The Dream Of The Darkman - The Misdeeds Of Our Dreams Part Two

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[Daguerreotype photo of German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. Photo is in the public domain.]

Prologue to Pere's Letter and Dream:

"...In this dream I leap from hill to roof to cliff to church ledge equally at home in the boulevard and the hedge, the city and the valley creche, the height and the hole; I feel something for the mother, her son, the Dame, the human bits and parts parceled and packed, parked under the cobbled streets but the feeling/emotion is remote subjected to the detached overview and perspective of larger Vision/Mission--Impersonal Forces are at work in the World, in humans, too, almost especially so, therefore sentimentality is dangerous - compassion is not - although I cannot stop to comfort or explain (if I know at all) what is going on and wherefore to the Dame of the Manor, the Great Mother. I must to my bags then swiftly fly off to some destination/destiny as yet to be known by the Dark Man though he at least intuitively leans toward that place, unclear destination, a furthering mission..." - Pere Bleubols, excerpted from his letter to the Bishop in which he recounts and speaks of his "Dream Of The Dark Man". Read the blogspot essay for the letter and the dream.

"This God is no longer miles of abstract space away from you in an extra-mundane sphere. This divinity is not a concept in a theological textbook, or in the Bible; it is an immediate thing, it happens in your dreams at night, it causes you to have pains in the stomach, diarrhea, constipation, a whole host of neuroses...If you try to formulate it, to think what the collective unconscious is after all, you wind up by concluding that it is what the Prophets were concerned with; it sounds exactly like some things in the Old Testament. There God sends plagues upon people, he burns their bones in the night, he injures their kidneys, he causes all sorts of troubles. Then you come naturally to the shocking dilemma: Is that really God? Is God a neurosis?...Now that is a shocking dilemma, I admit, but when you think consistently and logically, you come to the conclusion that God is a most shocking problem. And that is the truth, God has shocked people out their wits." -C.G. Jung, Letters Vol. 2, p. 391

"All opposites are of God, therefore man must bend to this burden; and in so doing he finds that God in his "oppositeness" has taken possession of him, incarnated himself in him. He has become a vessel filled with divine conflict." - C.G. Jung, "Answer to Job" in Psychology and Religion: West and East, C.W., 11, par. 659

God has knowledge of the opposites but not the experience of their effect. He has experienced only their peaceful unity...The repressed value contains transformative energies and a consciousness of its own; that to achieve consciousness and discover the nature of one's own inferiority it is at times necessary to go against one's own ego-dominated commandments.
-- Charles Ponce, Working the Soul, pgs. 68-69


This is the fourth essay focused upon retired Catholic Priest, Pere Bluebols, who, as has been demonstrated, struggles deeply and richly with the meaning of existence, personal and "otherwise." He does not eschew hard questions or living them, preferring to eschew the easier collective "answers" of popular culture and religion. A lonely man, he practices the Presence of God, as well as the Divine Absence through which, truth be told, all humans live, that sacred dialectic psychologically experienced in and between both Presence and Absence-as-Presence. The reader may find the previous three essays on Pere on the blogspot.

For this month's essay on dreams and dream work I eagarly submit for the reader's interest Pere Bluebol's "Dream Of The Dark Man" as not only an indication of one man's personal mythology but also as a meditation upon the transpersonal level of dream work, specifically of shadow work, done not only for one's personal integration and individuation but, as Jung wrote much of, also for healing the evident split in the Western god-image, both good and evil. Jung contends that if each individual struggles to integrate - reclaim shadow projections, both human and divine - into human personality they contribute to the transformation of the as yet to be transformed Western god-image which evolves, as do all god-images everywhere, as humans evolve in consciousness in space and time, meaning, individual, clan, culture and civilization. Here is where personal and divine transformation occurs, from the bottom up, from the dynamic tension between both, both contingent upon the other for some as yet understood yet intuited understanding that, as Sir Eddington once said, "Something, we know not what, is doing something, we know not what."

Thus one can work dreams on three levels; usually in the first and second-intermediate stages of therapy/analytical work the personal dimension of the dream is worked all the while knowing (or not) that the transpersonal (archetypal) dimension is present as foundation from and to which the personal psychological "complexes" express and refer consciously back to, the transpersonal depth dimensions and function of the psyche. This is essentially a religious function, religious here understood etymologically as linking back to original, fructifying, and ultimately mysterious Sources/Forces.

The second-intermediate stage begins to more deeply amplify the dreams from archetypal perspectives as the client progresses in understanding and integration of early personal history. The archetypal layers can be more explicitly drawn upon and amplified to broaden the client's understanding of what can be called their "personal mythology" so-called because their awareness now begins to consciously include and recognize the archetypal, mythic dimensions of their existence, indeed, all existence. Myth is here understood to be archetypal, really real, not the still current understanding of myth as a fictional metaphorical story referring to"nothing but" some non- or less real, merely imaginal idea or thing. Again, the current belief is that the imaginal realm, the imagination, is a product of the ego and not as many have intuited, which Jung and others have emphasized, the more really Real because it derives from the archetypal, ultimately mysterious depths of the collective unconscious. Here one may want to access Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth PBS series - there is also a book - of renown where Campbell clearly and vitally reconnects, which is the function of religion and good psychology, the viewer/reader to the living archetypal dimensions which myths mediate and reconnect us to.

Third level dream work which is already explicated in the latter part of the paragraph above presumes working the personal historical/developmental first and second/intermediate levels of psychological development with consequential growing awareness of the relationship between the personal and transpersonal realms. Holistically, simultaneously, all three levels are present yet the client may be consciously, psychologically living and experiencing one level more than the other two. The therapist's function is to be as aware as possible of and to hold all three levels though the client must experientially work in and through one level to another. This process is more of a linearly moving spiral which honors and acknowledges the presence of personal and collective past as it grows forward in a dialectic of expansion and contraction, of progression and regression in order to incorporate the prior which is foundational to the evolving "new". This therefore presumes that the therapist has and ongoingly submits herself/himself to the continual scrutiny and counsel of the unconscious, the Self, Jung's term for the greater totality of the human psyche, and with some humble, brave and consciously human, all too human others who have worked, and continue to, deeply with the Unconscious, personal and transpersonal. Shadow work is ongoingly paramount throughout all evolutionary stages of individuation. As much as we all wish it otherwise, there is no final transcending of the dialectical, psychological human experience. In fact, Jung immensely has helped us here by illustrating and demonstrating in his work that this "something" which Eddington refers to in the quote above is dependent upon the incarnated human vessel, the all too human individual for Its own "we know not what" but is hinted at in the fact of development and evolution of human consciousness. This "we know not what" is evolving to and has an intrinsic, intimate and co-dependence/co-creative relationship to the material, incarnate realm and it's creatures. I use co-creative here not in the inflated New Age sense of the word which inflates the ego "as a god" and which actually reinforces Freudian psychology's mistake that the divine, the ineffable, is a creation of the ego and not the other way around. Other paragraphs below will go into this more.

To expand and reiterate the stages above, Pere's dream can be worked on a purely personalistic psychological level, the first and second levels, as to what the dream reveals about the this psychic state. Dream interpretation can remain at this level and is always of great practical value for the dreamer. However Jung's as yet to be understood discovery of the archetypal unconscious can also be traced in dreams, as in the one below, for Jung's revolutionary contribution to psychology, one of many, is that every individual psyche is a necessary and sacred vessel for the transformation of none other than God, rather, the God-image. This term refers to the images of God evolved and inherited throughout the evolution of human consciousness as humans began to image what was at first a lasting compelling yet mercurial intuition, that there is more to conscious human existence "than meets the thigh or eye". This "something more" is independent of, objective to the material realm and yet appears to also be a part of (even with its perceived to be/experienced apartness from) incarnate existence, "all creatures," including the human, "here below". To quote the mystic and "all too human" priest/poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, this intuition is that "the world is charged with the grandeur of God like shining from shook foil", that this grandeur is a holy terror and "a shocking problem" for which both earliest and contemporary humans are compelled tremblingly yet boldly to seek, understand, appease and serve. The Western God-image is clearly a split entity, both good and evil, more unconscious than conscious, more a force of nature like a volcano or tempest and yet, and yet...

Jung discovered that individuals struggling with their own part of good and evil are also carrying the tremendous task and burden of that good and evil of and for the "still untransformed God-image". Suffering one's opposites is intimately involved in the transformation of God, as well. Anyone who has truly been gripped by the unconscious, by "God as a trauma", as Jung has characterized, deeply knows that there is no ego inflation in accepting this sacred task. Pere Bluebols dream recounted below depicts this divine duty. The Dark Man of the dream consciously lives to this task albeit never with full comprehension of the immensity of it.

The Dark Man of Pere Bluebol's dream is not inflated. He is not like the popular vampire heroes of current Western movies and books. The current fascination with vampires does reveal a growing intuition of the ideas above, in the fictional and cinematic romanticized vampire images the West is beginning to have a dawning awareness of what Pere Bluebols' Dark Man accomplishes- he is a conscious walker in, between "both worlds" of good and evil, he is light and dark, conscious and unconscious. This work will be accomplished in individuals and in the fullness (and emptiness) of time perhaps the human species will evolve into developed capacities of the "side by side" consciousness as opposed to earliest and still operative "either/or" consciousness. This shall not be accomplished quickly but, rather, thickly and wickedly as our "misdeeds of dreams" are "wicked". Concurrently with popular culture's vampires and gurus, adulterations of Eastern religions in the West find many nouveau Hindus uttering the "namaste" salutation, a sacred Hindu salutation which means, "I salute/bow to the god in you". No harm done in that as far as it goes. What most do not comprehend is that this "god" is also split, good and evil, and a "most shocking problem" (note the thousands of deities and semi-deities in Hinduism which reveals the universal problem of "the one and the many"). Well meant, sincere, naive and glib "namaste" curtsies shall remain one dimensional until one has the capacity to own, wrestle with, and truly integrate the "na-monster" in self, other, and the "god" within you. With Pere Bluebols I bow to the monster in me and you consciously. There has enough serious scholarship the world over regarding human history, the history of human consciousness (which is a history of "god images") and also now has experienced observation and participation with Eastern and other religions' god-images. Although cultural approaches to and expressions of god-images differs widely, the monstrous nature of self, other, and gods are kindred and very much present and active. Why else would scriptures and rituals past and present all around the world beg god and gods to remember their good side?

Na-monster.

Now to Pere's letter to the Bishop and the dream of the Dark Man.

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For now we see through a glass, darkly;
but then face to face: now I know in part;
but then shall I know even as also I am known. - I Corinthians 13:12, King James Bible

"Jesus says: "Men indeed think I have come to bring peace to the world. But they do not know that I have come to bring to the world discord, fire, sword, war. Indeed, if there are five (people) in a house, they will become three against two and two against three--father against son and son against father--and they will be lifted up (to the state of) being solitaries."

The end of the passage makes clear the purpose of inciting discord. It is to achieve a solitary condition, the state of being an autonomous individual. This can be achieved only by separation from unconscious identification with others. - Edward Edinger, Ego and Archetype, pg. 131

"All opposites are of God, therefore man must bend to this burden; and in so doing he finds that God in his "oppositeness" has taken possession of him, incarnated himself in him. He has become a vessel filled with divine conflict." - C.G. Jung, "Answer to Job" in Psychology and Religion: West and East, C.W., 11, par. 659


Dearest Bishop D'Boue [Boue means mud in French],

Thank you for the subscription to the science journal. I reread your letter with great relish and with great appreciation for the tremendous patience you have with my ongoing battles 'twixt and 'tween heaven and earth. This, as you know, is still the battle of all humanity caught between the animal instinctual and the rational/spiritual. I seem to personally embody this conflict ongoingly.

...As you know I have been in a 'hermit' phase since the recent public trial and purgings...already a spiritual exile long before those Inchling Inquisitors I now am more than ready to move to my own self-chosen Patmos...I am a mendicant now without real temple to kneel in...to quote once again my beloved Rimbaud, "Ah, I am so forsaken I will worship at any shrine impulses toward perfection," only the word perfection, as you know, you who bother with the roots of all things including words, this misused word actually means complete, as in evolving in space in time, ripening like fruit, into maturity and readiness...

I dreamed last night I was in an old European city, a Copenhagen, Stockholm, Brussels, Bruges-type city, late 1800's, gas lamps in the streets), an old city, heavy with something, some spirit/zeitgeist...I am a dark powerful man-force whom zombie/daemon/vampire-like creatures roaming the city ignore since I apparently have some of them, their energy and consciousness, in me or I am partially one of them (a hopeful indicator, I think, of ongoing shadow integration) which allows me to safely deliver a mother (my mother in the dream but NOT my mother in waking reality) and her son (just-adolescent, perhaps my baby brother, about 13 y/o or so with that fuzz just beginning over the upper lip) to a "safe house" owned by a still beautiful, late mid-aged blond/graying woman of magnificent eyes and bearing. She is the widow of a powerful man and prior to whatever had befallen the City had been the 'queen' matriarch of society, and not superficially...she has bearing, depth, wisdom, she has suffered and suffers still bearing it with dignity deep concern and pain. She looks like a combination of my late and beautiful friend Madame Marianne, who died last December, and Madame Curie with some similarity in appearance, too, to some Nordic actress or other whose name I cannot recall. I am compelled to leave having accomplished the delivery of mother and son to the "safe house".

The Boschers, as I now call them after demons depicted in Heironymous Bosche paintings, look like enfleshed gargoyles of various frightening visages and bodies. They load dead bodies into vaults underneath the cobbled streets...they do not give me much notice as I comfortably pass by them. At some point they are stacking old blown glass laboratory tubes (science lab equipment of late 1800's) in which a forearm or lower leg with foot attached are sealed for future feedings/experiments.

I am tall, medium dark skin color, pockmarked face with long flowing black hair, caped, wearing black expensive breeches/clothes, white shirt of the bourgeoisie, shiny black boots moving quickly with purpose to somewhere away from the safe house. At some point I wear expensive running shoes/sneakers, silver in color, very designed like a lot of contemporary sneakers the new Droogs now wear, which enable me to leap easily, almost weightlessly, over barriers, up rocky hillsides, and down from high places...my arms easily grasp tree limbs, balcony railings, cross-bars, eaves, bricks, pipes and protrusions through the city propelling me over cobbled streets below and over rooftops to get quickly to where I am going of which I am not sure in the dream. I am somehow invisibly guided.

Clearly I am of the "dark side" or have enough of it consciously in me now (rather than unconsciously) to allow me to move through the city, the countryside, the continent now full of the Boschers and other daemons and vampire/zombie-like beings going about the work of science...I am to assist both sides, Boschers/other underworld beings/forces and the humans (I am a mix of both) in this difficult transition during the upsurge of chthonic underworld beings, energies, awareness (brought about by science, Freud, Jung, etc.), the repressed content of the human and collective unconscious now erupting into the once safe, secure Victorian, Christian hierarchical society where church and state ruled by high "social crust" dominate the proletariat, earthy, instinctual, considered biologically and morally lower and mentally/spiritually inferior by the bourgeois power and spiritual elite.

As I "fly" away to the city outskirts I suddenly realize that I have left my traveling bags back at the safe house/manor. The bags have necessary things for my journey and task important enough for me to quickly turn around to retrieve them. Close to the safe house I pass two Boschers still stacking the human flesh filled glass tubes under the cobbled street in a vault...I pick up two tubes and toss them to the Boschers who catch them, stack them, me helping them out as I pass. Upon reentering the safe house the Dame of the House, the majestic beautiful woman who once was top of the socio-political, literati/philosophical strata of the city and nation, looks at me with concern and pain in her clear piercing blue eyes...she turns away toward some slow and heavy task as I bend to my bags intent on my 'mission' whatever that may be, thinking, "no time to comfort her...must move on..."

I can easily reenter this dream and continue it...it is very real...I can sense, hear, smell, feel the ambiance and the mental/spiritual air of the time and place, the city and the period it all is taking place in. I am both good and evil, conscious and unconscious, human and Boscher (partake of the underworld realm)...the post-modern sneakers, silver colored, allude to the god Mercury/Hermes who is the traveler of and between all the realms, who is both criminal and saint, who plays both or all sides, who has some mission of developing consciousness which does not exclude any realm, upper, middle, lower nor values from evil to good and all between...I move swiftly, a kind of earth flight low to ground but in flight and touching the earth lightly

...a whole era/aeon is undergoing a tremendous shift, a troubled, troubling, dangerous, violent, reactive time...Science has unsettled the old paradigm of God on His throne running the universe in a hierarchy of good and evil His powerful Representatives on the Earth identified solely with the All Good, whereas the Boschers serve the "God of Science", the Lord of this World, eating/dissecting the human body and Nature. I stride between and within both paradigms, old and new, more of the old where magic silver shoes can help one 'fly', where being partially of the dark forces allows one to pass unharmed, even to assist, the Boschers and other dark ones experimenting compulsively urged by the emerging zeitgeist/spirit/god of science/rationality which is the 'New'...yet the 'New' foolishly, inflatedly "thinks" it is not a part of or beholden to history, the past; it hovers, if you will, born like Athena from the head of Zeus, without mother, without history, full blown/full formed with no moral obligation to history, to matter/Mater including humans or Nature...Nature is reduced to an 'it' to be crafted to serve only the human will/ego...but the Boschers are driven compulsively to have what humans have, capacities for consciousness, emotions, subtleties, spirit, empathy as yet unable to fully integrate/embody these human things...they partake of a dark Eucharistic rite of eating human bodies, drinking human blood in hopes of some transubstantiation and transformation from monster to human.

Your timely and soothing letter with the subscription to the science journal open for me a deeper door to the scientific realm at least 100 or more years ahead of where my dream locates me, late 1800's, as European civilization begins Its outward decay/decline with the release of repressed instincts and shadow surges up in individuals, cultures, nations, continents...all this the necesary antecedent to new consciousness incorporating past and the hopeful 'new' integration and god-image.

My gargoyle self is now fleshed out and moving in this dream...his mission? help the mother and the son, the Dame of the House which is to render conscious service to the Great Mother, AND also to assist the Boschers/dark ones serving Her unconsciously to become serve Her consciously in and through this transition, these rough beasts "slouching toward Bethlehem to be born" (W.B. Yeats in his poem, 'The Second Coming'), instinct and rationality in more conscious integration...or some dream of it which is yet to come...

Synchronistically, while sitting at the Cafe Rue de Repos rereading your letter today, writing, reading, amplifying the dream, watching it unfold imaginally, writing it all down, an old, still elegant though faded Victoria LTD automobile parks right in front of me, old world splendour of a car, large, Cadillac-like, jaded copper/gold color green tinged--that verdigris "micturation of metals" that the alchemists speak of. The man driving it got out and I was shocked to see an older version of the Dark Man complete with badly scarred/pocked face, thick dark brown hair pulled back into a pony tale. He wore black boots, black jeans, dark brown shirt with a gold embroidered vest having an Eastern European/romani flare to the design...he looked part native american and part Romani/gypsy...I noticed on the large dashboard in the car interior that there were two black and white European-style images of the Our Blessed Mother (not the Virgin of Guadalupe whom you know I adore) along with what appeared to be a sacred card in a red felt frame with a red-lettered hand inscribed prayer.

The driver went to the car trunk, opened it revealing full bags overflowing with clothes, some scattered about, and a bottle of red wine, an Italian vintage whose label I recognized, inexpensive but sufficient for a boiled potato, a crust of bread with butter, something rustic like that...he fished a coat out of a rag heap, closed the trunk, put it on then reopened the trunk to adjust the wine bottle further into the rags...he walks away...while watching all this the hair was standing on my arms, my neck goose bumped and prickly...this is just still too too passing strange...I write in my journal, "he looks just like the man in the dream, the dream me, only maybe 10 or 15 years older, my age now, late 50's/early 60's, but large, in good shape but for a bit of middle-aged stomach, wide hips, barrel-chested with strong arms, large liver-spotted hands, a powerful feel about him like a medicine man or wizard, Rasputin meets the Righteous Reaper and the Dear Savior, sharp clear eyes, shining..."

I tried to see the car tags as he later pulled away but looked up too late from my writing to be able to make out where he is from...Canada? Wisconsin? Couldn't make it out...damn. I half expected to find him parked in front of my quarters in the church upon return home. Not.

This dreams seals it...there is now no wonder why I could no longer be in the Enclave d'Esprit Spirale which inflatedly thinks it can be "all Light", naively romanticizing Nature and the chthonic forces of which I believe the Boschers represent in the dream. To what purpose can I turn or guide, if at all, the Boschers and other related 'ill-k"? Who leads all this if it is One Entity at all? or some greater force partaking of Dark and Light, some Archon, some Entelechy experimenting, forcing, thrusting, using human consciousness to what purpose which moves manipulatively through what humans call "Good" and "Evil"...we personify the Powers/Archetypes but these ultimately defy such personifications which are images and embodiments, hints and conjectures with hiccups of their work/way/will under the push of the Force...

...In this dream I leap from hill to roof to cliff to church ledge equally at home in the boulevard and the hedge, the city and the valley creche, the height and the hole; I feel something for the mother, her son, the Dame, the human bits and parts parceled and packed, parked under the cobbled streets but the feeling/emotion is remote subjected to the detached overview and perspective of larger Vision/Mission--Impersonal Forces are at work in the World, in humans, too, almost especially so, therefore sentimentality is dangerous - compassion is not - although I cannot stop to comfort or explain (if I know at all) what is going on and wherefore to the Dame of the Manor, the Great Mother. I must to my bags then swiftly fly off to some destination/destiny as yet to be known by the Dark Man though he at least intuitively leans toward that place, destination, furthering mission...

To be continued. Must be noted that the Dark Man was not inflated, was not full of himself and his powers though he strode with magnificent assurance, authority, power and courage through the city and the world. There was no question as to his right to exist, to be other than he is, of both Forces and "teams", both good and evil, a man with purpose, no 'moral confusion' but with a sense of ethical obligation to the Forces and the creatures born of such, human and otherwise, a mediary between what appear to be opposing worlds/energies, the opposites Jung writes so much about.

Please accept my gratitude along with my apologies for sending you all this and taking up so much of your valuable time. It aids me so to know you are constantly present to receive my rantings, my prayers, my quandaries with such equanimity and genuine interest. I am forever indebted and grateful.

Yours humbly,

Pere BB

Hell To Pay At Work & Play With Psyche's Trickster Child While Lurching Toward A New Central Myth

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[Dual Dog - My title for this sculpture exhibited in a Princeton, NJ sculpture garden. Click on it to enlarge the image. Photo by Warren Falcon, September 2008. Currently seeking the names of the sculptor and sculpture to give full and due credit]
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[Tres Coyotes. Public domain. I found this image on the Web and believe it belongs to the public domain. If using this image is in violation of copyright law, please email me [falconwarren@gmail.com] and I will remove it immediately.Click on the photo to enlarge the image.]


Jung was the first to formulate the problem of modern man as mythlessness...It is evident to thoughtful people that Western society no longer has a viable, functioning myth. Indeed, all the major world cultures are approaching, to a greater or lesser extent, the state of mythlessness. The breakdown of a central myth is like the shattering of a vessel containing precious essence: the fluid is spilled and drains away, soaked up by the surrounding undifferentiated matter. Meaning is lost. In its place, primitive and atavistic [reverting/regressing to a past style, manner, outlook, approach, or activity; throwback] contents are reactivated. Differentiated values disappear and are replaced by the elemental motivations of power and pleasure, or else the individual is exposed to emptiness and despair. With the loss of awareness of transpersonal reality (God), the inner and outer anarchies of compelling personal desires take over...It is the loss of a containing myth that is the root cause of our current individual and social distress, and nothing less than the discovery of a new central myth will solve the problem for the individual and for society.

- Edward F. Edinger, The Creation of Consciousness, Jung's Myth for Modern Man, Inner City Books, 1984, from pgs. 9-11.

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"I blow my nose at you! I wave my private parts at your aunties! Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time!" - French soldier character in the film, "Monty Python And The Search For The Holy Grail"


Can you not hear Trickster laughing, warning in goose-bump raising howls that there will be hell to pay for willful stupidity, for willful ignoring of psychological depths insisting on emerging into consciousness which cannot and should not be escaped via perfectionist spiritualish fantasies of transcendence?

If one courts and sports with Trickster be prepared for egg on the face and shit on the shoe, winged or not, eating a large portion of humble pie which "is always hard to swallow with your pride" (lyrics from a Graham Nash song). Being a dissembler and dissolver he will dissolve egoic masks of individuals, groups, organizations, programs of all flavors that are too self-important, too pompous and self-inflated. He will use "sex, lies, and videotape" to break down donut sugar piety in order to bring up now-insistent and spiritually incorrect, repressed essentials demanding integration toward greater wholeness/holdness. He wounds the healer and heals the wounder. He transforms all values in an ongoing evaluating and revaluing, unsettling those values which calcify into sacred cows. From Greek myth one of the first acts upon the trickster god Hermes birth was to steal the sacred cows of His brother Apollo, god of law and order, of rules and regulations, of theologies and systems, of drawing lines and planting flags declaring rights and wrongs derived mostly from opinionated collective throngs, be they Olympian or human.

According to C.G. Jung, Hermes/Mercury, the Greek/Roman Trickster god, is "the patron deity of depth psychology" who descends into the depths of the unconscious by way of the personal unconscious into the transpersonal (archetypal) layers in order to bring archetypal energy to everyday mind for conscious, always creative/destructive integration. When this material/energy crosses the threshold into awareness it greatly rearranges the world within and around/surrounds. Trickster makes, remakes, deranges, rearranges, destroys, ploys and re-ploys established orders and worlds, his investment in order tenuous at best, ordure and disorder being more his style. When Trickster works you over it is best to smile while you can, oft through clinched teeth, caught in one's own trap and deception (and often enough in those of sanctimonious others), adhered to one's "absolutes" eventually revealed to be follies, fortresses and weapons used to stay the uncertainties of existence but for that only one which is incontrovertible, the constancy of change, the birth and death and rebirth and re-death of meaning.

Trickster is subject to his own medicine which if nothing else hints us that there is a tandem process of change, of inexorable involution/evolution/dissolution/re-solution/revolution within sacred/archetypal dimensions, as well. Thus, when William Butler Yeat's says in his poem "The Second Coming" that "things fall apart, the center cannot hold" one can know and take some comfort that what is occurring within and around one is not only of one's personal making. Something, some "rough beast", collective/social and transpersonal is undergoing transformational processes and, Sphinx-like, composed of many parts of historical symbols, is "slouching toward Bethlehem to be born." Some new god image which incorporates and holds shadow, the shadow of god and nature, human and divine, personal and collective, encroaches without abeyance nor is turned away or transformed with easy affirmations and "positive thinking" which reinforces their opposite.

Trickster, a god of making-consciousness, continually rents the contents of consciousness asunder into an "unknowing" confirming that there is great wisdom in universal human knowledge that one must become comfortable with this not knowing. "One must go by way of dispossession" (St. John of the Cross) of what was known to be certain, exact and true and dwell in emptiness ("kenosis" in Christian mysticism), vacated of familiar internal and external worlds, forsaken by once were loves. and stays against the swarm and storm. In many indigenous medicine wheels knowledge becomes an enemy when reified/calcified into "letter and law", into dogma and doctrine. This is not to forsake knowing but to understand it that knowledge is a stage toward widsom derived from alchemical personal and collective cauldrons at high boil with necessary, often merciless, crushing dissolution of old, familiar, and "sacred" forms, ideas, doctrines, truths.

This quicksilver Hermetic/Mercurial nature of consciousness making suggests a more fluid process involved in becoming conscious which partakes of its own open creativity allowing for all possibilities, in fact, insisting upon them, moving toward "we know not what for sure" though we are confronted with the plethora of what the Buddhists call "the ten thousand thing". Carl Jung suggests that this movement is toward "meaning-in-mythos", that humans live symbolic lives, are contained in myths (most often dimly or unconsciously and identified with the myths), that an ongoing study of one's own dreams and of the dreams of history/culture reveals that humans seek and create/recreate meaningful patterns which render our lives a significance in and beyond ourselves. Archetypes, primal patterns, are independent though interactive appearing to be stable but also undergo changes from human (and nature's) interaction with them. They assume no final shape though they do take shape when perceived, they re-pattern themselves in an ongoing dialectic of this then that, then this/that, or neither or either depending upon human or divine weather and chance, or fate, or both, chasing out of the gate of awareness like the black and white horses, opposites, tethered and harnessed to the chariot in the image of the Tarot "Chariot" card, the strong and challenged charioteer struggling to master the repelling propulsion of these two beasts at natural odds mindfully prodded to move forward in one direction. This image informs us that the very conflict of the opposites (the black and white horses)mindfully engaged moves the vehicle of consciousness, of knowing, forward. This Trickster "vehicle" ("yana" in sanskrit) "mixes it up", keeps the creative/destructive pattern, patter and pratter going as rumors and ultimately humors of "order" for where there is order, ordure cannot be too far behind. In common English vulgate how often do we exclaim, "Bullshit!" when what appears to be ordered, measured, received truth is misused, misapplied and turned to convenient lies of the tricksterish "sage" redolent with "taurean ordure"?

But, importantly, thankfully, we are not left with ordure alone. Alchemy tells us that it is from the shit, the primal material, that gold is eventually derived; it does not spring from Zeus's head fully formed. Gold is made from hellish heat and recombinant elements burned then turned into precious metal symbolic of great value throughout the world. Trickster is this process of crush and burn and turn and in spite of himself and his skewing and screwing of set "laws" there are noticeable "habits of transformation" which seem to bear out in experience uniquely impressed and expressed via individuals and collectives. But lest we think we or Nature or Deity has finally arrived in terms of ultimate knowing and consciousness Trickster is the destroyer of that certainty. We get to argue with Trickster, to give him a taste of his own medicine realizing that he like all/us/we are "bozos on the consciousness-bus", big red noses, flaming red coronas of hair radiating from our tonsured pates, big floppy shoes hindering our gait, loudly sounding our retreats and advances giving us away lest we sneak up on some "Absolute Truth" then haplessly fall through the gap between the two front teeth of God, and to what end? What lies within and behind that gap? What is the story there? Dare we ask? or speculate? Trickster grins a big toothy grin, gap and all lending and rending entire universes.

Of Psychopomp, Psycho-pomposity and Trickster's Romp Though A Spiritual-ish Group Or, Fuck The Gap! My Front Teeth Are Missing! A Confessorial Tale And Tattle-tail Dream

Hermes/Trickster is chiefly known as a guide, a "psychopomp", "psyche" meaning "soul" and "pomp" meaning "sending, sender." Thus He is a "soul sender" in, through, and beyond official boundaries. He is the "cosmic blender" with one setting, "High Frappe"; one can only reach for the plug to unplug the machinery from its apparently indiscriminate mixing of the most disparate ingredients for as Guide and Teacher, Hermes is a troublemaker, a boundary and rule breaker, a thief, a liar, loudmouth truth teller with egg on his ever changing face. He's not "appropriate." He is a god of messes and makes plenty of them. He dwells in them, an equal opportunity trickster manifesting chaos in both secular and spiritual settings where He is duty-bound to mug each without apology, with or without "rhyme or reason", often using both! The more Light-identified the individual or group the more likely an encounter with Hermes/Trickster is fated. He raucously exclaims, "the King has no clothes..." which also means that his subjects have no clothes since they've projected their inner King upon the outer one and thus find themselves ungarbed though garbled with a Babel of accusations while proclaiming their innocence. To this Trickster proclaims, "ah, what a load of crap!" or like Cher in "Moonstruck"" as she slaps Nicholas Cage commanding him to "snap out of it!". Trickster shape shifts to shock and startle bringing a new way of perceiving reality, seeing it as it is, not as one visualizes it New Agely, egoically willing it to be otherwise. Even if one can and does will it to be otherwise this does not exclude that otherwise from Tricksterish intentions and reinventions preventing certainty but always inventing tears and laughter.

Trickster is Psyche's child, not Spirituality's. Spirituality formed to escape from Psyche, from unfathomable, incomprehensible and therefore frightening depths, though it is a product of Psyche yet in hubris proclaims itself to be of greater value, nostrums of Narcissus/narkosis the "soma" drug most often imbibed. I witnessed and haplessly participated in Trickster's gripping of and dissolving a spiritual-ish group which, though it intended to "heal the split between spirituality and psychology", continually relegated psychology to "red-headed step child" status, not of equal value to "spirituality" which, of course, kept the very split it purportly desired to heal going. Thus, one August day while on vacation with some friends and colleagues of this overly identified-with-spirituality group and after difficult and troubling conversations between one of my colleagues and the de facto leader of this group who was unwittingly used by Trickster (and other participants, my inflated self greatly included) to dissolve the group, I went to the bathroom to ponder and shit. While letting go on my turd tuffet - which humbles one and all reminding that we are animals "after all is said and dunged", we holy animals who dung in our own dwellings - I suddenly heard just outside the open window the loudly resonant, cackling howls of at least three shrill coyotes.

Flushing fast and quickly spraying in vain "New Aeon Shit Coat Air Freshener", I called to my colleagues to "come quick! listen up! the coyotes are warning that there is real mischief at work and much shit ahead. No one shall be exempted." We immediately went to a sweat lodge on the property to sweat and fret for once Trickster has sprayed and marked one and others for his bitter "soul sending" medicine one can only pray and return yet again to conscious shadow work all the while knowing that scapegoating and shadow projecting will run unchecked in groups, and it did and still does, that shitty whiff-gift that keeps on giving. Willful ignoring of shadow and Trickster guarantees disaster and perhaps the greatest disaster is to to be ignored completely by the gods, to be left to one's own unconscious, inflated devices. Even though catching the gods attention, especially Trickster's, means trouble while in their gaze and grip, the eventual grace wrung is not of saintliness and rumored spiritual high-stature but of simple, humble humanity participating in imperfect yet creative encounter of self and other, newly awake to being only one member of vast uncountable choirs of beings in a tricksterish unfolding/enfolding cosmos creating and destroying entire galaxies like a child who crumbles a cookie in her hand merely because she can, a display of will to power and power over.

Growth and transformation is to be gained from struggle thus is Trickster's domain. Intuition, valuable as it is, does not really trump wisdom hard won from enduring vicissitudes in space and time. Intuition "drops in" to one and all heedless of quality of consciousness and development or moral character or social or spiritual stature. It impresses but does not necessarily transform. It often entertains delusions of Tom Thumb-like grandeur - "what a good boy am I!" thinking that the pie, the plum, the thumb and the eye/I are of his own god-like making. It is no accident that intuition has been subjected to dimly lit parlors or now New Age light-flooded lofts, reduced to fascinating entertainments with vague "metaphysics" manufactured more from slick wishes and wonders in the consumer wanderland of Trickster's "secret knowledge", paying participants sucker punched and punch drunk from table tipping and raps enraptured and intellectually, often psychologically/spiritually, fractured and disappointed from projected, promised and expected "enlightenment" with materialistic gain to prove one's spiritual arrival.

In wisdom's struggle transcendence (escape) is not gained for it is no needed. Transcendence, that fantasy of perfectionist religions and groups of "escaping to a fiddle beyond the pail" (Rainer Rilke) cannot surpass what is to be gained from incarnation, individuation, and the transformative struggle of psychological integration (also a dream but with practical incremental gains) which include all of the gods, sacred energies all, from warrior energies, erotic energies, to more subtly nuanced inflections establishing orders of history from which now and future generations may learn to build or take down "these lucastrine cities" of gods and humaity:

These lacustrine cities grew out of loathing
Into something forgetful, although angry with history.
They are the product of an idea: that man is horrible, for instance,
Though this is only one example...

The worst is not over, yet I know
You will be happy here. Because of the logic
Of your situation, which is something no climate can outsmart.
Tender and insouciant by turns, you see

You have built a mountain of something,
Thoughtfully pouring all your energy into this single monument,
Whose wind is desire starching a petal,
Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears.

- John Ashberry, from Rivers and Mountains (1966)


As one banished now from more than one overtly spiritual guild, lucastrine cities all, I have had to bear stains that are truly my own. I have also had to painfully discover and differentiate those stains which are NOT mine and to return them to those who refuse to reclaim them or who cannot, from psychological wounding, weakness or outright hubris, bear the pain of seeing their own authentic sinfulness and guilt. Many these days in New Age "perfectionist trances" - those of organized religion have been numerously exposed and analyzed by history - refuse to acknowledge authentic evil in existence, their own and others. These days an inflated, naive, magical slight of hand dismisses evil and shadow to mere "gremlins" with whom one does a workshop dance, or pinches! thinking that Trickster can be appeased and transformed by such cartoon-like psycho-spiritual flickers which are ultimately egoic entertainments and impotent wishful thinking, what Trungpa Rimpoche astutely calls "spiritual materialism" where profoundly/confoundingly real sacred images, rituals and powers are turned into consumer items for purchase in what Harvey Cox calls the "new gluttony" - spirituality - with "enlightenment by Ticketron" and a dumbing down dance with one's cutesy gremlins. Oy.

Ironically, unwittingly prophetic, the notes from which I am composing this essay were taught in the group mentioned above three years before its demise, then already in the paws and maws of the Trickster. Repeating myself (so that I may ultimately "get it") hubris is an equal opportunity inflation and self or group hypnotic trances of piety and god almightiness are some of the ugliest and most difficult parts of the pathways of individuation and shadow integration. To find oneself there may be occasion for denial, for battle and scapegoating but if one can remain conscious enough and eat authentic humble pie with one's real crow one may also see that real enlightenment, not the transcendence-inflected, namaste-tourretting, consumer-Ticketron-best seller spiritualities-Lite so currently prevalent, greater wholeness may be derived. This wholeness is not perfection. Trickster laughs at perfection. Quoting a taunting Monty Python character, Trickster says, "I blow my nose at you. I wave my private parts at your aunties!" Trickster the maker, breaker, expander of boundaries is more about wholeness, greater expansions of consciousness which can contain and hold tremendous conflicting opposites without demanding that they all "get along" in hypnotic group think, sacred or secular. Trickster is not a god of perfection but infection and inflections of all the spectrum of consciousness from red to violet/indigo. To vote as "best" for one or several colors over the full spectrum of colors manifests variously as neuroses and, in extreme, psychoses of various kinds, so-called "spiritualities" being perhaps the most disguised forms of psychoses since spiritual group-think sacrifices critical intelligence for sheep-like belief in a leader and systems which perpetuate faux-transcendence bestowing power on a leader and inner circle who call themselves "good guys" as opposed to all those "bad guys" out there out to get them and their power, their "spiritual" and material baubles.

In this light the Trickster is irreverent and sacrilegious. Since my own life is the best example I know of hubris and denial, of "dumb-ass" pomposity and pretenses, alas, I share the following dream had at the advent of my first year of training in a New Age seminary which warned not only of my own god almightiness and inflation but in retrospect that of the very program I was training in. To be fair the program was no exception. All programs, beset by and identified with archetypes beneath their ideals and missions, are unconsciously inflated and this dream would be appropriate to them as well. The dream:

I am to be crowned Bishop to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I am standing outside the front doors awaiting entry into the cathedral overflowing with parishioners there to witness my ordination. I wear the gold robes and the bishops miter. At the signal I knock loudly with my Crosier/Shepherd's Staff upon the door. I can hear it echoing throughout the vast spaciousness of the cathedral. The door slowly open, clouds of incense smoke billowing out into the secular city. I enter and slowly begin my walk down the central aisle to the altar at the other end of the cathedral. As I pass the initial crowds in the foyer I begin to hear gaspes and snickers of laughter. Nevermind. I am full of the august occasion of my inauguration and stay focused. As I continue to walk the aisle past smiling people who then begin to gasp and laugh I become annoyed. This laughter is inappropriate to the seriousness of the ocassion. Halfway down the aisle the din of laughter is too loud to ignore. I stop and wonder what to do. It is then that I feel a cool breeze up my legs to my ass. I reach behind to feel my back side and discover that the robes have somehow caught at my waist above my buttocks which are naked. I look back and see to my horror that I have not a human ass but that florid garish brightly colored ass of a mandrill. The crowd roars with laughter. I cringe in humiliation and shame. So much for sacredness and pomposity. A sure cure for spiritual inflation and taking one's self way too seriously. The laughter compensates for the too too seriousness and high mightiness of belief and affiliation/institution.

This is Trickster's dream. And though I have yet to shed the mandrill ass I can indeed laugh at myself and, of course, as required, at others knowing that Trickster is subject to his/her own medicine and is a Fool, too, for gods, humans, and all phenomena of existence.

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What follows is reprinted from my published notes on Hermes/Mercury [click here or copy and paste to read these notes:

Of Boundaries and Bounders, Hermes Makes & Breaks Them Without Apologies
Any discussion of boundaries calls for a presentation of the god of boundaries, Hermes/Mercury. According to C.G. Jung he is "the patron deity of depth psychology," which goes into the depths of the unconscious through the personal unconscious and into the transpersonal archetypal layers of the unconscious, to bring unconscious archetypes, energy, and content up over the boundary/threshold into consciousness.
Hermes is chiefly known as a guide or psychopomp, "psycho/psyche" meaning "soul" and "pomp" meaning "sending, sender." Thus He is a soul sender, in, through, and beyond official boundaries.

As Guide and Teacher, Hermes is a troublemaker, a boundary and rule breaker, a thief, a liar, and loudmouth truthteller. He's not "appropriate." He is a god of messes and makes plenty of them. He equally is an equal opportunity trickster manifesting chaos in both secular and "spiritual" settings where He is duty-bound to mug each without apology, with or without reason. The more Light-identified or Justice-identified the individual or group the more likely an encounter with Hermes is fated. He shouts out, "the king has no clothes..." or "ah, what a load of crap..." or like Cher in Moonstruck, as she slaps Nicholas Cage, "Snap out of it!". He's a trickster who shapeshifts to shock and startle, bringing a new way of perceiving reality, as it is, not as one visualizes it.

Hermes is not about safety. Safety for Hermes is being street smart, eyes wide open, canny, cunning and swift of foot and mind. He's a fast talker, a sideways walker-talker, speaking out of both sides of his mouth in order to gain something, to steal something hidden away in the unconscious in order to make conscious "by any means necessary" holy and unholy, writ, or wit, or twit, equally valuing the white between the lines, opening out or in to a "WHA'?" of mind.

Hermes, a god of occult, hidden knowledge, teaches by reversals, mistakes, sudden insight, and revelation. He is well-acquainted with the dark, the unconscious, the repressed, and forbidden, not only a protector of all wayfarers on official byways, but is the god and protector of thieves. He lies in wait, then springs upon and reshapes that which is set and stodgily staid into new revelations, new meanings, new formulations. He is the god of interpretations, of hermeneutics, which is the art of reading texts and finding the meaning "between the lines".

Hermes is a messenger deity, thus His winged helmet and feet. He carries messages between the upper world (the conscious), the lower world (the unconscious), and the inbetween world. In ancient times it was believed that if you entered the underworld without a guide, you would never come back. Hermes is that guide. He knows the ways of the demons there. He speaks "demon" and proclaims "shadow", and will shout it from the rooftops willy-nilly. He helps to negotiate and integrate the shadow, for He is a god of integrations, re- and dis- integrations in the depths of Dis (see William Blake's cosmological poem, "The Four Zoas" re: the Kingdom of Dis).

If one courts and sports with Hermes, be prepared for egg on the face and shit on the shoe, winged or not, and a large portion of humble pie which "is always hard to swallow with your pride" (lyrics from a Graham Nash song). Being a dissolver, He will dissolve groups, organizations, programs of all flavors that are too pompous and self-inflated. He wounds the healer and heals the wounder. He transforms all values in an ongoing evaluating and revaluing, unsettling those values which calcify into sacred cows. One of Hermes's first acts upon birth was to steal the sacred cows of His brother, Apollo!

I will use the following dream to reveal how Hermes shows up in contemporary dreams. As far as I know, the dreamer had no knowledge of the attributes of Hermes prior to dreaming this dream:

A client dreamed that he was late getting to the airport to fly to Europe, due to traffic congestion. He finally arrived, but found there was a problem with his passport and ticket. His plane was leaving shortly, and he felt "fucked with" when he realized that he had left his most important baggage back with the baggage claim man. He ran back to the man, who, upon seeing him, said, "I knew you'd be back for this", and gave him his bag. The dreamer explained the problems with his ticket and passport, and that the plane was about to leave. The baggage claim man smiled, and said, "No problem. Follow me." He led the client through a series of doors through which only airport officials go. In minutes they were at the gate. The doors were about to close. A few words from the baggage claim man to the flight attendant, and the dreamer was led to the airplane door. The client shouted his gratitude to the man, and asked his name so he could find him upon his return. The baggage claim man shouted back, "My name is HERMAN!"

In this dream we have the presence of a god, Herman, or rather, HERMES Himself, the keeper of the gates, breaker of rules and boundaries, who knows the right people. The baggage claim man (and the flight attendant) could allude to the dreamer's therapist, who functions as a guide and hermaneut in the ways of the client's conscious and unconscious life.

From Nerve To Nirvana And Back Again - Upon Trance, Its Uses, Misuses & Abuses In "An Unweeded Garden" - A Hysterico-History

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[St. Gregory With Three Scribes. Artist Unknown. Relief: ivory Height: 8 in. (20.3 cm) Tenth century CE Site: Probably Reichenau, Germany Location: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Click on the image to enlarge it. Please note the bird at St. Gregory's ear, that he writes with a feather pen, inspired]

Demon or bird! (said the boy's soul,)
Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?
For I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping, now I have heard you, Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake...

Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there,
In the night, by the sea, under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there arous’d—the fire, the sweet hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me.

-Walt Whitman, from "Out Of The Cradle Endlessly Rocking"


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Symbols have valid and legitimate effects only when they serve to change our psychic state or conscious attitude. Their effects are illegitimate and dangerous when applied in a magical way to physical reality. - Edward F. Edinger [see full quote and attribution in the text below]


I'll come to reality! but only as a tourist! - Murray, Jason Robards' character in "A Thousand Clowns" by Herb Gardner


Questioner : Teaching One, then why is my mind and my heart breaking?

Lama Sorghem : (Long silence, then) I am for trance. I am for all trance which enhances life in in-fleshed pants and skirts...in breaking minds and hearts, and all other parts! Not being flip here. I am only slip-streaming...

(Silence, then) Listen. Hear me. Trances which serve only as a means to escape 'what is', what is here...what is a given, its insistent crush and...what needs to be released from within - this is a large part of the history of religion, is it not? for it hurts to be here - ...trance may provide needed temporary respite and relief BUT when concretized into and sanctified as received dogmas of escape, then these devalue the material creation and all her creatures...and THAT is to blaspheme Life and its Creator...THAT is to devalue bodies...bodies which can hold hands! Marvelous that, is it not? ...Your poet, Theodore Roethke, says it right - great scripture, this - "Things with hands, take hands." I repeat it.

"Things with hands, take hands."

Yes? Yes? (Reaches out his hand to the questioner).

See?! I just now offered you my hand and you reached for it. Yes? This is trance - offered hands...reaching hands...taking hands. But..EYES OPEN! MINDS OPEN!! Yes?

(Silence, then)...But the heart is promiscuous and easily seduced. And I love the heart. But one is not only heart...ONE IS NOT ONLY HEART. Yes? There are eyes and minds. Yes? And there are hands which do as they are bidden by eyes, hearts, minds...And, most important of all, often bidden by That Greater Personality Which Is Within You. Jung calls it archetypal psyche, the Self. It is not Freud's personal psyche alone. Yes? It is not the ego...you must try to get out of that inflation...this tenet that the ego creates the unconscious! It is quite the opposite...The ego extends, a hand of sorts, from the deeper beyond-personal unconscious. The not-I. Wholey Other. Yes? The Greater Personality...which is not a person, not an ego. Greater Personality can compel a reach not derived from the personal unconscious. With mind one may find That Which Is Doing The REACHING, THAT WHICH DRIVES THE REACH ITSELF!

(Long silence, then) These dogmas of escape also blaspheme and devalue our bodies' miraculous minds with which Greater Personality is always manifestly interpreting Itself in uncountable ways - interpretations of Greater Personality...by Greater Personality-as-us writ small but significantly. Yes, yes, yes! Yes? We mean so very much! all our lived stories told by us living humans, and other manifestations of life. The Greater Personality is there in it all, reaching, taking...and talking, talking...Spinning. Spinning. One reason we sit in silence for a time. Yes? We mistakenly misconstrue maya as illusion. It is much much more than that. But this is for another time to talk. And it is also true that we sit for no reason. Yes?

(Silence, then) Say - what does a spider reveal of the Maker?

Ah, for this question, it's answer, one must...slip-stream in the mire. Don't give up this question so easy! Sit with it. Yes? But know this, next time you meet a spider you cannot help it, you go into a trance! And like Little Miss Muffet, you do not sit any longer! You are compelled by Fate to move, and quickly so! And that perhaps is a sufficient answer. Yes? To respond to what is offered. (Laughter). An exitentialist philospher, Heinemann, says this is to live, to truly live, "Respondeo, ergo sum." I respond, therefore I am. Yes? So! Just move. Fate wants response. Fate wants to move you. So...just...dance. Only dance! Make your body a big question mark and move like that. "Question mark" yoga. Yes? (Laughter) New yoga. First time. Right here. Today. Fresh direct from spidery hands and minds. Yes? Yes? (More laughter, falls to silence).

(Then) All these trances? Spats. Just spats with Reality. Your Frost poet, the cold one. He says, "Lovers quarrels." Yes. That's all. You see now? So easy...so easy. We must quarrel as lovers do with existence. That is a kind of dance, too. Yes?

Why not big spider spats? Yes?

With so many possibilities of hands to take.

Same questioner: Then, Teaching One, why is my mind and my heart still breaking?

- Lama Dorje Sorghem Dungen, Sartorial And Arterial Dreams, The Art Of Slip-Streaming When Mud Refuses To Inspire, Interviews And Asides, Moon Of Alabama Press, Limited publication, Slumberton, Alabama, 1967, pg. xxi footnote


You start escaping into the other!...And don't seek consolations because cheap consolations are available. The mind is very clever in supplying them. When you ask, "who am I?" the mind can supply immediately an answer and the mind is very clever. Mind says, "You are god. You are a soul...immortal soul." These are the ideas of the magician put in the heads of poor sheep. The magician suggests to a few that you are lions, to few that you are eagles, to a few that you are man, to a few that you are even magicians!
- Bhagwan Rajneesh, Opening remarks transcribed from a discourse,"Aloneness Is Tremendously Beautiful", Osho International Foundation, Zurich Switzerland.


The journey from cloud cuckoo land lasted a long time. In my case Pilgrim's Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of dirt that I am.
- Jung Letters, Vol. 1, pg. 19 footnote


THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness...

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins, from "God's Grandeur"


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The Business Of Trance, Minding Our And God's Business - A Loathe Story, Part "The One": The Religious (And Greater) Instinct From And For Which The Sexual and Power Instincts Derive-Drive Enthusiatically Along Panentheistic Paths

Religions are in the trance business. Oh, and also the "Grandeur Business". And one cannot draw near to "Grandeur" without also nearing it's shadow, grandiosity, which makes the business of god and god-trances tricky and blood-sticky, a veritible human sin and skin trade for deity wampum and "whomp 'em". Herein is a short, short history of human religions, a drive/strive for a god-gain.

Try as we might and may we cannot be free of the religious instinct within us which, as Jung says, both the sexual and power instincts are expressions and drives toward (See C.J. Jung's, Flying Saucers, A Modern Myth Of Things Seen In The Sky, pgs 44 - 56). Sex and power, forbidden though "fraught-with/fought-with" domains which religions seek to sublimate are not easily spiritualised ala ego acetic agendas to "tame the savage beast", its alpha drive and mating strains. Beneath both these impulses, these drives, is that greater instinct, the religious one, which makes all our striving and failing with both essentially meaningful, less punitive, less, well, Freudian and Adler-ian, not so much to be overcome as to be translated as "frought with the divine" (See any number of Sufi poets to confirm this truth, redeem the tooth, reclaim the grope for godhood's good). One seeks then the "god" within both eros and power striving to arrive consciously framed as Rimbaud calls them, evident at "any altar...impulses toward perfection (from, The Drunken Boat, Poem Two). It can be said that drives are trances which explains our animal-blind obedience to nerves for in them lie nascent, all powerful, implicated "nirvana" which in Sanskrit means, "blown out" as in "a flame extinguished." Some sublime - not sublimated ala Freud or church or acetic, gnostic, life-force negating religious movement or group - bliss is gained via the "Via Negativa", the "Neti Neti Path", the "No. No To Noodles-And-Noddling-And-All-That Traipse" - Not this, not that. Some sublime thing known by what it is not. Trance not trance. That neti neti dance Lama Sorghem advances above.

Now then: "Neti neti, ergo sum".

Yes? Yes?

And it must be pointed out for wholeness/holdness sake that there are three other Vias/Paths to take, phases, facets, faces, phrases of relationship between the human and the other/Other/Wholey Other - Nature and Nuances beyond the five senses but not beyond because the senses fail or flail. They, too, reveal and are revelations. It is the "medicine wheel" of Creation Spirituality ala Meister Eckhart and Matthew Fox who currently interprets it to us. Creation spirituality is creation-centered which acknowledges and honors creation pan-en-theistically . Wikipedia is helpful here: Panentheism (from Greek (pân) "all"; (en) "in"; and (theós) "God"; "all-in-God") is a belief system which posits that God exists and interpenetrates every part of nature, and timelessly extends beyond as well. - wikipedia.org/wiki/Panentheism). Thus God is revealed in the particulars. William Blake encourages us, therefore,to “Labour Well the Minute Particulars, attend to the Little-ones” (William Blake, Jerusalem, plate 55, line 51. Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. Erdman, pg. 205).

To companion and inflect the Via Negativa there are the Via Positiva, Via Creativa, and Via Transformativa. These three paths are inherent companions to the Via Negativa. To read and celebrate this wheel and its spokes (spokens/speakings) of revelation, parsed as Particulars as well as panned (as in "pan" - all, everything-at-once) read Matthew Fox's "conversations" with Meister Eckhart in Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart's Creation Spirituality In New Translation.

To resume, wheeling on:

With popular New Age beliefs now permeating collective culture, with the growth of New Age training programs and seminaries, trance is a major part of the curriculum these days to be studied and experienced. Makes sense. Yes? And great mana is to be gained to the tranciest entrancers with pearly wisdom and powers gained. Indeed, many texts used in these programs are those written by people in trance which are received as "holy writ" but are purposefully understated, referred to as "information" so called, a preferred neutral term used since "revelation" and "prophesy" are charged theological terms which the New Age studiously tries to avoid hoping that the veneer of supposed empiricism and objectivity regarding the "sources" of channeling will be less dubious to thinking minds, to critical thinking minds regarding the subject matter of the text. In all of Jane Roberts "Seth Books which are transcripted recordings of the channeled teachings of that ghostly visitor and spirit wiseacre, the amiable and extroverted "Seth", her husband Robert Butts plentifully, relentlessly and dutifully (and irritatingly) recorded his own experiences and observations of himself, Jane, Jane-as-Seth, before, during and after the hundreds if not thousands of hours of channeled sessions. Jane recorded her own observations and experiences of herself and "herSeth", in an attempt to be objective and, I presume, for readers and students to come who may question, as they should, the verity and setting for Seth visitations, his copious expositions.

It is commonly believed that these channeled sources such as Seth are wiser, more spiritually and now scientifically evolved, viz. Ramtha, J. Z. Knight's etheric visitor financing and fan-dangling with pipe and tobacco props in the surprise hit movie, "What The Bleep Do We Know" with its plethora of experts, more props still, from the sciences as well as religion. However, in fairness, these trance channeled teachings are not an aberration in the history of religion since most sacred scriptures of recognized and valued world religions are - it is believed, taught and preached - revealed to men in trance who wrote what they heard and saw as they were instructed and compelled by divine sources to do. And these revelations are truth which may, it is hoped, render us, and unto us, an experience and a relationship with the divine.

There is a marvelous ivory carving, tenth century [see image above], of St. Gregory, an early bishop of Rome, holding a pen with a dove at his ear dictating what he is writing down. St. Gregory wrote prolifically, one book being "a book of miracles to uplift the citizenry of his beleagured city." George R. Elder in his book, The Body, An Encyclopedia of Archetypal Symbolism, further describes the ivory image pictured above :

Curtains have been pulled aside, and we witness a little bird perched on the bishop's right shoulder, its beak at the man's ear. This is the traditional dove that symbolizes the inspiration of the Holy Spirit...In the register below are posed variously three scribes with large, doll-like heads (typical the period's art), presumably copying, somewhat sleepily, the inspired words of the larger, more important figure. - Elder, pg. 197

This image speaks of an archetypal event repeated throughout world history, an archetypal motif of an experience of revelation from a divine source and an obedient, submissive scribe-priest (or shaman, or grandmothers/grandfathers preserving what has been an received via oral history passed on, and many other similar functionaries with "birds-at-ear" or the equivalent). It is therefore not unusual for the New Age religious to claim and proclaim inspiration from a variety of inspiring un- or once-were-worldy-Other sources which deliver the miraculous and magical to us, the "beleagured citizens" of a nuclear, post-modern age seeking meaning amidst the cyber-swarm of texts and images contexted solely within the medium of its conveyance blinking be-screened and variously i-proffered tourettedly before us in nano-seconds unfilling a falsely linear day on a faux flat monitor, a delusional enmeshment of digital quanta and bio-chemical nerve endings which have yet to deliver us from the dream and expectation, o endlessly, of apocalyptic endings. Thus we need befriendings from the "Other Side" to betide snide modernity, its slick knowledge, now selling us the "divine" corporately focus grouped but NOT corporeally for after all "this too too solid flesh" must be dissolved and "escaped into a dew" dewy transcendence:

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

- William Shakespeare. Act 1 Scene2: O That This Too Solid Flesh Would Melt (Spoken by Hamlet)

The image of St. Gregory and his scribes depicts not only trance and a divine messenger but also the earnest obedient scribes hard at work in the exacting labor of conscious transcription and, it is hoped and most certainly needed, meaningful translation into lived quotidian of profane reality. Touching the sacred the dove enters the profane world which creates a heirophanic (revealing of the sacred) experience which is then subject to interpretations as to what it means in regards to this material world. Mircea Eliade in his book, The Sacred And The Profane, writes that once the Really Real and Wholey Other Sacred Reality enters the Less Real but Real Nonetheless Profane reality both sacred and profane are transformed. One could with some authority argue that the proof of authentic religious experience as propounded by any religion, recognized or other, is whether both the sacred and the profane are transformed via the heirophanic meeting of extrordinary reality with ordinary reality, presumably for the better, the greater good; well, at least for the profane realm. How would we really know if the Wholey Other is transformed except for a hint of that transformation via the ever evolving and transforming god images throughout conscious human history? By history we know that we have changed by our shifts in consciousness. If Consciousness is "God" then we may extrapolate that It/God, too, changes, evolves in a co-dependent (used descriptively, not in its usual description of pathological relationship) dance of changes. Our gods as is our species and evolving creation are "not done," to steal a phrase from the poet, Stanley Kunitz, "with [their] changes" (from, "The Layers", The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz).

Granted, all this flux and flummoxed-ness regarding the sacred, its images and the concrete poured upon and around them, is the source of ancient and ongoing current religious debates and holy wars which greatly complicates things since variations and inflections of the "St. Gregory bird-at-the-ear" image can be found in all cultures, each one prescribing THE sacrality for the profane eyes and ears of ordinary mortals saddled with "too too solid flesh" while longing and hoping to "dissolve" then resolve "into a" meaningful and final "dew." But whose is the Absolute Bird True? How do we tolerate all the Filled With Whispering, At Times Cawing, Holy Aviary? These ongoing questions are never satisfactorily answered though many purport to have finally and absolutely done so. Hence the trees are full winged things sounding it all out in all weathers. When beneath that din one must hear and heed, don't sit in that raucous tree shade. One head may feel such droppings, sacred and profane, and stain one's hope with digested seeds and grains unremovable. But they can, O Mercurius, be reframed.

Trance, Tautology, and Homo Sapiens Prehensile Intuition

Trance and sacred experience are evidently and evidentially tautological, viz., A is equal to A. A religion of any kind without trance does not at all function in the way the very word "religion" indicates, meaning "to link back, to connect again, to relink, to reconnect" to essentially vitalizing and revitalizing sources and forces rendering meaning.

Earliest homo sapiens intuited that there was more to material existence and being here than meets, as I like to say, "the eye or thigh." It could be said that the history of human consciousness beginning with earliest "just rational" (self reflective thinking) hominids has been an ongoing attempt to understand, explicate and manipulate what is within those primal and archetypal intuitions apparently available in examining any and every inner and outer object of reality. The world was then and is now charged with Light, Hopkins' "shook foil" indeed, that Light being Consciousness Itself. However, since the beginning of this human consciousnes, this light, it has been concretized, reified in things as things, this earliest error still ongoingly, cross-culturally made when interpreting symbols.

Called the "concretistic fallacy", Edward F. Edinger helpfully defines this as an inability "to distinguish symbols of the archetypal psyche from concrete reality. Inner symbolical images are experienced as being real, external facts. Examples of this fallacy are animistic beliefs...hallucinations and delusions of psychotics, and superstitions of all kinds. Confused mixtures of psychic and physical reality such as the practice of alchemy, astrology, and the numerous present-day cults of healing (my italics for emphatic focus) fall into this category. The same fallacy is at work in those religious believers who misunderstand symbolic religious images to refer to literal concrete facts and mistake their own personal and parochial religious convictions for universal and absolute truth. There is a danger of succumbing to the concretistic fallacy whenever we are tempted to apply a symbolic image to external physical facts for the purpose of manipulating those facts in our own interest. Symbols have valid and legitimate effects only when they serve to change our psychic state or conscious attitude. Their effects are illegitimate and dangerous when applied in a magical way to physical reality." (Edward Edinger, Ego And Archetype, Individuation And The Religious Function Of The Psyche, Penguin Books, 1972, pg. 111.

And succumb to this fallacy we will and often do, especially in this mostly western, middle and upper class New Age which is more than prone to magical thinking. It is come by honestly enough since intuition does appear to be magical since it is acausal, synchronistic, and does not follow logical patterns of thought, that sequential experience of thinking/sensing/perceiving in Newtonian time and space. The experience of intuition is, indeed, "magical", many preferring the concretistic use of symbols and the archetypal energies they derive from the experience which has put one in touch with the living symbolic life. There are several mistakes here, dangerous ones, the most common being the reduction of a symbol to a sign, an "only just". Another greater danger is psychological inflation which comes from identifying with a symbol, its archetypal image, energy and content, a very real temptation, viz, Hitler, Stalin, Timothy McVeigh, Amy Semple McPherson, Joel Osteen and others to name only a harmful few. All of us have access to the archetypes and their energies. All can use them. "But to what purposes?" is the question. The importance of personal ongoing and continuous shadow work is underscored with this question. There is no resting on one's spiritual laurels no matter how many birds sit upon them with your initials tattooed in golden filigree upon their heavenly smooth, feathered breasts, no matter how psychic, intuitive and power-filled one becomes, no matter the crowds of supplicants and psychophants sitting at one's feet, coffers filling, reputations expanding, trances spectacular and lucrative all around.

More On Intuition And Trance Channels


Intuition has always been a part of sacred experience, the New Age being no exception; however, in the New Age with its now multitudinous channelers, (prophets by another name, but this is a theologically charged word which may, if used, detract from any empirical authority the channel gains as one who seeks objective knowledge regarding the phenomenon since objectivity alludes to empiricism and the empirical scientific method. Intuitive channels seek - and frankly need - authoritative weight for what is revealed, its method and its message in a real sense being one package. Channelers are trance orators of what/who they believe to be elevated knowers, spirits, teachers, energies from a variety of interpreted sources, star beings, aliens (the Pleiadean material which was a best seller in the '80s and '90s"), angels, devas, earth (abstracted) spirits, long dead (and therefore wiser?) human souls now returned to teach and guide humanity into a variety of transcendent awakenings and achievements with a goals of transforming into Light, always away from materiality. This Light, or THE Light, is the goal, the refined, astral/etheric planes are believed to be of greater value than any incarnate, carbon-based plane, being or object, which are lower manifestations of Light in the New Age very loosely formed and hardly thought out cosmology, it being a pastiche of pilfered plumes from many world religions and global indigenous rituals and beliefs mixed with white upper and middle class narcissism with a penchant for "stuff", for material goods all the while disappearing into "Light" (but not too too far from their "stuff").

There is neither time nor space in this essay to go into gnosticism as a historical philosophical and theological movement which was and should be seriously studied by anyone who proclaims to partake of New Age "thought" (I use this word "thought" reluctantly for I have found thinking, critical thinking, greatly deficient in New Age believers and teachers, their being embarrassingly, naively gullible and susceptible, taking as fact just about anything that is trance channeled as divinely revealed "information". The New Age is mostly a neo-gnostic movement, though I use "neo-gnostic" hesitantly not wanting to give weight to the New Age where there is none for, alas, much of its weight is money, not in intellect and discriminatory thinking. Even the word "guru" which sends thrills and chills up New Agers spines means "heavy" which certainly implies some gravitas and substance to the Teacher. But this is not to be found in most New Agers who tend to be light, fluffy-puffy intellectually and as Carl Jung once described some obstinate folks who preferred to purposely misunderstand and misinterpret his psychology, "maliciously stupid."

The New Age is often performance based. Channels are trance performances, rituals are performances where emotions are titillated, followers are consolidated into supposed "mystery schools" of elitist knowers of occult, "secret" knowledge which of late, if not of past, is mostly a haphazard rehash of hardly or not studied gnostic hits and misses mixed with ever popular and slightly shape-shifting "positive thinking" movements which have not much evolved since their inception in the "mind-cure" movement so prominent among American masses in the late 1800's. The successful, wealthy charismatic teachers and preachers in this movement then and now made and make most of their gelt from their followers who tithe from tighter belts hoping to "be like them" the blessed mani-festering prophets who expound pathological positivity while collecting fame and fortune pound for pound.

Unlike the historical gnostics who seriously thought (and, yes, felt) through their beliefs with engaged intellects regarding these mysterious experiences and "revelations" of archetypal psyche, what their source or sources are, and to what purpose they served personally and culturally, the New Age is essentially a-historical though it purports to hearken back even to pre-history or if history must be included to and partake of supposed ancestral teachings and rituals of indigenous and other religious, mostly parenthetical, groups and movements. There is much, indeed, in the parentheses. That which is rejected or consigned to back alleys of thought often contains consciously rejected and repressed shadow truths called "heresies". For all conscious and consciously constructed cosmologies there exist their equivalent shadow cosmologies. This is found in ALL systems of thought. That which is left out or spurned does not disappear. It reappears as radioactive heretics and apostates to the received and canonized teachers and teachings, even within "peace loving, blessings bestowing" New Agers who curse others with positives which are curses nonetheless.

I have found the New Age movement to be more hysterical than historical, incredulity and gullibility more the norm than not. Not all but many followers are indeed light - light in the loafers. Dissociation and loose association in both channeler and followers are reframed as mantras, magical ancient sounds and similar all used for inductive purposes and all subjected to that channeled Other's, as well as its channeler's, interpretation of the channeling event, the "information" revealed, and its affect upon channel and audience. There is an extreme rejection of the profane, of everyday reality, of critical intellect and thinking. There is an uncritical acceptance of and taking-as-fact just about any and everything channeled no matter how split off and fantastical the "revelation" with little or no accounting for psychology, archetypal, analytical, developmental, or social, regarding the said event and manifestation of channelers and channeled material. There is also rarely accountability held to and by the channeler, what is channeled, and the effect of what is channeled.

The last channeling session I ever attended was in a seminary where the unnamed but obvious leader of the program - it was idealistically supposed to be a leaderless group - channeled regarding what new directions the seminary was to take in the near future. The channeler essentially channeled her view, her program changes, her dream for the program while the hearers sat (some of them, not me) entranced, too, receiving the "good news" and proposed changes as divinely, intuitively inspired. And in the months following that channeled revelation the leader piece by piece dismantled the program as it was, deconstructing it according to her will and way. Circumstances arose which allowed her to "in good conscious" essential end the program and "to take her ball and go home." How does one argue with this when the collective feeders buy the channeler and the channeled material as authoritative and "good" and "for their own good" when it most certainly satisfies the power drives and desires of the leader?

Carl Jung remains still hundreds of years ahead of the field in the study of trance phenomena manifest throughout human history and is currently manifesting prolifically with all the force of media and entertainment industries behind them. Rather than seriously studying what Jung so earnestly and astutely researched and experienced to the continual ongoing rejection and ridicule by the culture at large, by both psychology and religion, the New Age has co-oped Jung as their own prophet, adulterating his findings as proof texts for their often weightless, ungrounded, unexamined experiences and teachings. Yes, these experiences are indeed manifestations of the psyche, of the unconscious, but they must be examined and weighed, consciously engaged, egos to archetypes, so that one is not to become as Jung once described "dumb fish" who willfully forfeit freedom of will and mind to collective and archetypal demands for submission, exchanging autonomy for conformity embraced by the collective (as fish are embraced by water). Yet they remain un-individuated though they may access and manipulate powerful archetypal forces and heal and speak with the tongues of angels [see appendix below]. With all the archetypal powers at their disposal, still, it is not individuation, integration of shadow, of anima, of animus, in a conscious relationship to the unconscious, the Self.

Jung wrote appreciatively and thoughtfully of the gnostics giving much study and credence to gnostic thought as evident of archetypal dimensions of the human psyche from whence even the childishly fantastical channelings of many are derived (which does not necessarily make them sacred). I recommend, no! I prescribe a much needed and long overdue compensating balance and antidote to "Spirituality Lite" - those New Age amalgamations and adulterations in cartoon form no matter how seriously spun by the prophets, coffers filling, their followers hopeful pockets emptying - a serious study of Jung and the gnostics along with undertaking a long term Jungian-oriented therapy, inquiry, analysis, counseling which delves deeply into the shadow, the inner masculine and feminine, whicdh explores personal history with an awareness of the archetypal underpinnings of personal and collective complexes, of personal familial and collective shadow, those mythic themes, messiahs and meanies which do shape our lives, often unknowingly, unconsciously so.

As profoundly intuitive as Carl Jung was he engaged in a lifelong serious empirical intellectual study, research, examination of the human psyche, its manifestations historically and contemporaneously, in order to discover what can be objectively revealed of its intuitive depths. Jung neither devalued intuition nor rational inquiry, empirical research and testing. In his lifelong study and experiment using both intuition and science Jung discovered that psyche tells many mythic stories about its own reality and fact. This, without reduction, is the very history of human consciousness. Mythic mind, that first mind of human ancestors still actively present in contemporary humans, has documented and manifested itself via humans from the very beginning. Human history and its manifest cultures reveal these stories, these myths that psyche, that consciousness, tells of itself. To reify them, to value one over others is to imbalance and misuse the power of these stories which are not "only-just stories" but are generators and catalyzers of ongoing archetypal energies which continually, mercurially shape and reshape ourselves and our experience of incarnate existence.

New Age or any entranced flight away from material existence and its creative unfolding in space, time and matter in consciousness of Psyche, its dynamic dialectic of the opposites, must be called out, confronted and engaged with serious openness within the vicissitudes of thoughtful human existence. Compassionate heart must balance critical thinking. The Eternal Child/Wanderer/Wonderer, the archetypal puer aeternus, coincides with the Wise Old Man/Woman of Time, Space and Matter who incarnates and literally grows/manifests/creates consciousness and it's unending manifestations, permutations, creations and recreations in the here and now of coagulate space and time. The New Age is very much a Puer phenomenon which compensates for too much calcifying fundamentalist reification/concretization of once dynamic revealed religious symbols as well as those symbols activated in the natural sciences, all turned into spirit killing doctrines and dogmas represented and rammed by their various institutions. Unfortunately, the New Age reifies as did the religions of old, making concretistic interpretations of symbols.


The New Age seeks to re-enchant the world, one's very self and that self's personal and communal encounter with an equally re-enchanted world. I have no quarrel with that. But is it a nostrum of escape via what is believed to be transcendence but is actually dissociation and splitting from the givens of 'what is'. Murray, Jason Robards character in the excellent play, A Thousand Clowns, about a puer's painful confrontation with reality as it is with consequent possible suffering and loss of a highly valued relationship with a beloved child, when admonished by a reality-oriented social worker to "come to reality" regarding the inevitable loss of that relationship if he did not, defiantly and petulantly exclaimed, "I'll come to reality! but only as a tourist!!"

But to reality we must.

Having said all of the above at the beginning and here in the end, it is not a question of "to trance or not to trance" for this consensus reality we all partake of and call "everyday, ordinary mind" is also a trance. I am for trance. I am for all trance which enhances life in in-fleshed pants and flesh-filled skirts. However, any entranced escapist flight away from material existence and its creative unfolding in space, time and matter, in consciousness with its dynamic dialectic of the opposites continuously seeking and birthing "the third thing," must be called out. With good will and intent it must be seriously confronted and engaged with balanced, critical thinking. Trance may indeed provide much needed temporary respite and relief, but when concretized into and sanctified as received dogmas of escape, then these devalue the material creation and all her creatures; and I believe that this is to blaspheme Life and its Creator, that this is to devalue bodies which can hold hands! The poet, Theodore Roethke, says it right, "Things with hands, take hands." Minds open, working, thinking. Eyes open, seeing. Ears, listening, carefully. Heart, curious, always. Mano a mano, this is trance—offered hands, reaching hands, taking hands. And knowing when to release them. So many possibilities of hands.


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APPENDIX ONE - JUNG'S DREAM "A MILLIMETER TO SPARE"

To read Jung's autobiography free online click here:

http://ia331332.us.archive.org/0/items/memoriesdreamsre007394mbp/memoriesdreamsre007394mbp.pdf

This excerpt is found on page 217 of the autobiography.

Jung's dream referred to in the above essay :

The problem of Job in all its ramifications had likewise been foreshadowed in a dream. It started with my paying a visit to my long-deceased father. He was living in the country I did not know where. I saw a house in the style of the eighteenth century, very roomy, with several rather large outbuildings. It had originally been, I learned, an inn at a/spa, and it seemed thatmany great personages, famous people and princes, had stopped there. Furthermore, several had died and their sarcophagi were in a crypt belonging to the house. My father guarded these as custodian.

He was, as I soon discovered, not only the custodian but also a distinguished scholar in his own right which he had never been in his lifetime. I met him in his study, and, oddly enough, Dr. Y. who was about my age and his son, both psychiatrists, were also present. I do not know whether I had asked a question or whether my father wanted to explain something of his own accord, but in any case he fetched a big Bible down from a shelf, a heavy folio volume like the Merian Bible in my library. The Bible my father held was bound in shiny fish skin. He opened it at the Old Testament I guessed that he turned to the Pentateuch and began interpreting a certain passage. He did this so swiftly and so learnedly that I could not follow him. I noted only that what he said betrayed a vast amount of variegated knowledge, the significance of which I dimly apprehended but could not properly judge or grasp. I saw that Dr. Y. understood nothing at all, and his son began to laugh. They thought that my father was going off the deep end and what he said was simply senile prattle. But it was quite clear to me that it was not due to morbid excitement, and that there was nothing silly about what he was saying. On the contrary, his argument was so intelligent and so learned that we in our stupidity simply could not follow it. It dealt with something extremely important which fascinated him. That was why he was speaking with such intensity; his mind was flooded with profound ideas. I was annoyed and thought it was a pity that he had to talk in the presence of three such idiots as we.

The two psychiatrists represented a limited medical point of view which, of course, also infects me as a physician. They represent my shadow first and second editions of the shadow, father and son. Then the scene changed. My father and I were in front of the house, facing a kind of shed where, apparently, wood was stacked. We heard loud thumps, as if large chunks of wood were being thrown down or tossed about. I had the impression that at least two workmen must be busy there, but my father indicated to me that the place was haunted. Some sort of poltergeists were making the racket, evidently.

We then entered the house, and I saw that it had very thick walls. We climbed a narrow staircase to the second floor. There a strange sight presented itself: a large hall which was the exact replica of the divan-i-kaas (council hall) of Sultan Akbar at Fatehpur Sikri. It was a high, circular room with a gallery running along the wall, from which four bridges led to a basin shaped center. The basin rested upon a huge column and formed the sultan's round seat. From this elevated place he spoke to his councilors and philosophers, who sat along the walls in the gallery. The whole was a gigantic mandala. It corresponded precisely to the real divan-i-kaas.

In the dream I suddenly saw that from the center a steep flight of stairs ascended to a spot high up on the wall whichno longer corresponded to reality. At the top of the stairs wasa small door, and my father said, "Now I will lead you into the highest presence." Then he knelt down and touched his forehead to the floor. I imitated him, likewise kneeling, with great emotion. For some reason I could not bring my forehead quite down to the floor there was perhaps a millimeter to spare. But at least I had made the gesture with him. Suddenly I knew perhaps my father had told me that that upper door led to a solitary chamber where lived Uriah, King David's general, whom David had shamefully betrayed for the sake of his wife
Bathsheba, by commanding his soldiers to abandon Uriah in the face of the enemy.

I must make a few explanatory remarks concerning this dream. The initial scene describes how the unconscious task which I had left to my "father," that is, to the unconscious, was working out. He was obviously engrossed in the Bible Genesis? and
eager to communicate his insights. The fishskin marks the Bible as an unconscious content, for fishes are mute and unconscious. My poor father does not succeed in communicating either, for the audience is in part incapable of understanding, in
part maliciously stupid. After this defeat we cross the street to the "other side," where poltergeists are at work. Poltergeist phenomena usually take place in the vicinity of young people before puberty; that is to say, I am still immature and too unconscious. The Indian ambience illustrates the "other side." When I was in India, themandala structure of the divan~i-kaas had in actual fact powerfully impressed me as the representation of a content related to a center. The center* is the seat of Akbar the Great, who rules over a subcontinent, who is a "lord of this world," like David. But even higher than David stands his guiltless victim, his loyal general Uriah, whom he abandoned to the enemy. Uriah is a prefiguration of Christ, the god-man who was abandoned by God. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" On top of that, David had "taken unto himself" Uriah's wife. Only later did I understand what this allusion to Uriah signified: not only was I forced to speak publicly, and very much to my detriment, about the ambivalence of the God-image in the Old Testament; but also, my wife would be taken from me by death. These were the things that awaited me, hidden in the unconscious. I had to submit to this fate, and ought really to have touched my forehead to the floor, so that my submission would
be complete. But something prevented me from doing so entirely, and kept me just a millimeter away. Something in me was saying, "All very well, but not entirely." Something in me was defiant and determined not to be a dumb fish: and if there were not something of the sort in free men, no Book of Job would have been written several hundred years before the birth of Christ. Man always has some mental reservation, even in the face of divine decrees. Otherwise, where would be his freedom? And what would be the use of that freedom if it could not threaten Him who threatens it?


Uriah, then, lives in a higher place than Akbar. He is even, as the dream said, the '^highest presence,'* an expression which properly is used only of God, unless we are dealing in Byzantinisms. I cannot help thinking here of the Buddha and his relationship to the gods. For the devout Asiatic, the Tathagata is the All- Highest, the Absolute. For that reason Hinayana Buddhism has been suspected of atheism very wrongly so. By virtue of the power of the gods man is enabled to gain an insight into his Creator. He has even been given the power to annihilate Creation in its essential aspect, that is, man's consciousness of the world. Today he can extinguish all higher life on earth by radioactivity. The idea of world annihilation is already suggested by the Buddha: by means of enlightenment the Nidana chain the chain of causality which leads inevitably to old age, sickness, and death can be broken, so that the illusion of Being comes to an end. Schopenhauer's negation of the Will points prophetically to a problem of the future that has already come threateningly
close. The dream discloses a thought and a premonition that have long been present in humanity: the idea of the creature that surpasses its creator by a small but decisive factor.

APPENDIX TWO - MICHAEL VANNOY ADAM'S COMMENTARY ON JUNG'S DREAM

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"In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung (1963) recounts a dream ...what I call the “Millimeter to Spare Dream.” In the dream, Jung and his father enter a house that has a room that is a replica of the council hall of Sultan Akbar, the Muslim emperor of Mughal India. In that room, Jung’s father prays in the Islamic style. “Then he knelt down and touched his forehead to the floor,” Jung says. “I imitated him, likewise kneeling, with great emotion. For some reason I could not bring my forehead quite down to the floor—there was perhaps a millimeter to spare” (p. 219). Jung interprets the dream to mean that “things awaited me, hidden in the unconscious.” He says: “I had to submit to this fate, and ought really to have touched my forehead to the floor, so that my submission would be complete. But something prevented me from doing to entirely, and kept me just a millimeter away. Something in me was saying, ‘All very well, but not entirely.’” What was this something that prevented Jung from complete submission? “Man always,” he says, “has some mental reservation, even in the face of divine decrees. Otherwise, where would be his freedom?” (Jung, 1963, p. 220)." Adams, 2002

Jung goes on to say, "Something in me was defiant and determined not to be a dumb fish...Man always has some mental reservation, even in the face of divine decrees. Otherwise, where would be his freedom? And what would be the use of that freedom if it could not threaten Him who threatens it?

Adams continues:

To submit to God without any mental reservation is for the ego not to engage in free, critical conversation with the unconscious. In this respect, to practice prayer—or active imagination—is for the ego to exercise the freedom not to accept the opinions of the unconscious as dictates but to assess those opinions and either
accept or reject them. The purpose of Jungian psychoanalysis is not for the ego to capitulate, or surrender unconditionally, to the opinions of the unconscious but to relate to them effectively—that is, freely, critically—through dialogue and negotiation. Prostration of the ego before the unconscious may be the Islamic [and other religions] style, but it is not the Jungian style. Dialogue or negotiation with God (or the unconscious) is very different from submission to God."

Jung goes on to say this of this millimeter to spare:

These were the things that awaited me, hidden in the unconscious.
I had to submit to this fate, and ought really to have
touched my forehead to the floor, so that my submission would
be complete. But something prevented me from doing so entirely,
and kept me just a millimeter away. Something in me was
saying, "All very well, but not entirely." Something in me was
defiant and determined not to be a dumb fish: and if there
were not something of the sort in free men, no Book of Job would
have been written several hundred years before the birth of
Christ. Man always has some mental reservation, even in the
face of divine decrees. Otherwise, where would be his freedom?
And what would be the use of that freedom if it could not
threaten Him who threatens it?"

APPENDIX THREE - OSHO'S OPENING DISCOURSE ON LONELINESS

What Jung refers to above as being a "dumb fish", Osho calls being a sheep. Both Jung's dream with Adam's commentary and Osho's opening remarks here relate to trance, being negatively entranced and giving up one's autonomy and free will by completely submitting to entrancers. Here's Osho:

You start escaping into the other. Gather courage. Take a plunge into your being. Let us be acquainted with our own Center. Let us ask only one question, "Who am I?" All else is meaningless. Unless this question is answered all your love affairs, friendships are all nonsense. Unless this question is answered nothing is answered. Go into your aloneness. Let there be only one quest, "who am I?"

And don't seek consolations because cheap consolations are available. The mind is very clever in supplying them. When you ask, "who am I?" the mind can supply immediately an answer and the mind is very clever. Mind says, "You are god. You are a soul...immortal soul." These are the ideas of the magician put in the heads of poor sheep. The magician suggests to a few that you are lions, to few that you are eagles, to a few that you are man, to a few that you are even magicians.

That magician hypnotized the sheep and told them that "you are immortal souls. Nobody can harm you ever. How [can] you be harmed?" The Magician suggested [to] them that, "I am for you. I am the best master you can find ever and I exist for you. And I will do whatever is needed and I will do whatsoever is good for you. Even if I kill you I will be killing you just for your sake."

You have been given these ideas by the society. Your mind is nothing but a projection of the society. It is society within you. The penetration of the society inside you. It is in the image of society. You have been told things and you have believed. This is not your answer! You have been taught by the magician. I am not saying the answer is wrong or right. I am simply saying it is not your answer and when the answer is not yours it is wrong.