As Dew On Grass Sleeves No Longer Stiffening In The Wind - Moments From The Orange World - After Kenneth Patchen

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A poem to accompany the Dark Man Dream and Misdeeds of Our Dreams essay below the poem or click onto "July (2)" archives column on the right.

"The repressed value contains transformative energies and a consciousness of its own..." - Charles Ponce

"All truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed, Second it is violently opposed. Third it is accepted as self-evident." -- Arthur Schopenhauer

"The Saviors do not lend themselves to art successfully: they are outside the pale, beyond, as incomprehensible in their love as in their example. They have never become incorporated in the blood stream. Forsaking the world, they become as the idols they sought to destroy. This is human perversity. Throughout the ages it displays itself in the individual life, and now and then it bursts forth in cosmic waves of futility and self-destruction." - Henry Miller in an essay on Kenneth Patchen
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[Photo by Amanda Friedman, from Saeed Jones website: http://saeedjones.wordpress.com/]

As Dew On Grass Sleeves No Longer Stiffening In The Wind - Moments From The Orange World - After Kenneth Patchen

for Bruce and Patti
happily singing in their chains by the sea...

& for Pere Bluebols
"...do not grieve, therefore, those who are lost to you;
they were ever so to themselves..."
- Kenneth Patchen - from "There Is One Who Watches"


I've lost my way and wait for signs.
Distant signal fires indicate 'wait here'.
No gate ahead. The iron dogs are waiting over there
to chew all who approach edges of the orange world.
Best to settle in, grin at stinking Death who is
sinking into the ground winking at me as if to say,

You will soon sink. You will soon sink.
Who do you think you are or were?
Step forward if you dare.

*

I've observed how furred things give up without much complaint.
They've grabbed often enough and so Death grabs back.
They sigh or call out in their animal way, Son of a bitch!
but in the end they relent and they sink leaving only their
pink tongues spread out over the dawn as if to say...as if to say...

I blink in the dark looking at edges distant fire.
I wink back at Death who's left only a bony hand
on the ground where He waits just beneath.
How trite He is but it does the job, conveys His trap clearly.
When dawn tongues awake licking dew from my face,
and my fears, I shall raise both my hands, too,
as if to say...as if to say...

And flaunting these two hands to Death's one, and with flesh,
I shall walk away the way I came having done with burning signs
and a night's work of waiting, my presence taunting the dogs,
Death baiting as if He has forgotten one hand upon the dirt.
We have flirted, Death and me. Not the kind of company
I like to keep preferring furred things to winking bones,
Death's head all teeth and no whistle. But I earn my pay.
I walk away, my own tongue licking.

*

I can barely contain myself arriving back at camp where
She waits dreaming shyly in our tent, a Bedouin soul bending
gently over wells in Her keeping on Gentler Hill.
I shall lick Her face then. I shall not tell Her how
I have survived the night with Death at my feet,
the taunting signals over there at the edges, iron dogs alert.
I shall not hurt Her with knowledge of this orange world,
all the dark things within it. I shall not take Her roughly
to me but softly settle beside Her where she breezes as dew
on grass sleeves no longer stiffening against the wind.

I shall bring Her in as a fisherman brings
in his boat, softly singing a fisherman's tale,
his throat a song-sore nocturne rocking night waves,
beacons ashore flaring where his Love lies sleeping
awaiting conjectures, his folding, folding into Her
gently suspiring guesses -

'Is my love away at sea, at sea,
dark as wine presses as he will
surely press me?

O drink from the wells I tend -
I earn my pay - and away with
ocean roaming! '

Distant lights demur sure in their beckoning.
Sudden, he turns singing boat and heart to shore,
starfish near at hand yearning beyond foam for depth.
Dawn tongues slowly raise up the land-sunken houses,
stilled curtains in darkened windows not yet stirring.

Nearing, he shall not shake the dew from his cloak but gather
as much as he can to bathe Her - feet, hands, those parts
Death cannot sink into, but he can. And life will continue on.

As will the other, his lost brother of the inland tent
now gratefully at rest forgetting the ever orange world,
edge fires signaling unseen until dark,

and then the dogs,

and Death's hand,

and then back to work again.


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The Dream Of The Dark Man - The Misdeeds Of Our Dreams Part Two


[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

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry.
- Ezra Pound, from "Canto LXXXI"

"So I write out of an awkward shyness; not understanding the angel."
- Kenneth Patchen

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

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Reprise - Orienting Words Of Ezra Pound

What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity,
Paquin pull down! The green casque has outdone your elegance.

"Master thyself, then others shall thee beare"
Pull down thy vanity Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,
A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,
Half black half white
Nor knowst'ou wing from tail
Pull down thy vanity How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.

But to have done instead of not doing
This is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
To have gathered from the air
a live tradition or from a fine old eye
the unconquered flame this is not vanity.
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered . . .

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.