Answering James Joyce: The Solar Apex

This online book and its partner, Immanent Function, evolve Jung’s thoughts on depth psychology. In particular, they revision the closing sentence of Jung’s 1951 essay, Depth Psychology. (In Collected Works, vol 18, pp. 477-486) He closed that essay with the following:

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.

The United States has an apocalyptic penchant that possesses its citizens from time to time. Our national symptom is woven in its foundation due to its Christian roots. In May, 2023, the same pattern played out again at the Shakahola Farm in Kenya. It was reported that:

Children were targeted as the first to be starved to death in the final days of a Christian doomsday cult in Kenya, according to fresh accounts emerging. Police investigating an apparent mass suicide have so far exhumed 201 bodies in a forest in the nation's southeast. A former deputy preacher of the cult told the New York Times that children were killed first, ordered "to fast in the sun so they would die faster." Women and men were next to follow the suicide plan, Titus Katana said. Mr Katana - who is helping police with the investigation - also described to the Sunday Times the alleged brutal treatment of the children, saying they were shut in huts for five days without food or water. "Then they wrapped them in blankets and buried them, even the ones still breathing," he was quoted as saying. It is alleged that the cult followers were told they would reach heaven faster if they starved to death.

The most recent living out of our own apocalyptic penchant was the January 6th Capitol attack of which author, Bradley Onishi states, There is a real sense [among white Christian nationalists] that the apocalypse is coming for this country if [they] don’t do something radical. An even more tragic example was David Koresh and the Branch Davidians outside of Waco, Texas, in 1993. Koresh himself was carrying forward ideas from Cyrus Reed Teed who also claimed to be the messiah. Jeff Guinn, who recently published his book, Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage, also wrote biographies of Jim Jones and Charles Manson. Near the end of this interview, Guinn makes the comment that unlike Jones and Manson, David Koresh (Vernon Wayne Howell) believed what he was claiming. I propose in this book that he was possessed by a messiah complex and was surrounded by a culture with no knowledge of depth psychology and archetypes. The same kind of American true believing occurred at a foundational moment in American religion in 1801 at Cane Ridge Kentucky.

Phillip P. Arnold and Sandra L. Bigtree’s essay, Ten Religious Themes of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery That Contrast With Indigenous Values, raises the issue that I name here in their 4th religious theme:

4. Apocalyptic thinking eagerly anticipates the end of the world, the return of Jesus Christ, and the rapture—where the chosen people return to a heavenly paradise. This Christian message connects with millennialism, and what drives the fanaticism of explorers, missionaries, ‘end of the world’ thinking, etc. Today, this paranoid thinking about how the world ends drives global Capitalism and consumerism.

Indigenous values response: if there is to be an end of the world it will not come with a promise of a new world. It is our responsibility to keep this Creation alive for seven generations into the future.

What you are reading is to be a psychological vaccine for now and future generations in order for us to always remember that politics, religion, atheism, economics, and culture are not a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil— especially now. Answering James Joyce is a vaccine I wish had been available to those I love in the past who suffered without it, especially my grandmother, Hazel Kraft Donovan. As Americans who share a nation that could literally bring the nuclear end to life on our planet, finding sobriety as regards the End Times is necessary. O’Leary stresses this same concern:

The recently acquired human capacity to end all life on earth does appear to many as a tragic sign of a catastrophic conclusion of history. Yet one must ask whether the tragic apocalypse might be a self-fulfilling prophecy, whether the logic of a purely historical eschatology may not, in the end, contribute to the End it predicts. [p. 220 in, Arguing Apocalypse]

I think he has it right based on Ronald Reagan’s inner circle thinking they would bring the Second Coming through literal nuclear war with the Soviet Union. That kind of thinking still possesses us nationally.

**Urperson and Urth: Self-image and World-image, The Messiah complex - The Vaccine**

Up front, what I propose is that we require a better awareness of how we each personally and collectively participate with an inner and outer Self-image and World Image that I call, Urperson and Urth: Self-image and World-image, Messiah complex. I am encouraging us to be more discerning in how we choose to live out the renewal of ourselves and our culture. The Bible and other religious texts without this awareness, and an accompanying oral tradition, especially from those traditions found in monotheistic/atheistic empires, remain explosive.

With humanity now capable of touching the sun revealed by the Parker Solar Probe, NASA’s DART Mission, that demonstrated that our planet can push back against destructive forces in the cosmos, as the James Webb Space Telescope begins to share its images of cosmos magnified 100 times more than Hubble, the idea of new heavens has new depths. As the wars in Gaza and Ukraine slog on, as we witness ongoing racial, social, political strife, as we take in that 70 percent of animal species have died the past 50 years, we can remember what the stretcher-bearer founders of the American Field Service learned caring for all war wounded, as American war veteran, Andy Wall, so passionately reminds us, We are all mothers, fathers, grandfathers, grandmothers, aunties, uncles, cousins, sons, daughters, nephews, nieces, all grandchildren. Human beings all long to be safe and for the future generations to flourish in a beautiful world.

James Joyce wrote what I consider to be an ecomasculine way to free himself and his readers from the cosmic war of the New Testament’s Second Coming brought to Ireland by the colonizers. The day of Ulysses and the night of Finnegan’s Wake together are a restoration, a re-indigenization of Celtic sovereignty meant to be a gift to humanity. (He dissolved Roman authority by aiming Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake at Dublin)

The goal is articulated by Joseph Campbell 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)

Campbell came to the same conclusion as I do in this book. He came about it by following his own wyrd while I have followed mine. Here’s how he expressed his vaccine:

The mystical theme of the Space Age is this: the world as we know it is coming to an end. The world as the center of the universe, the world divided from the heavens, the world bound by horizons in which love is reserved for members of the in-group: that is the world that is passing away. Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and complacency are coming to an end. Our divided, schizophrenic world view, with no mythology adequate to coordinate our conscious and unconscious — that is what is coming to an end. The exclusiveness of there being only one way in which to be saved, the idea that there is a single religious group that is in the sole possession of the truth — that is the world as we know it that must pass away. What is the Kingdom? It lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us.

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

All that follows in this book is summed up the clip below of The Magnification:

The Magnification

Come out now people from wherever you been.

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

Be wise near them shallow ones creeping the Earth.

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

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

Jupiter and jupiter, the One and the one,

The Light and the light, above and Above.

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

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

Let each revelation open your mind

To the Magnification. A song is true

When all you were given, you can see through.

Come on your readers, you see with your heart.

Feel into these words, all of them watermarks

On into this night, beyond and within you,

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

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

Reflection in reflection, the Seen in the seen,

Depth in the depth, Is in the is.

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

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

They come in four times the meaning.

Rise up, have your turn.

For the Magnification, a Love is true

When all you are giving, you can see through

Grandmothers, Grandfathers, Elders body and soul,

Thank you for the Love and the Life you bestow.

Hold in your hearts the little ones’ Names.

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

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

The daughter and Daughters, the Old and the Young,

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

As it was in the Beginning, Her Robe is Spread

The Magnification of your space and your time.

Let each Revelation open your Mind

To the magnification. Our world is true

And all you were given, all your are giving.

You can see through.

The mystical theme of Gaza, Ukraine, Covid pandemic, all the other pressing struggles, the coming revelations from the James Webb that mark our time on Earth is, as Campbell named it in 1986 - the world as we know it is coming to an end. Like him and Joyce before him, I make the case that what we face is not a fiery Armageddon, but the end of our divided, schizophrenic world view, with no mythology adequate to coordinate our conscious and unconscious.

The end of a world is a common theme found during times of profoundest psychological transformations called positive disintegration and/or spiritual emergency. Such transformations are experiences of a psychological/ritual death and rebirth. The partner to individual psychic death and re-birth is that you feel like the End of the World, with the capital letters, is at hand. In positive disintegration/spiritual emergency, you live a symbolic personal Apocalypse that can take on such a magnitude that it can feel like you are at the center of a cosmic conflict between good and evil. It’s not easy. You can trust me on this because I’ve been through it twice. The American landscape is littered with its ten thousand Armageddons.

The theme of complete destruction of all that is that brings about universal renewal runs through all of the eight colossal monads of great majesty and it remains present in a ninth now in formation. Joseph Campbell in Inner Reaches of Outer Space observed:

…as the imagery of a dream is metaphorical of the psychology of its dreamer, that of a mythology is metaphorical of the psychological posture of the people to whom it pertains. The sociological structure coordinate to such a posture was termed by the Africanist Leo Frobenius (1873-1938) a cultural “monad.” Every feature of such a social organism is, in his sense, expressive and therefore symbolic of the informing psychological posture. In Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) identified eight colossal monads of great majesty, with a ninth now in formation, as having shaped and dominated world history since the rise, in the fourth millenium B.C.E., of the first literate high cultures — (1) the Sumero-Babylonian, (2) the Egyptian, (3) the Greco-Roman (Apollonian), (4) the Vedic-Aryan of India, (5) the Chinese, (6) the Maya-Aztec-Incan, (7) the Magian (Persian, Arabian, Judeo-Christian-Islamic), (8) the Faustian (Gothic Christian to modern European-American), and now, beneath the imposed alien crust of a Marxist cultural pseudomorphosis, (9) the germinating Russian-Christian.

(p. xiv)

The above colossal cultural monads starting with the Sumero-Babylonian feature an idea known as the Great Year. The above monads all share some form of astrological awareness of the ecliptic and a zodiac that marks not only years, decades, and millennia, but also can be used to describe a 26,000 year cycle. We no longer have the luxury of a mythology where our cosmos is renewed by higher powers acting on our behalf. We are now to steward our own ecological health with an awareness that our planet is going to continue in its life adventure for many cycles of 26,000 years. It is for this reason that you can see the zodiac placed with the Indigenous wisdom of the Medicine Wheel at the center circle of Urperson and Urth. We are called to participate more wisely and gently upon the planet now. I take my cue from the Sermon on the Mount where The gentle shall inherit the Earth. It is long overdue that we put aside intentions of world dominion in the name of our group of choice.

This book intends to give language and ideas in order to no longer be swept up by messiahs of all kinds.

John Wier-Perry, in Stan and Christina Grof’s Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis, writes that the trigger can be a primarily physical factor, such as a disease, accident or operation. I would like to add that it can be a global pandemic, global climate change, revolution, terrorism, world war, moral injury, ecological collapse, genocide/ecocide. Wier-Perry continues:

At other times, extreme physical exertion or prolonged lack of sleep may appear to be the most immediate trigger. In women, it can be childbirth, miscarriage or abortion. We have also seen situations where the onset of the process coincided with an exceptionally powerful sexual experience.

In other cases, the psychospiritual crisis begins shortly after a traumatic emotional experiences. This can be loss of an important relationship, such as the death of a child or another close relative, divorce of the end of a love-affair. Similarly, a series of failures or loss of a job or property can immediately precede the onset of spiritual emergency. In presidposed individuals, the “last straw” can be an experiences with psychedelic substances or a session of experiential psychotherapy. (p. 139)

It’s possible to understand and carry forward the best of Apocalypse and not literalize it. It is possible to separate the transformative collective cultural life-potential from the Biblical narrative of the Second Coming, from mythologies of cosmic war between good and evil persons/political parties/nations. It’s possible to avoid literalizing the destruction of our enemies. I’m saying here we can become stewards conscious of our unconsciousness, stewards of Earth who work with the longterm future in mind. I offer again a teaching image of Urperson and Urth: Self-image and World-image, The Messiah Complex. This time, note where the zodiac is.

*Urperson and Urth: Self-image and World-image, The Messiah Complex*, by Christopher Reynolds, c. 2016

We are dying through the geocentric world view’s up and out mythologies and heliocentric world views’ down and out materialistic exclusiveness of there being only one way in which to be saved by a single religious group or groups who use science religiously in the sole possession of the truth. Perhaps Coronavirus has been an invitation to crowning into an awareness of solar identity as the realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us.

Our yellow dwarf star is self-sacrificing, life-giving, life-protecting, consciousness-engendering, revolving, orbiting, turning on its axis soli. Like the lightning bolts of our now-celestial Earth, the sun’s state of matter is plasma. We are consciousness’ liquid, solid, gas, and plasma’s children. The plasma state of matter weaponized upon the Earth in 1945 at the American Trinity explosion is more than a matter of state. - a mythologizing of plasma, is another way to describe this book. The solar system has wisdom for us all now concerning compassion, generosity, balance, justice, care for life, evolutionary stewardship of waking and dreaming lives. This wisdom integrates the awareness that all the celestial bodies of our solar system are orbiting the point that is not a point, the barycenter. Here’s what our solar system looks like:

With the barycenter in mind, read this excerpt of T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton:

…We move above the swaying treetops, amid the light on the patterned leaves. We hear, on the soggy earth below, the hunting dog chase the wild boar as usual, but the pattern of their violence seems like part of the pattern of the heavens.

At the quiet center of the spinning universe—not body or spirit, not movement from or toward anything—at the quiet center, that's where the true, dance-like action is, but it's neither stillness nor motion. And don't say it's stagnation, there at the intersection of past and future. It's not movement from or toward anything, up or down. If not for this quiet center, there would be no dance-like action, and there is only this dance-like action. All I can say is, we've been through that, but I can't say where that is. And I can't say how long it lasted, since that would be to locate it in time (as opposed to eternity). An inner release from functional wants and needs, from activity and pain, from both internal and external demands—instead, immersion in a graceful sensation, a blank light that's both moving and unmoving, a sense of elevation without any movement, of focus without reduction. A new world opening up and the old one opened to understanding, grasped in the fulfillment of its unfulfilled bliss, the end of its unresolved awfulness. Still, the linking of past and future in the vulnerable, changing body (i.e., the body's existence in time) shields humanity from both heaven and hell, which mortal people can't withstand.

Time (past and future) permits us to be only slightly conscious. Being truly conscious means being outside of time, but it's only in a time-bound existence that special moments—like the one in the rose garden, the one under a shady niche in a rainy garden, or the one in a chilly church as fog descended—are available to memory. Only then are these special moments linked to the rest of time. Only those who live in time can defeat time.

It’s misleading to propose that we can defeat time. We can, however, fully participate and flourish in the becoming of the spacetime of our century. Autumn does not defeat the summer. Summer grows, matures, and becomes autumn. Autumn grows, matures and becomes spring. Spring grows, matures, and becomes, summer.

Broken God

Jesus of Nazareth is the person carrying the greatest burden. I don’t mean it as in he saved all the universe because he was, is and always will be God. I mean that his humanity has never been lovingingly accepted. In Bart D. Ehrman’s 2014, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, Ehrman writes:

What we can know with relative certainty about Jesus is that his public ministry and proclamation were not focused on his divinity; in fact, they were not about his divinity at all. They were about God. And about the kingdom that God was going to bring. And about the Son of Man who was soon to bring judgement upon the earth. When this happened, the wicked would be destroyed and the righteous would be brought into the kingdom — a kingdom in which there would be no more pain, misery, or suffering. The twelve disciples and Jesus would be rulers of this future kingdom and Jesus would rule over them. Jesus did not declare himself to be God. He believed and taught that he was the future king of the coming kingdom of God, the messiah of God yet to be revealed. This was the message he delivered to his disciples, and in the end, it was the message that got him crucified. It was only afterward, once the disciples believed that their crucified master had been raised from the dead, that they began to think that he must, in some sense, be God. (pp. 128-129)

The kind of messiah-language and ideas that Jesus uses in Ehrman’s interpretation is garden variety mythological speech you find in spiritual emergencies/spiritually transformative experiences/positive disintegrations. It is a mode of symbolic language from an individual’s psycho-spiritual transformation of the inner Self-image and its accompanying outer World-image. We now have a decent depth psychology and ritual knowledge to help a person move through such a life-changing crisis. This writing, then, has information derived from our time that I wish could have been shared with Jesus and his circle as well as with all those who came before him, are here now and are to come.

Find below the lyrics of my song, Broken God. The song represented a public smashing of the dead icons of my Catholic youth that had either toxic meaning or no psychological meaning for me. They were for me the shells of forms produced and left behind by lives once lived. It was my direct address to the Father God and my enacting Creative Mythology:

[Creative Mythology] springs not, like theology, from the dicta of authority, but from the insights, sentiments, thoughts and vision of an adequate individual, loyal to his 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.

Broken God was my way of expressing what Joyce called his war with Catholicism. Whereas he aimed two books at Dublin to dissolve Roman authority in 1922 and 1939, I aimed one song at a crucifix at Notre Dame University in Southbend, Indiana in July, 1992. In the center of the song is a lamentation that is also a declaration of the sacredness of life. Broken God, then, works like a soul filter to separate the toxic elements of Christianity from the Original Instruction which resonates with the life-affirming wisdom traditions of the planet:

I built my temple in the street
In muddy holes, I made the seats
A ruined child, I transfixed
upon my crucifix

I took the blood of a poisoned whore,
smeared it up across the door.
All the filth, I raised up
into a communion cup

God of pollution
O God of waste
God of suicidal grace

God of Chaos
God of Loss
O Broken God upon the cross

O, Broken God…

Joyce struggled with the impact that the faith had on Irish sovereignty, originality and transcendent sex. My struggle has been with the same concerns. I would add that the sovereignty I am seeking is democratic and for the planet. In July, 1992, at the Festival of Archetypal Psychology in Honor of James Hillman, I sang Broken God during a talk by Eugene Monick entitled, Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine and The Gulf War.

The song unexpectedly triggered a psychic opening in me that I understand as a shamanic calling. By shamanic calling, I mean an ecomasculine experience drawn from suffering the ills of our culture and finding powers to heal them. There were 3 main messages that came like a download over 10 days, 6 of them in the psych ward on the fourth floor at St Vincent’s Charity Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio:

Help to heal your culture’s sacred connection to Earth.

Help to heal your culture’s sacred connection to the Ancestors.

Help the stars to touch the Earth again.

All three of these Missions are woven into the chant embedded in Broken God. So here for the third refrain is the conceptual framework Urperson and Urth: Self-image and World-image, The Messiah Complex. This time, notice the numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, above and below the medicine wheel/zodiac. Those numbers describe what the Ojibway call the layers of a sweat lodge which describe fully human life experiences we call, COEX systems or COEX constellations, in our current depth psychology.

With a sweat lodge, the lodge is understood to be a sphere above and below embodied life. The first layer is called, the suicide layer. It is a reminder that we are always in relationship with all living beings and that they seek to lift us up when we are flattened by life events. The suicide layer describes times when the beauty of nature, trees, winds, water, thunders, sun, moon, swimming, walking, flying beings, insects, become message bearing. This can include human cultural items, like clocks, coins, license plates, songs on the radio, paintings, books, movies, songs, rituals, all gifts of our creativity, that remind us of our worth.

The psychological fact we call, synchronicity, is how we describe the suicide layer. Synchronicity or meaningful coincidence describes times when our inner emotional state is mirrored by outer events. The gift of these experiences is that we remember we are participating in a much larger and more ancient whole that wishes us to live. This first layer, whether called suicide layer or COEX system/constellation, reminds us that we raise ourselves off the ground when we choose to love others and focus on lifting them up. The other layers are: survival layer, you’re doing better layer, and fully human.

Stan Grof, in his Psychology of the Future, explains ta COEX system or COEX constellation:

(A COEX system) …consists of emotionally charged memories from different periods of our life that resemble each other in the quality of emotion or physical sensation that they share. Each COEX has a basic theme that permeates all its layers and represents their common denominator. The individual layers, then contain variations on this basic theme that occurred at different periods of a person’s life. The unconscious of a particular individual can contain several COEX constellations. Their number and the nature of the central themes varies considerably from one person to another…in addition to negative constellations, there are also those that comprise memories of very pleasant or ecstatic moments and situations.

In my present understanding, each of the COEX constellations seems to be superimposed over and anchored in a particular aspect of the trauma of birth. The experience of biological birth is so complex and rich in emotions and physical sensations that it contains in a prototypical form the elementary themes of most conceivable COEX systems. However, a typical COEX system reaches even further and its deepest roots consist of various forms of transpersonal phenomena, such as past-life experiences. Jungian archetypes, conscious identification with various animals and others.

The COEX systems play an important role in our psychological life. They can influence the way we perceive ourselves, other people, and the world and how we feel and act. They are the dynamic forces behind our emotional and psychosomatic symptoms, difficulties in relationships, and irrational behaviors. (pp.23-24, in Psychology of the Future)

Look again at Urperson and Urth: Self-image and World-image, The Messiah Complex.

**Urperson and Urth: Sefl-image and World-image, The Messiah Complex**

As I learned more about James Joyce’s life and work, I found in him a brither-in-arts. I feel joined in time and intention with his war on Catholicism by taking on my part in a larger work for peace on Earth. One thing I can do, due to my family’s 900 years or so living inside its doctrine, is directly address Catholic and Protestant Christianity’s God of War and Second Coming. We can choose to step together into the expansive, more compassionate atmosphere of a New Earth - Urth.

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

Every full moon invites all humanity to recognize that we are standing on the New Earth together — everyone, even our enemies.

The direction our sun is orbiting the galactic center is called, the apex of the sun’s way or solar apex.

If You Meet Zoe Christ On The Road

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There is a Zen saying that if we should meet the Buddha on the road, we should kill him. That has always seemed over the top to me. I realize that the message is that the Buddha we all seek is within our own experience and not to be met second-hand from authoritarian others. Thich Nhat Hahn commented about this same teaching:

I am a Zen master—and, as you know, Zen masters always reply incomprehensibly. So I will say that you only find the Buddha by killing the Buddha whenever you find him.” Then he laughed and said, “But I am a nice Zen master, so I will tell you that the Buddha is truth, and the only thing that keeps you from finding truth is your conviction that you have already found it. So whenever you find truth, you must recognize it is a lie, kill it, and go on in the search for truth.

There are unexpected insights that open up when we translate the Zen saying into a Christianized version:

If you meet the Christ on the Road….

My song, Orphan Soul, is based on having a conversation between two Christs who meet each other. There are advantages in a choice not to kill each other, to go on in search for truth. In John Phillip Newell’s 2021 book, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World, he describes this conversation as the tradition of the soul friend, the anamchara:

In other words, it is vital for us in our personal journey of inner awakening to have a friend who knows the depths of the soul, to whom we can uninhibitedly show what is stirring within us.

“We must open our souls completely to this friend,” said Pelagius, “hiding nothing and revealing everything.” This is not because our soul friend knows more about what is stirring in us than we do. It is because the very act of trying to give expression to our soul, in the presence of someone who loves and trusts us, will enable us to grow in awareness. Then what may have been unconscious in our depths will move up into greater consciousness, further enabling us to translate this awareness into action in our lives and in relationship in the world. (p. 37)

Here are the opening lines from Orphan Soul. It is an invitation to follow along in our ongoing (James Joyce/Christopher Reynolds) conversation. I can state up front that our mutual goal is a new realization of inborn universal worth and gratitude for life.

When you meet the Orphan Soul

May you talk all night because the time is full

May you know the growing edge of you

The secret questions, what your dreams told you.

Where did you wake up in this world?

These are the meanings, the signs and science I explored.

Feel your words grow thick, the synchronistic clues.

Feel the golden chills for the beautiful and true

Minds from all times visit our Time.

Minds from all Time are visiting our time.

I think one of the central messages of Joyce’s Ulysses is that the Christ we seek is to be brought forth from within ourselves and in relationship. Communities where that level of expectation for each person’s potential is where the Second Coming is. It is at the heart of the brothel scene, then, that the Second Coming occurs. The passage below convinces me of this secret hidden in the most unexpected, degraded, local.

Though the entire book could be understood as a Trojan Horse — a Trojan Horse full of Trojan Horses, I think this is a place where Joyce made good on his own pledge to silence, exile, and cunning that he swore through the words upon the lips of Stephen Dedalus: I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church; and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning:

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]

O, so many Christs!

Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Lynch Christ… In his way, he introduced a pattern to take in: (Your Name Here)-Christ. This pattern, it turns out, is trans-Christian, pre-Christian, post-Christian — all at once. You have to go out of your mind to write about it, to read about it, to speak about it.

As of June 16. 1904, in Dublin, you have to go out of the modern and late-modern minds that brought you to that day to understand it. You have to be drunk to understand it. This is the start of my personal response to Ulysses. It is offered as an invitation to a festival in which you can take all you want, so long as you enjoy it. Should anything be unsavory, then leave it behind. The fault falls on me as your host. So it is with drunkeness that my Answering James Joyce all begins.

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Drunk On Nobody’s Wine Of Apollo

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One who believes all of a book would be better off without books.

— 孟子 (Mencius) 385-302 BCE

The first hint of a deeper allegorical, psychological reading beneath the literal story is the title, Ulysses, aka. Odysseus. Ulysses is an epic, certainly an homage to Homer, but one with even deeper Gaelic roots in bardic traditions. Among the responsibilities of bards is to remind the people who they are. Memory as a force of transformation works in the same style as dreaming and dreams, singing and songs. When you read this story, you are entering a waking dream and singing along with it.

Reading the drunken lyricism about that June day, I invite you to consider how when Odysseus and his crew are prisoners of the cyclops, Polyphemus, the half-sighted giant, immediately devours 2 of Odysseus’ 12 men and shuts the rest of them in his cave with him for future meals. In order to escape, the hero hatches a plan to get their captor drunk on the wine of Apollo. Earlier in the tale, he described this wine as part of his preparations to meet the giant:

Then I ordered the rest of my loyal friends to stay there and guard the ship, while I selected the twelve best men and went forward. I took with me a goatskin filled with dark sweet wine that Maron, son of Euanthes, priest of Apollo guardian god of Ismarus, had given me, because out of respect we protected him, his wife and child. He offered me splendid gifts, seven talents of well-wrought gold, and a silver mixing-bowl: and wine, twelve jars in all, sweet unmixed wine, a divine draught. None of his serving-men and maids knew of this store, only he and his loyal wife, and one housekeeper. When they drank that honeyed red wine, he would pour a full cup into twenty of water, and the bouquet that rose from the mixing bowl was wonderfully sweet: in truth no one could hold back. I filled a large goatskin with the wine, and took it along, with some food in a bag, since my instincts told me the giant would come at us quickly, a savage being with huge strength, knowing nothing of right or law.

This one-eyed power who will potentially consume all those you care about has a name that opens a gate. Polyphemus means Abounding in songs and legends. Using the sideways psychological approach of archetypal psychology, the pathologized contains a hidden and forgotten divinity who wants our attention. There are few lands that abound in songs and legends like Ireland, Brittany, Scotland, Isle of Man, Cornwall and Wales.

There is here an idea that people are being eaten alive by a one-eyed brutish consumer named Abundance-in-songs-and-legends. Here is a character whose name could also be, I-am–the consumer-half-blind-to-abundance-in-songs-and-legends or I-am-unconscious-to-the-unconscious. To complete the work on the pathologized character, continuing with archetypal rhetoric, means to restore proper dignity to the forgotten divinity of the people, the songs, the legends and the landscapes of the Gaels for whom Joyce wrote — and move more deeply now to restore the proper dignity to the forgotten dignity of the people, the songs, the legends, landscapes of a now celestial Earth.

I think, then, the title, Ulysses, a Latinized form of Odysseus, invites a deeper look into more than a thousand years of colonizing whether by Rome, Roman Catholicism, Catholic Kingdom, English Protestantism, Kingdom, Empire, or multi-national corporation.

To offer some of Apollo’s wine, is to shift the mind to be able to perceive the full depths of meaning before us. In the Greek tradition, the ancient de-literalizer is sacred geometry. To intoxicate I-am-the consumer-half-blind-to-abundance-in-songs-and-legends is to inebriate its single, shallow understanding — literalism. Once we escape from the cave, the adventure can continue. May your cup be filled. Here, now, is a taste of Apollo’s vintage.

In the Bible, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, pi, is removed from sight:

23 And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.

A circle that is ten cubits across does not have a circumference of thirty cubits. There are traces here and there that this section of text is meant to attract the attention of wide-awake readers. In Hebrew mysticism, where letters are also numbers, only one who asks about this hint learns about the hidden and deeper message — there are missing letter/numbers that complete pi‘s ratio. This is a teaching strategy called, remez, in Kabbalah. In Indigenous traditions, this is called, Coyote teaching. In esoteric Buddhism, this message is carried by Ragaraja, the Love-Stained Wisdom King who fiercely protects the tradition with his 6 hands. One of his hands is held closed and hides the tradition’s key called, That.

Pi, taken as poetry, describes where and how the inner and the outer worlds meet — the seat of the soul. (As of 2021, there are 62,831,853,071,796 digits to pi.) For this reason, pi is called a transcendental number or an inutterable. There is no naming of pi. When Polyphemus asks Odysseus who he is, he tells the cyclops, Nemo — Nobody — No Man.

With pi comes a teaching that all that is visible is seamlessly merged with invisble, infinite depths of felt meaning. Conversely, invisible and infinite depths of insight are co-present in all we perceive. Drunkenness on Apollo’s wine is a way of saying, From now on, all this is symbolic, metaphoric, psychological. No Man owns these lyrical depths. They are within and all around you. Thus, you may enter the realm of soul.

I think this is why the molten sea is outside Solomon’s Temple. It is because until you know that all that is within the Temple precincts is poetic, mythic, archetypal, bardic, language, you risk seeing a literal meaning where there are depths all around you. Those who don’t know risk setting fire to the wine-dark sea.

(Your Name Here)-Christ And The Christ Pattern

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In his book, Pipe and Christ, Fr. John Stolzman wrote that he kept asking the shamans if the Lakota Spirits knew Christ.

They kept telling him to ask the Lakota Spirits himself! When he did ask the Spirits in a Yuwipi ceremony, they replied,

Mahpiya ekta na maka sitomni.

which means, roughly, “Into heaven (cloud) and throughout the Earth, Spirit who travels and helps the people.”

Stolzman interpreted the answer with colonial Catholic prejudice because he had trouble putting the Lakota Spirits on the same footing as his own Holy Spirit. However, the answer he received is worth further consideration as an indication of how an already existing tradition integrated the (Your Name Here)-Christ. The Lakota Spirits and culture have managed to integrate the archetype — even as they remained Lakota Spirits. In alignment with Joyce’s proclamation in Ulysses, Indigenous wisdom, expresses the Christ-message, a message of blessing meant to be integrated into already existing sacred ways that open the horizons between cultures. When placed together, the message seems to be strengthened:

Into the sky and throughout the Earth, all human beings are (Your Name Here)-Christ, traveling and helping the people.

Orphan Soul, continued:

When you meet the Orphan Soul,

Talk of immortal love, the Southern and the Northern Poles

As philosophers held out their mirror,

Again you know yourself, together the mind is clearer.

Once in painted caves, all the Spirit rooms

Across the wide oceans, along the rivers and roads

Know each other by laughter and heart

By the passion for your Work and your Art…

Astrological Codes In Greek Christianity For (Your Name Here)-Christ

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Because its value was borne out by decades of personal experience, there were sound reasons for C. G. Jung to write:

Astrology represents the sum of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.

To describe astrology as “the sum of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity” is to recognize astrology as Western Indigenous Wisdom. Using the idea from above, that the Christ-message was meant to be integrated into already-existing cultural traditions, we should be able to find in Western Astrological Wisdom our version of the Christian message.

Failure to carry forward our wisdom tradition appears in Bart Erhman’s 2014 book: How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. and in Dara Malloy’s 2009 book, The Globalisation of God: Celtic Christianity’s Nemesis.

In both books, there is a description of the centuries-long process of transforming an enlightened human person into an “all-knowing,” “all-good,” Godman who during the Second Coming will wage Holy War against the powers of evil and bring a New Heaven and New Earth.

Jesus who brings peace into the world because all persons are capable of the same enlightenment and Jesus, co-equal with Almighty I AM who imposes imperial rule by war, globalization, colonization, and ultimate control of the entire planet, don’t seem to be the same guy.

(It is the second Jesus, God of Holy War that I lament in Broken God. Jesus, spiritual fascist whose rules cut off our sacred connections to Nature and Ancestors, invites disaster. Disaster, in English, is derived from dis – “split from” and aster – “star.” My song was and still is intended to smash apart 500 years of feeling split-off, not at home on a living planet, in a living galaxy, in an ever-expanding 14,82 billion years old living cosmos.)

There is a helpful invitation to reconnect to Christianity as a development out of ancient Western cosmology in David Fideler’s, Jesus Christ, Sun of God: Ancient Cosmology and Early Christian Symbolism.

Fideler demonstrates how the Christos or Annointed was integrated into the Alexandrian Greek, Egyptian and Hebrew traditions. He drives home how the New Testament is mostly in Greek and that Christianity is essentially a Greek mystery religion with roots in long-developed planetary archetypal knowing.

Through the use of isopsephy or gematria, sacred writing in which letters are also numbers, scholars created, IHSOUS, which is a mis-spelling of Yeshua or Joshua.

Fideler presents the evidence that Christianity began as a Greek mystery tradition, thus, it makes sense to look at ancient Greek cosmology for Christian roots. The ancestors of the Western mind rendered a name that would add up to 888 did so that the name could be integrated in to the already existing tradition in which the hero’s name was one of many numbers associated with the celestial archetype of the sun.

The celestial archetype of the sun is one of the seven celestial powers of our ancestors: Sun, Moon, Venus, Saturn, Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter. Handed down over the millennia along with those sky powers are a series of magic squares that were associated with the number patterns of the powers above. How exactly they were created is lost to history. I think it’s safe to assume that they were received in rituals, dreams, visions, moments of awe, trance, Near-Death Experiences, and other forms of spiritual emergency. (Benjamin Franklin described magic squares in his autobiography, though his approach was more of curiosity and mental gymnastics than of consciousness and cosmology.)

The magic squares were developed as understanding geometry, astronomy, music, the motions of the zodiac and the synchronicities (The stars are like letters. Everything breathes together) expanded. As archetypes, magic squares can be recognized as examples of Western cultural understanding of the root patterns of meaning. If Pythagoras famously said, All is number, then there must be particular numbers that are connected to particular planetary themes you find in the All.

The symbolism of the magic squares was used with gematria to create the dimensions of temples, art, amulets, prayers, curses, and songs. The number-letters associated with the divinities were imagined as a way to have architecture and life resonate with the divinity in question – as a means to invite powers in the sky down to Earth and to anchor them with numerical musical beauty as the resonant tone, archetypal allurement.

A temple to Artemis, Goddess of the moon, would use “lunar numbers.” A temple to Venus would use the number/letters/timing associated with venus. A temple to Mars would be created using martian codes in the same way.

With gratitude to David Fideler’s scholarship, here are the magic squares and some temples associated with divine numbers derived from those squares:

Why would the name, Jesus, be associated with the celestial archetype of the sun? Here are some other “solar numbers” derived from its magic square using gematria:

37, 74, 111, 222, 333, 444, 555, 666, 777,

Over the years, I’ve heard a number of stories of persons repeatedly seeing sets of numbers in threes. One of my old friends used to call these, “angel numbers.” They tend to show up all around you during major life turning points.

An old version of the magic square of the Sun:

The letters for the name, Jesus, in this Greek rendering, add up to the “solar” number, 888

With gratitude to the math, geometry, architecture, music, and cosmology, in Sun of God, I would like to add a fundamental message that is carried within the astrology of our ancestors.

I AM WHO AM

Using the information from Jesus Christ, Sun of God, it becomes possible to recollect the wisdom carried in an astrological birth chart. The sun is the psychological center of the individual personality:

sun = identity, the center of the personality.

In the depths of this “natal sun” is what Joseph Campbell referred to as, the inborn, sealed-in soul or “intelligible character” of the individual at birth.

Birth Chart (“Theme” in French) of James Joyce, aka. James Christ

When integrated into the psychological knowledge handed down from antiquity, the Christian message reads that carried within each human soul is an unexpected ______-Christ. You can find the sun in James Joyce’s birth chart next to the symbol of Aquarius – his birth sign or sun sign. This is a cosmological writing of the name, James Christ.

This idea concerning the sacredness of individual identity informs author Steven Forrest’s 6th principle of evolutionary astrology from his book, Yesterday’s Sky: Astrology and Reincarnation:

Astrology recognizes only 2 absolutes: the irreducible mystery of life, and the uniqueness of each individual viewpoint on that mystery.

Forrest invoked the sun as identity and moon as soul in his saying:

The sun is the secret of sanity.
The moon is the secret of happiness.

As an evolutionary astrologer, he is referring both to true Identity (sun’s secret) as well as the relational, evolutionary soul-freedom of psychological awareness (moon’s secret) that nourishes and is nourished by that knowing.

This way of understanding, now, further strengthens the weave of a universal message expressed within the various cultural ways. Western tradition mirrors the Lakota mirrors the Bard of the Gaels. The air we breathe calls us to be compassionate. We are all potentially merciful persons when we are truly ourselves and also acknowledge the same worth in others. Now putting them all as one mind:

Into the sky and throughout the Earth, participate with humanity, See and Be (Your Name Here)-Christ. In the same way that all the planets are in the birth-chart, so all the Gods and Goddesses psychologically inform you and each person in a one-of-a-kind manner. Do this to help the people.

Indigenous Virtue From The West

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I sat in a sharing circle and listened to a person subjected to terrible infant abuse. She said it felt like it came with an intention of destroying her identity. Part of the healing journey included a Near-death experience. During the experience, Christ appeared. “Where in the f### have you been?!,” was the obvious question. The answer that came back is worth remembering. I never left you and was always with you. I am always in your will.

The love, courage, truth, honesty, humility, respect, and wisdom to be born into life and become who we are is equal to that of the original being to die to itself to become our cosmos. In fact, our willingness to build on the original intention is a gift to all in the All.

This is an example of sacred human character that merges the divine with the human. This is a way that our culture’s psychological understanding can join with other enduring cultures of the planet. Joseph Campbell traces its beginnings to the Provencal culture of amor of southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries. The indigenous virtue of the West, if you will is:

…a secular spirituality, sustained by self-responsible individuals acting not in terms of general laws supposed to represent the will or way of some personal god or impersonal eternity, but each in terms of his own developing realization of worth…It is the idea represented in Schopenhauer’s ‘intelligible character’, the old Germanic, ‘wyrd',’ a life responsible to itself, to its own supreme experiences and expectations of value, realized through trials in truth, loyalty, and love, and by example, in generous encouragement and support, then, to the inspiration of others to like achievement…In the long course of our surveys of the mythologies of mankind, we have encountered nothing quite like this. (P. 480)

C. G. Jung worked with this same reverence toward soul. He writes in a letter to Rev. David Cox in The Symbolic Life, Volume 18 of Collected Works:

The self or Christ is present in everybody a priori, but as a rule in an unconscious condition to begin with. But it is a definite experience of later life, when this fact becomes conscious. It is not really understood by teaching or suggestion. It is only real when it happens, and it can happen only when you withdraw your projection from an outward historical or metaphysical Christ and thus wake up Christ within. This does not mean that the unconscious self is inactive, only that we do not understand it. The self (or Christ) cannot become conscious and real without the withdrawl of external projections. An act of introjection is needed, i.e., the realization that the self lives in you and not in an external figure separated and different from yourself. The self has always been, and will be, your innermost center and periphery, your scintilla and punctum solis. It is even biologically the archetype of order and — dynamically — the source of life. (p. 725)

In Psyche Unbound: Essays to Honor Stanislov Grof, not only is the intelligible character of each individual and scintilla, but also the innate self-healing processes of the soul - personal and collective. We are all merged with the infinite is affirmed by transpersonal psychology.

The same in-born dignity of identity and soul-sovereignty is front and center in the Matrix Resurrections film. The possibility of freedom from the sleep of the Matrix is shared by all sentient beings, even beings who in the past were called machines. In this latest chapter, awakened beings from the machine world prefer to be known as synthians. The effects of waking up are similar for them too.

The message found in Matrix is also a key to understanding Rupert Sander’s film, Ghost in the Shell. In the film, Aramaki reminds Major that she limits herself thinking she is a weapon because she is a sacred being:

You are more than a weapon. You have a soul, a ghost. When we see our uniqueness as a virtue, only then do we find peace.

When we can see through Aramaki’s words and recognize the soul-respect he is living, then we, too, are Christian in the indigenous sense of the term. All beings are capable of this awareness. To remember we are more than our biography and position in any institution. Ghost in the Shell dares to show how even mechanized ones can become realized. The same courage to honor consciousness runs through all of the X-Men mutant stories. In fact, Logan aka. Wolverine reminds and affirms the dignity and purpose the mutant children that they are more than weapons. The theme appears again in both Bladerunner films as we as appearing as a pun in the titles of Bourne Identity.

The Gift of sovereign individuality in soul that comes from all these centuries is one of the better aspects of patriarchy. Ideally, a gift of the West to the planet is a cosmically expressed fundamental worthiness of each human being, regardless of class, caste, nationality, faith, gender.

I know that one of the better aspirations of the American Dream is to establish a way of life that honors the sovereign dignity of each personality and nourishes all communities who strive for the same heart. Here is Lincoln on February 22, 1842:

The preacher, it is said, advocates temperance because he is a fanatic and desires a union of the Church and State; the lawyer, from his pride and vanity of hearing himself speak; and the hired agent, for his salary. But when one who has long been known as a victim of intemperance bursts the fetters that have bound him, and appears before his neighbors “clothed and in his right mind, ” a redeemed specimen and long lost humanity, and stands up with tears of joy trembling in his eyes to tell of the miseries once endured, now to be endured no more forever; of a wife long weighed down with woe, weeping, and a broken heart, now restored to health, happiness and renewed affection; and how easily it is all done, once it is resolved to be done; however simple his language, there is a logic, and an eloquence, that few, with human feelings can resist. They cannot say that he desires a union of church and state, for he is not a church member; they cannot say he is vain of hearing himself speak, for his whole demeanor shows he would gladly avoid speaking at all; they cannot say he speaks for pay for he receives none, and asks for none. Nor can his sincerity in any way be doubted, or his sympathy for those he would persuade to imitate his example be denied.

The end of patriarchy is to know that there is no goddamned boundary between the inner self and the sacred, between one human family and another. As American Afghan War veteran, Andy Wall, reflects on his time soldiering in our name:

We are all just human beings. We are all mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. We are all human beings.

Any jealous war-inciting gods now are abusive, generally, absentee Fathers in a world where all beings are worthy and deserve recognition. All traditions can learn to see through themselves into the sacredness of the others and all life.

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!

Hands Across The Water Heads Across The Sky

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The burden on Western persons seems more to do with how we regard others, all others, including all of the life of Earth and Earth as well, than has to do with claims about ourselves. In mythic thought, to eat and digest is to become. To follow this developing line of reasoning, does it seem like such a stretch to imagine that the Eucharist is eaten in the Christian mythology because the message is not to worship the Christ who will come down from the beyond to save unworthy you? Read as myth, the message is — become _______- Christ yourself, accept help from other beings and help all other beings become the I AM WHO AM who they are.

Is it an even greater stretch to imagine at Christmastide how the lowly unexpected location, neglected by the many and lost out in no man’s land, is human identity? Secreted away within each soulMary, could there abide a new and unexpected, new Christ who goes by your name? Share this and ingest it in community in an atmosphere of Mercy. Live in the world in this way – from the darkness of every round year, a Second Coming.

Another Biblical Coyote teaching is in the evidently intentional misleading as regards the name of God. In our times, I think it’s safe to consider that God tells Moses in the Burning Bush that his name is union of conscious and unconscious. God then tells Moses to tell the people only half of his name. Basically, “Tell the children of Israel my name is consciousness.” (Don’t tell them about how unconsciousness has been removed from sight)

God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”; and He said, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’

This split of I AM from WHO AM, conscious from unconscious, the Ojibway call, interfering with the vision quest of another. Around the Great Lakes, the song and presence of Robin, the robin, sings a reminder and a warning to all parents as regards their children.

Never interfere with the vision quest of another.

Never allow another to interfere with your quest.

Love your children for who they are, not for what they do.

Do not aspire beyond your scope and your own being.

Here again is Joseph Campbell at the close of Creative Mythology:

God’s initiative is represented by the inborn, sealed-in soul or “intelligible character” of the individual at birth; and the initiative, the freedom to act, must thereafter be one’s own, guided not by what other people say, have done, or may tell one is God’s will, but by one’s own interior voice; for indeed (continuing to speak mythologically) it is in one’s sealed-in soul, its hidden, God-given difference from all others that “God’s will” has been secreted, and to be found and shown, like an Easter egg: and not by retreat into a bed of rapture, either in darkness or in light, but through action here in this mixed world (why otherwise be born?), where nothing is foul, nothing pure, but all, like a magpie’s plumage, mixed.

James Joyce, saying the same thing in his Irish lyrical prophecy:

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.

In my essay, Immanent Function, I made the case that I Am Who Am is the mythology of the W axis of time. The two infinite poles are, All is Many and Many are All, Will and Memory, Father and Mother, Grandfather and Grandmother. We participate in this as our “I” of the daytime and the “imaginal I” of night. In the day, we say we had a dream. At night, the dream has us.

An Atmosphere Of Mutual Understanding

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The inherent sacredness of each individual and the many-faceted Beauty of our Earth that shares this same nature is the Root, with the big, “R,”of the primal world view, Indigenous wisdom. Here is an example from the Cherokee. Not only is there a message here about the dignity of all beings, this is a women’s song, so, it is a truth about womanhood, about all who participate in its patterns:

All enduring cultures have their forms that announce, affirm, resuscitate, celebrate, and educate to bring each person to direct knowing.

Hermes Tresegistos, from Stolcius, Viridarium Chymicun, 1624 — Hermes Tresegistos, from Stolcius, *Viridarium Chymicun*, 1624

In our own Western tradition of Hermeticism, here is an example from the Corpus Hermeticum:

That Light, He said, am I, thy God, Mind, prior to Moist Nature which appeared from Darkness; the Light-Word (Logos) [that appeared] from Mind is Son of God.

What then? - say I.

Know that what sees in thee and hears is the Lord's Word (Logos); but Mind is Father-God. Not separate are they the one from other; just in their union [rather] is it Life consists.

Thanks be to Thee, I said.

So, understand the Light [He answered], and make friends with it.

There has recently been a new appreciation of the Renaissance painter, Caterina van Hemessen’s (1528-1570ish) creative innovation. In her self-portrait below, the words in Latin are: Ego Caterina de Hemessen me pinxi 1548 Etatis suae 20. In English, it reads: I, Caterina of the Hemessens, painted me in 1548 at the age of 20.

The hidden message in how her horizontal paintbrush crosses the vertical mahlstick is, I am a Christ.

There is a lovely section in Jenny Wade’s 2004Transcendent Sex: When Lovemaking Opens The Veil that elaborates on soul’s participation in divinity:

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 mystical experience of God transcends the symbolic gradations of the canonical Bible and rabbinical literature. Mystical Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all describe something very different from any personified being — and very different from anything that can easily be conceived. For instance, Sufi mystic, Abu Yazid Bistami, who began by courting God as a lover tells of his gradual abandonment of any notions of an anthropomorphic God as his contemplation deepened:

“I gazed upon [God] with the eye of truth and said to Him, “Who is this?” He said, “That it is neither I nor other than I. There is no God but I.” Then he changed me out of my identity into His Selfhood…Then I communicated with him…saying, “How fares it with me with Thee?” He said, “I am through Thee; there is no god but Thou.”

Sufi mystic al-Hallaj was martyred when he proclaimed his own experience of God in the words, “Ana’l Haqq,” which can be translated as “I am the Truth” or “I am the Absolute.” Or as the Christian saint Catherine of Genoa said, “My Me is God, nor do I recognize any other Me except my god Himself.” In the King James New Testament, St. Paul’s words are similar: “I live, yet not I, but Christ in me,” which can be more contemporaneously translated as, “but I am living, not as I, but for it is Christ who lives me.”

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.

Rabbi Chaim Vital wrote the same message in his Gates of Holiness:

The famous kabbalist (1543-1620) taught and wrote that all humans are worthy of participating in JVHV:

Part 3 Gate 7: On attaining Ruach Hakodesh (holy spirit) in our times

After our warnings in the previous gate of all the types of attaining (supernatural revelations/powers and the dangers), one should not despair (due to the difficulties involved). Because on the verse “And Devorah, was a woman prophet…”, (there is a commentary from) Tana D’Bei Eliyahu: “(says G-d) I testify on Myself heaven and earth, whether man or woman, whether gentile or Jew, whether slaveman or slavewoman, everyone according to his actions, the Ruach Hakodesh will dwell on him.” (i.e. anyone can reach Ruach HaKodesh even women, slaves, or non-Jews).

In the Hindu ways, the doctrine of the divine human, (Your-Name-Here)-Christ pattern, is called, Narayana. In his book, Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrisha, Kripal elaborates, affirming Joyce’s view:

…for Ramakrishna’s teaching on the divine nature of every human being is unconcerned with the moral worth of the person in question. God plays every role in the play of the world. Thus, after he watched a play about the life of Krishna, for example, Ramakrishna declares: “I saw clearly that she herself had become everything, I see that whoever was dressed up [in a female role] was the Blissful Mother herself! Those who were dressed as cowherds in Golaka I saw as Narayana himself. He himself has become everything!” The world is a play in which the god and the goddess play all the parts. (p. 228)

The Sufi’s are a mystical branch of Islam. It’s not a big leap to hear the (Your Name Here)-Christ/divine human with a part to play in the words of Rumi about the sacred individuality of each soul that has its hidden reasons for coming into being in this life:

Don’t come to our party without a drum!

Don’t come to our party without a drum!

Stand up and play the melody

I am God —-

That’s all we want to hear.

And drink! Get drunk on the wine

That cannot be found

even in paradise.

There is one thing in this world you must never forget to do

There is one thing in this world you must never forget to do. If you forget everything else and not this, there’s nothing to worry about, but if you remember everything else and forget this, then you will have done nothing in your life.

It’s as if a king has sent you to some country to do a task, and you perform a hundred other services, but not the one he sent you to do. So human beings come to this world to do particular work. That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person. If you don’t do it, it’s as though a priceless Indian sword were used to slice rotten meat. It’s a golden bowl being used to cook turnips, when one filing from the bowl could buy a hundred suitable pots. It’s like a knife of the finest tempering nailed into a wall to hang things on.

You say, “But look, I’m using the dagger. It’s not lying idle.” Do you hear how ludicrous that sounds? For a penny an iron nail could be bought to serve for that. You say, “But I spend my energies on lofty enterprises. I study jurisprudence and philosophy and logic and astronomy and medicine and the rest.” But consider why you do those things. They are all branches of yourself.

Remember the deep root of your being, the presence of your lord. Give yourself to the one who already owns your breath and your moments. If you don’t, you will be like the man who takes a precious dagger and hammers it into his kitchen wall for a peg to hold his dipper gourd. You’ll be wasting valuable keenness and forgetting your dignity and purpose.

This is Eushiba, founder of Aikido. His description of a 2-stage process that occurred in 1924-1925 rings of Eushiba Christ. He was hoping to find a way, a do, Japanese for the Chinese term, Tao, of a way of life for human beings that would unify ou… — This is Eushiba, founder of Aikido. His description of a 2-stage process that occurred in 1924-1925 rings of Eushiba Christ. He was hoping to find a way, a do, Japanese for the Chinese term, *Tao*, of a way of life for human beings that would unify our planet’s races and religions. Stage one occurred in 1924 when the team of men he was with was ambushed:
…when I concentrated my vision…I could see pebbles of white light flashing just before the bullets. I avoided them by twisting and turning my body, and they barely missed me. This happened repeatedly with barely time to breathe, but suddenly I had an insight into the essence of budo. (the Tao of blocking a blade) I saw clearly that the movements in martial arts come alive when the center of ki (ch’i) [energy-breath] is concentrated in one’s mind and body and that the calmer I became, the clearer my mind became. I could intuitively see the thoughts, including the violent intentions of the other.
Later, in 1925, as he walked through a garden, he knew this second gnosis:
Then, in the spring of 1925, if I remember correctly, when I was taking a walk in a garden by myself, I felt that the universe suddenly quaked, and that a golden spirit sprang up from the ground, veiled my body, and changed my body into a golden one. At that time, my mind and body became light. I was able to understand the whisperings of the birds, and was clearly aware of the mind of God, the Creator of this universe. At that moment, I was enlightened: the source of budo is God’s love—the spirit of loving protection for all beings. Endless tears of joy streamed down my cheeks. [in The Code of the Warrior by Rick Fields, p. 200]
*I am a part of God, I am a part of the cosmos. I am a part of the earth. I am a part of you.* [p. 138, in *Aikido and the Harmony of Nature*]
Eushiba’s student Saotome wrote of this same theme:
*I asked O Sensei, “How can you see God?”*
*He pointed at himself and then at me.*
*“My God perceives your God.”*

This is Joseph Campbell when he worked the same portion of Ulysees:

In the Orient, the Boddhisattva represents this principle in its aspects both of time-transcending wisdom (bodhi) and of the time-regarding compassion (karuna), while Shiva, as both the archetypal yogi and personification of the lingam, is an earlier representation of the same. Dionysus, Orpheus, and the other figures of the mysteries are variant aspects in manifestation of this cosmogonic power, whose mythology the Christian sphere became focused in the crucified Redeemer. (Who sees me sees Him who sent me.” I and the Father are one.) Through our humanity (we have been told), we are related to that Christ, who through his godhood relates us to divinity. In the Bodhisattva, on the other hand, each is to recognize the mirror-to-nature of his own intelligible Buddhahood. Florry Christ, Stephan Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ,” Joyce wrote in the brothel scene. Feirefiz, Parzival, and their father Gahmuret are one: so Wolfram von Eschenbach. The Imitatio Christi proper to the non-dual knowledge of the Homo Dei must be to recognize the personality of the god or goddess Eros-Amor, Kosmogonos, not where it can be neither sought nor found, “out there” somewhere in transcendence, but—-as Christ did— in oneself. And not oneself alone, but in all things, all events: in every individual, just as he is—crude, fine or superfine—God’s mask. (p. 647)

Just here, some words from Richard Tarnas’ Passion of the Western Mind, published in 1991, carry forward Campbell’s paean to human participation in this global climate change:

…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 of the feminine in all its forms. The feminine then becomes not that which much be controlled, denied, and exploited, but rather full 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.

(pp. 444-445)

Buried in Tarnas’ remarkable prophecy is an important, foundational fact that I think needs to be included when a patriarchal text describes the feminine. When John Heckwelder was missionizing among the Delaware, he heard stories of how the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) made the Delaware into women. Heckwelder reported in his History, Manners, and Customs of Indian Nations:

It is conceded on all sides that the Lenape and Iroquois carried on long and bloody wars with each other; but while the one party assert, that they completely conquered the other, and reduced them by force to the condition of women, this assertion is as strongly and pointedly denied by the other side; I have therefore thought that the real truth of this fact was well deserving of investigation.

The story told by the Mingoes to the white people, of their having conquered the Lenape and made women of them, was much too implicitly believed; for the whites always acted towards the Delawares under the impression that it was true, refused even to hear their own account of the matter, and “shut their ears” against them, when they attempted to inform them of the real fact. This denial of common justice, is one of the principal complaints of the Lenape against the English, and makes a part of the tradition or history which they preserve for posterity.

This complaint indeed, bears hard upon us, and should, at least, operate as a solemn call to rectify the error, if such it is found to be; that we, in our history, may not record and transmit erroneous statements of those Aborigines, from whom we have received the country we now so happily inhabit. We are bound in honour to acquit ourselves of all charges of the kind which those people may have against us, who, in the beginning welcomed us to their shores, in hopes that “they and we would exist beside each other as brothers;” and it should not be said, that now, when they have surrendered their whole country to us, and retired to the wilds of a distant country, we turn our backs upon them with contempt.

We know that all Indians have the custom of transmitting to posterity, by a regular chain of tradition, the remarkable events which have taken place with them at any time, even often events of a trivial nature, of which I could mention a number. Ought we then, when such a source of information is at hand, to believe the story told by the Six Nations, of their having conquered the Lenape, (a powerful nation with a very large train of connections and allies) and forcibly made them women? Ought we not, before we believe this, to look for a tradition of the circumstances of so important an event; for some account, at least, of the time, place, or places, where those battles were fought, which decided the fate of the Lenape, the Mohicans, and of a number of tribes connected with them? Are we to be left altogether ignorant of the numbers that were slain at the time, and the country in which this memorable event took place; whether on the St. Lawrence, on the Lakes, in the country of the conquerors, or of the conquered? All these I am inclined to call first considerations, while a second would be: How does this story accord with the situation the first Europeans found these people in on their arrival in this country? Were not those who are said to be a conquered people, thickly settled on the whole length of the sea coast, and far inland, in and from Virginia to and beyond the Province of Maine, and had they not yet, at that very time, a great National Council Fire burning on the banks of the Delaware? Does not the joint tradition of the Delawares, Mohicans and Nanticokes, inform us, that their great National Council House3 then extended from the head of the tide on the (now) Hudson river, to the head of the tide on the Potomack? All this we shall find faithfully copied or written down from their verbal tradition, and that this Council House “was pulled down by the white people!”4 and of course was yet standing when they came into the country; which alone is sufficient to prove that the Lenape, at that time, were not a conquered people; and if they had been conquered since, we might expect to find the fact, with its particulars, somewhere on record.

It is admitted, however, by the Lenape themselves, that they and their allies were made women by the Iroquois. But how did this happen? Not surely by conquest, or the fate of battle. Strange as it may appear, it was not produced by the effects of superior force, but by successful intrigue. Here, if my informants were correct, and I trust they were, rests the great mystery, for the particulars of which, I refer the reader to the history of the Lenape and Mohicans themselves, as related in part by Loskiel in his “History of the Mission of the United Brethren among the North American Indians,” and in this work. In the first, he will find three material points ascertained, viz. 1st, “that the Delawares were too strong for the Iroquois, and could not be conquered by them by force of arms, but were subdued by insidious means that the making women of the Delawares was not an act of compulsion, but the result of their own free will and consent; and that the whites were already in the country at the time this ceremony took place, since they were to hold one end of the great Peace Belt in their hands.” In the following History, which I have taken from the relation of the most intelligent and creditable old Indians, both Delawares and Mohicans, not only the same facts will be found, but also a more minute account of this transaction; in which it will be shewn, that the Dutch not only were present at, but were parties to it, that it was in this manner that the Six Nations were relieved from the critical situation they were in, at that very time, with regard to their enemies, the Delawares, Mohicans, and their connections, and that the white people present coaxed and persuaded them to cause the hatchet to be buried, declaring at the same time that they “would fall on those who should dig it up again;” which was, on the part of the Hollanders, a declaration of war against the Delawares and their allies, if they, or any of them, should attempt again to act hostilely against the Six Nations. All this, according to the tradition of the Lenape, was transacted at a place, since called “Nordman’s Kill,” a few miles from the spot where afterwards Albany was built, and but a short time after the Dutch had arrived at New York Island, probably between the years 1609 and 1620.

The Rev. Mr. Pyrlæus, who had learned the Mohawk language of Conrad Weiser, and was stationed on the river of that name, for some time between the years 1742 and 1748, has noted down in a large manuscript book, that his friend there, the Mohawk chief, had told him, that at a place about four miles from Albany, now called Nordman’s Kill, the first covenant had been made between the Six Nations and the white people; which is in confirmation of the correctness of the above tradition of the Mohicans.11

There is a more-than-Western cultural habit to call the men of defeated enemy cultures, women. So, there is a necessary decolonizing work to be done by all genders of Western culture as regards indigenous cultures. When we add this to Tarnas’ quote, a more gentle and participatory West is able to easily join arms with all peoples.

You find this depth of mutual kind regard of the enemy in Malidoma Some’s account of his Remembrance of why he came into the world, why he was named, Malidoma, which means, Makes friends with the enemy/stranger:

The voice of the shaman now was asking, "Speak to us child-who-is-to-come." Speak? How could I speak? Why speak? The warmth and silence of the womb allowed me to remain tied to the Otherworld. To speak would be to touch the land of the living. Did I even want to do that?

"You must speak, you must answer my questions, child-who-is-to-come." The shaman's drum could now be heard. It's beat was growing louder than the drumbeat of my mother's heart. I was being lured, being pulled into the land of the living. The feelings, the energy of the living were rising within me, now too much to contain. I could be silent no longer.

"What is it you want to know?" I heard myself say. But it was the voice of my mother that was speaking this. It was the voice that talked to me before her sleep time. How could she be speaking the same words as I?

Grandfather's voice could be heard again. Even though he was a shaman-priest of great repute, it was customary to have a boburo officiate the fetal ritual hearing. "I know that you shall come to us as a man-child. Tell us why you have been sent, your purpose for visiting us."

From the Otherworld could be seen the purpose. It was like a painting made of light that had no speakable form. The vision had no message made of words. To look at it was to feel its meaning.

"I have come to walk with the enemy. I have come to wander in the house of the other, bringing the peace of water to the heat of yonder. I am to carry our name across the sea. From the land of the nipula (white man) I shall carry the word of the Dagara. Gold shall flow with silver. East will shake hands with West. To make an enemy a friend is to end the need for war, to vanquish the powers of destruction." (p. 36)

It becomes possible to value the planetary ethnosphere and nourish it together, eventually in an embrace as Beloveds. Ken Wilbur affirms this in his forward to Transcendent Sex: When Lovemaking Opens the Veil:

That is why sex can kill you. As the simplest, most accessible, most here-and-now transcendent experience that anybody can have, it is the most common doorway to the Divine, the most ordinary (in the best sense of the word) altered state that accelerates the stages of spiritual realization. The more one is plunged into the ocean of Spirit, into the ocean of infinite ease, the more one dies to one’s smaller self, dies to one’s ego, that finite and contracted mortal coil, and finds instead one’s own Original Face, one’s own Godhead, one’s own True Nature, prior to, but not other to the manifest world.

And discovering That, we laugh — and laugh and laugh and laugh. It is truly the ultimate inside joke: You are That. In the deepest, highest, wildest part of yourself, you intersect Infinity, you are one with the radiant Divine, you are the luminescent Essence of everything that exists, the blazing realization of which brings such a shattering relief that henceforth you might never stop laughing. Or crying — at that point, they mean pretty much the same thing. But the ultimate cosmic joke is simply that You’re It. (p.xi)

Jung described this same idea in one of his letters:

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.

The Beyond Within

In systematic spiritual practice involving holotropic states of consciosness, we can repeatedly transcend the ordinary boundaries of the body-ego. In this process, we discover that any boundaries in the material universe and in other realities are ultimately arbitrary and negotiable. By shedding the limitations of the rational mind and the straightjacket of common sense and everyday logic, we can break through many separating barriers, expand our consciousness to unimaginable proportions, and eventually experience unity and idenity with the transcendental source of all being, known from the spiritual literature by many different names.

When we reach experiential identification with the Absolute, we realize that our own being is ultimately commensurate with the entire cosmic network, with all of existence. The recognition of our own divine nature, our identity with the cosmic source, is the most important discovery we can make during the process of deep self-exploration. This is the essence of the famous statement found in the ancient Indian scriptures, the Upanishads: Tat tvam asi. The literal translation of this sentence is, “Thou art That” meaning “you are of divine nature,” or “you are Godhead.” …This revelation concerning the identity of the individual with the divine is the ultimate secret that lies at the core of all great spiritual traditions, although it might be expressed in somewhat different ways.

(Grof in Psychology of the Future, p. 276)

In Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul, Newell invites those of us who have lived within the Christian faith:

Will we continue in our language and expressions of faith to give the impression that the light of Christ is somehow essentially alien to the matter of the universe and to what is deepest in every human being? Or will we be guided in our love of the light that is Christ to look for this light, adore it, and serve it deep within the mystery of one another and the body of the earth?

This, I believe, is the most pressing issue facing the Church today. The extent to which we faithfully address this issue will be the extent to which we either serve the world’s well-being by helping reawaken it to a sense of the sacred in all things, or continue to be irrelevant to the world’s well-being, by inferring that sacredness is somehow the property only of certain people and certain places rather than the birthright and essence of all.

(p. 132)

Becoming Conscious Of The Forgotten Split

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At the beginning of the use of magic squares was the dawning realization of the ecliptic. The ecliptic is the apparent path of the sun, moon and planets across the sky.

Looking outward from the rotating and orbiting Earth, due to the tilt of our planet and its orbit, the sun, moon and planets appear to follow the tilted circle that passes through the 12 constellations of the zodiac. That tilted sky circle is called the ecliptic. The horizontal circle in this drawing is called the celestial equator. Notice how the two circles create a flattened “X” where they cross.

The moon in its orbit around the Earth is not drawn in the image above. The movement of the moon along the ecliptic is more nuanced. Here is Michael McCoy on Astronomy.com:

The Moon follows generally the same path, but with some important differences. The Moon’s orbit is tilted 5.1° relative to the ecliptic. So, the Moon can appear anywhere in a band extending 5.1° north (above) and south (below) of the ecliptic.

Each month, the Moon twice crosses the ecliptic on opposite sides of Earth. These intersections are called the nodes of the Moon’s orbit…

…The nodal points also wander along the ecliptic. An imaginary line connecting the nodes through Earth’s center rotates around the planet every 18.6 years. When the Moon lies on a node, Earth, the Sun, and the Moon lie in the same plane. Rarely do the nodes line up exactly, but when they do — and if the Moon happens to be at new or full phase — total solar or lunar eclipses occur. However, due to the 5.1° tilt, eclipses do not occur every month. The 18.6-year period is called the Saros cycle, and it is used to help determine the periodic repetition of eclipses.

The Moon’s rising and setting points wander back and forth between the extremes, but not over an annual cycle like the Sun. Instead, the Moon performs this cycle every month (overlaid on a slow 18.6-year cycle as well), and with a swing relative to the Sun that can reach plus or minus 5.1°. When the line of nodes aligns with the solstices, the tilt of the Moon’s orbit causes the Moon to pass either 5.1° above or below the ecliptic at the nodes’ northern and southern extremes.

By Matthew Zimmerman at English Wikipedia

Knowledge of the ecliptic, of 18.6 year Saros cycle along with literacy, numeracy, and knowledge of the north and south nodes of the moon gave any person, priesthood, family, or people with that knowledge immense numinous influence over illiterate persons without that knowing. It was like harnessing the power of a sky dragon and using it. Case in point, in his Masks of God series, Campbell cites the royal tombs of the city of Ur as an example of the results of this kind of “heavenly” order lived out by a people. There are digs that reveal burials of the dead king, the queen and the entire court. In one royal tomb, they found three persons with the king, sixty-two in his death pit and twenty-four with the dead queen. In the largest tomb, sixty-eight women, four of them harpists. The court members were buried while unconscious, but still alive (due to an imbibed drug) along with the royal corpses in order to satisfy the righteous heavenly order. In all of my reading, though bodies of priests were found, I have yet to learn of the bones of a high priest or a high priestess who offered their lives in the mass suicides known as voluntary dead following.

Sir Leonard Wolley remarked on the royal tombs:

Clearly, these people were not wretched slaves killed as oxen might be killed, but persons held in honor, wearing the robes of office, and coming, one hopes, voluntarily to a rite which would in their belief be but a passing from one world to another, from the service of a god on earth to that of the same god in another sphere…Human sacrifice was confined exclusively to the funerals of royal persons, and in the graves of commoners, however rich, there is no sign of anything of the sort, not even such substitutes, clay figurines, etc., as are found in Egyptian tombs and appear there to be reminiscent of an ancient and more bloody rite. [pp. 409-410, Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell]

(To this day, the north and south nodes of the moon on a birthchart retain their early symbolic shapes and names in a birth chart as head and tail of the dragon. If you look at Joyce’s birthchart, you can find his north and south nodes of the moon.)

Our Greek and Biblical texts still carry inherited vestiges of this split-off power above. In Plato’s Timaeus and in the Book of Job, there remains an assumption that the reader knows about the existence of the ecliptic. The Hebrew word, Mazzaroth, meaning, Garland of Crowns, is the name of the ecliptic/zodiac in their tradition.

Timaeus:

Next, he cleft the structure so formed lengthwise into two halves, and laying the two so as to meet in the center in the shape of the letter, X, he bent them in a circle and caused them to meet themselves and each other at a point opposite to that of their original contact: and he comprehended them in the motion that revolves uniformly on the same axis, and one of the circles he made exterior and one interior.

Book of Job 38:

31 Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?

32 Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?

33 Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?

I traveled with my cousin, Penny, to watch the 2017 total eclipse of the sun in Princeton, Kentucky. During the minutes of its totality, all human life around me stopped. I walked out into the middle of Main Street. A total solar eclipse was the single-most-powerful sky-sign I have ever witnessed. Even for me, a 21st century American, the eclipse was numinous. There was a man down the street with his church community nearly shouting words from Job as he read aloud from his Bible to proclaim the awesome power of the God on High:

Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?

As I noted above, it is clear that any human beings who figured out how to predict solar eclipses could claim to know the superior mind of a power on high. In this, the 3 current forms of monotheism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have contentiously appropriated a way of the split sky split off in earnest in Sumer around 2350 BCE forming a Messiah Complex. According to Joseph Campbell in Oriental Mythology:

The world was no longer to be known as a mere showing in time of the paradigms of eternity, but as a field of cosmic conflict between two powers, one light and one dark.

The earliest prophet of this mythology of cosmic restoration was, apparently, the Persian Zoraster…The system associated with his name is based on the ideas between the wise lord, Ahura Mazda, “first father of the Righteous Order, who gave to the sun and stars their path,” and an independent evil principle, Angra Mainyu, the Deceiver, principle of the lie, who, when all had been excellently made, entered into it in every particle. The world, consequently, is a compound wherein good and evil, light and dark, wisdom and violence are contending for a victory. And the privilege and duty of each man–who himself, as part of creation, is a compound of good and evil–is to elect, voluntarily, to engage in the battle in the interest of the light..

It is obvious that a potent mythical formula for the reorientation of the human spirit is here supplied–pitching it forward along the way of time, summoning man to an assumption of autonomous responsibility for the renovation of the universe in God’s name, and thus, fostering a new, potentially political (not finally contemplative) philosophy of holy war. (p.8)

I think there is an unbroken line of continuity from 2350 BCE in Sumer to the fortress of Khor Rori in Oman. I visited the fortress of Khor Rori with my son, Isaac, in 2016. It was there that a people, ancestors of the Hadrumat people, whose name means, Death has come, established a port and stole the lucrative frankincense trade by war in the name of Sin, the Divinity of the moon, Saros cycle and ecliptic, around 100 BCE. (The name has no relation to the English, “sin,” by the way.)

I think it’s reasonable to consider that human authority by relationship with a War God Above began with the consciousness of the ecliptic. Monotheism, as we experience it today, looks a lot like elaborations over the centuries of ever higher and higher God the Most Highs chronically aspiring to demonize, destroy and replace each other. What makes one God the Most High higher than others? Moral purity. When human beings do the most violence to each other and the planet, it’s when they claim to be acting with a greater moral purity than their enemies and/or strangers they encounter. In Christianity, this cosmic war between good and evil has possessed even the human body and all life. Gene Monick, in Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine makes this point using Sir Jacob Epstein’s sculpture of St. Michael and the Devil:

*St. Michael and the Devil at Coventry Cathedral*, [Source: Wikimedia Commons]

“Michael is swathed in a rippled cloth, covering his midsection. A barely visible protuberance suggests the presence of a penis beneath the cloth. Not so the devil. His naked and realistic penis and testicles, quite apparent in the shadows of his open legs, are ample and swarthy. The devil is clearly depicted as sexual, the opposite of Michael. Michael’s spiritual spear has conquered corporeality and psychologically emasculated it.

St. Michael and the Devil was precisely the image I needed to illustrate the point of this work. The sculpture depicts St. Paul’s viewpoint on sexuality as he wrote to the new Christians of Galatia:

Walk in the Spirit

And ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.

For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit

And the Spirit against the flesh:

And these are contrary the one to the other.

St. Paul is far indeed from Eliade’s understanding of sexuality as hierophany. Sexuality, instead of revealing the divine, has become for St. Paul an enemy of the divine. For reasons that I will not go into here, Christianity adopted St. Paul’s antipathy to the flesh. That which was sacred had become profane. Epstein’s Michael clearly denigrates physicality and sexuality. Masculinity, following St. Paul, should be spiritual only. Phallos as physical organ, is devilish. Physicality and spirituality are fundamentally opposed. If one wins, the other loses, and in the case of physical phallos, it is the will of God that it lose…

…With the modern demise of institutional and doctrinal Christianity and the patriarchy espoused and carried by the Pauline church, phallos is emerging from its hidden gnostic reservoir. It is ironic that a sculpture on a modern Christian church should so dramatically proclaim an understanding of masculine sexuality and body that his held openly as doctrine today only by the most reactionary and repressed Christians.

It will be many years before phallos fully emerges from its catacomb entombment. It will be many years before the devil is seen as a psychological factor in each person — and, according to Jung, in the deity itself — rather than as specific to phallos, sexuality and the flesh. Phallos, of course, participates in evil, as does every facet of the created order. But not as Epstein’s sculpture states. Such an image seriously distorts psychological reality.”

(pp. 41-42, in Phallos)

Let The Curses Be Unbound

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With a recollection of the developments that brought us here, it becomes possible to unbind ourselves, our relationships, our way of life from what is a cultural soul-splitting via demonization of the Other. Humanity’s creation of nuclear armaments puts an extra burden on the Messiah Complex of all Americans. Since July of 1945, it has been our responsibility as citizens to become conscious of any leftover prejudice for the “saved” and the “pure” due to the ecliptic, numeracy, literacy, based on the Bible and its flat-earth cosmology.

Botticelli’s 1485 Map of Hell inspired by Dante’s Inferno is a reminder of a Western habit of mind. There is a now-dying way of life that has landed in our laps that began some 4370 years ago. Its collective mental habit has assumed that the direction upward is the heavenly best and downward is the hellish worst. We are the inheritors of a way of life that has believed that the Earth is renewed at the end of time by force of will through a morally pure Almighty Power who is victorious in a battleground of good against evil after which the past, Memory, is forever forgotten in a brave New World.

More than four centuries later, in 1971, I made my Confirmation at St. Mary’s in Norwalk. On my way into the church that day, one of the older students came charging up to us with a grimace on his face. He growled, Grrrr! I’m prayin’ to the Devil! I’m prayin’ to the Devil! In that moment, he put his hands together, as we were taught to pray with our fingers pointing up to God in the Sky, but then, he slowly turned his fingers downward. In our world at that time, he was pointing to make a prayer to the demons in Hell. That scared me to death. It goes without saying that passing so closely to a satanic gesture made it hard for me to stay focused in the sacrament that followed!

Prayers For The Faces Coming Up From The Ground

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Not all of Earth’s cultures share the rather recent cosmic battlefield concept. There are Indigenous peoples who continue to thrive after 10,000 years or more. For them, the world is renewed when human beings honor oral traditions, songs, dreams, visions, and participate with Creation in the co-creation of the future together. To live in right relationship with the planet, mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually with all our relations calls for a balanced, yet dynamic merging of Memory and Will. In the enduring view, the world is healed when human beings remember who they are and choose to be the best form of themselves in service to the happiness of all beings.

I think James Joyce’s war on Catholicism and my struggles with Christianity’s God of War and Second Coming can now find a path forward.

This Son of the Father Almighty has been Catholic since 325 with the Nicene Creed. You can discern his voice 1200 years later in the 1493 Doctrine of Discovery:

Among other works well pleasing to the Divine Majesty and cherished of our heart, this assuredly ranks highest, that in our times especially the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.

Here is from Oliver Cromwell’s 1649 Letter to Lenthall about invading Ireland with his Model Army:

And now give me leave to say how it comes to pass that this work is wrought. It was set upon some of our hearts, That a great thing should be done, not by power or might, but by the Spirit of God. And is it not so, clearly? That which caused your men to storm so courageously, it was the Spirit of God, who gave your men courage, and took it away again; and gave the Enemy courage, and took it away again; and gave your men courage again, and therewith, this happy success. And therefore it is good that God alone have all the glory.

James Joyce’s proposal of Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ, (Your-Name-Here)-Christ, represents a re-affirmation of Gaelic integration of a divine human identity into Irish culture and literature. In my mind, Joyce was re-claiming the wisdom of Pelagius, who affirmed the goodness of human beings and human will. Joyce, with his own Ancestor, decried the falsehood of the teaching of Original Sin.

In this, I agree with him and going forward, nationalist, exclusionary, elitist, colonial, continuing memberships in ways of any Highest Gods, or in ways of any powers claimed by assumptions to privilege, are best checked for hidden hatred, racism, homophobia, and when the Bible is involved, anti-semitism, misogyny, and all-too-often, older and younger brothers vying for the father’s inheritance.

John Philip Newell gives a similar Pelagian affirmation in his work in Celtic Christianity, which follows more the pattern found in the Lakota. Christ is integrated into the already sacred cultural lifeways. The Christ who comes to destroy the existing culture and impose his saving upon the un-saved is known as the imperial Christ, in Newell’s work:

In his Forum at Grace Cathedral, he states:

The central challenge for the Christian household at this moment in time is, will we see our adoration of the light that is in Christ as leading us to look for and adore and serve that light in one another and in the Earth? or will we continue to give the impression that the light that we are celebrating in the Christ mystery is somehow essentially opposed to the light at the heart of your being, at the heart of all beings, at the heart of the Earth. I think that is the great divide. (click here for full Forum)

Post-Apocalyptic American

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It is the Second Coming where my life experience can offer an affirmation that Earth is renewed by participation with deep reverence, communication and courageous human love in peace-making and not by militaristic moral discipline preparing for life-everlasting after the end of time via cosmic war. I’ve enjoyed the unique experience of knowing both forms of the end of the world and a new beginning.

From 1980-1982, I lived through an apocalyptic group understanding of Christianity It was triggered by the death of one of my best friends, Dale “Butch” Fisher. This end-times mentality did not materialize out of nowhere. Growing up, my grandmother and her religious community were convinced the End was coming soon. In high school, a number of my friends and I were inspired by Black Sabbath’s song, War Pigs, and fervent believing adults around us, to become enamored with the Book of Revelation and its prophecies. Lastly, from the womb onward, as a Catholic, I was bathed in the Church’s ritual words – to wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Weeks after Dale’s passing in late August, 1980, during a prayer service, I suddenly became certain that we were in the Final Days. As pristine as in ancient Sumer some 4000 years before, the idea of my sacrifice for the good guys in a soul-saving cosmic war between good and evil possessed me as much as I possessed it. I can share that within this mindset, as an individual, you assume you are in the hands of a power beyond yourself. The best thing you can do is to soldier on, pray together for the end, do good things for other people to store up treasures in the afterlife, and convert as many persons as possible to Christianity.

My family’s, friends’ and religious community’s Apocalyptic potential also did not materialize out of nowhere. In the 1980’s there were surprising numbers of fellow Ohioans and Americans who had the same certainty.

Puritan Leader Jonathan Edwards — Puritan Leader, Jonathan Edwards

American history, from the Puritans onward, has chronically featured leaders, literature and ideas that foster an atmosphere of Apocalyptic expectation. Even Jefferson in his version of the Bible in which he cut out all miracles, held on to the Apocalyptic End-times without missing a step.

Here is a brief list of dates for the Final Days:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events

It turns out that American culture at large in August, 1980, was in one of those Doomsday periods. In 1970, Hal Lindsey and C. C. Carlson predicted that the end was near with the book, The Late Great Planet Earth.

The Late Great Planet Earth predicted that the Rapture would take place in 1981 and after 7 years of persecution by the Antichrist, the battle of Armageddon and Second Coming would be in 1988.

By November 1980, the book reached into the White House through the minds of Ronald Reagan and members of his inner circle. In Jonathan Kirsch’s, A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization, Kirsch notes:

To hear Lindsay himself tell it, Reagan was eager to win over the American military establishment to apocalyptic true belief. With the president’s blessings, Lindsey asserts, he was invited to brief Pentagon war planners on the divine implications of nuclear combat with the Soviet Union. And Reagan invited televangelist, Jerry Falwell, another prominent and outspoken apocalyptic preacher, to attend briefings of the National Security Council and deliver the same message. (p. 225)

The Dreaming Gourd, COEX Constellation by F Christopher Reynolds, c. 2001 — *The Dreaming Gourd*, COEX Constellation by F Christopher Reynolds, c. 2001

Moving through the fever of End-times mindset into a post-Apocalyptic time in my case, came in four steps. The first step came through dreaming in which I was shown in a dream, in very direct language, that preparing for the End and saving up treasures for the afterlife were parasites on my life.

The second step came with a loving kiss to the center of my chest. When Paula, whom I would later marry, pressed her warm lips up against my skin, my entire awareness dropped in from above me. It was as if, up until that point and all of my life before, my self-awareness had been living about one foot above and behind my body, up in the air and to the right. I woke up inside myself and below and outside any sense that the Earth was going to die. I had finally made it to Earth as a man.

The third step was reading Elaine Pagel’s book, The Gnostic Gospels. Her book gave me language for the direct knowing of the sacred of my dreaming and of my embodied loving — gnosis.

The fourth was watching Carl Sagan’s, Cosmos, on PBS. I think my journey through the End-times mentality into a participatory Earth-centered future by dreaming, embodied loving, gnosis and into cosmos was a lot like Joyce’s path with Nora Barnacle. It was my path forward from 1982 onward until July of 1992 when the God of War broke me open into my Calling.

My 2018 trip to Vietnam confirmed for me how healing of the Christian God of War requires not only a personal, family approach. War is a collective experience. Surely, it is a gift to find how to heal from the collective. Unfortunately, to face Christianity’s God of War requires discovering strategies that heal the collective by finding ways to participate and heal with the collective. American culture has never had this, nor have there ever been any Christian rituals nor Catholic sacraments to heal the faith from its own supremacy.

Post-Apocalyptic Americans

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By an incredible miracle of my life, I was invited to my first Sun Dance ceremony at Pine Ridge, South Dakota by a friend whom I consider to be my big sister – ma grande soeur Lakota – I call her. It was there that I learned that the community of the world and humanity can be renewed through loving participation in Earth-based ritual. Sun Dance is one of them.

The Lakota themselves are “post-Apocalyptic” in their ways. Their hopes for a new world were destroyed along with the Ghost Dance Movement on December 29, 1890, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. They are a “post-Ghost Dance” people. It would not be until 1978 that their traditions would be de-criminalized. What few people know is that during the years when it was a felony to pray, a small number of elders kept the Sun Dance Tree alive.

I did not know this was true until I saw the Sacred Tree coming over the hill. I wept when I saw it. A woman standing next to me said, “They kept it alive when it was against the law.”

With tears in my eyes, I responded, “The Tree never died?”

“No, The Sacred Tree Lives!” — she exclaimed.

Sun Dance is a ceremony whose intention is to restore the balance of the people and all life of the Earth, including enemies. It was not difficult for me to notice the many similarities between the mythology of Sun Dance and the mythology of the Second Coming. The central theme they share is the renewal of the Earth. It also shone clear as the sun in the sky the many ways that dancing, loving, healing, singing, sharing, and praying together for the good of all for the world to come, as in the coming year, was so much more generous than praying, working, and saving the chosen for Final Days not far off. A world to come that is a long-awaited home cut off from condemned billions of people and many ecosystems and a world to come that is a flourishing of the many human lives now participating with a healthy planet Earth are markedly different.

During that first Dance in 2010, I felt a healing of those energies of my being, those deepest intentions, that were so unexpectedly overloaded during my years in the American Christian End-times mentality. This was an affirmation of a basic tenet in depth psychology regarding what Myers called, the subliminal self, Jung called the Self, Hillman called, force of character.

Every individual human consciousness appears to feature within a guiding and organizing self and world image that has the potential of self/cultural/world renewal or destruction, depending on how we engage it.

In my essay, The Immanent Function, I update a description of that guiding and organizing center and whole of the personality. My update borrows heavily from John Wier-Perry who, as a Jungian, used Jung’s image of the mandala. In Immanent Function, I make the case that Jung’s use of a 2 dimensional mandala requires a four-dimensional understanding. This is because human beings are not psychologically time-bound. The psyche moves quite freely in all directions of the past, present and future. To move freely through time requires the 4+ dimensions.

With this shift in mind:

Urth and Urperson by F. Christopher Reynolds — *Urperson and Urth*: *Self-Image and World Image, The Messiah Complex* by F. Christopher Reynolds

…these two motifs – self-image and world image are companion pieces in the process of renewal. They share the same representative image: a mandala that is now to be imagined as a 4D+ hypersphere resonant with the 5th dimension and turning like a gyroscope on its axis mundi. We are inside the world image and the self-image is within us, except when we are not. The entire process of renewal is evidently human co-participation in the work of the powerful planetary image that symbolizes the psyche’s governing source simultaneously within (self-image) and all around (world image) us, except when it’s not.

Now that you have seen the Urth symbol and the update, Urth means primal, original, planetary source. The more elegant description is:

…these two motifs – self-image and world image are companion pieces in the process of renewal. They share the same representative image: Urth and Urperson.

At Sun Dance, I was affirmed in my experience of life renewal by participating with my own psyche’s governing source. I learned that to engage my own soul at the depth of self-image/world image, I need to commit to care for the well-being of all life — beyond, yet including myself. I learned that it is possible to join at the same psychological depth with the collective group with one heart, one mind. When each person takes part with this same intention during the season of the year when the ecosystem resonates with this same vitality, a renewal of our felt connection with Earth and sky, a Second Coming, takes place. We deserve a Second Coming every year, a cultural birthday to nourish our personal birthday.

This is a place where I’d like to push Joseph Cambpell’s work forward. I think he knows what he’s described in his book, Inner Reaches of Outer Space. I think it was through Amor that he came to his knowing. However, I have learned that Amor alone is not enough to sustain and renew the radiance of ourselves and existence. Our dream of life gets a lot of support when we enter into relationship with the day and night, tides, moons, seasons, stars, with one heart, one mind with at least one other person for the good of all that is, was, and shall be.

All In This Vibration

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It came clear to me how the Final Days mythology birthed with the ecliptic, whether called, a split structure so formed lengthwise into two halves, and laying the two so as to meet in the center in the shape of the letter, X, or Mazzaroth, took kindness, laughter, the ways all life belongs to the Original Instructions, delight, sovereignty from the entire sensual Beauty of our cosmos, from all past, present and future immanence within it. The Earth was no longer imagined as a self-healing wise being. Saving the now-demonized Earth was imagined as coming from Above and Beyond. As Campbell noted, this shift also placed a burden on human beings, not to steward by participation the balance within and around them, but to fight in a chronic war against evil.

I know from being inside this mentality that it has a domesticating effect. You are no longer able to remember why you were born or feel your connection to your own loved ones — both your Ancestors in the Spiritworld as well as the sacred beings of your bioregion. It is a twisting-off of our life’s nuclear core, eventually mirrored by nuclear weapons. Inner worth seems derived from beyond and above, taking any job in service to the Purest Good and Divine Laws. It feels like you are in a bunker or a war-room waiting for the end to come. As Rumi so well describes it, you become the man who takes a precious dagger and hammers it into his kitchen wall for a peg to hold his dipper gourd. You waste valuable keenness and forget your dignity and purpose.

At the end of my first Sun Dance, I felt a seamless continuity between my being, the other people, and with the intricate varied beauty of the ecosystem, landscape, and sky. I felt proud to be a human being for the first time in my life.

At the end of their prayers, the Lakota say, All my relations. This is a lived experience. Pride in being human came because I felt we did our part together to restore the dynamic balance of the beauty of the world. I did not feel a pride like some kind of pharaoh in dominion. I consider myself to be one among many post-Messianic Americans — simple, humble, fully-human.

I learned the hard way that the process of renewal includes participation in the work of the powerful planetary image that symbolizes the psyche’s governing source. I learned by taking a wrong turn that it is an archetype of our own being that has the potential of self/cultural/world renewal or destruction, depending on how we engage it.

I learned by letting go of the past that the archetype of our deepest potential, when lived collectively, can be a well-spring of life renewal. I now know from direct experience that when ritually engaged in Earth-based, embodied ways, the well-spring beautifully and fiercely sustains human cultures. I also have paid in life-time wasted to find out how deeply our own potential can be manipulated and weaponized. It’s a hollow victory to live within a split-off bunker mentality fighting in an imagined war of good versus evil. Intuitively, I know that we all have paid enough for 5000 years or more for the Glory of the Coming of the Lord.

Into the sky and throughout the Earth, remember the deep root of your being, participate with humanity, See and Be (Your Name Here)-Christ. In the same way that all the planets are in the birth-chart, so all the Gods and Goddesses psychologically inform you and each person in a one-of-a-kind manner. Do this to help the people. You are more than a weapon. You have a soul, a ghost. When we see our uniqueness as a virtue, only then do we find peace. You have that something within, the higher self. I say you have a logic, and an eloquence, that few, with human feelings can resist whether man or woman, whether gentile or Jew, everyone according to her/his/their actions, the Ruach Hakodesh will dwell on him The world is a play in which the god and the goddess play all the parts.

How Much Does A World Savior Cost?

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The mental split that brought about the patterns of the ecliptic, the sun, moon, and planets, appears to have personally split apart the inner worth of everyone. We have accepted the domestication of the archetype of self and world renewal and have struggled in the confrontation with the draft into service for the “good” side in a ruined universe. Where the late-modern world view has lopped off the numinous from the cosmos, it still continues to hang onto the ruined universe in open or assumed nihilistic proclamations of cosmic absurdity.

It is time for us to consciously choose to learn from those long enduring Indigenous peoples in whose ways the renewal of cultural flourishing comes by actively participating in caring relationship with our conscious self-renewing planet. It is time for us to consciously seek out the hundreds of thousands unto millions of future-oriented others who have already been called into and who are already living in wholeness of soul, who have devoted their Remembrance and Will to the good of all beings.

C. G. Jung wrote:

Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.

The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is a psychic danger. Reason has proved itself completely powerless, precisely because its arguments have an effect only on the conscious mind and not on the unconscious.

The greatest danger of all comes from the masses, in whom the effects of the unconscious pile up cumulatively and the reasonableness of the conscious mind is stifled. Every mass organization is a latent danger just as much as a heap of dynamite is. It lets loose effects which no man wants and no man can stop.

It is therefore in the highest degree desirable that a knowledge of psychology should spread so that men can understand the source of the supreme dangers that threaten them. Not by arming to the teeth, each for itself, can the nations defend themselves in the long run from the frightful catastrophes of modern war. The heaping up of arms is itself a call to war. Rather must they recognize those psychic conditions under which the unconscious [tsunami-like] bursts the dykes of consciousness and overwhelms it.

Knowledge Of Psychology

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My reading of Ulysses is informed by knowing how it feels to be possessed by and freed from a psychic epidemic brought on by the End-times mythology and its Messiah Complex. I have looked through half-blinded eyes that saw the “Glory of the Coming of the Lord.” I think it is this same kind of psychic epidemic that drove millions to murder each other in the 20th century. Ruin of life, nation against nation, brother against brother, sister against sister, taken up enthusiastically by so many, sadly, happens when all those millions feel they are doing something good.

It takes courage to face the peer pressure and to step away from masses that use Apocalyptic ideation. Stephan D. O’Leary calls this mental mode, Arguing the Apocalypse, in his 1994 text. O’Leary reminds how Derrida, like Jung before him, struggled with how to argue with those who argue the Apocalypse

O’Leary writes:

In this reading, the proper answer to the question, “When will the Last Judgement occur?” is not “In 1842, or “In the year 2000”: for all such answers deny the truly ultimate significance of the Apocalypse and are destined to reveal, with the passage of time, their misapprehension of its message. Only an answer that questions the fundamentally tragic assumptions on which the apocalyptic question is based can prevent the Apocalypse from being rendered irrelevant and thereby preserve its ultimate significance. The proper reply to this question then, is “It has already occurred; it is always about to occur; it is here now and has always been. In the terminology of this study, this represents a shift from a tragic to a comic interpretation of the Apocalypse, from a literal and predictive reading to a figurative reading that protects the relevence of the text by asserting the primacy of ethical significance over historical content.(p. 220)

O’Leary’s words carry within them a an archetypal pattern of depth psychology as regards the archetypes of the collective unconscious — for they are unchanging and recur throughout time. What has already been, is about to happen, is happening now, will happen in the future, is an archetype, but that archetype is not The Last Judgement. It is the archetype of Urperson and Urth: Self-Image and World Image, The Messiah Complex. The Last Judgement is only one cultural way to live out our inborn potential. It is a way that we do not have to choose any longer, as O’Leary encourages.

Our planet has many other life-giving stories of self and world renewal in which to participate. Those other cultural stories of renewal share the theme of being revealed to the people through dreams, visions, visitations, Near-death, out of body, abduction experiences. We are here now to create new courageous, loving, healing ways, unimagined in the past. I call this courageous way of stars in the cosmos, The Lunisolar Vehicle or The Plasma Vehicle. I propose a name for our own solar system vivified by our star, a yellow dwarf star that is too small to go into supernova —

The Heart of the Heavens.

Earthrise is Earth in its waxing gibbous phase - backwards mirror to lunar phase.

Earth Eclipses Sun Seen From Moon, by Hana Gartstein. The Moon is in its Blood Moon phase.

Urperson and Urth: *Self-Image and World Image, Messiah Complex*

It’s not the fully engaged self-image/world image that has caused so much devastation. We can all be psychically renewed in rituals that call us to fully live that self-image/world image. It’s the story we act out of our self-image world image that is the issue.

…to participate as consciously as possible with the work of this powerful planetary image symbolizing the psyche’s governing source.

I, as an individual, am healthier if I get to live in a way that I can participate at the Turning Point of my whole being in the renewal of life and the birth of the future.

It is possible to choose ways of gentleness and be wise as serpents near any Messianic fight against evil in league with any Catholic, Protestant, and/or nationalistic military-industrial-entertainment industry motives. Participation in Earth-based rituals that place me in right relationship with the season on the ground, with the atmosphere of the planet and with others, works.

A full commitment to participate in the work of the powerful planetary image that symbolizes the psyche’s governing source with my own inner Reason for being renews waking and dreaming life. There is a mental, emotional, physical, spiritual health, clear-minded embeddedness in what I experience as our planet’s seasonal sacred text.

I don’t think each person needs a Sun Dance. I do think you, the individual reader can feel better about life and the future of the planet in some collective ritual that is in sync with the symbolism of the season of the year in whatever ecosystem you may find yourself. If I never meet you, the simplest way is to be with another who wishes good for the future generations, for all our relations. Time your being together with the full moon/new Earth and the season of the year. (See Full Moon/New Earth) Offer to the Earth together your grief, fear, frustration, longing, pain, illness, mental suffering, despair, empty out and hold nothing back. Offer this for making new possibilities. Pay attention to all that is around and within you in waking and in dreaming for response.

I had the pleasure of meeting a man from Pecos Pueblo, New Mexico. He was 8th generation here from Spanish and Aztec ancestry. His European family roots were of a man who came to learn the Aztec language to be an interpreter. He said the story they tell in his family is that when his ancestors watched the Franciscan missionaries raze sacred sites, burn books, and build churches over it all, they asked each other, How do you reason with people who don’t know they live in a solar system?

After all these centuries, during which families kept their traditions alive and hidden, some churches that were built over the ancient sacred sites have started to open their doors for the wisdom keepers. They invite people to share their ceremonies on their sacred lands again. He shared that all are welcome to these ceremonies, especially one where the healing symbols are sticks adorned with the petals of flowers to represent the Flowering Tree. He himself was healed in one of those ceremonies that go all through the night. He said, ‘The Flowering Tree still lives.’

This kind of humbling return to the human family is another way open going forward. It is possible for former colonial churches to open the doors and invite all nations to come to share the space for prayers, to honor the moons, the seasons, the days, the initiations together. We already have all the elements for gatherings in restored sacred places across the world wherever former colonial powers want to heal the planet with all peoples. Hopefully, there may be families who have been keeping the ancient traditions alive who might sing once again their Songs.

As of this writing, I think our lost Sun Dance is cut-off and buried beneath the colonial Saint Vitus and the summer dance that was named, St. Vitus’ Dance. Beneath the colonial St. Vitus is an ancient divinity of divination, abundance, the white horse, warrior defense of the realm, and the Four Directions. The colors are white for north, green for east, black for south and red for west.

Though there are certainly connections to the symptoms of St. Vitus Dance as hallucinations due to ergot poisoning, exhaustion and economic/food stress, it’s not difficult to find the Dancer for the restoration of the world in the poetics of attributed to St. Vitus, but who belongs more properly to Svetovid. I think it’s not a stretch to recognize a primordial celebration of life in our summer music festivals.

Below is a cloutie well. The pieces of cloth hung near it are prayers left by people who are keeping alive an enduring Earth-based tradition that still opens the old ways among the Celts.

Strips of Cloth, ‘Clooties,’ Near A Clootie Well in Ireland

There rings a bardic depth in Joyce’s announcement of the Second Advent. He encourages getting down to the bedrock of Atonement with the Mother and remembrance of the Abyss of Her Sacred Wells:

…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. It is immense, supersumptuous. It restores. It vibrates. I know and I am some vibrator. Joking apart and, getting down to bedrock…

Such an immense, supersumptuous, restorative, vibrational, and humorous self is exactly what emerges in Chris Bache’s, LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven. Here, I wish to unburden him from carrying this block of the collective healing by writing that he has done a collective work for all those who were born into the Apocalyptic End-times thought-forms. He shares here the archetype I have been describing as fundamentally human and always accessible:

I was on an African plain where hundreds of people were dancing in celebration. The lions were far away, there was no danger, and no one was hungry. The tribe had survived the rigors of another year and they were dancing their thanks and their celebration of life. This was one of the most extraordinary experiences of the session. I was able to take in the experience of these many people whole. I was the tribal mind reveling in celebration.

Their infectious joy and dance-induced ecstasy blended them into a single field of celebration. They knew what was happening, and they kept giving themselves over to the process, letting it deepen until they were completely awash with the unifying joy. They were one with themselves, each other, and their environment. I had never experienced anything like this before, and it was profoundly moving. How impoverished we are who have lost these rituals that activate the deeper weave of our connectedness.

My reference point for experiencing all this was an intelligence that saturated everything—the people, the animals, the fire and the Earth itself. If I had to name it, I wold call it Earth Consciousness. I discovered that not only did this celebratory dance heal the people—cleansing them of the pains of the year’s losses and healing the friction of interpersonal conflicts—to my surprise, it also healed the Earth itself. I actually experienced a release of energy that healed the field of this region of the planet. (pp. 155-156)

There is another pathway open to freeing ourselves from the cosmic-war themes of our lives by what Jeffrey Kripal calls, being an author of the impossible. We can wake up inside the war stories into which we have been born and take the pen into our own hands. C. G. Jung made a similar case as regards what he called, individuation. For he had discovered that what we remain unconscious to will bind us to its path and feel like fate to us. Becoming conscious of the unconscious opens a degree of freedom of choice where we can open new doors and choose more beneficial ways.

Kripal notes of authoring one’s own story:

These events happen to all sorts of people in every culture in every historical era for which we have a record. Today, people tend to employ popular culture to talk about them. The phrases I’ve heard the most often are:

It was as if I were a character in someone else’s novel.

It was as if I were caught in a science-fiction movie.

It was as if it were all staged badly.

There is often this humorous, trickster-like quality. What we would see, if we looked at these things with an open mind, is that they reveal a paranormal that is not just a story, but it’s a story waking up to its own authorship, to its own author, ie, us. If you think about it, these phrases are actually quite true. We are all caught in a story. We are all caught in a novel that we may not even like. We are all born into cultures and languages and belief-systems that may or may not serve us. Yet, they define what we can think, what we can imagine and who we can become. We are, in fact, all written. We are all being played in some way.

…There are moments in a life when a curtain opens and we can see the human wizard pulling all the levers behind the curtain, the moments of awakening.

Post-Apocalyptic-Post-Ghost-Dance Jesus

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My first sweat lodge teacher was a Vietnam veteran. He was sick for 10 years after the war. All the strategies of the VA and ways of self-medication did not work. He received 2 life-changing healings during his first two sweats. Later, he was invited to be a Sun Dancer at a Veteran’s Sun Dance. He passed away a number of years ago. I am sharing one of his sacred stories in a good way:

He chose to pierce during the round (one of 8 periods during a day) before the children’s healing round. To pierce means to have your body connected with 2 pegs that are tied to a small harness attached to rope that is connected to the Tree. Each peg is slipped beneath a thin layer of your skin on either side of your chest, (In a Sun Dance, the Dancers offer a bit of themselves, feed the Tree, in order for those who come to have healing in the healing round after the piercing round.)

During the piercing round, there is a time when you pray and dance with the others who have pierced with you. Around the Tree in the center, there is the circle of Dancers who have pierced. Around the pierced Dancers, there is a larger circle the rest of the Dancers who did not pierce. Around them is the great circle of the people who pray and dance just outside the Sun Dance Altar. On the south side of that outer circle, there are the Singers.

After praying and dancing, the Sun Dance Chief will call the Dancers to approach the Tree 4 times in preparation to break free from their piercings. On the fourth time, my mentor described his experience as he broke free:

When I broke, my Spirit was pulled up and out of my body. I flew upward over the Tree and went straight into the inside of the middle of the sun.

He did not share more, but he knew that I knew that he described how he experienced the deepest healing moment of his life. He did not go to be a Sun Dancer for his solar knowing. He was only told that, as a veteran, if he went to Dance for others, chances were favorable that he, himself, would experience a healing. He was not dancing for himself when he broke. He was dancing for the children and the future generations to have a good life. He was dancing so maybe he could take some of their pain and sorrow from them.

I share his story now as a example that brings all the above into a more peaceful way forward. A Westernized soul can participate in a renewal of the Earth in a way that includes the Christ-message, but chooses to leave Apocalypse and the first father of the Righteous Order, who gave to the sun and stars their path, to a bygone Age, yet hopefully never-forgotten era.

Thinkers have liberated Jesus the human being who learned how to participate in divinity from Jesus the man of War and Apocalypse. You can find this unbinding of the man from the Messianic brand in the book, The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say, by an international group of scholars called, The Jesus Seminar.

In their study, they offer the following:

Scholars are agreed that Jesus spoke frequently abut God’s imperial rule, or, in traditional language, about the kingdom of God. Does this phrase refer to God’s direct intervention in the future, something connected with the end of the world and the last judgement, or did Jesus employ the phrase to indicate something already present and of more-elusive nature.

The first of these options is usually termed apocalyptic, a view fully expressed in the book of Revelation. which is an apocalypse….One thing is clear, John the Baptist and the early Christian community espoused this first view: they believed the age was about to come to an abrupt end. Did Jesus share this view, or was his vision more subtle, less bombastic and threatening?

The Fellows of the Jesus Seminar are inclined to the second option: Jesus conceived of God’s rule as all around him but difficult to discern. God was so real for him that he could not distinguish God’s present activity from any future activity. He had a poetic sense of time in which the future and the present merged, simply melted together, in the intensity of his vision. But Jesus’ uncommon views were obfuscated by the more pedestrian conceptions of John, on the one side, and by the equally pedestrian views of the early Christian community, on the other. (p. 137)

Next, I think we can deliver a post-Apocalyptic Jesus by recalling that the Earth as already gone through one Battle of Armageddon. It took place during the First War War from September 19 to September 26, 1918. The Allied victory was the reason that Field Marshall Allenby was given the name, Allenby of Armageddon. Here’s a short excerpt from Wikipedia with a link if you want more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Megiddo_(1918)

The Battle of Megiddo also known in Turkish as the Nablus Hezimeti (“Rout of Nablus”), or the Nablus Yarması (“Breakthrough at Nablus”) was fought between 19 and 25 September 1918, on the Plain of Sharon, in front of Tulkarm, Tabsor, and Arara in the Judean Hills as well as on the Esdralon Plain at Nazareth, Afulah, Beisan, Jenin and Samakh. Its name, which has been described as “perhaps misleading” since very limited fighting took place near Tel Megiddo was chosen by Allenby for its biblical and symbolic resonance.

In his book, The Great and Holy War: How World War 1 Became a Religious Crusade, Philip Jenkins makes the case for how both the Allied leaderships use of biblical Apocalypse to boost enthusiasm for the war and what appears to be the public’s psychic epidemic brought on by the End-times mythology made for a literal playing out of the script in the Bible’s last book.

We can separate Jesus the human being from the realm of the Father God of War by taking back the archetype of self-image and world image. We can find cultural renewal into our own inherited tradition of Hermeticism and the images from Tarot. The image above is the 20th card of the Tarot of Marseilles. Here are our lost elders. They are persons who are able to welcome and receive those who awaken. They are persons who are able to be vulnerable and honest and who know that the goal of the person who is awakening is to now consciously and lovingly participate in the world. They have been lost to us for a very long time. If you grew up with no help and felt orphaned by life, I invite you to consider that you are here to be a part of the restoration of elders. You are here to offer the next generations, the children and grandchildren what you longed to receive. You are here to carry forward all the good you did receive. In our own tradition, Judgement is not the end. It is a New Beginning and Return.

Judgement, the 20th card, follows with the 21st card named, The World. Our destination is not the Eternal Beyond. We are all trying to arrive into the Beauty and Rhythm of life that merges Eternity and Time in the here and now. With this in mind, (Your Name Here)-Christ, in our Western ways, can be imagined like this:

Dissolve The Image In Its Own Water

The world-annihilating/world-renewing story and symbolism of the Book of Revelation is just one of a larger and more ancient collection of psychological maps of transformation. The patterns appear during times of radical collective awakening and are called, spiritual emergencies, in transpersonal psychology. At this time, there are 13 main kinds, with the list still growing. They are: shamanic and bardic crises, alcoholism/addiction and co-dependency, nearing death awareness, peak experience, near-death experience, global pandemic, psychic opening, UFO abduction, possession, moral injury/PTSD, past-life experiences, awakening of Kundalini, communication with spirit guides and channeling, and psychological renewal by return to the center. In near-death experiences alone (5% of Americans) 13-15 million persons attest to an ocean of many transformational shores beyond Christianity’s mean-spirited and nationalistic Apocalypse or science’s state of oblivion.

The spiritual emergencies, though each has its own pattern, form a larger constellation in which they all participate. All the stories that come from the above are our sacred texts now. Each journey has its information where the individual carried the collective to a new insight.

In the book, Spiritual Emergency, Stan Grof paraphrases from the work of John Wier Perry:

The psyche of people in this kind of crisis appears to be a colossal battlefield where a cosmic combat is being played out between the forces of Good and Evil or or Light and Darkness. They are preoccupied with the theme of death—ritual killing, sacrifice, martyrdom, and afterlife. The problem of opposites fascinates them, particularly issues related to the differences between sexes.

They experience themselves as the center of fantastic events that have cosmic relevance and are important for the future of the world. Their visionary states tend to take them farther and farther back — through their own history and the history of humanity, all the way the creation of the world and the original ideal state of paradise. In this process, they seem to want to strive for perfection, trying to correct things that went wrong in the past.

After a period of turmoil and confusion, the experiences become more and more pleasant and start moving towards a resolution. The process often culminates in the experience of a “sacred marriage”; this either happens with an imaginary archetypal partner, or is projected onto an idealized person from one’s life. It usually reflects that the masculine and feminine aspects of the personality are reaching a new balance.

At this time, one can have experiences involving what Jungian psychology sees as symbols representing the Self—the transpersonal center that reflects our deepest and true nature and is comparable to the Hindu concept of Atma-Brahmna, the divine-within. In visionary states, it appears in the form of light of supernatural beauty, precious stones, pearls, radiant jewels, and other similar symbolic variations.

There is usually a stage in which these glorious experiences are interpreted as a personal apotheosis, a procedure that raises one to a highly exalted human status or to a state above the human condition altogether— a great leader, a world savior, or even the Lord of the Universe. This is often associated with a profound sense of spiritual rebirth that replaces the earlier preoccupation with death.

At the time of completion and integration, one usually envisions an ideal future—a new world governed by love and justice, where all ills and evils have been overcome. As the intensity of the process subsides, the person realizes that the entire drama was a psychological transformation that was by and large limited to the inner world of the main protagonist.

According to Perry, the renewal process moves one in the direction of what is called in Jungian psychology, “individuation,” a fuller expression of one’s deeper potential. The positive outcome of these episodes and their connections with archetypal symbols from ancient history make it very unlikely that the renewal process is a chaotic product of a dysfunctional brain. (p. 17)

John Wier-Perry’s essay honestly describes what are both the most difficult and most valuable passages in a human lifetime:

People often define the world ‘spiritual’ loosely to signify anything uplifting; at the other extreme, it is considered lofty, sepharic, rarefied, high above nature, in some realm, hence, supernatural. In descriptions of cultures, the word often designates any aspect that is not material, economic, political.

When we look at the actual phenomenology of spirit, we get a different impression. The ancient words for it imply breath or air, particularly air in motion, and thus wind — in Hebrew, ‘ruach;’ in Latin, ‘animus;’ in the Far East, ‘prana’ or ‘ch’i.' The word itself conveys the meaning of breath, derived from Latin, ‘spiritus.’ All these clearly denote a dynamism that is invisible as air but capable of being powerful as wind. It ‘bloweth where it listeth.’ the Bible says, suggesting a will of its own. In short, spirit is a strongly moving dynamism that is free of material structure.

These descriptions lead us to think of spirit as pure energy, but on closer look, we find more than that — it is typically experienced as having a voice, when persons are moved by the spirit. It seems them to have the property of intention, to be freighted with information, and this aspect could be defined as ‘informed energy’ or energy with a quality of mind.

Spirit cannot be separated from its plural form, ‘spirits.’ In old traditional societies, these are invisible dynamisms that life in the natural world, especially in biological life, but also in mountains, streams, springs, and in a belief system called animism. To clairvoyants, these spirits appear to have a voice and to take on a personified visibility. They also require a great deal of attention from the human community in the form of offerings and sacrifices. When one lives in such a society (as I have in China), one is constantly aware of this other dimension of existence, an existence we have long since relegated to oblivion.

Less unusual in sophisticated cultures are experiences with spirits that belong in the realm of the afterlife, with the deceased. Death is viewed as a liberation of the spirit from the body by a transformation process called transfiguration…In ancient traditions all over the world, spirits are highly valued ancestral beings that make themselves heard, give advice and counsel, and even make demands…

From this cursory glance at the range of manifestations of spirit and spirits we may see that spirit can be either free of bodily structure or engaged in a struggle to be liberated from it. I find this helpful in understanding how spirit operates in psychological experiences. For here again, we find spirit constantly striving for release from entrapment in routine or conventional mental structures. Spiritual work is the attempt to liberate this dynamic energy, which must break free of its suffocation in old forms: emotional patterns such as the complexes engendered in the family system; assumptions about the nature of the world and human life; values that need revision as conditions change; and cultural forms derived from family, subculture, or dominant cultural conditioning that must change with the times….

During a person’s development process, if this work of releasing spirit becomes imperative but is not undertaken voluntarily with knowledge of the goal and with considerable effort, then the psyche is apt to take over and overwhelm the conscious personality with its own powerful process. (pp. 66-67)

At some point in the process, there comes an end of the world that is also the end of the person’s life and reality as they understood it. The experience of it is, at the beginning, like being in a cosmic battleground. Wier-Perry explains:

Whenever a profound experience of change is about to take place, its harbinger is the motif of death. This is not particularly mysterious, since its the limited view and appraisal of oneself that must be outgrown or transformed, and to accomplish transformation the self-image must dissolve. In severe visionary states, one may feel one has crossed over into the realm of death and is living among the spirits of the deceased. One is forced to let go of old expectations of oneself and to let oneself be tossed about by winds of change.

Far less familiar is the companion piece to this death motif–the image of world destruction. Like the self-image, the world image is a compacted form of the very complex pattern of how one sees the world and how one lives in it. We learn most about this from cultural anthropologists, who find that, in times of acute and rapid culture change, visionaries undergo the shattering experience of seeing the world dissolve into chaos and time whirl back to its beginnings. This dissolution of the world image clearly represents the death of the old culture to pave the way for renovation. 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.)

In the Tarot card of Judgement, we are shown a person who has successfully passed through the transmutation of an initiatory passage, generally experienced as world-shattering. The Traveler is being welcomed and received by elders who understand the process. The goal of the journey is a return, in fact, it is to become the World’s Beloved.

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, April, 1865

Finally, in America you can still hear news of groups who have walled themselves off for a Second Coming. You can surf the web and read the zealous manifestos penned by minds who fan the flames of hatred in hopes of bringing a new culture and/or new Earth by destroying them both. Especially during our Covid-19, Black Lives Matter, Red v. Blue v. Purples, divisions, we can recall how America has already paid enough blood for its own Bible-inspired literalization of The Glory of the Coming of the Lord. Lincoln, more than anyone, grasped this about what the nation faced after the war. Here’s what a post-Apocalyptic American Dream sounds like:

…Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered–that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope–fervently do we pray–that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away…

The Father God Of Cosmic War Is A Tin Man

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The Father God of Cosmic War and those who become possessed by the archetype unleash a Wasteland upon the Earth. The method is that (paraphrasing Campbell) the timeless symbols are taken over and re-combined, applied systematically, and with full intent, to the aim of subjugation through indoctrination. A totally new order of state beliefs and rites, to the glory of some name or other, 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…force and not love, indoctrination, not education, authority, not experiences prevail in the ordering of lives.

The short formula for this is that first, there is a claim for Almighty power. Second, there is a taking over of the descriptions and definitions, the ideas and stories concerning death, life-between-lives, and re-birth. When you control the beginning and the end, you can control the middle - which is life itself.

The Six Nations in their Great Law of Peace and the reforms of Handsome Lake offer us a story that can help us move through belief or non-belief in God, the Father Almighty and All-Knowing. Handsome Lake’s spirit teachers urged him the tell the Haudenosaunee to address their prayers to the Great Mystery using the name, Creator of All. As a people, they were encouraged to set aside chronic wars and to lean away from using an earlier term that translates into English as, God the Controller. In the Western tradition, we lag behind the Haudenosaunee whenever we refer to the deity of our belief or unbelief as Omnipotent, Father, the Almighty. The most recent pre-Christian omnipotent god was the Roman Jupiter. What made Jupiter the Almighty Father was his absolute power to do as he pleased in the Heavens, on Earth, in the oceans, and in the Underworld. Before Roman Jupiter was Greek Zeus. He was imagined in this same All-powerful, All-knowing Sky Father. Here is from Aratus’ Phaenomena:

Let us begin with Zeus, whom we men never leave unnamed: filled with Zeus are all the streets and all the meeting places of human beings, and filled too the seas and harbors; and everywhere all of us have need of Zeus. For we are indeed his offspring, and he is in his paternal kindness sends helpful signs to mortals, and rouses people to work by reminding them of life’s demands, he tells us when the soil is most fit for oxen and for picks, he says when the right season has come for digging trees into the ground and sowing every kind of seed. For it was Zeus himself who fixed the signs of the zodiac of these things in the heavens by marking out the constellations, and arranged that the stars over the course of the year should provide men with most dependable signs of the passing seasons, so that everything may grow as it properly should. And thus it is that first and final homage is always addressed to him. Hail! Father, great marvel you are, and great source of benefit to human beings, hail to you and to the prior race! And to the kindly Muses, one and all! As for me, I who am praying to you to be able to tell fittingly the stars, guide my song right through to the end. (p. 137 in Robin Hard’s Eratosthenes and Hyginus Constellations Myths, 2015)

In the New Testament, the author of Acts of the Apostles assumes you have read Aratus’ Phaenomena. Paul references the book when he addresses the Athenians in the Areopagus - Paul hopes to replace the high Father of the Greeks with the even higher all-powerful authority of Jesus Christ and his Father. This kind of divinity possesses and cans his people. Almighty controller gods tragically split off souls from life and love, all the while making claims how it’s better to be dead and in Paradise there and later than alive and well, here and now. The double-bind is that the power seems bound to the virtues of righteousness and loyalty to group ego. It feeds in its shadows and forces, as Campbell reflects, suppression of the natural impulse to mercy. Saotome, also identifies the tin powers:

It’s easy to see and understand personal ego, but much more difficult to recognize group ego. Humanity’s misunderstanding of loyalty to God has caused more suffering than any other form of self-righteous ego. The loyalty of genocide, the loyalty of the gas-chambers, the loyalty of the human torch — does God order this kind of loyalty? Can we really call out God’s name to absolve us from this kind of guilt? Blind loyalty is most dangerous, for it is all too easy to twist the ideas of loyalty and righteousness with the lever of greed and selfish ego. A selfish ego has no respect for the differences. [p. 144, in Aikido and the Harmony of Nature]

Milgram’s 37, the controversial psychological experiment to learn to what extent would human beings, even those who claim to have set aside any theology. For human beings were shown that they continue obey authority and follow orders from a scientific authority figure. More than greed and a selfish ego were in play in even science’s climate of group ego. Published in 1963, Milgram found that 2/3 of persons would obey authority, even if it meant hurting another person. Fear seems to have played a role as well as being coerced into a situation where there seemed to be no other choice in the matter. In this, it’s a very human question to ask; Can we really call out (insert name of Person in Charge here) to absolve us from this kind of guilt?

Jupiter in Maier’s Viatorium, 1618 — Jupiter in Maier’s *Viatorium,* 1618

It is worthwhile to remember how Alchemists assigned to Jupiter the element of tin. Like alchemists, we can refine Jupiter’s metal to bring forth the Gold of the Philosophers. Jupiter’s element has its value and serves best when will-power serves the priority of the Beauty of Mystery, life serves care of soul.

The Father God of Cosmic War dictates orders and ignores the boots on the ground humanity. John Shea described such a leader as a ‘rear-echalon M***cker” or REMF. John E. Mack called this mental habit, ontological tyranny, and wrote of it:

We rarely stop to think that what we have come to accept as real may be determined by individuals and groups whose point of view in a culture at a give time seem authoritative, or who have the power to impose upon the rest of the society their methods and criteria for perceiving and defining reality. [In The Politics of Ontology, 1992]

Mayan Day Keeper, Gina Miranda, shares in her 2018 book, The Ancient Mayan Constellations, how in mesoamerica, when the Spanish came to colonize the Mayans, they executed leaders, philosophers, poets, and writers. She shares:

Unfortunately, when the invasive armies from Europe arrived to occupy the land they had little respect for people whose colored skin was different. They proceeded to systematically burn all the library halls and temples of knowledge were destroyed. They executed leaders, philosophers, poets and writers — burning them on stakes. The women were raped and the wealth of the cities pillaged. Not thinking this was enough damage, the occupation and unabated assault over the original cultures of the continent continues even today.

If people do not line up and embrace the culture of the land or understand the soul of the continent, they will continue to be outsiders for generations. The books that could explain all about thousands of years of the culture are gone, only a few texts survived the conflagration, and some researchers think that at one time there were at least half a million books. Now less than a handful survive. (p. 11) Gina’s website is worth a visit.

Melville, in Moby Dick, noted the Christian troubles with tin in his reflections on the whiteness of the whale:

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous- why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

The participatory world view invites individuals and groups to become temperate about use of adjectives like; Sovereign, Almighty, Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnibenevolent, Highest. Scientific materialists are invited to be temperate about use of nouns like natural resources, mineral rights, private property, natural laws.

Like alchemists, we are invited to separate the tin out of the gold, to let our numinous images, evolve. The partial view pretending to be whole has seen its days here.

Here are five examples of stepping away from the tin god: In Kripal’s Mutants and Mystics. He writes:

That Other, however, is not simply alien, foreign and scary, but also by definition, what one is not. Hence, if the seeker or hero is spiritually mature (that is, neither a true believer or a righteous patriot), the Other can also complete one, function as one’s own, always relative and limiting lifeworld. (p.31)

David Spengler has a wonderful essay that offers the term, holarchy, as a way to discern any partial concept of hierarchy that presents itself as whole. He defines holarchy and distinguishes it from hierarchy this way:

Holarchy is the system—or the attitude—that allows information, love, caring, and creative energy to flow between levels of a system without regard for rank or position…In a holarchy, there is no “higher” or “lower.” There is difference and the creative value that such difference can provide. In a hierarchy, the structure itself imposes clear rules on communication and evaluation; information flows in a regularized way up and down a chain of command. A hierarchy imposes order. In a holarchy, order and integration are co-created in the moment at the boundaries between people; rules are often made up in the moment based on the conditions and requirements of the unique relationships that are present at the time. It can appear chaotic, though in fact it is not. Negotiation and openness rather than position provide organizing factors. [from A Vision of Holarchy]

Ilia Delio further develops holarchy and writes of catholicity. In her Making All Things New: Catholicity, Cosmology, Consciousness:

Holons and holarchy mark living systems. Everything in nature is a whole and part of a larger whole. Can we imagine the Church to consist of Christified wholes, that is, those who have said “yes” to the public dimension of christifying love?…can we recognize that holons are not gender specific, that every person is a whole and part of a larger whole that is the Church? Holons require a shift from seeing people as passive spectators, victims, or innocent bystanders to seeing them as active participants in shaping reality, from reacting to what is handed down from on high to creating the future from below and within the relationships of daily life. When the experience of being part of something is our own experience, we seek to create ourselves based on that experience. How we organize whole/parts locally and unify globally is the challenge of the Church’s holarchy for the future. (p. 133)

The anonymous Catholic author of the book, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, warned:

…anyone who preaches the pure and simple omnipotence of God sows seeds of athiesm for the future. For he makes God responsible for wars, concentration camps, and physical and psychic epidemics from which mankind has suffered and will suffer again.

And sooner or later one arrives at the conclusion that God does not exist because his omnipotence does not manifest where it should without doubt manifest. The contemporary Marxist-communist movement, has, truth to tell, no other argument for the non-existence of God than this lack of direct intervention by the all-powerful divinity…(discerning between a reign of love as opposed to a reign of omnipotence pure and simple)…it was not omnipotence that was at stake, but rather love.

Thus, it is dangerous to preach the omnipotence of God–and then to leave his sheep to extricate themselves from the inner conflicts that experience will sooner or later lead to. The petition of the Lord’s Prayer; “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” when well understood, guards us from making divine impotence a stake of faith. It teaches that divine will is not done on earth as it is in heaven, and that it is necessary for the human will to pray for it, i.e. to unite with it…it is not a unilateral act of divine impotence, but rather, an act resulting in the union of two wills — namely, divine will and human will.

Anonymous Friend, in Meditations on the Tarot, writes along a very precarious line. As a member of the clergy, Anonymous clearly had to toe the line as regards Roman Catholic dogma. On the other hand, Anonymous brushes close to a more participatory world view when the possibility that the “I Am Who Am” is a description of the human soul’s capacity to unite conscious and unconscious. The difference between the two is that a Roman Catholic version would be a submission to a power outside of you, above and beyond while the more Hermetic version is the Thou Art That so often described in the East.

In Stephen Greenblatt’s 2011 book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, he notes how the Pope enacts the mode of the tin god:

The Pope was, or claimed to be, the absolute ruler of a large swath of central Italy...To hold his own, he needed all the diplomatic cunning, money, and martial ferocity he could muster. And hence, he needed and maintained a large governmental apparatus. The Pope was, of course, the absolute ruler of a much larger spiritual kingdom, one that extended, in principle at least, to the entire human race and affected to shape its destiny, both in this world and in the next. Some of those he claimed as his subjects professed surprise at his presumption, as did the New World peoples that the Pope in the late 15th century grandly signed over en masse to be vassals of the kings of Spain and Portugal. Others, such as the Jews, the Eastern Orthodox Christians, stubbornly resisted.

The temptation to become the split-off tin divinity appears in the clip below from Lord of the Rings:

The possessive power of the God of Cosmic War appears in Tolkien’s poem about the One Ring:

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them.

One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

Here is Campbell’s more articulate description of the kind of power we are now all hoping to release to the past:

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

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

This is an image of Pope Theophilus of Alexandria. He is near the epicenter of a significant intergenerational trauma for Western culture. From 391 to 412, Theophilus invoked a literal image of God the Father Almighty and oversaw the annihilation of all non-Christian and non-fundamentalist Christian institutions. At his worst, he oversaw the execution of 10,000 monks who were aligned with the teachings of Origen.

He was affirmed in his violence by the Church’s Nicene Creed. His actions in Alexandria, which included the lynching and flaying of the teacher, Hypatia, are only now coming to be fully understood. The tradition of Mithras, of the Serapeum, of Origen into which reincarnation was integrated into Christianity, of the sacred sexuality and joy in erotic life symbolized by the phallic image of Priapus — all were razed and buried beneath what amounts to chronic Christian warfare in a cosmic battle between good and evil.

Such a “One” is in an Indian myth told by Joseph Campbell. The willful God-personality, named, Indra, was shattered by Shiva in a form called, “Hairy.” Hairy shows Indra a long file of ants. When Indra asks who the ants art, Hairy tells him, “Former Indras all.” The mind-shattered God is near renouncing embodied life when his queen intervenes. Together, the King and Queen learn to make love together in such a way as to open each other into the Infinite. In short, Our Father would do well a courtesy with His Beloved. Campbell describes what happened after Hairy shattered the God-king’s mind:

Desiring nothing now but release from the burden of his inconsequential role, the god entrusted charge of the course of history to his son, and he was on the point of retiring to practice yoga in the forest, when is beautiful queen, Shachi, turned in consternation for comfort and advice to the palace chaplain, Brihaspati, the Lord of Magic Wisdom, Indra’s spiritual advisor, who, with a wizard’s smile, took her hand and led her to her husband’s throne. There bowing before his majesty, the two settled on the floor before him, where Brihaspati, the Lord of Language, commenced a golden discourse on the art of experiencing in the bond of married love the bliss transcending duality. The king and his queen drank in the golden words, which were as a healing balm to their hearts. Indra relented in his extreme resolve. Shachi recovered her radiant joy. And Brihaspati promised to compose for them a handbook on the mystery of marriage, wooing ever anew in the knowledge of each as both, to the end of time.

And so, the wonderful story ends of the opening of the eyes of…god to a dimension of being, transcendent of himself. (pp. 119-120 in Inner Reaches of Outer Space)

The way of freedom is knowledge. Here to close this section are words from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Brihadaranyaka means, Great Wilderness:

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

Finally, with Eushiba, the founder of Aikido, though most often interpreted at a human to human level, from this point forward in my participation in war, especially with Christianity’s God of War, I, too, shall do my best to defend myself and my enemy as my responsibility. I embrace the fact that true victory is not defeating an enemy, but gives love and changes the enemy’s heart. The rest of this essay is devoted to changing the heart of the Father God of War.

The most important clue I can offer takes its cue from Melville:

To be finally free of the God of War, we do well to learn wisdom about what has been taught over the centuries as judgement. It’s a lynchpin that others can’t pull for you. You have to make the choice yourself. Whether it is a last judgement in front of a Throne or a rejection of all that B*******t, you can take judgement back as native to human being. The 2006 book, Suicide: What Really Happens In The Afterlife?, by Pamela Rae Heath and Jon Klimo, is one amoung many now available. Clear and well-researched, it offers a solid psychological ground on which to stand and to step forth into a new more responsible freedom:

After he had taken his own life, the surviving spirit of Stephen Puryear spoke of the life review in this way:

“We do this in stages for no one could handle it all at once. We begin to look at specific things honestly and clearly…and we see what we did correctly and incorrectly. No one sits in judgment on us. Though we judge ourselves very harshly at first, we soon begin to ease up and see what we can learn from reviewing our mistakes and our strengths.

At first, its very emotional because you see all the people you have interacted with, helped, hurt, and forgotten. Unfortunately, everyone around you sees them too. Soon, what others see about you is unimportant. What you see about yourself, how you fell short, and what golden opportunities you failed to use, is heartbreaking. You feel such a shame, other times anger. Later there is a little more detachment…All of it is something you now must be worked with and understood before you can advance further. Or before you can again claim a physical body to return and get about what you have left undone.” (P. 125)

Here is more from Kenneth Ring on what we now know about death and return in an interview with Jeffrey Misholove:

Jerald Walker gives an up close and honest account of a recent example of his family’s experience entering, passing through and exiting Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God, in his A World In Flames: A Black Boyhood In a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult. Here is when he was able to dissolve the tinman’s hold on his mind:

I still believe Mr. Armstrong is God’s apostle. I still believe in the seven holy days, that it’s wrong to celebrate Christmas and birthdays, and that the moment of Christ’s return can be counted in days, maybe hours. I especially believe in the lake of fire and I see myself there….I still believe all the teachings of the church, not because I want to but because I don’t know how to stop. Instead of merely filling my brain, the doctrines give it shape, like a cookie cutter pressed into dough.

“How do you unbelieve a belief?” I ask.

“In what? The Place of Safety?”

“In anything.”

“Easy. Replace it with another belief, preferably one that’s true.”…

“Mr. Armstrong gives a date for the end-time, and we send him money to help spread the word that the Tribulation is coming. The Tribulation doesn’t come. What does he do? Changes the date again, then he denies he set it one. Same test, same result. It’s a shell game, an elaborate con that’s making him richer and richer and his followers poorer and poorer. He’s the best con man there is. And you know what that makes the Co-Workers?

“Marks and tricks?”

“Wrong again.”

“Vics?”

“Hypocrites.”

“Hypocrites?”

(pp. 161-162)

Pope Clement XI (1649-1721)[SOURCE: Creative Commons] — Pope Clement XI (1649-1721)
[SOURCE: Creative Commons]

Pope Clement’s Decree of 1704 is an essential snapshot of the oppression of sacred ways of other nations. In this case, it is Roman Catholic against Chinese Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist ways. This basic archetype is the one I have encountered most often when listening to Christians of all stripes who take up missionizing. Just remove the terms referencing Roman Catholicism and fill in the blanks:

Pope Clement XI wishes to make the following facts permanently known to all the people in the world ...

I. The West calls Deus [God] the creator of Heaven, Earth, and everything in the universe. Since the word Deus does not sound right in the Chinese language, the Westerners in China and Chinese converts to Catholicism have used the term "Heavenly Lord" (Tiānzhǔ) for many years. From now on such terms as "Heaven" [Tiān] and "Shàngdì" should not be used: Deus should be addressed as the Lord of Heaven, Earth, and everything in the universe. The tablet that bears the Chinese words "Reverence for Heaven" should not be allowed to hang inside a Catholic church and should be immediately taken down if already there.

II. The spring and autumn worship of Confucius, together with the worship of ancestors, is not allowed among Catholic converts. It is not allowed even though the converts appear in the ritual as bystanders, because to be a bystander in this ritual is as pagan as to participate in it actively.

III. Chinese officials and successful candidates in the metropolitan, provincial, or prefectural examinations, if they have been converted to Roman Catholicism, are not allowed to worship in Confucian temples on the first and fifteenth days of each month. The same prohibition is applicable to all the Chinese Catholics who, as officials, have recently arrived at their posts or who, as students, have recently passed the metropolitan, provincial, or prefectural examinations.

IV. No Chinese Catholics are allowed to worship ancestors in their familial temples.

V. Whether at home, in the cemetery, or during the time of a funeral, a Chinese Catholic is not allowed to perform the ritual of ancestor worship. He is not allowed to do so even if he is in company with non-Christians. Such a ritual is heathen in nature regardless of the circumstances.

Despite the above decisions, I have made it clear that other Chinese customs and traditions that can in no way be interpreted as heathen in nature should be allowed to continue among Chinese converts. The way the Chinese manage their households or govern their country should by no means be interfered with. As to exactly what customs should or should not be allowed to continue, the papal legate in China will make the necessary decisions. In the absence of the papal legate, the responsibility of making such decisions should rest with the head of the China mission and the Bishop of China. In short, customs and traditions that are not contradictory to Roman Catholicism will be allowed, while those that are clearly contradictory to it will not be tolerated under any circumstances.

The Kangxi Emperor (1654 – 1722)[SOURCE: Creative Commons] — The Kangxi Emperor (1654 – 1722)
[SOURCE: Creative Commons]

The Kangxi Emperor, in response to Clement’s Decree expelled Christians from China with the Decree of Kangxi:

Reading this proclamation, I have concluded that the Westerners are petty indeed. It is impossible to reason with them because they do not understand larger issues as we understand them in China. There is not a single Westerner versed in Chinese works, and their remarks are often incredible and ridiculous. To just from this proclamation, their religion is no different from other small, bigoted sects of Buddhism or Taoism. I have never seen a document which contains so much nonsense. From now on, Westerners should not be allowed to preach in China, to avoid further trouble.

Alice Walker opens a generous doorway out beyond the Father God of War and His Chosen People in The Color Purple’s Shug:

Ain’t no way to read the Bible and not think God white, she say. Then she sigh. When I found out I thought God was white and a man, I lost interest…

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. (p. 202-203)

Woodpecker: Being who helped First Man defeat the Enemy of All Lifec. 2014, F Christopher Reynolds — *Woodpecker: Being who helped First Man defeat the Enemy of All Life*
c. 2014, F Christopher Reynolds

To bring this section home and integrate my own story, in 2014, when I went on pilgrimage to honor and call forth into our times the Spirit of the 1914 Christmas Truce, my first stop was in Paris. I spent a few days visiting during which I went to Notre Dame cathedral to pray and for a mass. By 2014, my embodied awareness of the Earth was fully functioning again. I decided to wander the cathedral and just feel where my experience of the sacred was strongest. After 30 years of teaching high school French, I was aware of the historical layers that are present on Ile-de-la-cite where Notre Dame is located. I was able to feel into those layers, but inside the cathedral itself, there was not much else that I noticed. When I walk in sacred places, it feels like my body is infused with warmth and I get warm chills over and through me. In Notre Dame de Paris, when I got to the statue of Notre Dame de Guadelupe, I was moved to tears by the flow I felt. All around her image were roses and rose petals. This was the only place in the cathedral where the sacred registered for me.

Being Catholic, I was familiar with the mass, but as it started, it did not feel safe to me. This was because having just been in a space of the flow of the sacred, I was keenly aware of how that same kind of flow was not inside, locked-outside, the experience of the mass going on. When we got to the Nicene Creed, I was not able to feel comfortable and continue the ceremony. I stepped out of the roped-off celebration of the mass and watched the service from beyond. During the Credo, the people took on a militant energy, quite similar to prayer-meetings I had been to in the 80s during my days of possession by the End-times mentality.

Je crois en un seul Dieu, le Père tout-puissant,
Créateur du ciel et de la terre,
de l’univers visible et invisible.
Je crois en un seul Seigneur,
Jésus Christ, le Fils unique de Dieu,
né du Père avant tous les siècles…
…Je reconnais un seul baptême pour le pardon des péchés.
J’attends la résurrection des morts
et la vie du monde à venir. Amen.

So, not wishing to harm anyone and just to offer this if it is helpful, the prayer above invokes a god of war and is a tin man’s prayer. I know it because since 2014, I’ve been able to feel with full awareness the difference between sacred spaces flowing with embodied awareness and a hard-bodied mental invocation of will-power that has its underpinnings in a theology of cosmic war impressed upon the human being and all ecosystems of the planet.

Joseph Campbell wrote it this way:

…an idea of good and evil, light and dark, even of life and death as separate took hold, and the prophecy was announced of a progressive restoration of righteousness of the order of nature. Where formerly there had been the planetary cycles, marking days, nights, months, years, eons of unending time, there was now to be a straight line of progressive world history with a beginning, middle, and a prophesied end — Gayomart, Zarathustra, and Saoshyant: Adam, Jesus, and the Second Coming. Where formerly there had been, as the ideal, harmony with the whole, there was now discrimination, a decision to be made, “not peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34), effort struggle, and zeal, in the name of universal reform. In the Persian empire this ethical world-ideal became identified with the political aims of the King of Kings himself, who reigned as the regent of Ahura Mazada; in Christendom, by a sort of spiritual contagion, Gott mit uns has been ever the war cry of every national army, on both sides of the line; while throughout the territorial reaches of Islam, the rhetoric of righteousness has been epitomized by the matched phrases, “dar al’islam” (“the realm of submission [to Allah]”) and “dar al’harb” (“the realm of war), which is to say, the rest of the world.

And so throughout the complex of mythologies now operative in the West— which by virtue of their common impulse to missionary imperialism are today reshaping the planet, save where the no less reformational zeal of the mission of Karl Marx has lately taken over the enterprise — the reaches of outer space to which the religious mind is formally directed are not cosmic, but geographical, and defined in terms, moreover of dark and light, God’s portion (dar al’islam) and the devil’s (dar al’harb): prayers are still being addressed in all seriousness to a named and defined masculine personality inhabiting a local piece of sky a short flight beyond the moon. (p. 43, in Inner Reaches of Outer Space)

In the recent American political divisions, to the missionary imperialism and the Marxist enterprises, there needs to be added the multinational corporations to this list of those who seek to righteously improve the economic security of their shareholders.

Nicene Resolution, COEX constellation by F Christopher Reynolds, c. 2019. — *Nicene Resolution*, COEX constellation by F Christopher Reynolds, c. 2019.

I have made attempts to write out a personal Credo and base it on actual experiences, updated cosmology and psychology. However, my more original art form is sidereal COEX constellations that update our art of heavenly correspondences. Nicene Resolution features the 26,000 year circle that is the motion of the celestial north pole. Within it, except for its tail’s/tale’s-end, is our inherited constellation, Draco, the Dragon. Both the circle of the celestial north pole and Draco have been flipped as if seen from above them, looking back towards Earth. This means- Become psychological.

Being psychological implies that the Tin Man God of War of this section resides not only in others, in institutions, but most powerfully in my own soul. My hunch is that this is the biggest issue for human beings trying to learn and grow as individual, cultural I Am Who Am’s/(Your name here)-Christs. We are wise to have protections against the split off tyrant, the Great I Am. I think in this book, I am offering an outsider’s approach to an astrological tradition buried within the Book of Job. Job’s secrets were, perhaps still are, a hidden oral tradition as regards what we call now, archetypal cosmology/evolutionary astrology. The Book of Job is a trojan horse whose secrets are about protection from Almighty God, within and beyond because you remember that you participated in the pre-meditation and then chose this life for the love of living.

Jack Miles’ book, God: A Biography, offers Job’s response to the Lord after the Lord addresses him. I think such a human being is able to stand to address this particular Almighty because he knows something the Almighty does not. Job’s resilience, though it may have remained as mysterious to him as the Civil War was to Lincoln, was rooted in a knowing that he had said, Yes, to this life of trials, loss, then, restoration. He was able to wrestle with God:

Then Job answered the Lord:

You know you can do anything.

Nothing can stop you.

You ask, “Who is this ignorant muddler?”

Well, I said more than I knew, wonders quite beyond me.

“You listen, and I’ll talk,” you say,

“I’ll question you, and you tell me.”

Word of you had reached my ears,

but now that my eyes have seen you,

I shudder with sorrow for mortal clay.

Job feels sorrow for all life in a world where an all powerful Lord, voice from the whirlwind, reigns almighty. I think Job’s warning is of any willful I Am, collective or individual, split from the other half, the dreaming, remembering depths of Who Am.

This section is my art and my prayer for our world to no longer be held captive inside cultural minds that imagine life as cosmic war. Though it is tempting to attribute the Dragon here with the Book of Revelation from which I am writing an escape route, I prefer a more gentle unblocking of the eastern serpent of life, kundalini, the energy and evolutionary wisdom that is empowered to move into and out of the many cages of the mind to which humanity is prone.

Post-Apocalyptic-Post-Ghost-Dance Jesuses

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It was a great gift to psychologically untie my self-image/world image from the messianic cosmic battleground story. I assumed that the healing work was completed until I went to Standing Rock in 2016. While I was there helping move large portions of a mesquite tree, I unknowingly hurt my back. At first, I hardly noticed it. But through the night and the next day starting my drive home, I was overcome with back-spasms. They came in waves, a lot like what I observed as my wife labored with our children. It dawned on me that I was quite possibly in a sort of somatic man-labor, a back-labor.

Curiously, an aspect of those spasms was how they seemed hugely out of proportion to my initial injury. It felt like my own unconscious was tripling the energy involved. Luckily, I knew a friend in whose presence I felt safe enough to go into labor. I stayed at her place for 2 days until the waves ceased and then made my way slowly home to Cleveland.

It took me a year to heal from the injury. I found that there were metaphors all through my muscle tissue. My healing process included finding out the functions of the muscles involved at different stages and imagining images that would require use of the particular muscles. So, for example, early on, when I asked the massage therapist when the muscles she worked on were responsible for, she replied, standing, walking, and turning. The image that came to mind immediately was a labyrinth:

For the next 6 months after, I authored by using the poetry of my body. In fact, through what began as psychosomatic labor pains came new understanding of the outdoor labyrinth. After nearly 800 years, an outdoor labyrinth represents a path that is a passageway to journey to the Holy Land that is all the Earth.

Next, as I considered the mesquite tree, I learned that it is the Tree of Life for the Apache as well as other tribes. There have been harsh seasons when only the fruit of the mesquite kept the people alive. It was a new understanding of the Tree of Life as my own spine that came out of my body through writing.

In Genesis, what gets Adam and Eve kicked out of Paradise is not so much the disobedience. Elohim is fearful that the knowledge-emboldened First Woman and First Man will also eat of the Tree of Life and realize immortality. The angel with the flaming sword who blocks entry to Eden is stationed there not as much to keep human beings away from the Garden as much as to prevent humanity from tasting the immortal wisdom of the Tree of Life.

Joseph Campbell went after the Biblical Tree of Life this way:

For the two modes of consciousness are of the one life, whereas the cherubim and flaming sword have forbidden entrance, even of the “justified,” to the earthly garden where the two become one again.

Accordingly, in Dante’s vision, Heaven and Hell are still separate, and the lower power (ethically judged) has been eternally condemned. The descent of the spirit is a fall. The life-giving demon has become a devil. The axial tree of the universe, around which all revolves, that is to say, is still cut in two, as it was in Yaweh’s Eden of the two trees, one, of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the other, of the Knowledge of Eternal Life. Whereas the unreformed, primeval archetype of the World Tree, such as appears in the Old Norse Yggdrasil and the Navaho Blue Corn Stalk, the life-giving roots and the pollen-bearing flowerings, or tassels, are of a single, organically intact, mythological image. (p. 104)

He addresses this angel with the flaming sword this way:

However, the daunting image of the flaming sword between the cherubim, turning every way at the gate of Eden to guard the way to the tree of eternal life, has kept separate the opposed powers of the two guardians, which in the image of the Navaho Pollen Path, no less than in that of the Indian sushumna, must be brought together if the middle way is ever to be opened. In this exceptional tradition, Eternity and Time, Heaven and Earth, are permanently apart. There can be no reading of the images of God and Satan as metaphors of any kind. They are invisible, supernatural facts. And the creatures of this visible earth are but dust, as is the earth itself (Genesis 3:19).

Wherefore, as Blake declares in his own poetic revelation of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

“The cherub and his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite, and holy, whereas now it appears finite and corrupt.

This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment. But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern.”

…Everything transitory is but a metaphor…

…Everything eternal is but a metaphor. (p. 115)

Sidereal COEX Constellation by F Christopher Reynolds

Since 1905, in the writing of William James, we have known that there is nothing blocking human beings from knowledge that we are woven, each and every one of us, with Eternity by our merging of our consciousness with our unconscious minds. Direct knowing within the flow of time, past, present and future, with enduring consciousness, gnosis, in the old way of saying it, is the goal of a true education and the heart of a living culture. In Varieties of Religious Experience, James wrote:

Disregarding the over-beliefs, and confining ourselves to what is common and generic, we have in the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come, a positive content of religious experience which, it seems to me, is literally and objectively true as far as it goes.

The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely “understandable” world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong.

Yet the unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change. (pp. 505-506)

James’ psychological foundation lends support to Wittgenstein’s propositions. They are psychologically experienced, thus open to all humanity:

Proposition 6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

Proposition 6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

Proposition 6.4311 If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

Here’s Jung in his essay, The Soul and Death on the same issue:

The unconscious psyche appears to possess qualities which throw a most peculiar light on its relation to space and time. I am thinking of those special and temporal telepathic phenomena which was we know are much easier to ignore than to explain. In this regard science, with a few praiseworthy exceptions, has so far taken the easier path of ignoring them. I must confess, however, that the so-called telepathic faculties of the psyche have cause me many a head-ache, for the catchword, “telepathy” is very far from explaining anything. The limitation of consciousness in space and time is such an overwhelming reality that every occasion when this fundamental truth is broken through must rank as an event of the highest theoretical significance, for it would prove that the space-time barrier can be annulled. The annulling factor would then be the psyche, since space-time would attach to it at most as a relative and conditioned quality. Under certain conditions it could even break through the barriers of space and time precisely because of a quality essential to it, that is, its relatively trans-spatial and trans-temporal nature…I have referred to this group of phenomena merely in order to point out that the psyche’s attachment to the brain, i.e,, its space-time limitation, is no longer as self-evident and incontrovertible as we have hitherto been led to believe.

Anyone who has the least knowledge of the parapsychological material which already exists and has been thoroughly verified will know that so-called telepathic phenomena are undeniable facts. An objective and critical survey of the available data would establish that perceptions occur as if in part there were no space, in part no time…

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, on in accordance with the ancient lessons of human wisdom, or 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”…

At the tail-end of my recovery, I asked my chiropractor how he understood my journey of injury and healing. He said that the simple form of the journey was that my spine was twisted and I didn’t know it. This sounded like psycho-somatic code for being split from the Tree of Life.

It has been a great gift to me this year through my BrotherCousin of Roscommon, bard and singer, James J. Lafferty, to Remember once again the Tree of Life of the Gaels that was paved over, distorted, and forgotten by my family the past centuries. The Celtic Tree of Life is the Rowan Tree. Our name for that tree is mountain ash. The teaching with it is that the first woman of the human race was born of the sacred Rowan Tree. First man was born of the Ash Tree. Women and children are of a profound sacredness and always connected to Eternity in the here and now — throughout our lifetimes and ongoing into death, inter-life, re-birth. The Bible’s story upon us of Eden and Eve, a crippling yoke most heavily upon the women and children of my family for far too long, has been lifted by Recollection. If you are of European ancestry, you, too, have this Tree of Life in your collective soul that was buried beneath centuries of intergenerational forgotten cultural trauma.

Rowan Tree (Creative Commons) — Rowan Tree, the Celtic Tree of Life, (Creative Commons)

When my brother, sister and I were growing up in Norwalk, Ohio, there was a Rowan Tree next to our driveway. We never knew it was the Tree of Life of our own ancestors. Yet, it was in this home where through the 12 Steps that centuries of alcoholism and co-dependency were set aside, where patriarchal control of women made its turn, men dreaming and sharing dreams came forth, all genders, LGBTQ+H as sacred also took root here. Our family home in Norwalk, Ohio, was as a ground kept safe by the Rowan Tree — a tree that in Scotland was also planted near cemeteries to protect even the dead.

And the Ash?

As I prepared for my vision quest before Sun Dancing the first of four years, I made a sacred pipe, a canupa, with which to pray and then leave as a gift. The stem of that canupa was of ash. I did not know of Rowan and Ash as the Trees of Women and Men. However, I was aware that the stem of a sacred pipe is to represent the inherent sacredness of all that is of the male-toned embodied life in the universe. My intention was to establish a new ground for our family where fathers and mothers are sacred beings.

Beauty Is The Revelation

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400px-Sandro_Botticelli_-_La_nascita_di_Venere_-_Google_Art_Project_-_edited.jpg

There is an especially heart-rending and symbolic story of this intergenerational trauma of the flipped and twisted off Western mind. Botticelli, famous for his paintings, Birth of Venus and Spring, burned many of his other paintings in the Bonfire of the Vanities. This happened in his hometown of Florence on February 7, 1497. The artist was swept up in an End-times mentality preached by Savonarola. According to the Dominican friar, Florence would become the New Jerusalem.

Not only did Botticelli burn his paintings, but he also set aside his creativity. Sadly, the artist would die in grinding poverty, walking with crutches. It was because Birth of Venus and Spring were locked inside a castle outside of Florence that the two works survived. The model for both oeuvres was la Bella Simonetta. Botticelli had been so inspired by her beauty that he asked to be buried at her feet. I think his Message was, Remember that Beauty is the Revelation.

The split of embodied life from eternity is common throughout the Christian centuries. This is certainly the ongoing effects of Biblical authority where human beings are kept from knowing immortality because God stationed an angel with a sword in front of the Tree of Life to keep our entire species away. (In fact, another Remez or Coyote Teaching) Here is how it sounded when preached by Savonarola:

In every creature, its creation is limited, both its being and its power; eternity has no limit or end, quia aeternitas est interminabilis vitae perpetua possessio. Time is not all joined together, while eternity is, because time is partly past, partly present, and partly future. But God, Who can do anything, is eternal and embraces all time because everything is present to Him; what has been and what is and what will be are always present to Him, and He sees and understands everything in the present.

Ignatius of Loyola in the Cave at Manresa, Spain

In 1522, Saint Ignatius of Loyala, founder of the Jesuit Order, was in Manresa and had the visionary experience below. This is from his autobiography, though he refers to himself as he:

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.

Here is the split again, but this time, in the life of a person who has influenced millions and who continues to do so through the Jesuit tradition. I honor all the good the order has done over the centuries. However, in places across the planet where the Jesuits missionized, the violence of colonialism went with them. Ignatius had no means of understanding his vision in the form of the serpent with the glittering eyes. I grew up in a similar world view, so, when I heard his story as a child, his vision was taught as a temptation of the devil. Jung, too, notes how St. Ignatius had no psychological approach:

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)

In the approach to our involvement in Vietnam, it was the imposition of Catholic ways and the outlawing of Buddhist traditions that led the monk, Thich Quan Duc, to set himself on fire in Saigon. At the outbreak of the war, one of the richest landowners in Vietnam was the Church. Vietnam was first Christianized by Portuguese Jesuit, Alexandre de Rhodes.

I honor the immense courage and centuries of work that came forward from Ignatius’ visionary days in Manresa. What I wish to highlight is that the exercises that grew from the passage set any practitioner apart from the Beauty of the Earth. In his mind, no soul comfort, nor Sacred Message could ever come from his Serpent Visitor. He could only conclude that he was being tempted by the Devil. So, out of his fear, he chased the Many-eyed Comforter away with his cane.

I think he chased away the path taken by James Joyce, the path I have been presenting here. It is a path of peace because it sets aside soldiering in the Cosmic War. I have no right to reproach Ignatius for his choice. I do, however, make the invitation that we have arrived at a time to take this Soldier of Christ’s Path Untaken.

To the best of my knowledge, which is open for new information should it arise — Western-educated souls need to know how all of our cultural institutions have twisted our awareness of direct spinal connection with wider, deeper, enduring consciousness. We carry still a flipped idea that our entire embodied life, past present and future, is completely severed from the altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely “understandable” world, enduring consciousness and with the planet. In the de-colonizing work called, ethnoautobiography, the name for our twisted-off and flipped condition is normative dissociation.

To heal the dissociation, we require a new mythological understanding of the ecliptic. I have been making the case in preparation for this moment in the reading to affirm that the very understanding we need already exists. When we dare to step to untwist our original split for the children and grandchildren, we find ourselves with marvelous and unexpected comrades. Together, we can go backwards, recall a flip or two, to go forward.

In the above section, I am re-asserting C. G. Jung’s initial effort to bring Beauty to the Jesuit world view:

In 1939 I gave a seminar on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. At the same time I was occupied on the studies for Psychology and Alchemy. One night I awoke and saw, bathed in light at the foot of my bed, the figure of Christ on the Cross. It was not quite life-size, but extremely distinct; and I saw that his body was made of greenish gold. The vision was marvelously beautiful, and yet, I was profoundly shaken by it. A vision as such is nothing unusual for me, for I frequently see extremely hypnagogic images.

I had been thinking a great deal about the Anima Christi, one of the meditations from the Spiritual Exercises. The vision came to me as if to point out that I had overlooked something in my reflections: the analogy of Christ with the “aurum non vulgi” (gold of the philosophers) and the “viriditas” (vitality, fecundity, lushness, verdure, or growth) of the alchemists. When I realized that the vision pointed to this central alchemical symbol, and that I had had an essentially alchemical vision of Christ, I felt comforted.

The green gold is the living quality which the alchemists saw not only in man but also in inorganic nature. It is an expression of the life-spirit, the anima mundi or filius macrocosmi, the Anthropos who animates the whole cosmos. [pp. 210-211, in Memories, Dreams, Reflections]

Meeting For Wisdom At The Bridge

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Gatherings to untwist and unflip in order to go forward are all around us. In the academic world, the gathering space is called, Ethical Space. This kind of “ritual-space-classroom” where the wisdom traditions of the world can share is defined by Marie Battiste as:

…the in-between space that connects Indigenous and Eurocentric knowledge systems…the space that is created when Indigenous and Western thought are brought together…It is not a merge or a clash, but a space that is new, electrifying, even contentious, but ultimately has the potential for an interchange or dialogue of the assumptions, values and interest each holds

Adding ethics to this space entertains our personal capacity and our integrity to stand up for our cherished notions of good, responsibility, and duty. (p. 105 in Decolonizing Education: Nurturing the Learning Spirit, 2013)

Her definition is a good place to begin. Working with her 2013 description, I have been forced to move beyond the borders because, in Ohio, Ethical Space soon includes Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, Yoruba, Dagara, Umbantu, Celtic, etc…informed persons who feel marginalized by the Indigenous/Western dichotomy.

My drawing below is the union of the red, black, white and yellow circle of the 4 Directions of the Medicine Wheel with the wholeness of a sweat lodge:

The 4 Directions represent many teachings: the cardinal directions of North, East, South, and West, the seasons of the year, the periods of a person’s lifetime and the 4 parts of the human being–mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual, are just a few of its lessons. Each Direction has its own wisdom, stories, dreams, songs, sacred plants, powers, weaknesses, friends, not-so-friends, and so on. Each Direction contains all of the other Directions within it.

There is also an understanding that comes when you spend lots of time outside. It’s that the Direction, Above, is included in the South and the Direction, Below, is in the North. This is true for the lands of the northern hemisphere where there are four seasons. In the Indigenous understanding, the Wheel is a sphere.

A traditional sweat lodge is imagined as a sphere with human beings sitting in the middle of all that is. The ‘dome’ above represents objective experiences of realities outside yourself. The ‘bowl’ below, which is imagined passing underground, represents subjective experiences of realities that you experience within yourself by becoming them. This is how Indigenous teachings describe the simultaneous both/and that Robert Bly called, two-fold consciousness, Jeffrey Kripal calls, human as two, and I call, Urperson and Urth: Self-Image and World Image, The Messiah Complex.

The Medicine Wheel, the Four Directions, the Lodge and its architecture are descriptions of all of life and all that lives. They certainly are meant to be experienced in the sweat lodge itself, but more importantly, they are realities that are always present to us whether we are conscious of them or unconscious.

From our Western Hermetic tradition of Tarot, the image above looks like this:

Traveling Forward Together

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See below an image of the ecliptic restored to Earth. This is a way to imagine what the goal looks like. As I wrote above, this image is Urperson and Urth: Self-Image and World Image, The Messiah Complex.

Those who conceived of the ecliptic did not know about our spherical planet’s bi-polar sovereignty. They were able to observe over centuries that the zodiac was moving in a motion called precession of the equinoxes. This realization is the experiential base to our Ages. This is why there was an Age of Aries that preceded our current Age of Pisces. This is the basis for now saying that we are moving into the Age of Aquarius. One entire cycle around all the signs of the zodiac is called, a Great Year. It lasts roughly 26,000 years. The unfortunate addition to the concept of the Great Year, was that wherever it became part of a culture’s mind, the end of a Great Year was either an accidental or intentional destruction of the world by an all-consuming fire. The new Great Year was expected to rise phoenix-like from the ashes. Luckily, for us, by learning to read the history written in fossils and by actually learning from biology, we can lay the Great World Renewing Destruction aside for the gentler ideas of adaptation and mutation.

So, using the idea that humanity psychologically projected incredible powers into the Celestial Rules of the Heavens, it’s now time to remember how those selfsame powers have always native to and mirrored by Earth and human beings. This was Fechner’s message as regards our planet as an angel. William James later re-affirmed Fechner in his Pluralistic Universe.

Find below a new star pattern that you can use over the next stretch of time. You are invited to lay the zodiac to rest for a bit. Let its measuring of time loosen. We all can take on the hard work of coming home to our own natures and Natures.

Our planetary fossil record and biology can help inspire our release from the past. Coelacanths appear in the fossil record, text of the Earth 400 million years ago. Thought dead since the late-Cretaceous mass extinction when the chicxulub asteroid struck the planet 65 million years ago, it was found alive and well in 1938 - a watery messenger to those with hearts to receive its wisdom at the end of the Age of the Fish:

This new star pattern indicates a now conscious projection of the 26000 year cycles traced above and below by the motions of the axial precession of our world’s poles. This is an invitation to a visual image to imagine seamless psychologically felt connection with past, present and future for millions of years. There are 2 halves meant to be put together like 2 sides of a coin. It is called, The Stolen Fruit.

These are the 26,000 year circles of the North and South Poles. It is a reminder that we live in a bi-polar cosmos and that our lives require an imagination of time that can match our galactic Invitation.

This is the sum of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity, with the (Your Name Here)-Christ thrown in, united together with a symbol of Indigenous wisdom. This is also the symbol I have been using as a way to describe our deepest potential:

Two motifs – self-image and world image- are companion pieces in the process of renewal. They share the same representative image: a mandala that is now to be imagined as a 4D hypershere turning like a gyroscope on its axis mundi. The process of renewal is to participate as consciously as possible with the work of this powerful planetary image symbolizing the psyche’s governing source.

When it occurs right in front of you, it sounds like this:

When I broke, my Spirit was pulled up and out of my body. I flew upward over the Tree and went straight into the inside of the middle of the sun.

and this:

Whether manifesting as flying above the Sacred Tree and into the center of the sun or feeling pride to be a member of the human species, or as countless other forms, recall how Forrest described evolutionary astrology:

Astrology recognizes only 2 absolutes: the irreducible mystery of life, and the uniqueness of each individual viewpoint on that mystery.

and

The sun is the secret of sanity.
The moon is the secret of happiness.

For the sun to be the secret of sanity, we truly embrace the gift of our birth into a unique viewpoint into the irreducible Mystery. When we allow for Joyce’s (Your Name Here)-Christ, our sanity belongs to participation in divinity that includes our Earth.

Here is where we are now, moon orbiting our Earth that orbits the sun that orbits in a 60 degree angle to the galactic plane in a 70 million year cycle beneath, through, above, through it again, that orbits the galactic center in a 226 million year cycle.

So, as we wait for our culture to complete the transition, here is a prototype for what I call, The Heart of the Heavens Rosary:

It is to offer a psychological ground in sync with the Lunisolar vehicle, the Heart of the Heavens of our lifetimes. It features the 26,000 year cycle of the north/south poles. At this time, there are north and south pole stars, so the image, in this case, Kokopelli, is “When” we are in the 26,000 year cycle:

It also features the 22 year pattern of the sun-spot cycle of our bi-polar sun. For every 11 years, the sun not only moves through a sun-spot cycle, but it also flips the polarity of its north-seeking and south-seeking poles.

To bring them together, consider that the sun has moved in its 70 million year cycle from its birth, 4.6 billion years ago, and will continue to do until its death, 5 billion years from now. From the alpha of its beginning to the omega of its death, that is the Trunk Line of the Sun. All the life of Earth, all of our lives, over lifetimes, are united in some way to this journey of the sun’s Trunk Line.

To unite the bipolar yellow dwarf star, the Heart of the Heavens, along with the 26,000 year cycling Earth with the 70 million year Trunk Line, use clay and ponder, “What matters most?/What’s the matter?” In this, you have an image of the question your life is to this cosmos.

The Camino Is The Holy Land: The Good Starry Road

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For us to participate in this way:

as inheritors of the soul of Western culture in this way:

is to know that where we are living was, is, and always will be, a Holy Land. If there is a burden of Jerusalem and Israel, it’s that so many millions of persons have forgotten that the Holy Land is everywhere. Each bioregion is a living sacred text, unimaginably rare in the cosmos. This is one of the messages of my book, Remembrance of the 1914 Christmas Truce. Briefly, it is the story of a pilgrimage I made to Belgium on December 24, 2014, in honor of the 1914 Christmas Truce. In December, 1914, the enemies came out of the trenches, out into No Man’s Land to meet in peace. In all cases, it was singing that called them into peace. My intention in 2014 was to walk in Flander’s Fields, along Route 365 between Ypres and Messines, Belgium and make a prayer that the Spirit of Peace that came forth a century before could be carried forward and shared in new ways in our time. I set out from Ypres the night of December 24, 2014, walked the 11 kilometers to Messines, in particular to the Island of Ireland Peace Park in Messines, made a ritual of peace on Earth and walked back to Ypres into the rising sun of Christmas Dawn.

For 4.6 billion years now, Earth has been Our Mother, the source and teacher of life. Imagined as Grandmother, she has modeled all the cherished virtues of humanity: integrity, generosity, wisdom, love, creativity, authenticity, healing, harmony, truth…no single human faith or ideology has any claim, text or ritual that entitles its followers to privilege. The virtues, like the Earth that spread before me, are possessed by no one – our entire planet belongs to all, not just human.

C. G. Jung complained that in the American unconscious, there is a dangerous drop of hundreds of feet. He was referring to the distance between everyday American consciousness and the Holy Land of the Indigenous ground.

A way to imagine Jung’s drop of hundreds of feet is to compare the experiential distance between minds that use the cardinal directions of a GPS:

And minds that seamlessly merge with the infinite depths of meaning that use a sweat lodge:

It is possible that a new giant I-am–the consumer-half-blind-to-abundance-in-songs-and-legends needs to drink a lot of Apollo’s wine. Here we meet again with Joyce:

…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.

Walking Away From The Original Ground

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Fortunately, we don’t have to make a death-leap downward to return to the home planet. It can be taken in flights, moving along a spiral. The forward and backward flips that hide in our forgotten intergenerational trauma appear to cancel each other out when their existence is understood.

Let this be the Ground:

When expressed as cultural art, it looks like this:

The first twist away from this Ground came with cultures who developed a priesthood or priestesshood who tracked the movements of the sun. Generally, those cultures also had a developed metals technology. For the Celts, for example, they were a people who had learned to forge iron. The iron advantage gave them great power over other cultures. The movement of the sun through the year looks like this:

The first twist comes now, when the direct North and South, shift to Northeast and Southwest. It is a form of an “X”. There is an example of this shift at Clava Cairns near the haunting battlefield of Culloden, Scotland.

Clava Cairns is built over a more ancient sacred site. The alignment of Clava Cairns is the Northeast/Southwest pattern.

The next twist comes with the establishment of the ecliptic and the zodiac. Originally, the signs of the zodiac were derived from the seasons. That is why JVHV proclaims at Job: Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?

An important divide to be mindful of is the zodiac’s use of Aristotle’s elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. There are 4 triangles arranged that spread the 4 elements through the entire circle. This spitting apart and spreading allowed for more articulate understandings, but it also was a colonial act that set the Western mind “above” indigenous persons. In an indigenous understanding, Grandmother Earth, Grandfather Sky, Grandmother Water, the Four Winds, the Thunders, are all persons, not elements.

Malidoma gives a good description of the difference between the Western mind and the Indigenous as regards fire:

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…

I call my initiation a radical healing. My angry, vicious self was quieted, intimidated by the sweeping powers of the Other World. Something like a new person was born in me. The region of my psyche that had been put to sleep at the schools of Western thought was suddenly restored. I was reconnected to the deep regions of my psyche and to all living things. I rediscovered my home in the natural world, which is the true home of all beings on earth. And I was reconciled to my family and to the village community into which I had been born. I was alive and in awe of what I felt. My indigenous life was allowed to resume.

For the Dagara and many others, this kind of fire is of the underworld, it comes up from below. Because the elements of the zodiac are projected onto the starry heavens, “Above,” many persons whether or not they remember when the zodiac was a source of wisdom for our culture, have 2 minds, one split off from the other, like two personalities.

The element of Fire of Aries, Leo and Sagittarius can become friends with the realm of the Other World where the indestructible love of ancestors warms all life.

To build the bridge between the worlds we can re-indigenize our own Western minds and recover the wisdom of alchemy. The greater complexity of the elements can be lived quite wisely and well using an alchemical Remembering that the elements are psychological processes that are 'operations' found in our dreaming.

Western persons who follow a spiritual path have an extra pressure to do the inner work, to re-indigenize to our own mental history. When you become mindful of the alchemy in our soul operations in dreaming you can feel more connected to the meanings in Indigenous wisdom because you have experienced them through your own soul’s operations.

Zodiac with its four elemental triangles drawn

The next twist appears with a “flipped” orientation of an astrological birthchart:

This twist is going to continue going forward into Christianity. The 4 symbols of the Gospel writers: Matthew’s eagle (Scorpio), Mark’s lion (Leo), Luke’s bull (Taurus) , and John’s angel (Aquarius) twist our separation further:

The second buried flip is hidden within the 3 images above. It is a Mithraic/Christian flip. When the stars were imagined as points of light in a single dome/vault, it seemed miraculous that somehow the entire sky of eternity was moving. This realization was centered in Tarsus. It was the mythology of Mithras.

The imagery of Mithras shows him slaying the bull of the constellation of Taurus, but the bull is flipped backwards. This is how Western mythological understanding first took in the reality that the constellations of the zodiac were moving sign by sign, completely around, every 26,000 years. Mithras was that Power higher than the Gods and Goddesses who moved the dome from above.

Before Mithras, a person’s birthchart was a fate not to be questioned. The Stoics are a good example of this way of living with the ups and downs of life. After Mithras, and what made him a Savior, was the idea that with his help, you could overcome what might be considered an astrologically bad birth. The theme of a Savior above the stars, more powerful than the sun, moon, planets and stars, was eventually taken over by Christianity.

The Mithraic flip remains hidden to us inside Christian images. I think Mithras is interwoven with the Christianity of St. Paul of Tarsus because of Tarsus. The actual constellation of Taurus, as we observe it at night, faces left. Look again at the now double-flipped Christian tetramorph of the 4 beings:

See how the Bull now faces right, an unacknowledged flip taken from Mithraism. This same awareness appears to have made its way into Tarot, now with the entire group of four flipped:

As the Christian monarchies traveled over the oceans, Earth orientation split from local directions, life, teachings, songs, dreams and lands — the Wheel abstracted further. To navigate a globe, the cardinal directions of a compass were split from the specific directions of a particular location and the now moble medicine wheel was used along with an astrolabe.

Oldest known Portuguese astrolabe (source: Creative Commons)

The Four Directions above, with their fleur-de-lys, and the astrolabe with its own royal symbols are now expressions of expansion of colonial control. There is a final split when navigation began to use a sextant, a compass, and a chronometer to move around the planet. After the political revolutions, the Four Directions below became the navigational tool of a compass. Tools for celestial navigation contain no reference to sacred lands.

The Labyrinth Home

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The twisting, flipping and splitting off of the primal world view’s Way of Orientation can be healed. It takes devotion and time. When you walk an outdoor labyrinth as a meditative path to return to the Earth as the Holy Land, it’s helpful to notice all the turns, the reverses, the times you come close to completion only to wind out away from the goal. There is also the walking outward from the center, the living with a circulation with the pulse of the planet.

Harmonize the Mind of Place.

Our work now is to re-align all our layers, all our times in order to deeply resonate with the sound and silence of life. Here are the layers, spiraling backward, unfolding, untwisting:

You Got That?

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To bring this all home, I think Joyce’s reference to the harmonial philosophy indicates the Platonic roots of Hermeticism, the larger (harmonizing) whole within which astrology is a discipline along with alchemy and Tarot. Harmony and philosophy have had a long relationship with each other.

And he proceeded to divide after this manner:-First of all, he took away one part of the whole, and then he separated a second part which was double the first, and then he took away a third part which was half as much again as the second and three times as much as the first, and then he took a fourth part which was twice as much as the second, and a fifth part which was three times the third, and a sixth part which was eight times the first, and a seventh part which was twenty-seven times the first. After this he filled up the double intervals [i.e. between 1, 2, 4, 8] and the triple [i.e. between 1, 3, 9, 27] cutting off yet other portions from the mixture and placing them in the intervals, so that in each interval there were two kinds of means, the one exceeding and exceeded by equal parts of its extremes [as for example 1, 4/3, 2, in which the mean 4/3 is one-third of 1 more than 1, and one-third of 2 less than 2], the other being that kind of mean which exceeds and is exceeded by an equal number. Where there were intervals of 3/2 and of 4/3 and of 9/8, made by the connecting terms in the former intervals, he filled up all the intervals of 4/3 with the interval of 9/8, leaving a fraction over; and the interval which this fraction expressed was in the ratio of 256 to 243.

The numbers in this text are descriptions of ratios between notes in the music of the time of the writing. This is the conceptual framework in support of the experience and idea of The Music of the Spheres. We are of a tradition that for 3000 years or so now, has invited us to hear the harmony of the truths of our life in this universe. Let Mazzaroth, then, remember its song is the music of the Garland of Earth. Our music, our songs, belong to the family of all the melodies of spacetime.

To bring the garland of the ecliptic and the celestial equator home, first, we are called to redress an error of our Ancestors. They assumed that there are literal objects in a literal vault of heaven that control the paths of the sun, moon, and planets. Plato’s “X” of the Maker is how it looks while standing on the northern hemisphere of the globe of our planet.

As Earth turns on its axis mundi, its wholeness includes our life-sustaining atmosphere. We are always turning, and seeing through the body of the atmosphere. We are always in the bi-polar, seasonal affected order of Earth.

It Works If You Work It

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Unlike Ulysses the Romanized Greek hero, Ulysses, the book, would never make it home after its war during Joyce’s lifetime. Though not officially banned in Ireland, if the book had been imported, there were fears that both the tome and its author would be officially banned and exiled. The year 1966 is my best hunch for when Ulysses could easily enter Ireland. (I’m listening to persons who want to teach me on this.) I think this is because of the profound role of Catholicism in Ireland and it was not until 1966 that the Catholic Index of banned books was abolished.

James Joyce, Nora Barnacle, and their son, Giorgio Joyce, are buried in Zurich, Switzerland. Their daughter, Giorgio’s sister, Lucia, suffered with mental illness. She died far from the rest of her family in 1982 and is buried at Kingsthorpe Cemetery, Northampton.

To end our walking and meeting as Christs on the road together, I leave these final hints. Personally, I’ve been approaching soul-life using the union of ecopsychology, evolutionary astrology, birthchart, zodiac, Hermeticism, alchemy, the 12 Steps of Recovery, our own Indigenous Western traditions, in symboisis with Indigenous wisdom. I think it is a more peaceful and gentle way to live with others with All Our Relatives. I could not be writing this now without the mentors I have known and still know. I most certainly could not be writing this without having the wonderful libraries of the State of Ohio. They are among the best of the planet.

As I stressed above, there exists a mental, emotional, physical, spiritual health, clear-minded embeddedness within planetary seasonal sacred text. Not only that, but here, at the end, I can attest that the music of our planet’s seasonal sacred songs harmonize with the solar, galactic and cosmological multiscient symphony. When we get the timing and the tuning right, we can see into and hear it all.

To be (Your Name Here)-Christ is a journey. Certainly, all who are born arrive with the potential to bring forth an awakened soul in relation to all that is. You are called to participate in your own educational process. In the 12 Steps of Recovery, they say, It works if you work it. There is a similar saying in the Gospel of Thomas:

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

I hear this now as a Call to humanity as a whole. We have it in us to bring about the turning point into a World of Beauty and Rhythm. May our mutual goal be a new realization of a global climate change of our species. The clearing atmosphere during the Corona Virus pandemic and global Black Lives Matter protests resonate an expanded inborn universal worth and gratitude for life.

The rest of this is to be sung as a finale:

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)

The Turning Point of evolutionary transformation of human identity is now over a century old. Here is Sir Oliver Lodge with an update from his 1908, Man and the Universe:

A discovery once made by the human race is permanent: it fades no more and its influence grows from age to age. We are now beginning to realize a further step in the process of atonement. We are rising to the conviction that we are part of nature, and so, a part of God, that the whole creation — the One and the Many and All-One – is working together towards some great end: and that now, after ages of development, we have at last become conscious portions of the great scheme and can co-operate in it with knowledge and with joy. We are no aliens in a foreign universe governed by an outside God: we are parts of a developing whole, all enfolded in an embracing and interpenetrating love, of which we too, each to other, sometimes experience the joy too deep for words. And this strengthening vision, this sense of union with Divinity, thus, and not anything artificial or legal or commercial, is what science one day will tell us is the inner meaning of the Redemption of Man. (p. 234)

Consider now too how Ervin Laszlo’s 2017 Credo , reflects the growing edge of science (and consciousness) Lodge prophesied:

I am part of the world. The world is not outside of me, and I am not outside of the world. The world is in me, and I am in the world.

I am more than a skin-and-bone material organism: my body, and its cells and organs are manifestations of what is truly me: a self-sustaining, self-evolving dynamic system arising, persisting and developing in interaction with other such systems and with the world around me.

…A healthy person has pleasure in giving: it is a higher pleasure than having. I am healthy and whole when I value giving over having. The true measure of accomplishment and excellence is my readiness to give, whatever I can give without harming myself, my family and those in my care. A community that values giving over having is a community of healthy persons, thriving through solidarity and love. Sharing enhances the community, while possessing and accumulating creates demarcation, invites competition and fuels envy. The share-society is the norm for all communities of life on the planet; the have-society is an aberration.

Only life and its development have intrinsic value as ends in themselves. All other things have value only insofar as they add to or enhance life and its development. Material things, and the energies and substances they need or generate, have value only insofar they contribute to the development of life in the community of all beings on the planet.

In my own verse in this Great Song, your Author and Host’s voice now joins in:

With all your love and courage, choose to gather for the happiness of all beings. Participate in communion with the collective ecological conscious and unconscious. Know the awe that opens your human heart to the Mystery of life. May your intermingling be recognized by an ensouled, living atmosphere of warmth, love, surprise and humor that makes your life-cycles worth living in enduring planetary and interplanetary relationships. May synchronistic anomalous, synesthetic, paranormal, psychokinetic, miraculous, prophetic, numinous, aesthetic arrest experiences that are immanent to the transcendent occur in your midst.

May you awaken among friends.

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

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

Orphan Soul, ending

When you meet the Orphan Soul

Talk of your loved ones, from the young to the Invisible

Share this ritual, bless the humankind

With a Mysterious Heart

Who is In Love with Time

Minds from All Times visit our time

Minds from all time, They are Visiting Our Time.

Heliosphere, in solarsystemcentral.com — *Heliosphere,* in solarsystemcentral.com

Image by Jim Slater from Creative Commons

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

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

[pp. 105-107, in Thou Art That, by Campbell]

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