Death-Rebirth
To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth.
~Jung, The Red Book, pg 266
"Unless you are constantly practicing it, this dying and being reborn, you are only a guest on this dark planet earth." Goethe
The imminence of death and the vision of the world in conspectu mortis is in truth a curious experience: the sense of the present stretches out beyond today, looking back into centuries gone by, and forward into futures yet unborn. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Page 10.
Nobody knows whether there is reincarnation, and equally one does not know that there is none. Buddha himself was convinced of reincarnation, but he himself on being asked twice by his disciples about it, left it quite open whether there is a continuity of your personality or not. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 103-104.
The moon is dead.
Your soul went to the moon, to the preserver of souls.
Thus the soul moved toward death.
I went into the inner death and saw that outer dying is better than inner death.
And I decided to die outside and to live within.
For that reason I turned away and sought the place of the inner life.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 267.
Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.
Psychological rebirth was Jung’s particular focus. Induced by ritual or stimulated by immediate personal experience, it results in an enlargement of the personality. He acknowledged that one might feel transformed during certain group experiences, but he cautioned against confusing this with genuine rebirth.
If any considerable group of persons are united and identified with one another by a particular frame of mind, the resultant transformation experience bears only a very remote resemblance to the experience of individual transformation. A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal. …
… The group experience goes no deeper than the level of one’s own mind in that state. It does work a change in you, but the change does not last. [“Concerning Rebirth,” CW 9., pars. 225f.]
To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth.
~Jung, The Red Book, pg 266
"Unless you are constantly practicing it, this dying and being reborn, you are only a guest on this dark planet earth." Goethe
The imminence of death and the vision of the world in conspectu mortis is in truth a curious experience: the sense of the present stretches out beyond today, looking back into centuries gone by, and forward into futures yet unborn. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Page 10.
Nobody knows whether there is reincarnation, and equally one does not know that there is none. Buddha himself was convinced of reincarnation, but he himself on being asked twice by his disciples about it, left it quite open whether there is a continuity of your personality or not. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 103-104.
The moon is dead.
Your soul went to the moon, to the preserver of souls.
Thus the soul moved toward death.
I went into the inner death and saw that outer dying is better than inner death.
And I decided to die outside and to live within.
For that reason I turned away and sought the place of the inner life.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 267.
Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.
Psychological rebirth was Jung’s particular focus. Induced by ritual or stimulated by immediate personal experience, it results in an enlargement of the personality. He acknowledged that one might feel transformed during certain group experiences, but he cautioned against confusing this with genuine rebirth.
If any considerable group of persons are united and identified with one another by a particular frame of mind, the resultant transformation experience bears only a very remote resemblance to the experience of individual transformation. A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal. …
… The group experience goes no deeper than the level of one’s own mind in that state. It does work a change in you, but the change does not last. [“Concerning Rebirth,” CW 9., pars. 225f.]
Philosophical Mercury
To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. --Jung, The Red Book, Page 266
The black beetle is the death that is necessary for renewal; and so thereafter, a new sun glowed, the sun of the depths, full of riddles, a sun of the night. And as the rising sun of spring quickens the dead earth, so the sun of the depths quickened the dead, and thus began the terrible struggle between light and darkness. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 238.
In you the reborn one will come to be, and the sun of the depths will rise, and a thousand serpents will develop from your dead matter and fall on the sun to choke it. Your blood will stream forth. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 239.
Your shock and doubt will be great, but from such torment the new life will be born. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 239.
I know, I have stridden across the depths. Through guilt I have become a newborn. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.
It is the mourning of the dead in me, which precedes burial and rebirth. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.
You new spark of an eternal fire, into which night were you born? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 243.
The one arose from the melting together of the two. He was born as a child from my own human soul, which had conceived him with resistance like a virgin. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.
To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. In the depths, being is not an unconditional persistence but an endlessly slow growth. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 266.
You would like to hear of the son of God, who shone and gave, who begot, and to whom life was born again, as the earth bears the sun green and colorful children. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 273.
I was born into life from below, and I grew up as heroes do, in hours rather than years. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 276.
I recognized the chameleon and no longer want to crawl on the earth and change colors and be reborn; instead I want to exist from my own force, like the sun which gives light and does not suck light. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 277.
My God, I love you as a mother loves the unborn whom she carries in her heart. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 286.
I became his nocturnal mother who incubated the egg of the beginning. And he rose up, renewed, reborn to greater splendor. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 287.
I have been baptized with impure water for rebirth. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 304.
But if the depths have conceived, then the symbol grows out of itself and is born from the mind, as befits a God. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 311.
Nothing has happened yet, the world has yet to begin, the sun is not yet born, the watery firmament has not been separated, we have not yet climbed onto the shoulders of our fathers, since our fathers have not yet become. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 320.
You Gods, your first born son is man. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 345.
I spent a long time pondering his words, which evidently he had spoken to the dead, and I was horrified by the atrocities that attend the rebirth of a God. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 357.
The division into four is a principium individuationis; it means to become one or a whole in the face of the many figures that carry the danger of destruction in them. It is what overcomes death and can bring about rebirth. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 372.
Since we are psychic beings and not entirely dependent upon space and time, we can easily understand the central importance of the resurrection idea: we are not completely subjected to the powers of annihilation because our psychic totality reaches beyond the barrier of space and time. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Self, Page 695.
To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. --Jung, The Red Book, Page 266
The black beetle is the death that is necessary for renewal; and so thereafter, a new sun glowed, the sun of the depths, full of riddles, a sun of the night. And as the rising sun of spring quickens the dead earth, so the sun of the depths quickened the dead, and thus began the terrible struggle between light and darkness. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 238.
In you the reborn one will come to be, and the sun of the depths will rise, and a thousand serpents will develop from your dead matter and fall on the sun to choke it. Your blood will stream forth. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 239.
Your shock and doubt will be great, but from such torment the new life will be born. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 239.
I know, I have stridden across the depths. Through guilt I have become a newborn. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.
It is the mourning of the dead in me, which precedes burial and rebirth. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.
You new spark of an eternal fire, into which night were you born? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 243.
The one arose from the melting together of the two. He was born as a child from my own human soul, which had conceived him with resistance like a virgin. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.
To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. In the depths, being is not an unconditional persistence but an endlessly slow growth. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 266.
You would like to hear of the son of God, who shone and gave, who begot, and to whom life was born again, as the earth bears the sun green and colorful children. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 273.
I was born into life from below, and I grew up as heroes do, in hours rather than years. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 276.
I recognized the chameleon and no longer want to crawl on the earth and change colors and be reborn; instead I want to exist from my own force, like the sun which gives light and does not suck light. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 277.
My God, I love you as a mother loves the unborn whom she carries in her heart. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 286.
I became his nocturnal mother who incubated the egg of the beginning. And he rose up, renewed, reborn to greater splendor. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 287.
I have been baptized with impure water for rebirth. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 304.
But if the depths have conceived, then the symbol grows out of itself and is born from the mind, as befits a God. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 311.
Nothing has happened yet, the world has yet to begin, the sun is not yet born, the watery firmament has not been separated, we have not yet climbed onto the shoulders of our fathers, since our fathers have not yet become. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 320.
You Gods, your first born son is man. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 345.
I spent a long time pondering his words, which evidently he had spoken to the dead, and I was horrified by the atrocities that attend the rebirth of a God. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 357.
The division into four is a principium individuationis; it means to become one or a whole in the face of the many figures that carry the danger of destruction in them. It is what overcomes death and can bring about rebirth. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 372.
Since we are psychic beings and not entirely dependent upon space and time, we can easily understand the central importance of the resurrection idea: we are not completely subjected to the powers of annihilation because our psychic totality reaches beyond the barrier of space and time. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Self, Page 695.
Moreover, the unconscious has a different relation to death than we ourselves have. For example, it is very surprising in which way dreams anticipate death. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 343.
As far as we know at all there seems to be no immediate decomposition of the soul.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 437-438.
It is a fact that the body very often apparently survives the soul, often even without a disease. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 437-438.
Dreams, Death, Birth --Rosen
http://chironpublications.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Dreams-Death-Rebirth-PROMO.pdf
http://chironpublications.com/dreams-death-rebirth/?utm_source=Chiron+Newsletter+4+new+books&utm_campaign=Chiron+5+New+Books&utm_medium=email
To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation.
This is the creation of the new, and that redeems me.
Salvation is the resolution of the task.
The task is to give birth to the old in a new time.
--Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 311.
The ego withdraws from its entanglement in the world, and after death remains alive because "interiorization" has prevented the wasting of the life-forces in the outer world. Instead of these being dissipated, they have made within the inner rotation of monad a centre of life which is independent of bodily existence. Such an ego is a god, deus, shen. ~Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 17.
Fire and water are inherent opposites and it is just this which causes rebirth.
~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 236.
It is our nature to transform ourselves from time to time; to cling to old ways is to resist a fundamental law of nature- death before rebirth. In Paths to Transformation, Kate Burns traces this process, correlating it with rituals of initiation and amplifying the stages with a rich collection of images, dreams, and case studies. Historically, the passage from adolescence to early adulthood was supported by extensive rites, and we now know that the absence of such rites in modern life has cast youth adrift and rendered them immature and dependent beyond their years. Similarly, our ancestors venerated aging, including its mortal goal, as a summons to wisdom rather than a horror to be resisted by every possible means. During the expanding years between youth and death, the question of how an individual is to find a personal path worthy of the soul becomes most pressing in our postmodern world.
Komarius teaches Cleopatra that the dead who stay in Hades [that is in chaos) are transformed into Spring flowers by the miraculous dew.
This is the idea of the living elements in chaos or Shunyata waking and uniting through being contained in the lotus. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 101.
I recognized the chameleon and no longer want to crawl on the earth and change colors and be reborn; instead I want to exist from my own force, like the sun which gives light and does not suck light. That belongs to the earth.
I recall my solar nature and would like to rush to my rising. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 277.
As far as we know at all there seems to be no immediate decomposition of the soul.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 437-438.
It is a fact that the body very often apparently survives the soul, often even without a disease. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 437-438.
Dreams, Death, Birth --Rosen
http://chironpublications.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Dreams-Death-Rebirth-PROMO.pdf
http://chironpublications.com/dreams-death-rebirth/?utm_source=Chiron+Newsletter+4+new+books&utm_campaign=Chiron+5+New+Books&utm_medium=email
To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation.
This is the creation of the new, and that redeems me.
Salvation is the resolution of the task.
The task is to give birth to the old in a new time.
--Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 311.
The ego withdraws from its entanglement in the world, and after death remains alive because "interiorization" has prevented the wasting of the life-forces in the outer world. Instead of these being dissipated, they have made within the inner rotation of monad a centre of life which is independent of bodily existence. Such an ego is a god, deus, shen. ~Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 17.
Fire and water are inherent opposites and it is just this which causes rebirth.
~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 236.
It is our nature to transform ourselves from time to time; to cling to old ways is to resist a fundamental law of nature- death before rebirth. In Paths to Transformation, Kate Burns traces this process, correlating it with rituals of initiation and amplifying the stages with a rich collection of images, dreams, and case studies. Historically, the passage from adolescence to early adulthood was supported by extensive rites, and we now know that the absence of such rites in modern life has cast youth adrift and rendered them immature and dependent beyond their years. Similarly, our ancestors venerated aging, including its mortal goal, as a summons to wisdom rather than a horror to be resisted by every possible means. During the expanding years between youth and death, the question of how an individual is to find a personal path worthy of the soul becomes most pressing in our postmodern world.
Komarius teaches Cleopatra that the dead who stay in Hades [that is in chaos) are transformed into Spring flowers by the miraculous dew.
This is the idea of the living elements in chaos or Shunyata waking and uniting through being contained in the lotus. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 101.
I recognized the chameleon and no longer want to crawl on the earth and change colors and be reborn; instead I want to exist from my own force, like the sun which gives light and does not suck light. That belongs to the earth.
I recall my solar nature and would like to rush to my rising. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 277.
William Blake (1757-1827) The House Of Death
Transformation of instinct, therefore, can only concern a small part of it and it takes untold thousands of years until a noticeable change is effected.
This is the transformation envisaged by the biologist.
But the kind of transformation which the psychologist has in mind is something else and cannot be compared to the biological effect, as it is not a "real" change such as is understood by a natural scientist.
It is rather a "psychological" change, a change brought about by a psychological superstructure: a relatively small amount of instinctive energy (i.e., energy of the instinct) is led over into another form, i.e., a thought or feeling-form (idea and value) upon the basis and with the help of a pre-existing archetype.
This is done for instance by a ritual anamnesis of an archetypal figure.
You can observe this procedure in nearly all renewal or rebirth mysteries: there is an invocation and dramatic representation of the (spiritual) ancestor and his deeds.
The "constellate" (or stimulate) the latent analogous archetype in the and its inherent fascination causes the instinctive energy (libido) to deviate from its original, biological
course and to adhere to its spiritual counterpart.
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 412-414.
In the renewed world you can have no outer possessions, unless you create them out of yourselves. You can enter only into your own mysteries. The spirit of the depths has other things to teach you than me. I only have to bring you tidings of the new God and of the ceremonies and mysteries of his service. But this is the way. It is the gate to darkness.
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, "Draft" Footnote 163, Page 246. http://ow.ly/2VR92E
It is our chameleon nature that forces us through these transformations.
So long as we are chameleons, we need an annual journey in the bath of rebirth.
Therefore I looked at the outdating of my ideals with horror, since I loved my natural greenness and mistrusted my chameleon skin, which changed colors according
to the environment.
The chameleon does this cleverly.
One calls this change a progress through rebirth.
So you experience 777 rebirths.
The Buddha did not need quite so long to see that even rebirths are vain.
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 278, Footnote 94.
This is the transformation envisaged by the biologist.
But the kind of transformation which the psychologist has in mind is something else and cannot be compared to the biological effect, as it is not a "real" change such as is understood by a natural scientist.
It is rather a "psychological" change, a change brought about by a psychological superstructure: a relatively small amount of instinctive energy (i.e., energy of the instinct) is led over into another form, i.e., a thought or feeling-form (idea and value) upon the basis and with the help of a pre-existing archetype.
This is done for instance by a ritual anamnesis of an archetypal figure.
You can observe this procedure in nearly all renewal or rebirth mysteries: there is an invocation and dramatic representation of the (spiritual) ancestor and his deeds.
The "constellate" (or stimulate) the latent analogous archetype in the and its inherent fascination causes the instinctive energy (libido) to deviate from its original, biological
course and to adhere to its spiritual counterpart.
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 412-414.
In the renewed world you can have no outer possessions, unless you create them out of yourselves. You can enter only into your own mysteries. The spirit of the depths has other things to teach you than me. I only have to bring you tidings of the new God and of the ceremonies and mysteries of his service. But this is the way. It is the gate to darkness.
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, "Draft" Footnote 163, Page 246. http://ow.ly/2VR92E
It is our chameleon nature that forces us through these transformations.
So long as we are chameleons, we need an annual journey in the bath of rebirth.
Therefore I looked at the outdating of my ideals with horror, since I loved my natural greenness and mistrusted my chameleon skin, which changed colors according
to the environment.
The chameleon does this cleverly.
One calls this change a progress through rebirth.
So you experience 777 rebirths.
The Buddha did not need quite so long to see that even rebirths are vain.
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 278, Footnote 94.
The maximum awareness which has been attained anywhere forms, so it seems to me, the upper limit of knowledge to which the dead can attain.
That is probably why earthly life is of such great significance, and why it is that what a human being "brings over" at the time of his death is so important.
Only here, in life on earth, where the opposites clash together, can the general level of consciousness be raised. That seems to be man's metaphysical task which he cannot accomplish without "mythologizing."
Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition. True, the unconscious knows more than consciousness does; but it is knowledge of a special sort, knowledge in eternity, usually without reference to the here and now, not couched in language of the intellect.
Only when we let its statements amplify themselves, as has been shown above by the example of numerals, does it come within the range of our understanding; only then does a new aspect become perceptible to us.
This process is convincingly repeated in every successful dream analysis. That is why it is so important not to have any preconceived, doctrinaire opinions about the statements made by dreams.
As soon as a certain "monotony of interpretation" strikes us, we know that our approach has become doctrinaire and hence sterile. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 311.
The Buddha did not need quite so long to see that even rebirths are
vain. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 298, Footnote 94.
...the figures in the unconscious could be explained by a long-lasting primeval matriarchy if only we knew for certain that it ever existed, just as the flood myths could be explained by the myth of Atlantis if only we knew that there ever was an Atlantis. Equally, the contents of the unconscious could be explained by reincarnation if we knew that there is reincarnation. ~ Carl Jung to Baroness Tinti, Letters Volume 1, Pages 208-209.
The division into four is a principium individuationis; it means to become one or a whole in the face of the many figures that carry the danger of destruction in them. It is what overcomes death and can bring about rebirth. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 372.
Christmas is celebrated three days after the shortest day, therefore it is the festival of the rebirth of the sun. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 176.
Fire and water are inherent opposites and it is just this which causes
rebirth. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 236.
I have been baptized with impure water for rebirth. A flame from the fire of Hell awaited me above the baptismal basin. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 304.
It is the mourning of the dead in me, which precedes burial and rebirth. The rain is the fructifying of the earth, it begets the new wheat, the young, germinating God. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 243.
The scarab is a classical rebirth symbol. According to the description in the ancient Egyptian book Am-Tuat, the dead sun God transforms himself at the tenth station into Khepri, the scarab, and as such mounts the barge at the twelfth station, which raises he rejuvenated sun into the morning sky ~Carl Jung, CW 8, §843.
The righteous man is the instrument into which God enters in order to attain self-reflection and thus consciousness and rebirth as a divine child trusted to the care of adult man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 739.
"…Blow on a dead man's embers
And a live flame will start
Let his forgotten briefs be now,
And now, his withered hopes…."
-Robert Graves, "To bring the dead to life"
What affects the body has its influence on the soul, and vice versa.
There are many rebirth techniques. Initiates, for instance, were drowned in a vessel and, when brought out, swaddled like newborn babies and given new names or new garments to emphasize that they had become different people.
Sometimes an adoption ceremony was used to symbolize rebirth, the initiates were reborn as children of different parents. And there is the ordeal of passing through the fire door; rebirth can take place through fire or water, or through both.
Fire and water are inherent opposites and it is just this which causes rebirth. When opposites come together new energy is born and this is the purpose of the whole procedure.
We cannot slay death, as we have already taken all life from it. If we still want to overcome death, then we must enliven it. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book. Page 244.
As Hillman (1999) writes,The myth of Eternal Return is based upon a radical premise: Time is cyclical.What happens now has happened before and will happen again at some basic level if not exactly in each detail. This cyclical repetition reflects the eternal time of the cosmos. Stable, sacred patterns or archetypal forces govern the changing life of the world. Life in the world moves forward in secular time, usually quite ignorant of the mythic patterns it is repeating and cannot escape from. We do not see that the new is the old come around again, and that to understand the new we must return to the old. (p. 127
And a live flame will start
Let his forgotten briefs be now,
And now, his withered hopes…."
-Robert Graves, "To bring the dead to life"
What affects the body has its influence on the soul, and vice versa.
There are many rebirth techniques. Initiates, for instance, were drowned in a vessel and, when brought out, swaddled like newborn babies and given new names or new garments to emphasize that they had become different people.
Sometimes an adoption ceremony was used to symbolize rebirth, the initiates were reborn as children of different parents. And there is the ordeal of passing through the fire door; rebirth can take place through fire or water, or through both.
Fire and water are inherent opposites and it is just this which causes rebirth. When opposites come together new energy is born and this is the purpose of the whole procedure.
We cannot slay death, as we have already taken all life from it. If we still want to overcome death, then we must enliven it. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book. Page 244.
As Hillman (1999) writes,The myth of Eternal Return is based upon a radical premise: Time is cyclical.What happens now has happened before and will happen again at some basic level if not exactly in each detail. This cyclical repetition reflects the eternal time of the cosmos. Stable, sacred patterns or archetypal forces govern the changing life of the world. Life in the world moves forward in secular time, usually quite ignorant of the mythic patterns it is repeating and cannot escape from. We do not see that the new is the old come around again, and that to understand the new we must return to the old. (p. 127
The least differentiated function is always the one from which our renewal starts; it is just the one that yields the renewal of life; when a person has used up his conscious point of view, he capsizes; the thing which never has lived is as green and as fresh as spring-it means a complete reversal of the whole personality. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff - A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70
It is a primordial, universal idea that the dead simply continue their earthly existence and do not know that they are disembodied spirits an archetypal idea which enters into immediate, visible manifestation whenever anyone sees a ghost. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 518.
Life After Death
One widespread myth of the hereafter is formed by the ideas and images centering on reincarnation.
In one country whose intellectual culture is highly complex and much older than ours I am, of course,
referring to India the idea of reincarnation is as much taken for granted as, among us, the idea that God created the world, or that there is a spiritus rector.
Cultivated Hindus know that we do not share their ideas about this, but that does not trouble them.
In keeping with the spirit of the East, the succession of birth and death is viewed as an endless continuity, as an eternal wheel rolling on forever without a goal, Man lives and attains knowledge and dies and begins again from the beginning.
Only with the Buddha does the idea of a goal emerge, namely, the overcoming of earthly existence.
The mythic needs of the Occidental call for an evolutionary cosmogony with a beginning and a goal.
The Occidental rebels against a cosmogony with a beginning and mere end, just as he cannot accept the idea of a static, self-contained, eternal cycle of events.
The Oriental, on the other hand, seems able to come to terms with this idea.
Apparently there is no unanimous feeling about the nature of the world, any more than there is general agreement among contemporary astronomers on this question.
To Western man, the meaninglessness of a merely static universe is unbearable.
He must assume that it has meaning.
The Oriental does not need to make this assumption; rather, he himself embodies it.
Whereas the Occidental feels the need to complete the meaning of the world, the Oriental strives for the fulfillment of meaning in man, stripping the world and existence from himself (Buddha).
I would say that both are right.
Western man seems predominantly extraverted, Eastern man predominantly introverted.
The former projects the meaning and considers that it exists in objects; the latter feels the meaning in himself. But the meaning is both without and within.
The idea of rebirth is inseparable from that of karma.
The crucial question is whether a man's karma is personal or not.
If it is, then the preordained destiny with which a man enters life represents an achievement of previous lives, and a personal continuity therefore exists.
If, however, this is not so, and an impersonal karma is seized upon in the act of birth, then that karma is incarnated again without there being any personal continuity.
Buddha was twice asked by his disciples whether man's karma is personal or not.
Each time he fended off the question, and did not go into the matter; to know this, he said, would not contribute to liberating oneself from the illusion of existence.
Buddha considered it far more useful for his disciples to meditate upon the Nidana chain, that is, upon birth, life, old age, and death, and upon the cause and effect of suffering.
I know no answer to the question of whether the karma which I live is the outcome of my past lives, or whether it is not rather the achievement of my ancestors, whose heritage comes together in me.
Am I a combination of the lives of these ancestors and do I embody these lives again? Have I lived before in the past as a specific personality, and did I progress so far in that life that I am now able to seek a solution? I do not know.
Buddha left the question open, and I like to assume that he himself did not know with certainty.
I could well imagine that I might have lived in former centuries and there encountered questions I was not yet able to answer; that I had to be born again because I had not fulfilled the task that was given
to me.
When I die, my deeds will follow along with me that is how I imagine it.
I will bring with me what I have done.
In the meantime it is important to insure that I do not stand at the end with empty hands.
Buddha, too, seems to have had this thought when he tried to keep his disciples from wasting time on useless speculation.
The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me.
Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world's answer.
That is a supra-personal life task, which I accomplish only by effort and with difficulty.
Perhaps it is a question which preoccupied my ancestors, and which they could not answer.
Could that be why I am so impressed by the fact that the conclusion of Faust contains no solution?
Or by the problem on which Nietzsche foundered: the Dionysian side of life, to which the Christian seems to have lost the way?
Or is it the restless Wotan-Hermes of my Alemannic and Prankish ancestors who poses challenging riddles?
What I feel to be the resultant of my ancestors' lives, or a karma acquired in a previous personal life, might perhaps equally well be an impersonal archetype which today presses hard on everyone and has taken a particular hold upon me an archetype such as, for example, the development over the centuries of the divine triad and its confrontation with the feminine principle; or the still pending answer to the Gnostic question as to the origin of evil, or, to put it another way, the incompleteness of the Christian God-image.
I also think of the possibility that through the achievement of an individual a question enters the world, to which he must provide some kind of answer.
For example, my way of posing the question as well as my answer may be unsatisfactory.
That being so, someone who has my karma or I myself would have to be reborn in order to give a more complete answer.
It might happen that I would not be reborn again so long as the world needed no such answer, and that I would be entitled to several hundred years of peace until someone was once more needed who took an interest in these matters and could profitably tackle the task anew.
I imagine that for a while a period of rest could ensue, until the stint I had done in my lifetime needed to be taken up again.
The question of karma is obscure to me, as is also the problem of personal rebirth or of the transmigration of souls.
"With a free and open mind" I listen attentively to the Indian doctrine of rebirth, and look around in the world of my own experience to see whether somewhere and somehow there is some authentic sign pointing toward reincarnation.
Naturally, I do not count the relatively numerous testimonies, here in the West, to the belief in reincarnation.
A belief proves to me only the phenomenon of belief, not the content of the belief.
This I must see revealed empirically in order to accept it.
Until a few years ago I could not discover anything convincing in this respect, although I kept a sharp lookout for any such signs.
Recently, however, I observed in myself a series of dreams which would seem to describe the process of reincarnation in a deceased person of my acquaintance.
But I have never come across any such dreams in other persons, and therefore have no basis for comparison.
Since this observation is subjective and unique, I prefer only to mention its existence and not to go into it any further.
I must confess, however, that after this experience I view the problem of reincarnation with somewhat different eyes, though without being in a position to assert a definite opinion.
If we assume that life continues "there," we cannot conceive of any other form of existence except a psychic one; for the life of the psyche requires no space and no time.
Psychic existence, and above all the inner images with which we are here concerned, supply the material for all mythic speculations about a life in the hereafter, and I imagine that life as a continuance in the world of images.
Thus the psyche might be that existence in which the hereafter or the land of the dead is located.
From the psychological point of view, life in the hereafter would seem to be a logical continuation of the psychic life of old age.
With increasing age, contemplation, and reflection, the inner images naturally play an ever greater part in man's life. "Your old men shall dream dreams".
That, to be sure, presupposes that the psyches of the old men have not become wooden, or entirely petrified sero medicina paratur cum mala per longas convaluere moras.
In old age one begins to let memories unroll before the mind's eye and, musing, to recognize oneself in the inner and outer images of the past.
This is like a preparation for an existence in the hereafter, just as, in Plato's view, philosophy is a preparation for death. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections
It is a primordial, universal idea that the dead simply continue their earthly existence and do not know that they are disembodied spirits an archetypal idea which enters into immediate, visible manifestation whenever anyone sees a ghost. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 518.
Life After Death
One widespread myth of the hereafter is formed by the ideas and images centering on reincarnation.
In one country whose intellectual culture is highly complex and much older than ours I am, of course,
referring to India the idea of reincarnation is as much taken for granted as, among us, the idea that God created the world, or that there is a spiritus rector.
Cultivated Hindus know that we do not share their ideas about this, but that does not trouble them.
In keeping with the spirit of the East, the succession of birth and death is viewed as an endless continuity, as an eternal wheel rolling on forever without a goal, Man lives and attains knowledge and dies and begins again from the beginning.
Only with the Buddha does the idea of a goal emerge, namely, the overcoming of earthly existence.
The mythic needs of the Occidental call for an evolutionary cosmogony with a beginning and a goal.
The Occidental rebels against a cosmogony with a beginning and mere end, just as he cannot accept the idea of a static, self-contained, eternal cycle of events.
The Oriental, on the other hand, seems able to come to terms with this idea.
Apparently there is no unanimous feeling about the nature of the world, any more than there is general agreement among contemporary astronomers on this question.
To Western man, the meaninglessness of a merely static universe is unbearable.
He must assume that it has meaning.
The Oriental does not need to make this assumption; rather, he himself embodies it.
Whereas the Occidental feels the need to complete the meaning of the world, the Oriental strives for the fulfillment of meaning in man, stripping the world and existence from himself (Buddha).
I would say that both are right.
Western man seems predominantly extraverted, Eastern man predominantly introverted.
The former projects the meaning and considers that it exists in objects; the latter feels the meaning in himself. But the meaning is both without and within.
The idea of rebirth is inseparable from that of karma.
The crucial question is whether a man's karma is personal or not.
If it is, then the preordained destiny with which a man enters life represents an achievement of previous lives, and a personal continuity therefore exists.
If, however, this is not so, and an impersonal karma is seized upon in the act of birth, then that karma is incarnated again without there being any personal continuity.
Buddha was twice asked by his disciples whether man's karma is personal or not.
Each time he fended off the question, and did not go into the matter; to know this, he said, would not contribute to liberating oneself from the illusion of existence.
Buddha considered it far more useful for his disciples to meditate upon the Nidana chain, that is, upon birth, life, old age, and death, and upon the cause and effect of suffering.
I know no answer to the question of whether the karma which I live is the outcome of my past lives, or whether it is not rather the achievement of my ancestors, whose heritage comes together in me.
Am I a combination of the lives of these ancestors and do I embody these lives again? Have I lived before in the past as a specific personality, and did I progress so far in that life that I am now able to seek a solution? I do not know.
Buddha left the question open, and I like to assume that he himself did not know with certainty.
I could well imagine that I might have lived in former centuries and there encountered questions I was not yet able to answer; that I had to be born again because I had not fulfilled the task that was given
to me.
When I die, my deeds will follow along with me that is how I imagine it.
I will bring with me what I have done.
In the meantime it is important to insure that I do not stand at the end with empty hands.
Buddha, too, seems to have had this thought when he tried to keep his disciples from wasting time on useless speculation.
The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me.
Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world's answer.
That is a supra-personal life task, which I accomplish only by effort and with difficulty.
Perhaps it is a question which preoccupied my ancestors, and which they could not answer.
Could that be why I am so impressed by the fact that the conclusion of Faust contains no solution?
Or by the problem on which Nietzsche foundered: the Dionysian side of life, to which the Christian seems to have lost the way?
Or is it the restless Wotan-Hermes of my Alemannic and Prankish ancestors who poses challenging riddles?
What I feel to be the resultant of my ancestors' lives, or a karma acquired in a previous personal life, might perhaps equally well be an impersonal archetype which today presses hard on everyone and has taken a particular hold upon me an archetype such as, for example, the development over the centuries of the divine triad and its confrontation with the feminine principle; or the still pending answer to the Gnostic question as to the origin of evil, or, to put it another way, the incompleteness of the Christian God-image.
I also think of the possibility that through the achievement of an individual a question enters the world, to which he must provide some kind of answer.
For example, my way of posing the question as well as my answer may be unsatisfactory.
That being so, someone who has my karma or I myself would have to be reborn in order to give a more complete answer.
It might happen that I would not be reborn again so long as the world needed no such answer, and that I would be entitled to several hundred years of peace until someone was once more needed who took an interest in these matters and could profitably tackle the task anew.
I imagine that for a while a period of rest could ensue, until the stint I had done in my lifetime needed to be taken up again.
The question of karma is obscure to me, as is also the problem of personal rebirth or of the transmigration of souls.
"With a free and open mind" I listen attentively to the Indian doctrine of rebirth, and look around in the world of my own experience to see whether somewhere and somehow there is some authentic sign pointing toward reincarnation.
Naturally, I do not count the relatively numerous testimonies, here in the West, to the belief in reincarnation.
A belief proves to me only the phenomenon of belief, not the content of the belief.
This I must see revealed empirically in order to accept it.
Until a few years ago I could not discover anything convincing in this respect, although I kept a sharp lookout for any such signs.
Recently, however, I observed in myself a series of dreams which would seem to describe the process of reincarnation in a deceased person of my acquaintance.
But I have never come across any such dreams in other persons, and therefore have no basis for comparison.
Since this observation is subjective and unique, I prefer only to mention its existence and not to go into it any further.
I must confess, however, that after this experience I view the problem of reincarnation with somewhat different eyes, though without being in a position to assert a definite opinion.
If we assume that life continues "there," we cannot conceive of any other form of existence except a psychic one; for the life of the psyche requires no space and no time.
Psychic existence, and above all the inner images with which we are here concerned, supply the material for all mythic speculations about a life in the hereafter, and I imagine that life as a continuance in the world of images.
Thus the psyche might be that existence in which the hereafter or the land of the dead is located.
From the psychological point of view, life in the hereafter would seem to be a logical continuation of the psychic life of old age.
With increasing age, contemplation, and reflection, the inner images naturally play an ever greater part in man's life. "Your old men shall dream dreams".
That, to be sure, presupposes that the psyches of the old men have not become wooden, or entirely petrified sero medicina paratur cum mala per longas convaluere moras.
In old age one begins to let memories unroll before the mind's eye and, musing, to recognize oneself in the inner and outer images of the past.
This is like a preparation for an existence in the hereafter, just as, in Plato's view, philosophy is a preparation for death. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections
It frequently happens that when a person with whom one was intimate dies, either one is oneself drawn into the death, so to speak, or else this burden has the opposite effect of a task that has to be fulfilled in real life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Page 239.
But when you die, nobody else will die for you or instead of you. It will be entirely and exclusively your own affair. That has been expected of you through your whole life, that you live it as if you were dying.
So it will happen to you as it happens to most people. They die in exactly the same ways as they should have lived. Good Lord, how many impersonations do you reckon you need to understand this simple truth?
So it will happen to you as it happens to most people.
They die in exactly the same ways as they should have lived.
Good Lord, how many impersonations do you reckon you need to understand this simple truth? ~~Carl Jung to J. Allen Gilbert, Letters Volume 1, Pages 422-423.
"As long as you do not know how to die and come to life again, you are but a sorry traveler on this dark earth." ~ Goethe.
The acacia, in the mythic system of Freemasonry, is preeminently the symbol of the IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL - that important doctrine which it is the great design of the Institution to teach. As the evanescent nature of the flower, which "cometh forth and is cut down," reminds us of the transitory nature of human life, so the perpetual renovation of the evergreen plant, which uninterruptedly presents the appearance of youth and vigor, is aptly compared to that spiritual life in which the soul, freed from the corruptible companionship of the body, shall enjoyeternal spring and an immortal youth. Hence, in the impressive funeral service of our Order, it is said that "this evergreen is an emblem of our faith in the immortality of the soul. By this we are reminded that we have an immortal part within us, which shall survive the grave, and which shall never, never, never die." And again, in the closing sentences of the monitorial lecture of the third degree, the same sentiment is repeated, and we are told that by "the ever-green and ever-living sprig" the Mason is strengthened "with confidence and composure to look forward to a blessed immortality." Such an interpretation of the symbol is an easy and a natural one; it suggests itself at once to the least reflective mind; and consequently, in some one form or another, is to be found existing in all ages and nations. It was an ancient custom, - which is not, even now, altogether disused, - for mourners to carry in their hands at funerals a sprig of some evvergreen, generally the cedar or the cypruss, and to deposit it in the grave of the deceased. According to Dalcho,* the Hebrews always planted a sprig of the acacia at the head of the grave of a departed friend. Potter tells us that the ancient Greeks "had a custom bedecking tombs with herbs and flowers." All sorts of purple and white flowers were acceptable to the dead, but principally the amaranth and the myrtle. The very name of the former of these plants, which signifies "never fading," would seem to indicate the true symbolic meaning of the usage, although archaeologists have generally supposed it to besimply an exhibition of love on the part of the survivors. Ragon says, that the ancients substituted the acacia for all other plants because they believed it to be incorruptible, and not liable to injury from the attacks of any kind of insect or other animal - thus symbolizing the incorruptible nature of the soul.
hence we see the propriety of placing the sprig of acacia, as an emblem of immortality, among the symbols of that degree, all of whse ceremonies are intended to teach us the great truth that "the life of man, regulated by morality, faith, andjustice, will be rewarded at its closing hour by the prospect of Eternal Bliss." So, therefore, says Dr. Oliver, when the Master Mason exclaims "my name is Acacia," it is equivalent to saying, "I have been in the grave - I have triumphed over it by rising from the dead - I have triumphed over it by rising from the dead - and being regenerated in the process, I have a claim to life everlasting."
The srig of acacia, then, in its most ordinary signification, presents itself to the Master Mason as a symbol of the immortality of the soul, being intended to remind him, by its evergreen and unchanging nature, of that better and spritual part within us, which, as an emanation from the Grand Architect of the Universe, can never die. And as this the most ordinary, the most generally accepted signification, so also is the most important; for thus, as the peculiar symbol of immortality, it becomes the most appropiate to an Order all of whose teachings are intended to inculcate the great lesson that life rises out of the grave." But incidental to this the acacia has two other interpretations which are well worthy of investigation.
http://antinewworldorder.blogspot.com/2009/06/acacia.html
But when you die, nobody else will die for you or instead of you. It will be entirely and exclusively your own affair. That has been expected of you through your whole life, that you live it as if you were dying.
So it will happen to you as it happens to most people. They die in exactly the same ways as they should have lived. Good Lord, how many impersonations do you reckon you need to understand this simple truth?
So it will happen to you as it happens to most people.
They die in exactly the same ways as they should have lived.
Good Lord, how many impersonations do you reckon you need to understand this simple truth? ~~Carl Jung to J. Allen Gilbert, Letters Volume 1, Pages 422-423.
"As long as you do not know how to die and come to life again, you are but a sorry traveler on this dark earth." ~ Goethe.
The acacia, in the mythic system of Freemasonry, is preeminently the symbol of the IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL - that important doctrine which it is the great design of the Institution to teach. As the evanescent nature of the flower, which "cometh forth and is cut down," reminds us of the transitory nature of human life, so the perpetual renovation of the evergreen plant, which uninterruptedly presents the appearance of youth and vigor, is aptly compared to that spiritual life in which the soul, freed from the corruptible companionship of the body, shall enjoyeternal spring and an immortal youth. Hence, in the impressive funeral service of our Order, it is said that "this evergreen is an emblem of our faith in the immortality of the soul. By this we are reminded that we have an immortal part within us, which shall survive the grave, and which shall never, never, never die." And again, in the closing sentences of the monitorial lecture of the third degree, the same sentiment is repeated, and we are told that by "the ever-green and ever-living sprig" the Mason is strengthened "with confidence and composure to look forward to a blessed immortality." Such an interpretation of the symbol is an easy and a natural one; it suggests itself at once to the least reflective mind; and consequently, in some one form or another, is to be found existing in all ages and nations. It was an ancient custom, - which is not, even now, altogether disused, - for mourners to carry in their hands at funerals a sprig of some evvergreen, generally the cedar or the cypruss, and to deposit it in the grave of the deceased. According to Dalcho,* the Hebrews always planted a sprig of the acacia at the head of the grave of a departed friend. Potter tells us that the ancient Greeks "had a custom bedecking tombs with herbs and flowers." All sorts of purple and white flowers were acceptable to the dead, but principally the amaranth and the myrtle. The very name of the former of these plants, which signifies "never fading," would seem to indicate the true symbolic meaning of the usage, although archaeologists have generally supposed it to besimply an exhibition of love on the part of the survivors. Ragon says, that the ancients substituted the acacia for all other plants because they believed it to be incorruptible, and not liable to injury from the attacks of any kind of insect or other animal - thus symbolizing the incorruptible nature of the soul.
hence we see the propriety of placing the sprig of acacia, as an emblem of immortality, among the symbols of that degree, all of whse ceremonies are intended to teach us the great truth that "the life of man, regulated by morality, faith, andjustice, will be rewarded at its closing hour by the prospect of Eternal Bliss." So, therefore, says Dr. Oliver, when the Master Mason exclaims "my name is Acacia," it is equivalent to saying, "I have been in the grave - I have triumphed over it by rising from the dead - I have triumphed over it by rising from the dead - and being regenerated in the process, I have a claim to life everlasting."
The srig of acacia, then, in its most ordinary signification, presents itself to the Master Mason as a symbol of the immortality of the soul, being intended to remind him, by its evergreen and unchanging nature, of that better and spritual part within us, which, as an emanation from the Grand Architect of the Universe, can never die. And as this the most ordinary, the most generally accepted signification, so also is the most important; for thus, as the peculiar symbol of immortality, it becomes the most appropiate to an Order all of whose teachings are intended to inculcate the great lesson that life rises out of the grave." But incidental to this the acacia has two other interpretations which are well worthy of investigation.
http://antinewworldorder.blogspot.com/2009/06/acacia.html
Berthold Furtmeyer: Baum des Todes und des Lebens, Tree of Death and Life– c. 1481
The image above by Berthold Furtmeyer (1481) is titled the Tree of Death and Life. This image illustrates the paradox and ambi-valence in the mother archetype. Anne Baring describes the scene of the image:
“The faces of the two women are identical, and their heads incline away from the central point of the tree in antithetical relationship: Eve, predictably naked, offering to humanity the apple of death, which she is passing on from the serpent; and Mary, predictably clothed, offering the redeeming apple of life. The position of the serpent arising from the not-to-be seen phallus of Adam is presumably less than coincidental. On Eve’s side of the tree lies the grinning skull, while Death waits for her on the right, and on Mary’s side of the tree – the Life side - the cross with the crucified Christ poised as on a branch, himself the fruit of her miraculously intact womb.”
The tree of life represents our common genealogy, reflecting the interrelatedness of all life and our common descent. Jung says:
“The tree of life may have been, in the first instance, a fruit-bearing genealogical tree, and hence a kind of tribal mother” (CW 5, para 321).
The tree of life is a “mother symbol” (Jung, CW 5, para 321). The Tree of Death and Life illustrates the paradox inherent in the imagery of the “mother symbol.” The mother’s fruit is the image of paradox: the fruit of death and the fruit of redemption come from the same mother tree. Eve, the mother of our fallen state offers the fruit of death. Mary, the mother of redemption offers the fruit of new life, of rebirth into spiritual reality. Death in life; Life in death. In archetypal terms, spiritual reality is symbolic reality. Both mothers pick the fruit from one mother tree– a form of archetypal ‘mother of all,’ the unknown and unarticulated frontier of psychic life which proffers our symbolic development.
The mother tree is there not only in the begging of life, as the Fall, but in the end as well, as Revelation (from Latin revelatio, from revelare ‘lay bare’). She sets the bounds of biblical time. Revelations 22 tells us that leaves from the tree of life will heal all nations:
“the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:1-2).
The tree of life offers a rich symbolism, pointing to the potential for integration through symbolic development. The tree of life proffers both the fruit of our fall into a world yet to be symbolized, as well as the fruit of our redemption through symnolization. Tree as mother symbol is an image of the fruit bearing potential of the symbol, capable of metabolizing the great unknown– the noumenon.
References:
The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image By Anne Baring, Jules Cashford
Symbols of Transformation (CW5) by Carl G. Jung (in US Pubic Domain, first published 1912)
http://pathofsoul.org/2014/07/03/paradox-of-the-tree-of-death-and-life/
“The faces of the two women are identical, and their heads incline away from the central point of the tree in antithetical relationship: Eve, predictably naked, offering to humanity the apple of death, which she is passing on from the serpent; and Mary, predictably clothed, offering the redeeming apple of life. The position of the serpent arising from the not-to-be seen phallus of Adam is presumably less than coincidental. On Eve’s side of the tree lies the grinning skull, while Death waits for her on the right, and on Mary’s side of the tree – the Life side - the cross with the crucified Christ poised as on a branch, himself the fruit of her miraculously intact womb.”
The tree of life represents our common genealogy, reflecting the interrelatedness of all life and our common descent. Jung says:
“The tree of life may have been, in the first instance, a fruit-bearing genealogical tree, and hence a kind of tribal mother” (CW 5, para 321).
The tree of life is a “mother symbol” (Jung, CW 5, para 321). The Tree of Death and Life illustrates the paradox inherent in the imagery of the “mother symbol.” The mother’s fruit is the image of paradox: the fruit of death and the fruit of redemption come from the same mother tree. Eve, the mother of our fallen state offers the fruit of death. Mary, the mother of redemption offers the fruit of new life, of rebirth into spiritual reality. Death in life; Life in death. In archetypal terms, spiritual reality is symbolic reality. Both mothers pick the fruit from one mother tree– a form of archetypal ‘mother of all,’ the unknown and unarticulated frontier of psychic life which proffers our symbolic development.
The mother tree is there not only in the begging of life, as the Fall, but in the end as well, as Revelation (from Latin revelatio, from revelare ‘lay bare’). She sets the bounds of biblical time. Revelations 22 tells us that leaves from the tree of life will heal all nations:
“the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:1-2).
The tree of life offers a rich symbolism, pointing to the potential for integration through symbolic development. The tree of life proffers both the fruit of our fall into a world yet to be symbolized, as well as the fruit of our redemption through symnolization. Tree as mother symbol is an image of the fruit bearing potential of the symbol, capable of metabolizing the great unknown– the noumenon.
References:
The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image By Anne Baring, Jules Cashford
Symbols of Transformation (CW5) by Carl G. Jung (in US Pubic Domain, first published 1912)
http://pathofsoul.org/2014/07/03/paradox-of-the-tree-of-death-and-life/
The knowledge of death came to me that night, from the dying that engulfs the world.
I saw how we live toward death, how the swaying golden wheat sinks together under the scythe of the reaper, like a smooth wave on the sea-beach.
He who abides in common life becomes aware of death with fear. Thus the fear of death drives him toward singleness.
He does not live there, but he becomes aware of life and is happy; since in singleness he is one who becomes, and has overcome death.
He overcomes death through overcoming common life. He does not live his individual being, since he is not what he is, but what he becomes. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 267.
I saw how we live toward death, how the swaying golden wheat sinks together under the scythe of the reaper, like a smooth wave on the sea-beach.
He who abides in common life becomes aware of death with fear. Thus the fear of death drives him toward singleness.
He does not live there, but he becomes aware of life and is happy; since in singleness he is one who becomes, and has overcome death.
He overcomes death through overcoming common life. He does not live his individual being, since he is not what he is, but what he becomes. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 267.
Rosslyn Chapel
In the last quarter of the 19th century, a number of figures became interested in organic or ancestral memory, a notion buttressed by Lamarckian views on inheritance and Ernst Haeckel's biogenic law, the contention that the individual developed recapitulated the development of the species. Figures such as Thomas Laycock, Théodule Ribot, and Stanley Hall contended that many of our actions and reactions should be viewed as ancestral reversions, and denoted the activation of mnemonic residues laid down in the course of human evolution, and that such residues resided in a phylogenetic layer of the unconscious.
As Gustave Le Bon noted in 1894, "Infinitely more numerous than the living, the dead are also infinitely more powerful than them. They govern the immense domain of the unconscious, this invisible domain which contains under its empire all the manifestations of intelligence and character."
As Gustave Le Bon noted in 1894, "Infinitely more numerous than the living, the dead are also infinitely more powerful than them. They govern the immense domain of the unconscious, this invisible domain which contains under its empire all the manifestations of intelligence and character."
http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/musings/dying.php#twic
Renaissance: Twice born, once dead -- Thrice born...? Many religions, and especially Christianity, place great emphasis on rebirth, whether "in this life" -- through a process of "reincarnation" (as in Buddhism or Hinduism) -- or as prefiguring "resurrection". In this life, it may be intimately related to a conversion experience, or to any form of baptism, considered symbolically to be a form of rebirth (and possibly a confirmation of a conversion process). For some Christians rebirth is recognized through the expression "born again" or "twice born". There is little consensus on use of these terms or their metaphorical interpretations, as separately noted (Varieties of Rebirth: distinguishing ways of being born again, 2004). This clustered such understandings as follows:
There is a certain irony to the focus on such "rebirth" in that it necessarily implies a somewhat neglected preceding "dying" and "death". This may be framed in terms of "dying to the world" or "dying to oneself" -- otherwise understood as a fundmental process of detachment from any conventional world view (D. W. Ekstrand, A summary of the doctrine of “Dying to Self”, The Transformed Soul). In Christianity, the first main principle of surrender is "Dying to Self", or the "emptying of self" to allow Christ to live through the believer. There is however also little consensus on the nature of this process, although it is fundamental to descriptions of the mystical experience.
These various metaphorical frameworks are applied to cultures and civilizations -- as in use of Renaissance. There is much anticipatory discussion of a New Renaissance (David Lorimer and Oliver Robinson, A New Renaissance: transforming science, spirit and society, 2010). Use of the birth metaphor suggests the need for careful consideration of its implications with respect to such anticipation. Understandings of the birth of a child can be compared with socio-cultural renaissance to that end (Challenges of Renaissance: suggestive pattern of concerns in the light of the birth metaphor, 2003).
Of particular relevance to this argument is how the previous culture or civilization died -- and how the dying process was experienced -- prior to any question of "renaissance". Implying necessarily a "second death" (or more), the question applies both to the classical Renaissance and to the sense that the current civilization is dying or dead. Also challenging is the possibility that many may fail to "re-cognize" the New Renaissance, as separately explored (Missing the New Renaissance? No Room at the In? 2010). The latter asked the following questions in provocative vein:
The argument here is that metaphor may offer the connectivity to enable rebirth -- and is therefore worth exploring as a means of enabling collective "sustainability" and individual "immortality". Curiously rebirth is itself a metaphor -- requiring "reconception", namely the absence of "contraceptives". It might be expected that those most against physical contraceptives may well have dysfunctional attitudes to "cognitive contraception".
The argument here is that metaphor may offer the connectivity to enable rebirth -- and is therefore worth exploring as a means of enabling collective "sustainability" and individual "immortality". Curiously rebirth is itself a metaphor -- requiring "reconception", namely the absence of "contraceptives". It might be expected that those most against physical contraceptives may well have dysfunctional attitudes to "cognitive contraception".
Especially interesting are the insights of cybernetics into different orders of control of any system understood generically -- whether an individual or a global civilization. The manner in which conventional objectivity is progressively challenged by first, second, thrid and higher orders of cybernetics merits consideration in relation to self-reference and reflexivity, as separately argued (Consciously Self-reflexive Global Initiatives: Renaissance zones, complex adaptive systems, and third order organizations, 2007).
More unconventionally these "stages" of increasing subtlety could be understood in terms of "initiations" as forms of rebirth in some spiritual traditions. Each stage then implies a form of "death" in relation to the previous one -- involving a dying process. Of particular interest is the comparison with the traditional ten ox-herding images of Zen Buddhism. These lend themselves to interpretation with respect to stages of insight into the problems of humanity. In a Commentary on the Integration of perceived Problems in the Human Development section of the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential, an attempt was made to suggest how that classical sequence might be interpreted for clues to an unfolding relationship between humanity and its shadow (in the shape of the complex of world problems), as separately discussed (Progressive integration of the shadow of non-self-reflexivity, 2007).
It was noted above that death is being given a new kind of attention by both science and the emperors of cyberspace, with the New Scientist arguing that perhaos it is time for humanity to reinvent death (Memento mori: it's time we reinvented death), New Scientist, 20 October, 2012). A cover of Time magazine features the theme Can Google Solve Death? -- introducing Calico, a Google-owned initiative to address issues of health and ageing (Harry McCracken and Lev Grossman, Google vs. Death, Time, 30 September 2013).
In its issue on death, the New Scientist featured a summary of the work of Stephen Cave (Immortality: the quest to live forever and how it drives civilization, 2012). Presented by the Utne Reader as "how immortality became a national obsession", Lewis Lapham (Memento Mori, 24 September 2013) argues:
The substituting of the promise of technology for the consolations of philosophy had been foreseen by John Stuart Mill... His premonition is now the just-over-the-horizon prospect of life everlasting bankrolled by Dmitry Itskov, a Russian multimillionaire, vouched for by the Dalai Lama and a synod of Silicon Valley visionaries.... As presented to the Global Future 2045 conference... Itskov's Avatar Project proposes to reproduce the functions of human life and mind on "nonbiological substrates," do away with the "limited mortal protein-based carrier" and replace it with cybernetic bodies and holograms, a “neohumanity” that will “change the bodily nature of a human being, and make them immortal, free, playful, independent of limitations of space and time.” In plain English, lifelike human heads to which digital copies of the contents of a human brain can be downloaded from the cloud.
As "emperors" of cyberspace, their initiatives are reminiscent of the traditional preoccupation of Chinese emperors with ensuring their own immortality. One favoured approach was of course the construction of monuments of appropriately framed significance, as separately discussed (Enstoning in Memorials and Monuments, 2012). Of particular interest, and of relevance to this argument, was the exploration by those emperors of the "inner alchemy" of Taoism to that end. This was experientially related to an understanding of the "circulation of light" as essential to sustaining health.
These associations merit reflection in the light of consideration of the relation between death and alchemy by Steven M. Rosen (Dreams, Death, Rebirth: a multimedia topological odyssey into alchemy's hidden dimensions, 2013), in the light of his earlier work (Wholeness as the Body of Paradox, Journal of Mind and Behavior, 1997; The Concept of the Infinite and the Crisis in Modern Physics, Speculations in Science and Technology, 1983).
It is therefore somewhat curious that Google should have selected "Calico" as the name for its initiative, given its close association with the burial shroud. The more appropriate traditional name would have been "Elixir" -- unless "shroud" is then to be understood as a "digitally woven" cocoon of relationships of higher dimensionality, as separately discussed (Interweaving Thematic Threads and Learning Pathways: noonautics, magic carpets and wizdomes, 2010). Now revealed to be a friendly, global front-end for the US National Security Agency, might Google search facilities enable a transformation of its obsession, as separately discussed (From ECHELON to NOLEHCE: enabling a strategic conversion to a faith-based global brain, 2007).
To what extent will some form of "cognitive fusion" be discovered to be vital to the kinds of life prolongation and immortality sought by such initiatives? Is this in effect a significant mirroring at the individual level of the energy sustainability associated with the quest to manage the "power of the sun" through nuclear fusion in the International Thermonuclear Experiment Project (ITER), as argued separately (Enactivating a Cognitive Fusion Reactor: Imaginal Transformation of Energy Resourcing (ITER-8), 2006)? Curiously a fundamental design issue for ITER is management of the snake-like instabilities of the circulating nuclear plasma recalling the preoccupation of Douglas Hofstadter (I Am a Strange Loop, 2007).
Renaissance: Twice born, once dead -- Thrice born...? Many religions, and especially Christianity, place great emphasis on rebirth, whether "in this life" -- through a process of "reincarnation" (as in Buddhism or Hinduism) -- or as prefiguring "resurrection". In this life, it may be intimately related to a conversion experience, or to any form of baptism, considered symbolically to be a form of rebirth (and possibly a confirmation of a conversion process). For some Christians rebirth is recognized through the expression "born again" or "twice born". There is little consensus on use of these terms or their metaphorical interpretations, as separately noted (Varieties of Rebirth: distinguishing ways of being born again, 2004). This clustered such understandings as follows:
- Cultural rebirth (renaissance, aesthetic birth, mytho-poesis)
- Socio-religious rebirth (birthright, destiny, reincarnation, socal status, ceremony, ritual, group affiliation, games, sports)
- Psycho-behavioural rebirth (sin-to-virtue, changing patterns of consumption, conversion)
- Developmental rebirth (education, perspective, initiation, cultural creativity, individuation)
- Therapeutical rebirth (release from trauma, mentors, self-help, discipleship)
- Cognitive perspective (metacognition, critical thinking, philosophy, aesthetic sensibility, orders of thinking, systematics, orders of abstraction, disciplines of action)
- Experiential rebirth (operacy, flow, embodiment of mind, speaking with God, born-again, possession, psychedelic experience, embodiment in song, spiritual rebirth)
There is a certain irony to the focus on such "rebirth" in that it necessarily implies a somewhat neglected preceding "dying" and "death". This may be framed in terms of "dying to the world" or "dying to oneself" -- otherwise understood as a fundmental process of detachment from any conventional world view (D. W. Ekstrand, A summary of the doctrine of “Dying to Self”, The Transformed Soul). In Christianity, the first main principle of surrender is "Dying to Self", or the "emptying of self" to allow Christ to live through the believer. There is however also little consensus on the nature of this process, although it is fundamental to descriptions of the mystical experience.
These various metaphorical frameworks are applied to cultures and civilizations -- as in use of Renaissance. There is much anticipatory discussion of a New Renaissance (David Lorimer and Oliver Robinson, A New Renaissance: transforming science, spirit and society, 2010). Use of the birth metaphor suggests the need for careful consideration of its implications with respect to such anticipation. Understandings of the birth of a child can be compared with socio-cultural renaissance to that end (Challenges of Renaissance: suggestive pattern of concerns in the light of the birth metaphor, 2003).
Of particular relevance to this argument is how the previous culture or civilization died -- and how the dying process was experienced -- prior to any question of "renaissance". Implying necessarily a "second death" (or more), the question applies both to the classical Renaissance and to the sense that the current civilization is dying or dead. Also challenging is the possibility that many may fail to "re-cognize" the New Renaissance, as separately explored (Missing the New Renaissance? No Room at the In? 2010). The latter asked the following questions in provocative vein:
- What is the New Renaissance?
- When will the New Renaissance happen?
- Where will the New Renaissance happen?
- Which New Renaissance?
- How will the New Renaissance be enabled?
- Who emerges from a New Renaissance?
- Why a New Renaissance?
The argument here is that metaphor may offer the connectivity to enable rebirth -- and is therefore worth exploring as a means of enabling collective "sustainability" and individual "immortality". Curiously rebirth is itself a metaphor -- requiring "reconception", namely the absence of "contraceptives". It might be expected that those most against physical contraceptives may well have dysfunctional attitudes to "cognitive contraception".
The argument here is that metaphor may offer the connectivity to enable rebirth -- and is therefore worth exploring as a means of enabling collective "sustainability" and individual "immortality". Curiously rebirth is itself a metaphor -- requiring "reconception", namely the absence of "contraceptives". It might be expected that those most against physical contraceptives may well have dysfunctional attitudes to "cognitive contraception".
Especially interesting are the insights of cybernetics into different orders of control of any system understood generically -- whether an individual or a global civilization. The manner in which conventional objectivity is progressively challenged by first, second, thrid and higher orders of cybernetics merits consideration in relation to self-reference and reflexivity, as separately argued (Consciously Self-reflexive Global Initiatives: Renaissance zones, complex adaptive systems, and third order organizations, 2007).
More unconventionally these "stages" of increasing subtlety could be understood in terms of "initiations" as forms of rebirth in some spiritual traditions. Each stage then implies a form of "death" in relation to the previous one -- involving a dying process. Of particular interest is the comparison with the traditional ten ox-herding images of Zen Buddhism. These lend themselves to interpretation with respect to stages of insight into the problems of humanity. In a Commentary on the Integration of perceived Problems in the Human Development section of the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential, an attempt was made to suggest how that classical sequence might be interpreted for clues to an unfolding relationship between humanity and its shadow (in the shape of the complex of world problems), as separately discussed (Progressive integration of the shadow of non-self-reflexivity, 2007).
It was noted above that death is being given a new kind of attention by both science and the emperors of cyberspace, with the New Scientist arguing that perhaos it is time for humanity to reinvent death (Memento mori: it's time we reinvented death), New Scientist, 20 October, 2012). A cover of Time magazine features the theme Can Google Solve Death? -- introducing Calico, a Google-owned initiative to address issues of health and ageing (Harry McCracken and Lev Grossman, Google vs. Death, Time, 30 September 2013).
In its issue on death, the New Scientist featured a summary of the work of Stephen Cave (Immortality: the quest to live forever and how it drives civilization, 2012). Presented by the Utne Reader as "how immortality became a national obsession", Lewis Lapham (Memento Mori, 24 September 2013) argues:
The substituting of the promise of technology for the consolations of philosophy had been foreseen by John Stuart Mill... His premonition is now the just-over-the-horizon prospect of life everlasting bankrolled by Dmitry Itskov, a Russian multimillionaire, vouched for by the Dalai Lama and a synod of Silicon Valley visionaries.... As presented to the Global Future 2045 conference... Itskov's Avatar Project proposes to reproduce the functions of human life and mind on "nonbiological substrates," do away with the "limited mortal protein-based carrier" and replace it with cybernetic bodies and holograms, a “neohumanity” that will “change the bodily nature of a human being, and make them immortal, free, playful, independent of limitations of space and time.” In plain English, lifelike human heads to which digital copies of the contents of a human brain can be downloaded from the cloud.
As "emperors" of cyberspace, their initiatives are reminiscent of the traditional preoccupation of Chinese emperors with ensuring their own immortality. One favoured approach was of course the construction of monuments of appropriately framed significance, as separately discussed (Enstoning in Memorials and Monuments, 2012). Of particular interest, and of relevance to this argument, was the exploration by those emperors of the "inner alchemy" of Taoism to that end. This was experientially related to an understanding of the "circulation of light" as essential to sustaining health.
These associations merit reflection in the light of consideration of the relation between death and alchemy by Steven M. Rosen (Dreams, Death, Rebirth: a multimedia topological odyssey into alchemy's hidden dimensions, 2013), in the light of his earlier work (Wholeness as the Body of Paradox, Journal of Mind and Behavior, 1997; The Concept of the Infinite and the Crisis in Modern Physics, Speculations in Science and Technology, 1983).
It is therefore somewhat curious that Google should have selected "Calico" as the name for its initiative, given its close association with the burial shroud. The more appropriate traditional name would have been "Elixir" -- unless "shroud" is then to be understood as a "digitally woven" cocoon of relationships of higher dimensionality, as separately discussed (Interweaving Thematic Threads and Learning Pathways: noonautics, magic carpets and wizdomes, 2010). Now revealed to be a friendly, global front-end for the US National Security Agency, might Google search facilities enable a transformation of its obsession, as separately discussed (From ECHELON to NOLEHCE: enabling a strategic conversion to a faith-based global brain, 2007).
To what extent will some form of "cognitive fusion" be discovered to be vital to the kinds of life prolongation and immortality sought by such initiatives? Is this in effect a significant mirroring at the individual level of the energy sustainability associated with the quest to manage the "power of the sun" through nuclear fusion in the International Thermonuclear Experiment Project (ITER), as argued separately (Enactivating a Cognitive Fusion Reactor: Imaginal Transformation of Energy Resourcing (ITER-8), 2006)? Curiously a fundamental design issue for ITER is management of the snake-like instabilities of the circulating nuclear plasma recalling the preoccupation of Douglas Hofstadter (I Am a Strange Loop, 2007).
We cannot slay death, as we have already taken all life from it. If we
still want to overcome death, then we must enliven it. Therefore on your
journey be sure to take golden cups full of the sweet drink of life,
red wine, and give it to dead matter, so that it can win life back.
~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Liber Primus; Page 244
Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. But if you look out greedily for all that you could still live, then nothing is great enough for your pleasure, and the smallest things that continue to surround you are no longer a joy.
Therefore I behold death, since it teaches me how to live. If you accept death, it is altogether like a frosty night and an anxious misgiving, but a frosty night in a vineyard full of sweet grapes.
You will soon take pleasure in your wealth. Death ripens. One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Without death, life would be meaningless, since the long-lasting rises again and denies its own meaning. To be,and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being. ~Carl Jung; Red Book.
If there were to be a conscious existence after death, it would, so it seems to me, have to continue on the level of consciousness attained by humanity, which in any age has an upper though variable limit.
There are many human beings who throughout their lives and at the moment of death lag behind their own potentialities and even more important behind the knowledge which has been brought to consciousness by other human beings during their own lifetimes. Hence their demand to attain in death that share of awareness which they failed to win in life. I have come to this conclusion through observation of dreams about the dead. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections.
Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. But if you look out greedily for all that you could still live, then nothing is great enough for your pleasure, and the smallest things that continue to surround you are no longer a joy.
Therefore I behold death, since it teaches me how to live. If you accept death, it is altogether like a frosty night and an anxious misgiving, but a frosty night in a vineyard full of sweet grapes.
You will soon take pleasure in your wealth. Death ripens. One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Without death, life would be meaningless, since the long-lasting rises again and denies its own meaning. To be,and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being. ~Carl Jung; Red Book.
If there were to be a conscious existence after death, it would, so it seems to me, have to continue on the level of consciousness attained by humanity, which in any age has an upper though variable limit.
There are many human beings who throughout their lives and at the moment of death lag behind their own potentialities and even more important behind the knowledge which has been brought to consciousness by other human beings during their own lifetimes. Hence their demand to attain in death that share of awareness which they failed to win in life. I have come to this conclusion through observation of dreams about the dead. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections.
"We cannot slay death, as we have already taken all life from it. If we still want to overcome death, then we must enliven it.
Therefore on your journey be sure to take golden cups full of the sweet drink of life, red wine, and give it to dead matter, so that it can win life back." ~Carl Jung; The Red Book.
Therefore on your journey be sure to take golden cups full of the sweet drink of life, red wine, and give it to dead matter, so that it can win life back." ~Carl Jung; The Red Book.
“Like all of us, I have the impression that our culture and civilization is in a final stage, that it has entered a stage of decay.
I believe that either we shall find a renewal, or else it is the end. And I can only see this renewal coming out of what Jung discovered, namely in our making positive contact with the creative source of the unconscious and with dreams.
These are our roots. A tree can only renew itself through its roots.
For this reason my message is to urge everyone to turn back to these inner psychic roots because that’s where the only constructive suggestions are to be found — how to come to grips with our enormous dilemmas: the atom bomb, overpopulation.
This is the best way of solving all our problems which appear insoluble.” – Marie-Louis von Franz
I believe that either we shall find a renewal, or else it is the end. And I can only see this renewal coming out of what Jung discovered, namely in our making positive contact with the creative source of the unconscious and with dreams.
These are our roots. A tree can only renew itself through its roots.
For this reason my message is to urge everyone to turn back to these inner psychic roots because that’s where the only constructive suggestions are to be found — how to come to grips with our enormous dilemmas: the atom bomb, overpopulation.
This is the best way of solving all our problems which appear insoluble.” – Marie-Louis von Franz
[Ancient Homily for Holy Saturday]
Today a great silence reigns on earth, a great silence and a great stillness. A great silence because the King is asleep.
The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began... ..
He has gone to search for Adam, our first father, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow Adam in his bonds and Eve, captive with him --
He who is both their God and the son of Eve.. "I am your God, who for your sake have become your son... ...
I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead." [Ancient Homily for Holy Saturday: PG 43, 440A, 452C; LH, Holy Saturday, OR]
Today a great silence reigns on earth, a great silence and a great stillness. A great silence because the King is asleep.
The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began... ..
He has gone to search for Adam, our first father, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow Adam in his bonds and Eve, captive with him --
He who is both their God and the son of Eve.. "I am your God, who for your sake have become your son... ...
I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead." [Ancient Homily for Holy Saturday: PG 43, 440A, 452C; LH, Holy Saturday, OR]
To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. In the depths,being is not an unconditional persistence but an endlessly slow growth. You think you are standing still like swamp water, but slowly you flow into the sea that covers the earth's greatest deeps, and is so vast that firm land seems only an island imbedded in the womb of the immeasurable sea.
As a drop in the ocean you take part in the current, ebb and flow. You swell slowly on the land and slowly sink back again in interminably slow breaths. You wander vast distances in blurred currents and wash up on strange shores, not knowing how you got there. You mount the billows of huge storms and are swept back again into the depths. And you do not know how this happens to you. You had thought that your movement came from you and that it needed your decisions and efforts, so that you could get going and make progress. But with every conceivable effort you would never have achieved that movement and reached those areas to which the sea and the great wind of the world brought you.
From endless blue plains you sink into black depths; luminous fish draw you, marvelous branches twine around you from above. You slip through columns and twisting, wavering, dark-leaved plants, and the sea takes you up again in bright green water to white, sandy coasts, and a wave foams you ashore and swallows you back again, and a wide smooth swell lifts you softly and leads you again to new regions, to twisting plants, to slowly creeping slimy polyps, and to green water and white sand and breaking surf.
But from far off your heights shine to you above the sea in a golden light, like the moon emerging from the tide, and you become aware of yourself from afar. And longing seizes you and the will for your own movement. You want to cross over from being to becoming, since you have recognized the breath of the sea, and its flowing, that leads you here and there without your ever adhering; you have also recognized its surge that bears you to alien shores and carries you back, and gargles you up and down.
You saw that it was the life of the whole and the death of each individual. You felt yourself entwined in the collective death, from death to the earth's deepest place, from death in your own strangely breathing depths. Oh-you long to be beyond; despair and mortal fear seize you in this death that breathes slowly and streams back and forth eternally. All this light and dark, warm, tepid, and cold water, all these wavy; swaying, twisting plantlike animals and bestial plants, all these nightly wonders become a horror to you, and you long for the sun, for light dry air, for firm stones, for a fixed place and straight lines, for the motionless and firmly held, for rules and preconceived purpose, for singleness and your own intent.
The knowledge of death came to me that night, from the dying that engulfs the world. I saw how we live toward death, how the swaying golden wheat sinks together under the scythe of the reaper, / like a smooth wave on the sea-beach. He who abides in common life becomes aware of death with fear. Thus the fear of death drives him toward singleness. He does not live there, but he becomes aware of life and is happy; since in singleness he is one who becomes, and has overcome death. He overcomes death through overcoming common life. He does not live his individual being, since he is not what he is, but what he becomes.~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 266-267.
As a drop in the ocean you take part in the current, ebb and flow. You swell slowly on the land and slowly sink back again in interminably slow breaths. You wander vast distances in blurred currents and wash up on strange shores, not knowing how you got there. You mount the billows of huge storms and are swept back again into the depths. And you do not know how this happens to you. You had thought that your movement came from you and that it needed your decisions and efforts, so that you could get going and make progress. But with every conceivable effort you would never have achieved that movement and reached those areas to which the sea and the great wind of the world brought you.
From endless blue plains you sink into black depths; luminous fish draw you, marvelous branches twine around you from above. You slip through columns and twisting, wavering, dark-leaved plants, and the sea takes you up again in bright green water to white, sandy coasts, and a wave foams you ashore and swallows you back again, and a wide smooth swell lifts you softly and leads you again to new regions, to twisting plants, to slowly creeping slimy polyps, and to green water and white sand and breaking surf.
But from far off your heights shine to you above the sea in a golden light, like the moon emerging from the tide, and you become aware of yourself from afar. And longing seizes you and the will for your own movement. You want to cross over from being to becoming, since you have recognized the breath of the sea, and its flowing, that leads you here and there without your ever adhering; you have also recognized its surge that bears you to alien shores and carries you back, and gargles you up and down.
You saw that it was the life of the whole and the death of each individual. You felt yourself entwined in the collective death, from death to the earth's deepest place, from death in your own strangely breathing depths. Oh-you long to be beyond; despair and mortal fear seize you in this death that breathes slowly and streams back and forth eternally. All this light and dark, warm, tepid, and cold water, all these wavy; swaying, twisting plantlike animals and bestial plants, all these nightly wonders become a horror to you, and you long for the sun, for light dry air, for firm stones, for a fixed place and straight lines, for the motionless and firmly held, for rules and preconceived purpose, for singleness and your own intent.
The knowledge of death came to me that night, from the dying that engulfs the world. I saw how we live toward death, how the swaying golden wheat sinks together under the scythe of the reaper, / like a smooth wave on the sea-beach. He who abides in common life becomes aware of death with fear. Thus the fear of death drives him toward singleness. He does not live there, but he becomes aware of life and is happy; since in singleness he is one who becomes, and has overcome death. He overcomes death through overcoming common life. He does not live his individual being, since he is not what he is, but what he becomes.~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 266-267.
http://www.manlyphall.org/text/the-devolution-and-evolution-of-astrology/
"The greater solutio is an encounter with the Numinosum, solutio comes from the Self. What is worth saving in the ego is saved. What is not worth saving is dissolved and melted down in order to be recast in new life-forms. Thus, the ongoing life renews itself. The ego that is committed to this trans-personal process will cooperate with it and experience its own diminishment as a prelude to the coming of the larger personality, the wholeness of the Self." --Edward Edinger
Primordial consciousness, on the other hand, may be characterized as the absolute ground state of consciousness. This state of perfect symmetry entails the lowest possible state of mental activity, with the highest possible potential and degree of freedom in the universe. In the limited, relative vacuum of the substrate—as in the case of deep sleep—mental events specific to one individual emerge and dissolve back into that subjective space of consciousness. But all phenomena throughout time and space emerge from and dissolve back into the timeless, infinite vacuum of absolute space. --Alan Wallace
Come to your house, Osiris!
Long, long have I not seen you
My heart mourns you.
Shall I not see you, Good King?
Come to your beloved
Gods and men look for you, weep for you together
While I can see I call to you . . .
If you accept Death....
Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. But if you look out greedily for all that you could still live, then nothing is great enough for your pleasure, and the smallest things that continue to surround you are no longer a joy. Therefore I behold death, since it teaches me how to live.
If you accept death, it is altogether like a frosty night and an anxious misgiving, but a frosty night in a vineyard full of sweet grapes. You will soon take pleasure in your wealth. Death ripens. One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit.
Without death, life would be meaningless, since the long-lasting rises again and denies its own meaning. To be, and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being. ~Carl Jung; Red Book; Page 275
"We need the coldness of death to see clearly. Life wants to live and to die, to begin and to end.74 You are not forced to live eternally; but you can also die, since there is a will in you for both. Life and death must strike a balance in your existence. Today's men need a large slice of death, since too much incorrectness lives in them, and too much correctness died in them. What stays in balance is correct, what disturbs balance is incorrect. But if balance has been attained, then that which preserves it is incorrect and that which disturbs it is correct. Balance is at once life and death. For the completion of life a balance with death is fitting. If I accept death, then my tree greens, since dying increases life. If I plunge into the death encompassing the world, then my buds break open. How much our life needs death! Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. But if you look out greedily for all that you could still live, then nothing is great enough for your pleasure, and the smallest things that continue to surround you are no longer a joy. Therefore I behold death, since it teaches me how to live. If you accept death, it is altogether like a frosty night and an
anxious misgiving, but a frosty night in a vineyard full of sweet grapes. You will soon take pleasure in your wealth. Death ripens. One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Without death, life would be meaningless, since the long-lasting rises again and denies its own meaning. To be, and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being". C.G.Jung, Liber Novus/Libro Rosso,2009, pag. 274
Primordial consciousness, on the other hand, may be characterized as the absolute ground state of consciousness. This state of perfect symmetry entails the lowest possible state of mental activity, with the highest possible potential and degree of freedom in the universe. In the limited, relative vacuum of the substrate—as in the case of deep sleep—mental events specific to one individual emerge and dissolve back into that subjective space of consciousness. But all phenomena throughout time and space emerge from and dissolve back into the timeless, infinite vacuum of absolute space. --Alan Wallace
Come to your house, Osiris!
Long, long have I not seen you
My heart mourns you.
Shall I not see you, Good King?
Come to your beloved
Gods and men look for you, weep for you together
While I can see I call to you . . .
If you accept Death....
Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. But if you look out greedily for all that you could still live, then nothing is great enough for your pleasure, and the smallest things that continue to surround you are no longer a joy. Therefore I behold death, since it teaches me how to live.
If you accept death, it is altogether like a frosty night and an anxious misgiving, but a frosty night in a vineyard full of sweet grapes. You will soon take pleasure in your wealth. Death ripens. One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit.
Without death, life would be meaningless, since the long-lasting rises again and denies its own meaning. To be, and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being. ~Carl Jung; Red Book; Page 275
"We need the coldness of death to see clearly. Life wants to live and to die, to begin and to end.74 You are not forced to live eternally; but you can also die, since there is a will in you for both. Life and death must strike a balance in your existence. Today's men need a large slice of death, since too much incorrectness lives in them, and too much correctness died in them. What stays in balance is correct, what disturbs balance is incorrect. But if balance has been attained, then that which preserves it is incorrect and that which disturbs it is correct. Balance is at once life and death. For the completion of life a balance with death is fitting. If I accept death, then my tree greens, since dying increases life. If I plunge into the death encompassing the world, then my buds break open. How much our life needs death! Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. But if you look out greedily for all that you could still live, then nothing is great enough for your pleasure, and the smallest things that continue to surround you are no longer a joy. Therefore I behold death, since it teaches me how to live. If you accept death, it is altogether like a frosty night and an
anxious misgiving, but a frosty night in a vineyard full of sweet grapes. You will soon take pleasure in your wealth. Death ripens. One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Without death, life would be meaningless, since the long-lasting rises again and denies its own meaning. To be, and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being". C.G.Jung, Liber Novus/Libro Rosso,2009, pag. 274
Necromanteion means "Oracle of Death", and the faithful came here to talk with their dead ancestors. Temple of Poseidon in Taenaron as well as those in Argolis, Cumae, and Herakleia in Pontos are known to have housed oracles of the dead, but the Necromanteion of Ephyra was the most important. It belonged to the Thesprotians, the local Epirot Greek tribe. According to Herodotus' account, it was to the Necromanteion that Periander, the 6th century BC tyrant of Corinth, sent legates to ask questions of his dead wife, Melissa. In Homer's Odyssey, the Necromanteion was also described as the entrance by which Odysseus made his nekyia. The ancient Greeks believed that the dead (in Greek: “Nekys”, “Nekroi") stayed in the earth as a perishable body while as a soul they were released and found their way to the Underworld through deep gorges, crevices and caves. The souls of the dead did not have ordinary consciousness but had other capabilities not possessed by the living such as the ability to know the future.
Ritual Use
Ritual use of the Necromanteion involved elaborate ceremonies wherein celebrants seeking to speak to the dead would start by gathering in the ziggurat-like temple and consuming a meal of broad beans, pork, barley bread, oysters, and a narcotic compound. Following a cleansing ceremony and the sacrifice of sheep, the faithful would descend through a chthonic series of meandric corridors leaving offerings as they passed through a number of iron gates. The nekyomanteia would pose a series of questions and chant prayers and the celebrants would then witness the priest arise from the floor and begin to fly about the temple through the use of Aeorema-like theatrical cranes. The Necromanteion functioned until 167 BC when it was looted and destroyed by the Romans. The purpose of these procedures was presumably to strengthen the pilgrim’s defences against the psychologically powerful contact with the death experience. With yet more severe fasting and meditation the pilgrim would also stay in the northern room of the eastern corridor until the time of the oracle.
Then, together with a priest, he would enter the eastern corridor, would sacrifice a sheep and then, holding bloodless offerings in his hand, he would follow a meandering corridor with three ironclad gates, as many as the gates of Hades. He would leave some of his offerings there, and would offer the rest in the central hall, which was the place where the souls of the dead would appear. During the whole process the priest would chant prayers and evoke the dead. The long preparation in such an imposing environment, and the special fasting [and meditations] together with the faith in the appearance of the dead would induce the pilgrim to see the shadows of the dead.
Dr. Raymond Moody modified this process to fit more in the modern day. He coined the term "psychomanteum". Dr. Irene Blinston expanded and modified Dr. Moody's psychomanteum, and psychomanteum process, developing "The Portal".
Physical Description
The Portal is a very dark, dimly lit chamber varying in size. At one end of the chamber is a chair and at the other end a mirror. The mirror is tilted at an angle so the sitter is prevented from seeing his or her own reflection. The special mirror is the true portal.
Purpose of the Portal (psychomanteum) The primary focus of research of the psychomanteum team at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology was the psychomanteum's effects on the reduction of the symptoms of grief associated with a lost loved one. However, there are many possible uses for the Portal (psychomanteum). The possible uses include:
Ritual Use
Ritual use of the Necromanteion involved elaborate ceremonies wherein celebrants seeking to speak to the dead would start by gathering in the ziggurat-like temple and consuming a meal of broad beans, pork, barley bread, oysters, and a narcotic compound. Following a cleansing ceremony and the sacrifice of sheep, the faithful would descend through a chthonic series of meandric corridors leaving offerings as they passed through a number of iron gates. The nekyomanteia would pose a series of questions and chant prayers and the celebrants would then witness the priest arise from the floor and begin to fly about the temple through the use of Aeorema-like theatrical cranes. The Necromanteion functioned until 167 BC when it was looted and destroyed by the Romans. The purpose of these procedures was presumably to strengthen the pilgrim’s defences against the psychologically powerful contact with the death experience. With yet more severe fasting and meditation the pilgrim would also stay in the northern room of the eastern corridor until the time of the oracle.
Then, together with a priest, he would enter the eastern corridor, would sacrifice a sheep and then, holding bloodless offerings in his hand, he would follow a meandering corridor with three ironclad gates, as many as the gates of Hades. He would leave some of his offerings there, and would offer the rest in the central hall, which was the place where the souls of the dead would appear. During the whole process the priest would chant prayers and evoke the dead. The long preparation in such an imposing environment, and the special fasting [and meditations] together with the faith in the appearance of the dead would induce the pilgrim to see the shadows of the dead.
Dr. Raymond Moody modified this process to fit more in the modern day. He coined the term "psychomanteum". Dr. Irene Blinston expanded and modified Dr. Moody's psychomanteum, and psychomanteum process, developing "The Portal".
Physical Description
The Portal is a very dark, dimly lit chamber varying in size. At one end of the chamber is a chair and at the other end a mirror. The mirror is tilted at an angle so the sitter is prevented from seeing his or her own reflection. The special mirror is the true portal.
Purpose of the Portal (psychomanteum) The primary focus of research of the psychomanteum team at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology was the psychomanteum's effects on the reduction of the symptoms of grief associated with a lost loved one. However, there are many possible uses for the Portal (psychomanteum). The possible uses include:
- Connection and communication with a deceased individual in order to say good-bye or apologize for something
- Connection and communication with one's ancestors in order to ask questions or get advice
- Connection and communication with one's higher self
- Confronting and speaking your mind to a person who diminished you at some point in your life and has since died
- Connection and communication with one's former self in cases of major life transformations
- and so much more…
We lack concrete proof that anything of us is preserved for eternity. At most we can say that there is some probability that something of our psyche continues beyond physical death.
Whether what continues to exist is conscious of itself, we do not know either.
If we feel the need to form some opinion on this question, we might possibly consider what has been learned from the phenomena of psychic dissociation. In most cases where a split-off complex manifests itself it does so in the form of a personality, as if the complex had a consciousness of itself. Thus the voices heard by the insane are personified. I dealt long ago with this phenomenon of personified complexes in my doctoral dissertation.
We might, if we wish, adduce these complexes as evidence for a continuity of consciousness.
Likewise in favor of such an assumption are certain astonishing observations in cases of profound syncope after acute injuries to the brain and in severe states of collapse.
In both situations, total loss of consciousness can be accompanied by perceptions of the outside world and vivid dream experiences.
Since the cerebral cortex, the seat of consciousness, is not functioning at these times, there is as yet no explanation for such phenomena. They may be evidence for at least a subjective persistence of the capacity for consciousness even in a state of apparent unconsciousness. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections
Carl Jung on why Life and the moment of our Death is important.]
The maximum awareness which has been attained anywhere forms, so it seems to me, the upper limit of knowledge to which the dead can attain. That is probably why earthly life is of such great significance, and why it is that what a human being "brings over" at the time of his death is so important.
Only here, in life on earth, where the opposites clash together, can the general level of consciousness be raised. That seems to be man's metaphysical task which he cannot accomplish without "mythologizing."
Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition. True, the unconscious knows more than consciousness does; but it is knowledge of a special sort, knowledge in eternity, usually without reference to the here and now, not couched in language of the intellect.
Only when we let its statements amplify themselves, as has been shown above by the example of numerals, does it come within the range of our understanding; only then does a new aspect become perceptible to us.
This process is convincingly repeated in every successful dream analysis. That is why it is so important not to have any preconceived, doctrinaire opinions about the statements made by dreams. As soon as a certain "monotony of interpretation" strikes us, we know that our approach has become doctrinaire and hence sterile. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections
And so it is death is indeed a fearful piece of brutality; there is no sense pretending otherwise.
It is brutal not only as a physical event, but far more so psychically: a human being is torn away from us, and what remains is the icy stillness of death.
There no longer exists any hope of a relationship, for all the bridges have been smashed at one blow. Those who deserve a long life are cut off in the prime of their years, and good-for-nothings live to a ripe old age.
This is a cruel reality which we have no right to sidestep. The actual experience of the cruelty and wantonness of death can so embitter us that we conclude there is no merciful God, no justice, and no kindness.
From another point of view, however, death appears as a joyful event. In the light of eternity, it is a wedding, a Mysterium Coniunctionis. The soul attains, as it were, its missing half, it achieves wholeness.
On Greek sarcophagi the joyous element was represented by dancing girls, on Etruscan tombs by banquets. When the pious Cabbalist Rabbi Simon ben Jochai came to die, his friends said that he was celebrating his wedding.
To this day it is the custom in many regions to hold a picnic on the graves on All Souls' Day.
Such customs express the feeling that death is really a festive occasion. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections
Whether what continues to exist is conscious of itself, we do not know either.
If we feel the need to form some opinion on this question, we might possibly consider what has been learned from the phenomena of psychic dissociation. In most cases where a split-off complex manifests itself it does so in the form of a personality, as if the complex had a consciousness of itself. Thus the voices heard by the insane are personified. I dealt long ago with this phenomenon of personified complexes in my doctoral dissertation.
We might, if we wish, adduce these complexes as evidence for a continuity of consciousness.
Likewise in favor of such an assumption are certain astonishing observations in cases of profound syncope after acute injuries to the brain and in severe states of collapse.
In both situations, total loss of consciousness can be accompanied by perceptions of the outside world and vivid dream experiences.
Since the cerebral cortex, the seat of consciousness, is not functioning at these times, there is as yet no explanation for such phenomena. They may be evidence for at least a subjective persistence of the capacity for consciousness even in a state of apparent unconsciousness. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections
Carl Jung on why Life and the moment of our Death is important.]
The maximum awareness which has been attained anywhere forms, so it seems to me, the upper limit of knowledge to which the dead can attain. That is probably why earthly life is of such great significance, and why it is that what a human being "brings over" at the time of his death is so important.
Only here, in life on earth, where the opposites clash together, can the general level of consciousness be raised. That seems to be man's metaphysical task which he cannot accomplish without "mythologizing."
Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition. True, the unconscious knows more than consciousness does; but it is knowledge of a special sort, knowledge in eternity, usually without reference to the here and now, not couched in language of the intellect.
Only when we let its statements amplify themselves, as has been shown above by the example of numerals, does it come within the range of our understanding; only then does a new aspect become perceptible to us.
This process is convincingly repeated in every successful dream analysis. That is why it is so important not to have any preconceived, doctrinaire opinions about the statements made by dreams. As soon as a certain "monotony of interpretation" strikes us, we know that our approach has become doctrinaire and hence sterile. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections
And so it is death is indeed a fearful piece of brutality; there is no sense pretending otherwise.
It is brutal not only as a physical event, but far more so psychically: a human being is torn away from us, and what remains is the icy stillness of death.
There no longer exists any hope of a relationship, for all the bridges have been smashed at one blow. Those who deserve a long life are cut off in the prime of their years, and good-for-nothings live to a ripe old age.
This is a cruel reality which we have no right to sidestep. The actual experience of the cruelty and wantonness of death can so embitter us that we conclude there is no merciful God, no justice, and no kindness.
From another point of view, however, death appears as a joyful event. In the light of eternity, it is a wedding, a Mysterium Coniunctionis. The soul attains, as it were, its missing half, it achieves wholeness.
On Greek sarcophagi the joyous element was represented by dancing girls, on Etruscan tombs by banquets. When the pious Cabbalist Rabbi Simon ben Jochai came to die, his friends said that he was celebrating his wedding.
To this day it is the custom in many regions to hold a picnic on the graves on All Souls' Day.
Such customs express the feeling that death is really a festive occasion. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections
Jung enumerates different meanings of Rebirth:
- Metempsychosis – transmigration of souls
- Reincarnation - continuity of personality (main Buddhist theme)
- Resurrection – reestablishment of human existence after death (main Christian theme)
- Rebirth Renovatio – rebirth in the narrow sense within a span of a life with the implication of healing, improvement
- Rebirth Transmutation – such as transformation of a mortal in an immortal being
- Participation in or witnessing of a process of transformation – mystery of ceremony.
Jacob's Ladder, Io Miller, 1993
CHAOS AS THE UNIVERSAL SOLVENT
by Iona Miller, 1992
This article appears in PSYCHEDELICS REIMAGINED,
Thomas Lyttle, Ed., Introduction by Timothy Leary, Autonomedia, NY, 1999.
ABSTRACT: There is a generic process in nature and consciousness which dissolves and regenerates all forms. The essence of this transformative, morphological process is chaotic--purposeful yet inherently unpredictable holistic repatterning. The Great Work of the art of alchemy is the creation of the Philosopher's Stone, a symbol of wholeness and integration. The liquid form of the Stone, called the Universal Solvent, dissolves all old forms like a rushing stream, and is the self-organizing matrix for the rebirth of new forms. It is thus a metaphor or model for the dynamic process of transformation, ego death and re-creation.
The alchemical operation SOLUTIO, called "the root of alchemy," corresponds with the element water. It implies a flowing state of consciousness, "liquification" of consciousness, a return to the womb for rebirth, a baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness. It facilitates feedback via creative regression: de-structuring, or destratification by immersion in the flow of psychic imagery through identification with more and more primal forms or patterns--a psychedelic, expanded state. Chaos Theory provides a metaphorical language for describing the flowing dynamics of the chaotic process of psychological transformation.
"All substances are part of my own consciousness.
This consciousness is vacuous, unborn, and unceasing."
Thus meditating, allow the mind to rest in the uncreated state. Like the pouring of water into water, the mind should be allowed its own easy mental posture in its natural, unmodified condition, clear and vibrant.
--Leary, Metzner, Alpert; THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE
To summarize, I have spoken of seven major aspects of SOLUTIO symbolism: (1) return to the womb or primal state; (2) dissolution, dispersal, dismemberment; (3) containment of a lesser thing by a greater; (4) rebirth, rejuvenation, immersion in the creative energy flow; (5) purification ordeal; (6) solution of problems; and (7) melting or softening process. These different aspects overlap. Several or all of them may make up different facets of a single experience. Basically it is the ego's confrontation with the unconscious that brings about SOLUTIO. --Edward Edinger, ANATOMY OF THE PSYCHE
by Iona Miller, 1992
This article appears in PSYCHEDELICS REIMAGINED,
Thomas Lyttle, Ed., Introduction by Timothy Leary, Autonomedia, NY, 1999.
ABSTRACT: There is a generic process in nature and consciousness which dissolves and regenerates all forms. The essence of this transformative, morphological process is chaotic--purposeful yet inherently unpredictable holistic repatterning. The Great Work of the art of alchemy is the creation of the Philosopher's Stone, a symbol of wholeness and integration. The liquid form of the Stone, called the Universal Solvent, dissolves all old forms like a rushing stream, and is the self-organizing matrix for the rebirth of new forms. It is thus a metaphor or model for the dynamic process of transformation, ego death and re-creation.
The alchemical operation SOLUTIO, called "the root of alchemy," corresponds with the element water. It implies a flowing state of consciousness, "liquification" of consciousness, a return to the womb for rebirth, a baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness. It facilitates feedback via creative regression: de-structuring, or destratification by immersion in the flow of psychic imagery through identification with more and more primal forms or patterns--a psychedelic, expanded state. Chaos Theory provides a metaphorical language for describing the flowing dynamics of the chaotic process of psychological transformation.
"All substances are part of my own consciousness.
This consciousness is vacuous, unborn, and unceasing."
Thus meditating, allow the mind to rest in the uncreated state. Like the pouring of water into water, the mind should be allowed its own easy mental posture in its natural, unmodified condition, clear and vibrant.
--Leary, Metzner, Alpert; THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE
To summarize, I have spoken of seven major aspects of SOLUTIO symbolism: (1) return to the womb or primal state; (2) dissolution, dispersal, dismemberment; (3) containment of a lesser thing by a greater; (4) rebirth, rejuvenation, immersion in the creative energy flow; (5) purification ordeal; (6) solution of problems; and (7) melting or softening process. These different aspects overlap. Several or all of them may make up different facets of a single experience. Basically it is the ego's confrontation with the unconscious that brings about SOLUTIO. --Edward Edinger, ANATOMY OF THE PSYCHE
THE MEDICINE OF PHILOSOPHERS
Alchemy had one great prescription for the accomplishment of the Great Work: "Solve et Coagula"--reduce or dissolve all to its primary, most fundamental essence and embody that creative, holistic spirit. The ancient alchemists sought to transform "lead" into "gold."
We repeat this process as modern alchemists when we seek the transformative medium which allows us to recognize our rigidities ("lead") and facilitates our healing and expression of our full creative potential ("gold").
That medium is the ever-flowing river of our consciousness. 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, "elixir 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. This divine water signifies the return of The Feminine, a reflective consciousness with inner awareness and archetypal spiritual perceptions.
This Feminine Divinity is the Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World, the universal animating principle, the upwelling spring of the creative Imagination, the dynamic flow of imagery, pattern, and form. This dynamic has been known as Isis, Shakti, Maya, Shekinah, Sophia, Demeter/Persephone, Mary.
In psychedelic mysticism, the animating principle is being referred to as Gaian Consciousness (Abraham, 1992), which we might view as a rebirth of ancient ecstatic, communal consciousness. It is the psychobiological basis of deep ecology, the flow of relationships.
The return of chaos heralds the "greening of consciousness," the greening of the cultural wasteland. Hillman (1985) describes the anima not as a projection of, but rather the projector of psyche. We are contained within Her fantasy, not She within ours.
Grinnell (1973) describes the transformative process of solutio which facilitates the fluid, mobile basis of consciousness:
For aqua permanens is a mode of the arcane substance; its symbol is water or sea-water, an all-pervading essence of anima mundi, the innermost and secret numinosum in man and the universe, that part of God which formed the quintessence and real substance of Physis, at once the highest supercelestial waters of wisdom and the spirit of life pervading inorganic matter.
The arcane descriptors of this paradoxical liquid Stone are cryptic, couched in metaphor. But what does it mean experientially and pragmatically? How does this chaotic transformative process engineer our consciousness? The divine water, as a liquid symbol of the Self, can be experienced in many ways. It has been described as innocuously as the "stream of consciousness," and as poetically as the "Heart of The River of Created Forms."
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 superseded 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. In solutio, the body is joined with the soul and spirit. The skin-boundary dissolves into visceral as well as spiritual perception.
Awareness of physical processes may be greatly amplified, appearing as impressions, intuitions, sensations, sounds, odors. The body is always speaking silently. Through this raw, physical expression, that which was solid becomes liquified, dissolved, deliteralized. The concrete image of the body "morphs" into the flow of pure energy, in a variation of Transubstantiation.
It is the "rapture" of being seized up into the heavenly realm. The flow of dynamic energy from the deep Self reawakens and activates the body, and also that portion of the unconscious that the body carries. The body not only carries, but is the memory of the entire evolutionary cycle.
Consciousness can access any portion of this material memory through creative regression.
The body manifests kinesthetic, preverbal, and preconceptual memory of its direct experience. Immersion in the healing creative energy flow is like a spiritual baptism, which facilitates creative reformation of ordinary consciousness, and even the physical body.
Solutio, as a state of consciousness, unites the powers of above and below, transpersonal and personal. It is the integration of the higher spiritual powers with personal experience that embodies the healing dynamic. This produces the paradoxical poison-panacea. The dual nature of the universal medicine points to a consciousness state beyond both opposites.
In Greek myth, Athena gave Asklepios, the divine healer, the blood of Medusa as the universal medicine. In its negative aspect it was toxic and produced death. The positive aspect brought healing; this mysterious potion is the "cure-all," the "solution."
Divine water (sometimes symbolized as blood) is dangerous, poisonous, seductive, addictive, even deadly in its primeval, untransformed state--madness.
In the science fiction novel, DUNE, the new messiah and the Reverend Mothers of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood imbibe the psychoactive "water of life" with impunity. Moving past the fear and pain, they transcend time/space and commune with the continuum of all existence. What sets them apart from others, on whom the potion has a fatal effect, is their ability to withstand and convert its initial toxic effects into a religious ecstasy.
They know how to navigate in that turbulent flow, during their consciousness journeys --"moving without travelling." The alchemical solution to this problem of primordial, raw experience is to "cook" it into a reflective consciousness.
Recycling itself, the ego cooperates in its own "re-creational death," connecting with the transpersonal forces of rebirth and renewal. The reborn personality is resurrected, restored to life through new meaning.
The ego acknowledges the Self as its new center of gravity, and personality heals. Experiential connection to the living reality of the Self, the "waters of life" is the panacea, the magical elixer of life.
Solutio (and its prime agent, chaos) arises spontaneously from the depths as irrational images, dreams and fantasies. In dreamhealing, the dream symbols are followed deeper and deeper down to the primal level where all structure dissolves into its original source.
This journey into the depths, and subsequent emergence, is the basis of shamanic healing. As we journey in the autonomous consciousness stream, guided movement deeper into and beyond the fear and pain brings up the classical imagery of the solutio, as resistance subsides. There is no part of it that is not us. The transformative process dissolves blockages, obstructions or "frozen" consciousness which disturb and distort the free flow of energy.
1) RETURN TO THE WOMB OR PRIMAL STATE
The alchemist Paracelsus said, "He who enters the kingdom of God must first enter his mother and die." That death-like silence is also our mother, the virgin womb of the imagination. The dynamics of "creative regression" are common to mystical experience, psychedelic exploration, and therapeutic consciousness journeys. All lead to immersion in the flow of the stream of consciousness.
Creative regression is a generic form of the myth of the eternal return, chronic recurrence, reiteration.
In the dynamics of chaos theory we find this recursive motion in the concept of iteration--self-similarity--which produces the similarity in infinitely descending scales of fractal generation. Iteration is like a stretching and folding of the spacetime continuum.
Experientially it manifests within us as a spiritualizing instinct, a recursive "bending back" of instinct toward that which is primordial and divine. Thus, whether induced through psychoactive substances, mystical transport, or experiential psychotherapy typical imagery recycles, recapitulates, or reiterates cascades of impressionistic transformations spanning the entire spectrum of archetypal experiences--morphological transformations. These include but are not limited to childhood, birth, embryonic development, ancestral, mythic, genetic, evolutionary, universal, and quantum consciousness.
Access to the entire continuum of organic and inorganic evolution as well as the collective unconscious becomes available. That information most pertinent to the whole self emerges in the stream of consciousness as virtual experience. What is pertinent is what gets spontaneously "downloaded," and it repeats and reiterates the basic issues in yet another, eternally creative way.
Stan Grof has cataloged an extensive taxonomy of these states, most notably in THE ADVENTURE OF SELF-DISCOVERY (1988). Such experiences of cosmic consciousness constitute a "return to the Mother," the blissful fusion of primal union, at both personal and universal levels. The direction of this dynamic process is recursive, bending back through deep time, ontology, and phylogeny.
It echoes the semantic roots of the words religion and yoga, which imply a "linking backward" in the bond between gods and man, a craving for ecstasy, and transcendence of the limitations of physical form (Milkman, 1987). Jung called this dynamic an opus contra naturam, a work against nature.
But chaos theory shows us it is actually quite organic, natural, and instinctual. In alchemy it was the Great Work. Consciousness turns back on itself, reiterating each level of organization, de-structuring each strata as it dives deeper toward the unconditioned, formless beginning, or "unborn" state.
This primal state is amniotic bliss experienced as the Void, the cosmic womb. Images of the Great Mother system become reactivated, though not exactly in their original form.
Imagery like fractals is self-similar, but not entirely identical. This creative regression is to the prepersonal domain, the preverbal, preconceptual domain, not the transpersonal spiritual domain (transverbal, transconceptual). Typically in the first few dreamhealing sessions, a person will enter a dream symbol doorway which leads back to a conception memory. They may or may not recognize it as such during the journey. But in content, the symbolism is very clear.
The imagery is fundamental or primal, appearing as a dance of energy, matter, and consciousness--the body-ego's conscious experience. These images are close to the stuff of our creation -- the prima materia -- of our existence. We may experience it as free-floating: a paradox of chaos and a deep-felt sense of flowing and peace.
The imagery here is psychedelic -- consciousness expanding -- an autonomous manifestation of imagination. The panoply of the ceaseless transformation of energy may overwhelm the senses, leading to a sense of total chaos.
There is nothing to do but let go, surrender to it, merge with it, flow with it.
The dancing energy waves and patterns are perceived as deep whorls, spinning spirals, black holes, infinite voids, gray clouds of nothingness. There is melding of the senses -- synesthesia -- such as "tasting" music, "seeing" sound, etc. Simple throbbing and other extremely primitive sensations may be experienced.
Experience of this state produces a new acceptance of the original conditions of conception, and re-structuring of the primal self-image. We go into the primal chaos to begin the process of reformation from our pre-structural beginning. In essence, we re-enter the womb as we are initiated in the mysteries of the psyche. We re-conceive our primal self image, healed by communion with the creative Source.
2) DISSOLUTION, DISPERSAL, DISMEMBERMENT
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."
3) CONTAINMENT OF A LESSER THING BY A GREATER
The ego "takes the plunge," it lets go and dissolves its old matrix, its old boundaries. When its boundaries melt, ego-consciousness dissolves into deep consciousness.
The "wave merges with the ocean," and experiences its own deep transpersonal nature. It moves swiftly through the fear and pain, awakening to an infinitely wider reality of universal energy waves. In the ocean of creativity, "your own consciousness, shining, void and inseparable from the great body of radiance, has no birth, nor death." (Leary, 1964).
Experience of the pure, unmodified state of consciousness transcends all opposites, and therefore consciousness journeys provide an experiential "container" for the reconciliation of paradox within a larger field of experience--a broader, transcendent perspective.
The transformational process acts as a "container" (alchemical retort) of the contents of psyche. But these contents, reduced to their essence are "nothingness," simply dreams and imagination. Emptiness is the real Philosopher's Stone. By dissolving into non-relative consciousness, mood swings or identification with conflicting polar positions may be transcended by an enlarged state of consciousness which embraces and contains the entire continuum.
Flow replaces polarity.
Jung spoke of the transcendent function as a symbol-forming force continuously creating emergent imagery which facilitates whole-self realization. It is thus an evolutionary and adaptive force.
Mindell (1985) speaks of the flow in alchemical terms: The alchemists called this flow the 'aqua permanens', or permanent water. Aqua permanens is the fluid process, the energy or life which was locked up in the tension of conflict which has now been freed through the flow between the opposites.
Fluidity comes from conflict. Whereas before there was a boundary between conflicting opposites, between intent and reality, streaming energy now transforms therapy into natural science.
Dreams, visions, or the stream of consciousness can be used therapeutically as an evolutionary force to guide people from a small sense of self and expand them toward a larger image. This expansion of the sense of self may require some adjustment. The illumination (awakening to larger Reality) may also come through a nature-mystic experience, intense sexual experience, E.S.P., a consciousness journey, or meditation.
Enlightenment (even the "seed" of enlightenment) is an experience of awe, bliss, and infinite possibilities. The ego realizes it is not the center of the whole person, but only "manages" the personality. There are autonomous archetypal forces which inhabit the psyche with their own agendas, patterns, and goals.
Our psyche is transpersonal; it has no boundaries. Our conscious awareness is only a manifestation of this larger consciousness. Within this larger consciousness, we are at home with a plurality of visions. The parts contain the whole (to a degree), enfolded or embedded like a fractal or hologram. Containment may take place symbolically in the therapeutic relationship.
The consciousness guide, therapist, or shaman functions as a guide to the netherworld. The "wounded healer" has a numinous quality which provokes the projections of others. Shamans work within the belief systems of their subjects to expand their sense of what is possible.
Those subjects' experiences generally reflect the style and beliefs of the shaman--the shaman's positive expectation of particularized results. Exposure to the infinitely broader worldview of a shamanic personality will automatically move a "smaller" personality into solutio, dissolution. This rapport or participation mystique is an unconscious, automatic process--a positive sort of psychic contagion. This unconscious dynamic may be responsible for the phenomenon of "contact high."
4) REBIRTH, REJUVENATION, IMMERSION IN THE CREATIVE ENERGY FLOW
Psychedelic, as well as mystical literature contains many examples of surrendering, letting go, accepting, merging, and joining the flow of the "Nature Mind," where all is consciousness--the audible life stream.
This "Diamond Consciousness" is awareness of creative flux of the Void, the fluid unity of life.
We flow within it, and it flows through us. 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."
Franklin Merrell-Wolff (1973) spoke of the distillate of his mystical experience as follows:
"The Current is clearly a subtle, fluid-like substance which brings the sense of well-being already described. Along with It, a more than earthly Joy suffuses the whole nature. To myself, I called It a Nectar. Now, I recognize It under several names. It is also the 'Soma,' the 'Ambrosia of the Gods,' the 'Elixir of Life,' the 'Water of Life' of Jesus, and the 'Baptism of the Spirit' of St. Paul. It is more than related to Immortality; in fact, It is Identical with Immortality."
When the ego is completely dissolved in this renewing bath, we experience timeless consciousness, and are reborn based on a new, healthier primal self-image. This rejuvenation comes from connecting with pristine consciousness, the eternal aspects or forces of nature. Even though we cannot conceive of it, we can experience the infinite, the eternal, the transcendent.
Visions of Creation, Emanation, the upwelling Source, emerge. 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.
5) PURIFICATION ORDEAL
Aesculapian dreamhealing, uses many ritual forms of purification, such as diet, sweats, and baths. But the psychic purification is a process of shedding fears and pain which prevent us from flowing. Fear and pain are what keep us "stuck." Each initiation contains an ordeal within its enfolded nature. At least it feels like an ordeal to the old ego structure which must dissolve or die. The quantum leap of initiation, being seized from one state and moved to another, involves a sudden and profound change. It requires an adjustment. Also, life may present synchronistic challenges, outside the dreamhealing sessions. One dreamhealing participant was having a sweat.
She was sent to look for an offering in the form of some wood to burn in the ritual. She finally returned with a huge gnarled log, which was quite representative of her twisted back (scoliosis). That wood really stank when it first was consigned to the fire--but as time went on, it burned pure and smelled extraordinarily sweet. She emerged with more mobility than she could remember every having and the healing persists.
In yoga, we hear about clearing blocks at the various chakras through purification practices. Progressive stages of purification allow the energy of the serpent power to flow or rise ever-higher through the chakra system. Thus, the yogi realizes the true nature of self. Mindell (1982) has commented on this process in regards to flow and healing:
In healing ceremonies, light, water, love, release of emotions, energy flow, circulation, harmony and crystal clear water are all descriptions of curative experiences. The water is a description of free flowing energy which cleans the body by unlocking egotism and its resulting cramps. . .The sap of plants flows in the body of the enlightened yogi. In India lack of flow in the imaginary veins and arteries which carry energy and blood is blamed for illness. Cleaning these conduits and reestablishing flow is all-important. . .there is a resistance at some point to the flow of energies. In fact, all disease is merely a restriction of the flow of life force in a particular area.
Speaking more of the mental aspect of the process he uses water as an image of purification ordeal:
Whenever a complex exists, consciousness rigidifies and tries to steer around the strong emotions connected with the core of the complex. Water therapy allows the complexes to speak, encourages the body to dance its own rhythm and lets the unpredictable come alive. A water experience is holistic and unifies the entire personality so that ego, Self, dreams, body, inner and outer come together in one human being. The more rigid the ego and the more powerful a governing complex, the more threatening the flow of the body or the psyche appears. A rigid and frightened personality becomes terrified, split off from nature, and cannot believe that a Self or a body consciousness exists that can organize behavior once ego rulership is given up. . .Water is medicine against the rigidification of intuition, physical mobility, and feelings.
Another expression of purification ordeal occurs with psychedelics. It is a mental purge of gross karma which manifests as wrathful visions or second bardo nightmares. These visions, as well as the peaceful ones must simply be endured, despite awe and terror. They may be horrific visions of apocalypse and catastrophe--bloodthirsty hallucinations.
They come as the ego struggles to maintain its boundaries, as the mind seeks to reconstruct the personality. But the experience of this hellish state of consciousness is not mandatory with every journey. Recognition of the greater Reality brings instantaneous liberation from this ordeal.
Edinger (1973) uses Job from THE BIBLE as a classic example of an ego's confrontation with the awesome powers of the unconscious through its trials and travails. Job's encounter with the Self brings about a death/rebirth experience. Job feels like he is being punished, and insists on discovering the meaning of his experience. Job encounters Jahweh in dreams first, anticipating later conscious encounter.
Job is shown the abysmal aspect of God and the depths of his own psyche with its monstrous aspects, much like the wrathful visions of THE BARDO THODOL. Finally, Job's questions are answered, not rationally, but through living experience, conscious realization of the autonomous archetypal psyche. The realization comes to birth only through the ordeal. All these struggles in the cycling of death/rebirth may be linked back through symbolic similarity to the individual birth ordeal.
It is characteristic of chaotic systems that events originally separated by time and space can become enfolded closely together. Events linked by the same state of consciousness are related; learning is state-related (Tart; Rossi). Our lessons and our ordeals are related to our states of consciousness. Thus personal and transpersonal experience of this eternal cycle of the generation of forms become fused and conditioned by the individual aspect of archetypal experience.
6) SOLUTION OF PROBLEMS
There is more than a linguistic link between the metaphor of a liquid solution, and the solution of a problem. The moment of "a-ha" comes frequently in process-oriented therapy, as direct realization brings fresh understanding through the "empty mind," or "beginner's mind."
Solutions come through creativity. They may appear effortlessly. The relationship between healing and creativity is implicit--healing is the physical analog of creativity, like attitude changes and intuition are its emotional and mental analogs. Healing is a special case of creativity, or creative problem-solving. During reverie states, the mind goes into chaotic patterns for problem-solving. The more difficult the problem, the more chaos.
Dreamhealing facilitates entry into these healing states of consciousness. McAuliffe (198 ) reported in OMNI on the work of Paul Rapp detecting chaos in brain wave fluctuations: After analyzing the EEGs of humans, Rapp has also come around to this friendlier view. "When we are healthy and alert, the interval between electrical waves is never rigidly fixed," he reports, "but always vacillates around a certain frequency range."
Moreover, when we are mentally challenged, the interval between the electrical wave becomes even more variable--or chaotic. This suggests, in Rapp's opinion, that chaos "may actually be highly beneficial during problem solving. Clearly the greater the mental challenge, the more chaotic the activity of the subject's brain. . .What does all this mean? In Rapp's opinion, chaotic activity may be an asset in problem solving. "You want to be able to scan as wide a range of solutions as possible and avoid locking on to a suboptimal solution early on," he explains. "One way to do that is to have a certain amount of disorderliness, or turbulence, in your search."
We can draw a direct analogy between the dreamhealing process and creative process.
Dreamhealing begins with the pilgrimage, which expresses one's intent or commitment. The creative process begins with receptivity, which includes interest, preparation, and immersion in the subject matter. Next in dreamhealing comes the confession, or the identification of the problem, where you have missed the mark.
Creativity also requires the ability to identify the problem, see the right questions, to use errors, to have detached devotion. The purification or cleansing of dreamhealing parallels the generalized sensitivity to problems that come during creativity, an attunement to the realization of what needs to be done. The offering is a sign of letting go, sacrifice of the old ego form, the commitment to healing.
Creativity requires the surrender of time and self to the process of flow; fluency of thinking; flexibility; abandoning old ways of thought. The heart of the quest is dream incubation, a reverie which seeks connection with higher power. Creativity also requires incubation, reverie, serendipity, spontaneity, adaptation, tolerance for ambiguity, and originality. This permits uncommon responses and unconventional associations.
Healing occurs in a moment of oneness, chaotic consciousness.
In creativity it is paralleled by the moment of illumination, redefinition, invention, vision. Dreamhealing requires amplification, or work on dreams and validation. Elaboration is its counterpart, the use of two or more abilities for the construction of a more complex object or theory, plus verification.
Re-entry implies actualization, renewal, grounding, maturing. Creatively it means real-time application, follow-through, product, utilization of the result. It implies choosing the post-session personality, as re-calibrated through the imprint of the whole.
It means stabilizing that state of creative consciousness which emerged in the session. In all cases, guided or not, the creative or healing process follows approximately this model. The resources are contacted deep within and they well-up in sometimes unexpected ways from the deep Source.
7) MELTING OR SOFTENING PROCESS
Melting turns what was solid into a liquid. Variations on the theme include moistening and softening. Whether we look at modern consciousness journeys, ancient reports, or psychedelic experiences the metaphors are the same. Melting or softening is the result of incubation in dreamhealing, yoga, and alchemy.
THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE offers such suggestions as
"Let the feelings melt all over you," "Let your body merge with the warm flux," "Allow your own mind also to melt away very gradually." Feelings of the body melting or flowing as if wax are typical of the psychedelic experience, as boundaries dissolve. Leary et al note a state of consciousness where, "All the harsh, dry, brittle angularities of game life [are] melted. You drift off -- soft, rounded, moist, warm. Merged with all life. You may feel yourself floating out and down into a warm sea. Your individuality and autonomy of movement are moistly disappearing."
An older report is this passage from THE BOOK OF LAMBSPRING, a seventeenth century alchemy text:
The Father sweats, surrounding his Son,
And pours out his prayer to God,
To Whom all things are possible,
Who creates, and has created all things.
He prays that his Son may be led from his body,
And he be reborn as he was at first.
God grants his prayer, it is not ignored,
Telling the Father to lie down and go to sleep.
God sent down rain from heaven
Through the clear stars; in truth,
It was fruitful silver indeed.
The Father's Body is moistened and softened.
By the help and Grace of God, at the end,
We may obtain Thy gracious Gift!
The Father strongly sweats and glows,
While oil and True Tincture from him flows.
The feverish father sweats the tincture of the wise from his body. The hidden fire causing the sweat is the antithesis of the moisture that it produces. This heat is the warmth of incubation, which is equivalent to a "brooding" state of meditation. The aim of this meditation is self-incubation for transformation and resurrection. This liquefaction is a characteristic state of consciousness during psychedelic sessions.
When the normal structures of awareness break down, consciousness transforms to a flowing or fluid state. Speaking of his fusion of non-linear dynamics, post-structuralism, and psychedelic experience, psychonaut Manuel DeLanda was interviewed by MONDO 2000 (Issue 8; Winter, 1992). He reports on his experience in the language of chaos theory.
The metaphor they use is solid, liquid, gas. If the system is solid, too crystallized, its dynamics are completely uninteresting. If it's gaseous, it's also uninteresting--all you have to do is take averages of behavior and you know what's going on. Liquids have a lot more potential, with all kinds of attractors and bifurcations. Now what they're coming to believe is that the liquid state in nature--not just actual liquids, but liquidity in the abstract sense of being not too rigid or too loose--these liquid systems "poised on the edge of chaos" are natural computers. ...When you trip, you liquify structures in your brain, linguistic structures, intentional structures. They acquire a less viscous consistency, and your brain becomes a super-computer. You are able to think concepts you were not able to think before. Information rushes in your brain, which makes you feel like you're having a revelation. But of course no one is revealing anything to you. It's just self-organizing. It's happening by itself. ...free-flowing matter and energy are capable of self-organization. I don't think there are higher states of consciousness. You liquify yourself, and you go through phase transitions, and then it seems to you that you are in a higher state of consciousness. When I'm tripping, I'm thinking concepts I'm sure no one's ever thought before, and in a way it's like a higher state of consciousness, but it's not a plane that was waiting there for me to access it. It's something I'm building that moment by destratifying my brain. There might be an ethics here: how to live your life poised at the edge of chaos, how to allow self-organizing processes to take place in all the strata that bind you. In your life, you could create maps of attractors that bind your local destiny--those behaviors that are habitual and so on. And try to find those bifurcations that would allow you to jump, if not to complete freedom--that doesn't exist--but to another set of attractors less confining, less binding, less stratifying. Or learn to lead your life near a bifurcation without ever crossing it--the lesson of being poised on the edge of chaos.
In reducing all to pure water, the prima materia and the ultima materia become synonymous. That primal consciousness state, that creative and chaotic consciousness is the beginning of the operation of "water", and its ultimate realization. It becomes easy to see why the operation of water is the "root of alchemy."
Through consciousness journeys which liquify our rigid notions of self and world, we re-create the adventures of the hero or heroine. The theme is the loss and recovery of identity. The hero is deserted, betrayed or even killed, but then comes back to life again. They may be swallowed by a huge sea monster, or wander in a strange dark underworld and then fight their way out again.
The shift is from abandonment and isolation, to struggle, to the triumph or marriage phase, (unitive consciousness). The myth of the defeated hero (rigid ego) brings images of the triumph of dark forces, myths of floods and the return of chaos. Then the stage is set for miraculous rebirth--The Son is born from the Father, as in THE BOOK OF LAMBSPRING passage. This process of rebirth is the universal medicine.
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Alchemy had one great prescription for the accomplishment of the Great Work: "Solve et Coagula"--reduce or dissolve all to its primary, most fundamental essence and embody that creative, holistic spirit. The ancient alchemists sought to transform "lead" into "gold."
We repeat this process as modern alchemists when we seek the transformative medium which allows us to recognize our rigidities ("lead") and facilitates our healing and expression of our full creative potential ("gold").
That medium is the ever-flowing river of our consciousness. 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, "elixir 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. This divine water signifies the return of The Feminine, a reflective consciousness with inner awareness and archetypal spiritual perceptions.
This Feminine Divinity is the Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World, the universal animating principle, the upwelling spring of the creative Imagination, the dynamic flow of imagery, pattern, and form. This dynamic has been known as Isis, Shakti, Maya, Shekinah, Sophia, Demeter/Persephone, Mary.
In psychedelic mysticism, the animating principle is being referred to as Gaian Consciousness (Abraham, 1992), which we might view as a rebirth of ancient ecstatic, communal consciousness. It is the psychobiological basis of deep ecology, the flow of relationships.
The return of chaos heralds the "greening of consciousness," the greening of the cultural wasteland. Hillman (1985) describes the anima not as a projection of, but rather the projector of psyche. We are contained within Her fantasy, not She within ours.
Grinnell (1973) describes the transformative process of solutio which facilitates the fluid, mobile basis of consciousness:
For aqua permanens is a mode of the arcane substance; its symbol is water or sea-water, an all-pervading essence of anima mundi, the innermost and secret numinosum in man and the universe, that part of God which formed the quintessence and real substance of Physis, at once the highest supercelestial waters of wisdom and the spirit of life pervading inorganic matter.
The arcane descriptors of this paradoxical liquid Stone are cryptic, couched in metaphor. But what does it mean experientially and pragmatically? How does this chaotic transformative process engineer our consciousness? The divine water, as a liquid symbol of the Self, can be experienced in many ways. It has been described as innocuously as the "stream of consciousness," and as poetically as the "Heart of The River of Created Forms."
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 superseded 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. In solutio, the body is joined with the soul and spirit. The skin-boundary dissolves into visceral as well as spiritual perception.
Awareness of physical processes may be greatly amplified, appearing as impressions, intuitions, sensations, sounds, odors. The body is always speaking silently. Through this raw, physical expression, that which was solid becomes liquified, dissolved, deliteralized. The concrete image of the body "morphs" into the flow of pure energy, in a variation of Transubstantiation.
It is the "rapture" of being seized up into the heavenly realm. The flow of dynamic energy from the deep Self reawakens and activates the body, and also that portion of the unconscious that the body carries. The body not only carries, but is the memory of the entire evolutionary cycle.
Consciousness can access any portion of this material memory through creative regression.
The body manifests kinesthetic, preverbal, and preconceptual memory of its direct experience. Immersion in the healing creative energy flow is like a spiritual baptism, which facilitates creative reformation of ordinary consciousness, and even the physical body.
Solutio, as a state of consciousness, unites the powers of above and below, transpersonal and personal. It is the integration of the higher spiritual powers with personal experience that embodies the healing dynamic. This produces the paradoxical poison-panacea. The dual nature of the universal medicine points to a consciousness state beyond both opposites.
In Greek myth, Athena gave Asklepios, the divine healer, the blood of Medusa as the universal medicine. In its negative aspect it was toxic and produced death. The positive aspect brought healing; this mysterious potion is the "cure-all," the "solution."
Divine water (sometimes symbolized as blood) is dangerous, poisonous, seductive, addictive, even deadly in its primeval, untransformed state--madness.
In the science fiction novel, DUNE, the new messiah and the Reverend Mothers of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood imbibe the psychoactive "water of life" with impunity. Moving past the fear and pain, they transcend time/space and commune with the continuum of all existence. What sets them apart from others, on whom the potion has a fatal effect, is their ability to withstand and convert its initial toxic effects into a religious ecstasy.
They know how to navigate in that turbulent flow, during their consciousness journeys --"moving without travelling." The alchemical solution to this problem of primordial, raw experience is to "cook" it into a reflective consciousness.
Recycling itself, the ego cooperates in its own "re-creational death," connecting with the transpersonal forces of rebirth and renewal. The reborn personality is resurrected, restored to life through new meaning.
The ego acknowledges the Self as its new center of gravity, and personality heals. Experiential connection to the living reality of the Self, the "waters of life" is the panacea, the magical elixer of life.
Solutio (and its prime agent, chaos) arises spontaneously from the depths as irrational images, dreams and fantasies. In dreamhealing, the dream symbols are followed deeper and deeper down to the primal level where all structure dissolves into its original source.
This journey into the depths, and subsequent emergence, is the basis of shamanic healing. As we journey in the autonomous consciousness stream, guided movement deeper into and beyond the fear and pain brings up the classical imagery of the solutio, as resistance subsides. There is no part of it that is not us. The transformative process dissolves blockages, obstructions or "frozen" consciousness which disturb and distort the free flow of energy.
1) RETURN TO THE WOMB OR PRIMAL STATE
The alchemist Paracelsus said, "He who enters the kingdom of God must first enter his mother and die." That death-like silence is also our mother, the virgin womb of the imagination. The dynamics of "creative regression" are common to mystical experience, psychedelic exploration, and therapeutic consciousness journeys. All lead to immersion in the flow of the stream of consciousness.
Creative regression is a generic form of the myth of the eternal return, chronic recurrence, reiteration.
In the dynamics of chaos theory we find this recursive motion in the concept of iteration--self-similarity--which produces the similarity in infinitely descending scales of fractal generation. Iteration is like a stretching and folding of the spacetime continuum.
Experientially it manifests within us as a spiritualizing instinct, a recursive "bending back" of instinct toward that which is primordial and divine. Thus, whether induced through psychoactive substances, mystical transport, or experiential psychotherapy typical imagery recycles, recapitulates, or reiterates cascades of impressionistic transformations spanning the entire spectrum of archetypal experiences--morphological transformations. These include but are not limited to childhood, birth, embryonic development, ancestral, mythic, genetic, evolutionary, universal, and quantum consciousness.
Access to the entire continuum of organic and inorganic evolution as well as the collective unconscious becomes available. That information most pertinent to the whole self emerges in the stream of consciousness as virtual experience. What is pertinent is what gets spontaneously "downloaded," and it repeats and reiterates the basic issues in yet another, eternally creative way.
Stan Grof has cataloged an extensive taxonomy of these states, most notably in THE ADVENTURE OF SELF-DISCOVERY (1988). Such experiences of cosmic consciousness constitute a "return to the Mother," the blissful fusion of primal union, at both personal and universal levels. The direction of this dynamic process is recursive, bending back through deep time, ontology, and phylogeny.
It echoes the semantic roots of the words religion and yoga, which imply a "linking backward" in the bond between gods and man, a craving for ecstasy, and transcendence of the limitations of physical form (Milkman, 1987). Jung called this dynamic an opus contra naturam, a work against nature.
But chaos theory shows us it is actually quite organic, natural, and instinctual. In alchemy it was the Great Work. Consciousness turns back on itself, reiterating each level of organization, de-structuring each strata as it dives deeper toward the unconditioned, formless beginning, or "unborn" state.
This primal state is amniotic bliss experienced as the Void, the cosmic womb. Images of the Great Mother system become reactivated, though not exactly in their original form.
Imagery like fractals is self-similar, but not entirely identical. This creative regression is to the prepersonal domain, the preverbal, preconceptual domain, not the transpersonal spiritual domain (transverbal, transconceptual). Typically in the first few dreamhealing sessions, a person will enter a dream symbol doorway which leads back to a conception memory. They may or may not recognize it as such during the journey. But in content, the symbolism is very clear.
The imagery is fundamental or primal, appearing as a dance of energy, matter, and consciousness--the body-ego's conscious experience. These images are close to the stuff of our creation -- the prima materia -- of our existence. We may experience it as free-floating: a paradox of chaos and a deep-felt sense of flowing and peace.
The imagery here is psychedelic -- consciousness expanding -- an autonomous manifestation of imagination. The panoply of the ceaseless transformation of energy may overwhelm the senses, leading to a sense of total chaos.
There is nothing to do but let go, surrender to it, merge with it, flow with it.
The dancing energy waves and patterns are perceived as deep whorls, spinning spirals, black holes, infinite voids, gray clouds of nothingness. There is melding of the senses -- synesthesia -- such as "tasting" music, "seeing" sound, etc. Simple throbbing and other extremely primitive sensations may be experienced.
Experience of this state produces a new acceptance of the original conditions of conception, and re-structuring of the primal self-image. We go into the primal chaos to begin the process of reformation from our pre-structural beginning. In essence, we re-enter the womb as we are initiated in the mysteries of the psyche. We re-conceive our primal self image, healed by communion with the creative Source.
2) DISSOLUTION, DISPERSAL, DISMEMBERMENT
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."
3) CONTAINMENT OF A LESSER THING BY A GREATER
The ego "takes the plunge," it lets go and dissolves its old matrix, its old boundaries. When its boundaries melt, ego-consciousness dissolves into deep consciousness.
The "wave merges with the ocean," and experiences its own deep transpersonal nature. It moves swiftly through the fear and pain, awakening to an infinitely wider reality of universal energy waves. In the ocean of creativity, "your own consciousness, shining, void and inseparable from the great body of radiance, has no birth, nor death." (Leary, 1964).
Experience of the pure, unmodified state of consciousness transcends all opposites, and therefore consciousness journeys provide an experiential "container" for the reconciliation of paradox within a larger field of experience--a broader, transcendent perspective.
The transformational process acts as a "container" (alchemical retort) of the contents of psyche. But these contents, reduced to their essence are "nothingness," simply dreams and imagination. Emptiness is the real Philosopher's Stone. By dissolving into non-relative consciousness, mood swings or identification with conflicting polar positions may be transcended by an enlarged state of consciousness which embraces and contains the entire continuum.
Flow replaces polarity.
Jung spoke of the transcendent function as a symbol-forming force continuously creating emergent imagery which facilitates whole-self realization. It is thus an evolutionary and adaptive force.
Mindell (1985) speaks of the flow in alchemical terms: The alchemists called this flow the 'aqua permanens', or permanent water. Aqua permanens is the fluid process, the energy or life which was locked up in the tension of conflict which has now been freed through the flow between the opposites.
Fluidity comes from conflict. Whereas before there was a boundary between conflicting opposites, between intent and reality, streaming energy now transforms therapy into natural science.
Dreams, visions, or the stream of consciousness can be used therapeutically as an evolutionary force to guide people from a small sense of self and expand them toward a larger image. This expansion of the sense of self may require some adjustment. The illumination (awakening to larger Reality) may also come through a nature-mystic experience, intense sexual experience, E.S.P., a consciousness journey, or meditation.
Enlightenment (even the "seed" of enlightenment) is an experience of awe, bliss, and infinite possibilities. The ego realizes it is not the center of the whole person, but only "manages" the personality. There are autonomous archetypal forces which inhabit the psyche with their own agendas, patterns, and goals.
Our psyche is transpersonal; it has no boundaries. Our conscious awareness is only a manifestation of this larger consciousness. Within this larger consciousness, we are at home with a plurality of visions. The parts contain the whole (to a degree), enfolded or embedded like a fractal or hologram. Containment may take place symbolically in the therapeutic relationship.
The consciousness guide, therapist, or shaman functions as a guide to the netherworld. The "wounded healer" has a numinous quality which provokes the projections of others. Shamans work within the belief systems of their subjects to expand their sense of what is possible.
Those subjects' experiences generally reflect the style and beliefs of the shaman--the shaman's positive expectation of particularized results. Exposure to the infinitely broader worldview of a shamanic personality will automatically move a "smaller" personality into solutio, dissolution. This rapport or participation mystique is an unconscious, automatic process--a positive sort of psychic contagion. This unconscious dynamic may be responsible for the phenomenon of "contact high."
4) REBIRTH, REJUVENATION, IMMERSION IN THE CREATIVE ENERGY FLOW
Psychedelic, as well as mystical literature contains many examples of surrendering, letting go, accepting, merging, and joining the flow of the "Nature Mind," where all is consciousness--the audible life stream.
This "Diamond Consciousness" is awareness of creative flux of the Void, the fluid unity of life.
We flow within it, and it flows through us. 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."
Franklin Merrell-Wolff (1973) spoke of the distillate of his mystical experience as follows:
"The Current is clearly a subtle, fluid-like substance which brings the sense of well-being already described. Along with It, a more than earthly Joy suffuses the whole nature. To myself, I called It a Nectar. Now, I recognize It under several names. It is also the 'Soma,' the 'Ambrosia of the Gods,' the 'Elixir of Life,' the 'Water of Life' of Jesus, and the 'Baptism of the Spirit' of St. Paul. It is more than related to Immortality; in fact, It is Identical with Immortality."
When the ego is completely dissolved in this renewing bath, we experience timeless consciousness, and are reborn based on a new, healthier primal self-image. This rejuvenation comes from connecting with pristine consciousness, the eternal aspects or forces of nature. Even though we cannot conceive of it, we can experience the infinite, the eternal, the transcendent.
Visions of Creation, Emanation, the upwelling Source, emerge. 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.
5) PURIFICATION ORDEAL
Aesculapian dreamhealing, uses many ritual forms of purification, such as diet, sweats, and baths. But the psychic purification is a process of shedding fears and pain which prevent us from flowing. Fear and pain are what keep us "stuck." Each initiation contains an ordeal within its enfolded nature. At least it feels like an ordeal to the old ego structure which must dissolve or die. The quantum leap of initiation, being seized from one state and moved to another, involves a sudden and profound change. It requires an adjustment. Also, life may present synchronistic challenges, outside the dreamhealing sessions. One dreamhealing participant was having a sweat.
She was sent to look for an offering in the form of some wood to burn in the ritual. She finally returned with a huge gnarled log, which was quite representative of her twisted back (scoliosis). That wood really stank when it first was consigned to the fire--but as time went on, it burned pure and smelled extraordinarily sweet. She emerged with more mobility than she could remember every having and the healing persists.
In yoga, we hear about clearing blocks at the various chakras through purification practices. Progressive stages of purification allow the energy of the serpent power to flow or rise ever-higher through the chakra system. Thus, the yogi realizes the true nature of self. Mindell (1982) has commented on this process in regards to flow and healing:
In healing ceremonies, light, water, love, release of emotions, energy flow, circulation, harmony and crystal clear water are all descriptions of curative experiences. The water is a description of free flowing energy which cleans the body by unlocking egotism and its resulting cramps. . .The sap of plants flows in the body of the enlightened yogi. In India lack of flow in the imaginary veins and arteries which carry energy and blood is blamed for illness. Cleaning these conduits and reestablishing flow is all-important. . .there is a resistance at some point to the flow of energies. In fact, all disease is merely a restriction of the flow of life force in a particular area.
Speaking more of the mental aspect of the process he uses water as an image of purification ordeal:
Whenever a complex exists, consciousness rigidifies and tries to steer around the strong emotions connected with the core of the complex. Water therapy allows the complexes to speak, encourages the body to dance its own rhythm and lets the unpredictable come alive. A water experience is holistic and unifies the entire personality so that ego, Self, dreams, body, inner and outer come together in one human being. The more rigid the ego and the more powerful a governing complex, the more threatening the flow of the body or the psyche appears. A rigid and frightened personality becomes terrified, split off from nature, and cannot believe that a Self or a body consciousness exists that can organize behavior once ego rulership is given up. . .Water is medicine against the rigidification of intuition, physical mobility, and feelings.
Another expression of purification ordeal occurs with psychedelics. It is a mental purge of gross karma which manifests as wrathful visions or second bardo nightmares. These visions, as well as the peaceful ones must simply be endured, despite awe and terror. They may be horrific visions of apocalypse and catastrophe--bloodthirsty hallucinations.
They come as the ego struggles to maintain its boundaries, as the mind seeks to reconstruct the personality. But the experience of this hellish state of consciousness is not mandatory with every journey. Recognition of the greater Reality brings instantaneous liberation from this ordeal.
Edinger (1973) uses Job from THE BIBLE as a classic example of an ego's confrontation with the awesome powers of the unconscious through its trials and travails. Job's encounter with the Self brings about a death/rebirth experience. Job feels like he is being punished, and insists on discovering the meaning of his experience. Job encounters Jahweh in dreams first, anticipating later conscious encounter.
Job is shown the abysmal aspect of God and the depths of his own psyche with its monstrous aspects, much like the wrathful visions of THE BARDO THODOL. Finally, Job's questions are answered, not rationally, but through living experience, conscious realization of the autonomous archetypal psyche. The realization comes to birth only through the ordeal. All these struggles in the cycling of death/rebirth may be linked back through symbolic similarity to the individual birth ordeal.
It is characteristic of chaotic systems that events originally separated by time and space can become enfolded closely together. Events linked by the same state of consciousness are related; learning is state-related (Tart; Rossi). Our lessons and our ordeals are related to our states of consciousness. Thus personal and transpersonal experience of this eternal cycle of the generation of forms become fused and conditioned by the individual aspect of archetypal experience.
6) SOLUTION OF PROBLEMS
There is more than a linguistic link between the metaphor of a liquid solution, and the solution of a problem. The moment of "a-ha" comes frequently in process-oriented therapy, as direct realization brings fresh understanding through the "empty mind," or "beginner's mind."
Solutions come through creativity. They may appear effortlessly. The relationship between healing and creativity is implicit--healing is the physical analog of creativity, like attitude changes and intuition are its emotional and mental analogs. Healing is a special case of creativity, or creative problem-solving. During reverie states, the mind goes into chaotic patterns for problem-solving. The more difficult the problem, the more chaos.
Dreamhealing facilitates entry into these healing states of consciousness. McAuliffe (198 ) reported in OMNI on the work of Paul Rapp detecting chaos in brain wave fluctuations: After analyzing the EEGs of humans, Rapp has also come around to this friendlier view. "When we are healthy and alert, the interval between electrical waves is never rigidly fixed," he reports, "but always vacillates around a certain frequency range."
Moreover, when we are mentally challenged, the interval between the electrical wave becomes even more variable--or chaotic. This suggests, in Rapp's opinion, that chaos "may actually be highly beneficial during problem solving. Clearly the greater the mental challenge, the more chaotic the activity of the subject's brain. . .What does all this mean? In Rapp's opinion, chaotic activity may be an asset in problem solving. "You want to be able to scan as wide a range of solutions as possible and avoid locking on to a suboptimal solution early on," he explains. "One way to do that is to have a certain amount of disorderliness, or turbulence, in your search."
We can draw a direct analogy between the dreamhealing process and creative process.
Dreamhealing begins with the pilgrimage, which expresses one's intent or commitment. The creative process begins with receptivity, which includes interest, preparation, and immersion in the subject matter. Next in dreamhealing comes the confession, or the identification of the problem, where you have missed the mark.
Creativity also requires the ability to identify the problem, see the right questions, to use errors, to have detached devotion. The purification or cleansing of dreamhealing parallels the generalized sensitivity to problems that come during creativity, an attunement to the realization of what needs to be done. The offering is a sign of letting go, sacrifice of the old ego form, the commitment to healing.
Creativity requires the surrender of time and self to the process of flow; fluency of thinking; flexibility; abandoning old ways of thought. The heart of the quest is dream incubation, a reverie which seeks connection with higher power. Creativity also requires incubation, reverie, serendipity, spontaneity, adaptation, tolerance for ambiguity, and originality. This permits uncommon responses and unconventional associations.
Healing occurs in a moment of oneness, chaotic consciousness.
In creativity it is paralleled by the moment of illumination, redefinition, invention, vision. Dreamhealing requires amplification, or work on dreams and validation. Elaboration is its counterpart, the use of two or more abilities for the construction of a more complex object or theory, plus verification.
Re-entry implies actualization, renewal, grounding, maturing. Creatively it means real-time application, follow-through, product, utilization of the result. It implies choosing the post-session personality, as re-calibrated through the imprint of the whole.
It means stabilizing that state of creative consciousness which emerged in the session. In all cases, guided or not, the creative or healing process follows approximately this model. The resources are contacted deep within and they well-up in sometimes unexpected ways from the deep Source.
7) MELTING OR SOFTENING PROCESS
Melting turns what was solid into a liquid. Variations on the theme include moistening and softening. Whether we look at modern consciousness journeys, ancient reports, or psychedelic experiences the metaphors are the same. Melting or softening is the result of incubation in dreamhealing, yoga, and alchemy.
THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE offers such suggestions as
"Let the feelings melt all over you," "Let your body merge with the warm flux," "Allow your own mind also to melt away very gradually." Feelings of the body melting or flowing as if wax are typical of the psychedelic experience, as boundaries dissolve. Leary et al note a state of consciousness where, "All the harsh, dry, brittle angularities of game life [are] melted. You drift off -- soft, rounded, moist, warm. Merged with all life. You may feel yourself floating out and down into a warm sea. Your individuality and autonomy of movement are moistly disappearing."
An older report is this passage from THE BOOK OF LAMBSPRING, a seventeenth century alchemy text:
The Father sweats, surrounding his Son,
And pours out his prayer to God,
To Whom all things are possible,
Who creates, and has created all things.
He prays that his Son may be led from his body,
And he be reborn as he was at first.
God grants his prayer, it is not ignored,
Telling the Father to lie down and go to sleep.
God sent down rain from heaven
Through the clear stars; in truth,
It was fruitful silver indeed.
The Father's Body is moistened and softened.
By the help and Grace of God, at the end,
We may obtain Thy gracious Gift!
The Father strongly sweats and glows,
While oil and True Tincture from him flows.
The feverish father sweats the tincture of the wise from his body. The hidden fire causing the sweat is the antithesis of the moisture that it produces. This heat is the warmth of incubation, which is equivalent to a "brooding" state of meditation. The aim of this meditation is self-incubation for transformation and resurrection. This liquefaction is a characteristic state of consciousness during psychedelic sessions.
When the normal structures of awareness break down, consciousness transforms to a flowing or fluid state. Speaking of his fusion of non-linear dynamics, post-structuralism, and psychedelic experience, psychonaut Manuel DeLanda was interviewed by MONDO 2000 (Issue 8; Winter, 1992). He reports on his experience in the language of chaos theory.
The metaphor they use is solid, liquid, gas. If the system is solid, too crystallized, its dynamics are completely uninteresting. If it's gaseous, it's also uninteresting--all you have to do is take averages of behavior and you know what's going on. Liquids have a lot more potential, with all kinds of attractors and bifurcations. Now what they're coming to believe is that the liquid state in nature--not just actual liquids, but liquidity in the abstract sense of being not too rigid or too loose--these liquid systems "poised on the edge of chaos" are natural computers. ...When you trip, you liquify structures in your brain, linguistic structures, intentional structures. They acquire a less viscous consistency, and your brain becomes a super-computer. You are able to think concepts you were not able to think before. Information rushes in your brain, which makes you feel like you're having a revelation. But of course no one is revealing anything to you. It's just self-organizing. It's happening by itself. ...free-flowing matter and energy are capable of self-organization. I don't think there are higher states of consciousness. You liquify yourself, and you go through phase transitions, and then it seems to you that you are in a higher state of consciousness. When I'm tripping, I'm thinking concepts I'm sure no one's ever thought before, and in a way it's like a higher state of consciousness, but it's not a plane that was waiting there for me to access it. It's something I'm building that moment by destratifying my brain. There might be an ethics here: how to live your life poised at the edge of chaos, how to allow self-organizing processes to take place in all the strata that bind you. In your life, you could create maps of attractors that bind your local destiny--those behaviors that are habitual and so on. And try to find those bifurcations that would allow you to jump, if not to complete freedom--that doesn't exist--but to another set of attractors less confining, less binding, less stratifying. Or learn to lead your life near a bifurcation without ever crossing it--the lesson of being poised on the edge of chaos.
In reducing all to pure water, the prima materia and the ultima materia become synonymous. That primal consciousness state, that creative and chaotic consciousness is the beginning of the operation of "water", and its ultimate realization. It becomes easy to see why the operation of water is the "root of alchemy."
Through consciousness journeys which liquify our rigid notions of self and world, we re-create the adventures of the hero or heroine. The theme is the loss and recovery of identity. The hero is deserted, betrayed or even killed, but then comes back to life again. They may be swallowed by a huge sea monster, or wander in a strange dark underworld and then fight their way out again.
The shift is from abandonment and isolation, to struggle, to the triumph or marriage phase, (unitive consciousness). The myth of the defeated hero (rigid ego) brings images of the triumph of dark forces, myths of floods and the return of chaos. Then the stage is set for miraculous rebirth--The Son is born from the Father, as in THE BOOK OF LAMBSPRING passage. This process of rebirth is the universal medicine.
REFERENCES
Aaronson, Bernard S., "The Hypnotic Induction of the Void," Journal of the American Society of Psychosomatic Dentistry and Medicine, Vol. 26: No. 1, p. 22-30; No. 2, p. 63-72; No. 3, p. 114-117; No. 4, p.129-133.
Abraham, Ralph; McKenna, Terence; Sheldrake, Rupert; TRIALOGUES AT THE EDGE OF THE WEST; Bear and Co., Santa Fe, 1992.
Davis, Erik, "DeLanda Destratified"; MONDO 2000, #8, Winter 1992, p. 45-48.
Edinger, Edward F.; ANATOMY OF THE PSYCHE, Open Court; LaSalle, Illinois, 1985. Edinger, Edward F.; EGO AND ARCHETYPE, Penguin Books Inc., Baltimore, 1973.
Evans-Wentz, W.Y.; THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD; Causeway Books, New York, 1973.
Gold, E. J.; AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD; Gateways
Grinnell, Robert; ALCHEMY IN A MODERN WOMAN, Spring Publications, New York, 1973.
Grof, Stanislav; THE ADVENTURE OF SELF-DISCOVERY; SUNY Press, Albany, 1988.
Hillman, James; ANIMA; Spring Publications, Dallas, 1985.
Kauffman, Stuart A., "Antichaos and Adaptation"; SciAmer, August 1991, p.78-84.
Leary, T., Metzner, R., Alpert, R.; THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE, University Books, New York, 1964.
McAuliffe, Kathleen; "Get Smart: Controlling Chaos"; OMNI
Merrell-Wolff, Franklin; PATHWAYS THROUGH TO SPACE; Warner Books, New York, 1973.
Milkman, Harvey & Sunderwirth, Stanley; CRAVING FOR ECSTASY; D.C. Heath & Co., Lexington, Massachusetts, 1987.
Miller, I. & Miller, R.A.; THE MODERN ALCHEMIST (formerly The Book of Lambspring); Phanes Press, Chicago(1994).
Mindell, Arnold; DREAMBODY; Sigo Press, Boston, 1982.
Mindell, Arnold; RIVER'S WAY; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985.
Rossi, Ernest: THE PSYCHOBIOLOGY OF MIND-BODY HEALING, W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., New York, 1986. Stace, W.D.; MYSTICISM AND PHILOSOPHY; Lippincott, New York, 1960. S
winney, Graywolf and Iona Miller; DREAMHEALING: CHAOS AND THE CREATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS PROCESS, Asklepia Press, 1992.
Tart, Charles; STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS; E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1975.
Washburn, Michael; THE EGO AND THE DYNAMIC GROUND; SUNY Press, New York, 1988.
"The question of karma is obscure to me, as is also the problem of personal rebirth or of the transmigration of souls. "With a free and open mind" I listen attentively to the Indian doctrine of rebirth, and look around in the world of my own experience to see whether somewhere and somehow there is some authentic sign pointing toward reincarnation.
Naturally, I do not count the relatively numerous testimonies, here in the West, to the belief in reincarnation. A belief proves to me only the phenomenon of belief, not the content of the belief. This I must see revealed empirically in order to accept it. Until a few years ago I could not discover anything convincing in this respect, although I kept a sharp lookout for any such signs.
Recently, however, I observed in myself a series of dreams which would seem to describe the process of reincarnation in a deceased person of my acquaintance. But I have never come across any such dreams in other persons, and therefore have no basis for comparison.
Since this observation is subjective and unique, I prefer only to mention its existence and not to go into it any further. I must confess, however, that after this experience I view the problem of reincarnation with somewhat different eyes, though without being in a position to assert a definite opinion.
If we assume that life continues "there," we cannot conceive of any other form of existence except a psychic one; for the life of the psyche requires no space and no time. Psychic existence, and above all the inner images with which we are here concerned, supply the material for all mythic speculations about a life in the hereafter, and I imagine that life as a continuance in the world of images. Thus the psyche might be that existence in which the hereafter or the land of the dead is located.
From the psychological point of view, life in the hereafter would seem to be a logical continuation of the psychic life of old age. With increasing age, contemplation, and reflection, the inner images naturally play an ever greater part in man's life. "Your old men shall dream dreams."
That, to be sure, presupposes that the psyches of the old men have not become wooden, or entirely petrified. In old age, one begins to let memories unroll before the mind's eye and, musing, to recognize oneself in the inner and outer images of the past. This is like a preparation for an existence in the hereafter, just as, in Plato's view, philosophy is a preparation for death." — Carl Gustav Jung, On Life After Death
Naturally, I do not count the relatively numerous testimonies, here in the West, to the belief in reincarnation. A belief proves to me only the phenomenon of belief, not the content of the belief. This I must see revealed empirically in order to accept it. Until a few years ago I could not discover anything convincing in this respect, although I kept a sharp lookout for any such signs.
Recently, however, I observed in myself a series of dreams which would seem to describe the process of reincarnation in a deceased person of my acquaintance. But I have never come across any such dreams in other persons, and therefore have no basis for comparison.
Since this observation is subjective and unique, I prefer only to mention its existence and not to go into it any further. I must confess, however, that after this experience I view the problem of reincarnation with somewhat different eyes, though without being in a position to assert a definite opinion.
If we assume that life continues "there," we cannot conceive of any other form of existence except a psychic one; for the life of the psyche requires no space and no time. Psychic existence, and above all the inner images with which we are here concerned, supply the material for all mythic speculations about a life in the hereafter, and I imagine that life as a continuance in the world of images. Thus the psyche might be that existence in which the hereafter or the land of the dead is located.
From the psychological point of view, life in the hereafter would seem to be a logical continuation of the psychic life of old age. With increasing age, contemplation, and reflection, the inner images naturally play an ever greater part in man's life. "Your old men shall dream dreams."
That, to be sure, presupposes that the psyches of the old men have not become wooden, or entirely petrified. In old age, one begins to let memories unroll before the mind's eye and, musing, to recognize oneself in the inner and outer images of the past. This is like a preparation for an existence in the hereafter, just as, in Plato's view, philosophy is a preparation for death." — Carl Gustav Jung, On Life After Death
Leighton, Return of Persephone