraid you can't cope with either failure or success? We always have to adapt to our environment. You have to TRY, even to fail. Maybe you think your 'glory days' are all in the past.
Through conscious alchemy you can retrieve the psychophysical biochemistry of your balanced and peak performance states. You can apply this felt sense to pain management as well as emotional issues or boosting your potential. By recalling vital times, you essentially regress your body chemistry to a more youthful you, and minimize the toxic chemistry of stress. This allows both body and mind to relax and recalibrate homeostasis. You can also draw on the support and encouragement of your evolving future self through imagination.
Just as one incident can create trauma, one healing moment can change that instantly. When we willingly submit to the universal process of death and renewal we activate transpersonal resources that transcend our own limited capacities for restructuring our consciousness and self-healing. Ultimately all healing is self-healing, and implies profound self-acceptance, and can lead to loving acceptance of others and the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be. This is the basis of compassion and service.
ENVISION YOUR FUTURE
Perhaps you lack the right tools to help you realize your potential, to make it so. Self-mastery is a continuous process, which can be used to improve your position wherever you currently find yourself. Our motivations come from our beliefs and values. But along the road of life we may not have developed the resources to deploy our skills or have fallen into traps that derail us when we try.
Identifying beliefs and roadblocks is a solid first step to change. You already probably know exactly what you would like to change, and just how you feel when that's not happening, and even where you feel that in your body and what it is like. This technique allows you to get in touch with a metaphor of your situation.
The body is an alchemical furnace. The brain sends chemical messengers -- neurotransmitters of pain and pleasure -- throughout the body. In turn, the body sends signals to the brain about its sense of distress or safety and well-being.
We can intervene intentionally in this cycle at any point. We can use nutrition, exercise, self-talk and psycho-sensory exercises that create the kinds of experiences that move us forward in our goals. This is 21st Century alchemy - intentionally changing body chemistry from both inside and outside. Our organism obeys one of the maxims of information technology: "Garbage In; Garbage Out".
SELF DIRECTION
Studies have shown that the mindbody cannot distinguish imagination from reality in its automatic reactions. The same internal chemistry is produced whether you do something or imagine it, making mind and body truly one. Transform your imagination into reality.
It all starts and ends with imagination - with what you picture in your mind and the self-talk you use to convince yourself what things mean and what to do. This is where you develop vision and create meaning, which leads to purpose and understanding your mission in life. To change your mind, along with the feelings, attitudes and chemistry that it creates, just systematically change your imagination - the image you hold of your self, others, and world.
Inner guidance comes through the intimate connection between the chemistry of your body and that of your mind and moods. We all recognize a gut-feeling when we have it. Health and well-being involves physical, emotional, mental and spiritual dimensions.
A healthy mindbody opens the way to balance, integration, and inner peace, without resorting to personality-distorting medications. Research has shown that therapy is as effective as antidepressants. We all need exercise, affection, and discipline. We also benefit from reflection or self-knowledge. This alchemical investigation of self is a spiritual journey toward increased balance and mastery.
THE SHADOW KNOWS
Your shadow consists of all the baggage you have stuffed into your false self. You are either afraid to show it, or paradoxically compelled to show it in impulsive behavior. Either way, it is out of control. Acting out self-limiting, self-defeating or self-destructive tendencies means the shadow is running the show. Anger, sadness and fear block joy.
When your ego can no longer pursue only its selfish concerns and addictive demands, the Self forces you into a depression to shake up the stagnant order of things. It brings a burning awareness of your shortcomings and inadequacies. To get to the root of these, you need to process old traumas and negative core beliefs that limit you severely. The self appears on your inner stage as the shadow, and confronts you with your inferior traits.
"The head of the Raven" is another traditional name for the nigredo. It corresponds to the encounter with the shadow. Your ego and the shadow must eventually be reconciled. Your restlessness and disorientation come from your conscious experience of conflict between conscious and unconscious drives. The unconscious must be transformed. The Self devours itself and dies, only to rise again when the work is perfected. But feelings of guilt, worthlessness and powerlessness must be suffered and worked through patiently.
The Shadow is a ‘splinter personality’ that prevents you from realizing your unique potential for personal fulfillment. Cowardice, laziness, ambivalence, rashness, dishonesty, envy, greed, lust, vanity, and attachment, and other self-indulgent tendencies will have to be faced directly. The narcissistic shadow is the diametrical opposite of our positive assets. If you are compulsively organized in daily life, the shadow is a slacker. If you are puritanical, the shadow is promiscuous.
Our dark side isn’t necessarily acted out in self-destructive behavior, but if it has no means of self-expression no ego can transform beyond this phase of development. Some form of inner dialogue is useful. You must come to a conscious understanding of those things you have repressed, and have not been able, nor dared to live out. As a symbol of the self, the shadow embodies the primitive, dark background from which we all emerge. But only the ego passes negative judgment on the shadow. The self embraces all opposites, including good and bad.
Highly religious individuals, who tend to over-identify with the great good of the Light, have shadows that may assume the form of a devilish adversary. What may start as good intentions becomes perverted through repression not transformation. But in the broader reality, the shadow gives human existence body and depth. In physics, the brighter the light, the deeper the shadows which are cast by it. The shadow embodies our hidden agendas, ulterior motives and pathologies.
If you do not take responsibility for consciously becoming aware of your shadow traits, you will find them projected onto others (of the same sex) in your environment. You may feel an irrational instinctive hatred for virtual strangers. This is the collective basis of racial prejudice. When you feel any emotion that seems highly exaggerated, it usually means you are projecting. When that extreme emotion is irrational vehemence, you are projecting your own repressed weakness onto others. To do this you must deny a part of yourself and you cannot experience wholeness.
Therefore, in order to continue your process of transformation, you must come to an awareness of your particular shadow characteristics. If you reach down deeply enough, you will find that the shadow is not only negative, but holds your unlived potential for positive change, also.
As you re-own this lost part of yourself, you open a channel between the conscious and the superconscious levels, between the ego and the self. This experience can bring a flood of light, joy, and energy, which brings temporary release from the depression. Even your psychosomatic symptoms may vanish suddenly. It’s more than placebo effect.
If your personality is not well-grounded you may not be able to assimilate an inflow of light and strength. The alchemist must balance intellect and emotion by using imagination in a controlled way to digest this sudden illuminating insight. For your ego to react with egotism or conceit is to confuse itself with the power of the self. This confusion of levels has the unfortunate effect of creating a self-glorification. Of course, you are divine, but it is Source shining through you.
If you are bedazzled by spiritual truths beyond your mental power to digest, you may become self-deluded and/or victimized by a cult. You need to develop your powers of discrimination. Megalomania is extreme egotism and can lead a person to act out the role of prophet or savior, spurred on by the excitement of his or her own inner awakening.
You may begin experiencing paranormal phenomena, ESP, clairvoyance, or synchronicities (meaningful coincidences). You may have visions of divine beings, or hear voices, or dabble with automatic writing. Be sure to examine any messages of uncommon origin with discrimination. Any messages exalting your personality should be automatically suspect.
Other reactions to spiritual awakening may occur later as doubts fall away and inner security is found. You may be elated for a time, but your personal self was only temporarily overpowered not permanently transformed. When the spiritual influx ebbs away you may be in for trouble from your ego, which desperately seeks to reassert its dominion.
The trap is to judge yourself even more harshly for being merely human. You have not fallen lower than when you began, but you may feel the full fury of the lower drives when their uncontrolled expression is threatened. They may rear their ugly heads with more force than ever.
Another reaction is to deny the value and reality of your spiritual awakening. The inner critic, or skeptic, creates doubts and attempts to label it a fantasy. With bitterness and sarcasm you may rebuke your aspirations and ideals. But when you have had a transformative vision, you cannot deny it for long, and remain healthy. It brings more depression, a sense of unworthiness, and the feeling you are damned. Nigredo can be likened to "going through Hell."
All those in the arts and sciences experience periods of aridity and inability to work. No new inspirations come. You feel cut off from the source of creative flow. The depression and restlessness that result may lead to alcohol or drugs, until or unless the sudden flow of inspiration brings a sense of renewal.
You need to be aware of the true nature of this crisis, and realize that an exalted state cannot be maintained forever. It is no fall from grace, but a natural occurrence that gives you emotional and mental relief from the tensions of inspiration and illumination. After all, you can only digest so much change at once. Instead of staying stuck in the depression you can continue on the path to self-realization.
MEANING & MYSTERY
It is impossible to feel isolated, lonely, and “dead” with a felt sense of revivifying identification, which stems from direct experience of the dynamic whole of reality. It restores our sense of personal wholeness. We are an indivisible part of a flow in the whole field of consciousness. The entire cosmos is contained holographically within us: “As Above; So Below.”
When we become “superconductors” of consciousness, we draw from the spiritual wellsprings of life and health, that which eternally makes the world bloom anew, which brings re-enchantment. The “dam” of depression which has blocked the dynamic flow of life and love cannot withstand this immense healing force forever. It breaks through the “dead void” and one is no longer estranged from the power of the dynamic ground-state of existence, or cosmic unity.
What was lost has been found. The wilderness is no longer barren. Life blossoms and bears fruit. The self is the whole range of psychic phenomena, a psychic organ of perception. The self is transcendent, a center between conscious and unconscious, because it points to an unlimited future and unbound creative expansion of the evolutionary process. It signifies the harmony and balance of various opposing forces. Symbols of the self can be anything the ego recognizes as a greater totality than itself: the androgyne, the diamond body, the flower of life, the Elixir, the Stone.
The average heart beats two billion times and you can change utterly in any one of them. Reclaim your innate capacity for changing the cellular, subatomic, and psychophysical processes of your energy body. WHAT YOU THINK and the excitation level of your overall system changes your chemistry, markedly. We are fluid fields, through which energy and matter dynamically flow and change. Lifestyle, diet, emotional state and consciousness play a huge role in health and disease. We can catalyze our psychophysical homeostasis and spontaneous healing processes, complementing any traditional care we may require.
Restoration of the flow-state comes through identification with the alchemical process. Genius embodies powers greater than our own for no one can ever embody at once all the potential qualities of archetypal Self. But we can become extraordinary by transforming our character like carving a diamond from the rough.
Self is the primordial I AM of Being, as fundamental as inhalation and exhalation. Our lives are defined by their limitations and the strategies we use to cope with and overcome them. The self expresses the unity of the personality as a Whole, our holistic organism. The unconscious, including the mindbody and energy body, is the medium from which the sacred Source flows forth.
This is the serpentine process of healing. It changes us at the quantum, energetic and psychobiological levels. It literally changes our biochemistry. Creative flow states have the power to restructure our consciousness at the most fundamental level. Alchemy is an endless source of creativity, spiritual sustenance, and pleasure. Passion for the Great Work connects you experientially with Mystery.
Alchemy is a creative, synergetic process. It produces the universal medicine because it is essentially a healing process. Healing is a form of creativity. You become aware of previously unconscious emotions and find patterns in your behavior. You learn discernment and to intervene in our own negative cycle by exercising, practicing your passion, thought-stopping and changing your messages to yourself.
This curative power is that of the wounded healer archetype. Conscious alchemy means self-care, self-regulation, and self-help through a philosophical mindbody lifestyle. In an eclectic approach, you choose what works for you. You apply it with a level of intensity that meets or exceeds the compelling nature of the depression. Knowing yourself is true wisdom and mastering yourself is true power. You learn to modulate your own neurochemistry to improve your quality of life.
UNIVERSAL METASYN
What is described as the Elixir or Universal Medicine is a primary goal of alchemy. Those who take this literally might seek it in spagyrics or the "white gold" of Ormus, but it can just as easily be the mobilization of the body's own healing potential through psychoneuroimmunology and/or the placebo effect.
Arguably, the universal medicine is inextinguishable Light. Science has shown that the basis of biophysics is not chemistry but subtle fields and biophotons. Life has a biophotonic nature which is the basis of the energy body or field body. Life is orchestrated by light. Our atoms, DNA and cells emit light which choreographs our biological processes. An ultrapowerful energy potential radiates from zero point. http://myzeropoint.50megs.comhttp://photonichuman.50megs.com The Void exist within us just as it pervades the entire cosmos. Uncountable photons flicker on and off within us and influence the holographic blueprint of the body that is transcribed through our DNA and gene expression. The essence of healing is a return to the unconditioned state, free of all conditioning and full of primordial energy potential. Coherent light and sonic resonance or cymatics are present at the intracellular level. http://virtualphysics.50megs.com
We can take responsibility for our bodies and health, reclaiming our inherent shamanic, yogic and psychosomatic self-healing power. This alone changes our compassionate spiritual relationship to self, others, and universe. Meditation masters of all traditions speak of this primordial inner light and its brilliant healing power - Medicine Light.
The old-yet-new healing paradigm includes non-material but highly effective shamanic, psychic and spiritual tech that can be applied effectively in any cultural context. Mind is more than a powerless prisoner of the body. It has the power of focus, committed attention and intentionality. When you take responsibility for you own healing and well-being, the self-organizing power of your own hyperdimensional organism creates a positive resonance.
Healing fosters our evolutionary potential. Personal stillpoint is the point of release and reconnection. There is catharsis in the void. We touch our source, drink of the wellspring of life, reboot our system. Potentials are the source of all electromagnetic phenomena. To realize our own potential, we need to learn the art of living well, not just living better.
We can root out the disturbances of the past and transform them into assets, or strengths. We can remove the incongruencies of conflicting agendas in our belief systems and their fallout - our unresolved feelings. When we change our attitudes about ourselves and our past, we initiate a cascade of neurological changes that cover all four domains of our being. We can cultivate deeper awareness. The mind can change what "matters" to embody a healthier self.
The symbols of alchemy represent aspects of yourself. As you manipulate them, the attitudes associated with them morph. You start recovering from acute depression and become less vulnerable to depression in the future. We heal in the ground of our being.
The healing comes from deep inside not outside, adding to a sense of personal empowerment, rather than reliance or dependence on a pill or another person or an intangible belief. Suffering teaches us to nurture hope. Healthier lifestyle choices may follow.
Sadness is a clarifying and relieving emotion that helps us move on after losses. On the other hand, depression is a paralyzing short-circuit of self-doubt and self-recrimination. Sometimes people become depressed because they are not appropriately angry or sad over the situation. Self-reported distress includes the experience of headaches, faintness, loss of sexual appetite, trouble remembering things, uncontrolled temper outbursts, blaming oneself, pains in the lower back, feelings of inferiority to others, feeling hopeless and nauseous.
A BITTER PILL
Some lives are structured around a depressive life script. Often someone occupies the Victim role in the drama triangle, but switches periodically into the Persecutor role, or through magical means into the Rescuer role. The timing of the script is “Wait.” The “wait” is for a magical occurrence that transforms the world without requiring us to take an active part to initiate change. This is the secret meaning of “initiation” – it includes practice. It must be experiential. One must maintain a beginner’s mind.
The blocks include negative self-talk: “Don’t Succeed,” “Don’t Think,” “Don’t Be Close,” “Don’t Have Fun,” and “Don’t Judge Others.” Even “new age guilt”: “It’s my fault I’m sick; I did it to myself.” Medications may suppress symptoms, but turn you into a homogenized “pod person.” By themselves, they are never a cure. As such, they should be used only to recalibrate for the real healing process. They don’t deal with issues of guilt or change self-accusatory self-talk.
An experience we think is worthless can turn out to be the portal to healing, deepening and enriching us, funding our compassion for self and others. “Healing” does not necessarily mean a cure or total elimination of all symptoms. It has to do with a subjective process, difficult to describe. Self-expression has a curative value. As you work with symbols to manifest them, they heal you right back. By its very nature, the alchemical process is irrational, totally individual, and yet linked to a timeless and universal experience.
The therapist gives helpful encouragement to integrate new knowledge, or relate to the unintegratable, and accept it. Alchemy also helps us understand what the unconscious is saying directly. This promotes growth according to our own inner laws, allowing the unfolding of the total potential. Alchemy helps you conduct a similar process of self-initiation on yourself. The guide is your higher self, perhaps in some personification, pulling you toward your future.
REVIVAL
Flow helps us to integrate the self because in a state of deep concentration consciousness is unusually well ordered. Thoughts, intentions, feelings, and all senses are focused on the same goal. Concentration and ritual are forms of meditation – in alchemy, the meditatio. Experience is in harmony. And when the flow episode is over, one feels more “together” than before, not only internally but also with respect to other people, the world and cosmos in general.
Ultimately, it matters little what complex mechanisms help us mobilize our own inner capacity for healing. The fact that we enter the healing process with commitment and intentionality is far more important. Taking the journey toward healing means we recreate the archetypal journey of the hero or heroine, who is neither helpless nor hopeless, but approaches fate with determinism and courage.
NEW SELF-IMAGE
Is pain, grief, depression, fear, anxiety, guilt, relationship or career disappointment, rejection, alienation, inner conflict, victimization, resentment, superstition, rage, self-doubt or procrastination holding you back? Perhaps your old view of your self has become confining, obsolete, role-bound, or you just feel stuck. Are you afraid you can't cope with either failure or success? We always have to adapt to our environment. You have to TRY, even to fail. Maybe you think your 'glory days' are all in the past.
Through conscious alchemy you can retrieve the psychophysical biochemistry of your balanced and peak performance states. You can apply this felt sense to pain management as well as emotional issues or boosting your potential. By recalling vital times, you essentially regress your body chemistry to a more youthful you, and minimize the toxic chemistry of stress. This allows both body and mind to relax and recalibrate homeostasis. You can also draw on the support and encouragement of your evolving future self through imagination.
Just as one incident can create trauma, one healing moment can change that instantly. When we willingly submit to the universal process of death and renewal we activate transpersonal resources that transcend our own limited capacities for restructuring our consciousness and self-healing. Ultimately all healing is self-healing, and implies profound self-acceptance, and can lead to loving acceptance of others and the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be. This is the basis of compassion and service.
ENVISION YOUR FUTURE
Perhaps you lack the right tools to help you realize your potential, to make it so. Self-mastery is a continuous process, which can be used to improve your position wherever you currently find yourself. Our motivations come from our beliefs and values. But along the road of life we may not have developed the resources to deploy our skills or have fallen into traps that derail us when we try.
Identifying beliefs and roadblocks is a solid first step to change. You already probably know exactly what you would like to change, and just how you feel when that's not happening, and even where you feel that in your body and what it is like. This technique allows you to get in touch with a metaphor of your situation.
The body is an alchemical furnace. The brain sends chemical messengers -- neurotransmitters of pain and pleasure -- throughout the body. In turn, the body sends signals to the brain about its sense of distress or safety and well-being.
We can intervene intentionally in this cycle at any point. We can use nutrition, exercise, self-talk and psycho-sensory exercises that create the kinds of experiences that move us forward in our goals. This is 21st Century alchemy - intentionally changing body chemistry from both inside and outside. Our organism obeys one of the maxims of information technology: "Garbage In; Garbage Out".
SELF DIRECTION
Studies have shown that the mindbody cannot distinguish imagination from reality in its automatic reactions. The same internal chemistry is produced whether you do something or imagine it, making mind and body truly one. Transform your imagination into reality.
It all starts and ends with imagination - with what you picture in your mind and the self-talk you use to convince yourself what things mean and what to do. This is where you develop vision and create meaning, which leads to purpose and understanding your mission in life. To change your mind, along with the feelings, attitudes and chemistry that it creates, just systematically change your imagination - the image you hold of your self, others, and world.
Inner guidance comes through the intimate connection between the chemistry of your body and that of your mind and moods. We all recognize a gut-feeling when we have it. Health and well-being involves physical, emotional, mental and spiritual dimensions.
A healthy mindbody opens the way to balance, integration, and inner peace, without resorting to personality-distorting medications. Research has shown that therapy is as effective as antidepressants. We all need exercise, affection, and discipline. We also benefit from reflection or self-knowledge. This alchemical investigation of self is a spiritual journey toward increased balance and mastery.
THE SHADOW KNOWS
Your shadow consists of all the baggage you have stuffed into your false self. You are either afraid to show it, or paradoxically compelled to show it in impulsive behavior. Either way, it is out of control. Acting out self-limiting, self-defeating or self-destructive tendencies means the shadow is running the show. Anger, sadness and fear block joy.
When your ego can no longer pursue only its selfish concerns and addictive demands, the Self forces you into a depression to shake up the stagnant order of things. It brings a burning awareness of your shortcomings and inadequacies. To get to the root of these, you need to process old traumas and negative core beliefs that limit you severely. The self appears on your inner stage as the shadow, and confronts you with your inferior traits.
"The head of the Raven" is another traditional name for the nigredo. It corresponds to the encounter with the shadow. Your ego and the shadow must eventually be reconciled. Your restlessness and disorientation come from your conscious experience of conflict between conscious and unconscious drives. The unconscious must be transformed. The Self devours itself and dies, only to rise again when the work is perfected. But feelings of guilt, worthlessness and powerlessness must be suffered and worked through patiently.
The Shadow is a ‘splinter personality’ that prevents you from realizing your unique potential for personal fulfillment. Cowardice, laziness, ambivalence, rashness, dishonesty, envy, greed, lust, vanity, and attachment, and other self-indulgent tendencies will have to be faced directly. The narcissistic shadow is the diametrical opposite of our positive assets. If you are compulsively organized in daily life, the shadow is a slacker. If you are puritanical, the shadow is promiscuous.
Our dark side isn’t necessarily acted out in self-destructive behavior, but if it has no means of self-expression no ego can transform beyond this phase of development. Some form of inner dialogue is useful. You must come to a conscious understanding of those things you have repressed, and have not been able, nor dared to live out. As a symbol of the self, the shadow embodies the primitive, dark background from which we all emerge. But only the ego passes negative judgment on the shadow. The self embraces all opposites, including good and bad.
Highly religious individuals, who tend to over-identify with the great good of the Light, have shadows that may assume the form of a devilish adversary. What may start as good intentions becomes perverted through repression not transformation. But in the broader reality, the shadow gives human existence body and depth. In physics, the brighter the light, the deeper the shadows which are cast by it. The shadow embodies our hidden agendas, ulterior motives and pathologies.
If you do not take responsibility for consciously becoming aware of your shadow traits, you will find them projected onto others (of the same sex) in your environment. You may feel an irrational instinctive hatred for virtual strangers. This is the collective basis of racial prejudice. When you feel any emotion that seems highly exaggerated, it usually means you are projecting. When that extreme emotion is irrational vehemence, you are projecting your own repressed weakness onto others. To do this you must deny a part of yourself and you cannot experience wholeness.
Therefore, in order to continue your process of transformation, you must come to an awareness of your particular shadow characteristics. If you reach down deeply enough, you will find that the shadow is not only negative, but holds your unlived potential for positive change, also.
As you re-own this lost part of yourself, you open a channel between the conscious and the superconscious levels, between the ego and the self. This experience can bring a flood of light, joy, and energy, which brings temporary release from the depression. Even your psychosomatic symptoms may vanish suddenly. It’s more than placebo effect.
If your personality is not well-grounded you may not be able to assimilate an inflow of light and strength. The alchemist must balance intellect and emotion by using imagination in a controlled way to digest this sudden illuminating insight. For your ego to react with egotism or conceit is to confuse itself with the power of the self. This confusion of levels has the unfortunate effect of creating a self-glorification. Of course, you are divine, but it is Source shining through you.
If you are bedazzled by spiritual truths beyond your mental power to digest, you may become self-deluded and/or victimized by a cult. You need to develop your powers of discrimination. Megalomania is extreme egotism and can lead a person to act out the role of prophet or savior, spurred on by the excitement of his or her own inner awakening.
You may begin experiencing paranormal phenomena, ESP, clairvoyance, or synchronicities (meaningful coincidences). You may have visions of divine beings, or hear voices, or dabble with automatic writing. Be sure to examine any messages of uncommon origin with discrimination. Any messages exalting your personality should be automatically suspect.
Other reactions to spiritual awakening may occur later as doubts fall away and inner security is found. You may be elated for a time, but your personal self was only temporarily overpowered not permanently transformed. When the spiritual influx ebbs away you may be in for trouble from your ego, which desperately seeks to reassert its dominion.
The trap is to judge yourself even more harshly for being merely human. You have not fallen lower than when you began, but you may feel the full fury of the lower drives when their uncontrolled expression is threatened. They may rear their ugly heads with more force than ever.
Another reaction is to deny the value and reality of your spiritual awakening. The inner critic, or skeptic, creates doubts and attempts to label it a fantasy. With bitterness and sarcasm you may rebuke your aspirations and ideals. But when you have had a transformative vision, you cannot deny it for long, and remain healthy. It brings more depression, a sense of unworthiness, and the feeling you are damned. Nigredo can be likened to "going through Hell."
All those in the arts and sciences experience periods of aridity and inability to work. No new inspirations come. You feel cut off from the source of creative flow. The depression and restlessness that result may lead to alcohol or drugs, until or unless the sudden flow of inspiration brings a sense of renewal.
You need to be aware of the true nature of this crisis, and realize that an exalted state cannot be maintained forever. It is no fall from grace, but a natural occurrence that gives you emotional and mental relief from the tensions of inspiration and illumination. After all, you can only digest so much change at once. Instead of staying stuck in the depression you can continue on the path to self-realization.
MEANING & MYSTERY
It is impossible to feel isolated, lonely, and “dead” with a felt sense of revivifying identification, which stems from direct experience of the dynamic whole of reality. It restores our sense of personal wholeness. We are an indivisible part of a flow in the whole field of consciousness. The entire cosmos is contained holographically within us: “As Above; So Below.”
When we become “superconductors” of consciousness, we draw from the spiritual wellsprings of life and health, that which eternally makes the world bloom anew, which brings re-enchantment. The “dam” of depression which has blocked the dynamic flow of life and love cannot withstand this immense healing force forever. It breaks through the “dead void” and one is no longer estranged from the power of the dynamic ground-state of existence, or cosmic unity.
What was lost has been found. The wilderness is no longer barren. Life blossoms and bears fruit. The self is the whole range of psychic phenomena, a psychic organ of perception. The self is transcendent, a center between conscious and unconscious, because it points to an unlimited future and unbound creative expansion of the evolutionary process. It signifies the harmony and balance of various opposing forces. Symbols of the self can be anything the ego recognizes as a greater totality than itself: the androgyne, the diamond body, the flower of life, the Elixir, the Stone.
The average heart beats two billion times and you can change utterly in any one of them. Reclaim your innate capacity for changing the cellular, subatomic, and psychophysical processes of your energy body. WHAT YOU THINK and the excitation level of your overall system changes your chemistry, markedly. We are fluid fields, through which energy and matter dynamically flow and change. Lifestyle, diet, emotional state and consciousness play a huge role in health and disease. We can catalyze our psychophysical homeostasis and spontaneous healing processes, complementing any traditional care we may require.
Restoration of the flow-state comes through identification with the alchemical process. Genius embodies powers greater than our own for no one can ever embody at once all the potential qualities of archetypal Self. But we can become extraordinary by transforming our character like carving a diamond from the rough.
Self is the primordial I AM of Being, as fundamental as inhalation and exhalation. Our lives are defined by their limitations and the strategies we use to cope with and overcome them. The self expresses the unity of the personality as a Whole, our holistic organism. The unconscious, including the mindbody and energy body, is the medium from which the sacred Source flows forth.
This is the serpentine process of healing. It changes us at the quantum, energetic and psychobiological levels. It literally changes our biochemistry. Creative flow states have the power to restructure our consciousness at the most fundamental level. Alchemy is an endless source of creativity, spiritual sustenance, and pleasure. Passion for the Great Work connects you experientially with Mystery.
Appendix: Dialogue Text
Discourse of a Man with his Ba
probably Middle Kingdom, i.e. the XIIth Dynasty (ca.1938 - 1759 BCE) the present text owes much to recent critical translations; the hieroglyphic text is also available.
(...) documentary remarks ι --- short lacuna ι ------ long lacuna ι { } proposed restorations ι ... incomprehensible ι sections, layout of the dialogue are not part of the original text, neither is punctuation
FIRST section
<first section missing>
<opening lines are torn & incomplete>
-------
{My Ba opened its mouth to me, to answer what I said :} ------ (1) your --- to say ----- {their tongue} will not be partial ----- payment. Their tongue is not partial.
SECOND section
I opened my mouth to my Ba, to answer what it had said :
(5) This is too much for me today,
that my Ba does not converse with me !
It is too great for exaggeration.
it is like deserting me !
Don't go my Ba !
Attend to me in this !
------
--- in my body like a net of cord,
(10) but it will not be able to escape the day of pain !
Behold ! My Ba neglects me. I do not listen to it !
Drags me toward death before {I} come to it,
casts {me} on fire so as to burn me !
------
(15) It shall stay close to me on the day of pain !
It shall stand on that side,
like a praise-singer does.
Such is he who goes forth.
He has brought himself.
O my Ba, foolish to belittle the sorrow due to life,
leads me toward death before I come to it !
Sweeten (20) the West for me !
Is that difficult ?
Life is a passage and trees fall.
Trample on wrong, put down my misery !
May Thoth judge me, he who pacifies the gods !
May Khons defend me, (25) the scribe of truth !
May Re hear my speech, even he who conducts the Bark of the Sun !
May Isdes defend me in the Holy Hall !
For my suffering is pressing, a {weight} too heavy a burden to be borne by me. It would be a sweet relief, if the gods (30) drove off my body's secrets !
THIRD section
What my Ba said to me :
Are you not a man ?
Are you not alive ?
So what do you gain by complaining about life like a lord of wealth ?
FOURTH section
I said :
I have not passed away yet,
but that is not the point !
Surely, if you run away, you will not (35) be cared for,
with every criminal saying : "I will seize you."
Though you are death, your name lives.
Yonder is the place of rest, the heart's goal.
For the West is a dwelling-place, a voyage.
If my Ba listens to me without (40) making difficulties with its heart in accord with me, it shall be happy ! I shall make it reach the West like one who is in his tomb and whose burial a survivor tends.
(43) I shall make a cool shelter over your corpse, so as to make another Ba (45) in oblivion envious ! I shall make a cool shelter, so that you shall not be cold, and will make another Ba who is scorched envious ! I shall quench my thirst at the place at the river over which I made shade, so as to make another Ba who is hungry envious !
But if you lead (50) me toward death in this way, you will not find a place to rest in the West. So be clement, my Ba, my brother, until my heir comes, one who will present the offerings and wait at the tomb on the day of burial, having prepared the bier (55) of the necropolis.
FIFTH section
My Ba opened its mouth to me, to answer what I said :
If you think of burial, it is heartbreak ; it is the gift of tears, causing a man's misery ; it is taking a man from his house, to cast him on the high ground. Then, you will not go up to see (60) the sunlight. They who built in granite, who erected halls in excellent tombs of fine construction, so that the builders should become gods, their offering-stones are desolate, like the oblivious dead, who died on the riverbank for lack of a survivor, (65) when the flood has taken its toll, and the sunlight likewise, to whom only the fishes at the water's edge talk !
Listen to me !
Look, it is good for people to listen.
Follow the happy day and forget worry !
A common man ploughs his plot. He loads his harvest into (70) a boat. He tows the freight, for his feast day is approaching and he saw the darkness of a North wind arise. He is vigilant in the boat when the Sun sets and gets out with his wife and children, and they perish by a pool infested by (75) night with crocodiles. When at last he sat down, he broke out, saying : "I do not weep for that mother, for whom there is no coming from the West to be on earth another time. I grieve for her children broken in the egg, who have seen the face of Khenty (the crocodile-god) before they have lived !"
A common man asks for an early meal. His wife says to him : "It is for supper." He goes outside to relieve himself for a moment. When he turns back to his house, he is like another man, and though his wife pleads with him, he does not hear her, after he has relieved himself, and the household is disraught. (85)
SIXTH section
I opened my mouth to my Ba, to answerwhat it had said : ► FIRST CANTO : the denial of one's Name
Lo ! My name is loathsome.
Lo ! More than carrion smell
on a summer's day when the sky burns.
Lo ! My name is loathsome.
Lo ! More than a catch of fish
(90) on fishing days when the sky burns.
Lo ! My name is loathsome.
Lo ! More than ducks smell.
More than a clump of reeds full of waterfowl.
Lo ! My name is loathsome.
Lo ! More than fishermen smell.
More than the (95) marsh-pools where they fish.
Lo ! My name is loathsome.
Lo ! More than crocodiles smell.
More than a shore-site full of crocodiles.
Lo ! My name is loathsome.
Lo ! More than that of a wife
about whom lies are told to the husband.
Lo ! My name (100) is loathsome.
Lo ! More than that of a strong youth
who is said to belong to one who rejects him.
Lo ! My name is loathsome.
Lo ! More than the town of a king
that utters sedition behind his back.
► SECOND CANTO : the denial of the others
To whom shall I speak today ?
Brothers are bad,
the friends of today do not love.
To whom (105) shall I speak today ?
Hearts are greedy,
everyone robs his neighbour's goods.
{To whom shall I speak today ?}
Kindness has perished,
violence rules all.
To whom shall I speak today ?
One is content with evil,
goodness is debased everywhere.
To whom shall I speak (110) today ?
He who should enrage decent men by his crimes,
is acclaimed by everyone for his evil deeds.
To whom shall I speak today ?
Men plunder.
Everyone robs his neighbour's goods.
To whom shalI I speak today ?
The criminal is an intimate friend.
The brother with whom one dealt is (115) a foe.
To whom shall I speak today ?
Forgotten is the past.
Today one does not help him who helped.
To whom shall I speak today ?
Brothers are evil.
One goes to strangers for affection.
To whom shall I speak today ?
Faces are blank.
Everyone turns his face from (120) his brothers.
To whom shall I speak today ?
Hearts are greedy,
there is no heart to put one's trust in.
To whom shall I speak today ?
Gone are the just.
The land is left over to the evildoers.
To whom shall I speak today ?
One lacks an intimate.
One resorts to darkness (125) to complain.
To whom shall I speak today ?
The cheerful heart is gone
and he with whom one walked is no more.
To whom shall I speak today ?
I am burdened with grief
from lack of one who enters the heart.
To whom shall I speak today ?
Wrong roams the Earth,
(130) and there is no end to it.
► THIRD CANTO : the denial of life & glorification of death
Death is in front of my face today,
{like} health to the sick,
like deliverance from detention.
Death is in front of my face today,
like the fragrance of myrrh,
like a shelter on a windy day.
Death is in front of my face today,
(135) like the fragrance of lotus,
like sitting on the shore of drunkenness.
Death is in front of my face today,
like a well-trodden way,
like coming home from war.
Death is in front of my face today,
like the clearing of the sky,
as when a man grasps (140) what he did not know before.
Death is in front of my face today,
like a man's longing to see his home,
having spent many years in captivity.
► FOURTH CANTO
In truth, he who is yonder will be a living god,
punishing the crime of him who does it.
In truth, he who is yonder will stand in the Bark of the Sun,
making its bounty flow (145) to the temples.
In truth, he who is yonder will be a wise man,
who cannot, when he speaks, be stopped
from appealing to Re !
SEVENTH section
What my Ba said to me :
Throw complaint over the fence,
you my comrade, my brother !
May you make offering upon the brazier, (150) and cling to life by the means you describe ! Yet love me here, having put aside the West !
But when it is wished that you attain the West, that your body joins the earth, then I shall alight after you have become weary, and then we shall dwell together !"
Colophon : It is finished (155) from beginning to end, as it was found in writing.
probably Middle Kingdom, i.e. the XIIth Dynasty (ca.1938 - 1759 BCE) the present text owes much to recent critical translations; the hieroglyphic text is also available.
(...) documentary remarks ι --- short lacuna ι ------ long lacuna ι { } proposed restorations ι ... incomprehensible ι sections, layout of the dialogue are not part of the original text, neither is punctuation
FIRST section
<first section missing>
<opening lines are torn & incomplete>
-------
{My Ba opened its mouth to me, to answer what I said :} ------ (1) your --- to say ----- {their tongue} will not be partial ----- payment. Their tongue is not partial.
SECOND section
I opened my mouth to my Ba, to answer what it had said :
(5) This is too much for me today,
that my Ba does not converse with me !
It is too great for exaggeration.
it is like deserting me !
Don't go my Ba !
Attend to me in this !
------
--- in my body like a net of cord,
(10) but it will not be able to escape the day of pain !
Behold ! My Ba neglects me. I do not listen to it !
Drags me toward death before {I} come to it,
casts {me} on fire so as to burn me !
------
(15) It shall stay close to me on the day of pain !
It shall stand on that side,
like a praise-singer does.
Such is he who goes forth.
He has brought himself.
O my Ba, foolish to belittle the sorrow due to life,
leads me toward death before I come to it !
Sweeten (20) the West for me !
Is that difficult ?
Life is a passage and trees fall.
Trample on wrong, put down my misery !
May Thoth judge me, he who pacifies the gods !
May Khons defend me, (25) the scribe of truth !
May Re hear my speech, even he who conducts the Bark of the Sun !
May Isdes defend me in the Holy Hall !
For my suffering is pressing, a {weight} too heavy a burden to be borne by me. It would be a sweet relief, if the gods (30) drove off my body's secrets !
THIRD section
What my Ba said to me :
Are you not a man ?
Are you not alive ?
So what do you gain by complaining about life like a lord of wealth ?
FOURTH section
I said :
I have not passed away yet,
but that is not the point !
Surely, if you run away, you will not (35) be cared for,
with every criminal saying : "I will seize you."
Though you are death, your name lives.
Yonder is the place of rest, the heart's goal.
For the West is a dwelling-place, a voyage.
If my Ba listens to me without (40) making difficulties with its heart in accord with me, it shall be happy ! I shall make it reach the West like one who is in his tomb and whose burial a survivor tends.
(43) I shall make a cool shelter over your corpse, so as to make another Ba (45) in oblivion envious ! I shall make a cool shelter, so that you shall not be cold, and will make another Ba who is scorched envious ! I shall quench my thirst at the place at the river over which I made shade, so as to make another Ba who is hungry envious !
But if you lead (50) me toward death in this way, you will not find a place to rest in the West. So be clement, my Ba, my brother, until my heir comes, one who will present the offerings and wait at the tomb on the day of burial, having prepared the bier (55) of the necropolis.
FIFTH section
My Ba opened its mouth to me, to answer what I said :
If you think of burial, it is heartbreak ; it is the gift of tears, causing a man's misery ; it is taking a man from his house, to cast him on the high ground. Then, you will not go up to see (60) the sunlight. They who built in granite, who erected halls in excellent tombs of fine construction, so that the builders should become gods, their offering-stones are desolate, like the oblivious dead, who died on the riverbank for lack of a survivor, (65) when the flood has taken its toll, and the sunlight likewise, to whom only the fishes at the water's edge talk !
Listen to me !
Look, it is good for people to listen.
Follow the happy day and forget worry !
A common man ploughs his plot. He loads his harvest into (70) a boat. He tows the freight, for his feast day is approaching and he saw the darkness of a North wind arise. He is vigilant in the boat when the Sun sets and gets out with his wife and children, and they perish by a pool infested by (75) night with crocodiles. When at last he sat down, he broke out, saying : "I do not weep for that mother, for whom there is no coming from the West to be on earth another time. I grieve for her children broken in the egg, who have seen the face of Khenty (the crocodile-god) before they have lived !"
A common man asks for an early meal. His wife says to him : "It is for supper." He goes outside to relieve himself for a moment. When he turns back to his house, he is like another man, and though his wife pleads with him, he does not hear her, after he has relieved himself, and the household is disraught. (85)
SIXTH section
I opened my mouth to my Ba, to answerwhat it had said : ► FIRST CANTO : the denial of one's Name
Lo ! My name is loathsome.
Lo ! More than carrion smell
on a summer's day when the sky burns.
Lo ! My name is loathsome.
Lo ! More than a catch of fish
(90) on fishing days when the sky burns.
Lo ! My name is loathsome.
Lo ! More than ducks smell.
More than a clump of reeds full of waterfowl.
Lo ! My name is loathsome.
Lo ! More than fishermen smell.
More than the (95) marsh-pools where they fish.
Lo ! My name is loathsome.
Lo ! More than crocodiles smell.
More than a shore-site full of crocodiles.
Lo ! My name is loathsome.
Lo ! More than that of a wife
about whom lies are told to the husband.
Lo ! My name (100) is loathsome.
Lo ! More than that of a strong youth
who is said to belong to one who rejects him.
Lo ! My name is loathsome.
Lo ! More than the town of a king
that utters sedition behind his back.
► SECOND CANTO : the denial of the others
To whom shall I speak today ?
Brothers are bad,
the friends of today do not love.
To whom (105) shall I speak today ?
Hearts are greedy,
everyone robs his neighbour's goods.
{To whom shall I speak today ?}
Kindness has perished,
violence rules all.
To whom shall I speak today ?
One is content with evil,
goodness is debased everywhere.
To whom shall I speak (110) today ?
He who should enrage decent men by his crimes,
is acclaimed by everyone for his evil deeds.
To whom shall I speak today ?
Men plunder.
Everyone robs his neighbour's goods.
To whom shalI I speak today ?
The criminal is an intimate friend.
The brother with whom one dealt is (115) a foe.
To whom shall I speak today ?
Forgotten is the past.
Today one does not help him who helped.
To whom shall I speak today ?
Brothers are evil.
One goes to strangers for affection.
To whom shall I speak today ?
Faces are blank.
Everyone turns his face from (120) his brothers.
To whom shall I speak today ?
Hearts are greedy,
there is no heart to put one's trust in.
To whom shall I speak today ?
Gone are the just.
The land is left over to the evildoers.
To whom shall I speak today ?
One lacks an intimate.
One resorts to darkness (125) to complain.
To whom shall I speak today ?
The cheerful heart is gone
and he with whom one walked is no more.
To whom shall I speak today ?
I am burdened with grief
from lack of one who enters the heart.
To whom shall I speak today ?
Wrong roams the Earth,
(130) and there is no end to it.
► THIRD CANTO : the denial of life & glorification of death
Death is in front of my face today,
{like} health to the sick,
like deliverance from detention.
Death is in front of my face today,
like the fragrance of myrrh,
like a shelter on a windy day.
Death is in front of my face today,
(135) like the fragrance of lotus,
like sitting on the shore of drunkenness.
Death is in front of my face today,
like a well-trodden way,
like coming home from war.
Death is in front of my face today,
like the clearing of the sky,
as when a man grasps (140) what he did not know before.
Death is in front of my face today,
like a man's longing to see his home,
having spent many years in captivity.
► FOURTH CANTO
In truth, he who is yonder will be a living god,
punishing the crime of him who does it.
In truth, he who is yonder will stand in the Bark of the Sun,
making its bounty flow (145) to the temples.
In truth, he who is yonder will be a wise man,
who cannot, when he speaks, be stopped
from appealing to Re !
SEVENTH section
What my Ba said to me :
Throw complaint over the fence,
you my comrade, my brother !
May you make offering upon the brazier, (150) and cling to life by the means you describe ! Yet love me here, having put aside the West !
But when it is wished that you attain the West, that your body joins the earth, then I shall alight after you have become weary, and then we shall dwell together !"
Colophon : It is finished (155) from beginning to end, as it was found in writing.
REFERENCES:
Campbell, Joseph (1976), The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Bollingen.
Grof, Christina, Spiritual Emergency
Grof, Stanislav, "Birth Trauma and Its Relation to Mental Illness", Suicide and Ecstasy http://primal-page.com/grof.htm
Miller, Iona, "Chaos As the Universal Solvent."
Miller, Iona, "The Nigredo", from The Modern Alchemist.
Miller, Iona, “Conscious Alchemy,” (2006) consciousalchemy.50megs.com/
Miller, Iona and Graywolf Swinney, (2000) CHAOSOPHY 2000, “Depressive Disorders / Grief and the Consciousness Restructuring Process,” Asklepia Foundation. www.asklepia.org/Chaosophy...onCRP.html
Miller, Iona and Richard Alan Miller (1994), THE MODERN ALCHEMIST: A Guide to Personal Transformation, Phanes Press: Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Perera, S.B., Descent to the Goddess; A Way of Initiation for Women, Inner City Books, Toronto, Canada, 1981.
Roberts, Maureen, Depression: Soul's Quest for Depth, Meaning & Wholeness, http://www.jungcircle.com/depression.html
Focus Issue Journal of Consciousness Studieson Self-Transcending Experience (Narrative & Analysis) Edited by Gregory M. Nixon, Ph.D. Table of Contents Editorial
Editor’s Introduction: Transcending Self-Consciousness PDF Gregory M. Nixon
Articles
Transformations of Self and World I: Modeling a World PDF Christopher Holvenstot
Transformations of Self and World II: Making Meaning PDF Christopher Holvenstot The Shock of the Old: A Narrative of Transpersonal Experience PDF Milenko Budimir
Background Motivations for My Views on Consciousness PDF Chris Nunn
How Often or How Rarely Does A Self-Transcending Experience Occur? PDF Syamala Hari
Self-Transcendence as a Developmental Process in Consciousness PDF Roland Cichowski
A Longitudinal History of Self-Transformation: Psychedelics, Spirituality, Activism and Transformation PDF Phil Wolfson Transcending the Self Through Art: Altered States of Consciousness and Anomalous Events During the Creative Process PDF Tobi Zausner
Breaking Out of One’s Head (& Awakening to the World) PDF Gregory M. Nixon
Campbell, Joseph (1976), The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Bollingen.
Grof, Christina, Spiritual Emergency
Grof, Stanislav, "Birth Trauma and Its Relation to Mental Illness", Suicide and Ecstasy http://primal-page.com/grof.htm
Miller, Iona, "Chaos As the Universal Solvent."
Miller, Iona, "The Nigredo", from The Modern Alchemist.
Miller, Iona, “Conscious Alchemy,” (2006) consciousalchemy.50megs.com/
Miller, Iona and Graywolf Swinney, (2000) CHAOSOPHY 2000, “Depressive Disorders / Grief and the Consciousness Restructuring Process,” Asklepia Foundation. www.asklepia.org/Chaosophy...onCRP.html
Miller, Iona and Richard Alan Miller (1994), THE MODERN ALCHEMIST: A Guide to Personal Transformation, Phanes Press: Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Perera, S.B., Descent to the Goddess; A Way of Initiation for Women, Inner City Books, Toronto, Canada, 1981.
Roberts, Maureen, Depression: Soul's Quest for Depth, Meaning & Wholeness, http://www.jungcircle.com/depression.html
Focus Issue Journal of Consciousness Studieson Self-Transcending Experience (Narrative & Analysis) Edited by Gregory M. Nixon, Ph.D. Table of Contents Editorial
Editor’s Introduction: Transcending Self-Consciousness PDF Gregory M. Nixon
Articles
Transformations of Self and World I: Modeling a World PDF Christopher Holvenstot
Transformations of Self and World II: Making Meaning PDF Christopher Holvenstot The Shock of the Old: A Narrative of Transpersonal Experience PDF Milenko Budimir
Background Motivations for My Views on Consciousness PDF Chris Nunn
How Often or How Rarely Does A Self-Transcending Experience Occur? PDF Syamala Hari
Self-Transcendence as a Developmental Process in Consciousness PDF Roland Cichowski
A Longitudinal History of Self-Transformation: Psychedelics, Spirituality, Activism and Transformation PDF Phil Wolfson Transcending the Self Through Art: Altered States of Consciousness and Anomalous Events During the Creative Process PDF Tobi Zausner
Breaking Out of One’s Head (& Awakening to the World) PDF Gregory M. Nixon
Wrestling with Thantos
Contemplation of death conjures up images of disintegration, dismemberment, flying apart. In consciousness journeys, the dreamer may be sucked through a swirling vortex into a profound blackness--black that is blacker than black--cold and utterly empty. This state of nothingness feels different to individuals, depending on their personal experience with various aspects of death. Thanatos-consciousness may be an encounter with an apocalyptic whirlwind which rends one limb-from-limb, then fragments the sense of self even further down to cellular, genetic, and atomic consciousness. The imagery of apocalypse and natural disaster surfaces as the ego glimpses its immanent doom.
The dance of Death is a whirlwind of transformation. Ego-death is a requirement for opening to the broader realm of transpersonal reality. It heralds a change in the form of consciousness. The crux of this consciousness process is reaching the creative state of undifferentiated consciousness. It is in this state that old primal self images dissolve, and from it the new ones form. It is a death because at the deepest levels we define ourselves by this image and what it has created and frozen into our lives.
It ultimately means the dismemberment of our former personality and life patterns. We are it and it is our death when it dissolves into the infinite possibilities of chaotic consciousness. This unformed consciousness--which we often mistake for death-- is really the essence of our vitality and life force. It is the energy we can use to recreate ourselves in every instant of time. It reaches our awareness through dreams (Hypnos) and the flow of our imagination. Yielding to ego-death leads to this consciousness, whether it comes through therapy or a spontaneous near-death experience (N.D.E.) or a closely witnessing death.
This consciousness can result from a brush with one's own death or that of another. Dissolving is a death that opens into a field of unformed consciousness with infinite creative possibilities. But we must go through the fear and pain which surrounds this experience to reach this consciousness state. There may be sensations of falling, or floating-falling, or flying off in all directions at once. Eventually all parts of the self are dismembered by the centrifugal forces experienced in the vortex. With a sweep of His scythe, the unseen specter of death cuts us down utterly. Sensations of spinning and being drawn deeper create intense dizziness and disorientation, even nausea. Dismemberment in the spiral often leads to a sense of being "no-thing."
The experience of another's natural death is awesome, as is that of birth. Being there, one finds that at that amazing moment there is a giant dilation in the flow of time; a window opens into that other vast realm which is slow to close. It may capture part of oneself for a time, creating a mini-death, or death-in-life. The changes which ensue may be voluntary or involuntary. It may trigger a regression as well as a profound opening to transpersonal awareness.
Particularly when a parent or child of ours dies, we are permanently changed in ways we may never have imagined. Some of them have to do with what we imagine or believe the nature of death and an afterlife to be.
In myth, Thanatos or Death, naturally supplied Hades with his subjects. Thanatos is the son of Night, who in turn was born from Chaos. The godform of Thanatos is pictured alternatively as dressed in a black robe holding the fatal sword, or as a winged spirit, resembling his twin brother Hypnos, or Sleep. Hypnos also lives in the underworld. He induces the little death of sleep with his magic wand or by fanning his dark wings. In eastern mysticism, death is personified in feminine form as the dreaded and dreadful goddess Kali. Her cult was portrayed in the blockbuster movie INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM.
Graveyards or cemeteries are the haunts of this bloodthirsty goddess. Her image is built of a myriad of skulls and bones. Tantric Buddhists contemplate her, and their own personal demise, by visualizations of rotting corpses, or meditating in graveyards where the remains are strewn about. They seek liberation of their human souls through immortality.
Shiva, the Destroyer, consort of Kali Ma is the masculine form of this force. Shiva is the prince of demons, who brings pestilence and death. Paradoxically, he is also the slayer of demons. He is the dissolver of outworn forms--destroyer of all things. Shiva's dance is a process of universal creation and destruction, a symbol of the reconciliation of opposites. This powerful unbridled erratic force also carries archetypal healing capacity within its pattern. This archetypal drive was the theme of Gore Vidal's KALKI.
In our modern society, questions of life and death create issues such as moral positions on suicide, abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment. These questions bear directly ont who we are and shall be. Mankind is also wiping our entire species from the face of the earth daily. The Biblical injunction "Thou shalt not kill," has been misinterpreted as "Thou shalt not murder thy fellow human beings," while the pointless slaughter of animals for exploitation continues.
Spiritual teachers tell us that all life is sacred. As an archetype, Thanatos represents a fundamental soul-quality present in the psyche. From this perspective all life aims toward natural transformation and recycling through the process of death. The soul gains knowledge of itself, not only through love, intellect, and madness, but also by reflection on the great unknowable which lies past the gates of death.
The sorcerer's apprentice Carlos Casteneda was cautioned to keep death as his constant companion, always referring any powerful decisions to this touchstone of meaning. How differently we might act if we reflected on our actions in light of the constant possibility of immanent death. Psychologist Sigmund Freud spent as much of his career reflecting on death and the physical pathology of the body as he did obsessing on sexual motivation. He not only contemplated it in his patients' behaviors and fantasies, but in his own as well. He was phobic about cancer, which he later contracted in the mouth and jaws from years of smoking. As the father of depth psychology which focuses on the symbolic underworld, he introduced us to the world of Thanatos and Hades.
Freud pointed out that "pathologizing" is a metaphorical language of the psyche, allowing it to deliteralize the events of our daily life. Psychopathologies had been considered trivial, but Freud showed that they contained a previously invisible depth of meaning. The nature of that meaning revealed the profound relationship of death to life. Dreams, symptoms, and afflictions became the inroads into the dark realm of the subconscious. Freud resurrected the intimate symbolic connection between soul and death for Westerners.
Eastern religions had never lost this connection. He showed how the perspectives of Hades and Thanatos dissolve the organic, social, and emotional aspects of human life. Fantasies of putrefaction, decay, sickness, compulsion, and suicidal impulses disclose this psychological perspective which seeks deepening. Freud ended his own life enraptured or fascinated with this train of thought.
In Tarot, the Death card means being stuck in old patterns, needing to eliminate restrictive habits, beliefs, blocks and outworn ways. This painful uprooted may involve eliminating people or things from your past. The uprooting of habits is surgically cutting yourself free for entrance, assimilation and integration into a new state. It is liberation and renewal which makes new growth possible. Deep emotions can be like a "little death", as in intense sexual experience. Giving up one's sense of self means merging with another or Cosmos, cutting through superficialities, butting to the bone. Our energy is radically transformed from one shape or form to another.
PHYSICAL FORM
The food-chain extends beyond the notion of "Nature red-in-tooth-and-claw" to the cosmic and intergalactic levels. As in the sea, the 'little fish' are eaten by the 'bigger fish,' and Death awaits all forms in their own time-scale. By 1998, astrophysicists were fairly confident they had detected a massive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, and they dubbed it the Great Annihilator. Black holes are massive stellar objects whose gravitational fields cause the space and time around them to fold in upon itself—creating a so-called singularity from which nothing, not even light, can escape. Fountains of ejected antimatter were detected by 2001, and despite competing theories, such as gravastars, black holes are now widely presumed to lie concealed in the hearts of most, if not all galaxies.
The galactic core is viewed from Earth through the constellation Sagittarius, and the Annihilator is known as Sgr A Star. Something hugely massive is at the center of the Milky Way, acting like a galactic puppeteer by providing the tremendous gravity needed to tug at stars with invisible strings. If it is in fact a black hole, then it must meet the technical definition laid out by Einstein's general theory of relativity: All its mass must be locked and hidden inside a sphere known as an event horizon, beyond which nothing -- not even light -- can escape. Just before the matter swirls into a black hole, scientists predict it approaches the speed of light and become superheated, giving off X-rays prior to entering the event horizon.
The Annihilator, a gravitational monster, has the mass of 2.6 million suns, and is smaller than an atom. The temperatures in its vicinity top 10 billion degrees. It creates vast luminosities in its area, accelerating matter to .5 the speed of light. But once that matter crosses the black hole's "event horizon," not even light can escape the violent gravitational well.
Tidal force creates a whirlpool, a giant accretion disk of "snacks" to feed the hungy gaping maw -- sending the "hole food" into the veritable jaws of Death. Magnetic fields ripple through the large clouds of dust. Antimatter shoots up from the core straight out of the disk for around 5,000 light years, then annihilates with ordinary matter in gargantuan bursts of energy. It sucks in matter and belches radiation. Depending on the rate of matter flow, the massive pressures also create a nursery for new stars, which is more or less active at various points in our galactic evolution. There are what are called "Seyfert" and cosmic jewel "starburst phases" in that cyclic process. The black hole provides star-forming shocks which compress surrounding gas and dust clouds to the point of star formation. In Morris' theory, the galactic core goes through Seyfert, starburst and quiescent periods, which might mythopoetically be related to the cosmic cycles known as Days and Nights of Brahm.
The Milky Way is now fairly quiescent. The Annihilator is 24,000 light-years from Earth. But astronomers had not been able to rule out another possibility, a dense cluster of dark stars. Then, in 1999, NASA launched the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Chandra is a telescope that orbits the earth in space. Instead of seeing light like our eyes do, Chandra sees X-rays. The astronomers knew that as stars fall into black holes, they give off X-rays as they're being ripped apart. The hapless matter, before plunging into the abyss, becomes super dense and hot, releasing intense X-ray emissions.
So if they looked at the Milky Way's center with Chandra, and saw the right kind of X-rays, they could feel sure there was a black hole. By September, 2001, direct observations offered the first authoritative evidence that a black hole resides in the heart of our galaxy, The Chandra detected an X-ray flare leap from the center of the Milky Way, presenting almost conclusive proof of the scientific oddity. Large flares periodically erupt from the black hole as chunks of matter fall into it. The intense burst, heralding the fatal plunge of matter into oblivion, allowed astronomers to estimate the size of the black hole lurking in the central Milky Way at no larger than the distance between the sun and Earth. But astronomers had not been able to rule out another possibility, a dense cluster of dark stars.
The Milky Way's black hole has been described as the 'Holy Grail' of astrophysics. Its edge, the event horizon, "separates our Universe from another world", says Melia. "Some say that when you cross the event horizon, time becomes space and space becomes time."
The Great Attractor is another cosmic structure, drawing or apparently devouring matter. During the 1980s, a group of astronomers, dubbed the "Seven Samurai," examined these peculiar velocities and determined that a "Great Attractor" is pulling on every galaxy within a region of space 300 million light-years across. The Great Attractor is believed to be located in the direction of the constellation Virgo.
The local galaxies, including the Milky Way, appear to be rushing toward it at approximately 700 kilometers per second. On the opposite side of the Great Attractor, the Samurai have identified several galaxies moving toward us, which indicates that the source of the gravitational pull is a relatively small, supermassive object. In the 1980's, astronomers Alan Dressler, Sandra Faber, David Burstein and Gary Wegner had investigated thee motions of the Virgo cluster of galaxies, the Local Group (which contains the Milky Way), and the Hydra-Centaurus supercluster, and discovered that these vast collections of thousands of galaxies were also being tugged, gravitationally, by what appeared to be an even larger collection of matter.
This collection of matter, which they estimated was located 3 times farther away than the Virgo cluster (which is 77 million light years distant) in the direction of the constellation Centaurus, was dubbed the Great Attractor. The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are the dominant structures in a galaxy cluster called the Local Group which is, in turn, an outlying member of the Virgo supercluster. Andromeda--about 2.2 million light-years from the Milky Way--is speeding toward our galaxy at 200,000 miles per hour. This motion can only be accounted for by gravitational attraction, even though the mass that we can observe is not nearly great enough to exert that kind of pull. The only thing that could explain the movement of Andromeda is the gravitational pull of a lot of unseen mass--perhaps the equivalent of 10 Milky Way-size galaxies--lying between the two galaxies.
The team of astronomers even found that galaxies located on the other side of the Great Attractor were being pulled in by it. In other words, rather than these collections of galaxies expanding with the rest of the universe, they were being held back very slightly by the gravitational pull of the Great Attractor. Unfortunately, much of the predicted mass in the Great Attractor is hidden behind the obscurring dust and gas in the plane of our Milky Way, so it is very hard for astronomers to study this collection of objects directly; or to independently confirm that it is indeed there in the first place!
Somewhere behind the Milky Way disk, for example, are crucial parts of the two biggest structures in the nearby universe: the Perseus-Pisces supercluster of galaxies and the "Great Attractor," a gargantuan agglomeration of matter whose existence has been inferred from the motions of thousands of galaxies through space. Observations also show a tantalizing number of bright and nearby galaxies in the general direction of the disk, suggesting there are many others that go unseen.
Without knowing what lies in our blind spot, researchers cannot fully map the matter in our corner of the cosmos. This in turn prevents them from settling some of the most important questions in cosmology: How large are cosmic structures? How did they form? What is the total density of matter in the universe? The unseen mass inhabiting the voids between the galaxies and clusters of galaxies amounts to perhaps 10 times more than the visible matter. Even so, adding this invisible material to luminous matter brings the average mass density of the universe still to within only10-30 percent of the critical density needed to "close" the universe. Might the universe be "open" after all?
Cosmologists continue to debate this question, just as they are also trying to figure out the nature of the missing mass, or "dark matter." and "dark energy." A River of Galaxies, to rival that of the River Styx is flowing through interstellar space. This mass migration includes the Local Group, the Virgo Cluster, the Hydra -- Centaurus Supercluster, and other groups and clusters for a distance of at least 60 Mpc up and downstream from us. It is as if a great river of galaxies (including our own) is flowing with a swift current of 600 km/s toward Centaurus.
Calculations indicate that ~1016 solar masses concentrated 65 Mpc away in the direction of Centaurus would account for this. This mass concentration has been dubbed the Great Attractor. Detailed investigation of that region of the sky (see adjacent image of the galaxy cluster Abell 3627) finds 10 times too little visible matter to account for this flow, again implying a dominant gravitational role for unseen or dark matter. Thus, the Great Attractor is certainly there (because we see its gravitational influence), but the major portion of the mass that must be there cannot be seen in our telescopes.
Are these megastructures contemporary analogies of those from the Bible? John describes the constellation Virgo and Hydra in Revelation 12:14 evidenced by the description he (John)used in the second half of the sign that he describes in the heavens. Indeed the constellation Hydra, sometimes called "Hydra the Serpent or the Dragon" stands before the constellation in the early morning hours in Israel in the months of September/October (see Job 26:13; Ps. 74:14; and Is. 27: 1).
Here John also describes how a third of the stars of the heavens are drawn by the tail of the dragon and cast to the earth. [Job 26:13 By his spirit he hath garnished the heavens; his hand hath formed the crooked serpent. Psa 74:14 Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness. Isa 27:1 In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.] Is this mythopoetic or just a meaningless bit of information or was John given some insight to the powers and design of the cosmos? In the July, 1993 issue of Astronomy Magazine there is an article entitled, "Cosmic Tug of War" by David Burstein and Peter L. Manly. In the article, they describe this hidden force found in the constellation Centarus.
This "Great Attractor" of hidden dark matter is located in and at the very tail of "Hydra the Serpent or the Dragon." But what is most interesting is how they describe just what this "Great Attractor" is attracting or drawing to it. "Whereas galaxy clusters contain many galaxies in a small region, the Great Attractor has its many galaxies spread over an enormous volume of space. As we see it, over five thousand galaxies in the Great Attractor splay across 60 degrees of the sky, covering one-third of the southern hemisphere."
This truth about the "Great Attractor" was not officially discovered and released by scientists until 1987, but John describes this sign in the heavens the same way exactly 1900 years earlier (Rev. 12:1-4). "Our local group of galaxies, which consist of our galaxy, Andromeda, and some 30 smaller galaxies is moving at about 630 km per second towards this Great Attractor." That is about 391.5 miles per second or about 23,488.25 miles per hour. We are being drawn toward the constellation Centarus at the tail of Hydra, which is also toward the southern Crux (The Cross). As the seven discoverers of this Great Attractor have concluded, "we will not stop falling into Virgo Supercluster and the enormous mass of the Great Attractor will increasingly draw us towards it."
As we get closer and closer to the Great Attractor, it will increase its pull upon the earth. The earth and the local group that it is part of, will be caught up in this celestial tug of war. The powers that are at work in our universe are absolutely awesome. The Great Attractor is about 200 million light-years away [see "The Large-Scale Streaming of Galaxies," by Alan Dressler; Scientific American, September 1987]. The Local Group seems to be caught in a cosmic tug of war between the Great Attractor and the equally distant Perseus-Pisces supercluster, which is on the opposite side of the sky. To know which will win the war, astronomers need to know the mass of the hidden parts of these structures. Both are components of a long chain of galaxies known as the Supergalactic Plane.
The formation of such a megastructure is thought to depend on the nature of the invisible dark matter that makes up the bulk of the universe. Chains of galaxies should be more likely in a universe dominated by particles of so-called hot dark matter (such as massive neutrinos) rather than by cold dark matter (such as axions or other hypothetical particles). But astronomers cannot distinguish between these two possibilities until they map the structures fully. The true richness and significance of this cluster has become clear in the recent searches. Kraan-Korteweg, with Patrick A. Woudt of the European Southern Observatories in Garching, Germany, has discovered another 600 galaxies in the cluster. The observed velocities of the galaxies suggest that the cluster is very massive indeed--on par with the well-known Coma cluster, an agglomeration 10,000 times as massive as our galaxy.
At long last, astronomers have seen the center of the Great Attractor. Along with surrounding clusters, this discovery could fully explain the observed galaxy motions in the nearby universe. The Milky Way, too, has its prey: in 1994, when Rodrigo A. Ibata, then at the University of British Columbia, Gerard F. Gilmore of the University of Cambridge and Michael J. Irwin of the Royal Greenwich Observatory in Cambridge, England, who were studying stars in our Milky Way, accidentally found a galaxy right on our doorstep. Named the Sagittarius dwarf, it is now the closest known galaxy--just 80,000 light-years away from the solar system, less than half the distance of the next closest, the Large Magellanic Cloud. In fact, it is located well inside our galaxy, on the far side of the galactic center.
Because the Sagittarius dwarf lies directly behind the central bulge of the Milky Way, it cannot be seen in direct images. Its serendipitous detection was based on velocity measurements of stars: the researchers spotted a set of stars moving differently from those in our galaxy. By pinpointing the stars with this velocity, looking for others at the same distance and compensating for the light of known foreground stars, they mapped out the dwarf. It extends at least degrees from end to end, making it the largest apparent structure in the sky after the Milky Way itself. Its angular size corresponds to a diameter of at least 28,000 light-years, about a fifth of the size of our galaxy, even though the dwarf is only a thousandth as massive. Though it rarely comes through participation in the food chain nowadays, at the human scale, annihilation through natural or accidental death is the obvious physical expression of this Thanatos force.
DEATH has often been avoided or glossed over by Tarot commentators, who would prefer to stick to the symbolic meaning rather than stark reality; and yet somehow our culture is obsessed with death. Our society is making strides towards overcoming the phobic or denial response through such infrastructures as the hospice movement.
Death and Dying is not surrounded by such taboo as it once was. The fact is that death is a natural part of life, and contains its own beauty, meaning, and vision. Symptoms associated with this archetype of being seized down into the underworld, not only include death, but also appear in coma and the sleep disorders of Narcolepsy and Catalepsy. In narcolepsy, a person falls profoundly asleep with no warning during any activity. It is characterized by specific brain patterns. Catalepsy literally means "to seize down." Consciousness and feeling are suddenly and temporarily lost, while the muscles become rigid as in rigor mortis. There is no response to external stimuli, so in the past cataleptics were mistaken for dead and sometimes buried.
Edgar Allen Poe used catalepsy as the theme in PREMATURE BURIAL, playing on the horrific primal fear of "living death." In physics, Thanatos may be symbolized in the natural universe by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, also known as the Law of Entropy or Disorder. Briefly, this law describes how in the long-run there is certainty that order will give way to disorder in any closed system, macrocosmic or microcosmic. All earthly life involves organisms which function as closed systems, which are subject to the loss of order. Therefore, physical death is inevitable. That which takes form, ultimately dissolves that form and dies. In thermodynamics, entropy means that all energy seeks to become evenly distributed. It diffuses toward a neutral condition of "heat death." In human and universal terms, warmth means life. To retain the will to live as humans we resist diffusion, attempting to remain orderly, organized, stable, and solid. Spiritual practice and discipline is one means of increasing order, or tapping into the life-promoting forces of negentropy (see XI THEMIS).
On more mundane levels we watch our diets to be sure we take in enough life-giving nutrient to sustain mental and emotional stability. Yet, despite our conscious efforts, the reaper comes closer each and every day. There is a primal instinct within us which yearns for that final goal of life, that great moment when eternity yawns wide to receive us. Freud called it Thanatos, and contrasted it with life-promoting Eros.
Freud noticed the "longing" and drivenness toward death, which appears as self-destructive tendencies and aggression toward others. This destructive urge is primal. Both Jung and Freud recognized the archetypal "murderer and suicide in us." It surfaces in images of grisly, destructive acts. Thanatos functions within the cellular and genetic level. Every day thousands of worn out cells die and are replaced through the process of tissue regeneration. Our entire body is replaced about every seven years. Another little "death" comes as sleep each night. Thanatos inhabits our dreams as well, with images of death, torture, mutilation, and rotting. Then in the morning we are resurrected to a seemingly new life.
EMOTIONAL IMAGE
The term `threshold' evokes images of entering and leaving, passages, crossings and change. It marks the point at which choices and decisions must be made in order to move on, and it would be unusual to think of it as a place to stay, a place of permanent existence. There are, however, situations in the lives of people in which transitions from an old situation to a new one, one social position to another, are hampered or cannot be completed successfully. Individuals who are caught in between two stages of development, who do not hold clearly defined positions within their social system, feel marginal, excluded, without identity nor influence.
A number of anthropological studies (by Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner and Mary Douglas) have provided insight into forms of threshold existence (liminality) in modern society and have accounted for the difficulties that individuals have to face in these positions. They have also shown, however, that individuals who are caught in such positions are usually provided with a clear view on the social structure from which they are excluded, and that they carry the potential for critique of the norms that prevail within that structure.
The threshold symbolizes an in-between position. For individuals in in-between positions, as well as the conflicts that are caused by such positions, the literal meaning of `threshold' hardly needs any specification: it is the sill of a doorway, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, which has to be crossed when entering a house. It indicates the point at which the public outside world ends and the private, familial inside world begins. In more general terms it marks the place, line or border at which a passage can be made from one space to another.
Such a spatial structure has an essential influence on social interactions: relationships and social status are negotiated at the threshold, one is either rejected from or welcomed to the other side. To gain admission and step over the threshold into someone else's space means to submit to the rules that are in force in that place Social organisation decides whether we are included in or excluded from a social group, and political or religious reasons or social rank can account for the identification of a person with a certain group and space
As these examples show, the threshold can be interpreted as a symbol of division, which determines social structure and our notion of `self' and `other'. As a literal and figurative point of passage, however, the threshold also stands for change: one can step over the threshold, enter new territory and leave everything else behind. Such a change can be a shift in time, as in the expression `at the threshold of a new century'. It can also designate a decisive moment in one's personal development (`on the threshold of womanhood'), which means that one separates from a familiar situation and enters a new stage in life. In a religious context the threshold is a crucial element in initiation rites, indicating the passage from the profane to the sacred.
`Initiation,' furthermore, is a term that is not exclusively used in a religious context, but appears in all fields of social life, referring to a special ritual that opens the door, as it were, to a social group or new period in life. In a psychological context the threshold symbolises a point at which a decision must be made. Decision-making can be experienced as the overcoming of a difficulty or crisis, as the necessity to take a decisive step. The eventual change will provide the protagonist with new knowledge, he or she will undergo a development and be different from the person that he or she was before the change. A famous example of such a change can be found in the Book of Genesis: because of their decision to eat from the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve are driven out of the Garden of Eden, which is both a territorial passage and a figurative transition as their status changes through their loss of innocence.
This is the mythological threshold where mankind lost its immortality and entered the dominion of the Lord of Death, time and mortality. One is either "in" the paradisical garden, or "out" of the Garden. And it is guarded by the Dweller on the Threshold whose sword will cut one down for trying to enter without mystic cache. Decision-making is also an essential narrative element in fairy tales, where a vast number of princes or dragon killers or Bluebeard's wives have been standing in front of gates, caves and locked doors and have been losing their nerves about a decision that would bring either life or death, disaster or eternal happiness. It is interesting to note that decisions usually trigger off an irreversible process, which in many cases turns the threshold into a point of no return. Last but not least one might also think of the magical component of the threshold in superstitious beliefs. In some cultures the threshold is considered to be a dwelling place of ghosts and the souls of the dead, who lead an existence in between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
This is probably one reason why in some cultures and religions it is forbidden to step on it. In the majority of the examples above the threshold represents a point or border that divides two different elements and at which a passage can be made from the one to the other, or which simply marks a change or development in time or status. That a passage or a change is in fact a much more complex process has been argued by the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957), who investigated changes in the lives and statuses of people and the cultural or religious rites related to these changes. Van Gennep distinguishes between different sorts of changes in the life of a person and classifies them as `separation' (such as death), `transition' (e.g. pregnancy) and `incorporation' (e.g. marriage).
Van Gennep points out that actually every change consists of these three forms, or phases: phase 1 phase 2 phase 3 separation transition incorporation (from an old situation) (passage) (into the new situation). To perceive death, for example, as a separation (from life) rather than an incorporation (into an afterlife) clearly depends on the point of view that ascribes to one phase more importance than to the other, and also on cultural and religious beliefs. Van Gennep shows a special interest in the transitional phase: it is the period in which a person is in-between the former and the future social position or magico-religious state. In order to illustrate his point he refers to those early times in human history when countries did not border directly on each other but were divided by a neutral zone. In this zone travellers found themselves in a special situation as neither laws of the adjoining countries applied - they "wavered between two worlds", as it were (Gennep 18). Like this territorial passage, non-territorial transitions also consist of a moment or period of uncertainty, a liminal period.
Such a period is accompanied by, or equal to, a life-crisis. `Crisis' in this context is an interesting choice of vocabulary and could easily be misinterpreted. Van Gennep does not refer to the term in a strictly psychological sense. He uses it to indicate the unstable social or magico-religious position of the person who undergoes a change: during the transition the state of that person remains uncertain as he or she has been separated from a clearly defined state in the past and has not been incorporated yet into a clearly defined future state. Such a state that evades definition is potentially dangerous, because it represents a moment or period in which the routines of life are disrupted. As one of the consequences, the person undergoing the change has no guidelines anymore to hold on to, which might not only have a disturbing effect on that person but also on his or her surrounding.
As the title of his work, The Rites of Passage, suggests, Van Gennep was not only interested in the changes in the lives of people but also in the rituals that accompany these changes. These rituals have the function to give personal, social and cultural significance to a transition. They cushion the disturbances (such as a definition vacuum) that are caused by a change and help to incorporate the individual into a new group and return him to the customary routines of life (Kimball, introduction ix).
Van Gennep's theories were further elaborated by the anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner, however, did not only focus on the investigation of ritual processes in the lives of individuals but developed a more general theory of socio-cultural processes which he applied to changes and generative processes in modern societies. He primarily concentrated on the aspect of structure in Van Gennep's concept of passage. Parallel to Van Gennep's distinction between separation - transition - incorporation, Turner differentiates between structure - anti-structure - structure.
Turner does not define structure in the Lévi-Straussian sense as a system of `unconscious' logical categories, but refers to it simply as "social structure", that is, a differentiated system of mutually dependent institutions and structural positions which may or may not be hierarchically ordered (Turner, Ritual 166). Individuals who are part of social structure are defined by their social positions, statuses and roles. Due to their position in a social network they are expected to act in accordance with certain customary norms and ethical standards bound up with their social position and the social system as a whole. As soon as the state of a person is subject to change, such as in the process of maturation or at the initiation into another social position or group, this person is detached from its former position in the social structure, undergoes a process in which his or her structural attributes become temporarily ambiguous or neutralised, and finally re-emerges into social structure, usually (but not generally) at a higher status level.
Turner describes the attributes of a liminar (i.e. a person in a threshold position) as necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. (Turner, Ritual 95) Turner describes liminars also as structurally "invisible", by which he means that they are "no longer classified and yet not classified" (Turner, "Betwixt" 6) and therefore hard to grasp by a mind that is trained to perceive only clearly-defined objects: The subject of passage ritual is, in the liminal period, structurally, if not physically, "invisible."
As members of society, most of us see only what we expect to see, and what we expect to see is what we are conditioned to see when we have learned the definitions and classifications of our culture. A society's secular definitions do not allow for the existence of a not-boy-not-man, which is what a novice in a male puberty rite is (if he can be said to be anything). (Turner, "Betwixt" 6) The anti-structural period described by Turner is clearly identical with Van Gennep's definition of a transitional period. In his analysis of anti-structure Turner goes a step further than Van Gennep, however, when he starts to focus on other forms of liminality. Basically, he distinguishes between three forms of liminality. The first is ritual liminality, which forms the major point of interest in Van Gennep's works.
Ritual liminality forms the central element in transitional processes (such as maturation) and in any kind of initiation ceremony. Ritual liminality always implies the re-incorporation of the liminar into social structure. The two other forms of liminality are outsiderhood and marginality. Unlike ritual liminality, outsiderhood and marginality usually are semi-permanent or permanent forms of anti-structural existence, which means that the re-incorporation of the liminar (i.e. the outsider or marginal) back into structure is often difficult, impossible or unwanted.
Outsiderhood is defined by Turner as a condition in which the individual is either permanently or temporarily "set outside the structural arrangements of a given social system, (...) or voluntarily setting himself apart from the behaviour of status-occupying, role-playing members of that system" (Turner, Dramas 233). Monastic orders, for example, show characteristics of anti-structure in that they emphasise the unimportance of status, property and other cultural differentiae. A monk has in common with a pilgrim that both retreat from social structure to enter "a stage of reflection" (Turner, "Betwixt" 14). A pilgrimage, however, is a ritual process which is usually limited in time and ends when the pilgrim returns to his or her everyday life.
A monastic retreat, on the other hand, is a liminal form of existence which has become a permanent condition. According to Turner, also shamans, prophets, hippies and gypsies count as outsiders, because they lead a life at the boundaries of or opposed to the prevailing social structure. Another representative of outsiderhood is the artist (whom Turner also calls `edgeman' Ritual 128), who is careful not to be associated with established social structures and tries to resist classification. Outsiderhood, in short, is a condition in which an individual is located outside social structure, usually with no intention or ability to re-integrate. Marginals, on the other hand, are "simultaneously members (...) of two or more social groups whose social definitions and cultural norms are distinct from, and often even opposed to, one another" (Turner, Dramas 233).
Turner's definition of marginals is mainly based on an earlier sociological study of marginality by Everett V. Stonequist, who describes a marginal person as an "individual who through migration, education, marriage, or some other influence leaves one social group or culture without making a satisfactory adjustment to another and who finds himself on the margin of each but a member of neither" (Stonequist 2-3).
Migrant foreigners, persons of mixed ethnic origin or women in a changed, non-traditional role, to name but a few, belong to the group of marginals. Due to their special social condition, marginals are highly conscious/self-conscious individuals who produce a high number of writers, artists and philosophers. The social significance of the marginal is summarised in Stonequist's work as follows: The marginal man is a personality type that arises at the time and place where, out of the conflict of races and cultures, new societies, new peoples and cultures are coming into existence.
The fate that condemns him to live, at the same time, in two worlds is the same which compels him to assume, in relation to the worlds in which he lives, the rôle of a cosmopolitan and a stranger. Inevitably he becomes, relatively to his cultural milieu, the individual with the wider horizon, the keener intelligence, the more detached and rational viewpoint. (Robert E. Park, introduction, Stonequist xvii-xviii) Marginals, like ritual liminars, are betwixt and between clearly defined social states, but, unlike them, they have no prospect of a final stable resolution of their ambiguity: they will never be fully integrated into the one side or the other (Turner, Dramas 233).
This ambiguous position distinguishes marginals from outsiders: while the former is situated in between different or opposing social groups, the latter retreats to a position at the boundaries of the established social system. Even though anti-structure might show in different disguises (as ritual liminality, outsiderhood or marginality), its characteristics are often identical: liminars are symbolically or virtually bereft of status, which, consequentially, implies that they are also bereft of all the rights that go with status. This has two implications: first of all, due to the absence of a hierarchy of status positions, there is equality among liminars. This means that the occupants of one and the same anti-structural zone (such as monks in a monastic community, or hippies, or initiants in an initiation ritual) are aware of their equal positions.
Secondly, Turner ascribes to ritual liminars, outsiders and marginals a positive force, because liminal existence, whether temporary or permanent, forces the liminar to reconsider central values of his or her culture. Especially art, which best develops in the interstices or on the edges of society, is a medium which questions the prevailing social structure, and which is provoking, paradoxical, unusual, and above all, stimulating critical thought. The social counter-position allows liminars to have a clear view on the structure from which they are excluded, and although these individuals are usually bereft of privileges and in a condition of powerlessness, they carry the potential of critique of the norms of exactly that social structure. The danger that was ascribed to liminal personae by Van Gennep, in that they have lost their social attributes and therefore their guideline, takes a different shape in Turner's concept: anti-structure is not only "a stage of reflection" (Turner, "Betwixt" 14) but a "realm of pure possibility" (Turner, "Betwixt" 7) in which new ideas and concepts are stimulated and generated, representing a danger to those who hold positions of power and command in social structure.
Babbitt argues that in many cases, people must undergo personal transformation in order to conceive of themselves as fully human. Babbitt uses the term "personal transformation" to mean a transformative liberatory shift in consciousness. She thinks that the necessity of such shifts is particularly clear in cases of systemic oppression, where members of oppressed groups must think outside the (oppressive) interpretative framework provided for them. Babbitt argues that in order for members of deeply oppressed groups to gain access to their objective interests they must sometimes undergo liberatory personal transformation. Such a transformation would include the sort of change that a person who has been deeply discriminated against might have to undergo in order to think of herself as possessing inherent dignity.
Knowledge is a road to some practical or theoretical success while understanding is necessary for mastering any situation either in a real or a virtual world. At the same time understanding is only one of the hypostases of reflectivity, that is why not understanding is to be taught but reflectivity. In this connection another metaphor could have been used: anti-reflectivity, defence of impulsivity against reflectivity is the road to the wrong. And as soon as that second road enters our consideration, the term `reflectivity' and the corresponding notion begin approaching the topics of Law and Morality. It is only reflectivity that brings man to an experience of living with dignity, the idea of meeting death with dignity, an experience of loving concrete human beings along with loving one's own life and the whole human race.
Life, Death, Love make the experiential nucleus of our individual existence (Ustin, 1997), and this nucleus being present, the other few central meanings of existence will be manifested: Truth, Freedom, Beauty, the Good as the opposition of the Evil, maybe Fate as one's inevitable Future. To come to mastering all these existential meanings it is not enough to live one's natural life hoping for all this coming to the subjectivity of a "myself" as an individual. Just the opposite: one is to exercise hard, but exercise hard not in a ready-made knowledge, not even in a ready-made understanding but in reflectivity as the link connecting the lived experience with the gnoseological image under mastery (Kornienko, 1991).
In reflectivity the image is tinted by man's individual experience, and as for experience, it does not immediately change while something more important is happening to it: it is our attitude towards it that is getting changed. In this way we are changed ourselves, and this change is one to the better if the process of reflectivity serves socially and morally adequate aims. Reflectivity is the only instrument for an individual and a collective to become wiser, kinder and purer. In alchemy, the images of figurative death appear during the operation called mortificatio. This symbolic experience of death has to do with darkness, defeat, torture, mutilation, death, rotting, penance, and abstinence--denial of the body.
Emotionally it means the primitive, violent outbursts, resentments, and pleasure and power demands of Poseidon-consciousness must die for the process of transmutation to occur. Paradoxically, we must make ourselves miserable for the process of transmutation to proceed. Then the dark images change to positive ones of growth, resurrection and rebirth. In consciousness journeys, we find fear is the primary agent of mortificatio. Moving toward the fear and pain--deepening it--brings one closer to the tranformation.
Images of feces, excrement, overflowing toilets are found in dreams and during spontaneous journeys in Thanatos-consciousness. It feels like defeat and failure. Yet, to resist seems like madness--in fact, it induces madness. Those with near-death experiences tell us that to embrace death brings about deeper meaning and purpose in life. Rotting corpses, decapitation, amputation, creeping, crawling worms and snakes, and particularly noxious odors like the stench of graves are images which are reported again and again. It is truly a journey through "the Valley of the Shadow of Death."
Thus the psyche depicts the decay of outworn forms in preparation for new. It can be a voluntary death, giving up the old order for the sake of wholeness, the incorruptible body that grows from death. The infantile, personalistic ego is eclipsed. The journey to the land of the dead (collective unconscious) opens one to transpersonal life. When we sit quietly we notice that images come--and images go, of their own accord. They are spontaneously created and destroyed through the psychic process. Some of these images are projections.
When we withdraw them from their external "hooks" and re-own them, reabsorb them, they dissolve and "die." This furthers individuation. Plato said that "true philosophers make dying their profession," referring to the wisdom inherent in this process. What is natural and instinctual is allowed to die and transform. Western attitudes toward death and dying have changed markedly in the last few years. There is talk of "dying with dignity," and efforts toward assisting suicide for the terminally ill. It is a reaction to the dehumanization of dying. The Hemlock Society has been in the forefront of this debate, advocating free choice. There is much more talk about near-death experiences (NDE) and so-called astral projection or out-of-body experiences (OOBE).
Astral projection follows the same process described by those who report NDEs. They say attention is withdrawn from the limbs and trunk to the pineal area in the brain. Then consciousness passes out of the body through the top of the head. Many then report traversing a winding tunnel, and heading into the Light. Those who experience NDE find new purpose and meaning in life; they usually seek to render service to others, becoming more selfless, humble, and confident in the future. Having faced the ultimate fear they gain a sureness on the path of life. Frequently they receive some "message" about their duties in life, what they are to devote this "second chance" to achieving.
They are infused with wisdom--simply knowing what they must now do. It is the death of selfishness. Some report seeing other entities; they are met there by "others." Reports of this nature have offered some comfort or solace to the living, who inherently feel that these accounts offer descriptions of the passing into an afterlife. Others stoically feel that death is a final annihilation of the soul. The hospice movement, initiated by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D., approaches the care of the terminally ill with respect. Her books, ON DEATH AND DYING; QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ON DEATH AND DYING; and DEATH, THE FINAL STATE OF GROWTH are now classics on the subject, as is Feinstein and Mayo's RITUALS FOR LIVING AND DYING.
Kubler-Ross and other have developed therapeutic programs using psychodrama to free up the negative aspects of the personality. This provides a means for the old personality to die, leaving room for the emergence of the new while life goes on. Psychodrama allows the survivors of the terminal patient, as well as the patients themselves, a means of expressing and grieving old wounds and pains. This facilitates development of new patterns of living. The goal is to allow a fresh sense of personal well-being and contentment. For most, there is the discovery of new values and a deeper sense of appreciation for the gift of life--whatever life remains.
The term `threshold' evokes images of entering and leaving, passages, crossings and change. It marks the point at which choices and decisions must be made in order to move on, and it would be unusual to think of it as a place to stay, a place of permanent existence. There are, however, situations in the lives of people in which transitions from an old situation to a new one, one social position to another, are hampered or cannot be completed successfully. Individuals who are caught in between two stages of development, who do not hold clearly defined positions within their social system, feel marginal, excluded, without identity nor influence.
A number of anthropological studies (by Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner and Mary Douglas) have provided insight into forms of threshold existence (liminality) in modern society and have accounted for the difficulties that individuals have to face in these positions. They have also shown, however, that individuals who are caught in such positions are usually provided with a clear view on the social structure from which they are excluded, and that they carry the potential for critique of the norms that prevail within that structure.
The threshold symbolizes an in-between position. For individuals in in-between positions, as well as the conflicts that are caused by such positions, the literal meaning of `threshold' hardly needs any specification: it is the sill of a doorway, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, which has to be crossed when entering a house. It indicates the point at which the public outside world ends and the private, familial inside world begins. In more general terms it marks the place, line or border at which a passage can be made from one space to another.
Such a spatial structure has an essential influence on social interactions: relationships and social status are negotiated at the threshold, one is either rejected from or welcomed to the other side. To gain admission and step over the threshold into someone else's space means to submit to the rules that are in force in that place Social organisation decides whether we are included in or excluded from a social group, and political or religious reasons or social rank can account for the identification of a person with a certain group and space
As these examples show, the threshold can be interpreted as a symbol of division, which determines social structure and our notion of `self' and `other'. As a literal and figurative point of passage, however, the threshold also stands for change: one can step over the threshold, enter new territory and leave everything else behind. Such a change can be a shift in time, as in the expression `at the threshold of a new century'. It can also designate a decisive moment in one's personal development (`on the threshold of womanhood'), which means that one separates from a familiar situation and enters a new stage in life. In a religious context the threshold is a crucial element in initiation rites, indicating the passage from the profane to the sacred.
`Initiation,' furthermore, is a term that is not exclusively used in a religious context, but appears in all fields of social life, referring to a special ritual that opens the door, as it were, to a social group or new period in life. In a psychological context the threshold symbolises a point at which a decision must be made. Decision-making can be experienced as the overcoming of a difficulty or crisis, as the necessity to take a decisive step. The eventual change will provide the protagonist with new knowledge, he or she will undergo a development and be different from the person that he or she was before the change. A famous example of such a change can be found in the Book of Genesis: because of their decision to eat from the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve are driven out of the Garden of Eden, which is both a territorial passage and a figurative transition as their status changes through their loss of innocence.
This is the mythological threshold where mankind lost its immortality and entered the dominion of the Lord of Death, time and mortality. One is either "in" the paradisical garden, or "out" of the Garden. And it is guarded by the Dweller on the Threshold whose sword will cut one down for trying to enter without mystic cache. Decision-making is also an essential narrative element in fairy tales, where a vast number of princes or dragon killers or Bluebeard's wives have been standing in front of gates, caves and locked doors and have been losing their nerves about a decision that would bring either life or death, disaster or eternal happiness. It is interesting to note that decisions usually trigger off an irreversible process, which in many cases turns the threshold into a point of no return. Last but not least one might also think of the magical component of the threshold in superstitious beliefs. In some cultures the threshold is considered to be a dwelling place of ghosts and the souls of the dead, who lead an existence in between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
This is probably one reason why in some cultures and religions it is forbidden to step on it. In the majority of the examples above the threshold represents a point or border that divides two different elements and at which a passage can be made from the one to the other, or which simply marks a change or development in time or status. That a passage or a change is in fact a much more complex process has been argued by the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957), who investigated changes in the lives and statuses of people and the cultural or religious rites related to these changes. Van Gennep distinguishes between different sorts of changes in the life of a person and classifies them as `separation' (such as death), `transition' (e.g. pregnancy) and `incorporation' (e.g. marriage).
Van Gennep points out that actually every change consists of these three forms, or phases: phase 1 phase 2 phase 3 separation transition incorporation (from an old situation) (passage) (into the new situation). To perceive death, for example, as a separation (from life) rather than an incorporation (into an afterlife) clearly depends on the point of view that ascribes to one phase more importance than to the other, and also on cultural and religious beliefs. Van Gennep shows a special interest in the transitional phase: it is the period in which a person is in-between the former and the future social position or magico-religious state. In order to illustrate his point he refers to those early times in human history when countries did not border directly on each other but were divided by a neutral zone. In this zone travellers found themselves in a special situation as neither laws of the adjoining countries applied - they "wavered between two worlds", as it were (Gennep 18). Like this territorial passage, non-territorial transitions also consist of a moment or period of uncertainty, a liminal period.
Such a period is accompanied by, or equal to, a life-crisis. `Crisis' in this context is an interesting choice of vocabulary and could easily be misinterpreted. Van Gennep does not refer to the term in a strictly psychological sense. He uses it to indicate the unstable social or magico-religious position of the person who undergoes a change: during the transition the state of that person remains uncertain as he or she has been separated from a clearly defined state in the past and has not been incorporated yet into a clearly defined future state. Such a state that evades definition is potentially dangerous, because it represents a moment or period in which the routines of life are disrupted. As one of the consequences, the person undergoing the change has no guidelines anymore to hold on to, which might not only have a disturbing effect on that person but also on his or her surrounding.
As the title of his work, The Rites of Passage, suggests, Van Gennep was not only interested in the changes in the lives of people but also in the rituals that accompany these changes. These rituals have the function to give personal, social and cultural significance to a transition. They cushion the disturbances (such as a definition vacuum) that are caused by a change and help to incorporate the individual into a new group and return him to the customary routines of life (Kimball, introduction ix).
Van Gennep's theories were further elaborated by the anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner, however, did not only focus on the investigation of ritual processes in the lives of individuals but developed a more general theory of socio-cultural processes which he applied to changes and generative processes in modern societies. He primarily concentrated on the aspect of structure in Van Gennep's concept of passage. Parallel to Van Gennep's distinction between separation - transition - incorporation, Turner differentiates between structure - anti-structure - structure.
Turner does not define structure in the Lévi-Straussian sense as a system of `unconscious' logical categories, but refers to it simply as "social structure", that is, a differentiated system of mutually dependent institutions and structural positions which may or may not be hierarchically ordered (Turner, Ritual 166). Individuals who are part of social structure are defined by their social positions, statuses and roles. Due to their position in a social network they are expected to act in accordance with certain customary norms and ethical standards bound up with their social position and the social system as a whole. As soon as the state of a person is subject to change, such as in the process of maturation or at the initiation into another social position or group, this person is detached from its former position in the social structure, undergoes a process in which his or her structural attributes become temporarily ambiguous or neutralised, and finally re-emerges into social structure, usually (but not generally) at a higher status level.
Turner describes the attributes of a liminar (i.e. a person in a threshold position) as necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. (Turner, Ritual 95) Turner describes liminars also as structurally "invisible", by which he means that they are "no longer classified and yet not classified" (Turner, "Betwixt" 6) and therefore hard to grasp by a mind that is trained to perceive only clearly-defined objects: The subject of passage ritual is, in the liminal period, structurally, if not physically, "invisible."
As members of society, most of us see only what we expect to see, and what we expect to see is what we are conditioned to see when we have learned the definitions and classifications of our culture. A society's secular definitions do not allow for the existence of a not-boy-not-man, which is what a novice in a male puberty rite is (if he can be said to be anything). (Turner, "Betwixt" 6) The anti-structural period described by Turner is clearly identical with Van Gennep's definition of a transitional period. In his analysis of anti-structure Turner goes a step further than Van Gennep, however, when he starts to focus on other forms of liminality. Basically, he distinguishes between three forms of liminality. The first is ritual liminality, which forms the major point of interest in Van Gennep's works.
Ritual liminality forms the central element in transitional processes (such as maturation) and in any kind of initiation ceremony. Ritual liminality always implies the re-incorporation of the liminar into social structure. The two other forms of liminality are outsiderhood and marginality. Unlike ritual liminality, outsiderhood and marginality usually are semi-permanent or permanent forms of anti-structural existence, which means that the re-incorporation of the liminar (i.e. the outsider or marginal) back into structure is often difficult, impossible or unwanted.
Outsiderhood is defined by Turner as a condition in which the individual is either permanently or temporarily "set outside the structural arrangements of a given social system, (...) or voluntarily setting himself apart from the behaviour of status-occupying, role-playing members of that system" (Turner, Dramas 233). Monastic orders, for example, show characteristics of anti-structure in that they emphasise the unimportance of status, property and other cultural differentiae. A monk has in common with a pilgrim that both retreat from social structure to enter "a stage of reflection" (Turner, "Betwixt" 14). A pilgrimage, however, is a ritual process which is usually limited in time and ends when the pilgrim returns to his or her everyday life.
A monastic retreat, on the other hand, is a liminal form of existence which has become a permanent condition. According to Turner, also shamans, prophets, hippies and gypsies count as outsiders, because they lead a life at the boundaries of or opposed to the prevailing social structure. Another representative of outsiderhood is the artist (whom Turner also calls `edgeman' Ritual 128), who is careful not to be associated with established social structures and tries to resist classification. Outsiderhood, in short, is a condition in which an individual is located outside social structure, usually with no intention or ability to re-integrate. Marginals, on the other hand, are "simultaneously members (...) of two or more social groups whose social definitions and cultural norms are distinct from, and often even opposed to, one another" (Turner, Dramas 233).
Turner's definition of marginals is mainly based on an earlier sociological study of marginality by Everett V. Stonequist, who describes a marginal person as an "individual who through migration, education, marriage, or some other influence leaves one social group or culture without making a satisfactory adjustment to another and who finds himself on the margin of each but a member of neither" (Stonequist 2-3).
Migrant foreigners, persons of mixed ethnic origin or women in a changed, non-traditional role, to name but a few, belong to the group of marginals. Due to their special social condition, marginals are highly conscious/self-conscious individuals who produce a high number of writers, artists and philosophers. The social significance of the marginal is summarised in Stonequist's work as follows: The marginal man is a personality type that arises at the time and place where, out of the conflict of races and cultures, new societies, new peoples and cultures are coming into existence.
The fate that condemns him to live, at the same time, in two worlds is the same which compels him to assume, in relation to the worlds in which he lives, the rôle of a cosmopolitan and a stranger. Inevitably he becomes, relatively to his cultural milieu, the individual with the wider horizon, the keener intelligence, the more detached and rational viewpoint. (Robert E. Park, introduction, Stonequist xvii-xviii) Marginals, like ritual liminars, are betwixt and between clearly defined social states, but, unlike them, they have no prospect of a final stable resolution of their ambiguity: they will never be fully integrated into the one side or the other (Turner, Dramas 233).
This ambiguous position distinguishes marginals from outsiders: while the former is situated in between different or opposing social groups, the latter retreats to a position at the boundaries of the established social system. Even though anti-structure might show in different disguises (as ritual liminality, outsiderhood or marginality), its characteristics are often identical: liminars are symbolically or virtually bereft of status, which, consequentially, implies that they are also bereft of all the rights that go with status. This has two implications: first of all, due to the absence of a hierarchy of status positions, there is equality among liminars. This means that the occupants of one and the same anti-structural zone (such as monks in a monastic community, or hippies, or initiants in an initiation ritual) are aware of their equal positions.
Secondly, Turner ascribes to ritual liminars, outsiders and marginals a positive force, because liminal existence, whether temporary or permanent, forces the liminar to reconsider central values of his or her culture. Especially art, which best develops in the interstices or on the edges of society, is a medium which questions the prevailing social structure, and which is provoking, paradoxical, unusual, and above all, stimulating critical thought. The social counter-position allows liminars to have a clear view on the structure from which they are excluded, and although these individuals are usually bereft of privileges and in a condition of powerlessness, they carry the potential of critique of the norms of exactly that social structure. The danger that was ascribed to liminal personae by Van Gennep, in that they have lost their social attributes and therefore their guideline, takes a different shape in Turner's concept: anti-structure is not only "a stage of reflection" (Turner, "Betwixt" 14) but a "realm of pure possibility" (Turner, "Betwixt" 7) in which new ideas and concepts are stimulated and generated, representing a danger to those who hold positions of power and command in social structure.
Babbitt argues that in many cases, people must undergo personal transformation in order to conceive of themselves as fully human. Babbitt uses the term "personal transformation" to mean a transformative liberatory shift in consciousness. She thinks that the necessity of such shifts is particularly clear in cases of systemic oppression, where members of oppressed groups must think outside the (oppressive) interpretative framework provided for them. Babbitt argues that in order for members of deeply oppressed groups to gain access to their objective interests they must sometimes undergo liberatory personal transformation. Such a transformation would include the sort of change that a person who has been deeply discriminated against might have to undergo in order to think of herself as possessing inherent dignity.
Knowledge is a road to some practical or theoretical success while understanding is necessary for mastering any situation either in a real or a virtual world. At the same time understanding is only one of the hypostases of reflectivity, that is why not understanding is to be taught but reflectivity. In this connection another metaphor could have been used: anti-reflectivity, defence of impulsivity against reflectivity is the road to the wrong. And as soon as that second road enters our consideration, the term `reflectivity' and the corresponding notion begin approaching the topics of Law and Morality. It is only reflectivity that brings man to an experience of living with dignity, the idea of meeting death with dignity, an experience of loving concrete human beings along with loving one's own life and the whole human race.
Life, Death, Love make the experiential nucleus of our individual existence (Ustin, 1997), and this nucleus being present, the other few central meanings of existence will be manifested: Truth, Freedom, Beauty, the Good as the opposition of the Evil, maybe Fate as one's inevitable Future. To come to mastering all these existential meanings it is not enough to live one's natural life hoping for all this coming to the subjectivity of a "myself" as an individual. Just the opposite: one is to exercise hard, but exercise hard not in a ready-made knowledge, not even in a ready-made understanding but in reflectivity as the link connecting the lived experience with the gnoseological image under mastery (Kornienko, 1991).
In reflectivity the image is tinted by man's individual experience, and as for experience, it does not immediately change while something more important is happening to it: it is our attitude towards it that is getting changed. In this way we are changed ourselves, and this change is one to the better if the process of reflectivity serves socially and morally adequate aims. Reflectivity is the only instrument for an individual and a collective to become wiser, kinder and purer. In alchemy, the images of figurative death appear during the operation called mortificatio. This symbolic experience of death has to do with darkness, defeat, torture, mutilation, death, rotting, penance, and abstinence--denial of the body.
Emotionally it means the primitive, violent outbursts, resentments, and pleasure and power demands of Poseidon-consciousness must die for the process of transmutation to occur. Paradoxically, we must make ourselves miserable for the process of transmutation to proceed. Then the dark images change to positive ones of growth, resurrection and rebirth. In consciousness journeys, we find fear is the primary agent of mortificatio. Moving toward the fear and pain--deepening it--brings one closer to the tranformation.
Images of feces, excrement, overflowing toilets are found in dreams and during spontaneous journeys in Thanatos-consciousness. It feels like defeat and failure. Yet, to resist seems like madness--in fact, it induces madness. Those with near-death experiences tell us that to embrace death brings about deeper meaning and purpose in life. Rotting corpses, decapitation, amputation, creeping, crawling worms and snakes, and particularly noxious odors like the stench of graves are images which are reported again and again. It is truly a journey through "the Valley of the Shadow of Death."
Thus the psyche depicts the decay of outworn forms in preparation for new. It can be a voluntary death, giving up the old order for the sake of wholeness, the incorruptible body that grows from death. The infantile, personalistic ego is eclipsed. The journey to the land of the dead (collective unconscious) opens one to transpersonal life. When we sit quietly we notice that images come--and images go, of their own accord. They are spontaneously created and destroyed through the psychic process. Some of these images are projections.
When we withdraw them from their external "hooks" and re-own them, reabsorb them, they dissolve and "die." This furthers individuation. Plato said that "true philosophers make dying their profession," referring to the wisdom inherent in this process. What is natural and instinctual is allowed to die and transform. Western attitudes toward death and dying have changed markedly in the last few years. There is talk of "dying with dignity," and efforts toward assisting suicide for the terminally ill. It is a reaction to the dehumanization of dying. The Hemlock Society has been in the forefront of this debate, advocating free choice. There is much more talk about near-death experiences (NDE) and so-called astral projection or out-of-body experiences (OOBE).
Astral projection follows the same process described by those who report NDEs. They say attention is withdrawn from the limbs and trunk to the pineal area in the brain. Then consciousness passes out of the body through the top of the head. Many then report traversing a winding tunnel, and heading into the Light. Those who experience NDE find new purpose and meaning in life; they usually seek to render service to others, becoming more selfless, humble, and confident in the future. Having faced the ultimate fear they gain a sureness on the path of life. Frequently they receive some "message" about their duties in life, what they are to devote this "second chance" to achieving.
They are infused with wisdom--simply knowing what they must now do. It is the death of selfishness. Some report seeing other entities; they are met there by "others." Reports of this nature have offered some comfort or solace to the living, who inherently feel that these accounts offer descriptions of the passing into an afterlife. Others stoically feel that death is a final annihilation of the soul. The hospice movement, initiated by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D., approaches the care of the terminally ill with respect. Her books, ON DEATH AND DYING; QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ON DEATH AND DYING; and DEATH, THE FINAL STATE OF GROWTH are now classics on the subject, as is Feinstein and Mayo's RITUALS FOR LIVING AND DYING.
Kubler-Ross and other have developed therapeutic programs using psychodrama to free up the negative aspects of the personality. This provides a means for the old personality to die, leaving room for the emergence of the new while life goes on. Psychodrama allows the survivors of the terminal patient, as well as the patients themselves, a means of expressing and grieving old wounds and pains. This facilitates development of new patterns of living. The goal is to allow a fresh sense of personal well-being and contentment. For most, there is the discovery of new values and a deeper sense of appreciation for the gift of life--whatever life remains.
INTELLECTUAL IDEA
Psychologically, Thanatos is the concept known as "ego death"--the death of the old self which creates the conditions for rebirth. The phenomena of rebirth may mean a "born again" Christian, or the "twice-born" of philosophy which also implies the spiritual, yet non-religious renewal of one's purposiveness in life. The major mystery of Masonic initiation includes the death-rebirth mystery. The initiate is symbolically murdered, sealed in a ritual tomb, later to arise as a resurrected soul and brother of the Order. Israel Regardie quotes from the ceremony for Minor Adept grade in THE GOLDEN DAWN.
"Buried with that Light in a mystical death, rising again in a mystical resurrection, cleansed and purified through him our Master, o brother of the Cross of the Rose. Like him, O Adepts of all ages, have ye toiled. Like him have ye suffered tribulation. Poverty, torture and death have ye passed through; they have been but the purification of the gold. In the alembic of thine heart through the athanor of affliction, seek thou the true stone of the wise." The organic, regenerative process of "re-creational ego death" is common to mysticism, experiential psychology, and psychedelic journeys.
Spiritual exploration, or soul travel, is shared by all three modes of immersion in the universal stream of consciousness. They are all variations on the theme of the consciousness journey, and echo our shamanic roots, and the mythemes of eternal return and hero/heroine. Participants reach a deep, integral level, and direct experience of Higher Power, often merging with the Creation or the Creator. All these modes facilitate psychedelic consciousness, though any given experience may vary in duration and depth. Their prescribed frequency varies: meditators are advised to "die daily;" in psychotherapy once a month may be enough for regenerative therapy; psychedelic use varies from single experiences, to monthly, to annually. Despite different modes of induction, all these experiences reflect the illusory nature of time, space, and ego as reality constructs.
The primary nature of consciousness is revealed. The word psychedelic has its roots in the Greek psyche, soul, and delos, visible, evident. It is direct evidence of the soul, the pure manifestation of soul. Stace (1960) identifies nine qualities of the psychedelic experience as follows: 1) unity of all things; 2) transformation of space and time; 3) deeply felt positive mood; 4) sacredness; 5) objectivity and reality; 6) paradoxicality; 7) alleged ineffability; 8) transiency, and 9) persisting positive changes in subsequent behavior. In the practice of mysticism there is identification with progressively more subtle "bodies" or vehicles of consciousness, culminating in a transform from a mental or causal body to a vehicle of pure Light.
In experiential psychotherapy, transformation results from deepening within the flow of psychic imagery, progressively identifying with more primal forms, and ultimately with formlessness. In psychedelic experience, expansion of consciousness dissolves ego boundaries leading to morphological transformations and ecstatic communion. In alchemy, one sought not only to find or create the Stone, but also to apply it, or use it creatively in the everyday world. Now, we might speak of integrating or actualizing the results of our transformations in daily life.
Thus, self-actualization or self-realization implies the grounding of the spiritual fruits of inner exploration. The liquid form of the Philosopher's Stone was known as the UNIVERSAL SOLVENT. According to the alchemists, the operation of solutio (liquification) has a twofold effect: it causes old forms to disappear and new regenerate forms to emerge. To a rigid consciousness, the primal ocean of the unconscious is experienced as chaotic, violent, irrational processes of generation and destruction.
Through "creative regression," the generic form of ego death, consciousness recycles, recursively bending back upon itself. The direction is a recapitulation of, a re-experiencing of sequences from earlier life, conception and birth experience, ancestral awareness, genetic and physiological recognitions, molecular and atomic perception, and quantum consciousness. As consciousness explores and expands, ego dissolves. Pure consciousness, the fundamental luminosity, is the ground state of unborn form. The generic purpose of ego death is to liberate our embodied being, precipitating communion with and re-patterning by the Whole.
When all forms finally dissolve into unconditioned consciousness, the ground state of the Nature Mind is revealed as the mystic Void, the womb of creation. When the constructed forms which hold personality together are voluntarily relinquished, consciousness "liquifies" and rapidly moves toward the unconditioned state. Though easy to say, it is sometimes difficult to achieve such liberation from the mental-conceptual activity of the nervous system. When we do, the quiescent nervous system is open and receptive to the conscious recognition of pure energy transforms with no interpretations. The Universal Solvent dissolves problems, heals, allows life to flow in new, creative patterns. These new patterns embody the evolutionary dynamic. According to chaos theory, free-flowing energy is capable of self-organization. In consciousness this means that the obstructions to free flowing energy must first be dissolved.
Through re-creational ego death, consciousness dissolves into healing communion with the whole of existence, renewing itself, emerging with a new creative potential. The need for the periodic destruction of outmoded systems implies the value of recycling consciousness through death/rebirth experience. The universal solvent is not ordinary water, but "philosophical" water, the water of life, aqua permanens, aqua mercurialis. It is also the panacea, "elixer vitae," "tincture," or universal medicine. To periodically dip into these healing waters has a tonic, rejuvenating effect which pervades all aspects of being, like a soothing balm. Solutio implies the liquification of consciousness through the dissolution of rigidities which inhibit free flow. They include roles, game patterns, defense strategies, rigid attitudes and beliefs, interpretations, complexes, "old" myths, and "frozen" energy surrounding traumas which manifests as fear and pain.
Fossilized or ossified energies create obstructions to free flow, like boulders in a stream produce turbulence. Destructuring transformative processes can dissolve them, increasing the sense of flow. This "liquified" consciousness is psychedelic, a nonordinary expanded awareness which dissolves fixations and habits, and loosens cramped attitudes. Mystic ecstasy, or the psychedelic state is mind-manifesting, consciousness expanding. It dissolves the identification of our consciousness with our histories, bodies, emotions, thoughts, and even beliefs. We are free to explore myriad forms, structures, and patterns, and/or become formless, resting in that unborn, unconditioned, unmodified healing state. We experience the essence of other forms of existence.
The Oneness of all life and existence is directly experienced through a variety of transformations ranging from plant and animal identifications to planetary and universal consciousness. Entering the turbulent flow of the stream of consciousness, we can ride its currents back to the Source, pure unconditioned cosmic consciousness. We can imbibe the life-giving qualities of this "water" through mind-expanding experiential contact with this deep consciousness. The transformative process is also reflected in our modern physical worldview as chaos theory, which we can view as a modern "myth," a new metaphor for the dynamics of consciousness.
Chaos is ubiquitous in nature, pervading all dynamic processes, perturbing them unpredictably. Chaos theory shows us that nature is continually unfolding new forms from the chaotic matrix of creation. Our dynamic consciousness is an essentially chaotic process. Chaos tracks a time evolution with sensitive dependence on initial conditions. When we "return" experientially to the "initial conditions" of our existence, our whole being is holistically repatterned. Our historical limitations are superceded by the creative power of the eternal Now. We can allow chaos, as the universal solvent, to liquify consciousness and re-create ourselves. This presumes a therapeutic atmosphere, a "safe" set and setting, because each phase of the journey is an encounter with uncertainty.
The journey into deep consciousness appears inherently chaotic because the state of uncertainty pervades each moment of transition. Underlying moments of transience there are momentary blanks in awareness--little voids--flickering microstates which repattern each phase. Whether the experience is one of loss of personal boundaries or direct perception of stark, raw reality, or visionary dreams, there is no predicting where the chaotic orbit of consciousness will roam next.
To embrace chaos in our consciousness journeys, therefore means to cooperate and flow with the transformative process, opening ourselves to our deepest emergent potential. It's O.K. to let go periodically and temporarily become unstructured nothingness and open to holistic re-patterning. Chaos is self-organizing, self-iterating, and self-generating. It is an evolutionary force. The tendency of new forms emerging from chaos is toward a higher degree of adaptation, hence evolution (Kauffmann, 1991).
This "recycling" of consciousness leads to a self-referential vortex. Chaotic systems revolve around nexus points, known as strange attractors, because of their unpredictable quality. Rather than being "point-like," they are more like vortices within vortices. The Philosopher's Stone is like a psychic lodestone (or vortex). It acts like an inner magnet, ordering the contents of our consciousness around it (through feedback loops) in chaotic, yet meaningful fashion.
The Philosopher's Stone may thus be seen as a "strange attractor" in the life of anyone engaged in the quest for transformation. It is an instinctual attraction toward processes which dissolve the ego and liquify consciousness, leading to transpersonal experience after symbolic death/rebirth. Freedom in the exploration of imagery comes from the creative capacity to experience loss. Experientially, it appears as being channeled into the swirling mass of interacting symbols, an overwhelming vortex of pure information.
We are sucked inexorably into interaction with the self-symbol, sucked into ourselves, like flotsam is pulled into a whirlpool. This is the vortex of the system, the vortex of self, where all levels cross. It overwhelms or tangles the mental processes, the self-imaging processes that maintain the illusion of stable personality and individual boundaries. The classic text of re-creational surrender or sacrifice of self is THE BARDO THODOL, or THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD. It is explicitly for the living who undertake the death-like regression into the unconscious, as well as the dying. Because of their orientation toward consciousness journeys, THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE and THE AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD are useful translations or contemporizations of the transformational classic.
The realm of death is the twilight zone between consciousness and matter. Here psychoid phenomena manifest through the mingling of these modes. Here mind/matter duality ceases, creating enchantment, uncanny synchronicities, time warps, psychic experience, revelation of the mind of matter, the Nature Mind. The moment of ego death is heralded by certain symptoms of transition. Resistance by the mind to this creative dissolution brings about physical symptoms which range from shaking and a sense of increasing pressure and anxiety, to paradoxical flashes of hot and cold, to extreme dizzyness and disorientation. As the classic psychedelic manual says, "The hard, dry, brittle husks of your ego are washing out; Washing out to the endless sea of creation." (Leary et al, 1964).
Distressing or disturbing symptoms symbolize the violence of the passage of consciousness from form to formlessness. Images of the body disintegrating or being blown to atoms (fear of exploding = fear of expanding) are characteristic psychedelic experiences. Perhaps the very elements of our bodies "remember" their formation in the crucible of some supernova. There may be identification with merciless destruction, the Dance of Shiva, the raging elements of nature, a variety of forms of explosive discharge.
Here are visions of fires, floods, raging storms, earthquakes, volcanoes, turbulent lakes of magma. Consciousness "breaks up" into its elemental forms, manifesting as overwhelming imagery. This first phase of dissolution may be characterized by the futility of resistance, magnetic downward spirals, gravity wells, loss of morphological identity. E.J. Gold describes the second stage of the voyage as one of being overwhelmed by illusions produced by conditioning. Yet the primal element of pure forms breaks through and the voyager recognizes "the basic component of consciousness which when combined produces what is called the element Water."
In consciousness journeys, chaos functions as the universal solvent, that which dissolves all patterns and forms including the rigid, outmoded aspects of the self. In the dream journey, one might enter a spinning vortex and become dismembered by centrifugal force, torn limb from limb. We remain in this state of dis-integration until we re-member our essential self, embodying the wounded healer. That sense of disintegration comes as the ego gives up its "unified" linear perspective (bivalent) to the multiple consciousness or awareness (multi-valence) of the deep self. Fear makes it feel like fragmentation, but in truth there is nothing in that imagery that is not us. The death throes of the ego prepare it for rebirth, through communion with cosmic consciousness, a new incarnation of the spirit, death and resurrection. The nature of universal consciousness is oceanic.
When the ego is in danger of "getting in over its head," it panics as if faced with drowning in the depths of this vast ocean of consciousness. It overwhelms the ego which cannot fathom this abyss. This aspect of solutio brings mythic images of the dying god, of violent death and sacrifice, and of the isolation of the hero. It means nothing less than the sacrifice of the old self. The dissolution phase may mean myths of the triumph of darkness; myths of floods and the return of chaos, of the defeat of the hero. In Gold's words, "Death comes to all forms; everything eventually is broken up by dissolution, so there's no point clinging to yet another biological form out of desire, longing for stability, or from fear and weakness."
The death-rebirth sequence typically opens a person to the transpersonal domain with its virtually infinite creativity. It reveals and unfolds our future potentials. In dreamhealing, chaotic consciousness is also creative consciousness. Terence McKenna reminds us that, "Riverine metaphors are endlessly applicable. They represent the flowing of forces over landscapes, the pressure of chaos on the imagination to create creatively. . .The key is surrender and dissolution of boundaries, dissolution of the ego."
When we immerse ourselves in that creative energy, we find healing on many levels of our being. It may feel tingly or effervescent, or like streaming energy. Direct experience of this level brings a true sense of oneness with all that exists, the seamless fabric of existence. It opens us to re-patterning by the whole--a re-construction or re-patterning of personality through holistic change at the most fundamental level. Immersion in the oceanic experience of universal consciousness is a life-changing experience. It is experience of the web of life, the biological life flow, an ineffable current of bliss. Once we experience that larger world and self--the rhythmic pulse of all life--we are never the same again, so long as we remember. Communing with this energy, experiencing these states of consciousness, has been the practice of shamans since the dawn of man.
Shamanic consciousness means the ability to enter and exit altered states at will. This power is connected to the liquid expression of life--the sap of life--the vegetable forms of the liquid Stone, and its identity with psychotropic plants. This notion reiterates that of the "greening of consciousness." Spiritual reincarnation means bringing to life that which was formerly dead or unawakened, through connection with the original creative power. It is the theme of the Quest -- the greening of the Wasteland.
The process of rebirth is the mythic enactment of "the one story" whose pattern is found in every narrative. Beneath the differences, the meaning -- having to do with the loss and recovery of identity -- does not change. This story of the loss and regaining of identity is the framework of most literature, from which comes the hero with a thousand faces. Some variation of the hero's adventures, death, disappearance, and marriage or resurrection are the focal points of most stories. The original sense of identity (romance and comedy), its loss (tragedy and irony), and its recovery in the regenerate world of romance and comedy is mirrored in the mythic quest.
Myths of the birth of the hero, revival and resurrection, creation and defeat of the powers of darkness and death are perennial themes. The descent and subsequent ascent, going deep into the consciousness journey and emerging transformed, is a form of death/rebirth, a powerful archetypal theme which is initiatory in character. There is more than one form of rebirth. The notion emerges from the "belief system" level of psyche, which combines mythical, archetypal, and personal elements. Carl Jung detailed five specific types of rebirth with a variety of psychological aspects.
In ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS, he listed the forms of rebirth known to mankind as follows:
1. Metempsychosis. This means the transmigration of the soul from one body to another at death. The soul is believed to have the ability to transmigrate among plant, animal, or human forms. The change is not under the dominion of the will, but is the result of karma. The form is earned through one's deeds or misdeeds during life.
2. Reincarnation. This belief implies rebirth in human form, with some continuity or recall of personality. This is not only an eastern or Indian concept. At various times, it was embraced by the Hebrew and Greek cultures. It was expunged from THE BIBLE by Justinian and Theodora in Byzantine times. The soul is believed to migrate from human form to human form with some purposeful development.
3. Resurrection. Here the idea is the re-establishment of human existence after death, either through resurrection of the physical body, or in the glorified or "subtle body" of pure Light. It signifies a perpetual state of incorruptibility. It is a transformation of one's essence or essential being; a transport to a new dimension of existence.
4. Rebirth (renovatio). When we experience renewal or improvement through self-development, or even a vacation which revivifies us, we go through a kind of psychological rebirth. This rebirth takes place within the context of our individual life span. It may use magical, though not miraculous means of effecting change. The functioning of the personality may be enhanced, and we might feel rejuvenated, healed, or otherwise strengthened. We can face the daily grind with renewed zeal and effectiveness.
Rites of passage frequently involve a ceremonial form of rebirth, such as that of the adolescent into the adult world. When rebirth involves the transformation of the essence of our individuality, we are transmuted, or lifted from the human to the divine realm of being. 5. Indirect Rebirth. This implies witnessing or taking part in some transformative rite, such as the Catholic Mass, or the Eleusinian Mysteries. A modern example is psychotherapy which initiates the process of individuation, hastening the process of natural transformation. By focusing on dreams and self-awareness we can speed up nature's process of internal transformation. Our higher Self is revealed and we come to know our soul as a special "inner friend."
Meditation is the spiritual means most frequently used to bring this change about, outside of the therapeutic setting. All forms of rebirth, in the psychological sense, are experiences of the transcendence of life. Transcendence is a natural progression from the finite, mortal frame through space, time, and the personal ego into infinite, immortal life beyond. It gives us access to the experience of Cosmic Consciousness.
The experience may be induced by ritual means, with or without direct participation. It may be a spontaneous, ecstatic revelation, or a subjective transformation only. It frequently brings an enlargement of the personality, bringing richness and depth to life. Rebirth is experienced more easily, but not as deeply, through group participation or identification. In this case, the changes do not last, and one regresses to the former condition. Only spiritual exercises, or yoga, provide a clearcut means to the fullest, permanent experience of personal transformation, and access to the higher Self. To experience this, one goes through total annihilation of the old self--self-surrender.
The old ego dies to be revivified as part of a greater whole. Further reading on the concerns of Thanatos, death and rebirth include:
ANATOMY OF THE PSYCHE, "Mortificatio," Edward Edinger, 1985.
DEATH AND EASTERN THOUGHT, Frederick Holch, Ed., Abingdon Press, New York, 1974.
ON DREAMS AND DEATH, Marie-Louise vonFranz, 1986.
RITUALS FOR LIVING AND DYING, David Feinstein and P. Mayo.
TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD, Evans-Wentz.
TIBETAN BOOK OF LIVING AND DYING: Sogyal Rampa.
DIE TO LIVE, Huzur Maharaji Charan Singh.
SUICIDE AND THE SOUL, James Hillman, Spring Pub.
THE HUMAN ENCOUNTER WITH DEATH, Stanislav Grof & Joan Halifax, 1977.
LIFE AT DEATH, Kenneth Ring.
PSYCHE AND DEATH, Edgar Herzog.
SPIRITUAL MYTH
The God of Death haunts us all, consciously or subconsciously. Particularly the elderly are subject to a state which may be like a death in life--a paralysis from fear of what is to inevitably come. This event is a great moment, and some follow a natural urge to die at the right time, relinquishing heroic life-prolonging efforts. Our culture makes valiant attempts to repress the awareness that life is based on death. Our overactive physical fitness binges are heroic attempts to deny that the telos, or goal, of psyche is death.
This is not the case in all cultures. They prepare throughout life for death by putting dayworld notions to sleep. This radical shift in consciousness is expressed through metaphorical descriptors of death. Mystical philosophies encourage the aspirant to "die daily" by withdrawing into meditation. They recommend anywhere from 20 minutes to 1/10 of the day (2 1/2 hours). The idea is to tithe a tenth of one's time, rather than money to experiencial spiritual practice. This admonishment to "die daily" was also the advice of magician Aleister Crowley commenting on the Tarot Trump XIII, DEATH. Spiritual Masters, or Adepts, speak of the "gates of death."
They aid and teach the student to pass these gates and return to this plane at will. They help us solve the problem of what lies beyond. Coming and going at will through these gates is the process of dying while we live. This internal journey during meditation is routine to advanced students. During meditation consciousness is withdrawn from the external world and concentrated inside at the pineal gland, or eye center. This is what happens at the moment of death also, according to these teachers. The difference is that an adept who meditates never loses consciousness when passing out of the body. He retains complete memory of his experiences which happened during absence from the body, in higher spiritual planes of existence. Spiritual Masters, or Saints, describe four distinct classes or groups of people who meet with different sorts of experiences after physical death:
1. This group includes the bulk of mankind who have no living guide or spiritual teacher. They meet death unsupported, in great fear, helpless in the face of their own karma. They are judged immediately after death, sometimes quite severely. They return on the wheel of rebirth, born into the type of body which they created through their strongest desires in their past lives to fulfill their wishes.
2. This group have initiation from a living spiritual master, but didn't put much active emphasis on spiritual discipline or meditation (which balances or pays off karma). They indulged in many passions, and will be reborn to continue their training on the path. However, their teacher informs them when their time of death is near and accompanies them during the transition.
3. Faithful devotees of a spiritual guide have made good progress, but haven't yet gained liberation from the wheel of life. Since they are familiar with death through dying daily, they pass over without difficulty or distress; they understand and accept death calmly. They are also escorted by their Master, and rejoice at their homecoming. They need take a physical form no longer, and proceed to higher planes via their body of Light. Between initiation by a Master and liberation, there is a maximum of four human incarnations, instead of the eternal wheel of rebirth in various forms.
4. The final class consists only of Masters themselves. They leave the body when their work is done, simply putting it aside like soiled and worn clothing, and their souls merge back into God. Their duties and responsibilities fulfilled, they merged back into the Supreme One, who sends the great teachers here as embodiments of the Way. Perhaps one of the oldest traditional accounts of the western perennial philosophy concerning death and immortality comes down to us in The Hermetica, the Lost Wisdom of the Pharaohs (Freke & Gandy, Tarcher, 1997).
In the ancient texts, Hermes Trismegistus explores the nature of death and the fate of the soul which survives it. From our human point of view, time is a destroying force, for we all age and die. But from the cosmic perspective, it is an endless cycle. We can participate in that eternal realm through the spiritual quest, by learning to accept the inevitable transitory nature of forms, including our own. Death is just the discarding of the worn-out body.
According to ancient wisdom, pure souls are assinged to the heavenly realm while ignorant sould get recycled in the material realms. The Body of Light is recogized in East and West as the godlike form which transcends mortal death. According to The Hermetica: The end of becoming is the beginning of destruction.
The end of destruction is the beginning of becoming. Everything on Earth must be destroyed, for without destruction
nothing can be created. The new comes out of the old. Every birth of living flesh, like every growth of crop from seed,
will be followed by destruction. But from decay comes renewal, through the circling course of the celestial gods, and the power of Nature, who has her being in the Being of Atum. For man, time is a destroyer, but for the Cosmos it is an ever-turning wheel.
These earthly forms that come and go are illusions.
How can something be real
which never stays the same?
But these transitory illusory things arise
from the underlying permanent reality. Birth is not the beginning of life -
only of an individual awareness.
Change into another state is not death -
only the ending of this awareness.
Most people are ignorant of the truth,
and therefore afraid of death,
believing it to be the greatest of all evils.
But death is only the dissolution
of a worn-out body.
Our term of service as guardians of the world
is ended when we are freed
from the bonds of this mortal frame
and restored,
cleansed and purified,
to the primal condition of our highest nature. After quitting the body,
Mind, which is divine by nature,
is freed from all containment,
Taking on a body of Light,
it ranges through all space -
leaving the soul to be judged and punished,
according to its deserts.
Souls do not all go to the same place.
Nor to different places at random.
Rather, each is allocated
to a place that fits its nature. When a soul leaves the body
it undergoes a trial and investigation
by the chief of the gods.
When he finds a soul to be honorable and pure,
he allows it to live in a region that corresponds to its characteristics.
But if he finds it stained
with incurable ignorance,
he hurls it down
to the storms and whirlwinds,
where it is eternally tossed
between sky and earth
on the billowing air. Only a godd soul is spiritual and divine.
Having wronged no one
and come to know Atum,
such a soul has run the race of purity,
and becomes all Mind.
After it leaves its physical form,
it becomes a spirit in a body of Light,
so that it may serve Atum. At the dissolution of the body,
first the physical form is transformed
and is no longer visible.
The vital spirit returns to the atmosphere.
The bodily senses go back to the universe,
and recombine in new ways
to do other work.
Then the soul mounts upwards
through the structures of the heavens.
In the first zone,
it is relieved of growth and decay.
In the second,
evil and cunning.
In the third,
lust and deceiving desire.
In the fourth,
domineering arrogance.
In the fifth,
unbalanced audacity and rashness.
In the sixth,
greed for wealth.
In the seventh,
deceit and falsehood. Having been stripped
of all that was put upon it
by the structures of the heavens,
the soul now possesses
its own proper power
and may ascend
to the eighth sphere -
rejoicing with all those that welcome it,
and singing psalms to the Father.
The gods that dwell above the righth sphere
sing praises with a voice that is theirs alone,
call each soul to surrender to the gods,
and so each one becomes itself a god
by entering communion with Atum.
This is Primal Goodness.
This is the consummation
of True Knowledge.
Having been initiated into immortality,
a human soul,
now tranformed into a god,
joins the gods who dance and sing
in celebration
of the glorious victory of the soul.
Psychologically, Thanatos is the concept known as "ego death"--the death of the old self which creates the conditions for rebirth. The phenomena of rebirth may mean a "born again" Christian, or the "twice-born" of philosophy which also implies the spiritual, yet non-religious renewal of one's purposiveness in life. The major mystery of Masonic initiation includes the death-rebirth mystery. The initiate is symbolically murdered, sealed in a ritual tomb, later to arise as a resurrected soul and brother of the Order. Israel Regardie quotes from the ceremony for Minor Adept grade in THE GOLDEN DAWN.
"Buried with that Light in a mystical death, rising again in a mystical resurrection, cleansed and purified through him our Master, o brother of the Cross of the Rose. Like him, O Adepts of all ages, have ye toiled. Like him have ye suffered tribulation. Poverty, torture and death have ye passed through; they have been but the purification of the gold. In the alembic of thine heart through the athanor of affliction, seek thou the true stone of the wise." The organic, regenerative process of "re-creational ego death" is common to mysticism, experiential psychology, and psychedelic journeys.
Spiritual exploration, or soul travel, is shared by all three modes of immersion in the universal stream of consciousness. They are all variations on the theme of the consciousness journey, and echo our shamanic roots, and the mythemes of eternal return and hero/heroine. Participants reach a deep, integral level, and direct experience of Higher Power, often merging with the Creation or the Creator. All these modes facilitate psychedelic consciousness, though any given experience may vary in duration and depth. Their prescribed frequency varies: meditators are advised to "die daily;" in psychotherapy once a month may be enough for regenerative therapy; psychedelic use varies from single experiences, to monthly, to annually. Despite different modes of induction, all these experiences reflect the illusory nature of time, space, and ego as reality constructs.
The primary nature of consciousness is revealed. The word psychedelic has its roots in the Greek psyche, soul, and delos, visible, evident. It is direct evidence of the soul, the pure manifestation of soul. Stace (1960) identifies nine qualities of the psychedelic experience as follows: 1) unity of all things; 2) transformation of space and time; 3) deeply felt positive mood; 4) sacredness; 5) objectivity and reality; 6) paradoxicality; 7) alleged ineffability; 8) transiency, and 9) persisting positive changes in subsequent behavior. In the practice of mysticism there is identification with progressively more subtle "bodies" or vehicles of consciousness, culminating in a transform from a mental or causal body to a vehicle of pure Light.
In experiential psychotherapy, transformation results from deepening within the flow of psychic imagery, progressively identifying with more primal forms, and ultimately with formlessness. In psychedelic experience, expansion of consciousness dissolves ego boundaries leading to morphological transformations and ecstatic communion. In alchemy, one sought not only to find or create the Stone, but also to apply it, or use it creatively in the everyday world. Now, we might speak of integrating or actualizing the results of our transformations in daily life.
Thus, self-actualization or self-realization implies the grounding of the spiritual fruits of inner exploration. The liquid form of the Philosopher's Stone was known as the UNIVERSAL SOLVENT. According to the alchemists, the operation of solutio (liquification) has a twofold effect: it causes old forms to disappear and new regenerate forms to emerge. To a rigid consciousness, the primal ocean of the unconscious is experienced as chaotic, violent, irrational processes of generation and destruction.
Through "creative regression," the generic form of ego death, consciousness recycles, recursively bending back upon itself. The direction is a recapitulation of, a re-experiencing of sequences from earlier life, conception and birth experience, ancestral awareness, genetic and physiological recognitions, molecular and atomic perception, and quantum consciousness. As consciousness explores and expands, ego dissolves. Pure consciousness, the fundamental luminosity, is the ground state of unborn form. The generic purpose of ego death is to liberate our embodied being, precipitating communion with and re-patterning by the Whole.
When all forms finally dissolve into unconditioned consciousness, the ground state of the Nature Mind is revealed as the mystic Void, the womb of creation. When the constructed forms which hold personality together are voluntarily relinquished, consciousness "liquifies" and rapidly moves toward the unconditioned state. Though easy to say, it is sometimes difficult to achieve such liberation from the mental-conceptual activity of the nervous system. When we do, the quiescent nervous system is open and receptive to the conscious recognition of pure energy transforms with no interpretations. The Universal Solvent dissolves problems, heals, allows life to flow in new, creative patterns. These new patterns embody the evolutionary dynamic. According to chaos theory, free-flowing energy is capable of self-organization. In consciousness this means that the obstructions to free flowing energy must first be dissolved.
Through re-creational ego death, consciousness dissolves into healing communion with the whole of existence, renewing itself, emerging with a new creative potential. The need for the periodic destruction of outmoded systems implies the value of recycling consciousness through death/rebirth experience. The universal solvent is not ordinary water, but "philosophical" water, the water of life, aqua permanens, aqua mercurialis. It is also the panacea, "elixer vitae," "tincture," or universal medicine. To periodically dip into these healing waters has a tonic, rejuvenating effect which pervades all aspects of being, like a soothing balm. Solutio implies the liquification of consciousness through the dissolution of rigidities which inhibit free flow. They include roles, game patterns, defense strategies, rigid attitudes and beliefs, interpretations, complexes, "old" myths, and "frozen" energy surrounding traumas which manifests as fear and pain.
Fossilized or ossified energies create obstructions to free flow, like boulders in a stream produce turbulence. Destructuring transformative processes can dissolve them, increasing the sense of flow. This "liquified" consciousness is psychedelic, a nonordinary expanded awareness which dissolves fixations and habits, and loosens cramped attitudes. Mystic ecstasy, or the psychedelic state is mind-manifesting, consciousness expanding. It dissolves the identification of our consciousness with our histories, bodies, emotions, thoughts, and even beliefs. We are free to explore myriad forms, structures, and patterns, and/or become formless, resting in that unborn, unconditioned, unmodified healing state. We experience the essence of other forms of existence.
The Oneness of all life and existence is directly experienced through a variety of transformations ranging from plant and animal identifications to planetary and universal consciousness. Entering the turbulent flow of the stream of consciousness, we can ride its currents back to the Source, pure unconditioned cosmic consciousness. We can imbibe the life-giving qualities of this "water" through mind-expanding experiential contact with this deep consciousness. The transformative process is also reflected in our modern physical worldview as chaos theory, which we can view as a modern "myth," a new metaphor for the dynamics of consciousness.
Chaos is ubiquitous in nature, pervading all dynamic processes, perturbing them unpredictably. Chaos theory shows us that nature is continually unfolding new forms from the chaotic matrix of creation. Our dynamic consciousness is an essentially chaotic process. Chaos tracks a time evolution with sensitive dependence on initial conditions. When we "return" experientially to the "initial conditions" of our existence, our whole being is holistically repatterned. Our historical limitations are superceded by the creative power of the eternal Now. We can allow chaos, as the universal solvent, to liquify consciousness and re-create ourselves. This presumes a therapeutic atmosphere, a "safe" set and setting, because each phase of the journey is an encounter with uncertainty.
The journey into deep consciousness appears inherently chaotic because the state of uncertainty pervades each moment of transition. Underlying moments of transience there are momentary blanks in awareness--little voids--flickering microstates which repattern each phase. Whether the experience is one of loss of personal boundaries or direct perception of stark, raw reality, or visionary dreams, there is no predicting where the chaotic orbit of consciousness will roam next.
To embrace chaos in our consciousness journeys, therefore means to cooperate and flow with the transformative process, opening ourselves to our deepest emergent potential. It's O.K. to let go periodically and temporarily become unstructured nothingness and open to holistic re-patterning. Chaos is self-organizing, self-iterating, and self-generating. It is an evolutionary force. The tendency of new forms emerging from chaos is toward a higher degree of adaptation, hence evolution (Kauffmann, 1991).
This "recycling" of consciousness leads to a self-referential vortex. Chaotic systems revolve around nexus points, known as strange attractors, because of their unpredictable quality. Rather than being "point-like," they are more like vortices within vortices. The Philosopher's Stone is like a psychic lodestone (or vortex). It acts like an inner magnet, ordering the contents of our consciousness around it (through feedback loops) in chaotic, yet meaningful fashion.
The Philosopher's Stone may thus be seen as a "strange attractor" in the life of anyone engaged in the quest for transformation. It is an instinctual attraction toward processes which dissolve the ego and liquify consciousness, leading to transpersonal experience after symbolic death/rebirth. Freedom in the exploration of imagery comes from the creative capacity to experience loss. Experientially, it appears as being channeled into the swirling mass of interacting symbols, an overwhelming vortex of pure information.
We are sucked inexorably into interaction with the self-symbol, sucked into ourselves, like flotsam is pulled into a whirlpool. This is the vortex of the system, the vortex of self, where all levels cross. It overwhelms or tangles the mental processes, the self-imaging processes that maintain the illusion of stable personality and individual boundaries. The classic text of re-creational surrender or sacrifice of self is THE BARDO THODOL, or THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD. It is explicitly for the living who undertake the death-like regression into the unconscious, as well as the dying. Because of their orientation toward consciousness journeys, THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE and THE AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD are useful translations or contemporizations of the transformational classic.
The realm of death is the twilight zone between consciousness and matter. Here psychoid phenomena manifest through the mingling of these modes. Here mind/matter duality ceases, creating enchantment, uncanny synchronicities, time warps, psychic experience, revelation of the mind of matter, the Nature Mind. The moment of ego death is heralded by certain symptoms of transition. Resistance by the mind to this creative dissolution brings about physical symptoms which range from shaking and a sense of increasing pressure and anxiety, to paradoxical flashes of hot and cold, to extreme dizzyness and disorientation. As the classic psychedelic manual says, "The hard, dry, brittle husks of your ego are washing out; Washing out to the endless sea of creation." (Leary et al, 1964).
Distressing or disturbing symptoms symbolize the violence of the passage of consciousness from form to formlessness. Images of the body disintegrating or being blown to atoms (fear of exploding = fear of expanding) are characteristic psychedelic experiences. Perhaps the very elements of our bodies "remember" their formation in the crucible of some supernova. There may be identification with merciless destruction, the Dance of Shiva, the raging elements of nature, a variety of forms of explosive discharge.
Here are visions of fires, floods, raging storms, earthquakes, volcanoes, turbulent lakes of magma. Consciousness "breaks up" into its elemental forms, manifesting as overwhelming imagery. This first phase of dissolution may be characterized by the futility of resistance, magnetic downward spirals, gravity wells, loss of morphological identity. E.J. Gold describes the second stage of the voyage as one of being overwhelmed by illusions produced by conditioning. Yet the primal element of pure forms breaks through and the voyager recognizes "the basic component of consciousness which when combined produces what is called the element Water."
In consciousness journeys, chaos functions as the universal solvent, that which dissolves all patterns and forms including the rigid, outmoded aspects of the self. In the dream journey, one might enter a spinning vortex and become dismembered by centrifugal force, torn limb from limb. We remain in this state of dis-integration until we re-member our essential self, embodying the wounded healer. That sense of disintegration comes as the ego gives up its "unified" linear perspective (bivalent) to the multiple consciousness or awareness (multi-valence) of the deep self. Fear makes it feel like fragmentation, but in truth there is nothing in that imagery that is not us. The death throes of the ego prepare it for rebirth, through communion with cosmic consciousness, a new incarnation of the spirit, death and resurrection. The nature of universal consciousness is oceanic.
When the ego is in danger of "getting in over its head," it panics as if faced with drowning in the depths of this vast ocean of consciousness. It overwhelms the ego which cannot fathom this abyss. This aspect of solutio brings mythic images of the dying god, of violent death and sacrifice, and of the isolation of the hero. It means nothing less than the sacrifice of the old self. The dissolution phase may mean myths of the triumph of darkness; myths of floods and the return of chaos, of the defeat of the hero. In Gold's words, "Death comes to all forms; everything eventually is broken up by dissolution, so there's no point clinging to yet another biological form out of desire, longing for stability, or from fear and weakness."
The death-rebirth sequence typically opens a person to the transpersonal domain with its virtually infinite creativity. It reveals and unfolds our future potentials. In dreamhealing, chaotic consciousness is also creative consciousness. Terence McKenna reminds us that, "Riverine metaphors are endlessly applicable. They represent the flowing of forces over landscapes, the pressure of chaos on the imagination to create creatively. . .The key is surrender and dissolution of boundaries, dissolution of the ego."
When we immerse ourselves in that creative energy, we find healing on many levels of our being. It may feel tingly or effervescent, or like streaming energy. Direct experience of this level brings a true sense of oneness with all that exists, the seamless fabric of existence. It opens us to re-patterning by the whole--a re-construction or re-patterning of personality through holistic change at the most fundamental level. Immersion in the oceanic experience of universal consciousness is a life-changing experience. It is experience of the web of life, the biological life flow, an ineffable current of bliss. Once we experience that larger world and self--the rhythmic pulse of all life--we are never the same again, so long as we remember. Communing with this energy, experiencing these states of consciousness, has been the practice of shamans since the dawn of man.
Shamanic consciousness means the ability to enter and exit altered states at will. This power is connected to the liquid expression of life--the sap of life--the vegetable forms of the liquid Stone, and its identity with psychotropic plants. This notion reiterates that of the "greening of consciousness." Spiritual reincarnation means bringing to life that which was formerly dead or unawakened, through connection with the original creative power. It is the theme of the Quest -- the greening of the Wasteland.
The process of rebirth is the mythic enactment of "the one story" whose pattern is found in every narrative. Beneath the differences, the meaning -- having to do with the loss and recovery of identity -- does not change. This story of the loss and regaining of identity is the framework of most literature, from which comes the hero with a thousand faces. Some variation of the hero's adventures, death, disappearance, and marriage or resurrection are the focal points of most stories. The original sense of identity (romance and comedy), its loss (tragedy and irony), and its recovery in the regenerate world of romance and comedy is mirrored in the mythic quest.
Myths of the birth of the hero, revival and resurrection, creation and defeat of the powers of darkness and death are perennial themes. The descent and subsequent ascent, going deep into the consciousness journey and emerging transformed, is a form of death/rebirth, a powerful archetypal theme which is initiatory in character. There is more than one form of rebirth. The notion emerges from the "belief system" level of psyche, which combines mythical, archetypal, and personal elements. Carl Jung detailed five specific types of rebirth with a variety of psychological aspects.
In ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS, he listed the forms of rebirth known to mankind as follows:
1. Metempsychosis. This means the transmigration of the soul from one body to another at death. The soul is believed to have the ability to transmigrate among plant, animal, or human forms. The change is not under the dominion of the will, but is the result of karma. The form is earned through one's deeds or misdeeds during life.
2. Reincarnation. This belief implies rebirth in human form, with some continuity or recall of personality. This is not only an eastern or Indian concept. At various times, it was embraced by the Hebrew and Greek cultures. It was expunged from THE BIBLE by Justinian and Theodora in Byzantine times. The soul is believed to migrate from human form to human form with some purposeful development.
3. Resurrection. Here the idea is the re-establishment of human existence after death, either through resurrection of the physical body, or in the glorified or "subtle body" of pure Light. It signifies a perpetual state of incorruptibility. It is a transformation of one's essence or essential being; a transport to a new dimension of existence.
4. Rebirth (renovatio). When we experience renewal or improvement through self-development, or even a vacation which revivifies us, we go through a kind of psychological rebirth. This rebirth takes place within the context of our individual life span. It may use magical, though not miraculous means of effecting change. The functioning of the personality may be enhanced, and we might feel rejuvenated, healed, or otherwise strengthened. We can face the daily grind with renewed zeal and effectiveness.
Rites of passage frequently involve a ceremonial form of rebirth, such as that of the adolescent into the adult world. When rebirth involves the transformation of the essence of our individuality, we are transmuted, or lifted from the human to the divine realm of being. 5. Indirect Rebirth. This implies witnessing or taking part in some transformative rite, such as the Catholic Mass, or the Eleusinian Mysteries. A modern example is psychotherapy which initiates the process of individuation, hastening the process of natural transformation. By focusing on dreams and self-awareness we can speed up nature's process of internal transformation. Our higher Self is revealed and we come to know our soul as a special "inner friend."
Meditation is the spiritual means most frequently used to bring this change about, outside of the therapeutic setting. All forms of rebirth, in the psychological sense, are experiences of the transcendence of life. Transcendence is a natural progression from the finite, mortal frame through space, time, and the personal ego into infinite, immortal life beyond. It gives us access to the experience of Cosmic Consciousness.
The experience may be induced by ritual means, with or without direct participation. It may be a spontaneous, ecstatic revelation, or a subjective transformation only. It frequently brings an enlargement of the personality, bringing richness and depth to life. Rebirth is experienced more easily, but not as deeply, through group participation or identification. In this case, the changes do not last, and one regresses to the former condition. Only spiritual exercises, or yoga, provide a clearcut means to the fullest, permanent experience of personal transformation, and access to the higher Self. To experience this, one goes through total annihilation of the old self--self-surrender.
The old ego dies to be revivified as part of a greater whole. Further reading on the concerns of Thanatos, death and rebirth include:
ANATOMY OF THE PSYCHE, "Mortificatio," Edward Edinger, 1985.
DEATH AND EASTERN THOUGHT, Frederick Holch, Ed., Abingdon Press, New York, 1974.
ON DREAMS AND DEATH, Marie-Louise vonFranz, 1986.
RITUALS FOR LIVING AND DYING, David Feinstein and P. Mayo.
TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD, Evans-Wentz.
TIBETAN BOOK OF LIVING AND DYING: Sogyal Rampa.
DIE TO LIVE, Huzur Maharaji Charan Singh.
SUICIDE AND THE SOUL, James Hillman, Spring Pub.
THE HUMAN ENCOUNTER WITH DEATH, Stanislav Grof & Joan Halifax, 1977.
LIFE AT DEATH, Kenneth Ring.
PSYCHE AND DEATH, Edgar Herzog.
SPIRITUAL MYTH
The God of Death haunts us all, consciously or subconsciously. Particularly the elderly are subject to a state which may be like a death in life--a paralysis from fear of what is to inevitably come. This event is a great moment, and some follow a natural urge to die at the right time, relinquishing heroic life-prolonging efforts. Our culture makes valiant attempts to repress the awareness that life is based on death. Our overactive physical fitness binges are heroic attempts to deny that the telos, or goal, of psyche is death.
This is not the case in all cultures. They prepare throughout life for death by putting dayworld notions to sleep. This radical shift in consciousness is expressed through metaphorical descriptors of death. Mystical philosophies encourage the aspirant to "die daily" by withdrawing into meditation. They recommend anywhere from 20 minutes to 1/10 of the day (2 1/2 hours). The idea is to tithe a tenth of one's time, rather than money to experiencial spiritual practice. This admonishment to "die daily" was also the advice of magician Aleister Crowley commenting on the Tarot Trump XIII, DEATH. Spiritual Masters, or Adepts, speak of the "gates of death."
They aid and teach the student to pass these gates and return to this plane at will. They help us solve the problem of what lies beyond. Coming and going at will through these gates is the process of dying while we live. This internal journey during meditation is routine to advanced students. During meditation consciousness is withdrawn from the external world and concentrated inside at the pineal gland, or eye center. This is what happens at the moment of death also, according to these teachers. The difference is that an adept who meditates never loses consciousness when passing out of the body. He retains complete memory of his experiences which happened during absence from the body, in higher spiritual planes of existence. Spiritual Masters, or Saints, describe four distinct classes or groups of people who meet with different sorts of experiences after physical death:
1. This group includes the bulk of mankind who have no living guide or spiritual teacher. They meet death unsupported, in great fear, helpless in the face of their own karma. They are judged immediately after death, sometimes quite severely. They return on the wheel of rebirth, born into the type of body which they created through their strongest desires in their past lives to fulfill their wishes.
2. This group have initiation from a living spiritual master, but didn't put much active emphasis on spiritual discipline or meditation (which balances or pays off karma). They indulged in many passions, and will be reborn to continue their training on the path. However, their teacher informs them when their time of death is near and accompanies them during the transition.
3. Faithful devotees of a spiritual guide have made good progress, but haven't yet gained liberation from the wheel of life. Since they are familiar with death through dying daily, they pass over without difficulty or distress; they understand and accept death calmly. They are also escorted by their Master, and rejoice at their homecoming. They need take a physical form no longer, and proceed to higher planes via their body of Light. Between initiation by a Master and liberation, there is a maximum of four human incarnations, instead of the eternal wheel of rebirth in various forms.
4. The final class consists only of Masters themselves. They leave the body when their work is done, simply putting it aside like soiled and worn clothing, and their souls merge back into God. Their duties and responsibilities fulfilled, they merged back into the Supreme One, who sends the great teachers here as embodiments of the Way. Perhaps one of the oldest traditional accounts of the western perennial philosophy concerning death and immortality comes down to us in The Hermetica, the Lost Wisdom of the Pharaohs (Freke & Gandy, Tarcher, 1997).
In the ancient texts, Hermes Trismegistus explores the nature of death and the fate of the soul which survives it. From our human point of view, time is a destroying force, for we all age and die. But from the cosmic perspective, it is an endless cycle. We can participate in that eternal realm through the spiritual quest, by learning to accept the inevitable transitory nature of forms, including our own. Death is just the discarding of the worn-out body.
According to ancient wisdom, pure souls are assinged to the heavenly realm while ignorant sould get recycled in the material realms. The Body of Light is recogized in East and West as the godlike form which transcends mortal death. According to The Hermetica: The end of becoming is the beginning of destruction.
The end of destruction is the beginning of becoming. Everything on Earth must be destroyed, for without destruction
nothing can be created. The new comes out of the old. Every birth of living flesh, like every growth of crop from seed,
will be followed by destruction. But from decay comes renewal, through the circling course of the celestial gods, and the power of Nature, who has her being in the Being of Atum. For man, time is a destroyer, but for the Cosmos it is an ever-turning wheel.
These earthly forms that come and go are illusions.
How can something be real
which never stays the same?
But these transitory illusory things arise
from the underlying permanent reality. Birth is not the beginning of life -
only of an individual awareness.
Change into another state is not death -
only the ending of this awareness.
Most people are ignorant of the truth,
and therefore afraid of death,
believing it to be the greatest of all evils.
But death is only the dissolution
of a worn-out body.
Our term of service as guardians of the world
is ended when we are freed
from the bonds of this mortal frame
and restored,
cleansed and purified,
to the primal condition of our highest nature. After quitting the body,
Mind, which is divine by nature,
is freed from all containment,
Taking on a body of Light,
it ranges through all space -
leaving the soul to be judged and punished,
according to its deserts.
Souls do not all go to the same place.
Nor to different places at random.
Rather, each is allocated
to a place that fits its nature. When a soul leaves the body
it undergoes a trial and investigation
by the chief of the gods.
When he finds a soul to be honorable and pure,
he allows it to live in a region that corresponds to its characteristics.
But if he finds it stained
with incurable ignorance,
he hurls it down
to the storms and whirlwinds,
where it is eternally tossed
between sky and earth
on the billowing air. Only a godd soul is spiritual and divine.
Having wronged no one
and come to know Atum,
such a soul has run the race of purity,
and becomes all Mind.
After it leaves its physical form,
it becomes a spirit in a body of Light,
so that it may serve Atum. At the dissolution of the body,
first the physical form is transformed
and is no longer visible.
The vital spirit returns to the atmosphere.
The bodily senses go back to the universe,
and recombine in new ways
to do other work.
Then the soul mounts upwards
through the structures of the heavens.
In the first zone,
it is relieved of growth and decay.
In the second,
evil and cunning.
In the third,
lust and deceiving desire.
In the fourth,
domineering arrogance.
In the fifth,
unbalanced audacity and rashness.
In the sixth,
greed for wealth.
In the seventh,
deceit and falsehood. Having been stripped
of all that was put upon it
by the structures of the heavens,
the soul now possesses
its own proper power
and may ascend
to the eighth sphere -
rejoicing with all those that welcome it,
and singing psalms to the Father.
The gods that dwell above the righth sphere
sing praises with a voice that is theirs alone,
call each soul to surrender to the gods,
and so each one becomes itself a god
by entering communion with Atum.
This is Primal Goodness.
This is the consummation
of True Knowledge.
Having been initiated into immortality,
a human soul,
now tranformed into a god,
joins the gods who dance and sing
in celebration
of the glorious victory of the soul.