[ Note: This link will open to an earlier essay much related to what is below - Sin Eating, Transgression, and the Trivialization of the Sacred ]
[Preparatory Note - Several decades ago I had a close encounter with this gargoyle-like visage made of wood inside the Cathedral of Lemieux, France, and "knew" that he/It imaged the shadow of the therapist, analyst, counselor, parson, priest aka myself in my profession, my shadow therapist, indeed (best for one and all that one knows this aspect of self in the room, too, with others seeking counsel)...so I bought a postcard of It/Him which is on the wall of my office...many good discussions ensue in sessions from his compelling posture, that asscheek jutting toward the viewer...some clients address it and have conversations with it and it responds....
I work much with shadow, the shadow...the dark...partly by temperament and also by no choice in the matter other than dissociating to LIGHT LIGHT LIGHT as so very many folks do this day.]
"In the present times my personal view is that there is an ever increasing tendency to pursue 'self-realization' without struggling with the more painful task of self-knowledge. The proliferation of instant gurus has facilitated the defensive fantasy that self-realization is possible without the more painful struggle of self-knowledge. All that is in fact achieved by such instant and painless 'self-realization' is a persona of self-realization., a mask or ego-image of it, but not a psychic reality. Hence the first real stress or upset that occurs to such people with a persona of self-realization sees that so-called realization crumble into depression or explode into anger. The Jungian viewpoint is unequivocally that self-knowledge is the path to self-realization..."
- Peter O'Conner, Understanding Jung, Understanding Yourself, Paulist Press, 1985, pgs. 71-72.]
Texts as contexts for the texts aphoristic, of aporia, below, pacing, apace:
"Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel."
"My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt."
"Alyosha, I shall set off from here...loving with one's inside, with one's stomach..."
"The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong...I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky - from The Brothers Karamazov
"Seems, madam?
nay, it is, I know not "seems."
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forc'd breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passes show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe." - W. Shakespeare
"Like a good Zen student Mephistopheles
says "Myself am hell."
So all the old accounts are mistaken.
We need to translate,
the meanings are turned around:
for his screams, read "delight,"
and for the tortures he undergoes,
read "he does not shut out
any part of himself."
- John Tarrant, from "Spell To Be Recited While Dispelling Loneliness"
the animal we are.
We fight for blood right,
birth right, some bread,
a place to lie down
with kindred beings -
birth right, some bread,
a place to lie down
with kindred beings -
a patch beside a stream,
a doll house street
sweat-and-blood won
sweat-and-blood won
proclaims a personal kingdom.
- Warren Falcon
"But seriously (deliriously), folks."
Dubious. Not in this lifetime. Not me.
YADA YADA. KATZ!
What would Lynne say to all this one-hand-sleight-of-mind-clap-trap?
Is she still, as in a dream I had of her, working concessions at the theater on the corner of East 11th and 3rd avenue (my "hood"), hauling her large bag of popcorn, or was it corn chips or nachos, to the counter, dragging it across the floor, the strange burden of acquisitive/accumulation culture which now values ENTERTAINMENT uber alles in a massively pathologically inflated/egoic PUER culture.
One wonders just what a Buddha would do with such a country/culture but I am now in my negative "Eye of God" (as I eat my lemon poppy seed muffin and have yet another espresso in Elsewhere on East 6th Street with a planned stop at the nearby booze store for a bottle of Proseco to go with my crumpets and bitterness literally scratching an itch that is with me almost a year now, a body itch which my dream self has yet to clearly image but for the recurring Tower Card of Tarot, tower being my physical body, the bone house and me, the trench mouth babbler suffering from what Da Free John calls "the Dreaded Gom-Boo or the Imaginary Disease That Religion and Spirituality Seek to Cure, the horrible thumb and forefinger disease of hairy jiggledy meatedness" me nearing the final stages of meatedness and thus more prone to wind-bagged verbal flatululations and expustululululations.
I take my bow back from not so Free John and the now mass culture movement of New Age Gomboo Ananda Johnny come latelys' trance mongers, dime a millions, waiting for the UFOs and similar as has been done for millennia according to records left on cave paintings, glyphs, other walls, slabs, pottery, bones bearing consciously made marks and sign about arriving here, some being left behind but they'll be coming back to get me/all/us/we I gare-un-tee, this/these early dream/dreams of HOME (E.T.) which is not back to literal stars but to Mystery which stars/space do hint/convey so ancestors and current mutations do come by it honestly but reify and deify such, mistake symbols for signs (concretions) which are occupational hazards/errors of the psychology of religion all religions come from psyche, Virginia, soooo...we can't get it right nor is it necessary but close enough seems to satisfy the Mercurial continual shape-shifting, construction-deconstruction of the dialectic, too much to bear sometimes so I recommend K.O. pectate for the ills from the spectator sport of religion and spirituality where all bets are off but most are still pulling for Kablooey and Deep Bleu Ennui
And. But. So. IT goes, or appears to go, and so we, at least me, a very minor Ahab, doggy paddles in the wake of the White Whale of Western Siphillization here at its (clearly) END, intuiting and resolving (ongoing, that) that this is the way it goes in the Cosmosi (I'm gambling, and dreading that, there's more than one)...these words from Herman Melville's masterpiece of the American psyche and it crazy deity, the white whate Moby Dick lay out what is going on now in terms of not only the American pparadigm shift but of rotted Abrahamic religion-based pathological religion whose god is a trauma (Carl Jung's accurate diagnosis), and why so much absurd dissociations of religion and vapid "spirituality" are traject-ed reactionary enantiodromias denying (trying) in their own mass maya compensatory falsehoods aka "there is no evil (they wish), no shadow (so they insist others carry theirs for them in their delusional purityas All Light aka Echsnort Ick!abod Tolle - just old Plato dressed up in postmodern blah blah....gimme Melville, his summation, any day and pleez keep the Bliss Ninnies far, far away from me, and their "programs":
The Pequod stoved descend into the "drink",
*
Sokei-an, Rinzai Zen Master: "When I came to this county I realized that all the new religions of this country talk about "ascending" -- transcending this filthy, worldly life for some higher world; and then in the height of "somewhere" he will find the highest religion! So the eyes are always turned upward. Here in America, all the teachers are looking up at the sky! But we retreat -- go down -- go back. It is the new religions that have invented the sky! It is a hypothetical heaven...
...So we do not need to take away our eyes, cut off our ears, tear out our tongue, or burn our body! We retreat into the original state of mind by way of meditation.
We do not jump into the sky seeking for heaven! We just go back to original nature and find it there. The Buddha said this is the best almsgiving, the formless charity. So, we do not knock on the doors of Second Avenue, waking the tired people to offer them charity or to take their babies to institutions for charity's sake.
Sometimes Christians cannot understand the activities of Buddhists; all is quiet -- but we call it activity, and we call it purity. Purity does not mean good behavior; it means original nature un-stained by the five senses."
Even shadows in a zen garden - Easthampton zendo.
"Humility is the mother of giants.
One sees great things from the valley;
only small things from the peak." - G.K. Chesterton
The afternoon of the day Lynne died of a massive stroke a friend and I were drumming and gonging for her to, of course, recover from her complications from breast cancer. At some point in the sounding a large clear glass vase full of flowers fell over and shattered into fragments. My friend looked at me like, "Uh oh. She's not going to make it." And she didn't. She had a massive stroke, the "vase" of her brain shattered and she died that day. Mind you, her clear Mind did not shatter. There was nothing to break. And there was of course everything to break. But as always, words flail me. Words fail. But I/they/we try.
Lynne spoke often of right effort in terms of meditation and enlightenment. One day in exasperation after I had lamented my impossible monkey mind and irrepressible horniness, thinking and boinking, oink oink ergo (con)sum, Lynne looked at me with that martial arts fierce zen master gaze and said,
"Don't try so hard!!! you're still being way way too Christian, trying to do with zen what Christianity has failed to do and cannot do cuz it is not solved or resolved at that level!"
It did help. She was addressing the harsh inner judge internalized/constellated as the archetype of the negative judging/damning "Eye of God". I have not had much luck evading this archetypal eye but I remember Lynne's gaze, which at times could be fierce, especially when she was teaching, and then turn into sky blue mercy and compassion with some strong impishness there too. I realized later when in her piercing gaze that she was not in that negative/punitive "God-Eye" at all but merely squinting which she did while she was concentrating on what she was teaching...she spoke/taught in brief aphorisms, a sentence, a phrase, a long pause, as she walked slowly back and forth before enthralled/awed and induced students "side-ways but lanced-focused, danced" into her contemplative measured way of waiting for the idea to form, or image, into words spoken.
One sees great things from the valley;
only small things from the peak." - G.K. Chesterton
The afternoon of the day Lynne died of a massive stroke a friend and I were drumming and gonging for her to, of course, recover from her complications from breast cancer. At some point in the sounding a large clear glass vase full of flowers fell over and shattered into fragments. My friend looked at me like, "Uh oh. She's not going to make it." And she didn't. She had a massive stroke, the "vase" of her brain shattered and she died that day. Mind you, her clear Mind did not shatter. There was nothing to break. And there was of course everything to break. But as always, words flail me. Words fail. But I/they/we try.
Lynne spoke often of right effort in terms of meditation and enlightenment. One day in exasperation after I had lamented my impossible monkey mind and irrepressible horniness, thinking and boinking, oink oink ergo (con)sum, Lynne looked at me with that martial arts fierce zen master gaze and said,
"Don't try so hard!!! you're still being way way too Christian, trying to do with zen what Christianity has failed to do and cannot do cuz it is not solved or resolved at that level!"
It did help. She was addressing the harsh inner judge internalized/constellated as the archetype of the negative judging/damning "Eye of God". I have not had much luck evading this archetypal eye but I remember Lynne's gaze, which at times could be fierce, especially when she was teaching, and then turn into sky blue mercy and compassion with some strong impishness there too. I realized later when in her piercing gaze that she was not in that negative/punitive "God-Eye" at all but merely squinting which she did while she was concentrating on what she was teaching...she spoke/taught in brief aphorisms, a sentence, a phrase, a long pause, as she walked slowly back and forth before enthralled/awed and induced students "side-ways but lanced-focused, danced" into her contemplative measured way of waiting for the idea to form, or image, into words spoken.
In that long drive north along the coast, some any where, Lynne summed up the Buddha's advice as JUST SIT. As we later ate lobster rolls beside some roadside shack with a view of a sunken ship mast at a 45 degree angle tilting up from the harbor water, she said to me,
"You know, Warren, you can be enlightened in this lifetime."
"You know, Warren, you can be enlightened in this lifetime."
And this ain't pride piddle puddle prattle.
BUT I heard her, AND did not believe her.
But I am grateful for her honest optimism.
Right effort and "don't try so hard" and,
apparently after-life concessions
Wait. WAIT. Say (write it) that again:
apparently after-life concessions
in the Theater of Consciousness,
in the "pure dumb-show" of Mind,
it's projections and entertainments in
the ongoing cravings (junk food) and
sufferings, nostrums-of-should-ought-nought
such are addictions all kinds, spiritual
ones, ethical ones, carnal ones all
wrapped in sweet milk chocolate and
slathered with melted Ve'veeta cheese,
crunchy too with myriad cultural flavors,
implication though is that from the very
poison comes the pearl of great price,
the agua permanans, the gold,
the Self/No Self,
the breakthrough, enlightenment.
No matter what "mind-hand" is useful
or used, the left hand path, mine for sure,
by way of mayonnaise and cultural, and
mine-own manure, one handed claps of
zen koan notwithstanding, one can break
on through to the other side -
lose the calcified, reified plot and platz
then take a gander from the meandering
unwinding, or attempting too do so, "cognition" -
YADA YADA. KATZ!
What would Lynne say to all this one-hand-sleight-of-mind-clap-trap?
Is she still, as in a dream I had of her, working concessions at the theater on the corner of East 11th and 3rd avenue (my "hood"), hauling her large bag of popcorn, or was it corn chips or nachos, to the counter, dragging it across the floor, the strange burden of acquisitive/accumulation culture which now values ENTERTAINMENT uber alles in a massively pathologically inflated/egoic PUER culture.
Is the dream an after death koan for me.
She knew I was there in the theater but didn't look directly at me as she was in single-pointed awareness (I guess or project) and about "the work", chips and soda, Goobers and other (RAISINETS).
Movie theater (where folks go to watch projections? so....hmmmm....this is Buddhist, psychology territory).
Movie-addled America is directly right out of surrealist mind, for sure:
I bow (or curtsy) to the Da Da o blah di o blah da da Bubba Free John, a piece of brilliant work he (was - he dead) for sure, an UTTERLY inflated pathological narcissist as are many of the current crop of self-appointed gurus and mediums and channelers, wannabe Blahvatskooties massively possessed by Messianic archetypes, same old story gussied up for "trending" and the new techne (YAWNNNNNNN):
Master Da: If you want to "get religious" in our time you must first decide that you have the Dreaded Gom-Boo. Then you go to Doctor Pope, Doctor Church, Doctor Jesus, Doctor Mahatma, Doctor Mahatmaboo, Doctor Gombooananda, Doctor Gomananda-Booharaj. As soon as you get the feeling that you have the disease, you start to look for religious answers. Ask most the people around you how they got involved with this Way of Life, and they will describe some symptom or other of the Dreaded Gom-Boo. The Dreaded Gom-Boo led you all here because you were looking to be cured of the heebie-jeebies, the hopefull Three-Day-Thumb-and-Finger Problem, the terrible jiggly meatedness! (Laughter)
Are you telling me that you think God and Truth are supposed to be interested in curing you of the Dreaded Gom-Boo? Is that it? It is about time you realized there there is no cure for the Dreaded Gom-Boo! The Gom is terrible! The Boo is terminal! And this is what you've got, right? I thought so! I could see symptoms as soon as you came in here. Have you got the Boo? The Dreaded? The terrible Gom? Have you? That's what I thought! Tell me true- have you got the Gom-Boo?"
- he of the many names "ch ch ch changes" - Bubba Free John, Da Free John, Da Love-Ananda, Da Avabhasa, Adi Da Love-Ananda Samraj, and my personal favorite, Da Avidoot (prun-ounced "ah be dãt, too), and the surreal last laugh is his given name, from Long Guylund, is Franklin Albert Jones — OY —
SO.
I take my bow back from not so Free John and the now mass culture movement of New Age Gomboo Ananda Johnny come latelys' trance mongers, dime a millions, waiting for the UFOs and similar as has been done for millennia according to records left on cave paintings, glyphs, other walls, slabs, pottery, bones bearing consciously made marks and sign about arriving here, some being left behind but they'll be coming back to get me/all/us/we I gare-un-tee, this/these early dream/dreams of HOME (E.T.) which is not back to literal stars but to Mystery which stars/space do hint/convey so ancestors and current mutations do come by it honestly but reify and deify such, mistake symbols for signs (concretions) which are occupational hazards/errors of the psychology of religion all religions come from psyche, Virginia, soooo...we can't get it right nor is it necessary but close enough seems to satisfy the Mercurial continual shape-shifting, construction-deconstruction of the dialectic, too much to bear sometimes so I recommend K.O. pectate for the ills from the spectator sport of religion and spirituality where all bets are off but most are still pulling for Kablooey and Deep Bleu Ennui
and so, collective-we, the human horde/herd, oui chew our cud waiting for literal sky fall of already mentioned Messiahs projected , cuz archetypes, once again and again and again (into infinity) upon the sky, the skin of, into the plenum without end (tho we are told plenum/plena bends/bend, swerves/swerve, curves/curve so let's just see what happens countless lightyears from now if there is or will be a now)
[THIS MENTAL DRESSAGE IS BROUGHT
TO YOU BY ARCTURIAN COW-TIPPERS]
since conscious existence Itself, should such have a will, or at least a drive, desires (which are all unconscious drives), or, better, wishes (there's egos in wishes) to know and to be known, and so we leave our records, snapshots, carved, scratched, creative loath-and-love notes on things more durable than much less durable US but seem we be incurably wishful for eternity, selves all too soon (by our own clever nihilistic drives) shelved onto, turned back into, loaminess or other mulch pile to be woven again thru Maya's Loom (and Doom, Her Cosmic Broom's mad busy with ongoing laughter because dust can't be swept), and then there's the primal tissue and fabric, the squantatopia of what shall ne'er be kenned though Existence Itself, at least from Planet Earth petri dish vantage, seems to bend toward self-knowledge, atom by atom, monad by monad. Somehow, samraj it! is called 're-ality' but even that is, as poet Ginsberg says, just the phrase from HOWL,
"a hopeful little bit of hallucination."
clean up on aisle multiverse
And. But. So. IT goes, or appears to go, and so we, at least me, a very minor Ahab, doggy paddles in the wake of the White Whale of Western Siphillization here at its (clearly) END, intuiting and resolving (ongoing, that) that this is the way it goes in the Cosmosi (I'm gambling, and dreading that, there's more than one)...these words from Herman Melville's masterpiece of the American psyche and it crazy deity, the white whate Moby Dick lay out what is going on now in terms of not only the American pparadigm shift but of rotted Abrahamic religion-based pathological religion whose god is a trauma (Carl Jung's accurate diagnosis), and why so much absurd dissociations of religion and vapid "spirituality" are traject-ed reactionary enantiodromias denying (trying) in their own mass maya compensatory falsehoods aka "there is no evil (they wish), no shadow (so they insist others carry theirs for them in their delusional purityas All Light aka Echsnort Ick!abod Tolle - just old Plato dressed up in postmodern blah blah....gimme Melville, his summation, any day and pleez keep the Bliss Ninnies far, far away from me, and their "programs":
"The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;- Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it."
the white whale ghosts the once commanding
vessel, such is the nation and the pathological
deity inflicted upon the "new (but to whom)
world, doing so still but its millennium is ending
" . . . malicious agencies which some deep men
feel eating in them, till they are left living
on with half a heart and half a lung . . . "
— Herman Melville
SO. And. But (on the other fin) I take back my bow and, instead, give it to Lynne, and to the Buddhas, Arhats and even some carefully inspect ass-hats (my ancestral lineage) insisting that they be "killed" by ever erroneous fingers confusing themselves for such saviors, messiahs, crazy moons, all and just be my only self, aging, wistful, raging, turning page by page the near to the end book of myself, move aside, Walt, thou windbag that is still puffuing, and offer my one-trick adoration and affection to what sunrises and sunsets are left not only for me but for the planet, offer praise and homage and still, being human, all too human, I reserve some space, a few millimeters, as did Carl Jung, between my forehead and the floor while bowing, so as to not be a "dumb fish" relinquishing consciousness which means ego since ego is the minute conscious miracle in the spiraling mish mash of Mystery, so yeah, I honesly bow but with my free milimeter to spare and dare be awake (not Buddhaly but creaturely, with, one hand behind my back, fingers-crossed.
**
**
. . . But it cannot abide innocence . . .
James Hillman [NOTE: Hillman will be peppered amply throughout this assay/essay/aside] “Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling.
The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life – and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.
It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors.”
James Hillman [NOTE: Hillman will be peppered amply throughout this assay/essay/aside] “Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling.
The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life – and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.
It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors.”
Thus, major take away, daimon and destiny interplay and if too too long at the "Light and Blavatsky Kumbaya Fair", one's daimon may cash a check aka HELL TO PAY which may be blind, bland "persona of self-realization" aka in the long run - MAYA. Might make you some gelt, get you some "house" and devotees but, truth be told, you've fallen for your own act, the "Dreaded Gom-Boo", head-up-own-and-otherss-ass syndrome.
Been there. Done that. Now, exiled from the Holy Herd, I go my own way and proclaim a "dollhouse street sweat-and-blood won, a personal kingdom" eschewing the trivialization of the sacred (see link above to an essay on such trivialization and adulteration that is, in an acquisition/accumulation "marketing" "trending" culture, consumer "spirituality".
Odious.
You barricade yourself from the world with exaggerated saviour fantasies so climb down from the mountain of your humility and
follow your nose
- Carl Jung
Excerpts of something I wrote for Lynne as part of a homework assignment in a once important parenthesis in my life, early 1990's, Buddhism, Jung and James Hillman in MY mind, my essay about Hillman's essay, "Peaks and Vales" in his book "The Puer Papers," his, Hillman's autobiographical explorations/excoriations of humanity's obsession with Peaks over Vales for as old man Jung wrote a few years before he died:
"One doesn’t shoot at sparrows with cannons, i.e., the God-image is a "representation collective" [see footnote below] everyone knows something about.
As for the nigredo [the darkening, blacking in alchemy], it is certain that no one is redeemed from a sin he has not committed, and that a man who stands on a peak cannot climb it.
The humiliation allotted to each of us is implicit in his character.
If he seeks his wholeness seriously, he will step unawares into the hole destined for him, and out of this darkness the light will rise.
But the light cannot be enlightened.
If anyone feels he is in the light, I would never talk him into the darkness, for with his light he would seek and find something black which is not him at all.
The light cannot see its own peculiar blackness.
But if it dims, and he follows his twilight as he followed his light, then he will get into the night that is his.
If the light does not dim he would be a fool not to abide in it."
[the entire letter can be read here:
https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/2020/07/19/carl-jung-this/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR1OxFpL6JiV-IMidsTik2AiwhRPjeLPCCs0Fyok9EwzU3z7Q4y2h49DjfQ_aem_IVIud96fVrcCr2D37EbQUg#.XxRk_esg0uE.blogger ]
*
Notes and asides for a more recent assay that is me still doing homework in the Void/not Void- writ, say, a decade ago:
" . . . We speak of "scaling the peak."
To scale, to skin, to scrape, to measure/mark, to ascend. The hill climber is scaled, too, scarred, riven, driven forward, striving, peaking. One aspires to arrive there, both peak and vale, integrated or at least consciously held/endured/celebrated as sacred conflict/Life,
there is a spire in the word 'aspire' after all, symbol of sacred verticality dependent upon equally sacred horizontal foundation, and spire as in breath, to breathe in and upon, to encounter sacred breath, rarefied upon the high mountaintop, to have expended countless painful yet necessary breaths during the struggle with what becomes (to humans) hostile estranged elements, body, mind, earth, air, balance and gravity.
But here in the vale, looking up at peaks, I have anticipated myself, ahead of myself regarding the different values symbolized by the vale and the peak.
I walk backward here, spin and spill, to amplify what I have already sketched out, fore-stretched:
"The more I relate to everything everywhere
[peaks-language, unity and one, spirit, ecstasy],
the more I must relate to something somewhere
[vale-language, diversity, many, soul, depression]."
- [Source: A quote (as I remember it) by theology professor Robert Thurman who was Martin Luther King, Jr.'s theology professor, words which oriented MLK Jr. as a young divinity student at Harvard University.]
>>><<<
Lynne was an important teacher, friend, and eventual colleague of mine, the first real Buddhist I'd ever had any real relationship with. I first met her when she interviewed me as a candidate for training in a training amalgam in New York. We spoke of zen, of Christianity, of Jung, of dreams and, of all things, fried chicken and poetry (but not necessarily in that order).
Upon her assessment, approval and good-enough-inner/other-housekeeping-seal I was accepted into the heuristic educational program (heuristic = experiential, learning something from the inside out, from the bottom up, wholistic (THAT fantasy], not merely academic though there was some of that - but NOT enough for me, truth be told after the hack, I mean, fact). C'est la vie, C'esl la Guerre.
I left all that wearing only my underwear and a small beer stein souvenir from Switzerland in my hand, a symbol of Carl Jung for me, this from a dream, the one grab of a collapsed altar bearing many many consumerized religious symbols, totems, tokens, charms, amulets, feathers, the whole warehouse of "consumerized spirituality" America still has to offer. The altar and its plethora had to go, to fall, and it did, right in front of me and as it collapsed into a massive heap I knee-jerk grabbed at whatever was in front of me on the altar. Turns out, lucky me, and affirmation of MY Way, to be the souvenir beer stein from Switzerland aka Carl Jung, Jungian psycholgy, his still misunderstood and horribly abused by New Age and other, approach/discovery of the religious function of the psyche in the last 2 centuries the psyche was reduced to mechanistic scientific models, reductive science bent on Occum's Razoring of any "metaphysics" (aka religion) out of the culture.
Thank the gods and little fishes, you can't keep a "good Psyche" down. But that's an essay/assay already written elsewhere but writ much better by Jung and others who orient and revolve in his still resonant territory (Alpine peaks and, underscored, VALES, depths extending into regions unreachable but intuited and then given approximations, images, yogas, etchings, aka human civilizations and its dis- and mys- (as in mystic) and myth (as in archetypal energetic) contents.
POSTSCRIPT cryptical elliptical, limping toward some as yet to be located Net-lehem to reconfigure and try yet and yet and yet again, to be reborn with greater and better capacities to endure and still dance/mourn in the vales (still enamored of peaks, what they portend as symbol thus we everly attempt to scale (and complementarily spelunk into bowels of crushing darkness and depths with little lights on our foreheads, or handheld devices still called "torches" in other than American parts of the world.
I had 4 years with Lynne as a guide, a teacher, an encourager and faith-keeper to keep on meditating, chopping, carrying, dropping, scattering, breathing breath by breath with and through it all (and cursing much under said breaths, mea culpa alas). I remember one long and marvelous drive into New England for a week together with once were colleagues.
Lynne and I spoke of meditation and just what the Buddha taught, what is the essence of his teaching. She took her eyes off the road, she was driving, looked directly at me and said,
JUST SIT
I got it.
Hard, very hard for me with my ongoing fits (still legit, tho) of philosophy/theology//psychology.
Yeah, just sit. Not with a bang of SATORI enlightenment but a whimper and at my advancing old age, but a GRAMPER which is an adult sized PAMPER for sphinx-ster challenged geezers.
Oh. By the way, a "sphinx-ster" is an uneducated amateur archeologist who "can't tell shit from a hole in the ground. Which is too too often what is being offered in programs that want and intend to be about becoming ongoing "archeologists of soul, of psyche, and of the productions and probings thereof" but given the messiness of Nature (She always wins over our new brains so clever clever) best to bring lotsa rubber gloves, soap and water, and air freshener - OH, most most important, a sense of humor which, I found, its loss, destroys programs to slithereens which almost always get a fresh coat of projections aka paint that some still pull for, manage to get so that acolytes aka mini-me's begin the Beguine again and again and so the Messianic Redemption games proceed with promises of "ONLY LIGHT" which makes them and such promises dangerous and delusional. I refer the reader to the Jung quote toward the beginning of this long aside/aslide/a'snide but with my GRAMPER on, my clay feet longing to go more into depth and down and leave those peakers to their inflations and hubris.
*
That's it for now or forever, who knows, I don't believe in that projected "FOREVER" that still sells soap and spiritual entertainment and programs,
AND there's more to sitting besides butt boils and breath.
Lynne's death taught me much when I first dreamed of her post-her-death where she was working in a movie theater at the concessions counter (overpriced Raisinettes, popcorn, coke, Goobers, candy bars, jellied squishy things shaped like animals, etc.). I was shocked and pleased to see her there, ALIVE!, as she was dragging a large clear plastic bag of popcorn or was it cornchips, no matter but 'corn' is the word wanted) for the doves (popcorn in spanish is paloma aka dove) or nachos that were sold at concessions.
She paid me no mind (no mind - a Buddhist notion, yes?) as she was in one-pointed meditation in theater-of-the-mind where images myriad, PROJECTED images, flickered all too humanly the new brained homidid (the symbolic life consciously ensuing via painted cave walls, carved bones, etc) history of desire, suffering and the longing for surcease and release from the Wheel of Karma Kola and Karma Krunch Bars, first meal of self-reflexive consciousness.
Lynne was teaching me even in dream time. She seemed to demonstrate that all this suchness was no longer personal for her. She was beyond ego. I took. and still take, note of her working CONCESSIONS (see etymology of 'concede' 'concession' below), a place to eat or to buy things to eat, snacks and such...eating imagery is assimilation imagery, integration imagery...so something in her after-death ministry/teaching in dreamtime has much to do with, for me at least, assimilationn of consessions, relentings, surrenders of small yet karmically just desserts/junk food which appeal to the child in me/us/all.
Lynne's therapy skills were many, her training varied (with a great appreciation and assimilation of Carl Jung's psychology), she was an art therapist, a body-oriented therapist, did gestalt, hypnotherapy, was an ordained priest of Rinzai Zen. In the 1960's Lynne was a radical leftist politically and was connect with the radical underground militant group, the Weathermen, or similar, a suspect at the time, arrested at protests against the Viet Nam war, against racism, and more...she retained her absolutely strong sense of justice and service to the "least of society" (in terms of those wealthy privileged of greedy/gluttonous acquisition culture and society USA deemed "least" and of less value). Lynne was all about service all kinds.
>>><<<
OBITUARY ONLINE FOR LYNNE:
In First Notes of the First Zen Institute of America [clink the link in the comment section to see a great photo of her...and to read the humorous obit of the zen center's cat named, wait for it, Meowless]:
Lynne Marie Aston January 8, 1941- July 14, 2002
We are saddened by the sudden loss of Lynne Aston, one of our long term members as well as guest resident at the Institute for the last few years. Lynne had developed some complications from her second round of chemotherapy to treat some residual breast cancer, was sent to St. Peter's Hospital in Albany for an operation, contracted an infection after the surgery and died from a massive stroke a few days later on Sunday July 14 of this year.
Lynne was on our board of directors and had her own sitting group up in Chatham New York. She had all the qualities of a good Zen student; was reliable, well focused with an easy disposition and was noted by her peers as an excellent therapist. She began coming to the Institute in the early 1980's to attend sesshins here with Joshu Sasaki Roshi.
Lynne would stay at the Institute Sunday evening through Wednesday, take part in our morning and evening zazen practice and go out to see her patients during the day. She had a wonderful laugh, even during her chemotherapy, that brightened up the space around her, loved flowers and her weekly arrival at the Insti- tute the last few years was almost always accompanied by her beaming smile and a new flower arrangement in the Zendo.
So, dear lady, you will be missed by many and we hope you are getting a well deserved rest where ever you may be on that other shore...
GATE GATE PARASAM GATE
BODHI SVAHA
____________________________________________
FOOTNOTE: etymology for "CONCESSION" since the dream "makes" concessions and perhaps this too too long homage and confession to, for her.
concede (v.)
1630s, from Middle French concéder or directly from Latin concedere "give way, yield, go away, depart, retire," figuratively "agree, consent, give precedence," from com-, intensive prefix (see com-), + cedere "to go, grant, give way" (from PIE root *ked- "to go, yield"). Related: Conceded; conceding.
concession (n.)
mid-15c., from Old French concession (14c.) or directly from Latin concessionem (nominative concessio) "an allowing, conceding," noun of action from past participle stem of concedere (see concede). Meaning "right or privilege granted by government" is from 1650s. "Refreshment stand" sense is from 1910.
_______________________________________
From the too verbal for a Zen Buddhist priest/teacher, Lynne Aston, homework I mention and excerpted above...I submitted my "notes" and "rough drafts" to Lynne too which was fine for her:
"Meanwhile, am working on something now about writing my [Helix] cosmology paper which is about darkness, William James' "healthy minded religion" and "sick souled" religion, James Hillman's "Peaks and Vales" chapter in his puer book, which actually has two archetypal images in the title which give foundation to James' distinctions of these two religious attititudes healthy minded religion = peaks sick souled religion = vales though a case for the reverse could (and probably should) be made but I'm tired and, to quote Monty Python and David Bowie,
"my brain hurts alot."
If I can do this simply enough without having to go into too much expansion re: philosophy, religion, psychology, etc. then I might be able to pull it off...this is about the 6th beginning...everything wants to become a masters or phd and I haven't the energy or set up office-wise nor the organized enough scholar's brain/ability to linearly (patiently) lay it out on paper, like my tiny studio here, there is no space for spreading out books to transcribe, etc....too too frustrating...may have to relent and get a laptop so I can spread out in cafe "second-offices (almost wrote "orifices"). My father often accused me of being lazy. True re: hard physical work (I was not then, and now, as a child and as an adult, a farmer, meaning a shit shoveler and scatterer over ploughed fields, a rock hauler, a pea picker, a potato bug pincher, aweed pulling, corn-shucking irrigating DDT and Seven Dust plant powdering farmer called by god to do so (but then god was my father as always unchosen, the delusion of modern/postmodern culture/people is that they can choose their deity, I think not, or one must heavily consider the power of such a so-called choice...methinks the history of religion IS precisely because the NUMEN chose the individual and not the other way around but I aver)."
A lot of quotes and citations and tourettic remarks/loose associations followed the above.
>>><<<
Here are more notes, some repeated in other writings I hope to be added to what is in "the works" cosmology-wise 'Humility' etymologically is derived from L. humilis "lowly, humble," lit. "on the ground," from humus "earth".
To sum, the false though "convenient" Jamesian choice between healthy mindedness or sick souledness, false because of it places highest value upon convenience and the absolute power of the ego,the national "God of Convenience"
with it's emphasis upon utilitarian, quickest-means-to-an-end choices creating belief systems of expediency,what is called pragmatism which reduces religion/cosmology to rational ego choices thus inflating the ego, making it god-like, all the while losing sight of, and conscious connection to, the archetypal FACT that there is Something or Some Dimension Greater than the ego dwelling within us and around us, the Self, Jung's term for that Greater Center from, through, by, with and for which the ego exists. Still, the ego believes it is THE only center.
James, being a psychologist and interested in beliefs as a philosopher in one of the still most theologically-oriented countries in the world [USA], sees the 2 religions (healthy-minded and sick-minded) as temperments or attitudes most assuredly derived from, and unique to, individual personalities and predispositions. Carl Jung read James intently and used him muchly in his book, Psychological Types, which he wrote in order to understand his own conflict with Freud, along with Adler's and others' conflicts with Freud. Jung arrived at his introversion and extraversion as the two basic attitudes toward existence along with his four types (what I prefer to see as lenses) or expressions which differentiate and shape one's personal encounter with the world-- thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation.
Without going further into Jungian typology suffice it say that James' impact and shaping of the dialogue and language of the psychology of religion was and still is signficant. Jung indicates that James' two choices are not choices per se but are actual archetypal dimensions in every human no matter what their innate dispostions toward healthy or sick souled religions are. Both dimensions are related, are compensations for the other and, as Jung discovered, if one is identified more with one than the other then that other is alive and "well" in the unconscious. Integral work which Jung calls individuation with it's drive toward wholeness (what I refer to as conscious "holdness", a containing of opposites) is the work of making conscious and expressing that which is in the unconscious to compensate for one sided ego consciousness. Thus, if one is too identified with the "sunny peaks" then one is guaranteed a fated encounter with the darker "lonesome"valley for as Jung soberingly points out that which one does not make conscious he or she is destined to live as Fate. I believe we are all fated to encounter both peaks and vales because we, or some part of us, do "choose" and therefore in choosing become one-sided, one-dimensional because overly identified with that choice. We remain one dimensional if overly identified with that which is conscious. In actuality both archetypes are within us and around us for the two, mountaintops and valleys, make up the entire "mountain" of consciousness which includes the always greater dimension of unconscious, both personal and transpersonal which opens into ultimately mysterious and unknowable depths.
To choose happiness guarantees a constellation of it's opposite and vice versa.
This is the nature of human consciousness which is dialectical--an awareness of the opposites out of which may come the third thing, the new integral understanding and experience born of the tension between. This is the ongoing process of thought and this dialectical experience in humans is the stuff of religion, philosophy, psychology, art, all of human experience whether actively courted or not, known or unknown.
To nominate the peak of the mountain as the most numinous and essential part of the mountain is to devalue and repress the great equal value of the valley into the unconscious which guarantees a fated encounter with the valley. This works both ways although there is something about the valley which figures more prominently and descriptively in the human experience than with the peak. Hillman distinguishes 'spirit' from 'soul' in his essay associating spirit with peaks and soul with valleys. Hillman, a psychoanalyst and therefore oriented toward soul, psyche means soul, amplifies the vale archetype defining its vital function by quoting and amplifying the British Romantic poet John Keats' statement in a letter, "Call the world if you please the vale of soul-making. Then you will find out the use of the world." I am immediately struck by the word 'use' in the statement since pragmatism seeks those utilitarian uses of things, thoughts/ beliefs, activities and expressions. One can venture that there is a pragmatism of peaks and a pragmatism of vales. Perhaps they overlap or depending upon where on is at are put to different uses to possibly serve a greater whole, although wholeness language is "peaks" language.
The realm of soul is actually a human place though there are gods in the valleys and even near or upon the peaks but the peak, the sacred mountain top, points to something greater than multiplicity, something unitive and one. Thus is the history of human consciousness, the question of the one and the many, unity and diversity. This dialectic of running and returning, ascending and descending, is the way of human consciousness. Soul, says Hillman, is "concrete, multiple, and immanent," it is history, personal and collective, whereas spirit is "one, abstract, unified, concentrated," it's relationship to time is as the eliminator of history.
Hillman expands:
"The peaks wipe out history. History is to be overcome. History is bunk...So the spirit workers and spirit seekers first of all must climb over the debris of history, or prophesy its end or its unreality, time as illusion, as well as the history of their individual and particular localities, their particular ethnic and religious roots...the spirit is impersonal, rooted not in local soul, but timeless." In over emphasis on spirit, says Hillman, "history has become the Great Repressed." Thus our need to compenstate too much spirit by psychological soul work going into history, into the valleys where shadows are cast (ancient sun devices tracked shadows thus history is shadow) personal and transpersonal, in order to work "our complexes" [which are] history at work in the soul...it is so much easier to transcend history by climbing the mountain and let come what may than it is to work on history within us, our reactions, habits, moralities, opinions, symptoms that prevent true psychic change. Change in the valley requires recognition of history, an archeology of the soul, a digging in the ruins, a re-collecting. And--a planning in specific geographical and historical soil with its own smell and savor, in conneciton with spirits of the dead, the po-soul sunk in the ground below...from the viewpoint of soul and life in the vale, going up the mountain feels like a desertion. The lamas and saints "bid farewell to their comrades" [a quote from a letter by the current Dalai Lama of Tibet]." Hillman continues, "As I'm here an advocate of soul, I have to present its viewpoint. Its viewpoint appears in the long hollow depression of the valley."
I, Cloudiest, I mean Warren, am a soul man, partial to soul, to space, to time, to locale, at more than a lover's quarrel with the world and very much so at quarrel with spirit which "deigns to destroy us," says the poet Rilke, "us the most fleeting of all". Rilke is a soul man who spent much time on the peaks and even more time in the valleys. In the Nineth Duino Elegy from which the above quote comes Rilke is actually covering soul's ground, Keats foundational statement about vales and the use of the world, meaning full spectrum experience of life, life itself, and the Eternal's being enriched from the shadows, the surfaces, the subteranian. The Eternal is not complete afterall. The Eternal needs the temporal, what is gained there in consciousness, to be more whole. He begins:
Why, when this span of life might be fleeted away
as laurel, a little darker than all
the surrounding green, with tiny waves on the border
of every leaf (like the smile of a wind): - oh, why
have to be human, and shunning Destiny,
long for Destiny?...
Not because happiness really
exists, that precipitate profit of imminent loss.
Not out of curiosity, not just to practise the heart,
that could still be there in laurel...
But because being here is much, and because all this
that's here, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely
concerns us. Us the most fleeting of all. Just once,
everything, only for once. Once and no more. And we, too,
once. And never again. But this
having been once on earth - can it ever be cancelled?
As Hillman says, the peaks (spirit) wipes out history. Rilke's question, becoming an assertion in the asking, that having been (which is to be historical) he, we, history can never be canceled but is continuing creativity, human for the evolution of the divine.
Lest it be thought that I am voting for sickness over health, gravity over levity, Jamesian distinctions, anyone knows that to be is to express and to attest to the Blind Universe, that Wholey Other Eternal Abstraction, the full spectrum of material being, of incarnation from quantum to quarry where physical being, and for humans, conscious physical being, is an agony and an ecstasy and all between. It is this, Rilke says, that we bring to the discarnate "angelic" spirit realms:
Praise this world to the Angel, not the untellable: you
can't impress him with the splendour you've felt...So show him
some simple thing, refashioned by age after age,
till it lives in our hands and eyes as a part of ourselves.
Tell him things.
*
These things have soul, are soul or are ensouled by our conscious physical existence in the vales. John Tarrant, a Buddhist practicioner and Jungian oriented psychotherapist says as much in these opening lines:
There is a blessed fidelity in things.
Graceless things grow lovely with good uses.
And this is true of ourselves. It is practical and pragmatic, soul is.
While struggling over my ordination thesis, after having discovered Peaks and Vales by Hillman, I have spoken with my brother, a Christian minister with an inner city ministry in West Philadelphia, a vale if ever there was one. We often share with each other what we are reading and thinking, our having voracious appetites for both. Larry, my brother, read to me a tale by C.K. Chesterton, well-known British theologian and writer in the early 1900's. Chesterton writes of peaks and vales as religious attitudes, too, and of a preference to vales and of the use, or misuse, the danger of religious peaks:
"I think there is something rather dangerous about standing on these high places even to pray," said Father Brown. "Heights were made to be looked at, not to be looked from."
"Do you mean that one may fall over," asked Wilfred.
"I mean that one's soul may fall if one's body doesn't," said the other
priest.
"I scarcely understand you," remarked Bohun indistinctly.
"Look at that blacksmith, for instance," went on
Father Brown calmly; "a good man, but not a Christian--hard, imperious, unforgiving. Well, his Scotch religion [Presbyterian Scotch Calvinism] was made up by men who prayed on hills and high crags, and learnt to look down on the world more than to look up at heaven.
Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak."
"One doesn’t shoot at sparrows with cannons, i.e., the God-image is a "representation collective" [see footnote below] everyone knows something about.
As for the nigredo [the darkening, blacking in alchemy], it is certain that no one is redeemed from a sin he has not committed, and that a man who stands on a peak cannot climb it.
The humiliation allotted to each of us is implicit in his character.
If he seeks his wholeness seriously, he will step unawares into the hole destined for him, and out of this darkness the light will rise.
But the light cannot be enlightened.
If anyone feels he is in the light, I would never talk him into the darkness, for with his light he would seek and find something black which is not him at all.
The light cannot see its own peculiar blackness.
But if it dims, and he follows his twilight as he followed his light, then he will get into the night that is his.
If the light does not dim he would be a fool not to abide in it."
[the entire letter can be read here:
https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/2020/07/19/carl-jung-this/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR1OxFpL6JiV-IMidsTik2AiwhRPjeLPCCs0Fyok9EwzU3z7Q4y2h49DjfQ_aem_IVIud96fVrcCr2D37EbQUg#.XxRk_esg0uE.blogger ]
*
Here are more James Hillman quotes, a prophet of a different color and odor, cranky (NOTE: all prophets are cranky aka the burden of foreseeing - forget the New Age kind - if they fluffy then they ain't dealing). Hillman helps, complements and riffs on and off Jung, veers his, Hillman's own course, sourcing, circling what Jung laid more than solid ground work for which will keep a few folks busy for centuries to actually comprehend since most folks now and to come are not at all prepared for the impact of what Jung accomplished though too many claim to be Jungian but are not. There are now as many Jungs as there are and will be Jesus's, which flavor, which race, which color, which facet is amplified and reified, etc. Tis the fate of chakravartins (Hindi for "wheel turners") who very much have the Trickster archetype activated and thus appear to many in different guises. Just read the parables and Beatitudes of Jesus, observe (via the texts) his interactions with the official theologians of his day, pagan, Jewish, Hellenistas, et. al. and their most unkind and unaccepting reception of him, and who they made him out to be, and you know you've got a Wheel Turner in front of you. Most def. something, some things, are going to change, maybe fast, maybe (most definitely) slow but the old order is going going gots ta go and here we are now, at the end of a 2000 year unfolding, now imploding (contracting, reacting archetypal world view) which shall explode (is doing so now and will get even more explosive, since prophets, the real ones, not the self-appointed ones who did a workshop or program, are corrosives to status quo aka theology, sociology, collective values especially thus Jesus, who knew, saying, "A prophet is not accepted in his home town." Folks, the herd, would ask, sardonic tongues in bitter cheeks, holier than thous, "Can anything good come from Nazereth?" implying that Jesus was, well, "white trash". Enough of this aside but I paced you, dear patient reader, that there would be asides and dis- or any- order as it, order, presents itself most disorderly (such is thought, the nature of thought, though I love words, logos, my flow is certainly NOT logical, academic papers (why I knew that a masters and phd would be most impossible for me to do much less complete but, too late, never mind, I'll do me and say the say my way.
Wag.
Hillman could wander but keep the threads tight, weave it all in impressive gestalts and coagulations for further imaginal creative thinking unleashing impolite "gods" from soul-killing bunkers put in there by the "spiritual ones" for their, like dreams, misdeeds. How dare they, gods, dreams, shadow, break the calcified, barnacled, enforced fundamentalisms , even New Age fundamentalisms with their "personas of self-realization" (that look on their faces hermetic there - quite frightening).
But. And. SO.
Can't keep a good god/dess down. As Jung pointed out, my loose riffs here, restating, "Just try to, and they will show up as they do now as symbols and symptoms (and symptoms ARE symbols) aka there are gods in the symptoms so be like Philemon and Baucis and entertain the gods who are visiting, give them willful shelter and attention and there will be blessings, not the necessarily predictable and wishful (affirmations/treatments) kind but blessings from depth of psyche which are often based in shadow, that which is verboten, that which is "sin" or "bad thoughts" (for the herd of New Agers out there). Note to "spiritual groups/organizations, especially those ones that are all about "the Light, the Good", FAT CHANCE! Such groups ESPECIALLY have shadows, actual evil. SO, best to identify and OWN the group shadow which is there whether acknowledge or not; it is usually "sleight of hand/minded away but "positive thinking" which, DUH, if you say the word "positive" you've already conjured (while most abjuring and projecting/scapegoating the negative on to other persons, places, things, activities, et. al. Another digression, I do aver, yet another aver-ation.
NOW. To Hillman on peaks and vales although what follows directly below are my words riffing, summing (though not summiting) Hillman's most ovular/seminal/liminal (tho not minimal) essay. Note that all italics are mine:
"...After the peak, another flaying, a further rendering from the exacting/extracting journey, a necessary re-descent though one is transformed from the entire cycle of the journey which begins in veils/vales, spills/falls perhaps deeper there, struggles there, dreams of previous ascent, dreams of the peak, and so begins another phase - coagulatio in alchemy - the arduous ordeal of Incarnating and integrating (or trying to) the climb, of having arrived on top spent, depleted, yet the fuller for the grinding upward and forward. And yet, in the end, Saint Jack and Saint Jill, saints of vales, of soul, spill, all the more vessels of clay made the more sacred for the "what is", the reality, of what they consciously contain and convey in laughter and tears. There's no rhyme or time on peaks. No sound there at all. Nothing speaks. Utterance is of the gutter, the candle burning, sputtering. We stammerers, stutterers, murmurers, mutterers make matter matter all the more ensouled. Much there is to say and sing of that. Many the tongue wink and wag."
for Lynne Aston [1941 - 2002]
The animal we are
reserves just rights
to complain -
empty bellies,
encroached territories,
crotch urgencies,
skin withers,
fur falls -
brittle goes the bone,
so small the gathered human corners,
so great the needed mercies.
We must not dishonor
the animal we are.
We fight for blood right,
birth right, some bread,
a place to lie down
with kindred beings.
A patch beside a stream,
a doll house street
sweat-and-blood won
proclaims a personal kingdom.
Listen now.
Milky or Muddy Ways
somewhere require stunning loss.
We are falling,
battered lips praising
still.
We have
witnessed,
yes,
cracked
all this.
With a kiss
love in the crush
and crank is
sealed.
" . . . We speak of "scaling the peak."
To scale, to skin, to scrape, to measure/mark, to ascend. The hill climber is scaled, too, scarred, riven, driven forward, striving, peaking. One aspires to arrive there, both peak and vale, integrated or at least consciously held/endured/celebrated as sacred conflict/Life,
there is a spire in the word 'aspire' after all, symbol of sacred verticality dependent upon equally sacred horizontal foundation, and spire as in breath, to breathe in and upon, to encounter sacred breath, rarefied upon the high mountaintop, to have expended countless painful yet necessary breaths during the struggle with what becomes (to humans) hostile estranged elements, body, mind, earth, air, balance and gravity.
But here in the vale, looking up at peaks, I have anticipated myself, ahead of myself regarding the different values symbolized by the vale and the peak.
I walk backward here, spin and spill, to amplify what I have already sketched out, fore-stretched:
"The more I relate to everything everywhere
[peaks-language, unity and one, spirit, ecstasy],
the more I must relate to something somewhere
[vale-language, diversity, many, soul, depression]."
- [Source: A quote (as I remember it) by theology professor Robert Thurman who was Martin Luther King, Jr.'s theology professor, words which oriented MLK Jr. as a young divinity student at Harvard University.]
>>><<<
Lynne was an important teacher, friend, and eventual colleague of mine, the first real Buddhist I'd ever had any real relationship with. I first met her when she interviewed me as a candidate for training in a training amalgam in New York. We spoke of zen, of Christianity, of Jung, of dreams and, of all things, fried chicken and poetry (but not necessarily in that order).
Upon her assessment, approval and good-enough-inner/other-housekeeping-seal I was accepted into the heuristic educational program (heuristic = experiential, learning something from the inside out, from the bottom up, wholistic (THAT fantasy], not merely academic though there was some of that - but NOT enough for me, truth be told after the hack, I mean, fact). C'est la vie, C'esl la Guerre.
I left all that wearing only my underwear and a small beer stein souvenir from Switzerland in my hand, a symbol of Carl Jung for me, this from a dream, the one grab of a collapsed altar bearing many many consumerized religious symbols, totems, tokens, charms, amulets, feathers, the whole warehouse of "consumerized spirituality" America still has to offer. The altar and its plethora had to go, to fall, and it did, right in front of me and as it collapsed into a massive heap I knee-jerk grabbed at whatever was in front of me on the altar. Turns out, lucky me, and affirmation of MY Way, to be the souvenir beer stein from Switzerland aka Carl Jung, Jungian psycholgy, his still misunderstood and horribly abused by New Age and other, approach/discovery of the religious function of the psyche in the last 2 centuries the psyche was reduced to mechanistic scientific models, reductive science bent on Occum's Razoring of any "metaphysics" (aka religion) out of the culture.
Thank the gods and little fishes, you can't keep a "good Psyche" down. But that's an essay/assay already written elsewhere but writ much better by Jung and others who orient and revolve in his still resonant territory (Alpine peaks and, underscored, VALES, depths extending into regions unreachable but intuited and then given approximations, images, yogas, etchings, aka human civilizations and its dis- and mys- (as in mystic) and myth (as in archetypal energetic) contents.
POSTSCRIPT cryptical elliptical, limping toward some as yet to be located Net-lehem to reconfigure and try yet and yet and yet again, to be reborn with greater and better capacities to endure and still dance/mourn in the vales (still enamored of peaks, what they portend as symbol thus we everly attempt to scale (and complementarily spelunk into bowels of crushing darkness and depths with little lights on our foreheads, or handheld devices still called "torches" in other than American parts of the world.
I had 4 years with Lynne as a guide, a teacher, an encourager and faith-keeper to keep on meditating, chopping, carrying, dropping, scattering, breathing breath by breath with and through it all (and cursing much under said breaths, mea culpa alas). I remember one long and marvelous drive into New England for a week together with once were colleagues.
Lynne and I spoke of meditation and just what the Buddha taught, what is the essence of his teaching. She took her eyes off the road, she was driving, looked directly at me and said,
JUST SIT
I got it.
Hard, very hard for me with my ongoing fits (still legit, tho) of philosophy/theology//psychology.
Yeah, just sit. Not with a bang of SATORI enlightenment but a whimper and at my advancing old age, but a GRAMPER which is an adult sized PAMPER for sphinx-ster challenged geezers.
Oh. By the way, a "sphinx-ster" is an uneducated amateur archeologist who "can't tell shit from a hole in the ground. Which is too too often what is being offered in programs that want and intend to be about becoming ongoing "archeologists of soul, of psyche, and of the productions and probings thereof" but given the messiness of Nature (She always wins over our new brains so clever clever) best to bring lotsa rubber gloves, soap and water, and air freshener - OH, most most important, a sense of humor which, I found, its loss, destroys programs to slithereens which almost always get a fresh coat of projections aka paint that some still pull for, manage to get so that acolytes aka mini-me's begin the Beguine again and again and so the Messianic Redemption games proceed with promises of "ONLY LIGHT" which makes them and such promises dangerous and delusional. I refer the reader to the Jung quote toward the beginning of this long aside/aslide/a'snide but with my GRAMPER on, my clay feet longing to go more into depth and down and leave those peakers to their inflations and hubris.
*
That's it for now or forever, who knows, I don't believe in that projected "FOREVER" that still sells soap and spiritual entertainment and programs,
AND there's more to sitting besides butt boils and breath.
Lynne's death taught me much when I first dreamed of her post-her-death where she was working in a movie theater at the concessions counter (overpriced Raisinettes, popcorn, coke, Goobers, candy bars, jellied squishy things shaped like animals, etc.). I was shocked and pleased to see her there, ALIVE!, as she was dragging a large clear plastic bag of popcorn or was it cornchips, no matter but 'corn' is the word wanted) for the doves (popcorn in spanish is paloma aka dove) or nachos that were sold at concessions.
She paid me no mind (no mind - a Buddhist notion, yes?) as she was in one-pointed meditation in theater-of-the-mind where images myriad, PROJECTED images, flickered all too humanly the new brained homidid (the symbolic life consciously ensuing via painted cave walls, carved bones, etc) history of desire, suffering and the longing for surcease and release from the Wheel of Karma Kola and Karma Krunch Bars, first meal of self-reflexive consciousness.
Lynne was teaching me even in dream time. She seemed to demonstrate that all this suchness was no longer personal for her. She was beyond ego. I took. and still take, note of her working CONCESSIONS (see etymology of 'concede' 'concession' below), a place to eat or to buy things to eat, snacks and such...eating imagery is assimilation imagery, integration imagery...so something in her after-death ministry/teaching in dreamtime has much to do with, for me at least, assimilationn of consessions, relentings, surrenders of small yet karmically just desserts/junk food which appeal to the child in me/us/all.
Lynne's therapy skills were many, her training varied (with a great appreciation and assimilation of Carl Jung's psychology), she was an art therapist, a body-oriented therapist, did gestalt, hypnotherapy, was an ordained priest of Rinzai Zen. In the 1960's Lynne was a radical leftist politically and was connect with the radical underground militant group, the Weathermen, or similar, a suspect at the time, arrested at protests against the Viet Nam war, against racism, and more...she retained her absolutely strong sense of justice and service to the "least of society" (in terms of those wealthy privileged of greedy/gluttonous acquisition culture and society USA deemed "least" and of less value). Lynne was all about service all kinds.
>>><<<
OBITUARY ONLINE FOR LYNNE:
In First Notes of the First Zen Institute of America [clink the link in the comment section to see a great photo of her...and to read the humorous obit of the zen center's cat named, wait for it, Meowless]:
Lynne Marie Aston January 8, 1941- July 14, 2002
We are saddened by the sudden loss of Lynne Aston, one of our long term members as well as guest resident at the Institute for the last few years. Lynne had developed some complications from her second round of chemotherapy to treat some residual breast cancer, was sent to St. Peter's Hospital in Albany for an operation, contracted an infection after the surgery and died from a massive stroke a few days later on Sunday July 14 of this year.
Lynne was on our board of directors and had her own sitting group up in Chatham New York. She had all the qualities of a good Zen student; was reliable, well focused with an easy disposition and was noted by her peers as an excellent therapist. She began coming to the Institute in the early 1980's to attend sesshins here with Joshu Sasaki Roshi.
Lynne would stay at the Institute Sunday evening through Wednesday, take part in our morning and evening zazen practice and go out to see her patients during the day. She had a wonderful laugh, even during her chemotherapy, that brightened up the space around her, loved flowers and her weekly arrival at the Insti- tute the last few years was almost always accompanied by her beaming smile and a new flower arrangement in the Zendo.
So, dear lady, you will be missed by many and we hope you are getting a well deserved rest where ever you may be on that other shore...
GATE GATE PARASAM GATE
BODHI SVAHA
____________________________________________
FOOTNOTE: etymology for "CONCESSION" since the dream "makes" concessions and perhaps this too too long homage and confession to, for her.
concede (v.)
1630s, from Middle French concéder or directly from Latin concedere "give way, yield, go away, depart, retire," figuratively "agree, consent, give precedence," from com-, intensive prefix (see com-), + cedere "to go, grant, give way" (from PIE root *ked- "to go, yield"). Related: Conceded; conceding.
concession (n.)
mid-15c., from Old French concession (14c.) or directly from Latin concessionem (nominative concessio) "an allowing, conceding," noun of action from past participle stem of concedere (see concede). Meaning "right or privilege granted by government" is from 1650s. "Refreshment stand" sense is from 1910.
_______________________________________
From the too verbal for a Zen Buddhist priest/teacher, Lynne Aston, homework I mention and excerpted above...I submitted my "notes" and "rough drafts" to Lynne too which was fine for her:
"Meanwhile, am working on something now about writing my [Helix] cosmology paper which is about darkness, William James' "healthy minded religion" and "sick souled" religion, James Hillman's "Peaks and Vales" chapter in his puer book, which actually has two archetypal images in the title which give foundation to James' distinctions of these two religious attititudes healthy minded religion = peaks sick souled religion = vales though a case for the reverse could (and probably should) be made but I'm tired and, to quote Monty Python and David Bowie,
"my brain hurts alot."
If I can do this simply enough without having to go into too much expansion re: philosophy, religion, psychology, etc. then I might be able to pull it off...this is about the 6th beginning...everything wants to become a masters or phd and I haven't the energy or set up office-wise nor the organized enough scholar's brain/ability to linearly (patiently) lay it out on paper, like my tiny studio here, there is no space for spreading out books to transcribe, etc....too too frustrating...may have to relent and get a laptop so I can spread out in cafe "second-offices (almost wrote "orifices"). My father often accused me of being lazy. True re: hard physical work (I was not then, and now, as a child and as an adult, a farmer, meaning a shit shoveler and scatterer over ploughed fields, a rock hauler, a pea picker, a potato bug pincher, aweed pulling, corn-shucking irrigating DDT and Seven Dust plant powdering farmer called by god to do so (but then god was my father as always unchosen, the delusion of modern/postmodern culture/people is that they can choose their deity, I think not, or one must heavily consider the power of such a so-called choice...methinks the history of religion IS precisely because the NUMEN chose the individual and not the other way around but I aver)."
A lot of quotes and citations and tourettic remarks/loose associations followed the above.
>>><<<
Here are more notes, some repeated in other writings I hope to be added to what is in "the works" cosmology-wise 'Humility' etymologically is derived from L. humilis "lowly, humble," lit. "on the ground," from humus "earth".
To sum, the false though "convenient" Jamesian choice between healthy mindedness or sick souledness, false because of it places highest value upon convenience and the absolute power of the ego,the national "God of Convenience"
with it's emphasis upon utilitarian, quickest-means-to-an-end choices creating belief systems of expediency,what is called pragmatism which reduces religion/cosmology to rational ego choices thus inflating the ego, making it god-like, all the while losing sight of, and conscious connection to, the archetypal FACT that there is Something or Some Dimension Greater than the ego dwelling within us and around us, the Self, Jung's term for that Greater Center from, through, by, with and for which the ego exists. Still, the ego believes it is THE only center.
James, being a psychologist and interested in beliefs as a philosopher in one of the still most theologically-oriented countries in the world [USA], sees the 2 religions (healthy-minded and sick-minded) as temperments or attitudes most assuredly derived from, and unique to, individual personalities and predispositions. Carl Jung read James intently and used him muchly in his book, Psychological Types, which he wrote in order to understand his own conflict with Freud, along with Adler's and others' conflicts with Freud. Jung arrived at his introversion and extraversion as the two basic attitudes toward existence along with his four types (what I prefer to see as lenses) or expressions which differentiate and shape one's personal encounter with the world-- thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation.
Without going further into Jungian typology suffice it say that James' impact and shaping of the dialogue and language of the psychology of religion was and still is signficant. Jung indicates that James' two choices are not choices per se but are actual archetypal dimensions in every human no matter what their innate dispostions toward healthy or sick souled religions are. Both dimensions are related, are compensations for the other and, as Jung discovered, if one is identified more with one than the other then that other is alive and "well" in the unconscious. Integral work which Jung calls individuation with it's drive toward wholeness (what I refer to as conscious "holdness", a containing of opposites) is the work of making conscious and expressing that which is in the unconscious to compensate for one sided ego consciousness. Thus, if one is too identified with the "sunny peaks" then one is guaranteed a fated encounter with the darker "lonesome"valley for as Jung soberingly points out that which one does not make conscious he or she is destined to live as Fate. I believe we are all fated to encounter both peaks and vales because we, or some part of us, do "choose" and therefore in choosing become one-sided, one-dimensional because overly identified with that choice. We remain one dimensional if overly identified with that which is conscious. In actuality both archetypes are within us and around us for the two, mountaintops and valleys, make up the entire "mountain" of consciousness which includes the always greater dimension of unconscious, both personal and transpersonal which opens into ultimately mysterious and unknowable depths.
To choose happiness guarantees a constellation of it's opposite and vice versa.
This is the nature of human consciousness which is dialectical--an awareness of the opposites out of which may come the third thing, the new integral understanding and experience born of the tension between. This is the ongoing process of thought and this dialectical experience in humans is the stuff of religion, philosophy, psychology, art, all of human experience whether actively courted or not, known or unknown.
To nominate the peak of the mountain as the most numinous and essential part of the mountain is to devalue and repress the great equal value of the valley into the unconscious which guarantees a fated encounter with the valley. This works both ways although there is something about the valley which figures more prominently and descriptively in the human experience than with the peak. Hillman distinguishes 'spirit' from 'soul' in his essay associating spirit with peaks and soul with valleys. Hillman, a psychoanalyst and therefore oriented toward soul, psyche means soul, amplifies the vale archetype defining its vital function by quoting and amplifying the British Romantic poet John Keats' statement in a letter, "Call the world if you please the vale of soul-making. Then you will find out the use of the world." I am immediately struck by the word 'use' in the statement since pragmatism seeks those utilitarian uses of things, thoughts/ beliefs, activities and expressions. One can venture that there is a pragmatism of peaks and a pragmatism of vales. Perhaps they overlap or depending upon where on is at are put to different uses to possibly serve a greater whole, although wholeness language is "peaks" language.
The realm of soul is actually a human place though there are gods in the valleys and even near or upon the peaks but the peak, the sacred mountain top, points to something greater than multiplicity, something unitive and one. Thus is the history of human consciousness, the question of the one and the many, unity and diversity. This dialectic of running and returning, ascending and descending, is the way of human consciousness. Soul, says Hillman, is "concrete, multiple, and immanent," it is history, personal and collective, whereas spirit is "one, abstract, unified, concentrated," it's relationship to time is as the eliminator of history.
Hillman expands:
"The peaks wipe out history. History is to be overcome. History is bunk...So the spirit workers and spirit seekers first of all must climb over the debris of history, or prophesy its end or its unreality, time as illusion, as well as the history of their individual and particular localities, their particular ethnic and religious roots...the spirit is impersonal, rooted not in local soul, but timeless." In over emphasis on spirit, says Hillman, "history has become the Great Repressed." Thus our need to compenstate too much spirit by psychological soul work going into history, into the valleys where shadows are cast (ancient sun devices tracked shadows thus history is shadow) personal and transpersonal, in order to work "our complexes" [which are] history at work in the soul...it is so much easier to transcend history by climbing the mountain and let come what may than it is to work on history within us, our reactions, habits, moralities, opinions, symptoms that prevent true psychic change. Change in the valley requires recognition of history, an archeology of the soul, a digging in the ruins, a re-collecting. And--a planning in specific geographical and historical soil with its own smell and savor, in conneciton with spirits of the dead, the po-soul sunk in the ground below...from the viewpoint of soul and life in the vale, going up the mountain feels like a desertion. The lamas and saints "bid farewell to their comrades" [a quote from a letter by the current Dalai Lama of Tibet]." Hillman continues, "As I'm here an advocate of soul, I have to present its viewpoint. Its viewpoint appears in the long hollow depression of the valley."
I, Cloudiest, I mean Warren, am a soul man, partial to soul, to space, to time, to locale, at more than a lover's quarrel with the world and very much so at quarrel with spirit which "deigns to destroy us," says the poet Rilke, "us the most fleeting of all". Rilke is a soul man who spent much time on the peaks and even more time in the valleys. In the Nineth Duino Elegy from which the above quote comes Rilke is actually covering soul's ground, Keats foundational statement about vales and the use of the world, meaning full spectrum experience of life, life itself, and the Eternal's being enriched from the shadows, the surfaces, the subteranian. The Eternal is not complete afterall. The Eternal needs the temporal, what is gained there in consciousness, to be more whole. He begins:
Why, when this span of life might be fleeted away
as laurel, a little darker than all
the surrounding green, with tiny waves on the border
of every leaf (like the smile of a wind): - oh, why
have to be human, and shunning Destiny,
long for Destiny?...
Not because happiness really
exists, that precipitate profit of imminent loss.
Not out of curiosity, not just to practise the heart,
that could still be there in laurel...
But because being here is much, and because all this
that's here, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely
concerns us. Us the most fleeting of all. Just once,
everything, only for once. Once and no more. And we, too,
once. And never again. But this
having been once on earth - can it ever be cancelled?
As Hillman says, the peaks (spirit) wipes out history. Rilke's question, becoming an assertion in the asking, that having been (which is to be historical) he, we, history can never be canceled but is continuing creativity, human for the evolution of the divine.
Lest it be thought that I am voting for sickness over health, gravity over levity, Jamesian distinctions, anyone knows that to be is to express and to attest to the Blind Universe, that Wholey Other Eternal Abstraction, the full spectrum of material being, of incarnation from quantum to quarry where physical being, and for humans, conscious physical being, is an agony and an ecstasy and all between. It is this, Rilke says, that we bring to the discarnate "angelic" spirit realms:
Praise this world to the Angel, not the untellable: you
can't impress him with the splendour you've felt...So show him
some simple thing, refashioned by age after age,
till it lives in our hands and eyes as a part of ourselves.
Tell him things.
*
These things have soul, are soul or are ensouled by our conscious physical existence in the vales. John Tarrant, a Buddhist practicioner and Jungian oriented psychotherapist says as much in these opening lines:
There is a blessed fidelity in things.
Graceless things grow lovely with good uses.
And this is true of ourselves. It is practical and pragmatic, soul is.
While struggling over my ordination thesis, after having discovered Peaks and Vales by Hillman, I have spoken with my brother, a Christian minister with an inner city ministry in West Philadelphia, a vale if ever there was one. We often share with each other what we are reading and thinking, our having voracious appetites for both. Larry, my brother, read to me a tale by C.K. Chesterton, well-known British theologian and writer in the early 1900's. Chesterton writes of peaks and vales as religious attitudes, too, and of a preference to vales and of the use, or misuse, the danger of religious peaks:
"I think there is something rather dangerous about standing on these high places even to pray," said Father Brown. "Heights were made to be looked at, not to be looked from."
"Do you mean that one may fall over," asked Wilfred.
"I mean that one's soul may fall if one's body doesn't," said the other
priest.
"I scarcely understand you," remarked Bohun indistinctly.
"Look at that blacksmith, for instance," went on
Father Brown calmly; "a good man, but not a Christian--hard, imperious, unforgiving. Well, his Scotch religion [Presbyterian Scotch Calvinism] was made up by men who prayed on hills and high crags, and learnt to look down on the world more than to look up at heaven.
Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak."
SELAH
CODA
Midnight in Dostoevsky by Warren Falcon
[Note: Quotation marked passages are from The Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dostoevsky]
for Spider
"Alyosha, I shall set off from here...loving
with one's inside, with one's stomach..."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Is it
feathers
dawn shoe
through
which
blood
casings
mourn
the Orange
Moon?
Alyosha
the old
animal heat
turns in on
itself
burns
beneath skin
the bone bruise
fuses out
against what
yearning once
meant in
wetlands
between
navel
moon
corona
Anubus (1)
'There are moments, and it is only a matter of
five or six seconds, when you feel the presence
of the eternal harmony…a terrible thing is the
frightful clearness with which it manifests itself
and the rapture with which it fills you.If this
state were to last more than five seconds the
soul could not endure it and would have to
disappear." - Fyodor Dostoevsky (re: enlightenment)
belly laugh
the gut punch
and rabbit
that moment
of consent
entwined
with bridges
rooftops
orange sky
concrete
asphalt
and Anubus
a cigarette
each hand a
bottle of gin
a back pocket
search for
quinine the
brine (2) of Amun (3)
the run-on
trousers limp
the cobbled
street where
a spring
silvers
beneath
navel
moon
corona
Anu 'n' An (4)
"If, after your kiss, he goes away
untouched, mocking at you, do not
let that be a stumbling-block to you.
It shows his time has not yet come."
"My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt."
avenue smells
singed
hair
humming
boy hums
pokes bits
of scalp on
the walk
his small
white thumbs
alone touch
the white
lattice kiosk
sells
the
Stranger's
face again
navel
moon
corona
Ubis (5)
"The centripetal force on our planet is still
fearfully strong...I know I shall fall on the
ground and kiss those stones"
**
Quotation marked passages are from
The Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
[Footnotes 1 - 5 refer to ancient deities of Egypt, Mesopotamia]
1 = dog deity of Egypt
2 "brine of men" means "tears" of men
3 Egyptian god of sun and air
4 Anu (also known as An) is the sky-god (and wind) in Mesopotamian mythology
5 Ubis is the god Thoth, the most ancient of Egyptian deities
**
This link will open to another essay related to what is above:
Sin Eating, Transgression and the Trivialization of the Sacred
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