F. Christopher Reynolds, M.Ed., singer-songwriter, teacher and roving shaman

My mission is to sing, to teach, to restore American culture’s sacred relationships into the Anthropocene Epoch

Imagine that the Cornavirus global pandemic was a clean break with the past that has announced a collective rite of passage, a global climate change, where human beings can learn that we are all in this life together. From this perspective, global climate change is also a changing of our minds.

To deepen our inherited constellation of Pisces into The Immanent Function, we can carry forward the psychological wisdom of astrology and to it, add the galaxy, NGC 488, a spiral galaxy that we are looking at from above/below it. We are in a galactic time that reminds us to include awareness of the immense depths surrounding us, including us, and within us. This mirrors what we know of human consciousness.

The Immanent Function is a soundtrack to encourage you through the planetary rite of passage to a new appreciation of the much expanded adventure of life ushered in by our shared world events. It is the musical version of my book, The Immanent Function.

Immanent Function is defined as:

Synchronistic, embodied becoming together when two or more choose to gather for the happiness of all beings. The immanent function is the partner to C. G. Jung’s transcendent function. Individual consciousness participates in trans-immanent communion merged with the collective ecological conscious and unconscious. When in partnership, the immanent and transcendent functions make manifest the awe that opens the human heart to the Mystery of life. Their intermingling is recognized by an ensouled, living atmosphere of warmth, love, surprise and humor that makes life-cycles worth living in enduring planetary and interplanetary relationships. This is a mythology of Einstein’s theory of gravity.

Anomalous, synesthetic, paranormal, psychokinetic, miraculous, prophetic, ritual, numinous, transcendent sexual, aesthetic arrest experiences that are immanent to the transcendent occur in the midst of their union — trans-immanence. This is a declaration of the reality of the new Earth.

You can listen your way into an ensouled, living atmosphere of warmth, love, surprise and humor. The 10 songs of Immanent Function are like 10 pebbles I left along the path.

Have a listen!

1. The Magnification

2. Marilyn of the Whirlwind

3. Belikane

4. Creation

5. Of Your Lover’s Hopes

6. Highway Home

7. Ignatia’s Angel

8. Alive and Well

9. Remember Us

10. Rejoindre Aux Etoiles

    (You can download the songs here)

Upcoming events:

Song Circle for Earth

Sunday, April 21, 6:30-8:30

Centering Space

14812 Lake Ave, Lakewood, Ohio 44107

Come join us in the Celtic Great Song, the Oran Mor in Gaelic.

We will sing together for the Great Work of transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans are present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.

Weather permitting we’ll be outside.

Donation welcome

Christopher Reynolds, singer, teacher and shaman, earned his M.Ed. from Ashland University and served 30 years as a French instructor for the Berea City Schools. Chris continues to serve as an adjunct professor at Ashland University and Ursuline College. He is a singer-songwriter with 20 original albums. Chris has co-led two healing journeys to Vietnam (2018, 2023) with Warriors Journey Home as the group’s ritual practitioner. He continues to teach, consult, and provide non-traditional healing services. Chris is a co-founder of archetypal ecology and No Man’s Folk and serves as a board member and ritual consultant for Warriors Journey Home.

CURRENT PROGRAMS

The Alchemical Process from lead to Lead: The Lunar Nodes, Individuation, and Tobacco

“Welcome to the Anthropocene” Concert Series

Come out to sing together with Christopher Reynolds.

A Welcome to the Anthropocene Concert continues an American music tradition of which Pete Seeger wrote in 2014:

The older I get, the more I am convinced that if there's a human race still here in a hundred years, one of the main reasons will be that we found ways we can sing together.

We are in a literal and metaphorical global transformation out of the Holocene epoch and into the Anthropocene. Whether marked by the Industrial Era, Nuclear weapons since Trinity in July, 1945, or other means, humanity has transformed the entire atmosphere of the planet. More than any time in our history, Americans are being asked to deepen the dream beyond the pursuit of happiness. We are all called to the pursuit of happiness for all beings.

Here is an evening when we choose to join together to bring forth the courage and love called forth by this season.

$10 per person
$15 for families

Trinosophia and Trinity: Answering Oppenheimer’s Call for World Peace

Christopher Nolan said of his film, Oppenheimer: "I have hopes it will actually stimulate a national, even global conversation about the issues that Oppenheimer was desperate to speak out about — about how to live in the atomic age, how to live with the bomb and about McCarthyism — what it means to be a patriot, and what is the role for a scientist in a society drenched with technology and science, to speak out about public issues.”

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This session takes up our current spiritual work living with the Bomb in an atomic age. I will present Hermeticism's Trinosophia - Mother, Daughter, Holy Soul, who is partner to the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, the Trinity, as psychologically necessary for American soul-work since July, 1945.

We are the only nation on the planet to use nuclear weapons on others. This puts an extra burden of psychological stewardship upon each American soul to seriously take up what alchemists called, "Nigredo," of the Great Work of caring for All Our Relations.

I think that Trinosophia has always been implied in the image of the pyramid on the Great Seal of the United States. Hiding in that image is the eye that is the eye underworld.

When we bring the waking eye of willpower into relationship with the dreaming eye of Remembrance, we enter into an awareness known as The Chariot. This same idea of union of above and below is in all enduring traditions.

Contact:

spiriman AT aim DOT com

“Welcome to the Anthropocene” Concert Series

The Anthropocene Epoch can be recognized by the merging of consciousness, matter, and energy. Our universe is of spacetimeconsciousness. McGilchrist sums this up nicely in an interview called, The Divided Brain and the Sense of the Sacred.

Join Christopher Reynolds for this concert series that welcomes, celebrates and encourages the Creative Mythology as described by Joseph Campbell. Through songs, poems, and stories, Chris invites you to remember how we all volunteer to be born and to become ourselves through the seasons of life over many lifetimes. You will leave with songs, field notes, and strategies to help yourself, your loved ones, your ecosystem, planet, even your enemies and strangers.

Dark Nights and Dawns of the Soul: What is a Spiritual Emergency?

 A spiritual emergency, also known as a positive disintegration, an exceptional human experience, a spiritually transformative experience (STE), a Via Negativa experience in Creation Spirituality, the 11th and 12th Steps in the 12 Steps of Recovery, or a religious problem, V62.89, in the DSM-V diagnosis book used by psychiatrists, is a breakdown of meaning, daishigyo, great ego-death, that leads to transformative growth and greater psycho-spiritual health on the part of the individual that invites the community into a new awareness.

It is an experience of the Direction of the West in the Indigenous Medicine Wheel. The West is the quadrant of spirit that completes the mental, emotional, and physical quadrants. Knowledge of spiritual emergency and its patterns make a world of difference to those who are going through them as well as for those who love and care for persons in a breakdown of meaning. This workshop looks at a current list of 13 forms of spiritual emergency for which there is considerable amounts of scholarship. We will look at the patterns for:

shamanic and bardic crises

nearing death awareness

awakening of Kundalini

episodes of unitive consciousness

close encounters with UFOs/UAPs and abduction experiences

psychological renewal through return to the center

co-dependency, alcoholism and drug addiction

crisis of psychic opening

moral injury

past-life experiences

possession states

communication with spirit guides and "channeling"

Near-death experiences

With music, stories and a short ritual, Christopher Reynolds will also invite someone to share or share his own "lead" as done in the rooms of Recovery. This is an expansion of the stories permitted in the rooms beyond stories of addiction into all forms of spiritual emergency. He experienced a shamanic crisis/psychological renewal through return to the center experience in July, 1992, that set him on his path of singer, teacher, roving shaman.

No Man’s Folk Music Gathering

(roots music that Roots itself in dreaming)

No Man’s Folk is sobriety-based music for recovering peoples in recovering  communities. It unites original music with what we call ‘traditional’ folk music and Traditional, in the sense of Indigenous, folk music.

Generally, the population of the United States lives within 3 world views. They are the primal kinship/quantum world view, the modern world view, and the late-modern world view. Each world view has its ideas regarding death. They can be expressed by the images below:

To enter a No Man’s Folk circle, bring songs, poetry, dance, Beauty that invites all world views to be welcomed and encouraged to create a flourishing future together.

Our family, the Reynolds who came to settle in Pruitton, Alabama, was split in half by the war, 1861-1865. In the song, What Heaven Taught, along with the wonderful video by Chris Keffer, is my work to contribute to the unanswered questions of my Ancestors. Three brothers fought for the North and three for the South. Our direct ancestor, James H. Reynolds fought side by side with his eldest son, Jesse Reynolds, in the 1864 Camden Campaign.

The questions I am answering in What Heaven Taught is, “Why did some partisans and soldiers of the North become swept up in Messianic End-times rhetoric?” “Why did they make the war into a cosmic battle between the forces of Good and Evil, thinking that Jesus was coming soon.” The evidence of this is Battle Hymn of the Republic?

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

The narrator in What Heaven Taught is a Yankee brother who has taken up arms against his own family. He does this because he thinks it is the Final Days and because the Glory of the coming of the Lord is at hand. We meet him just after he dies and crosses over. At this moment, he sees things as they really are. He realizes that it is not in the battle against satanic evil that for which he has sacrificed his life. He was never fighting a cosmic devil. It was just his older brother.

The scales fall from my eyes, I see my brother’s soul.

Ten years earlier, in his 1851, Moby Dick, Herman Melville described the same self-righteous mission in the name of the so-called cosmic good that runs throughout American Christianity as:

…why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things… and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

The French anti-war film, J’accuse, by Abel Gance, is referenced in the imagery. At the end of the 1919 version of the film, the visionary soldier accuses the sun as he seeks the cause of all the ruin he witnessed. There are many ways to interpret this accusation. The one I am suggesting in What Heaven Taught comes from Western mysticism, especially the archetypes found in an astrological birth chart. In a birth chart, the sun is the center of the personality. In the centuries leading up the the Great War, the idea that a human being is also a sacred being was for the most part forgotten. The “sun” of Western culture’s understanding of humanity had dimmed. I think Gance’s soldier is accusing that idea of humanity that has forgotten that all human beings, all life is sacred.

What Heaven teaches us now is that all life, including human beings are sacred. Like trees that live many seasons, we, too, know many lives and are connected to all of them, past/present/future. We grow for 3 seasons and rest for one between them. Consciousness, matter, and energy are all woven together. When we know this, all that exists appears in its natural radiance.

What Heaven Taught

I feel the Word set fire of the Spirit in my heart,

Boldly mock the crossroads, so certain of my part.

I do not see it coming, for I have gone blind.

Now, I am broken in this deathbed of our pride.

When you run headlong to the guns with Truth burning in your veins

For your children, for the Kingdom, for the Union, for the slaves,

The lesson of your dyin’ is hollow at the Gate.

The Keepers ask your soul what Heaven taught of hate?

We sure 'nuff give 'em Hell down at Devil's Den

The shellfire does not scare me, no, nor the last words of my friends.

Faith is your armor, then you bleed out of control.

The scales fall from my eyes, I see my Brother's soul.

He's running headlong to the guns.

He's got the Truth burning in his veins.

For his children, for their Freedom, for his Birthright to the Father's Ways.

The lesson of your dyin’, Brother, is it hollow at the Gate?

The Keepers ask your soul what Heaven taught of hate?

The Keepers?

One day, if you go marching out in a parade.

If one day you go a-ridin’ and you find a grave.

One night beneath a dark sky with moonlight shining down,

If tears heal your heart, you’ll hallow the Ground.

Run headlong with a gun and the truth burning in your veins

For your Ways.

The lesson of your dyin’ is hollow at the Gate.

The Keepers ask your soul what Heaven taught of hate?

The lesson of your dyin’?

Hey Keepers……ain't it hollow?

If you never visit here again, I wish to write to you:

Thank you for the courage of your birth. Thank you for being born into the place you were born into. I can name a particular kind of spiritual poverty that our culture suffers that takes the name of “addiction,” addiction meaning, “surrendering your voice.” In the indigenous world and in our own tradition of Hermeticism, we volunteer to come into this world. We participate in the choosing of this life and mission. Western culture creates addiction by imposing onto the children’s minds that they are victims of their own birth. Whether you were taught that your birth was an accident, somebody else did it to you, or a blend of both…I call this, “a cinder block to the head.” Part of why you are here is to dismantle all the patterns of surrendering of voices/addictions and to give to the next generations what you longed to receive yourself but did not receive. You are here to let the beauty you love be what you do. A Western evolutionary astrological birth chart offers a “new sun.” New Sun means that human identity in the cosmos of the Anthropocene invites many lifetimes of the adventure of human being.

Pictured above is my father’s notes for his Alcoholics Anonymous lead. His certainty that without God, he was nothing, contains one of his unanswered questions. I am answering it now. Our family for centuries has suffered what Joseph Campbell describes as mythic dissociation. He writes:

…since it is at root a consequence of the basic biblical doctrine of an ontological distinction between God and his universe, creator and creature, spirit and matter, it is a problem that has hardly altered since it first became intolerably evident at the climax of the Middle Ages. In briefest restatement: The Christian is taught that divinity is transcendent: not within himself and his world, but “out there.” I call this mythic dissociation. Turning inward, he would not find divinity within, but only his created soul…Consequently, just as in the Old Testament view a relationship with God could be achieved only through physical birth as a member of the Holy Race, so in the New, only through baptism (spiritual birth) into membership in Christ’s Church; i.e., participation, in either case, in a specific social group…

Unhappily, however, in light of what is now known, not only of the history of the Bible and the Church, but also of the universe and evolution of species, a suspicion that was already dawning in the Middle Ages; namely that the biblical myth of Creation, Fall, and Redemption is historically untrue. Hence, now spread throughout the Christian world is a desolating sense not only of no divinity within (mythic dissociation) but also of no participation in divinity without (social identification dissolved): and that, in short, is the mythological base of the Waste Land of the modern soul, or, as it is being called these days, our ‘alienation.”

He strikes a similar tone in Thou Art That. By the way, this is the answer to my father’s unanswered question above. To his suffering of “Without God I am nothing.” I offer, “Thou Art That.” It’s my response to him from my life now to all our ancestors, those of my family alive now, all those to come, and for all the human species mind:

One of the most interesting things about the Bible is that every one of the major Old Testament mythological themes has been found by modern scholars in the earlier Sumero-Babylonian complex: The serpent-god, the tree in the garden of immortal life, the fashioning of mankind from clay, the deluge and many others…In the Western tradition, the divine is not within you. When you turn within, you find a human soul and that human soul may or may not be in proper relationship with its creator. The great world of the biblical tradition tells us that nature is corrupt and that a fall took place, whether you designate it as Original Sin or not. How in this tradition do you get related to God? The relationship is accomplished through an institution. This we may term the first mythic dissociation in that it dissociated the person from the divine principle. The individual can only become associated with the divine through the social institution…

By this arrangement, however, we have been emptied of our sense of our own divinity. We have been committed to a social organization or hierarchical institution which sets up claims for itself. (p. 12 & p. 25)

Wasteland, is how Campbell identified the world view that wields the cinderblock, abandons the soul, pollutes the waters, swallows the spirit, splits off individuals from the cycles of nurturing and being nurtured, makes us empty of divinity and alien, homeless with no way home:

A totally new order of state beliefs and rites, to the glory of some name or other, is superimposed upon the old, life-fostering order of the family and spiritual rites of passage and initiation: a “faith,” as it is called, is proposed for belief….The Wasteland, let us say then, is any world in which (to state the problem pedagogically) force and not love, indoctrination, not education, authority, not experiences prevail in the ordering of lives, and where the myths and rites enforced and received are consequently unrelated to the actual realization, needs, and potentialities of those upon whom they are impressed. Creative Mythology, p. 389

Here’s the same message in my father’s notes in Emblemata Sacra by Thomas Cramer in the 17th century.

TO THE GARDEN THE WORLD

TO the garden the world anew ascending,

Potent mates, daughters, sons, preluding,

The love, the life of their bodies, meaning and being,

Curious here behold my resurrection after slumber,

The revolving cycles in their wide sweep having brought me again,

Amorous, mature, all beautiful to me, all wondrous,

My limbs and the quivering fire that ever plays through them, for
reasons, most wondrous,

Existing I peer and penetrate still,

Content with the present, content with the past,

By my side or back of me Eve following,

Or in front, and I following her just the same.

In our current cosmology and understanding of consciousness, we are participants with choices in will and remembering. We can learn and grow into the Renaissance, the Requickening, at hand announced by the first image from the James Webb Space Telescope, by the announcement of the Anthropocene’s ‘golden spike,'“ at Crawford Lake, Ontario.

This is the same message found the remarkable work of the Bigelow Institute of Consciousness Studies. Especially in the winning essays that prove the survival of human consciousness beyond bodily death. Read Jeffrey Mishlove’s wonderful essay, Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death.

The Haudenosaunee and all indigenous persons ask us to fully address the Christian Doctrine of Discovery that underpins the past 500 years of colonizing. Read the essay, Ten Religious Themes of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery that Contrast with Indigenous Values, by Phil A. Arnold and Sandra L. Bigtree.

You are the turning point and are at a turning point. Among numerous times to place the beginning of the turning point, I think the solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, is worth considering. On that day, Einstein’s intuition that light is bent by gravity, gravitational lensing, was proved by telescope and photography. There is a direct connection to the impact on human consciousness and the realization in the next decade that plasma is the sun’s state of matter. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who was with Arthur Eddington the day the eclipse was studied, described the impact on her world view as:

The result was a complete transformation of my world picture…My world had been so shaken that I experienced something very like a nervous breakdown.

This same kind of shattering of the world view due to lived experience is what I call, The Magnification. The stars of the constellation Taurus were the ones that Eddington studied. The galactic anti-center, the marker for the outer edge of our galaxy when you trace a line from the galactic center through the sun to the galactic edge, is near the star, El Nauth, in Taurus.

Together, we can take back our forgotten life-fostering order of the family. We can remember together spiritual rites of passage and initiation. We can courageously respect love’s role in education. We can honor experiences that bring sense to life, participate in myths and rites that fully support our actual realization, needs, and potentialities. We can recover the inner fire of our knowing that connects us always to the center of why we are all adventuring here.

Here, since 2016, is a New Earth. Home is now understood by the image below of Earth colliding with another Mars-sized planet called, Theia. I offer this to heal our cultural split that came with the concept of the ecliptic, the “X” described in Plato’s Timaeus, which allowed priestly classes to predict solar and lunar eclipses. The moon is of our Home as much as Earth, which is literally a union of two who have become one. The waters of our planet are a blend of Earth’s waters and the moon’s (Theia’s) galactic waters which are older than the sun.

Though we labor through seemingly unforgiveable circumstances, our “yes” to live the adventure of this life is of a greater heart. Our new sun reminds us each day of this fact.

The symbolism of the sun as the center of the personality is what Joseph Campbell called, “the metaphysical dimension of the individual” in Volume Four of his Masks of God:

the metaphysical dimension of the individual as a value is set forth…individuality is not (as in the orient) a mere figment of illusion, to be analyzed away and dissolved at last, but a substantial entity in itself, to be realized, brought to flower. And the adventure of each, so interpreted, will consist in the following of a summons away from the ‘fixed and the set fast,’ of the world conceived of as law, to a “becoming,” the Purgatory of an individual life, moving toward its own proper end, its ‘wyrd’ (p. 482)

(Purgatory is a loaded term. This same description of becoming could also be described as the creativity, the conceiving, the vitality, the courage, love, wisdom, truth, honesty, humility, respect of an individual life.)

Alice Walker’s character Shug in The Color Purple says it in her way:

“Here’s the thing,” say Shug. “The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for…

My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house. I knew just what it was.”

The same message recurs from older Dagara voices:

The fire within us is what causes our real family — those we are always drawn to when we see them — to identify us. From the realm where the ancestors dwell this fire can be seen in each and every one of us, shining like the stars that you see above your heads. Imagine what would happen if you did not have this fire. You would be a dead star, invisible, wild, and dangerous.

Yes! This fire within us is never dead, therefore it never needs to be reborn. When we know, without being told, that we must perform a certain sacrifice or ritual, we know because fire tells us this. Through the fire within we dialogue constantly with those we left behind us by being born. The fire is the rope that links us with our real home that we abandoned when we died into being human. We leave our real homes to come into this life, but there is nothing wrong with this. You will understand why long before the end of your learning here…In the West, fire is thought to be something wild, dangerous, and unmanageable. It drives the individual into uncontrolled fits of passion and a restless pursuit of material things…To a Dagara, the craziness that fire inspires in the West comes from the fact that fire is upset that Western people have forgotten their purpose in life…

Protection is toxic to the person being safeguarded. This is because no one can effectively protect anyone. When you protect something, the thing you are keeping safe decays. People come into this life with a purpose that enables them to protect themselves. You are your own and best guardian. You go into Baor (initiation) to save yourself from the lethal protection of other people.

Source: NASA

Joseph Campbell in his essay, No More Horizons, now re-appearing in Tarnas’ and Kelly’s edited book, Psyche Unbound: Essays in Honor of Stan Grof:

For it is simply a fact — as I believe we all now got to concede — that mythologies and their deities are productions and projections of the psyche. What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man’s imagination? We know their histories, we know by what stages they developed. Not only Freud and Jung, but all serious students of psychology and of comparative religions today have recognized and hold that the forms of myth and the figures of myth are of the nature essentially of dream. Moreover, as my old friend Dr. Geza Roheim used to say, just as there are no two ways of sleeping, so there are no two ways of dreaming. Essentially, the same mythological motifs are to be found throughout the world…

I have thought about this problem a good deal and have come to the conclusion that when the symbolic forms in which wisdom-lore has been everywhere embodied are interpreted not as referring primarily to any supposed or even actual historical personages or events, but psychologically, properly, “spiritually,” as referring to the inward potentials of our species, there then appears through all something that can be properly termed a ‘philosophia perennis’ of the human race, which, however is lost to view when the texts are interpreted literally, as history, in the usual ways of harshly orthodox thought.

(pp. 7-8)

Source: NASA

Richard Tarnas describes the dying through the Holocene Epoch into a world view appropriate to the way of the solar apex of the Anthropocene Epoch:

The inner direction and goal of the Western mind has been to reconnect with the cosmos in a mature participation mystique, to surrender itself freely and consciously in the embrace of a larger unity that preserves human autonomy while also transcending human alienation….The Western mind must be willing to open itself to a reality the nature of which could shatter its most established beliefs about itself and about the world. This is where the real act of heroism is going to be.

A threshold must now be crossed, a threshold demanding a courageous act of faith, of imagination, of trust in a larger and more complex reality; a threshold, moreover, demanding an act of unflinching self-discernment. And this is the great challenge of our time, the evolutionary imperative for the masculine to see through, to see through and overcome its hubris and one-sidedness, to own its unconscious shadow, to choose to enter into a fundamentally new relationship of mutuality with the feminine in all its forms.

The feminine then becomes not that which must be controlled, denied, and exploited, but rather fully acknowledged, respected, and responded to for itself. It is recognized not as the objectified “other,” but rather source, goal, and immanent presence….Today we are experiencing something that looks very much like the death of modern man, indeed that looks like the death of Western man. Perhaps the end of “man” himself is at hand. But man is not a goal. Man is something that must be overcome —- and fulfilled, in the embrace of the feminine. (p. 444)

The path of larger unity that as Tarnas writes, “preserves human autonomy while also transcending human alienation,” was described by Hermann Hesse in his 1919 book, Demian:

Each man had only one genuine vocation — to find the way to himself…His task was to discover his own destiny — not an arbitrary one — and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt to evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one’s own inwardness.

To live out our destiny wholly and resolutely finds support as how it feels to live the Creative Mythology by Joseph Campbell:

Creative mythology, in Shakespeare’s sense, of the mirror ‘to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure,’ springs not, like theology, from the dicta of authority, but from the insights, sentiments, thoughts and vision of an adequate individual, loyal to her/his/their own experience of value. Thus it corrects the authority holding to the shells of forms produced and left behind by lives once lived. Renewing the act of experience itself, it restores to existence the quality of adventure, at once shattering and reintegrating the fixed, already known, in the sacrificial creative fire of the becoming thing that is no thing at all but life, not as it will be or as it should be, as it was or as it never will be, but as it is, in depth, in process, here and now, inside and out. [in, Creative Mythology, p. 6]

(Creative mythology) is to be of the whole human race, which is rapidly becoming a social as well as spiritual necessity as the monadic structures (cultures bound by horizons/forcing their horizons onto others) of the past dissolve, is derived from contemporary life, thought and experience, anywhere and everywhere, and the moral order to the support of which they are to be brought shall be the monad (Campbell’s “monad” is now the barycenter of our solar system) of mankind (all humanity). [Inner Reaches of Outer Space]

It’s important to keep in mind that the inner direction and goal of the Western mind as well as mandalic faith, non-agnostic psychology, Creative Mythology, are our culture’s ways to return to gentle relationship with the many other cultures who have already been doing this, some for thousands of years. They use other languages, symbols, rituals. Our inner direction and goal are not to be imposed upon others.

The Celts described our larger global unity that preserves individual sovereignty, the Oran Mor, the Great Song. The Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee live by their Great Law of Peace. In the clip below, their story from warring nations to nations in peace, from a Controller God who loves watching men make war to a Creator of All who loves watching men play the Medicine Game of lacrosse, offers the planet a wisdom worth knowing.

I'm grateful for Cottonwood Stone's invitation to her Quantum Corner. Her program is a gift that allows persons to speak about subjects that matter to them very much. Near-Death Experiences matter to me very much. They open us to shared humanity across all cultures. Please listen to this and share it, especially if the folks around you are mean where you live on the planet. We don't have to make life a living hell for each other. I think making peace with a good-enough knowledge of death makes a difference. We require sustainability in soul, meaning the endurance of soul-Identity over many lifetimes that is in harmony with the sustainable culture we are creating together.

For spirits to leave the hell they are in, they must change their own energetic pattern to one that is incompatible with their issues.

— Handbook to the Afterlife

Ultimately the efficacy of any spiritual path, even of a one-time spiritual experience, is judged not by the Olympian feats required of practitioners, but by whether it transforms the person in ways that also serve the greater good. In this respect, the fruits of transcendent sex can surely be stacked against those of sanctioned spiritual avenues. They are also almost an exact parallel for the transformative effects of near-death experiences.

— Transcendent Sex: When Lovemaking Opens the Veil

to recover the earlier challenges of art, to break through the walls of the culture to eternity. Thus, the only true service of a proper artist today will have to be to individuals; reattuning them to the forgotten archetypes which have been lost to view…

— The Inner Reaches of Outer Space

Every person has a guardian spirit or angel. They assist us in the transition between life and death and they also help us pick our parents before we are born.

— The Wheel of Life

It is also characteristic of our soul that it is concerned not only for its own body but for the bodies of all earthly things and for the earth itself, to cultivate them, to further them.

— Marsilio Ficino, in, Liber de Vita (Book of Life)

I will prove that the Earth has motion, and surpasses the moon in brightness and is not the place where the dull refuse of the universe has settled down.

— Sidereus Nuncias (Starry Messenger)

Source: Sky And Telescope

The moon and Earth are a gravitational pair whose orbit together around their barycenter and the barycenter of our solar system brings complementary phases of new/full, waxing crescent/waning gibbous, waxing half/waning half, waxing gibbous/waning crescent, full/new, waning gibbous/waxing crescent, waning half/waxing half, waning crescent/waxing gibbous, new/full, complete each other. Like Beloveds, Earth and moon complete each other as we journey within the solar system within the protective heliosphere of our yellow dwarf star. As we journey within the protective heliosphere of our yellow dwarf star, we cycle above, within, below, the galactic plane, about the galactic center. May our life-giving, life-sustaining, protective celestial star system that is balanced at the stillpoint of its barycenter be known as, The Heart of the Heavens. May we create together a life-giving mythology of the atmosphere in which mysteries are known to join us with our galactic neighbors.

Like Beloveds, Earth and moon complete each other as we journey within the solar system within the protective heliosphere of our yellow dwarf star.

We cycle above, within, below, the galactic plane, about the galactic center. May our life-giving, life-sustaining, protective star be known as, The Heart of the Heavens. May we create together a life-giving mythology of the atmosphere in which mysteries are known to join us with our galactic neighbors.

The famous Earthrise photo of 1969 shows an Earth in it’s waxing gibbous phase.

It’s not difficult now to look at the sun in our sky and experience it as a yellow dwarf star whose warmth, light, and energy produce a protective membrane around our solar system. Take a page from the Celts who imagined the sun as a horse with no name. I find it also works to imagine the sun as a riderless horse, taking a cue from ancient Buddhist art:

It’s not difficult to imagine our star as continuity, the driving force that carries and reflects enduring consciousness, the inner direction and goal of the Western mind, around the good path of our galaxy once every 226 million years. When you see the sun, know that we are carried along by it towards the apex of the Sun’s Way, a point between our constellation Hercules, and the star, Vega, found in the constellation, Lyra. The solar apex was first worked out by Herschel in 1783. He measured the movement of stars as he could during his century. Herschel’s sketch is here:

Lemonick writes of Herschel’s work in his 2009 book, The Georgian Star:

Herschel’s most creative piece of science during this period had to do with the sun and its motion through the heavens. Edmund Halley had first shown in 1718 that three stars, Sirius, Arcturus, and Aldebaran — had changed positions significantly since Hipparchus had first charted them nearly two millennia earlier…In the sixty-odd years since Halley had first noted proper motions, the number of known examples had grown from three to only a dozen or so. Herschel couldn’t help the statistical disadvantage of this small sample size, and he brushed aside the question of distance by once again assuming that dimmer stars were necessarily farther away…Plunging ahead, Herschel came out with the assertion that the sun is moving in the general direction of the star Lambda Herculis. He presented his conclusions to the Royal Society in March 1783. Despite three confounding factors working against him, he turned out to be more or less correct. (pp. 95-96)

Tomruen’s more up to date placement of the solar apex:

We are moving away from the region near the star, Sirius. Therefore, when you look at the sun, remember there is a continuity over the life of our star. We are already joined with the past, present and future, an Alpha and Omega which I call, the Trunkline of the Sun, inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses’ Elijah who appears and prophesizes in a Dublin brothel at 82 Tyrone Lower on June 16, 1904.

Our star and solar system are life’s vehicle for us both literally and metaphorically. Mature participation mystique means that we are now called to merge with the continuity of consciousness over millions of years and to pilot the evolution of planetary life — to live through our time as a species as best we can. Our shared goal can be imagined as living here and now, as pictured below.

I call merging with the continuity of consciousness over millions of years to better participate in the evolution our species in the life on our planet as we orbit the galactic center — Unio Terrae.

Unio Terrae was my state of being in July of 1986 after a mystical experience in the Font-de-Gaume Cro-magnon cave in Les Eyzies, France. In my book, The Immanent Function, I describe Unio Terrae this way:

…I enjoyed a simultaneous seeing and feeling into all the life around me. I could sensually feel the historical and geological ages beneath my feet. Those layers themselves rested upon, as if rooted into a timeless symbolic ground. I understood the shapes, colors, motions and intentions of each tree, bird, plant, breeze. I knew how the underlying summer’s pattern within and around us in-formed all events. In the Depths of it all, hummed a constant and faithful Silence.

Jung describes his experience of it this way in Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons.

Image by Jim Slater from Creative Commons

In the Western Hermetic tradition, the awareness of the continuity of consciousness is symbolized by The Star.

For my contribution, I further develop here Gene Monick’s work in his second installment of his phallos trilogy, Castration and Male Rage: The Phallic Wound. He challenged Western theologians to evolve from the patriarchal Greek term for the original human, Anthropos to Urperson. He and Alice Peterson used the Germanic prefix, ur, in order to render a whole way of speaking about humanity that includes, but expands beyond the word, Man. Humanity = Man + All Genders. In 2021, LGBTQ+H = Humanity. Urperson is defined as: Original/Primal/Source Being.

In Castration and Male Rage, there are numerous perspectives offered as to how those who identify as men experience being cut off, castrated, from authentic dreaming, loving, creating, being. Below is what I call a sidereal COEX constellation called: Urth and Urperson’s Journey: Apex of the Sun’s Way.

This is an update of our inherited constellation of the masculine hero, Hercules. My intention is to honor all of the lessons learned by human experiences of the heroic male-identified ego/one-man-show. I have intentionally included Vega, brightest light of Orpheus’ harp, Lyra, as a way to show that the burden has been lifted from both the heroic ego and the cultural savior complex that the West has lived. The Apex is an invisible arc that apparently goes before us in order to remind us of the context of current consciousness. As our solar system orbits the galactic center, we are all encouraged to say yes to an ever-deepening delight of being on journey of many lifetimes.

Tarnas observed in 1991:

…as Hegel suggested, a civilization cannot become conscious of itself, cannot recognize its own significance, until it is so mature that it is approaching its own death. Today we are experiencing something that looks very much like the death of modern man, indeed that looks very much like the death of Western man. Perhaps the end of “man” himself is at hand. But man is not a goal. Man is something that must be overcome — and fulfilled, in the embrace of the feminine.

I think Monick’s and Peterson’s Urperson, imagined as a union of LGBTQ+H, a whole human being, makes it culturally easier to let go of 25 centuries of Anthropos/Parusha/First Man. We let go of the narrow, cramped and mean for a greater loving. Gene wrote in 1991 himself (this text is in a different order in order to get the point across):

Frankly, I sometimes grow weary of the constant necessity in today’s world to explain and defend vocabulary, to weed out potentially offensive terminology, to expand examples to include everybody. I use heterosexual paradigms because I am familiar with them, because translating everything into a syntax acceptable to gay men would convolute my thinking and engage me in a language and thought process that I don’t use. Sexist language and thought structures are built into the way we talk and write. I know that I falter on the path of deconstruction, that what I am doing doesn’t work as it once might have, and that it shouldn’t. It’s a feeble excuse and I don’t defend it.

“You can’t use anthropos,” said Alice. I knew immediately what she meant, though I was impatient at what I experienced as yet another feminine intrusion. Anthropos is Greek for man. It was long used in alchemical writing as the original image of mankind (which in those days included women) in the primal psyche. Jung gave it currency; it means something to a Jungian audience. No one even thinks about its etymology. Alice did.

What Alice Peterson and I did on that editing day was to stop, and once I had calmed down, browse through our heads for an alternative to anthropos. First we left the English language, as an aid to innovation. Then we ranged around for a base-word that included both genders and was recognizable. In German and English, person is the same. The prefix “ur” had exactly the meaning I needed: primal, original, source. So we made up a new word, new at least to us and to the dictionaries at our disposal. Urperson (ur’-per-sohn) has none of the patriarchal etymology of anthropos. Of course, it has none of the tradition either, but we wondered if in use over time, it could become as recognizable to English speakers as are, say, ego, psyche, libido, etc. Something like this process will be necessary if our language and thought structures are to represent our new consciousness. [in Castration and Male Rage, pp. 131-132]

Notice Gene’s point regarding moving beyond ‘Man’ in the evolution of post-Jungian ideas. Here is Jung using “Man” and in this case, he means Urperson for Jung’s main message was of wholeness that makes room for all. In the 21st century, Man or Homo tend to have a narrowing, patriarchal effect:

God wants to be born in the flame of man’s consciousness, leaping ever higher. And what if this has no root in the earth? If it is not a house of stone where the fire of God can dwell, but a wretched straw hut that flares up and vanishes? Could God then be born? One must be able to suffer God. That is the supreme task for the carrier of ideas. He must be the advocate of the earth. God will take care of himself. My inner principle is Deus et homo. God needs man in order to become conscious, just as he needs limitation in time and space. Let us therefore be for him limitation in time and space, an earthly tabernacle. [in Letters, vol 2, 1975. Adler, ed]

Urth and Urperson’s Journey, then, is to shed anthropos and take galactic flight with our star. It is also known as de-colonizng, re-indigenizing, ethnoautobiography, mutation, new human. By far, the most enjoyable approach to the journey we must all make to the cosmos as we know it is with at least one other person who shares your passion for the longterm work. For we are no longer of a time of mono a mono theisms. Urth and Urperson indicate an inner and outer community who devote life to soul. I think it’s true that as Ficino wrote, It is also characteristic of our soul that it is concerned not only for its own body but for the bodies of all earthly things and for the earth itself, to cultivate them, to further them.

One of my teacher friends shared a story that one night, she slept over at her best friend’s home. All through the night, she kept being awakened what she thought was a loud conversation going on in the other room. With the light of the breaking day, she said, she realized that the voice that kept waking her up was her own - and her friend’s. They had been conversing all night long and were waking up inside a dialogue that began in the depths of the night. She said they both looked at each other with surprise, paused, then just kept the conversation going, now, however, with conscious awareness and intention.

I share this because I think Urth and Urperson’s journey require community of soul and dreams and the depths of the night that awaken into the already coming dawn. Here, then, is my furthering of the cultural restoration of soul for the West. What you are looking at invites you to revision Jung’s understanding of the mandala and Anthropos symbolism from a three-dimensional to a four-dimensional awareness. The image below is not a sphere, but a hypersphere that unites waking and dreaming consciousness objective and subjective, individual and universal, relationship with Earth, with Ancestors and the 26,000 year rhythms of our zodiac. I am magnifying Jung’s ideas when he wrote in 1948 in his essay, Depth Psychology, found in The Symbolic Life, Volume 18 of the Collected Works, (pp. 477-486):

The goal of the psychotherapeutic process, the self-regulation of the psyche by means of the natural drive towards individuation, is expressed by the above-mentioned mandala and Anthropos symbolism.

I invite you to a world expressed by the image-below of mandala as hypersphere and Anthropos symbolism as Urperson and Urth.

I offer this image of an inner, outer, and merged awareness also in response to a Jesuit unconsciousness towards the unconscious that has distorted and degraded the life of my family, my community, nation, Europe and all ecosystems of the planet. It’s a four-dimensional hypersphere with an axis mundi known as the ‘W-axis’ in geometry. It is also a necessary clarification of Jung’s development of the mandala as a self-image. As a rule, those who work with the circle in a mandalic way continue Jung’s original geometric and artistic mandalic error. He worked, dreamed, created and wrote during a time when the 4th dimension was being integrated into Western culture. In 1992, I had a personal conversation with Greg Mogeson. He shared that he was working on a paper he called, Refusal of the Muse. This paper was based on an inner dialogue Jung had with an inner feminine voice who told him his mandalas were art. He chose to not listen to her:

When I was writing down these fantasies, I once asked myself, ‘What am I really doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with science. But then what is it?” Whereupon a voice within me said, “It is art.” I was astonished. It had never entered my head that what I was writing had any connection with art. Then I thought, “Perhaps my unconscious is forming a personality that is not me, but which is insisting on coming through to expression.” I knew for a certainty that the voice had come from a woman. I recognized it as the voice of a patient, a talented psychopath who had a strong transference to me. She had become a living figure within my mind. Obviously what I was doing wasn’t science. What then could it be but art? It was as though these were the only alternatives in the world. That is the way a woman’s mind works. I said very emphatically to this voice that my fantasies had nothing to do with art, and I felt a great inner resistance. No voice came through, however, and I kept on writing. Then came the next assault, and again the same assertion: “That is art.” This time I caught her and said, “No, it is not art!

While Jung describes a 2-dimenional mandala with a point in the center and an outer circumference he will also affirm that experiences of mandalas in dreams are unbound from spacetime. Such dreams are revelatory because announce a future. The mental habit the past century to use 2 dimensional geometry to describe 4 dimensional lfie. A mandala is not a circle, nor even a sphere, but a hypersphere.

Jung affirms his four dimensional awareness of humans in his 1959 BBC Face to Face interview two years before his death:

…we know that there are these peculiar faculties of the psyche - that it isn't entirely confined to space and time. You can have dreams or visions of the future. You can see around corners and such things. Only ignorance denies these facts, you know; it’s quite evident that they do exist and have existed always. Now these facts show that the psyche is not under obligation to live in time and space alone, and obviously, it doesn’t. Then, to the extent that psyche is not subjected to those laws, that means a practical continuation of life, of a sort of psychical existence beyond space and time.

So, here’s Jung’s writings from the vol 9 of Collected Works with Urperson/Urth and hypersphere replacing mankind, man, center, point, periphery:

The basic motif is the premonition of a W-axis of personality, a kind of axis mundi within the psyche to which everything is related, by which everything is arranged, and which itself is a source of energy due to its turning. The energy of the axis mundi is manifested in an almost irresistible compulsion and urge to become what one is…Although the W-axis is represented by an innermost axis mundi (more like an complex lightning bolt), it is surrounded by relationships with Earth, Ancestors, Divinities, Waking, Dreaming, Creativity and Receptivity containing everything that belongs to Urth…This totality comprises consciousness first of all, then the personal unconscious, and finally, an indefinitely large layer of the collective unconscious whose archetypes are common to all Urpersons and to all Urths.

When Ignatius of Loyola was healing from his war-wounds in Manresa, Spain, he experienced a visionary visitation that he could not understand:

It was while he was living at the hospital at Manresa that the following strange event took place. Very frequently on a clear moonlight night there appeared in the courtyard before him an indistinct shape which he could not see clearly enough to tell what it was. Yet it appeared so symmetrical and beautiful that his soul was filled with pleasure and joy as he gazed at it. It had something of the form of a serpent with glittering eyes, and yet they were not eyes. He felt an indescribable joy steal over him at the sight of this object. The oftener he saw it, the greater was the consolation he derived from it, and when the vision left him, his soul was filled with sorrow and sadness.

In response to Ignatius, C.G. Jung wrote 400 years later:

From Ignatius Loyola’s autobiography, which he dictated to Loys Gonzales, we learn that he used to see a bright light, and sometimes this apparition seemed to him to have the form of a serpent. It appeared to be full of shining eyes, which were yet no eyes. At first he was greatly comforted by the beauty of the vision, but later he recognized it to be an evil spirit. This vision sums up all the aspects of our optic theme and presents a most impressive picture of the unconscious with its disseminated luminosities. One can easily imagine the perplexity which a medieval man would be bound to feel when confronted by such an eminently “psychological” intuition, especially as he had no dogmatic symbol and no adequate patristic allegory to come to his rescue. But as a matter of fact, Ignatius was not so very wide of the mark, for multiple eyes are also a characteristic of the Purusha, the Hindu Cosmic Man. The Rig-Veda (10. 90) says, “Thousand-headed is Purusha, thousand eyed, thousand footed. He encompasses the earth on every side and rules over the ten-finger space.” (p. 198, Collected Works, vol 8)

Urth and Urperson’s Journey: Self-image and World-image, The Messiah Complex, Teaching Image of Archetypal Ecology/Alchemical Shamanism, then, is a framework, a four-dimensional hypersphere that would have allowed Ignatius and his community to appreciate his own symbolic, mysterious, metaphorical psychospiritual experiences as well as those found in Indigenous vision quests, ritual spaces, dreams. Jung indicated that Roman Catholicism of the 16th century did not have this knowledge. I was born in 1961 into a profoundly Irish and German Roman Catholic family and the same lack of the 16th century was alive and well in the 20th. Not only that, but the scientific materialists’ world view compounded this psychological poverty and made it into a way of life.

I think we can sing and dream our way back to dignity when we sing and dream together.

The journey to this new life — and it is a journey we must all make — cannot be made unless we let go of the past. The reality of living in space means that we are born anew, not born again into an old-time religion, but to a new order of things. There are no horizons — that is the meaning of the Space Age. We are in a free fall into a future that is mysterious. It is very fluid and this is disconcerting to many people.

…we had the great symbol of change that has taken place. Men stood on the moon and looked back and by television we were able to look back with them to see earthrise. This is the symbol that enabled us to feel the truth of the discovery that Copernicus made more than four centuries ago. Until then, we may have agreed theoretically with Copernicus but his map of the universe was not available to us, except to mathematicians and astronomers. It was an invisible idea and we could go on thinking, as we did, about a religious idea in which everything was divided along the same lines as the heavens and earth were divided.

This divided model allowed us to think that there was a spiritual order, separate or divided from our experiences…With the moon walk, the religious myth that sustained this notion could no longer be held. With our view of earthrise, we could see that the earth and the heavens were no longer divided but that the earth is in the heavens. There is no division and all the theological notions based on the distinction between the heavens and the earth collapse with this realization. There is a unity in the universe and a unity in our own experience. We can no longer look for a spiritual order outside our experience…it signifies the return of Mother Earth to the heavens. [p. 105, in Thou Art That]

[p. 107, Thou Art That, by Joseph Campbell]

Mystery and that which is beyond knowing are basic facts for our cosmos. I call this growing awareness of the merging of our local cosmos with the wider mysterious whole, The Magnification. More fleshing out of The Magnification runs all through this website.

C. G. Jung in his essay entitled, The Soul and Death, gives a psychological underpinning for Magnification as a deepening of awareness that all could take up and encourage in each other:

The nature of the psyche reaches into obscurities far beyond the scope of our understanding. It contains as many riddles as the universe with its galactic systems, before whose majestic configurations only a mind lacking in imagination can fail to admit its own insufficiency. This extreme uncertainty of human comprehension makes the intellectualistic hubbub not only ridiculous but also deplorably dull. If, therefore, from the needs of his own heart, or in accordance with the ancient lessons of human wisdom, our out of respect for the psychological fact that “telepathic” perceptions occur, anyone should draw the conclusion that the psyche, in its deepest reaches, participates in a form of existence beyond space and time, and thus partakes of what is inadequately and symbolically described as “eternity.”

Our current awareness by Andrew Z. Colvin appears below.

There’s no place like home.

The Immanent Function in sound, word, and sidereal COEX constellation, occurs as a next step in a recording artist’s career that began in 1977 with a release called, Smashed Again with HOTROX. Here are key albums in my catalog since 1991. They offer a map of my journey from unconsciousness of the true depths of consciousness into an ever-deepening sensual delight in being, even during the most chaotic times:

(You can get the songs here)

I’m making my contribution to restore depth psychology to its home on Earth, co-founding an archetypal ecology. I experienced a shamanic illness in 1992 that was triggered by singing my song, Broken God, in a talk by Gene Monick called, Phallos and the Gulf War, which itself was at the Festival of Archetypal Psychology in Honor of James Hillman at Notre Dame University, South Bend, Indiana, USA. There is a saying in Indigenous wisdom that whatever virtue you leave out of your life will come back to bite you in the ass. During my passage, I drove home to Berea, Ohio. During that time, I was moving between worlds, living in assorted mythological stories, healing what was broken in the past, as often occurs in spiritual emergence. However, during my drive, there was a clear boundary between the road and the actual Earth and ecosystems I drove through. I did not know it at that time, but the colonization that had been part and parcel of Greek culture and that was very present in archetypal psychology, prevented me from even considering that who wanted my attention was the wisdom of the Medicine Wheel. That wisdom is called, Grandfather Teachings, in Anishinabe. I had no Grandfather Teachings and neither did Monick, Hillman, Jung, Freud, and on back into Heraclitis.

The Wisdom of the Directions do, however, appear in Hillman’s writings, all the way at the end of Revisioning Psychology. The Four Directions can be understood many ways. They can be the hours of the day, the weeks of a month, the seasons of a year, the
”seasons” of a lifetime. They can also be imagined as the heartbeat and breathing of all that lives. Look at Hillman’s final paragraph of ReVisioning and notice the circle within them. Notice how, like in the wheel of the year, he delivers the entire effort into what amounts to the stillness of winter and surrenders. Will there be a re-birth?

A Processional Exit

Though this has been a groundwork of irreplaceable insights, they are to be taken neither as foundations for a systematic theory nor even as a prolegomenon for any future archetypal psychology. Soul-making needs adequate ideational vessels, and it equally needs to let go of them. In this sense, all that is written in the foregoing pages is confessed to with passionate conviction, to be defended as articles of faith, and at the same time disavowed, broken and left behind. By holding to nothing, nothing holds back the movement of soul-making from its ongoing process, which now like a long Renaissance processional slips away from us into memory, off stage and out of sight. They are leaving — even the Bricoleur and the Rogue Errant who put together the work and charted its course; there goes Marsenne in his monk’s dress, and Lou, and Hagel; the Cartesians depart, and the transcendental refusers of pathology, and the Heroic Ego who had to bear such brunt; now Anima in all her marvelous veils moves off southward smiling; going too are Freud and Jung, side by side, psychologized, into the distance, and the mythical personages from Greece, the Greek words, and Latin phrases, the footnoting authorities, the literalistic enemies and their troop of fallacies; and when the last image vanishes, all icons gone, the soul begins again to populate the stilled realms with figures and fantasies born of the imaginative heart. (p. 229)

So, in the spirit of the soul’s new beginning to “populate the stilled realms with figures and fantasies born of the imaginative heart,” let us take Jung at his word when he describes what he learned about the mandala. Both the notion that this circle is a tool in our box, this definition also derives its Wisdom from the Earth, the Nature that we instinctively are:

In such cases it is easy to see how the severe pattern imposed by a circular image of this kind compensates the disorder of the psychic state — namely through the construction of a central point to which everything is related, or by a concentric arrangement of the disordered multiplicity and of contradictory and irreconcilable elements. This is evidently an attempt at self-healing on the part of Nature, which does not spring from conscious reflection but from an instinctive impulse.

[C. G. Jung in, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, p. 388]

Next, in Indigenous Wisdom, the “concentric arrangement” offers ways to hold and see nuances of meaning in relationship and in being. Above and below, here are waking a dreaming life, objective and subjective life. The Wheel is here, so too, our Zodiac, JVHV’s Mazzaroth, meaning Garland of Crowns, in the Book of Job, yet shown as being of the Earth, no longer projected up and out. Here is a way of being and being in relationship, of waking, living, sleeping, dying, being reborn, Urperson and Urth, Self-image and World-image, Messiah Complex.

Urperson and Urth: Self-image and World-image, Messiah Complex is a world-image/self-image you can use to imagine what your own messiah complex looks like. You can take responsibility for an tend souls of your community and your own. I offer this as a re-indigenization of the Western mind. This offering gives you a way to take up the tools of archetypal astrology and psychology. This offers a way to imagine how we could remain resilient in the face of even the most toxic ages of our species. The hope that persons will choose to learn the deeper ways of humanity Richard Tarnas writes about this way:

The current body of accumulated data makes it difficult to sustain the modern assumption that the universe as a whole is best understood as a blind, mechanistic phenomena of ultimately random processes with which human consciousness is fundamentally incoherent, and in which the Earth and human beings are ultimately peripheral and insignificant. The evidence suggests rather that the cosmos is intrinsically meaningful to and coherent with human consciousness; that the Earth is a significant focal point of this meaning, a moving center of cosmic meaning in an evolving universe, as is each individual human being, that time is not only quantitative but qualitative in character, and that different periods of time are informed by tangibly different archetypal dynamics, and finally, that the cosmos as a living whole appears to be informed by some kind of pervasive creative intelligence—an intelligence, judging from the data, of scarcely conceivable power, complexity, and aesthetic subtlety, yet one with which human intelligence is ultimately connected, and in which it can consciously participate. I believe that a widespread understanding of the potent but usually unconscious dynamics that coincide with planetary cycles and alignments, both in individual lives and in the historical process, can play a crucial role in the positive unfolding of our collective future.

As I can attest from my own initial encounter with this evidence, there are many reasons why a person with a twentieth century education and the usual background of modern cosmological assumptions would find it difficult to accept even the remotest possibility of meaningful correspondences between the movements of the planets and the patterns of human experience. I believe that historically, some of those reasons have indeed been justified, and I have sought to address these. Yet,I also believe that the evidence now available, when examined and explored with an open mind and an open heart, speaks for itself better than any defense I could attempt to provide. I have found the archetypal astrological perspective, properly understood, to be uniquely capable of illuminating the inner dynamics of both cultural history and personal biography. It provides extraordinary insights into the deeper shifting patterns of the human psyche, both individual and collective, and into the complexly participatory nature of human reality. It places the modern mind and the modern self in an altogether new light, radically recontextualizing the modern project. Perhaps most important, it promises to contribute to the emergence of a new, genuinely integral world view, one that, while sustaining the irreplaceable insights and achievements of the modern and postmodern development, can reunite the human and the cosmic, and restore transcendent meaning to both.

When left untouched due to our neglect of working on our unconscious, a shadow of this image of Urth and Urperson’s Journey: Messiah Complex appears in Star Wars as, The Death Star. Death Star could be read as a way of saying, we choose to surrender the responsibility of our inner work to others. Here is a way to understand saying 70 in the Gospel of Thomas:

If you have gained this within you, what you have will save you.

If you do not have this in [you], what you do not have in you [will] kill you.

Jenny Wade invites us all to the experience of LGBTQ+H/Urperson-lovers who are bringing forth together what is within them:

There’s no question Spirit can visit us with more force and power through sex than perhaps through any other venue. Opening the veil to apprehend the greater reality through sex changes people. Lovers, like other aspirants and near-death experiencers, understand the world in a different way and are transformed by that understanding, without the help, approval, or interference of priests, gurus, ideologies, or disciplines. Isn’t it enough to honor what the experiencers themselves are saying. What authority do we need to interpret the validity of the miraculous things that have happened to them? These lovers’ experiences speak for themselves. [p. 260, in Transcendent Sex: When Lovemaking Opens the Veil]

John E. Mack found a similar authenticity and transformation in experiencers of alien abduction:

For this awakening, the heightened awareness that grows out of the ego-shattering impact of the encounters, carries with it quite consistently certain inter-related psychological changes, especially if experiencers are enabled to work through the traumatic dimension of what they feel certain has happened to them.

First, they have access to what in Western societies is called nonordinary states of consciousness, similar to the symbolic worlds of the shamans of indigenous cultures. They become aware of the great archetypes of the collective unconscious, of birth, death, and rebirth, which helps them to experience their connectedness to other beings and to the Creator or Source.

Second, as a result of this deepening and expanding of their psychological and spiritual powers (abductees will often also speak of and manifest particular psychic abilities), together with the experienced shift of their bodily vibrations, they may undergo a profound connection or reconnection with the Divine, God, Source or whatever they may call the ultimate creative principle of the cosmos…

Third, they experience a heart-opening, a sense of loving connection with all living beings and creation itself, which can at times take on mystical proportions…This is consistent with the findings of Norman Don and Gilda Moura, who observed that Brazilian abduction experiencers could enter voluntarily into states of hyperarousal revealed by their brain waves to be comparable only to the states of ecstasy or samadhi of advanced meditators or yogis.

Fourth, abductees experience a renewed sense of the sacred and a reverence for nature. Some, like Carlos Diaz, see divine light, like an aura, surrounding each living thing…they may become aware of the interconnected web of life and be viscerally, sometimes unbearably, pained by the destruction of the Earth’s living forms, committing themselves to their preservation…

…Each of the principle elements of the phenomenon — the traumatic intrusions, the reality-shattering encounters, the reconnection with Source; and the forging of new relationships across dimensional divide—contributes to the daishigyo, the great ego-death, that is marking the end of the materialist business -as-usual paradigm that has lost its compatibility with life in the world as we know it. (pp. 277-278, in Passport to the Cosmos.)

John Wier-Perry writes of the same pattern as those above. He finds them in all spiritual emergence and spiritual emergencies successfully lived:

Thus, in an individual’s life, when a transformation of one’s inner culture is under way, dissolution of the world image is the harbinger of change. Expressions of cultural reform are explicit.

These and other archetypal images have the function of implementing the process of spirit, of liberating and transforming its energies, which will then slip out of the old structures and into new ones geared to the future. All this happens in the interest of development, of cultivating a more capacious consciousness, open to new dimensions of experience…

…The energy that had been bound up in the structures of the old self-image and world image, the issues of who one is and what sort of world one lives in, is immense. In dreams or visions, nuclear explosion is a frequent expression of this enormous change of psychic energy that is loose during the renewal process and raises havoc for a period of time. Though one’s own nature is struggling to break through, one may feel that who one is and what one values is up for grabs. Indeed, values and the emotional issues of life seem to be clashing opposites…  

…What is the ultimate goal of spiritual emergence and the renewal process? It has the same goal as that of the mystic way or of meditation: in Buddhist practice, it is called wisdom and compassion or love.” (pp. 68-69, in Spiritual Emergency, Christina and Stan Grof, eds.)



Watch the clip above and I invite you to be open to the possibility that the lyrics, And your spirit won’t die, are another way to sing that our deepest Identity does not die. It’s time to embrace and to encourage in others the enduring transpersonal, trans-temporal dimension of the individual as a substantial entity in itself, a morphogenetic field, a soul, to be realized, harmonized, and brought to flourish.

The changing points of view of the clip are an homage to Cubism. It is an update of the simultaneous perspectives that I invite you to imagine as a shift in consciousness along the W axis of spacetime. In Gratitude for the Cleveland Museum of Art and it’s Keithley Collection, here are 2 paintings by Picasso. Head of a Boy comes from his Rose Period, 1904-1906 and Head (Tete), is from 1926. The first is from a single point of view (W = 1/1) and the second has three points of view (W = 1/3) both sides and the frontal view.

Michael Murphy, in his 1992 book, The Future of the Body: Explorations Into The Further Evolution Of Human Nature, invites readers into remembering what is still known in Indigenous cultures as well as new potentials. He notes aspects of individuation and the sense of self:

— Awakening to a witness self that is fundamentally distinct from particular thoughts, impulses, feelings, or sensations.

— Feeling for a moment as if your body is only a small part of yourself, or that it is located at a specific point in the field of awareness.

— Feeling a new substantiality, as if you are somehow larger, stronger, and more solid.

— Spontaneously realizing a new and profound self-confidence that adverse criticism does not affect.

— Feeling as if you are suddenly more real, more authentic, more truly yourself.

— Momentarily apprehending all objects of perception as if they are contained within you.

— Experiencing an identity that self-evidently existed before your birth and that will outlast your body’s death.

Here is more from Chris Bache:

However we eventually conceptualize the makeup of the Soul, the story of the Soul is in essence a story of individual consciousness — ultimately sourced in the Creative Intelligence of the cosmos - moving systematically back and forth between the physical universe and a surrounding meta-universe on a long journey of self-development. The pulse of the Soul is the pulse of reincarnation, our awareness narrowing at birth and expanding at death. Reincarnation is a dance in which our earthly lives emerge from and return to our Soul, the larger consciousness that preserves every thought, every tear, every joy we experience on Earth and in-between our earthly living folding all our experiences elegantly into its expanding radiance. Reincarnation gives individual consciousness an open-ended amount of time in which to learn from its mistakes and develop its innate capacities. Properly understood, reincarnation is a work of genius…

[in LSD and the Mind of the Universe, p. 91]

Bache’s surrounding meta-universe is expressed in evolutionary astrology and earlier works over the centuries, like Yeats’, A Vision, in the symbolism of the moon. Steven Forrest notes:

The point of all this is simply that the Moon, with its vast baggage of internal, subjective biases, is the true ruler of the only thing any of us can reliably keep or take out of this world: the core, underlying moods and attitudes that our memories have generated in us…As you age, you, like Carl Jung, might find that your literal memories grow vague. But the moods and attitudes you have created in your heart will remain. that Moon memory will shine out through your rheumy, geriatric eyes, even if your brain fails. It will define much of the mysterious experience you face after your heart stops.

And when, after a moment of rest upon the wind, you have two clear eyes and a child’s impressionable heart again, it will shine on. [The Book of the Moon, pp. 315-316]

C. G. Jung had hinted at the same understanding decades earlier in his essay, The Undiscovered Self:

The structure and physiology of the brain furnish no explanation of the psychic process. The psyche has a peculiar nature which cannot be reduced to anything else. Like physiology, it presents a relatively self-contained field of experience, to which we must attribute a quite special importance because it includes one of the two indispensable conditions for existence as such, namely, the phenomenon of consciousness. Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists for us only in as far as it is consciously reflected by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being. Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position co-equal with the principle of physical being. The carrier of this consciousness is the individual who does not produce the psyche of his own volition but is, on the contrary, performed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. If therefore the psyche is of overriding empirical importance, so also is the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche. (p. 27)

The cosmology that affirms the larger consciousness that preserves every thought, every tear, every joy we experience on Earth and in-between our earthly living folding all our experiences elegantly into its expanding radiance where our minds can circulate in Eternity and space-time, is the four-dimensional quantum cosmos of Einstein’s universal law of gravitation published in 1915. Since July of 1969, with its human perspective of boots on the moon looking back at Earth in infinite space-time. Steven Forrest offers an excellent account and is an exemplar of how our culture could learn to integrate reincarnation into its world view. The planetary mind will heal the end of the Holocene Epoch and reveal the dawning magnificence of our hearts’ flowerings in the vast ecological brilliance of all life of the Anthropocene Epoch.

Ecomasculine, Ecofluid, Ecofeminine, Ecofluid = LGBTQ+H

The clip below, Monticello, in sound and image, represents part 2 of the four-part YouTube American global climate vaccine available on this website: Everything Has a (w)Hole, Monticello, All Failing (Crown of Stars for You), and, The Ghost of Jacques Brel. My hope is they inspire/irk you into taking on the task of re-claiming your right to freedom and the duty of individual responsibility. As our American Ancestors dreamed their way into an independent self-hood during the Revolutionary period from 1740-1840, as all members of American culture dreamed their way into a new possibility for true equality from 1840-1870, as human beings dreamed their way into a possibility of world peace among nations in the 20th century, so, we too, can take up dreams in a choice to unite our consciousness with our personal, collective, ecological, cosmological unconscious - a life aligned to the Apex of the Sun’s Way for the good of all beings past, present, future.

We can evolve the American Dream through the Epicurean pursuit of happiness into the greater hearts into the embodied delight of the pursuit of the happiness of all beings.

We can say, Yes, to life. Once again, the clip moves along the W axis of spacetime.

Knowing and living this responsibility are the vaccines against what Jung warned was the infection of a uniform and one-sided idea. He warned:

What, then, has the West, with its political and denominational schisms, to offer modern man in his need? Nothing, unfortunately, except a variety of paths all leading to one goal which is practically indistinguishable from the Marxist ideal. It requires no special effort of understanding to see where the Communist ideology gets the certainty of its belief that time is on its side, and that the world is ripe for conversion. The facts speak a language that is all too plain in this respect. It will not help us in the West to shut our eyes to this and not recognize our fatal vulnerability. Anyone who has once learned to submit absolutely to a collective belief and to renounce his eternal right to freedom and the equally eternal duty of individual responsibility will persist in this attitude, and will be able to march with the same credulity and the same lack of criticism in the reverse direction, if another and manifestly “better” belief is foisted upon his alleged idealism. What happened not so long ago to a civilized European nation? We accuse the Germans of having forgotten it already, but the truth is that we don’t know for certain whether something similar might not happen elsewhere. It would not be surprising if it did and if another civilized nation succumbed to the infection of a uniform and one-sided idea.

America…seems to be immune because of the outspoken counterposition she has adopted, but in point of fact, she is perhaps even more vulnerable than Europe, since her educational system is the most influenced by the scientific world view with its statistical truths, and her mixed population finds it difficult to strike roots in a soil that is practically without history. The historical and humanistic type of education so sorely needed in such circumstances leads, on the contrary, to a Cinderella existence. [p. 23, in The Undiscovered Self]

Our medicine will come through dreaming and working with our dreams, not only as individuals, but also with awareness that we dream for each other and with each other. During REM sleep, men, women, fluid/intersex, all genders, become aroused and their bodies intimately thicken with the blood of their dreaming. Our tumescent privates embodied, breath and blood, participation in nature dreaming, are the psychic roots, the living water and living breath, a personal apotheosis of the sacred masculine, sacred fluid, sacred feminine.

I choose to root this idea in our own ecosystem where the Cuyahoga river that burned has now healed. The symbols and “persons” of the recovery of our nature and dreaming nature that thickens our intimate members are the river chub and creek chub. (seen below) This is also a symbol that we have integrated the lessons of the Age of the Fish and are now learning how to share an entire planet.

I’ve got Chub in big letters at the top of my page because I have lived under the condemnation of our aroused, intimate members, regardless of the shape, that was put upon us by Augustine and then set up as a foundation stone for the Catholic and Protestant doctrine of Original Sin. May we no longer view life third-hand through the eyes of the dead. Here’s Augustine’s account of his experience of arousal in a Roman bathhouse, his terror of his own body which is re-enforced by his mother’s own terror, much to the dismay of his still-pagan, more embodied father:

I will now call to mind my past foulness, and the carnal corruptions of my soul; not because I love them, but that I may love Thee, O my God. For love of Thy love I do it; reviewing my most wicked ways in the very bitterness of my remembrance, that Thou mayest grow sweet unto me (Thou sweetness never failing, Thou blissful and assured sweetness); and gathering me again out of that my dissipation, wherein I was torn piecemeal, while turned from Thee, the One Good, I lost myself among a multiplicity of things. For I even burnt in my youth heretofore, to be satiated in things below; and I dared to grow wild again, with these various and shadowy loves: my beauty consumed away, and I stank in Thine eyes; pleasing myself, and desirous to please in the eyes of men…But while in that my sixteenth year I lived with my parents, leaving all school for a while (a season of idleness being interposed through the narrowness of my parents' fortunes), the briers of unclean desires grew rank over my head, and there was no hand to root them out. When that my father saw me at the baths, now growing towards manhood, and endued with a restless youthfulness, he, as already hence anticipating his descendants, gladly told it to my mother; rejoicing in that tumult of the senses wherein the world forgetteth Thee its Creator, and becometh enamoured of Thy creature, instead of Thyself, through the fumes of that invisible wine of its self-will, turning aside and bowing down to the very basest things. But in my mother's breast Thou hadst already begun Thy temple, and the foundation of Thy holy habitation, whereas my father was as yet but a Catechumen, and that but recently. She then was startled with a holy fear and trembling; and though I was not as yet baptised, feared for me those crooked ways in which they walk who turn their back to Thee, and not their face.

Many persons are already dreaming for us into this gentler embodied world. Black Elk was certainly one:

Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.

James Joyce wrote of the same knowing in Ulysses:

THE GRAMOPHONE: Jerusalem! Open your gates and sing Hosanna…

(A rocket rushes up the sky and bursts. A white star falls from it, proclaiming the consummation of all things and second coming of Elijah. Along an infinite invisible tightrope taut from zenith to nadir the End of the World, a twoheaded octopus in gillie’s kilts, busby and tartan filibegs, whirls through the murk, head over heels, in the form of the Three Legs of Man.)

THE END OF THE WORLD: (with a Scotch accent) Wha’ll dance the keel row, the keel row, the keel row?

(Over the possing drift and choking breathcoughs, Elijah’s voice, harsh as a corncrake’s, jars on high. Perspiring in a loose lawn surplice with funnel sleeves he is seen, vergerfaced, above a rostrum about which the banner of old glory is draped. He thumps the parapet.)

ELIJAH: No yapping, if you please, in this booth. Jake Crane, Creole Sue, Dove Campbell, Abe Kirschner, do your coughing with your mouths shut. Say, I am operating all this trunk line. Boys, do it now. God’s time is 12.25. Tell mother you’ll be there. Rush your order and you play a slick ace. Join on right here. Book through to eternity junction, the nonstop run. Just one word more. Are you a god or a doggone clod? If the second advent came to Coney Island are we ready?

Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ, it’s up to you to sense that cosmic force. Have we cold feet about the cosmos? No. Be on the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that something within, the higher self. You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama, an Ingersoll. Are you all in this vibration? I say you are. You once nobble that, congregation, and a buck joyride to heaven becomes a back number. You got me? It’s a lifebrightener, sure. The hottest stuff ever was. It’s the whole pie with jam in. It’s just the cutest snappiest line out. It is immense, supersumptuous. It restores. It vibrates. I know and I am some vibrator.

Joking apart and, getting down to bedrock, A. J. Christ Dowie and the harmonial philosophy, have you got that? O. K. Seventyseven west sixtyninth street. Got me? That’s it. You call me up by sunphone any old time. Bumboosers, save your stamps. (He shouts) Now then our glory song. All join heartily in the singing. Encore! (He sings)… [Ulysses, 1922]

Here is how I write in now:

Ecomasculine, ecofluid, ecofeminine, are their underpinnings — meaning — This is how it feels. The ecomasculine, ecofluid and ecofeminine are the embodied dreaming and REM/erotically available human participatory experiences, facets of human wholeness I call, The Magnification. Our bodies are literally, physically increased/magnified when we dream. There are wide-open spaces for LGBTQ+H to live out the mystical path of the Beloveds. Our embodied dreaming and waking loving offer us two poles of consciousness and an innermost axis mundi between them. Further developing Jung’s idea of becoming ‘decently unconscious,’ we can imagine this as learning to become decently bi-polar by stewarding our waking and dreaming - alone, in love, in family, clan, community, region, nation, planet.

Jenny Wade, in her 2004 book, Transcendent Sex: When Lovemaking Opens The Veil, wrote prophetically of this same theme, already 17 years ago:

The Face of God

What is the core of the unio mystica? If all the saints and spiritual masters — and the lovers from this study — are correct, it is finally achieving the soul’s desire to see God. But when people are taken into God, they find that Spirit has no face at all — or no face other than all of What Is, no other face than their own, Our Own.

The same staggering realization reverberates throughout the reports of lovers during transcendent sex. According to one man, the moment of recognition is the purest ecstasy and awakening:

It’s real! I can embody all my spirit and it is divine. At the same time I felt it coming from the outside, it was also coming from the inside. It was evident that it was also in me. I participate in divinity in a direct, inclusive way. There’s no separation at all…

It wasn’t a call, it wasn’t a sign. All the things I had interpreted as it weren’t true. Was there a face to God? No. Or a presence? The presence was us. We were just there. It just was…”

We really are All That Is. We are. We are All That Is. All That Is. (p. 189)

Our dream images belong to an even more expansive embodied delight for the self-generative activity of the soul in which we intimately participate. Hillman in his definition of archetypal psychology described this as:

The source of images - dream images, fantasy images, poetic images, is the self-generative activity of the soul itself.

In the archetypal ecology I’m co-founding, I hold to Hillman’s care for images in dreams, fantasy, and poetics, as if I am asserting the certainty of the existence of the moon. However, for a sustainable future, our care can be expanded to include our embodied arousal and the arousal, the flourishing seasonal journey of the life of our dreaming planet itself. Thomas Berry described this way:

Beyond our genetic coding, we need to look to the earth, as the source whence we came, and ask for its guidance, for the earth carries the psychic structure as well as the physical form of every living being upon the planet.

Here is an Earth and moon- based sustainable soul-update of a theory of human personality based on the dream. When our personhood belongs to dreaming and our dreaming belongs to the dream of the Earth, then we belong to the Earth. We are Earth.

We are Earth = Unio Terrae

Hillman first described a theory of personality based on the dream (a decolonizing of Western psychology) in 1975 as:

What we learn from dreams is what psychic nature really is—the nature of psychic reality: not I, but we; not one, but many. Not monotheistic consciousness looking down from its mountain, but polytheistic consciousness wandering all over the place, in the vales and along rivers, in the woods, the sky, and under the earth. By employing the dream as a model of psychic actuality, and by conceiving a theory of personality based on the dream, we are imagining the psyche’s basic structure to be an inscape of personified images…We can describe the psyche as a polycentric realm of nonverbal, nonspatial images…Dreams…are the best model of the actual psyche, for they show it personified, pathologized, and manifold. In them, the ego is only one figure among many psychic persons. Nothing is literal; it is all metaphor. Dreams are the best model also because they show the soul apart from life, reflecting it but just as often unconcerned with the life of the human being who dreams them, their main concern seems not to be with living, but with imagining. (Re-Visioning Psychology, pp. 33 & 175)

You are encouraged to consciously take up a cultural path untaken. The W-axis of the 4th dimension that brings depths to consciousness arrived in America from Europe in the 1913 Armory Show in NYC. The two infinities of the W-axis are upward and downward, named; ana and kata. In Hermeticism, these two infinities are the ever-virgin Father and ever-virgin Mother - implying always beyond the limits of our apprehension. These are the two infinities of human awareness. Upward/ana/Father simultaneously perceives many space-times from a single present space-time perspective. Downward/kata/Mother perceives a single present space-time perspective from many simultaneous space-times.

As an individual, when you align the W-axis, it’s called, the transcendent function, by C. G. Jung - the experience of the union of conscious and unconscious. Fr. John Bryde noted this same unification among the indigenous persons and tribes he met. He called the transcendent function, the innermost. Both Europe and America chose the shallow path into the First World War in 1914. We are at a time when the mental climate of the 20th century can be set aside.

As a community, where two or more are gathered for the good of all beings, a collective alignment of the W-axis, a union of transcendent functions, a one-heart/one-mind of innermosts, I call this, the Immanent Function. Another way to describe the Immanent Function is transimmanence.

Cubism was an art-form that showed the many points of view of now, the downward direction of the W-axis. The videos for Monticello, Everything Has a (w)Hole, and All Failing (Crown of Stars for You) on this website are all post-Cubist/neo-cubist works. They all invoke 4 Downward, 1/4, on the W-axis. They encourage transcendent function and immanent function. Dadaism, founded a few years after Cubism, is the source for an example of invoking Upward, 12/1 on the W axis. Post-dada/neo-dada informs the clip of the song, The Ghost of Jacques Brel.

As noted above psychological experiences, whether as transcendent or Immanent functions, the union of conscious with unconscious of the W-axis can be described as the now participatory "I Am Who Am" of evolutionary ecological waking and dreaming human lifetimes. We are all ecomasculine, ecofluid, ecofeminine, citizens of the Waking and Dreaming Earth.

Every one's a turning-Point to Light the earth.

As America hopes to re-birth the dream of its founding, it’s inspiring to read in Mechal Sobel’s, Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era, published in 2000. If you read her work with an open mind and open heart, you can see how America was founded in ways inspired by dreaming of all peoples. It was a national Dream sustained by dreaming. We can do this again now. However, in our era, we are to approach our understanding of self in profoundly deeper and participatory ways.

We are called to recover a wholeness lost over the centuries. We can revision Monticello as a middle way, a little mountain.

Monticello

Down below my Monticello

Is a grey-lit temple underground,

Tall totem on the doorwayMirror

Where there stands a stag-horned baboon god.

Down below my Monticello

On stone foundation walls is writ

A hymn in painted-gold inscription,

A hymn Hermetic, a living myth

Down below my Monticello

Issues forth a vital stream

Where there was Dreaming of Jefferson

Before Jefferson could ever dream.

Down below my Monticello,

If dreaming be our only gift,

Then enduring ayes we all offer.

every One’s a Turning-point to light the Earth.

==================================

The word, "ayes," in "Then enduring ayes we all offer" is not a typo. I'm after the triple meaning of "aye." Aye=Yes, Aye=Ever, Aye=Affirmative vote.

I am also after "eyes" and "I" in plural, with the intent for including the waking and dreaming I who we are.

It has been many centuries forgotten, but our births could not have been without our "Yes" to risking it all for this life for the good of all beings. Our "Yes" to be born is of the same courage and love as the "Yes" of the Great Mystery to become a cosmos. Indigenous wisdom songs like the Cherokee Morning Song, "I am of Great Spirit, it is so." and the Lakota wisdom teaching that says, Your spirit belongs to you, celebrate this. When you offer tobacco to someone, it is to honor who they are and why they came here. Offering tobacco is the “namaste” of Indigenous persons and it invites her/his/their reason for being born into action for the good of the people, all life.

In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic creation stories, life is breathed into a lifeless world from Beyond. Life is manufactured. We are of a particular theological brand of human. In stories like those, all of us who live in the midst of Creation, Truth, and its Master, have had only submissive participation. There is no "Yes" on the part of any living beings-- no "aye." When atheistic forms of science take over from the literalized rejected myths - meaning, there have been no Throne of The Most High and Heavenly Hosts seen afloat above the atmosphere, solar system or galaxy - the same habit of life-imposed-from-beyond gets shifted onto life happening to us by chemical reactions and accidents — Once again, no "ayes."

You do not find this kind of paving over of the courage to live in our own tradition of Hermeticism. The creation pattern expressed by the Golden Section, 1,1,2,3,5,8, etc....states how the one who we are comes forth from a One. We are of the Fifth Element. that is imagined with as much respect towards Mystery as traditions who honor the Tao. We are all of the Tao, a way to read, 1,1,2,3,5,8...

Another name for this is, sovereignty.

This has very much to do with how we treat each other.

When we get our national Dream right, it merges with the Dream of the Earth and the Dreams of all peoples.

Blake wrote of this in 1793:

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses,

calling them by names and adorning them with the properties of

woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their

enlarged and numerous senses could perceive.

And particularly they studied the genius of each city and country,

placing it under its mental deity;

Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, and

enslaved the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental

deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;

Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.

And at length they pronounced that the Gods had ordered such

things.

Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (with apologies for gender) affirms this same message. This knowing and respect for the individual’s worth is the cultural ground for a true democracy that resonates with the ground of the planet. Brihadaranyaka means, Great Wilderness:

Whoever knows “I am Brahman!” becomes this All, and not even the gods can prevent his becoming thus, for he becomes their very Self. But whoever worships another divinity than his Self supposing, “He is one, I am another.” he knows not. He is a sacrificial beast to the gods. And as many animals would be useful to men, so is even one such person useful to the gods. But if even one animal is taken away, it is not pleasant. What then, if many? It is not pleasing to the gods, therefore, that people should know this.

You can recognize the sovereignty of your own eyes and others’ ayes, by experiencing the metaphysical substances in the synaesthetic smell, taste, touch, hearing, vision — the clairsentient “tastes,” “smells,” “feels”, the clairaudient “sounds” and “hums,” the clairvoyant “sights” — of fully embodied individuals. William Blake described what is a re-indigenized/decolonized consciousness, awareness of how the complexes of our psyches merge with our bodies as was discovered in the word-association tests, in 1793 in his poetic revelation, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. (I do not seek to offend as I know he’s using 18th-20th century metaphor where “man” = “human being”):

No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings. Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of religion. Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth. Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you. The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow. Expect poison from standing water. Damn braces. Bless relaxes.

The cherub and his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite, and holy, whereas now it appears finite and corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment. But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged. If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern.

Nearly two hundred years later, in 1984, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross offered a solid path for walking out of seeing of all things through narrow chinks in academic/religious/healthcare/psychiatric institutions and into a full, whole adventure of life in her book, On Life After Death. (Along with her views on death, dying, and the afterlife, here is an experience she worried would be shred to pieces, if she shared it.) When she left her metaphorical self-imposed cavern, she writes:

Once I did that, the agony stopped and my breathing was easier. My physical pain disappeared at the moment I uttered the word “yes” not in words but in thoughts. And instead of a thousand deaths, I lived through a rebirth beyond human description.

It started with a very fast vibration, or pulsation, of my abdominal area which spread through my entire body and then to anything my eyes could see — the ceiling, the wall, the floors, the furniture, the bed, the window, the horizons outside my window, the trees and eventually the whole planet earth. It was as if the whole planet was in a very high speed vibration. Every molecule vibrated. At the same time, something that looked like a lotus flower bud appeared and opened into an incredible, beautiful colorful flower. Behind the lotus flower appeared the light that my patients talk about. And as I approached this light through the open lotus flower, with a whirl in a deep vibration, I gradually and slowly emerged into this incredible unconditional love, into this light. I became one with it.

At the moment of merging into this source of light, all vibrations stopped. A deep silence came over me, and I feel into a deep trance-like sleep from which I awoke knowing that I had to wear a robe, put my sandals on and walk down the hill. This would occur at the moment the sun was rising from below the horizon.

Approximately an hour and a half later I woke up, put on my robe and sandals and walked down the hill. I experienced probably the greatest ecstasy of existence that human beings can ever experience on this physical plane. I was in total love and awe of all life around me. I was in love with every leaf, every cloud, every piece of grass, every living creature. I felt the pulsation of the pebbles on the path, and I literally waked above the pebbles conveying to them: “I cannot step on you, I cannot hurt you.” As I reached the bottom of the hill I became aware that I had not touched the ground on this path. Yet, there was no questioning the validity of this experience, it was simply an awareness of a cosmic consciousness of life in every living thing, and love that can never be described in words. (p. 69)

Adjectives like, transpersonal, trans-temporal, metaphysical, are all poetic descriptions, metaphors, of the individual’s experience of evolving, mutating consciousness, gravitation, the marriage of mass and spacetime. As humans awake to our own morphogenetic fields, we are like trees who live many seasons. We individually and collectively support each other and all life from winter to winter. Our many lives are seasons of many lifetimes. Our enduring soul-Identities are like roots, trunks, branches and crowns of trees of shared ecosystems. Here are Chris Bache and Richard Rudd’s wonderful conversations where they note how we all are capable of knowing a sense of our eternal identity evolving inside the constant turnover of lives.



Richard Tarnas, in his introduction to Jorge Ferrer’s 2002 Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vison of Human Spirituality, expands on this. This shift he describes works quite well if you imagine it as a description of a mythology of the psychological experience of life in a cosmos of Einstein’s universal gravitation. Love that is the glue of the world saturates the poetics of gravity found in films like in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival. They are metaphors of Beloveds and enduring relationships that permeate death/birth’s veil and simultaneously sustain from beyond. You can know this as the unconditional love and wisdom of the spirit/mind worlds that infuse being — trans-immanence:

As the transpersonal field moves to an understanding of human spirituality as more profoundly encompassing and participatory, many have begun to see the very word 'transpersonal' as needing to be addressed, and perhaps fundamentally redefined. For as we integrate more fully the amplitude and immanence of the sacred, we better discern that spiritual power moving in and through the human person in all her, his, their living, embodied, situated specificity: psychological and physical, gendered, relational, communal, cultural and historical, ecological and cosmic. In this understanding, 'trans' recovers its original Latin larger range of meanings -- signifying not only beyond, but also "across," "through," "pervading;" so "as to change," "transform;" "occurring by way of."

Here 'transpersonal' multivalently acknowledges the sacred dimension of life dynamically moving beyond as well as within, through and by way of the human person in a manner that is mutually transformative, complexly creative, opening to a fuller participation in the divine creativity that IS the human person and the ever unfolding cosmos. It is precisely this spiritual dynamism in the human person embedded in a spiritually alive cosmos that empowers, and challenges, the human community's participatory cocreation of spiritual realities, including new realities still to unfold.

Our family, neighborhood, civic, county, state, national ways of learning, creating, living well and dying well, do best when what we do bears the following fruits:

Appreciation for life, self-acceptance, concern for others, reverence for life, expanded mental awareness, paranormal sensitivities, healing gifts, hyperesthesia, meaning increases sensual sensitivity, electrical issues, Increased sense of calm and peace, increased amounts of energy/kundalini, neurological and brain changes (pp. 130-131, in Lessons from the Light)

Our work is on the global climate in compassion so all beings enjoy the blessings of Earth. Wade Davis, in his 2009 book, The Wayfinders, coined the marvelous term, ethnosphere. He defined ethnosphere as:

…plants and animals, ancient skills and visionary wisdom…a vast knowledge and expertise, a catalogue of the imagination, an oral and written language composed of the memories of countless elders and healers, warriors, farmers, fishermen, midwives, poets, and saints — in short, the artistic, intellectual and spiritual expression of the full complexity and diversity of the human experience…the diversity of the human experience as expressed by culture. (p. 34)

You can know the ethnosphere because it is as Blake described:

…by an improvement of sensual enjoyment. But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged. If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

My ideal audience is you when you are seeking to step away from ways of addiction by empowering persons to renew their own life-fostering order of the family, spiritual rites of passage and initiation for the good of future generations. The term, addict, in its Latin roots means, to surrender the voice. Our cultural ways of the past 500 years have forced surrender of voices and the promotion of deafness to the voices of all but an ecocidal few who claim divine and/or military authority. I mean here not only human voices, but all other voices of our planetary body. Not only their voices but their wisdom, medicines, songs, dreams, all Gifts. Where you find trouble with addiction of all kinds, you find addiction prophetically announcing that the culture at large has become the Wasteland.

Paraphrasing Joseph Campbell, the timeless symbols have been taken over and re-combined, applied systematically, and with full intent, to the aim of subjugation through indoctrination. A totally new order of state beliefs and rites, to the glory of some name or other, has been superimposed upon the old, life-fostering order of the family and spiritual rites of passage and initiation; a ‘faith,’ as it is called, is proposed for belief…force and not love, indoctrination, not education, authority, not experiences prevail in the ordering of lives.

Addiction and co-dependency at the levels we see now announce that the myths and rights enforced and received are unrelated to the actual realization, needs, and potentialities of the peoples upon whom they have been impressed. This has been the main source of suffering in my life and in the lives of all those around me, not only loved ones, but also those whose names I never learned. There is an insightful section from Hillman on recovering the soul of speech and speech of soul in his Re-Visioning Psychology:

But only continued attempts at accurate soul-speech can cure our speech of its chatter and restore it to its first function, the communication of soul.

Soul of bulk and substance can be evoked by words and expressed in words; for myth and poetry, so altogether verbal and “fleshless,” nonetheless resonate with the deepest intimacies of organic existence. A mark of imaginal man is the speech of his soul, and the ring of this speech, its self-generative sponanaeity, its precise subtlety and ambiguous suggestion, its capacity, as Hegel said, “to receive and reproduce every modification of our ideational faculty,” can be supplanted neither by the technology of communication, nor by physical gestures and signs. The more we hold back from the risk of speaking because of the semantic anxiety that keeps the soul in secret incommunicado, private and personal, the greater grows the credibility gap between what we are and what we say, splitting psyche and logos. The more we become tied by linguistic self-consciousness, the more we abdicate the ruling principle of psychological existence. (p. 217)

We Earthlings have known since December, 1968, that there are phases of the Earth that complement the phases of the moon. Since July, 1969, human boots on the the lunar ground have expanded what we now consider the ground of being to include the rising of the Earth. Like the moon, Earth, too, cycles monthly from New Earth to Full Earth and back.

Every full moon invites humanity to recognize that we are all standing on the New Earth together - everyone includes our enemies. There is a now global opportunity to join together, even if it’s just two persons, and share some ritual with the intention of caring for all members of the human species and planetary life. The results of rituals like this is that embodied life becomes revelatory in ways that infuse all we are with delight in life. It is a stewardship of each of us as regards our own unconscious or maya, as I explained above.

Here again is Joseph Campbell concerning the planetary mental expansion, The Magnification, of July, 1969:

The Space Age is central to all of this…we had the great symbol of change that has taken place. Men stood on the moon and looked back and by television we were able to look back with them to see earthrise. This is the symbol that enabled us to feel the truth of the discovery that Copernicus made more than four centuries ago. Until then, we may have agreed theoretically with Copernicus but his map of the universe was not available to us, except to mathematicians and astronomers. It was an invisible idea and we could go on thinking, as we did, about a religious idea in which everything was divided along the same lines as the heavens and earth were divided.

This divided model allowed us to think that there was a spiritual order, separate or divided from our experiences…With the moon walk, the religious myth that sustained this notion could no longer be held. With our view of earthrise, we could see that the earth and the heavens were no longer divided but that the earth is in the heavens. There is no division and all the theological notions based on the distinction between the heavens and the earth collapse with this realization. There is a unity in the universe and a unity in our own experience. We can no longer look for a spiritual order outside our experience…it signifies the return of Mother Earth to the heavens. [p. 105, in Thou Art That]

In my song, Creation’s video clip below, there is an introduction to our expanded ground of being with no more division between Earth and the heavens/conscious and unconscious. During the centuries of the return of Mother Earth to the heavens, we do well to reclaim our own star-art. It can help space time travelers when we include extraterrestrial star-images that update the big picture. Find in Creation, star constellations and ideas meant to orient ourselves to life on Earth, on the moon, and on mars. I have named the new constellations, sidereal COEX constellations. I have used Galileo’s star 1610 method of showing the naked eye stars using star outlines and asterisks for stars seen by magnification. I have included skin, flesh, breath, blood, bones, to Stan Grof’s psychological COEX constellations/systems. COEX is shorthand for, Condensed Emotional eXperience. COEX’s were Grof’s own expansion of the Jungian notion of psychological complexes. These sidereal COEX constellations are for traveling in our solar system to remind human beings that our own skin and sensual lives merge seamlessly with enduring infinite consciousness. We are never separated from Eternity.

William Wilson and Annette S. Lee use a similar approach to deepening our stars. They call it x-ray style. In their book, Ojibwe Sky Star Map Constellation Guide:

William Wilson used traditional Ojibwe x-ray style to paint the Ojibwe constellations. This style is symbolic of seeing the unseen. It is an allegory for the material world and the spirit world. The brightly colored internal organs and anatomical shapes are a glimpse into the inner layers of our bodies. Wilson explains, “We are seeing the pictures as the spirits see us. They see right through. The strange looking animals and figures are portrayed as they come in ceremony. Sometimes they are half beaver, half eagle. Sometimes they are scary. Sometimes they are tempting.”

The labyrinth you will see in the clip is at Crown Point Ecological Center in Bath, Ohio. NASA images of beyond the moon and from the surface of mars are reminders that as patriarchy in the West comes to an end, the love that motivated the past 2000 years is not abandoning us. What was once inside, exclusive, is now outside, for all. The outdoor labyrinths appearing around the planet beginning in the 1990s are our bridges out of the past and into the awakened life within our solar system, solar vehicle.

The best of love of all humanity and all life encourage us all, wants us to carry forward into even deeper Delight. This is the meaning of the update of our inherited constellation, Cygnus as Tree of Life Experience, and its embodiment by the photo of the Signal Tree in Akron, Ohio. This is the meaning of the undated Our Lady of Guadelupe’s heart as a way to imagine the heart of the galactic center who holds all we have ever known together.



We are here to live into an embodied mystical, inspired, committed and charitably voiced participation in the planetary initiatory ordeal of these times. It is as if we are coming to flourish as we shed a thousand years of cultural ways that violently appropriated mystical/spiritual/religious experiences (experiences of the awe, the Beauty, that make life worth living) with the intention of making people think they are subjects enclosed in a world of objects — closed up and seeing all things through the narrow chinks of their caverns.

To describe this with a metaphor to take the shredding of the sacred into pieces further, it’s as if our ways of life dismiss the winter of the four seasons, the entire direction of the North - end and beginning of the Indigenous Medicine wheel. Winter is also the yin of the Tao, like the bardo of life between life. We have grown accustomed to mental habits that dictate the value and manage what we think can be experienced (human ontology) in pre-conception, conception, uterine-life, birth, life-stages of childhood, adolescence, adulthood, elderhood, becoming ancestors, initiations, nearing death, near-death, death, judgement, life-between-lives, after-death communications, re-birth. The deep identity of humans and the universe in Western culture have been appropriated, monetized, weaponized. Our Western mental climate is most-often governed by a religiously encouraged “up and out” or a scientifically imposed “one and done/YOLO” attitude or blends of both world views towards consciousness throughout the entire cosmos.

This Medicine wheel with no North nor Underworld, a Tao with no yin of winter, a partial circle of three seasons of life and the year as if there existed no season before, season after, nor between, souls with no bardo, is known as, The Waste Land. Most annihilating to soul is the complete absence of education rooted in the knowledge learned through direct experience that we are of and are participants in the Loving Mystery — for each of us is a unique “yes” to dare this life for the sake of all. We are and are of the Mystery before which words turn back.

Campbell noted in Inner Reaches of Outer Space in 1985:

And today (1984-1985), in the formerly charming little city of Beirut, the contending zealots of three differing inflections even of the same idea of a single paternal “God” are unloading bombs on each other.

One cannot but ask: What can such tribal literalism possibly contribute but agony to such a world of intercultural, global prospects as that of our present century? It all comes of misreading metaphors, taking denotation for connotation, the messenger for the message, overloading the carrier, consequently with, with sentimentalized significance and throwing both life and thought thereby off balance. To which the only generally recognized correction as yet proposed has been the no less wrongheaded one of dismissing the metaphors as lies (which they are, when so construed), thus scrapping the whole dictionary of the language of the soul (this is a metaphor) by which mankind has been elevated to interests beyond procreation, economics and '“the greatest good for the greatest number.”

The way we are unconscious about our missing mythic metaphors, descriptions of how it feels to experience a season of inter-lives of Deep Rest, Receptivity and Renewal, has made us a people who live in a chronic shredding north winds of the sacred and who are prone to apocalyptic mass-possession. This is because we don’t know how to symbolically come to an end, die, renew, and start again. We tend to be enamored with enacting new beginnings by literal cosmic war-making. Our collective unconsciousness poses a global risk by accident, intention, or neglect, of triggering nuclear winter/mass-extinction caused by a misplaced war for renewal that will haunt the future generations.

In the face of the habit of blowing ourselves up to start over, we are also living in a crucial time of opportunity to take up the gift of the evolution of human awareness over past centuries. We are all poised to take a next step forward together into what Joseph Campbell called, a Creative Mythology. We are at a time of re-birth as well as evolutionary adventure. The Invitation is to a living mythology’s properly religious (and metaphoric) function known since 1925 as the numinous. The role of the numinous in our living mythology, following Joseph Campbell, is to waken and maintain in the individual an experience of awe, humility, and respect, in recognition of that ultimate mystery, transcending names and forms, “from which,” as we read in the Upanishads, “words turn back.” The numinous is more expansively defined since the 1968 publication of Creative Mythology.

All names of the numinous include the fact that numinosity and synchronicity, also known as meaningful coincidence, are partners. Over the years, I have found the American climate to be one that dismisses the numinous while at the same time refusing to seriously study the research. I offer the following lengthy list to describe what alchemists called, the living water because I think it is now intellectually dishonest to refuse to read. Whether known as mystical, co-creative, anomalous, akashic, paranormal, death-bed visionary, shamanic, lucid dreaming, out-of-body, extrasensory perceptions, psychokinetic, synesthetic, telepathic, after-death communications by felt presence, voice, touch, fragrance, partial or full appearance, dreaming, telephone, books, objects, animals, elements, miraculous, prophetic, aesthetic arrest, visitation of the muse, mantic, extraordinary human, spiritually transformative, nearing death, transcendent sexual experiences, spiritual emergency by near-death, crises of psychic opening, shamanic crisis, addiction, moral injury, past-life memory, kundalini awakening, UFO encounter, possession, co-dependency, communication with guides/ancestors, channeling, psychological renewal by return to the center, unitive consciousness experiences, they are very real and significant for the persons who live them.

The numinous, synchronistic knowing occurs for individuals, beloveds, communities, in ritual, in crisis, at turning points, in those those times and places when loving care of soul is the shared intention. (This list is open-ended and growing - write me to let me know what I left off.)

In the TedTalk above, theologian Jeffrey Kripal encourages us to take up the inspiration and knowing of mystical/paranormal experiences and to become, each of us, authors of the impossible:

..I could spend the next two hours telling you hundreds of stories just like Mark Twain's dream of his brother's death and they would come from all professions, all walks of life. They would come from great writers like Twain. They would come from world-class scientists like Wolfgang Pauli, the great quantum physicist around whom poltergeist phenomenon spiked his whole life...These stories would include neuroscientists, doctors, nurses, psychotherapists, who deal with people in traumatic, suffering contexts. Most of these stories, though, would be from ordinary people like you or me and they would be from our mothers and fathers. They would be from our children. These sort of events happen to all sorts of people in every culture, in every historical era for which we have a record.

Ken Ring and Evelyn Elsaesser have also announced this:

It’s unfortunate that the term, near-death experience, has become as popular and as widely used as it is, because it implies that there is a unique state of consciousness that is associated with the onset of death. There is a very distinctive state of consciousness that occurs when people come close to death, but it’s not unique to near-death crises, There are many other pathways that lead essentially to the same state of consciousness. Out-of-body states, meditative and spiritual disciplines, yoga, shamanic journeys, psychedelic experiences, lucid dreams, mystical and religious experiences—all lead to an encounter with the light, to a feeling of ineffable joy, of well-being, of total knowledge. [p. 104 in On the Other Side of Life, Elsaesser]

Since 1984, in one of the early studies of NDE, The Near-Death Experience: Problems, Prospects, Perspectives, pathways and knowledge to help us in our quest for world peace have been recognized. Using the idea from above that beyond NDE, there are many pathways now the bring the same state of consciousness. Of this opportunity to take a new path together in death education, suicide prevention towards world peace, Ken Ring noted:

…many researchers and scholars have been impressed deeply by the consistent pattern of value changes that experiencers express and manifest following their experiences. Recurrently and reliably, they speak of values of unconditional love and acceptance, human unity, compassion, tolerance, and tend to endorse a spiritual or religious point of view that ignores racial, national, or cultural distinctions….These can provide a new compelling empirical basis for the adherence to the Golden Rule at precisely the time in history when failure to observe it at a global level is likely to lead to a holocaust of unimaginable dimensions. (p. 14)

Marilyn of the Whirlwind is my song about recognizing, sharing, and celebrating the numinous (living water) awe of authentic mystical knowing:

Because the many ways of numinous experience have no rational language to fully describe what is by definition impossible, a release from the past is upon us:

for every claim to authority of the book on which pride of race, pride of communion, the illusion of special endowment, special privilege, and divine favor were based has been exploded. Theology, so called, can now make no claim more than to be a literary exercise in explanation or an archaic text where in certain historically conditioned, ambiguous names, forms, acts, and utterances are attributed to what (if the name “what” must be used) can be called only “far above all that all genders can possibly think",” i.e., ineffable. The faith in Scripture of the Middle Ages, faith in reason of the Enlightenment, faith in science of modern Philistia belong equally today to those alone who have as yet no idea how mysterious, really, is the mystery even of themselves. (p. 609)

We do well to note Jeffrey C. Miller’s (depth psychology’s) invitation to learn the value of myth when the numinous is understood as a way we experience unconscious contents:

Unconscious materials, such as contents of numinous experiences, have no conscious language adequate for clarifying their meaning. This lack of an appropriate language occurs because unconscious materials are psychic phenomenon alien to the conscious mind through which they are communicated. Jung has observed that unconscious contents, because their nature is unknown, have a tendency to self-amplification, that is to say, they form the nuclei for an aggregation of synonyms. He states: “When something is little-known or ambiguous, it can be envisaged from different angles, and then, a multiplicity of names is needed to express its peculiar nature.” These synonyms are unmistakably mythological in their character, and Jung regards them as the inborn language of the psyche and its structure or “the language of the unconscious which lacks intended clarity of conscious language.”

This archaic, non-rational language of the psyche is universally found in such unconscious materials as dreams, fantasies, psychotic episodes, fairy tales, myths and religious literature, such as various accounts of the Buddha’s experience of the numinous…the images, thus amplified, which are otherwise obscure and confusing, can become clearer and more intelligible by being permitted, in a sense, to speak for themselves. The method of amplification cannot attempt to establish or designate the specific content of a numinous experience; it can, however, approximately reveal the essential nature of the experience. [p. 128, Transcendent Function]

Elisabeth Kubler Ross described the same archaic, non-rational, unintelligible language of the psyche in her 1999 book, The Tunnel and the Light:

The second gift my schizophrenic patients gave me was that I learned a language without which I would not have been able to work with dying children. That language is symbolic, universal language that people all over the world use when they are in a crisis. If you are raised naturally — not normally because normally means terribly unnaturally — you would never have to read books on death and dying in order to work with dying patients because you would be able to learn what needs to be done the way I learned it in Manhattan State Hospital. I would always say — half joking, because I am serious about it — the only honest people left on this earth are psychotics, young children and dying patients. And if you use these three kinds of people — and I mean “use” in a positive sense — if you can learn to hear, really hear them, they will teach you what we call the symbolic language.

People in pain, people in shock, people in numbness, people who are overwhelmed with a tragedy that they believe is beyond their comprehension, beyond their ability to cope with, use this language. Dying children, who are faced with their imminent death know it even if they have never been taught it. The symbolic language is a universal language, and it is used all over the world. (pp. 6-7)

Ignatia’s Angel is a song inspired by Sister Ignatia Gavin, the “third person” of the Recovery Trinity with Bill W. and Dr. Bob. It is a prayer for Recovery consciousness to expand to recover our relationships with our bioregions.

Alive and Well is a song inspired by our family healing of hearts through the power of horses. It is a prayer for hearts to return to the peace that surpasses understanding that is the natural state of the Earth.

Everything Has a (w)Hole reminds us all that death and birth are passages between the worlds of life, the worlds between lives, the Source of all.

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The Call To Adventure

We are meant for this historical period. We are called to strive together in waking and dreaming life for more tolerant, generous, peaceful, participatory ways. It’s time to leave the ways of up and out and/or one and done with gratitude for the good they wished to do. These are the years to move forward courageously and be carried by the deeper currents of mutually beneficial life energy. There is a momentum that comes from within, between and beyond entrenched attitudes even as it includes them. Up and out, one and done, are no longer supported by current depth psychology, quantum physics, ecology, evolutionary cosmology. They are no longer supported by the life experiences of the people, especially the peoples with tens of thousands of years of Indigenous Wisdom for whom the Great Mystery is known by direct experience. One and done/up and out are not supported due to how they have too many times made life here into a hell on Earth for those deemed uninvited unchosen.

Joseph Campbell in Creative Mythology described the Waste Land methods of the various forms of single-use power-groups by high-lighting that:

It has been the chief concern of all these power groups, in the interpretation, formulation, and enforcement of their own rites, not so much to foster the growth of young individuals to maturity as to validate supernaturally, and to render religiously (scientifically, economically, politically, technologically, militarily) unchallengeable, their own otherwise questionable authority, whether as dynasty, as tribe, or as churchly sect. The timeless symbols, taken over and re-combined, are applied systematically, and with full intent, to the aim of subjugation through indoctrination. A totally new order of state beliefs and rites, to the glory of some name or other, is superimposed upon the old, life-fostering order of the family and spiritual rites of passage and initiation; a ‘faith,’ as it is called, is proposed for belief.

The Waste Land, let us say, then, is any world in which (to state the problem pedagogically) force and not love, indoctrination, not education, authority, not experiences prevail in the ordering of lives, and where the myths and rites enforced and received are consequently unrelated to the actual realization, needs, and potentialities of those upon whom they are impressed. (p. 389)

Current knowledge opens a generous spaciousness within which both now-partial world views can find their recognition, their values and faults in soul’s unfolding adventure in our evolving cosmos — mutations and all. This is what I mean by being carried forward by the deeper currents of mutually beneficial life energy. We can reclaim the old, life-fostering order of the family and spiritual rites of passage and initiation. We can work as a team for a world where love, education, and experiences prevail in the ordering of lives. We can learn to recognize where myths and rights related to the actual realization, needs, and potentialities of all peoples are nourished. We can learn to live in a beautiful world that people want to share. All the addiction, suicide, violence the past decades are an indication that there are a hell of a lot of persons who don’t feel at home in the world we have made. We don’t have to participate in the sad ways of life any longer.

May we help each other to choose the courage to love and live generously to renew the act of experience itself native to our time of mysterious free fall.

Since July 16, 1945, at the Trinity detonation of the first atomic bomb on Earth, (for every claim to authority of the book on which pride of race, pride of communion, the illusion of special endowment, special privilege, and divine favor were based has been exploded) at Jornada del Muerto (The Way of the Dead Man), New Mexico, there has been an added responsibility placed upon American souls that other nations do not bear. Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki, August 9, 1945, remain examples for the world for what it looks like when a nation chooses it’s own way of the dead man, dead woman, dead non-binary human beings.

It is upon us now to take some leadership on the planet. Fortunately, we are not alone and billions of other persons and other nations also desire expansive peace. We are challenged to learn, love, co-author, and sing into a full sovereign ecomasculinity, ecofemininty, and ecofluidity. I use these three terms to remind us that human beings are nature. Our goal is here and now — a rhythmic wisdom of a loving gravitational spiral between upward, outward, evolution and downward, inward, involution. Ours is a globally matured humanity that participates in its birth, becoming, death, love-assisted self-reflective judgment, healing, learning, renewal of Purpose in the life between lives. In place of experiencing Judgement before the Throne by the Almighty, we learn because we feel the impact of our lives on the lives of others in a life-review. The 2009 American Book of Living and Dying in its section called, Tools:

Testimonies from thousands of survivors of near-death experiences (NDEs) give insight into the psychospiritual process of dying. While each story is unique, there are clear patterns indicating universal shared experiences at the end of life. One of the most consistent reports concerns the life-review…the life review is more than just an inventory of past deeds; it is an opportunity to recommit old, or perhaps establish new, life priorities. (p. 252)

Kenneth Ring elaborates on the life-review to Jeffrey Mishlove:

See full Thinking Allowed interview here.

I think this is one of the most remarkable aspects of the near-death experience and it's not given the amount of attention that it should. Obviously, people know about the Light and the out-of-body experience, but what is really important about the life-review process is that it isn't just a life-review. It's a re-living of your life. When people describe this experience, it's every single act that you have done, every single thought you have thought, every word you have spoken, suddenly, all of this is back with you. You are running through it again and you see, you experience, the effects of these acts, these thoughts, these words on other people...A man I know experienced this in a dual aspect. It was as if he were a witness, high up in a building, looking down through a window on a fist-fight from 15 years earlier. At the same time, he found himself in the role of the other person he had fought. He felt all 32 blows rain down upon his face. He felt what it was like to receive the effects of his actions. An empathic life-review is what many people report. When they report, they say they realize that in our lives, we are the people we hurt. We are the very people we help to feel good. We experience these actions, as though done to ourselves...Thus, the golden rule, "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."

I apologize if this is abrupt, but after living my whole life within a story that showed no evidence of reality born out by psychological experience, what the life-review experience is showing is that there is no Bible’s God on High on a Judgement Throne that we meet after we die. This Sumero-Babylonian cosmology has had its day upon the minds of human beings. What has been learned in the life-review materials is that we are participants in soul-judgment. If we might tease out the global climate change from the colonialism of the Good Book, look again at the John 20:21-23. The burden of forgiveness or condemnation resides in each of us now. Arguably, it was a main message of the Age now passing away. The human climate of the atmosphere/breath of Earth IS the Holy Ghost:

21Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you.22 And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: 23Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.

Here is affirmation of how souls are the arbiters and judges of their own destinies from Klimo and Heath’s 2010 book, Handbook to the Afterlife:

Newly channeled material tends to shift the judgement from an outside entity to oneself. For example, the Spiritualist medium Sheila Jones channeled the message from her guides that there really are no such halls of judgement. Instead each soul must review, and judge, its own life. It is in looking back over the past that, sooner or later, a soul begins to understand what is necessary to bring about a kind of balance.

Most modern channels agree. George Anderson says that judgement “is not done by God on a throne. Judgement rests basically with yourself. And we all know that the greatest enemy we can face is ourselves.” Similarly, Joseph, one of the many suicides channeled through Lysa Mateu notes, “We are our own judge and jury. Self-punishment and regret is worse than any punishment from the outside.”

The fact that souls are asked to judge their own lifetimes does not make it easy for them. Some souls may need to be eased into the process. Arthur Ford, while in spirit, explained that this can be the case for those with rigid, inaccurate expectations of the afterlife. These souls may see what they expect to see initially. However, once in the life-review phase (which according to Ford begins soon after the newly dead make their transitions to the afterlife) they begin to recognize the thoughts and feelings that truly matter. Most spirits take their shortcomings seriously, and often deal harshly with themselves. Another of the spirits channeled by Mateu, known as Alexy, points out that souls are already punished by seeing and feeling the impact and results of their actions on others still living…This period of remembering the life and performing self-assessment seems to apply to all spirits regardless of the manner of death. (pp. 134-136)

On the scientific materialist’s version of events after death as an experience of nothing, there is a double-layered challenge to accept the many thousands of accounts of the life-review, the themes of soul, spirit, sacred. Fortunately, there are many who have come through the apocalyptic and nihilistic initiation and who have made art of their journeys. Akash Sherman’s film, Clara, is one among many recent examples of the past 2 decades.

The impact of NDE on the persons I have known and in the literature is well-described by Ring and Valarino in their book, Lessons from the Light. Individuals experience a lasting change to their personal values and beliefs, appreciate life more fully, experience increased feelings of self-worth, have a more compassionate regard for others and for all life, develop a heightened ecological sensitivity, experience a decrease in purely materialistic, self-seeking values, become more universalistic and inclusive their spirituality. They nearly all report that the fear of death is replaced with a knowing, a gnosis, that life goes on after the doorway of death. Experiencers develop powers of higher sense perception, increased psychic ability, intuitive awareness, gifts of healing. In their 2018, Changed in a Flash, Krohn and Kripal affirm this.

Lessons from the Light elaborates further upon the fruit of the NDE, which align with initiations, ritual experiences, and sacred ceremonies of Indigenous peoples. They also align with biblical teachings like that of Matthew 7:20 - Therefore by their fruits you will know them. Rings and Valarino’s list below offers a boots on the ground, good sense of direction as regards the wisdom of our own family and cultural practices. When we get them back and updated, they resonate with:

1. Appreciation for Life

2. Self-Acceptance

3. Concern for Others

4. Reverence for Life

5. Expanded Mental Awareness

6. Paranormal Sensitivities

7. Healing Gifts

8. Hyperesthesia, meaning increases sensual sensitivity, electrical issues

9. Increased sense of calm and peace, increased amounts of energy/kundalini

10. Neurological and Brain Changes (pp. 130-131)

In my life, I’ve had the good fortune to talk to those who have died and who have returned - deloks. Two of the persons were suicides whose lives had become unbearable. Both persons who had killed themselves learned in the spirit worlds that there was nothing wrong with them and that there never was anything wrong with them. They were told that the community where they lived was cruel without realizing it. Knowing that they were not the problem and that it was poverty and ignorance in soul that had caused their sorrows, they both wanted to return to help raise the people up. What I learned from them and from all the stories I’ve heard is that Judgement and Hell, annihilation of consciousness with brain-death, as they have been taught over the centuries have little to do with the lived experience of dying, crossing over, experiencing and returning.

Hell and self-annihilation, it turns out, seem to be more a description of the living hells and erasure we put our fellow beings through. Humanity by intention or neglect makes life a meaningless living hell for others. We don’t have to participate in this sort of business any longer. The golden rule is true and trustworthy. Also, there is another kind of near-death learning where you realize you have not lived your life and are distracted, off-course, fearful, brutal, perhaps asleep at the helm of your life’s vessel. In this case, you can choose to return and wake up with a renewed vitality. Sometimes, you are not allowed to die until you live into your purpose more than you have. This was the first lesson I learned in 1977 from my first Teacher with a capital “T” who died and came back. His name was Mike Hay.

Our life-cycles include death, transformation, and rebirth — A season of life that precedes Childhood, Adulthood, Elderhood, and receives them all at the end - mirroring our planet’s winter of the annual seasonal cycle. Our enduring consciousness/identity is measured in proportion to the lifetimes of stars. We are the inheritors of an enduring memory that is measured in proportion to the age of the celestial bodies of planets, moons, planetesimals, asteroids, comets, often older than the middle-aged yellow dwarf star that we call sun. Yet our star is gentle due to its size. Our life-giving warmth and light will not go into supernova like other larger suns. Our star is unique in its attitude toward the rest of the galaxy, unique in its orbit through the galactic disk, priceless in its immense capacity to carry the ancient story of galactic life.

From Once upon a time…

To here and now:

The clip below of The Magnification offers ways to be alive now and also carry forward, Once upon a time together with Here and Now.

The Magnification

Come out now people from wherever you been.

Your Comfort’s no longer safe inside where you live.

Be wise near them shallow ones creeping the Earth.

They’re always preaching Salvation. They’re always measuring their worth.

There’s Heaven and heaven, the Sun and the sun,

Jupiter and jupiter, the One and the one,

The Light and the light, above and Above.

There’s the fire and the Fire, the Love and the love.

It’s the Magnification of your space and your time.

Let each revelation open your mind

To the Magnification. A song is true

When all you were given, you can see through.

Come on your readers, you see with your heart.

Feel into these words, all of them watermarks

On into this night, beyond and within you,

To when you are going, to where you have been.

There’s Memory in the memory, Dream in the dream,

Reflection in reflection, the Seen in the seen,

Depth in the depth, Is in the is.

There is TIme in the time, the Abyss in the abyss.

It’s the Magnification. You gotta double your words.

They come in four times the meaning.

Rise up, have your turn.

For the Magnification, a Love is true

When all you are giving, you can see through

Grandmothers, Grandfathers, Elders body and soul,

Thank you for the Love and the Life you bestow.

Hold in your hearts the little ones’ Names.

Through the chaos and troubles, remind them why they came.

There’s the mother and the Mothers, the son and the Sons,

The daughter and Daughters, the Old and the Young,

The father and the Fathers, Brothers, Sisters and Friends,

As it was in the Beginning, Her Robe is Spread

The Magnification of your space and your time.

Let each Revelation open your Mind

To the magnification. Our world is true

And all you were given, all your are giving.

You can see through.

With this, I am defining what is an Earthly archetypal ecology to complement the celestial archetypal cosmology. Archetypal ecology deepens Hillman’s original Greek, therefore, colonial vision of soul he inherited from his lineage of Jung, Freud, Dilthey, Coleridge, Schelling, Vico, Ficino, Plotinus, Plato and Heraclitis.

It’s subtle, but where he incisively critiques the anthropologist’s mental habit of demeaning the soul’s personifying found in the animism of infantile behavior, psychology of fetishism, the common people of the collective mind, or the dark places and peculiar behaviors of exotic peoples in distant lands or insane asylums, he was also a man of his century, thus unconscious of what was beneath his own feet. Yale, where he gave his Terry Lectures in 1972, now addresses its own foundation on Indigenous ground with the land acknowledgement below:

Yale University acknowledges that indigenous peoples and nations, including Mohegan,1 Mashantucket Pequot,2 Eastern Pequot,3 Schaghticoke,4 Golden Hill Paugussett,5 Niantic,6 and the Quinnipiac7 and other Algonquian8 speaking peoples, have stewarded through generations the lands and waterways of what is now the state of Connecticut.  We honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land.

Pronunciation guide:

1 mow.hee.gn

2 mash.an.tuck.et pee.kwot

3 east.ern. pee.kwot

4 skat.ih.kohk

5 gold.en. hill po.gaw.sett

6 ni.han.tic

7 kwihn.ih.pee.ac

8 al-gon-kwihn

Hillman’s only land acknowledgements in Re-Visioning Psychology are European. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act did not decriminalize the heart of Indigidenous wisdom until 1978. James Hillman, the soul tradition of the West, the Recovery Movement, the world-wide web, and Ohio public libraries saved my soul. I could not be writing this without that ongoing, unbroken chain of love. However, Western spiritual knowledge because of relationships with the dead and Indigenous wisdom healed my life. The long-resilient ways buried beneath the Western mind restored my personal nature to Earth. My interpretation of the Trinity of archetypal ecology that merges Indigenous and Western wisdom, is a way of honoring Ancestors and elders, thus carrying the soul of Hillman all the way home from Zurich. It is a way of de-colonizing by coming home to ourselves. For the labors, triumphs, striving of our own hearts are the Heart of Creation inside us, yet beyond us. This means that home merges seamlessly with the dead and finds its life-giving role among the many beings in the landscapes and does so due to undying love.

So, where he defined the object of archetypal psychology with the words: Our desire is to save the phenomena of the imaginal psyche, I invite a recollection that this mental foundation was one that was set up by the Greeks. It hides a condemnation of Gaia into Tartarus, a pre-Christian version of hell. Where Hillman saves the chthonic underworld, its community of shades, all free of the dayworld concerns, I would push more deeply and re-admit that beneath the underworld and dreaming of Western culture still pulses the dreaming heart of our planet. Human dreaming still reflects our familial grandparents as well as the mythological Grandmother Earth (Gaia) and Grandfather Sky (Ouranos). Human and planetary dreamings are interdependent. In America, they necessarily now include land acknowledgements as well as acknowledgements of colonization, white supremacy, eurocentrism, and a resolution to heal them in ourselves and others.

Lest we look down on our ancestors, that same kind of meanness of imagination and memory occurred April 26, 1920 in The Great Debate between Curtis and Shapley on the scale of our cosmos. At the Smithsonian, Shapley argued that the Milky Way galaxy was the entire universe. Curtis, who was in the minority opinion at that time, argued that there were many galaxies in the universe. Their point of contention was the Andromeda galaxy. The same poverty of imagination came up that if Andromeda was a galaxy, then it had to be at a distance that most astronomers could not accept. History has proven Curtis right. It was Hubble, later in the 1920’s who was able to prove the distances cited as mostly correct. The current estimate of galaxies in 2020 is 2,000,000,000,000+.

I approach the division in Western culture as an argument about interpretations of the experience of the moon. Unable to create together a generous quaerum locum lunae that could be shared, there has been instead a battle for who dictates what it means to be human and to control the interpretation of all life on the planet. Scientific modern monotheism, whether Hebrew, Christian or Islamic, remains entrenched in spiritual images/non-images of the past, as it simultaneously rejects current cosmology. Scientific atheisms remain entrenched in rejection of any insights derived from persons using those chronopathologizing (causing dissociation from current cosmology) spiritual image/non-images. Both wrestlers in this match struggle to gain the upper hand in a soul-less cosmos - like a battle for an Earth with no moon. Each claims a privilege to dictate how all shall experience our soul’s first freedom: the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image and fantasy—that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical. [Hillman, 1975]

Campbell’s critique from 1968 is still true: The faith in Scripture of the Middle Ages, faith in reason of the Enlightenment, faith in science of modern Philistia belong equally today to those alone who have as yet no idea how mysterious, really, is the mystery even of themselves.

There is a wonderful example of a Copernican/Ptolemaic accord in hospice care. In the 1992, Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying, Callahan and Kelly found no common biophysical cause for the symbolic language of the dying. They found a similarity in the communications of those at the threshold regardless of culture, gender, age, ethnicity, ethnic group, nationality, religious background or no. Crossing over, certainly has its scientific and physical, measurable manifestations, yet, it all becomes metaphor for a larger, more meaning-filled wholeness:

The experience of the dying frequently includes glimpses of another world and those waiting in it. Although they provide few details, dying people speak with awe and wonder of the peace and beauty they see in this other place. They tell of talking with or sensing the presence of people whom we cannot see—perhaps people they have known and loved. The know without being told that they are dying, and may even tell us when their deaths will come.

Nearing Death Awareness often includes visions of loved ones, or spiritual beings, although they don’t necessarily signal death’s immanence. Dying people may see and speak with religious figures. They may feel warm, peaceful, and loved, some see a bright light or another place. Some review their lives and come to a more complete understanding of life’s meaning. Realizing they are dying, they don’t seem to feel fear, rather, they express concern for those who will be left behind.

They may attempt to describe being in two places at once, or somewhere in between. Their descriptions offer unique opportunities to enter that landscape, to participate by responding to their needs and wishes, and to learn what death is like for them—and perhaps what it will be like for us…

…each had something to say, some message to convey. The more data we collected and reviewed, the more excited we became as we began seeing that their messages fell into two categories.

The first category of messages described what patients were experiencing: being in the presence of someone not alive, the need to prepare for travel or a change, mentions of some place they alone could see (although now it is known that the vision can be shared by loved ones as well), their knowledge of when death would occur.

The second category consisted of messages about something, or someone, needed so death could be peaceful: the desire to reconcile personal, spiritual, or moral relationships, and requests to remove some barrier to achieve this peace.

As we learned more, we were able to interpret those messages for others and observe how this understanding helped not only patients but families and professional caregivers as well. (pp. 35-36)

Deborah L. Grassman is one of those professional caregivers who was helped and helped others. In her 2009, Peace At Last: Stories of Hope and Healing for Veterans and Their Families, she shared with here friend, Isla, how metaphors are the language of the dying:

“When people are dying, their conscious mind recedes and their unconscious mind expands,” I explained. “The language of the unconscious is symbols and images. Transportation, travel, or ‘going-home’ metaphors are very common as people are dying. You’ll see it in veterans. They often speak in battle metaphors.”

“Oh my gosh, I’ve been telling Mama that there is no train,” she groaned.

We talked about questions she could ask that would help her determine her mother’s needs. That evening when her mother again spoke about the train, Isla listened carefully and intermittently asked questions.

“Where’s the train going, Mama? Who’s on the train? When’s the train leaving?” Most importantly, “What do you need to get on the train, Mama?”

“I need you to get on with me.” Mama said in response to the last question.

Isla was stunned at first, not knowing how to respond; but then she answered calmly, “This is your train, Mama. You go ahead and get on it. I’ll catch other train and meet up with you later…”

Her mother seemed satisfied, relaxing peacefully. Having received her daughter’s blessing, Mama boarded the train the next day. (p. 150)

Notice the union of meanings as you read the final sentence. “Mama boarded the train the next day” and “Mama died the next day,” resonate together with a shared meaning that merges metaphor with literal life experience. In the same way that the two meanings are able to be understood, so it is possible for the literal, evolving Copernican cosmos and the metaphorical, more ancient Ptolemaic spheres lovingly merge, yet also take turns in leading the dance of quaerens lucum lunae.

Astronomically, Earth and the moon travel together as pair inside the heliosphere. Both are made of the same substance. The heavier elements of our loving-couple Home are from stars long ago who lived and gave their lives for life to go on. In many ways, Earth and Moon are elders to the sun. This pair of life-engendering twins, one ever present and loving beyond biological life and one who is in life and loving biological life, speaks of consciousness that simultaneously witnesses itself from beyond as it lives at the same time. The twins who merge eternity and time are an archetypal pair, arguably a ground for Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields as well as reincarnation. Wier Perry describes this as world Image and self-Image. (together they form our active world view) In 2018, Kripal and Krohn described the same insight based on Krohn’s near-death experience. Krohn reported that she learned while she was dead that each person has a angelic guide or energetic double with whom he/she/they eventually merge. Indigenous wisdom shares a similar notion and the double is our dreaming “I” Who is the other pole of our consciousness, a downward burning flame, as well as the collective clan/totem soul who is also an animal, bird, force of nature.

Human seasons of life, then, cycle between two homes united through soul and love— a home in the becoming , a Home in the Enduring. Frederic Myers cracked open the door and invited us inside in 1903:

The reader who may feel disposed to give his/her/their adhesion to the long series of evidences which have pointed with more and more clearness to the survival of human personality, and to the possibility for human beings on earth of actual contact with a world beyond, may feel perhaps that the intimate and universal hope of every generation of humanity has never until this day approached so near to fulfillment. There has never been so far a prospect for Life and Love. Deep in this spiritual environment the cosmic secret lies. Can we, for instance learn anything—to begin with fundamental problems — of the relation of spiritual phenomena to Space, to Time, to the material world? The subject matter has not yet been exhausted of half its significance…But if in truth souls departed call to us it is to them then that we shall listen most of all.

…I have assumed that a human being is an organism informed or possessed by a soul. This view obviously involves the hypothesis that we are living in two worlds at once: a planetary life in this material world, to which the organism is intended to react; and also a cosmic life in that spiritual world which is the native environment of the soul. From that unseen world the energy of the organism needs to be perpetually replenished.

Admittedly, for the sake of argument, these vast assumptions, it will be easy to draw further inferences that the soul’s attention should be frequently withdrawn from the business of earthly life, so as to pursue with greater intensity the maintenance of the pervading connection between the organism and the spiritual world.

[p.35 Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death]

In Lessons from the Light, Ring and Valarino share a three your old child’s NDE account:

“Could you tell, Mommy, what you remember when I bit the cord of the vacuum cleaner?” Without even looking up, he told her, “I went in a room with a very nice man and sat with him.” His mother asked him what the room looked like, Todd replied, “It had a big bright light in the ceiling,” which his mother took to mean some kind of chandelier. Todd’s mother then asked him what the man had said to him. Todd responded, “He asked me if I wanted to stay there or come back to you. Looking up at his mother, he said, “I wanted to be with you and come home.” Then he smiled, and went back to his toys. (p. 105)

Eushiba and Saotome describe the expanding and contraction soul rhythm in Aikido as kokyu:

Creation within the body, within the spirit, and within the universe is the living breath of God’s (Kami - meaning - Great Spirit among many kami) love. Respiration is the divine force of life. This is the power of kokyu…Kokyo is an open-ended process that joins the galaxy to the universe, the sun to the galaxy, the earth to the sun, and humanity and life to the earth. The evolution of energy is kokyo. The reincarnation of energy is kokyo. It is the rhythms of the seasons, the oceans, and the, and the moon. It is the expansion and contraction that created the universe and the earth, the inhalation and exhalation of global phenomena, All are breathing processes of an inseparable cycle, each helping the other. [p 154 in Aikido and the Harmony of Nature]

Kathleen Dowling Singh in her Grace in Dying that established the Nearing Death Experience shares the theme of human life as union of the becoming and the Enduring:

…it is proposed that we conceive of this end moment of a human being as a "remerging" to reflect the fact that the soul is returning to merge with the Unity from which it had once emerged. The phases of the movement in this human journey always occur in the same sequential dynamic from pre-personal levels of consciousness, through personal levels, and on into transpersonal consciousness that realizes its identity with the Ground of Being.

You can hear the affirmation of the moon, mythologically speaking, when Campbell honors the sacred individuality cultivated in the Grail myth as the metaphysical dimension of the individual as a value is set forth…individuality is not (as in the orient) a mere figment of illusion, to be analyzed away and dissolved at last, but a substantial entity in itself, to be realized, brought to flower. And the adventure of each, so interpreted, will consist in the following of a summons away from the ‘fixed and the set fast,’ of the world conceived of as law, to a “becoming,” the Purgatory of an individual life, moving toward its own proper end, its ‘wyrd.’

Here again is Richard Tarnas, in his introduction to Jorge Ferrer’s 2002 Revisioning Transpersonal Theory - a trans-immanence:

As the transpersonal field moves to an understanding of human spirituality as more profoundly encompassing and participatory, many have begun to see the very word 'transpersonal' as needing to be addressed, and perhaps fundamentally redefined. For as we integrate more fully the amplitude and immanence of the sacred, we better discern that spiritual power moving in and through the human person in all her, his, their living, embodied, situated specificity: psychological and physical, gendered, relational, communal, cultural and historical, ecological and cosmic. In this understanding, 'trans' recovers its original Latin larger range of meanings -- signifying not only beyond, but also "across," "through," "pervading;" so "as to change," "transform;" "occurring by way of."

Here 'transpersonal' multivalently acknowledges the sacred dimension of life dynamically moving beyond as well as within, through and by way of the human person in a manner that is mutually transformative, complexly creative, opening to a fuller participation in the divine creativity that IS the human person and the ever unfolding cosmos. It is precisely this spiritual dynamism in the human person embedded in a spiritually alive cosmos that empowers, and challenges, the human community's participatory cocreation of spiritual realities, including new realities still to unfold. (p. xv)

Evelyn Elsaesser writes in her book, On the Other Side of Life:

I believe the study of NDEs compels us to consider the possible existence of a reflective, emotional, hyperpowerful consciousness (thus possessing all the properties of a living being), that evolves in an atemporal dimension. Would this invalidate the laws that necessarily associate life with time? In addition, all philosophical thought is goverened by the concept of life as within a body, never as without one. After hearing the numerous testimonies of experiencers, who clearly state that during their NDE they were conscious - even hyper-conscious - but detached from their physical bodies, I wonder if we should not give some consideration to the notion of life as liberated from matter and space-time…Given the general functioning of living organisms, we could postulate that human beings evolve towards maturation by changing states. Our matter, which is destined for disintegration, would be left behind, while our essences would meet with a completely different destiny. (p. 9)

The intimate and universal hope described above has never left Indigenous wisdom. For long-enduring peoples of the Earth, the relationship between the living and our enduring Root in the before, after, and throughout life, in all others and in oneself, is the key to survival. Here’s a short talk on the Lakota Yuwipi:

An archetypal ecology offers the West a chance to humble itself and honor the dreaming of its own people, as well as the dreaming of all life, nations of Earth. We can remember that all life is a community of dreaming persons whose personalities are rooted in dreaming that is rooted in the more comprehensive dreaming of Earth.

Hillman and Monick both brought forward this aspect of the the fantasy life of the image of the masculine’s dreaming in the 1980s. Monick referred to the experience with the term, phallos. Hillman offered a more fluid approach. His suggestion is that all we know for sure about our arousal during sleep, regardless of our private forms, is that that dream person aroused is not us, but another among others who seek us:

If we follow Jung, however, and “reach down, or up, to quite other levels than so-called common sense would suspect,” then why make exceptions about kinds of dreams or kinds of persons in dreams? We are obliged that all dreams have their home in the underworld and all their persons are shades. We must search for the numen in the dream-ego, too. The “I” who wakens and remembers is left with traces of all sorts, not only wet ones, of the play he/she/they has been in and the role he/she/they has played, but the remembering I goes on in a different place, maybe in a quite different person. Just as the dream releases the shade of my brother and father from their actual embodiments, so it releases the dream-ego from having to embody the waking-ego and act in its name. Again, in dreams, all persons, including myself, are dead to their lives, shadows of what they are elsewhere. Even their orgasms are in the land of the dead. (in, Dream and the Underworld, pp. 103-104)

Whether more like the knower and the known or a raised up standing stone, called, The Creative, strong and firm, yang in the I-Ching, or a mystical hill with its cave-hidden wellspring, called, The Receptive, flexible and gentle, yin, when we dream, we are returned to the sustainable rhythms between day, night, moons, seasons, years, in an Earth-like way that always circulates between life and death and life. It is here where our Celtic ancestors would ask why, with their stature, neither Freud, nor Jung, nor VonFranz, nor Hillman, nor Roszak, left us any songs?

The Creative, firm and strong and Receptive, flexible and gentle, do not become Grace to each other until they begin to sing together, with the Great Song/Great Music the Celts called, the Oran Mor. Their intoning together restores Priority as we each receive with the Receiving and create with the co-Creating/co-Receiving.

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