"Teeth, In This Case, Is The Beginning Of Wisdom"
"Finished in lightning, the little chaos raves.
I meet it in all the faces that I see." - Muriel Rukeyser
"Blake's vision in his long poem is none other than the assimilation of chaos." - Christine Gallant
"Here [in chaos, in catastrophe, in shadowland] faith functions as a boundless or infinite container." - Michael Eigen
Several of James Hillman's books, Dreams and the Underworld, and Healing Fiction, especially chapter two, "The Pandaemonium of Images, Jung's Contribution to Know Thyself", deliciously explore the dimmed yet dynamic dimensions of the Nightworld, the mythic unconscious where upon entering there, says Hillman, human Dayworld values must be left behind. In the Nightworld, in Dreamtime, in the Unconscious, the world of daimons and more, one enters often kicking and screaming or, dangerously to self and others, naively (viz. there's no darkness at all). According to Carl Jung dreams are often enough ruthless "impartial facts" from the objective psyche, many people resist them knowing that if taken seriously their whole view of self, other and reality will be profoundly altered and not so readily wrestled into the ever narrowing corrals of (dis)positivity (as in dispose-tivity). Out of site in this case guarantees out-of-their-mind for even apparently "sane" and "cool" dimentias will out, the nightworld, the daimonic will out by any means necessary and cares not a hoot whether one smells of light and sandalwood or is yogically stretched yet still karmically kvetched and shadow-projected, for the psyche, the daimonic, eventually, finally-had-enough, turns like the proverbial whipped dog and bites.
Such biting increases the possibility of wholeness, real wholeness, if one does not turn away from teeth.
Teeth, in this case, is the beginning of wisdom.
In Michael Eigen's immensely wise and helpful book, The Psychoanalytic Mystic, in a section describing the function of faith in psychoanalysis and therapy work, he speaks of "the explosive or catastrophic potential in every therapeutic encounter" (page 124). This is certainly so in any encounter with the daimon. Therapeutic work implies the goal of becoming conscious and making consciousness, thus a conscious explosive/catastrophic encounter with the daimon is an inevitable arrival in good, and extremely patient, therapy.
Eigen describes William Blake's Heaven, a similar description which my daimon depicts of Hell as does Hillman in his book on the underworld, "William Blake describes heaven as all out war between every human capacity in which all have their say without compromise yet incessantly enrich and are enriched by others. Here faith functions as a boundless or infinite container (Eigen, The Psychoanalystic Mystic. Pages 124/125)."
Blake's and Eigen's appreciation of Blake's view of heaven is that of an indestructible container (as that which is required in alchemy, a vessel capable of containing the most volatile and destructive of opposites), ever expanding, allowing for each energy as equally valid/vital to participation in the creation/destruction/reformation essential to Creativity and Creation on all levels (mostly unknown given human mental limitations to ken the subtle yet profound beyond-the-senses-and-rationality process and results). Heaven is not at all about "purity" which is too often confused as one opposite on top valued over the other on the bottom and of lowest value (sin/corruption), and vice versa. The goal of alchemy from the oevre or work (volatile cooking) of alchemy is that from the intensity of energies released in the combination of such conflicting substances, and the distillation of vapors derived from the mixing of both or many, a third thing, a refined substance, a new creation born of the foundational substances which are broken down, degraded, dissolved and adulterated in order to undergo refining fires and subsesquent phases, create a new thing, a unifiying refinement which advances/evolves a new creation/evolution in (at least human) consciousness.
This all sounds "heady" but is actually the exact opposite for, though linear and with consciousness operative, the processes incorporate irrationality as one of the elements cooking with other conficting elements...the resulting alchemical product is new and vital and brings about a profound paradigm shift from the inside out.
And that, my friends, is indeed a process called "heaven."
Heaven is not a place. It is a process ever ongoing, an eternal evolution taking place in space and time yet partaking of something, and within something, a vital allusion, called eternity.
