Disneyland, Anaheim, California, USA.

http://www.disneydreamer.com/history/disneyland.htm  

Disneyland was built in 1 year. Construction began on July 21, 1954. Walt Disney hired a research team to find the best place to hold the vision he had for Disneyland. Anaheim California was the spot chosen to hold a mountain, rivers and the other various ideas Disneyland now contains.
Disneyland was built for a total cost of 17.5 million dollars. July 17 1955 - Disneyland opens with 18 attractions, including the Jungle Cruise, Tomorrowland, Autopia, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, and the Mark Twain. The televised opening is hosted by Ronald Reagan, Art Linkletter and Bob Cummings. The 11,000 invitation only tickets to opening day are so easily duplicated that first day attendance shoots to 28,154, with an ABC television audience of 90 million. One entrepreneur folds a ladder over the park's backside fence and lets people in for $5. Official general admission cost $1. Cost of attractions ranged from 10c to 35c.

I could never convince the financiers that Disneyland
was feasible, because dreams offer too little collateral.
--Walt Disney


By late 1953 Disney had stretched his personal resources to the limit. At that point, television, in the form of the American Broadcasting Co., came to the rescue. ABC had been after Disney to produce a weekly show for their struggling network. Disney agreed--in exchange for partial financing of his amusement park. Loans and an investment from the Santa Fe Railroad covered the rest, and with money secured, work began on Disneyland in earnest.

Studio employees were taken out of their old jobs of cartooning and set to work on their boss' latest endeavor. Architects, engineers and designers were hired. Bill Martin, an art director from Twentieth Century Fox, came in on the early stages of planning and was amazed at Disney's attention to detail.

Walt was a typical case of an obsessive/compulsive. The biographies do not do proper justice, to the ruthless ambition,and, driving force, that made him, what he came to be known, as.

Some loved him,

Others despised him,

Some saw him as a modern day 'saviour', of moral values, etc,
Some still see him, as a user of others, a manipulator , a not very nice, person.
I see him as a genius, but, like all genius, flawed.


'Mandala symbolism', is produced by the collective unconscious, to restore balance in the Psyche.

My previous postings, show a little of the variation, that is possible, in Mandala productions.


'Disneyland is a giant Mandala' 
   
The actual geometry and location, of Disneyland, reveals much about it's creator!

The original central point , of Disneyland, was an   OLIVE TREE.

[now replaced with, 'Uncle Walt, and Mickey Mouse'.]

Orange County, California, the actual location, is very relevant, notwithstanding Walt's financial status, at the time of construction.

 

The sections of the original plan, formed 'worlds', or segments, built around the central point.

There is much symbolism here. The abundance of Water, the contrasting Worlds, of, Old and New. Greenery, Animals, and, a search, for, the 'Historic ' America , So keenly, and, idealistically,felt, and, remembered, from, his Youth.

Bounded, by, the 'Monorail', [Very significant!, One Rail, Power Boundary], Disneyland, -Fulfils, all, the requirements, of, a Giant, 'Mandala'.
[I,Can, of Course, expand,the Symbolism.Inherently,and patently obvious, is the 'Fire' , Element. Little wonder, that, Walt's, favourite, 'Haunt',was the 'Fire-House', near, to, the Entrance.....] 

Men, of, Genius, -like Walt Disney, are, Driven.
Driven,- by, a desire, to Create.
Disneyland ,is, His Monument, -His, Last, 'Will and Testament' . It, stands, as a Reminder.
 A Reminder, that, what, is created, through, hard work, inspired dreams, and sheer Determination, is, created, from,- Love. 

Little wonder, then, That, I, Love, Disneyland!

 Now there are three steps to Heaven! 
Just listen, and you will plainly see!
That as life travels on, and things do go wrong....
Just Follow, steps1, 2, and 3!

[Eddie Cochrane]

I'm outta here, back in 2 weeks...... 

Jung's 'Liverpool' Dream, More Observations....

http://www.quodlibet.net/articles/brabazon-jung.shtml

Many of the dream examples used by Jung to demonstrate the centrality of the quaternity to the psyche are actually based on the formula of the-dreamer-plus-three-others.  Here are some of the examples from Psychology and Alchemy [Collected Works, vol 12] which Jung employed to show ongoing alchemical symbolism in modern man's unconscious.  The dreamer in each case, I believe, is representative of the ego and the three others, the triune Self.

The dreamer finds himself with his father, mother and sister in a very dangerous situation on the platform of a tram-car. [One similar to  this is recorded by P W Martin in Experiment in Depth: A Study of the Work of Jung, Eliot and Toynbee, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1976, page 52, which commences "We were in a car going from Geneva to Lausanne.  There were four of us, my father, mother, younger brother and myself...".  Indeed, many of the ancient triadic formulations were based on familial relationships, especially in Egypt.][29]

Four people are going down a river; the dreamer, his father, a certain friend and the unknown woman.[30]

The dreamer, the doctor, a pilot, and the unknown woman are travelling by aeroplane.[31]

The dreamer is in the Peter hofstatt in Zurich with the doctor, the man with the pointed beard, and the 'doll woman'.[32]

In a primeval forest.  An elephant looms menacingly.  Then a large ape-man, bear, or cave-man threatens to attack the dreamer with a club. Suddenly the man with the pointed beard appears and stares at the aggressor, so that he is spell-bound.  But the dreamer is terrified.  The voice says, "Everything must be ruled by light."[33]

In this final example Jung points out that the man with the  beard is the archetypal symbol for God. 

The symbolism of the other two figures the dreamer encounters can be interpreted as (the elephant for) nature and  man, making a thematic nature, man and God.  The success on the third - "third time lucky" - is a well-known formulation in fairy tales (and mythology) world-wide, the list almost endless:  The Three Bears, Cinderella, The Three Little Pigs, Rumpel-Stilts-Skin,  Aladin and the Lamp, The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs, etc. etc.  (How von Franz manages to interpret The Three Feathers as success on the fourth is totally beyond me.)   

 The same theme underlies the universal hero being tested three times to gain spiritual power and immortality.

Emma Jung was deeply interested in Arthurian lore, writing with Marie-Louise von Franz a seminal volume on the Holy Grail,

and was familiar with the tale of : Sir gawain and The Green knight, it was certainly a great favourite with the Jungian-flavoured mythologist Joseph Campbell. 

The tale is one of death and resurrection, symbolised in the opening scene by the axe and the holly branch which the Green Knight carries with him into the court of King Arthur, and follows the standard formulation of the hero achieving the victorious goal after a series of trials based on the triple test (see below).

There is one final triadic example from this volume where Jung interprets an ace of clubs as a trinity becoming a cross. This again fits the formulation of an original likeness of the parts of the triality finding expression through the 'odd' fourth.

Perhaps the most important dream Jung had - for himself and his psychological system - was the one of Liverpool which marked the end of his midlife or creative trauma, and with it the finish of his mandala drawing and painting. Originally Jung published the dream in 1929, attributing it to "a patient", as indeed it still is in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious[34]. 

  However, the dream is related in his autobiography as his own.  Moreover, the dream is slightly altered from the original account, the most telling being the opening scene.  In the original version it commences thus:

The dreamer found himself with three younger travelling companions in Liverpool.

In the autobiographical version:

I found myself in a dirty, sooty city.  It was night, and winter, and dark, and raining.  I was in Liverpool.  With a number of Swiss - say half a dozen - I walked through the dark streets.[35]

Both versions end with the discovery of a red-flowering magnolia, which is for Jung the centre of the psyche, the Self, beyond which it is impossible to go.  This then is the end of his internal quest.  The importance of this discovery cannot be underrated; Jung himself writes in the most pressing way to convey this sense of importance:

The dream depicted the climax of the whole process of development of the conscious....Without such a vision I might perhaps have lost my orientation and been compelled to abandon my undertaking.  But here the meaning had been made clear.  When I parted from Freud, I knew nothing; but I had taken the step into darkness.  When that happens, and then such a dream comes, one feels it is an act of grace.[36]

This whole breakthrough is enacted by Jung and three others, but this is, for some reason, omitted from the later version in the '50s.  This, I feel, is an unconscious attempt to devalue the importance of the trinity, which is nevertheless replaced by "say, half a dozen", the double trinity.

His fantasies at the very beginning of the midlife trauma, which ended with the Liverpool dream, are also full of trinitarian symbolism, which again is overlooked by Jung as well as commentators on his life.  On 12 December 1913 he withdrew his internal barriers and plunged into his transforming, creative illness, which was to last for four years. 

Jung wrote, "I let myself drop."  After "descending a thousand feet or more" he eventually meets three individuals, Elijah, Salome and a black serpent.  He understands these characters as: "Elijah is the figure of the wise old prophet"; "Salome, the erotic element"; and "the snake was an indication of a hero myth".  Not only is this an obvious triad but the three modalities of the Self are expressed in the formulation of Elijah=God, Salome=Nature and the snake=Man. 

These characters eventually give way to three others, namely Philemon who develops out of Elijah, Ka[e] who was "a spirit of nature" and a woman, the anima, who "must be the 'soul', in the primitive sense".

As the alchemists discovered, the spirit Mercurius can be a good friend (as in the Liverpool dream) or the "dark tricephalus"[f], the tempter, deceiver and adversary of the universal hero.  By overcoming the chthonic trinity the saviour not only becomes a demi-god but, in bringing the fruits of his victory to the tribe, ensures the spiritual and physical well-being of mankind.

One of the stories from Hindu mythology seems to prefigure the struggles of Buddha and Christ with the Evil One.  In the case of Hinduism the Christ-like person is the son of a Brahman, Tvashiri, who is eventually killed by the god Indra.  Tvashiri, in a bid to outdo Indra, created a three-headed son who possessed wondrous spiritual power which grew at such a rate it promised to absorb the universe. 

The three heads had the separate functions of reading the Vedas, feeding himself, and observing all that existed:  a combination of intellectual, physical and divine sustenance - the totality of life. 

  As in the accounts of the temptations of Christ and the trials of Gautama, the tricephalus Brahman is attacked three times: firstly through seduction by Heavenly maidens; secondly by a thunderbolt thrown by Indra which kills the hero; and lastly by a triple decapitation.  The final onslaught, ordered by Indra because the body continued to glow with the light of spirituality, released a great flight of doves and other birds, symbolising the resurrection of the perfected spirit and is analogous to the enlightenment of Buddha and the defeat of Satan in the wilderness. 

The attacks on Gautama by Mara are variations on the same ideas of seduction, attack by the actual god and attack by the god's henchman.  The Buddha now becomes an enlightened being, losing his old material desires, and brings salvation to mankind.

In the Middle East there existed other notorious examples of the triple heroic test, and cannot be unconnected with the  temptations of Christ.

 In ancient Egypt one of the stories of Se-Osiris (reputedly the greatest Egyptian magician) from the 13th century BC show him in psychic battle with the Ethiopian the Son of Tnahsit who is the agent of Apophis, the Egyptian Devil.  As in the other stories, Se-Osiris has to overcome his satanic adversary three times in order to prove himself and gain total victory. 

Firstly, the Ethiopian manifests a huge serpent in front of the Pharoah, but Se-Osiris picks up this giant cobra, turns it into a small white worm and throws it out of the window. 

Next the evil protagonist summons a large black cloud which resembles the darkness of the tomb or the dark cloud of smoke from burning bodies.  Again, the hero easily decreases the threat to an infinitesimal size and throws it out of the window. 

The final threat is in the shape of a sheet of flame moving towards Pharaoh, but the good magician reverses its movement back in the direction of his adversary, who is subsequently engulfed and totally defeated.

Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, writes of the triple life force released by the universal hero upon completion of his struggle with the internal monster; the bestowing of the secret treasure, the Holy Grail:

The effect of the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and release again of the flow of life into the body of the world.  The miracle of this flow may be represented in physical terms as a circulation of food substance, dynamically as a stream of energy, or spiritually as a manifestation of Grace.  Such varieties of image alternate easily, representing three degrees of condensation of the one life force.[37]

The hero's encounters infer a triality of character, with ramifications for typological classification.  Tripartite man is a theme as old as that of the trinity, the two being inextricably linked in the relationship of micro and macrocosmic. 

  The origin of much of the tripartite formulations is to be found in the works of Plato, originator of the archetype theory of Form or Idea. 

Plato's own threefold division of the soul is into spirit, reason and desire.

It is from these three segments that the layers of society in the utopian Republic are derived: the Guardians, the Auxiliaries and the Plebs.

Broadly, the philosophers, the spiritually enlightened, rule over and guide society, the military types carry out the directives of the elite, applying the rules to the governorship of the materialistic majority. 

This hierarchical view of tripartness is counter-balanced by an egalitarian formulation allegorised in the Phaedrus by a charioteer and two horses.  One horse is an expression of honour and modesty whilst the other stands for man's animal desires, with their unity in the hands of the charioteer, the middle conjoining factor. 

The Gnostics use this platonic schema in their soteriological explanations - the saved spiritual type, the pneumatic, the damned materialists, the hylic, and those with the possibility of  choice, the psychic - described in the Jung codex of the Nag Hammadi library.

The multiplication of tripartite theories has produced an overwhelmingly extensive list of variations on the same theme, including Freud and beyond, but I think it worthy of note to mention that it was part of Carl Gustav Carus' thinking.

I say this because he was one of the old-school of psychologists much admired by Jung.  Interestingly, Dostoyevsky was also a great fan and one wonders if the three Karamazov brothers, Dmitri, Ivan and Alyosha, characterising respectively blind social obedience, the human intellect and mystical-propheticism, were not Carus-inspired.

My Note
Edinger too, notes much in his , 'Creation of Consciousness',  the God-Imago, is represented in the dreams of mental patients , as , 'an ape-man figure , with no neck, who 'expels flatus loudly', he equates this figure with the description of Yahweh in the Book of Job.
He also notes, that this figure, is 'whirling', something echoed in the movements/artistic productions, of AUTISTIC CHILDREN.
He notes; the 'Self', must be given attention! as the egocentricity, is 'inside', ie, in an identification [usually negative]
This has been the case, reported by victims of trauma-induced 'mind control', especially in the USA. 

Prince's Dock,Liverpool.

 Honesty, Ruthless Honesty, is required.


Other therapy can prove redemptive;

Abstract

In 1939, Margaret Lowenfeld, a child psychiatrist in London, created a therapeutic medium with which children could freely communicate and express themselves. Through the influence of Jungian, Dora Kalff, and the Jungian theories she applied to it, this new technique spread throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. Termed Sandplay by Kalff, it is recognized as a highly effective and creative modality used mostly in child therapy, but also in Jungian analysis with adults. As a sandplay therapist who specializes in sexual abuse treatment, I have experienced the healing power of sandplay in the treatment of traumatized children, especially those who were sexually abused. The focus of this article is on the inner world expression and process of a boy I call Adam, who was a participant in my doctoral dissertation study on sandplay with sexually abused children. The article describes Adam's twelve-tray sandplay process and the theories behind the assessments that I made, based on Jungian psychology, Kalffian sandplay theory, and previous research. 

http://www.springerlink.com/content/k75478870jp73v25/ 

Victims of 'Magicians', [negative ego-identified people, who do not understand themselves]

are usually male.Sexual abuse is part of their 'apprenticeship'.

But, in the world of negative -identifications, lies are made to appear as 'truths'.

An examination of the 'nadi's', in esoteric literature, will show some unusual, 'energy paths' etc.

I, posted this Picture to illustrate, some ,relatively, 'unknown', pathways or 'Channels', that 'Spiritual', seekers are known to use in India etc, for example.
The Chinese, call, some, of, these, 'Channels', by,other names, Acupuncture', points, etc.
It, would follow, logically, that the Psyche, too, has 'Channels'......

Jung made the connection to Liverpool being the 'Pool of Life' being somehow related to the 'Liver' in the Human body but I suspect He had no idea about the Origins of the word..

There are many Theories but My own thinking is it relates in many ways to the Cormorant depicted

as a stylised replacement for the original 'Eagle' on the Royal Seal of King John which was lost some time after 1207

Alchemy, Solutions To 'Complex' Problems?

http://www.sandplay.org/symbols/eye.htm


http://tap3x.net/EMBTI/j5tales.html

 [ Click Above links for 'Eye in Hand', Symbolism etc]

Alchemy;

Solutio

The solutio is change through the element of water. While fire burns away moisture in the calcinatio, here
water dissolves the structure and substance of some aspect of your life. Solutio is found in the imagery of
melting, floods, the sea, drowning, water, intoxication, dismemberment, devouring, tears, sex, dew.16

It becomes apparent that the calcinatio and the solutio are both variations of the mortificatio, because they
involve the necessity of letting go of what existed up until now, and passing through a transitional stage
until arriving at a new and transformed state. This is the “rebirth” so often mentioned in alchemical texts.

Implicit in alchemy and in the journey to your Home—the True Self you originally were and which it is
your destiny (“make firm, establish; place for which one is bound”) to be—is the idea of rebirth and re-
newal. None of these transformative deaths is final. Think of the losses you have experienced in your life:
a marriage ending, a career over, a friendship lost, a role finished. You survived them all, even when the
letting go experience of the death of what was passing may have felt as if you were being annihilated. It is
the nature of the deaths we go through that we cannot see what will come after. If we could we would be
reassured. This is where faith comes in.

Faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen.17

The message of the soul as reflected in the fantasies of alchemy is a life-affirming one, encouraging us to
take the leap by portraying transformation in all its agonies yet promising renewal and rebirth.

The state of imperfect transformation, merely hoped for and waited for, does not seem to be one of torment
only, but of positive, if hidden, happiness. It is the state of someone who, in his wanderings among the
mazes of his psychic transformation, comes upon a secret happiness which reconciles him to his apparent
loneliness. In communing with himself he finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but an inner partner;
more than that, a relationship that seems like the happiness of a secret love, or like a hidden springtime,
when the green seed sprouts from the barren earth, holding out the promise of future harvests. It is the
alchemical benedicta viriditas, the blessed greenness, signifying on the one hand the “leprosy of the
metals” (verdigris), but on the other the secret immanence of the divine spirit of life in all things.18

106

Alchemy, Transformation and the Soul

The fantasy of the solutio probably came from the alchemists’ observation of what happens when a solid
substance dissolves in a liquid, just as their calcinatio was derived from perceiving how a solid turned black,
or to white ash, or a liquid evaporated when heat was applied.

In your experience of the solutio you will find yourself “drowning,” or turning to a kind of mush or primary
substance like that which the caterpillar becomes before it emerges as a butterfly. This is not a painful
burning like the calcinatio where desire is frustrated. Instead you feel immersed, in over your head, and like
you’ve lost the feeling of the solid ground under your feet.

Dreams of tidal waves, being at sea, swimming pools, bathtubs, puddles and other liquids may signify the
presence of the solutio in your life. It is a time when structure dissolves and plans and goals are fluid. This is
a good time to make uncertainty your ally. Remember how it is said that when someone is struck blind, their
other senses become more acute. Your usual sense of orientation and direction are temporarily submerged
as you melt from one form into another, and in this transitional lost space, look for ways to orient yourself
other than those you are most accustomed to relying upon.

Once again in this transformation you are called upon to let go, let the waters of change go over your head
and to lose your previous sense of self, of identity. Trust in these same waters to bring renewal and rebirth,
to wash you clean of your errors and limitations for a fresh start.


T HE PEARL WITHIN.DISCOVERING THE R ICHES
OF THE UNDERWORLD
PHILIP LEVINE , M.A.
Chapter Nine

Alchemy, Transformation and the Soul

ELOQUENT WRITER OF THE SOUL ,has this to say about the mysteries of alchemy and
A psychological attitude does not come about through escape from the tangles and problems, or the joys
and pleasures, of ordinary life. Like the clouds, psyche remains close to earth but not embedded in it. It
has the moisture of mist, feeling and passion leading not simply to action but toward deep reflection.

Heating, cooking, boiling, and baking are alchemical procedures—literally and figuratively. Dense, solid
substance can be cooked with thought and reflection until its subtle elements, trapped within, escape.
Under the heat of passion, knotty problems in life rise into consciousness in the forms of images and
moods. As a person ‘stews over’ predicaments and plans, life may become less productive but its soul-
value deepens. In therapy, or in any psychologically moving situation, what has been stagnant and heavy
begins to bubble. Dormant memories of the past rise to the surface, and feelings formerly kept covered
and quiet break through. On the ‘hot seat’ of confrontation with formerly neglected issues, memories and
feelings begin to loosen and move about. What has been allowed to settle as sediment, causing heaviness
and immobility, under the heat of alchemical attention becomes unsettled and unsettling.

At various times in psychological life it seems appropriate to boil, bake, roast, fry, or just keep warm.
Sometimes a fantasy needs incubation—warmth and containment. The alchemical vessel was seen as both
womb and tomb, a place for birth and a place for decay, but always a place for containment. In us the
retort is the vessel of memory and imagination, holding events and fantasies where they can be subjected
to the heat of passion and feeling or to the simmering of thought and reflection. In this retort, events of
life decay, losing their literal form, but they also ferment, acquiring taste, bite, and body. A good cook of
the psyche knows the best combinations of temperature and time, when to let things simmer and when to
bring them to a boil.1

The “Hymn of the Pearl” is our story which tells how we left our home on a mission while still a child:
“When thou goest down into Egypt and bringest the One Pearl which lies in the middle of the sea which is
encircled by the snorting serpent, thou shalt put on again thy robe of glory and thy mantle over it and with
thy brother our next in rank be heir in our kingdom.”

On our journey to retrieve the Pearl, we forget who we are while visiting a foreign land (Egypt):

Egypt as a symbol for the material world is very common in Gnosticism. . . that is, the world of matter, of
ignorance, and of perverse religion.2

At an early stage of development Egypt serves as a nourishing, protective mother. Later she becomes
bondage and tyranny from which to escape.3

After journeying “downward,” partaking of the foreign food found there, “I forgot that I was a king’s son
and served their king. I forgot the Pearl for which my parents had sent me. Through the heaviness of their
nourishment I sank into deep slumber.” Through the partaking of the purely materialistic and literal view
of the world, that of Egypt, we have forgotten our royal heritage and mission. We have forgotten the Pearl.
A pearl is a precious gem that is formed from layers which grow abnormally because of an irritation. Is our
Pearl also grown in this way, and if so, how differently does this portray those irritating façets of personality
which trouble us, the very things we wish would go away? We will return to this idea shortly when we take
up the alchemical prima materia or massa confusa.

Because our royal parents have somehow perceived our situation, “. . . they wrote a letter to me, and each of the
great ones signed it with his name:

From thy father the King of Kings, and from thy mother, mistress of the East, and from thy brother, our
next in rank, unto thee, our son in Egypt, greeting. Awake and rise up out of thy sleep, and perceive the
words of our letter.Remember that thou art a king’s son: behold whom thou hast served in bondage. Be mindful of the Pearl,for whose sake thou hast departed into Egypt.
Remember thy robe of glory, recall thy splendid mantle, that thou mayest put them on and deck thyself
with them and thy name be read in the book of the heroes and thou become with thy brother, our deputy,
heir in our kingdom.
“Remember that thou art a king’s son or daughter.” Remember that you are descended from royalty, and
so your rightful heritage is to rule in your kingdom. You are endowed with the birthright of (co-)rulership
over your inner world, on behalf of and in cooperation with your Father and Mother, the mysterious King
and Queen who gave birth to you, your Source and Foundation.

“Be mindful of the Pearl.” “Be mindful of the Pearl.” This book is about being mindful of the Pearl,
the Mystery that must be retrieved and brought Home. It seeks to articulate the relationship available to
you with the underworld of the unconscious; its message is like that letter, sent by “the great ones.” It
says, “Awake and rise up out of your sleep.” Remember. Remember your robe of glory (“praise, honor, or
distinction, a distinguished quality or asset”), this part of you that is your most praiseworthy asset. Your
True Self may be covered over with years of conditioning and prejudice, veiled by desire for approval and
wealth, but it still remains, waiting like the Pearl to be rescued.

Remember. Be mindful of the Pearl.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value,
he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.4

The King and Queen did not send their entire kingdom to retrieve the Pearl, not even the other brother, just
the one son whose dharma was to fulfill this mission. Each of us has also been sent here to complete a task;
we each may be called.

Try to realize the moment has come to remember, and be mindful. We are here to live a life that has meaning
and substance, to embody the best in us (as well as the rest). In our desire to fit in, to be acceptable, we must
not lose sight of the core part of our nature that has something unique to offer and which may only be
realized through the courage to follow our mission.

Using ideas from the fields of psychology and religion, assuming they are different names for the same
thing, we have tried to describe this journey as one in which you recognize and engage with the Mystery
under the name “unconscious,” which truly describes nothing other than that which you do not know. To
find who you truly are, you must encounter and accept that part of you which has remained in the shadows,
and which holds the key.

This is of course a great risk, because you cannot know at the outset what you will find. Not knowing, most
do not make the effort, afraid that what they will find will confirm their shameful memories, revealing them
as not worthy. Not worthy of what? What is it that we unconsciously fantasize we will be unworthy of?
Isn’t it our “robe,” our “mantle?” Our heritage and calling? Yet because we remain unconscious of this, we
fulfill our fears and doubts. Holding back from we know not what, we ensure that we will in fact not carry
out our true calling. The way to break this cycle of failure is to recognize your fears and their source, and to
realize that YOU WILL DIE, and are dying.

With the fearlessness of the terminal patient or someone brought back from death, you know you have
nothing to lose anymore. Because not risking fulfilling your True Nature is death itself anyway. Bringing
yourself to face the true reality that your life will end, may end today, is the way to let go of the provisional
“soon,” “when I’m ready,” “someday” that holds us in prison and keeps us asleep.

And what shall thy soul say when it wakes and knows
The work was left undone for which it came?
Or is this all for thy being born on earth
Charged with a mandate from eternity,
A listener to the voices of the years,
A follower of the footprints of the gods,
To pass and leave unchanged the old dusty laws?
Shall there be no new tables, no new Word,
No greater light come down upon the earth
Delivering her from her unconsciousness,
Man’s spirit from unalterable fate?
Cam’st thou not down to open the doors of Fate,
The iron doors that seemed for ever closed,
And lead man to truth’s wide and golden road
That runs through finite things to eternity?
Is this then the report that I must make,
My head bowed with shame before the Eternal’s seat, —
His power he kindled in thy body has failed,
His labourer returns, her task undone?5

Imagine your funeral, your obituary—not as a morbid exercise, but as an opportunity in fantasy to recon-
sider your life. Life can only be weighed at the end. Until then, you make it and its worth with your choices
and actions.

In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the soul of the dead is brought before the goddess of Justice and Truth,
Maat, who wears a feather on her head. Beside her is Ammut, Devourer of the Dead, a beast part crocodile,
part lion, and part hippopotamus, ready to destroy the deceased if his heart should be full of sin (“sin”
means “missing the mark”). The heart of the deceased is placed on one side of the scales, and the feather of
Maat on the other. The truth in the heart, the living of one’s truth, is the crucial factor that determines the
destiny of the deceased after life.

What if you faced such a weighing of the truth lived in your heart during your life?

We live in a time which is largely neglectful and therefore ignorant of these things. Our education and
upbringing offer almost nothing to help us to examine and become familiar with ourselves. We are largely
on our own and without support as we try to remember and be mindful. How many of us have even heard
the term “mindful” used?

Imagine living in a land where being mindful and living your inner truth were what mattered most.

So the underworld of the unconscious is full of treasures and demons, and we are so strangely without
resources to find our way. It is as if we live on the edge of a jungle filled with terrifying and wonderful
creatures, but we have no way of knowing their natures and which are which. This leaves us starved for
psychology, the modern term for mapping the soul. The psychology of the university is totally unequipped
because it only dares to address the quantitative and measurable. The unconscious is treacherous and tricky
enough without our having to go into it blindly and unprepared.

Lankavatara Sutra, Buddy...

The Buddha as Love

The Buddha's love is not something ego-centered. It is a will-force which desires and acts in the realm of twofold egolessness, it is above the dualism of being and non-being, it rises from a heart of non-discrimination, it manifests itself in the conduct of purposelessness (anabhogacarya). It is the Tathagata's great love (mahakaruna) of all beings, which never ceases until everyone of them is happily led to the final asylum of Nirvana; for he refuses as long as there is a single unsaved soul to enjoy the bliss of Samadhi to which he is entitled by his long spiritual discipline. The Tathagata is indeed the one who, endowed with a heart of all-embracing love and compassion, regards all beings as if they were his only child. If he himself enters into Nirvana, no work will be done in the world where discrimination (vtkalpa) goes on and multitudinousness (vicitrata) prevails. For this reason, he refuses to leave this world of relativity, all his thoughts are directed towards the ignorant and suffering masses of beings, for whom he is willing to sacrifice his enjoyment of absolute reality and self-absorption (samadhi-sukhabhutakotya vinivarya).


http://lirs.ru/do/lanka_eng/lanka-nondiacritical.htm 

The Great Money Trick [R.Tressel]

The Great Money Trick (Robert Tressel)

Zone of Phanes [Xenophanes,or, 'Zen?', ]

http://zoneofphanes.com/papers5.html

INTUITIONS OF THE SELF AS GOD

God is within
1. The essential dynamism of every religion lies in the experience of the numinous – which is labelled ‘God’ in theistic religions – by a gifted and committed core of adherents whom we have tended to describe as mystics.

2. Testimony as to this experience has always indicated that it occurs ‘within’ – that is, except in the minority of cases which are projected externally as visions or other apparently paranormal phenomena. Thus it is said in Luke 17:21, “Neither shall they say, Lo here! Or, lo there! for behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” And in the Mandukya Upanishad: [the wise speak of]”the pure Self alone. Dwelling in the heart of all, it is the lord of all, the seer of all, the source and goal of all.” “The pure Self alone, that which is invisible, which cannot be described, the supreme good, the one without a second…” The Chandogya Upanishad: “Now that Being which is the subtlest essence of everything, the supreme reality, the Self of all that exists, That Art Thou.”

3. Apart from the Hindu tradition, and from the insights of quite exceptional minds throughout history, it has taken all the generations of human evolution down to modern times to recognize what is so overwhelmingly obvious: that what is subjectively experienced, that which comes to us from within, comes from the psyche. What has changed is that in the twentieth century we began to have a psychological understanding of religious experience.

4. Speaking of an experience of the numinous erupting into a person’s life, Jung says, “if you understand it rightly, this recognition of the psychogenic factor is the first recognition of the Perusha – the Lord, the Master, the Christ within, the personified symbol of that archetype of archetypes, that Supreme Being in the collective unconscious – The Self.” (Jung quoted by Stevens in “Archetype Revisted.”) Stevens continues: “The Self is thus the living embodiment in each and every one of us of the numinous power that has always and everywhere been attributed to ‘God.’”

5. Jung states that the Self, “should be understood as the totality of the psyche. The Self is not only the centre, but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness.” (CW 12, para. 44)

6. Stevens writes that the Self is, “The psychic aspect of the genome; the entire archetypal system of the unconscious; for Jung a dynamic concept at the heart of personality development and individuation.” (356)

7. Edinger in “Ego and Archetype”, lists themes and images that he declares, ”all refer to the Self, the central source of life energy, the fountain of our being which is most simply described as God. Indeed, the richest sources for the phenomenological study of the Self are in the innumerable representations that man has made of the deity.”

8. Having acknowledged (above) that what comes to us from within comes from the psyche, does not, of course, preclude us from adding ‘and through the psyche’ – thus preserving the metaphysical dimension that is the domain of theology, and permitting speculation as to something, some ultimate influence, that enters the psyche from beyond. God is generally regarded in the religious context as both immanent and transcendent. Jung himself consistently refused to deny this as a possibility on the ground that he was an empirical scientist and not concerned with the absolute status of belief.

9. But the archetypal ground of the psyche, the collective unconscious, that Jung calls ‘the objective psyche’, is transpersonal and wholly ‘other’ as far as the ego is concerned. Once this is admitted the ‘sufficiency’ of the psyche is adequate to encompass all that is – the personal and the transpersonal. These two terms can therefore be substituted for immanent and transcendent, and the projection of a ‘beyond’ is itself brought home within the sphere of the all-encompassing psyche.

10. Ultimately, however, the metaphysical question cannot be determined conclusively because the psyche is all that we experience and know, and we probably experience and know ( and probably only can experience and know) only a fraction of the psyche. The absolute nature and full extent of the psyche remain beyond our comprehension and conception.

11. What we learn from the mystics in every age and culture is that the experience of the transpersonal psyche brings with it an overwhelming sense of the numinous. Experiencing this, we experience what most human beings throughout our history have called ‘God.’

The Self is God
12. Who and what is God? At last we can begin to frame an answer. First and foremost, Jung posited that the Self and the God-image in the human psyche are synonymous. This seems to me to be incontrovertible. I believe that the Self as God indeed is God, God as ‘Person’, formless ‘Person’, who may become personified to us in human terms of his own choosing, as, for example, Jesus Christ, Krishna, the Divine Child, etc., These forms or representations are, as it were, masks, that the Self puts on in order to relate with an individual consciousness. Such forms might therefore be said to personify the ego-Self axis. When I say that ‘the Self as God is God,’ I am mindful once again of the psyche’s all-sufficiency – there is no need to look to a speculative metaphysical reality beyond it. The psyche alone can support the intuition, “In him we live and move and have our being.” (Paul, perhaps quoting Epimenides, Acts, 17:28) This conclusion raises profound inferences as to the ultimate nature of reality.

13. “Jung associates the godhead with the unconscious and associates ‘God,’ ‘Anthropos,’ and ‘Christ’, with the Self” (Segal, “The Gnostic Jung”). It is said that “The godhead symbolizes the unconscious before the emergence of the ego out of it.” “The godhead, which Jung takes to be a largely impersonal principle, embraces the whole psyche because it is not yet divided, or differentiated, into opposites. God, who for Jung is a full-fledged personality, encompasses the whole psyche because he mediates the opposites within himself. He thereby symbolizes the ideal state of wholeness, selfhood or individuation.” (Segal)

14. My own conviction is that the Self is God, and is identical with the God-image; the Self is God as formless Person who may at his choosing becomes personalized in human form in relating to a human consciousness. The relationship that is established sustains the ego-Self axis. But I also believe that in God one must also include the unconscious, especially the collective unconscious, because its resources are the organs of God, and it is this inclusion which makes God the One and universal; otherwise God would be infinitely plural. Further, I believe one must speak of the whole psyche as God. I feel that one cannot truly distinguish between God and Godhead, and that God – the Self – is constellated in the whole which then comprises a single reality justifying the axiom of Paul/Epimenides. Reality is then ‘immaterial’, matter does not exist as something different from the ‘non-substance’ of the psyche. This is irrefutable, from the psyche’s point of view at least.

15. The Hermetic axiom, “God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere”, chimes strangely with the concept of an all-inclusive psyche.

16. The abstract or immaterial nature of the psyche, that is, of God, is movingly conveyed by Meister Eckhart in sermon 28 of the German series, Renovamini spiritu in which the Meister says: “You should love God non-mentally, that is to say the soul should become non-mental and stripped of her mental nature. For as long as your soul is mental, she will possess images. As long as she has images, she will possess intermediaries, and as long as she has intermediaries, she will not have unity or simplicity. Therefore your soul should lose all her mental nature and should be left non-mental, for if you love God as ‘God’, as ‘Spirit’, as ‘Person’, as ‘Image’, then all this must be abandoned. You must love him as he is, a non-God, a non-Spirit, a non-Person, a non-Image. Indeed, you must love him as he is One, pure, simple and transparent, far from all duality. And we should eternally sink into this One, thus passing from something into nothing. So help us God. Amen.”

17. The Self, and therefore ‘God’ (the God-image) will have the same gender as each human being.

God is not his name
18. “But when Zarathustra was alone he spake thus within his heart: Can it indeed be possible! This old Saint in his forest hath not yet heard that God is dead! –“ Nietzsche.

19. “If you encounter the Buddha, kill him” Zen Master Rinzai.

20. “The Mind is the great Slayer of the Real. Let the Disciple slay the Slayer.” Voice of the Silence.

21. These three quotations all carry the same message: that in order to experience reality, to become enlightened, we must rid ourselves of our conceptions. Our concept of a thing is no part of the thing-in-itself, and has the effect of screening us from the direct experience of reality – “we see through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:11).

22. ‘God’ is a concept for almost all of us, and a very shadowy and imprecise concept as is demonstrated by all the anomalies, contradictions and divergent content revealed when people try to amplify what that concept means for them. We might say that the word ‘God’ is only a concept; indeed, it is hardly more than a mere word which signifies a psychological imperative to clothe with a personal concept something that is inconceivable and beyond comprehension. But the existence of that inner imperative and the personal nature of the response carry significant inferences for us.

23. In himself (the pronoun is as unsatisfactory as the name) God is not a concept – God is! That ‘is’ can only refer to the Self and the psyche.

24. Thus Meister Eckhart says with his typically extravagant use of metaphor, “Strip away from God, therefore, everything which clothes him and take him in his dressing room where he is naked and bare in himself. Thus you will remain in him.”

25. The twentieth century saw a momentous advance in our understanding as rational beings, an advance as tremendous as any in the whole previous course of human history. The credit for this enlightenment must largely go to the visionary genius of C. G. Jung whose ‘discovery’ of the psyche (for one must acknowledge that the East has always been far in advance of the Middle East and the West in terms of introspective knowledge and religious insight) and whose empirical delineation of it have finally lead to the inescapable identification of the psyche with God. Suddenly, for the theistic temperament, the existence of God (as herein defined) is no longer a matter of belief and metaphysical speculation: God demonstrably exists and we have a degree of insight into his essential nature.

26. It is likely to be many generations before the full significance of this advance in understanding is fully or widely recognized.

27. Jungians describe as ‘contemporaries’ that growing minority of people in the world whose development has led to their alienation from the traditional forms of religion. “Because contemporaries are sensitive both to the existence of nonrational inclinations and to the demise of past means of fulfilling them, [organized religion] they comprise a select minority…” (Segal) These people are alienated from their unconscious because they have been deprived of all traditional means of connection, yet they are acutely aware of a spiritual hunger in themselves, and finding no satisfaction for that hunger they are prey to malaise and emptiness: their lives lack all meaning. These people cannot regress to the forms of the past, their only option is to live the symbolic life in a totally personal way, confronting the reality of the psyche directly and following the path of individuation. It is a lonely fate, lacking the support and community of collective religion, and the way is fraught with dangers of all sorts. Those who take this journey do so of necessity, for the survival and salvation of the soul: they are the direct heirs of the Gnostics, and of their medieval successors, the Alchemists.

God the Creator
28. The religious orthodoxy of Judaism, Christianity and Islam states that God created the material universe. For religious fundamentalists and those of what might be described as ‘extroverted belief’ this is accepted as being literally the case. For such persons a successful attack by scientific atheism would topple the whole edifice of religion. This is why Darwinism is so feared and contested.

29. When God is equated with the psyche it becomes self-evidently true that God is, indeed, the Creator, who creates all that is ‘in’ and ‘for’ each sentient being who is possessed of full self-consciousness.

30. With regard to the existence of the material universe the crucial question is, ‘what is the nature of being?’ The answer is that the nature of being is explained when we recognize that the ’world’ has neither substance nor location – it is an experience, an experience contained within the non-material medium of consciousness. Consciousness and being are interchangeable terms.

31. Once again, it was the genius of C. G. Jung who gave unforgettable expression to the rediscovery of this truth. Of his travels in Kenya and the insight which resulted, he writes: “There the cosmic meaning of consciousness became overwhelmingly clear to me. ‘What nature leaves imperfect, the art perfects,’ say the alchemists. Man, I, in an invisible act of creation put the stamp of perfection on the world by giving it objective existence… Now I knew…that man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence – without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being.” (MDR)

32. A second creator? Jung’s approach is always empirical. Elsewhere he says, “I do not mean to imply that only the psyche exists. It is merely that, so far as perception and cognition are concerned, we cannot see beyond the psyche.” (MDR 384) Whether God and the material universe exist in a truly objective sense outside of the psyche are questions Jung never addressed, regarding such matters as belonging to the realm of metaphysics and quite beyond the possibility of verification by any means at the disposal of rational science.

33. The religious perspective, however, can hardly refrain from considering these questions; although in the end we are obliged, if not invoking faith or revelation, to accept the limitation identified by Jung’s analysis. The psyche is all we know and can know, and when we consider the nature of the psyche, insofar as it can be understood, we surely cannot help being struck by the fact of its all-sufficiency. It seems to me that this raises a powerful inference that the psyche is the ultimate and only reality.

34. The following are points that I believe support that conclusion:

35. In the psyche everything that appears to be ‘other’ (other to, and therefore external to ourselves) and to possess material substance is, in fact, contained within the psyche as the receiver of all perceptions -that is, non-self is identical with self, while all things are without substance.

36. This totally contradicts the natural inference to be drawn from our experience – that the other is truly so and that therefore an external and material world exists.

37. One might say that materiality is simply a cognitive devise imposed so as to better differentiate between subject and object, knower and known, as structural prerequisites for any form of perception and cognitive experience.

38. As noted above, we are psychic beings and wholly such: we are contained absolutely within the psyche receiving experiential data from presumed external sources which is processed and represented to us as mental formulations. Material (whether it takes the form of thoughts, emotions, moods, fantasies or dreams) which we regard as originating from purely inner processes is no way different in kind from the formulations representing external experience because (a) they both exist in the same medium, and, therefore, (b) they share a common lack of substance. They have content and duration, but substance, as we conceive of it in relation to external materiality, is not a property of consciousness.

39. On careful analysis of our experience, it is found that the world does not exist in time and space, and it does not possess material substance. The world is not a place, it is an experience that exists only within the insubstantial medium of consciousness. As to oneself, the body is in the mind, not the mind in the body.

40. This is the great paradox of experience that what appears to be external and substantial exists, so far as we can ever know, only in the insubstantial medium of consciousness. Truly the psyche contains all things within itself; we can never pass beyond its boundaries, and maybe it has no boundaries because it is, indeed, as previously suggested, the only reality.

41. Science considers consciousness to be an efflorescence of neural activity. This suggests a verification of external materiality until we stop to recall that our ‘physical’ observations and the conclusion reached, once again, occur only in consciousness itself.

42. The contrasting terminology we naturally use to refer to interior states, such as ‘in me’ or ‘in here’, and that which refers to the world and its contents as ‘out there’ might seem grounds of a sort for positing an external reality. In fact, such usages indicate mere categories of experience whose contents obey different sets of rules. The inference of externality can be drawn, but never proved by reference to these expressions which cannot be shown to be more than linguistic aids to the cognitive process.

43. If the psyche is held to be the only reality, does this inevitably lead to solipsism? Is there more than one of us? That we are truly plural is represented by our inner and supposedly outer experience. Human beings we encounter resemble what we conceive ourselves to be; they have the same autonomy. This is incontrovertible fact. We can interact with other beings, but we do not share consciousness with them and therefore have no direct access to their interior states. Although this can be taken as evidence of their reality external to us in a material sense, they are not, as perceived external beings, external to our consciousness. Their ultimate externality in an external material world is not proven because all that is demonstrated is that the beings encountered comply with different experiential categories.

44. Our apparent framing between states of non-existence prompts the further speculation that none of us might exist as the defined, continuing entities that we suppose ourselves to be; that we might, in fact, be less ‘entities’ than constellated nuclei or centres for experience generated temporarily within a universal psyche, reflecting the ancient intuition, “In him we live and move and have our being.”

45. Towards the end of his life the distinguished analyst and life-long friend of Jung, Erich Neumann, gave an address in which he declared, “that there was a ‘Self field’ outside the psyche, which created and directed the world and the psyche, and manifests itself to the Ego in the shape of the Self. And this Self in man is the image of the creator.” (Reported by Gilles Quispel)

46. Gilles Quispel emphasises the correspondence between Gnosticism and Jungian psychology, preferring a synchronistic rather than a projective interpretation of Gnosticsm. In “Gnosis and Psychology” he writes: “…obviously the outside world is in full sympathy with our inner emotions, without any causal connections. Obviously the rationalistic approach towards reality is one-sided: the principles of time, space, and causality should be supplemented by the principle of synchronicity. And this means that both the absurd world of the unconscious within and the absurd nonsense of the world outside is pervaded by a mysterious and awe-inspiring Sense. Old-fashioned people would call it the hand of God.”

47. Quispel daringly speculates that Gnosticism may even be true metaphysically, not just psychologically. (Segal) Quispel writes: “But they [Gnostics] did not agree that God is a projection of man. They rather expressed in their imaginative thinking that the world and man are a projection of God…I suggest that this is a correct definition of the truth of imaginative thinking as revealed by the Gnostic symbols. The world and man are a projection of God. And the consummation of the historical process will consist in this: that man and the universe are taken back and reintegrated into their divine origin…Certainly this is a plausible, spirited, and provocative hypothesis concerning the nature and end of the psyche, the universe, and ultimate reality.”

48. I find it very striking that these and related conceptions are entirely consonant with the ideas expressed since ancient times in the religions and philosophy of the East. It is the understanding of God in psychological terms which permits this virtual unanimity as to the ultimate nature of reality.

49. The question of the material reality of an external cosmos can never be answered. But perhaps we should take note of the fact that our absolute containment within a wholly self-sufficient psyche can be seen as suggesting an answer. We cannot exceed the boundaries of the psyche, which would have the effect of insulating us from anything that did happen to exist outside of it. So it is possible that the question as to whether or not reality has such a further dimension should be regarded as meaningless.

The consequences of equating God with the Self
50. Knowledge (Gnosis) of God replaces a hoping belief. The reality of God is immediate and total, the bond with God indissoluble. God is personal; able to be experienced; available to be loved.

51. The way is opened up to realize the spiritual destiny of one’s unique wholeness through conscious participation in the symbolic life and the process of individuation.




XENOPHANES

Xenophanes (c.570-c.475 BC) was born in Colophon, an Ionian Greek city of Asia Minor. He  emigrated in western Greece and he activated as a poet in Sicily and southern Italy. For this reason he was probably related to the Pythagorean School. He wrote especially didactic poetry and ‘Lampoons’ (Silloi): satirical poems in hexameters. Some verses of these poems survive from his work.

Religion Criticism

Xenophanes is well-known for his criticism of the traditional view-image of the Gods. In his poems he clearly attacks the Homeric and Hesiodic anthropomorphic descriptions of the divine deities. The image of the Gods is relative to the region and the culture which is expressed (black gods for the Africans, white gods for the Greeks). Such portrayals should be denied because of their subjectivity. 

Single God

For Xenophanes there is one single god beyond any human or physical description. It is the greatest among the Gods without organs or body. This God is motionless, intelligent, with complete perception of the world, activating everything just by the sheer power of thought. It is this Xenophanes’ account of God that probably affects the Eleatic conception of the oneness and immobility of Being.

Cosmology

Xenophanes asserts that all natural phenomena are not divine deities but formations of material substances (the rainbow is not Iris but a special cloud formation). Earth stretch down ad infinitum and the horizontal border between air and earth is the only visible one. More significantly he distinguishes between divine knowledge and human opinion. Divine knowledge is the only true knowledge, while human opinion is totally subjective and probable. Xenophanes is aware that even his own views are only an assumption. 

zen

Buddhas don't save buddhas. If you use your mind to look for a buddha, you won't see the Buddha. As long as you look for a buddha somewhere else, you'll never see that your own mind is the Buddha. Don't use a buddha to worship a buddha. And don't use the mind to invoke a buddha. Buddhas don't recite sutras. Buddhas don't keep precepts. And buddhas don't break precepts. Buddhas don't keep or break anything. Buddhas don't do good or evil. To find a buddha, you have to see your nature.

[bloodstream text]

[WU]

BE YOURSELF! 

Way Back Home...[Junior Walker+AllStars]

Oh, there's good 'n bad things
About the South, boy
Oh, and some leave a bitter taste
In my mouth, now

Yeah!
Like the black man livin' across the track
White man were on the other side
Holdin' him back
Way back home, now

Oh, but we won't talk about that
'Cause it's understood
Ev'rybody sees the bad
But what about the good?

Ooh, I'd give anything
Just to smell that scent
Of honeysuckle growin'
On a backyard fence
Way back home, now

'Oow!'

'Oh Heaven Scent, Ya'All!'

<with female chorus>

(Way back home)
Yeah, way back home
(Way back home)
Way back home, back home

I'd love to smell the wetness
Of grass and trees
And see ground kissed
By honey bees
Like way back home, now

Oh, but childhood days
Are dead 'n gone
Well, but the memories
Still linger on

Oh, have you ever gone swimmin'
In a muddy creek
With nothin' on your body
From head to feet?
Way back home, yeah

How much you'd pay for the game
Like hide an seek
Yeah!
And snake through the weeds
Overhear the streams

Well, I know some kids
Still play those games
But when they play
It just ain't the same
Like way back home

'Sad to sing it, ya'all!'

YEAH!
Way back home, way back home

(Way back home)
Way back

Oh, I really miss those things
That have faded away
I remember them
Like it was yesterday
Now, way back home

(Way back ho-ome)
(Way back ho-ome)

FADES:
Doo-doo, do-do
Doo-doo, do-ooo-do

(Way back ho-ome)
(Way back ho-ome).

Surely, one of THE finest soul sounds....Right on!

Jung's 'Liverpool',Dream

www.guildofpastoralpsychology.org.uk

A Healing Symbol.

The conscious experience of the archetype was characterised by a particularly feeling-tone, which gave it its fascinating and com-
pelling character.

In order more accurately to define this essential aspect of the archetype, Jung referred back to Otto’s category of the
numinous.

It was the energetic aspect of the archetype, says Jung, that accomplished the healing, since it impressed the conscious mind
with the experience of a meaning hitherto lacking.

Experience of the archetype is not only impressive, it seizes and possesses the whole personality, and is naturally productive of
faith
… When … a distressing situation arises, the corresponding archetype will be constellated in the unconscious.

Since
this archetype is numinous, i.e., possesses a specific energy, it will attract to itself the contents of consciousness, conscious ideas
that render it perceptible and hence capable of conscious realisation. Its passing over into consciousness is felt as an illumination,
a revelation, or a ‘saving idea’. [Jung, CW5, paras. 44, 450]

This overwhelming dynamism of the archetype is irrefutable to consciousness because of the emotion it generates.

It complements
consciousness with the non-rational contents of the unconscious, which have an autonomy and purpose of their own.


There is a mystical aura about its numinosity, and it has a corresponding effect upon the emotions. It mobilizes philosophical and
religious convictions in the very people who deemed themselves miles above any such fits of weakness.


Often it drives
with unexampled passion and remorseless logic towards its goal and draws the subject under its spell, from which despite the
most desperate resistance he is unable, and finally no longer even willing, to break free, because the experience brings with it a
depth and fulness of meaning that was unthinkable before. [Jung, CW8, para.405]

I would now like to turn to examples of the numinous experience, and in particular, those that can be classified under the heading
‘Vision of Light.’ These may be experiences of outer life, dreams or visions. What they have in common is the illumination of the dark-
ness of life, a resolution of conflicting opposites, and a restoration of meaning.

The first example is a dream of Jung himself, dating from
the end of his school days. It was a time when he was in confusion and indecision about what he should study at university.

He was
equally divided between the arts and the sciences. At this time of conflict, he had the following dream:


… I was in a wood; it was threaded with watercourses, and in the darkest place I saw a circular pool, surrounded by dense under-
growth. Half immersed in the water lay the strangest and most wonderful creature: a round animal, shimmering in opalescent
hues, and consisting of innumerable little cells, or of organs shaped like tentacles. It was a giant radiolarian, measuring about three
feet across. It seemed to me indescribably wonderful that this magnificent creature should be lying there undisturbed, in the hid-
den place, in the clear, deep water. It aroused in me an intense desire for knowledge, so that I awoke with a beating heart.
[Jung,Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.105].
This dream was instrumental in removing Jung’s doubts about studying the sciences.

In the dream, we can see several specific characteristics of the vision of light, as this particular archetype manifests itself. There is the
darkness of the wood, symbolising the confusion and inner lack of clarity in life. Then there is the central source of light, emphasised in
this dream by the circular pond with its spherical occupant, the radiolarian.

But the real resolution that the image brought was the actual emotional experience for Jung, the effect of which was to resolve the conflict of opposites in consciousness. The luminosity of the creature was at the same time its numinosity, charging consciousness with energy from the unconscious, and thereby creating meaning.

The experience of light was also central to a later dream of Jung, which came to resolve another dark period in his life. This dream was
preceded two years earlier by an actual experience of light, magnificent and awesome, which he had when he visited East Africa. Among
the Elgonyi tribe, Jung was eager to discover if they had any religious rites or ceremonies, the ‘numina’, as he calls them. Eventually he
was told of one custom, which so impressed him that he mentions it several times in his Collected Works.

An old man tells Jung:

“In the
morning, when the sun comes up, we go out of the huts, spit into our hands, and hold them up to the sun.” Jung goes on:
I had him show me the ceremony and describe it exactly. They held their hands in front of their mouths, spat or blew vigorously,
then turned their hands towards the sun. [Ibid., p.296]

The man explained that all the tribes around worshipped the sun at the moment of rising, for only then was the sun mungu, God.

Jung
goes on to interpret the ritual action:
Evidently, the meaning of the Eligonyi ceremony was that an offering was being made to the sun divinity at the moment of its ris-
ing. If the gift was spittle, it was the substance which, in the view of the primitives, contains the personal mana, the power of heal-
ing, magic, and life.

If it was breath, it was robo – Arabic, ruch, Hebrew, ruach, Greek, pneuma – wind and spirit. The act was there-
fore saying: I offer to God my living soul. It was a wordless, acted-out prayer, which might equally be rendered: “Lord, into thy
hands I commend my spirit.” [Ibid., pp.296-97]

Jung later describes in poetic, Iyrical fashion, watching the sunrise over the African landscape. It obviously touched him deeply:


At such moments I felt as if I were inside a temple. It was the most sacred hour of the day. I drank in this glory with insatiable
delight, or rather, in a timeless ecstasy. [Ibid., p.298]
He reflects further on this experience, which even the local baboons seemed to share:
… for untold ages men have worshipped the great god who redeems the world by rising out of the darkness as a radiant light in
the heavens. At that time I understood that within the soul from its primordial beginnings there has been a desire for light and an
irrepressible urge to rise out of the primal darkness. When the great night comes, everything takes on a note of deep dejection,
and every soul is seized by an irrepressible longing for light … That is why the sun’s birth in the morning strikes the natives as
so overwhelmingly meaningful. The moment in which light comes is God. That moment brings redemption, release. [Ibid., pp.298-
9]
The light is not only symbolic of the light of consciousness rising out of the darkness of the unconscious, but also portrays the essence
of the central, ruling archetype of the psyche, the Self, the source of consciousness itself.

The awesome experience of the African dawn,
indeed of any dawn, encapsulates the miracle of the origin of human consciousness. It recapitulates, in a ritual designed by nature itself,
a mythic enactment of the first times, when the creator god created humanity in his own image, and instilled in him the spirit of con-
sciousness.

The creative energy of this moment is what the Elgonyi tribe reconnected with in their morning ritual, and it is what we
reconnect with every time we experience the numinosity of the archetype.

Two years after his African journey, in 1927, Jung had a dream which finally confirmed for him what he had learned during the dark-
est period of his life, which had begun with his split from Freud. This had been a period of confusion and disorientation, when even his
sanity at times seemed at risk. His emergence began with a long series of automatic drawings of circular shapes, which he later came to
recognise as mandalas. 

However, he had as yet no idea where this process was leading him, or what the goal was. Gradually it dawned
on him that the mandalas represented the goal, which is the centre of the psyche, the Self.

The path of development, he realised, is only
initially a linear one; ultimately all is directed towards the centre. It was his dream which confirmed this discovery for him, and resolved
his inner doubts.

This is his dream:

I found myself in a dirty, sooty city. It was night, and winter, and dark, and raining. I was in Liverpool. With a number of Swiss
… I walked through the dark streets. I had the feeling that we were coming from the harbour, and that the real city was actually
up above, on the cliffs. We climbed up there … When we reached the plateau, we found a broad square dimly illuminated by street
lights, into which many streets converged. The various quarters of the city were arranged radially around the square. In the cen-
tre was a round pool, and in the middle of it a small island. While everything round about was obscured by rain, fog, smoke, and
dimly lit darkness, the little island blazed with sunlight. On it stood a single tree, a magnolia, in a shower of reddish blossoms. It
was as though the tree stood in the sunlight and was at the same time the source of light. My companions commented on the
abominable weather, and obviously did not see the tree. They spoke of another Swiss who was living in Liverpool, and expressed
surprise that he should have settled here. I was carried away by the beauty of the flowering tree and the
sunlit island, and
thought, “I know very well why he has settled here.” Then I awoke. [Ibid., pp.223-4]


['Magnolia's crop up in movies , more than once! oldsojur]

Jung comments that the dream represented his situation in life at the time. He continues,
Everything was extremely unpleasant, black and opaque – just as I felt then. But I had had a vision of unearthly beauty, and that
was why I was able to live at all. Through this dream I understood that the self is the principle and archetype of orientation and
meaning. Therein lies its healing function … When I parted from Freud, I knew that I was plunging into the unknown. Beyond
Freud, after all, I knew nothing; but I had taken the step into darkness. When that happens, and then such a dream comes, one
feels it as an act of grace. [Ibid., pp.224-5]


After this dream, Jung drew no more mandalas, because, he says, “the dream depicted the climax of the whole process of develop-
ment of consciousness.” The dream brought a sense of finality, in which the goal which is the centre had been revealed.

We are reminded of Jung’s earlier dream above, with the image of the pool in the dark place, and the centre of light which brings resolution and meaning. That dream had given the teenager Jung an image for the future course of his life, providing the psychic energy
that enabled him to take that course. His Liverpool dream likewise brought knowledge and inspiration, which were to last for the rest ofhis life. The images of the dream follow a similar pattern. The movement towards a centre is made very clear – from the city to the pool,to the island to the tree. At the same time there is a movement from darkness to light. It is an increase and intensification of light, a
dawn. We can see in this dawn the resolution of various opposites – light and dark, nature and city, winter and spring. There is also amovement of ascent, which is always associated with spiritual revelations.

The tree, however, is the real centre and source, both of light and life.
It is at the centre of Liverpool, which means the pool of life.
 Its.luminosity is its numinosity. It is the tree of life itself, standing in an everlasting spring, at the heart of the dark, wintry city, which is,how life often seems.

The tree represents life constantly developing and ever rising to the heavens. The magnolia symbolises perfectly,the wonder of life renewed in springtime, banishing the dark of winter, and the threat of death.

It stands, therefore, for the immortal centre of the psyche, which can survive every vicissitude in life. To see a huge magnolia in full bloom is truly an experience of the numinous
in nature.

The darkness in which Jung found himself at the time of the dream stands for what Edward Edinger calls ‘the alienation of the ego,from the Self’. In this state, the person suffers from a sense of meaninglessness. The connection between the ego and Self is important,says Edinger, because it “gives foundation, structure and security to the ego and also provides energy, interest, meaning and purpose.”
[Edinger, Ego and Archetype, p.43]

With the decline of traditional religion, the symbols that mediated the archetypal powers for mankind no longer do their healing work,
and we are faced with disorientation and lack of meaning. Collectively, we have lost contact with the Self. That is why dreams have
become important in the maintenance of psychic health, as they mediate the symbols we need to give our lives meaning. In a letter Jung
says:
I have found that, as a rule, when “archetypal” contents spontaneously appear in dreams, etc., numinous and healing effects
emanate from them. They are primordial psychic experiences which very often give patients access again to blocked religious truths.

I have also had this experience myself. [Jung, Letters II, pp.56-7]
The tree of light cannot but remind us of the burning bush which Moses saw in the wilderness:
The angel of Yahweh appeared to him in a flame blazing from the middle of a bush. Moses looked; there was the bush blazing,
but the bush was not being burned up. [Exodus 3, v.2]

The bush, like Jung’s magnolia, is an image of the vegetative, organic level of the psyche, the centre and source of our life-force, inde-
pendent of our rational will. It is the level where the archetypes pursue their autonomous courses, expending numinous energy, but never
being consumed. The burning bush is the image through which we glimpse the divine immanence in the world. It is an image of the Self
manifested in the material world, ‘a symbol of the source and goal of the individuation process.’ [Jung, CW13, para.241]

To be a fugitive in the wilderness, as Moses was, is to be alienated from the Self, and to lack meaning and purpose in life. Through his
vision of light, Moses was granted a goal, a life-assignment. It was the beginning of his great destiny, to be the saviour and liberator of
his people, and to become the great law-giver. From his peripheral condition and obscurity, Moses became the centre of his people, and
attained the heights of communion with God on Mount Sinai. All was contained in embryo, in the original non-rational
experi-
ence, the paradoxical vision of the burning bush.

The American writer, Annie Dillard, writes in an autobiographical story about her search for the ‘tree with lights.’ She was inspired
by a girl, once blind, who had seen a tree with lights in it. Dillard herself then decides to set off in search of it. She writes:
Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all, and I saw the tree with lights in it. I saw the backyard
cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with lights in
it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focussed and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than being for the first time seen,
knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending its power … the vision comes and goes,
mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the
mountains slam. [Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, pp.33-34, quoted in M. Grey, ‘Transfigured Existence and Recovery of the Dream,’
The Way, Vol.40]
The theologian, Professor Mary Grey, discussing this passage, says the writer captures something that is at the core of ‘transfigured
existence,’ and she quotes the following lines from the poet Kazantsakis, which illuminate all these instances of trees of light:
And I said to the almond tree:
‘Sister, speak to me of God.’
And the almond tree blossomed
[Kazantsakis, Report to Greco, p.234]

Jung writes about the flowering tree in his commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower. This Chinese alchemical text was sent to Jung
by the sinologist Richard Wilhelm, shortly after Jung had completed a mandala painting with a golden castle at the centre. In the text he
found confirmation of his ideas about the mandala and the circumambulation of the centre. About the golden flower itself he says:
The golden flower is a mandala symbol I have often met with in the material brought me by my patients. It is drawn either seen
from above as a regular geometric pattern, or in profile as a blossom growing from a plant. The plant is frequently a structure in
brilliant fiery colours growing out of a bed of darkness, and carrying the blossom of light at the top, a symbol recalling the
Christmas tree. [Jung, CW13, para.33]
The mandala, or the tree of light, represents the centre of the new being, which it expresses, but also brings into effect. It cre-
ates a sacred temenos, where the healing of the split between conscious and unconscious may take place. It expresses a transfig-
uration of the life experience, from multiplicity into unity, from meaninglessness into meaning.

The transfigured existence which Moses experienced, and which Jung, Dillard and
Kazantsakis each in their own specific way
experienced, was brought about in each case by a vision of the mystical light, in which the meaning lacking in life was restored to them.
This vision of light has always been a part of mystical experiences worldwide, either individual or collective.

'As above, So Below', the Posters for the original Movie, 'MobyDick',