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

My brother, sister, cousins, and I are 7th generation Reynolds. Our branch of the family has lived the American adventure since the 1740's. For this website, it's important that I share that our family owned land near the Cane Ridge Revival of America’s Second Great Awakening in August, 1801, three brothers fought for the North and three brothers for the South - 1861-1865. On my mother’s side of the family, the O’Donovans, which become Donovan in America, my Uncle Ned worked on the pressurized cabin of the B-29 bomber during the war. He didn’t know what he was working on until August 6, 1945, when he realized that he was working on the kind of aircraft that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. Our ancestors prayed and/or did not believe in the same God on High that held sway in the Age of Aries and the Age of Pisces.

On November 19, 1863, at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln stated in the Gettysburg Address that America was at a time of a new birth of freedom. With this website, on behalf of my family and myself, I offer you an update, a 2025 new birth of freedom, that is based on a deeper awareness of the depth of a human soul and the profound value of a human life - the value of all life. The deeper awareness is in fact a return to our conscious co-creation of the future that is at the heart of Indigenous wisdom the world over. Peace on Earth begins with a step into the new thermodynamics where the law of entropy describes physical energy and the law of syntropy describes life energy. This principle of life encourages the dynamic balance of peace within ourselves and all we do each for the other.

The new thermodynamics in quantum physics, cosmology, depth psychology, Recovery Movement/New Consciousness, and the kinship worldview found in Indigenous wisdom, already exist. For Western culture, this means that updates for our three notions of time - Chronos/Kronos, Kairos, and Aion - open the way for us to enter into planetary stewardship and a galactic ecology.

Vannini and Di Corpo describe the New Thermodynamics as:

1. Chronos/Kronos describes the sequential causal time, which is familiar to us, made of absolute moments which flow from the past to the future.

2. Kairos describes the retrocausal time. According to Pitagora kairos is at the basis of intuition, the ability to feel the future and to choose the most advantageous options.

3. Aion describes the supercausal time, in which past, present and future coexist. The time of quantum mechanics, of the sub-atomic world.

Vannini and Di Corpo express the dynamic union of past, present and future of syntropy and entropy in Aion using the yinyang, the union of Shiva and Shakti, and synchronicity as described by Jung and Pauli. I offer the four-dimensional hypersphere/threesphere called, Urth and Urperson: Self-image and World-image, The Messiah Archetype.

Urth and Urperson: Self-image and World-image, The Messiah Archetype — Teaching and Home-Making Image for Archetypal Ecology/Alchemical Shamanism, by Christopher Reynolds, copyright, 2016

My mission is home-making*

*to sing, to teach, to restore American culture’s sacred relationships of home into the Anthropocene Epoch/Age of Aquarius

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 out of the narrowness of the Holocene into the Anthropocene. We can move out from the lessons learned through various forms of supremacy during the Age of Pisces. Our cultural clock of the soul that reflects this mental shift is expressed symbolically by the ever-turning signs of the Zodiac. The signs that mark the seasons of the year change every 2160 years or so, from Age to Age. This has been expressed metaphorically and often veiled in the West by the symbols of the 4 Evangelists, by the faces of the living creatures in the book of Ezekiel, frozen in time and handed down over the centuries. They have not been updated for the West in roughly 4000 years. The past centuries, we have been moving from the Age of Aries:

…to the Age of Pisces:

…to here and now in the Age of Aquarius. The sun in the sky during our winter solstice ritual at Sacred Stones Mystical Farm in Mansfield, Ohio, on December 22, 2024, was in the edge of Scorpio just exiting Sagittarius. If you could switch off the sun for a moment in the photo below, you would see this along with the galactic center in the depths behind them all.

Culturally, the clock of the Western soul has remained untended in since the Age of Aries. Thus, in our psychologically frozen spacetime awareness you can recognize Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius of the zodiac still described in the four faces of the living creatures mentioned in Ezekiel and the Book of Revelation. See below the updated spacetime piece, which means the zodiac turned counter-clockwise two signs or two “clicks.” The updated living faces mirror 21st century scientific and psychological awareness. Pisces, Gemini, Virgo, and Sagittarius reflect how we could live together in a collective mental climate of the Anthropocene/Age of Aquarius. These faces also reflect the delight in living of persons who have lived through what James Joyce called, aesthetic arrest, what Joseph Campbell called, the opening of the heart through the experience of awe, what Antonella Vannini and Ulisse Di Corpo describe as, Aion, and what Jeffrey Kripal succinctly calls, a Flip:

A Flip is a life-changing moment, often catalyzed by trauma or some extreme event, in which a person enters an altered state of consciousness and subsequently reverses or "flips" her or his or their metaphysical perspective. Once holding to a strong materialist position in which consciousness is understood to be an evolutionary accident or a purely local epiphenomenon of brain processes, the flipped individual is now convinced that consciousness is a fundamental fact of the cosmos and not reducible to neurological and biological processes.

-- John Morgan, cited by Jeffrey Kripal, in, The Flip: Epiphanies of the Mind and the Future of Knowledge

The future is more coherent than the present, more animate and purposeful, and in a real sense wiser. It knows more, and some of the knowledge gets transmitted back to us by what seems to be a purely natural phenomenon. We are being talked to by a very informed Entity: that of all creation as it lies ahead of us in time.

— Philip K. Dick, in, Consciousness Unbound: Liberating Mind From The Tyranny of Materialism, p. 359

While there are no certainties here, there is at least one conviction that seems justified: consciousness is a basic feature of reality, and it will have to be recognized as such if the data, ordinary and extraordinary are to be understood. More speculatively, consciousness may itself be evolving through the development of its partial manifestations.

— Paul Marshall, in, Consciousness Unbound: Liberating Mind From The Tyranny of Materialism, p. 471

Our Western mental habit or karma over the past 4000 years has been to erase consciousness as a basic feature of reality. We have been actively co-creating our own unconsciousness, anti-consciousness, in religion, science, and culture. The past 2000 years of the Age of the Fishes can be imagined as a battle of two chained together bound by their mutual dislike for each other - like a yin and yang gone blind and unable to see themselves through the loving eye of the other. This mythology of cosmic war can be set aside now. We have reached a level of evidence that shows that war does not produce what claims about the activity propose.

The changing of the faces of the Age allow us to draw on the past centuries and future centuries in order to re-learn a mythology of peace. Like any living mythology, there is necessary psychological shadow-work. In the same way that there are “dry drunks” who are alcoholics who choose to drink no more but who do no inner psychological work, there are “dry peace-makers.” We can choose to invest the billions, the courage, love, and intelligence, once spent on war-making in an unconscious cosmos on the creation of a living future for all beings, a life-making in an inspiring, conscious cosmos.

Ed Tick, in his 2005, War and the Soul:

In all of humankind’s efforts at war-making — in our recruitment and training of the vulnerable young, in our indoctrination of our populations on every side of the globe, in our politics and arms manufacture, and especially in our crusades that mimic the crusades of the past — we are in search of the mystic warrior. But no matter how much we aspire to be the cultural hero who performs the great tasks of civilization in the name of divinity, modern warfare cannot engender the mystic warrior. It can only create the latest and most technological version of what Buffy Sainte-Marie’s song called the universal soldier — the one from every race, religion, culture, of all sizes, shapes, and colors, who will do the killing he or she or they is bidden to do.

We must return our charges — our children and our veterans, our deeds and our dreams, our soldiers and our adversaries — to the path of the mystic warrior. And we must do so in the name of healing, reconciliation, and restoration. We must make the pursuit of peace as mythic as the pursuit of war has been. The fate of our world depends upon how successfully we undertake and carry through this great task.”

(pp. 288-289)

This update of the four living faces offers us a cosmological and psychological framework to encourage us to take up this great task. No one owns this framework. As an archetype, living in conscious participation with these ideas, no matter who you are, is expressed in themes like the Recovery Movement’s Twelve Promises:

1. If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half-way through.

2. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.

3. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.

4. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace.

5. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.

6. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.

7. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.

8. Self-seeking will slip away.

9. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life with change.

10. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us.

11. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.

12. We will suddenly realize that the God of our understanding is doing with* us what we could not do for ourselves.

*I’ve made a change from the idea of “doing to us” because in current psychological understanding, we are also participating in what happens to us. We are not passive subjects of an Otherworldy King on High, nor even the earlier notion of the Otherworldly King of Kings whose Name is above all Names. Jung describes this psychological reality as: Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. The same psychological view is in the Gospel of Thomas, Saying 70:

If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you.

The Hunt for the Holy

The Hunt for the Holy is a program where you learn how to restore your sacred relationships with the Earth, solar system, galaxy and cosmos, how to restore your sacred relationships with your Ancestors, and how to restore your sense of adventure and continuity through many lifetimes.

From 2002 to 2008, Christopher Reynolds learned through Earth-based ways that he combined with Wisdom Sessions with his friend, Dr. Michael Olin Hitt. He named their monthly practice, The Hunt for the Holy. This soul cross-training was small part of the effort for Chris to create Urth and Urperson: Self-image and World-image, The Messiah Archetype, which is his teaching Image for Archetypal Ecology/Alchemical Shamanism and for Michael to establish what is now called, The Braided Way.

Chris says of this: "I was able to learn at a remarkable rate during those years. I learned that each tradition has its language. Each month, both languages expressed in both waking and dreaming, a similar loving intention that resonated with the landscape, trees, animals, day, night, month and season, planets and stars of the year, the Age and the galactic year."

The Hunt for the Holy can be a 25 minute talk, 1-2 hour, day-long or week-end retreat, weekly or seasonal offering. (in person or over Zoom)

Introduction to the Labyrinth Wheel and Medicine Labyrinth: Union of Western and Indigenous Wisdom

Labyrinth Wheels which are outdoor labyrinths and Medicine Labyrinths, which are indoor Medicine Wheels are outdoor and indoor instruments of peace-making that offer us paths for our evolutionary next steps. We can carry forward the wisdom gained from 4000 years into the Anthropocene/Age of Aquarius.

The labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral and the Indigenous medicine wheel are two ways that express the Tao, Chronos/Kairos/Aion. This archetypal pattern reflects wholeness, harmony, sanity, and happiness — totality. A Labyrinth Wheel is an outdoor labyrinth. It is a union of Western and Indigenous wisdom that invites us all to come to a No Man’s Land of peace within ourselves and with all our relations -- even with our enemies. A Medicine Labyrinth is a circle of the Four Directions established indoors. Labyrinth Wheels and Medicine Labyrinths are soul support for alchemical and shamanic practices.

To deepen our inherited constellation of Pisces and the Zodiac for the Anthropocene/Age of Aquarius, here is what I call a COEX sidereal constellation. This COEX sidereal constellation is named, The Immanent Function, to reflect in the sky what we do on Earth. We can carry forward the psychological wisdom of evolutionary astrology and to it, add the cosmology of 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 and how we participate in our own COEX constellations/systems that unite waking consciousness with the personal, collective, perinatal, and ecological unconscious — especially in imaginal experiences.

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, syntropic, embodied home-making, 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, past and future life experiences that are immanent to the transcendent occur in the midst of their union — trans-immanence. This is a declaration of the psychoid (psychological union of eternity and time) reality of the new Earth and new Heaven.

You can listen your way into an ensouled, imaginal, 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)
    

CURRENT PROGRAMS

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

Cross the Threshold, Welcome to the Anthropocene/Age of Aquarius Concert Series

Come out to sing together.

A Cross the Threshold, Welcome to the Anthropocene Concert/Age of Aquarius 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, a rite of passage, 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 Age.

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. Trinosophia is the precognitive awareness of causes affecting us from the future. Trinity is the historical awareness of causes affecting us from the past.

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

Cross the Threshold, Welcome to the Anthropocene/Age of Aquarius Concerts and Open-Mics

The Anthropocene Epoch/Age of Aquarius can be recognized by the merging of consciousness, matter, and energy that Vannini and Di Corpo call, the New Thermodynamics. Our universe is of spacetimeconsciousness where past and future causes dance in the now is what McGilchrist sums this up nicely in an interview called, The Divided Brain and the Sense of the Sacred.

Join Christopher Reynolds and Raven Heart for an evening of songs, spirit messages, poems, and stories that welcome you to the Anthropocene Epoch/Age of Aquarius. The end of patriarchy or "Man" can be recognized by the dynamic evolutionary merging of consciousness, matter, and energy of the New Thermodynamics. In a cosmos where the future is a retrocausal consequence of biological life, consciousness survives permanent bodily death. Consciousness from the future and past sustain life, precedes birth, inspire the resilience of life. Consciousness is of this Beauty that Sustains the World and IS the World:

The material universe as we know it offers countless possibilities for extraordinary adventures in consciousness. As embodied selves, we can witness the spectacle of the heavens with its billions of galaxies and the natural wonders on Earth. Only in the physical form and on the material plane can we fall in love, enjoy the ecstasy of sex, have children, listen to Beethoven's music, or admire Rembrandt's paintings. The opportunities for the explorations of the microworld and the macroworld are virtually unlimited. In addition to the experiences of the present, there is also the adventure of probing the mysterious past, from the ancient civilizations to the antediluvian world to the events during the first microseconds of the Big Bang.

To participate in the phenomenal world and to be able to experience this rich spectrum of adventures requires a certain degree of identification with the embodied self and acceptance of the world of matter. However, when our identification with the body-ego is absolute and our belief in the material world as the only reality unshatterable, it is impossible to fully enjoy our participation in creation. The specters of personal insignificance, impermanence and death can completely overshadow the positive side of life and rob it of its zest. We also have to add to it the frustration associated with repeated futile attempts to realize our full divine potential within the constraints imposed on us by the limitations of our bodies and of the material world.

To find the solution to this dilemma, we have to turn inside, to a systematic inner quest. As we keep discovering and exploring various hidden dimensions of ourselves and of reality, our identification with the body-ego becomes progressively looser and less compelling. We continue to identify with the "skin-encapsulated ego" for pragmatic purposes, but this orientation becomes increasingly more tentative and playful. If we have sufficient experiential knowledge of the transpersonal dimensions of existence, including our own true identity and cosmic status, everyday life becomes much easier and more rewarding.

-- Stan Grof, in, Psychology of the Future, p. 290

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, a religious problem, V62.89, in the DSM-V diagnosis book used by psychiatrists, or an Unusual Experience, by the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia, is a breakdown of meaning, daishigyo, great ego-death, crossover mind-shattering event, 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 transpersonal 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 and addiction

crisis of psychic opening

moral injury/PTSD

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 alchemical shaman.

No Man’s Folk Music Gathering

(roots music that Roots itself in dreaming and loving spirits.)

No Man’s Folk is sobriety-based music and spirit messages — songs and spirits. It unites original music with what we call ‘traditional’ folk music, Traditional, in the sense of Indigenous, folk music, and mediumship in the spiritualist folk tradition that originated on March 31, 1848, in New York on formerly Haudenosaunee land.

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, your gifts of mediumship, Beauty that invites all world views to be welcomed and encouraged to create a flourishing future together. It’s the joyful gathering where even enemies sing together that is the goal. The No Man’s Folk approach is like that of the 1914 Christmas Truce - come in a good way with Gifts for the good of all.

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.” I refer to this as being “smashed again” which means that the three experiences of spacetime, Chronos, Kairos, and Aion, are all flattened and presented as Chronos. Chronos means the literal timeline of all life caused by the past and now winding down towards death, chaos, annihilation. In the indigenous world and in our own tradition of Hermeticism, Chronos, Kairos, and Aion are carefully tended. 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, this is known as mythic dissociation. Part of why you are here is to dismantle all the patterns of surrendering of voices/addictions, all the smashing of future and meaning down into Chronos, the mythic dissociation and to give to the next generations the awareness of the divinity of life that 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. My father suffered from mythic dissociation. Campbell 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, declares the imaginal is imaginary, pollutes the waters, swallows the spirit, splits off individuals from dreaming, from the cycles of nurturing and being nurtured, makes us empty of divinity and alien, homeless, visionless, 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 published in 1611, in Emblemata Sacra by Thomas Cramer.

Walt Whitman is an early example of Remembrance of human dignity.

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 Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) of the University of Virginia affirms the same psychological reality in its own research, especially as regards

Children Who Report Memories Of Past Lives

• Near-Death Experiences

• Neuroimaging Studies Of Psi

• Altered States Of Consciousness

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, our own immortality and divinity, 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 gravitationally 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. This is the astronomical foundation for what Jeffrey Kripal calls, human as two. Eric Wargo, in Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious, offers a good example of human as two:

We not only possess an “individual mind” that adheres to the brain at any given time point, but we also are part of a larger, “Universal Mind,” that transcends the now and that spaghetti-clump body. The Universal Mind…is ultimately shared — a consciousness-in-common — that is equivalent to what has always been called, “God.” Universal Mind is immortal. The body-bound individual mind, is, in some sense, a “child of God and man.” (p. 56)

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

And behold, in the midst of all resides the sun. For who, in this most beautiful temple, would set this lamp in another or better place, whence to illuminate all things at once?…Truly indeed does the sun, as if seated upon a royal throne, govern his family of planets as they circle about him.

— Nicolaus Copernicus, 1543

Through the wild heavens, stars fly like sand.

I know how I love you.

You have a place to stand.

I have a place to stand.

It is time.

— Christopher Reynolds, 1991, It Is Time

The symbolism of the sun as the center of the personality in orbit with the rest of the planets, moons, all celestial bodies, around the gravitational barycenter of our solar system reflects our own lived experiences of 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.)

However, the post-Copernican shift is when we remember how the metaphysical dimension of the individual is a single cell in a much vaster living being. The poem from Copernicus places the sun on the throne of an absolute monarch, emperor of an empire. My response to him is that to flourish as individuals is to be in relationship in service to all life. Like trees of a forest who stand on their own, yet always reach out in service of the greater 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 of mankind. (Mankind = all humanity). [Inner Reaches of Outer Space]

The “monad of mankind” once belonged to those traditions that knew that the past-life reflection and judgment of the life that was lived is natural to the soul itself. Any weighing of virtue and testing the worth of a soul is not done by an outside power. Newton’s law of universal gravitation was the realization that dismantled ideas of a literal heaven above where the powers on high sit in judgement of us all. Newton’s shift introduced the concept of the center of mass, center of gravity or barycenter around which bodies orbit. Each of us when we embody also have our personal barycenter at the center of gravity of the psychoid (union of matter/energy/psyche) wholeness of our being. Campbell’s monad of mankind is the mythologizing of the gravitational center. Newton’s and later, Einstein’s law of universal gravitation that established the 4th dimension as necessary to understand Creation and ourselves. Jung’s approach to healing resonates with this mythological barycentric ground of our current cosmos:

…we try to supplement the inadequate attitude (or adaptation) of the conscious mind by adding to it contents of the unconscious, our aim is to create a wider personality whose center of gravity does not necessarily coincide with the ego, but which, on the contrary, as the patient’s insights increase, may even thwart his/her/their ego-tendencies.

…only patient and painstaking work on the contents of the unconscious, and the resultant synthesis of conscious and unconscious data, can lead to a “totality,” which once more uses circle and quaternity symbols for purposes of self-description. In this phase, too, the original dreams of childhood are remembered and understood. (pp. 189-190, in AION)

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 and solar system be now 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 “human as two” 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 LGBTQH+, 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 world. 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. Jung’s main message was of wholeness that makes room for all. Jung himself nearly coined the term in Mysterium Coniunctionis (p. 416) in 1956:

A cliche like “the old Adam” which can have no other meaning, does not occur in a dream-text without a very good reason, even though the author might have excused it as a mere “slip.” Even if — as seems to be the case here, he understood the “old” Adam as the “Ur” or “original” Adam, he was compelled by some obscure intention to pick on “the old Adam,” which in this context is thoroughly ambiguous.

In the 21st century, Man or Homo tend to have a narrowing, patriarchal effect that was not yet apparent in the mid 20th century to a thinker as nuanced as Jung:

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 two-dimensional to 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/three-sphere with an axis mundi known as the ‘W-axis’ in geometry. It is a review of Jung’s development of the mandala as a self-image as four-dimensional. It is also a recovery of Jung’s standing as a vital artist of the 20th century without whom an understanding of the art of the 20th century is incomplete. Leaving Jung’s four dimensional art out of an understanding of 20th century visual artists is the same as describing James Joyce and then never speaking of Ulysses. As a rule, those who work with the circle in a Jungian, mandalic way, carry on an original geometric and artistic mandalic dissociation that was first set in motion by Jung himself. In AION: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, Jung gets his quantum physics and depth psychology into a good-enough harmony. His writings, dreams, insights, integrate the fourth dimension into psychological understanding:

If we look at this quaternio from the standpoint of the three-dimensionality of space, then time can be conceived as a fourth dimension. But if we look at it in terms of the three qualities of time — past, present, future — then static space, in which changes of state occur, must be added as a fourth term. In both cases, the fourth represents an incommensurable Other that is needed for their mutual determination. Thus we measure space by time and time by space. The Other, the fourth, corresponds in the Gnostic quaternities to the fiery god, “the fourth by number”…

The space-time quaternio is the archetypal sine qua non for any apprehension of the physcial world — indeed, the very possibility of apprehending it. It is the organizing schema par excellence among the psychic quaternities. In its structure it corresponds to the psychological schema of the functions. The 3 : 1 proportion frequently occurs in dreams and in spontaneous mandala drawings. (pp. 252-253)

It’s clear from the above that Jung understood the mandala drawings he worked with as 4 dimensional. As for as his art goes, especially in the Red Book, he created during a time when the 4th dimension was being integrated into the art of 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 life. A mandala is not a circle, nor even a sphere, but a hypersphere/three-sphere.

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 Archetype, 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 Archetype.

Urperson and Urth: Self-image and World-image, Messiah Archetype 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 Archetype 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/Age of Aquarius.

Ecomasculine, Ecofluid, Ecofeminine, Ecofluid = LGBTQH+

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.

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.

We each receive with the Receiving and create with the co-Creating/co-Receiving.

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