👁For the Eskimos, when one falls ill, one takes on a new name, a new diseased personality. To get over a disease, one must quite literally “get over” it by transcending it, that is, by dying. The only hope for cure lies in the death of the ill personality. Health requires death.
Perhaps this is what Socrates meant with his last obscure words about owing a sacrificial cock to Asklepiós. Once the cocky pride of life that crows hopefully at each day’s dawning is sacrificed, the instinct for tomorrow is yielded. Death then is the cure and the salvation and not just a last, worst stage of a disease. The cock crow at dawn also heralds resurrection of the light. But the victory over disease and the new day begins only when the ambition for it has been abandoned upon the altar. The disease which the experience of death cures is the rage to live. .
An analyst often finds himself purposely passing by the symptoms appearing in his practice. Rather than investigate these symptoms, he turns to the person’s life which has fostered the pathology. His premise is that the disease has its meaning in the life of the patient and he tries to understand this meaning. He cannot hold out the usual hope for cure or even relief of symptoms. His analytical experience says that the hope which the patient presents is part of the pathology itself. The patient’s hope arises as an essential part of the constellation of his suffering. It is frequently governed by impossible demands to be free of suffering itself. The same condition that constellated the symptoms is just the condition which these symptoms are interrupting and killing- or curing. Therefore, an analyst does not hope for a return to that condition out of which the symptoms and the hope for relief arose. Because hope has this core of illusion it favors repression. By hoping for the status quo ante, we repress the present state of weakness and suffering and all it can bring. Postures of strength are responsible for many major complaints today–ulcers, vascular and coronary conditions, high blood pressure, stress syndrome, alcoholism, highway and sport accidents, mental breakdown. The will to fall ill, like the suicide impulse, leads patient and physician face to face with morbidity, which stubbornly returns in spite of all hope to the contrary. One might ask if medical hope itself is not partly responsible for recurrent illness; since it never fully allows for weakness and suffering the death experience is not able to produce its meaning. Experiences are cheated of their thorough effect by speedy recovery. Until the soul has got what it wants, it must fall ill again. And another iatrogenic vicious circle of recurrent illness begins. 👁 (James Hillman ,Suicide and the Soul)
As an analysis proceeds, it moves inward from the case history toward the soul history, that is, it explores complexes more for their archetypal meanings and less for their traumatic history. Soul history is recaptured by separating it from obfuscations in case history. The immediate family, for instance, become the real people they are, undistorted by inner meanings which they had been forced to carry. The rediscovery of soul history shows itself in the reawakening of emotion, fantasy, and dream, in a sense of mythological destiny penetrated by the transpersonal, and by spontaneous acausal time. It reflects the “cure” from a chronic identification of the soul with outer events, places, and people. As this separation occurs, one is no longer a case but a person.
James HillmanSoul history emerges as one sheds case history, or, in other words, as one dies to the world as an arena of projection. Soul history is a living obituary, recording life from the point of view of death, giving the uniqueness of a person sub specie acternitatis. As one builds one’s death, so one writes one’s own obituary in one’s soul history.
“To sense penetratingly we must imagine, and to imagine accurately we must sense.”
James Hillman
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“Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each new event as it is, its sensuous presentation as a face bespeaking its interior image – in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing, God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street.”
James HillmanThere is a further consequent of the credit one pays to the im- ages of the soul. A new feeling of self-forgiveness and self-acceptance begins to spread and circulate. It is as if the heart and the left side were extending their dominion. Shadow aspects of the personality continue to play their burdensome roles but now within a larger tale, the myth of oneself, just what one is which begins to feel as if that is how one is meant to be. My myth becomes my truth; my life symbolic and allegorical. Self-forgiveness, self-acceptance, self-love; more, one finds oneself sinful but not guilty, grateful for the sins one has and not another’s, loving one’s lot even to the point of desire to have and to be always in this vivid inner connection with one’s own individual portion. Such strong experiences of religious emotion seem to be the gift again of the anima.
James HillmanThe third step is gratuitous. It refers to the free and creative appearance of imagination, as if the inner world now come to life begins to act spontaneously, by itself, undirected and even unattended by ego-consciousness. The inner world not only begins more and more to take care of itself, producing crises and resolving them within its own transformations, but it also takes care of you, your ego-worries and ego-claims. This is the feminine Shakti of India at a higher state; it is also the nine Muses responsible for culture and creativity. One feels lived by imagination.
James HillmanPanic, especially at night when the citadel darkens and the heroic ego sleeps, is a direct participation mystique in nature, a fundamental, even ontological experience of the world as alive and in dread. Objects become subjects; they move with life while one is oneself paralyzed with fear. When existence is experienced through instinctual levels of fear, aggression, hunger or sexuality, images take on compelling life of their own. The imaginal is never more vivid than when we are connected with it instinctually. The world alive is of course animism; that this living world is divine and imaged by different gods with attributes and characteristics is polytheistic pantheism. That fear, dread, horror are natural is wisdom. In Whitehead’s term nature alive means Pan, and panic flings open a door into this reality.
James Hillman“A world without soul offers no intimacy. Things are left out in the cold, each object by definition cast away before it is manufactured, lifeless litter and junk, taking its value wholly from my consumptive desire to have and to hold, wholly dependent on the subject to breathe it into life with personal desire. When particulars have no essential virtue, then my own virtue as a particular depends wholly and only on my subjectivity or on your desire for me, or fear of me: I must be desirable, attractive, a sex-object, or win importance and power. For without these investments in my particular person, coming either from your subjectivity or my own, I too am but a dead thing among dead things, potentially forever lonely.”“Isn’t devotio to anima the calling of psychology? So, another deep-seated reason for this book is to provide grounding for the vision of soul in psychology, so that psychology doesn’t abandon itself to the archetypal perspectives of the child and developmentalism or the mother and material causalism. The vision of soul given by anima is more than just one more perspective. The call of soul convinces; it is a seduction into psychological faith, a faith in images and the thought of the heart, into an animation of the world. Anima attaches and involves. She makes us fall into love. We cannot remain the detached observer looking through a lens. In fact, she probably doesn’t partake in optical metaphors at all. Instead, she is continually weaving, stewing, and enchanting consciousness into passionate attachments away from the vantage point of a perspective.
(James Hillman, Anima, ix-x)I like to imagine a person’s psyche to be like a boardinghouse full of characters. The ones who show up regularly and who habitually follow the house rules may not have met other long-term residents who stay behind closed doors, or who only appear at night. An adequate theory of character must make room for character actors, for the stuntmen and animal handlers, for all the figures who play bit parts and produce unexpected acts. They often make the show fateful, or tragic, or farcically absurd.
James HillmanDRAMATIC TENSIONS If psychotherapy is to understand the dreaming soul from within, it had best turn to “theatrical logic.” The nature of mind as it presents itself most immediately has a specific form: Dionysian form. Dionysus may be the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, but this force is not dumb. It has an internal organization. In psychology this language speaks not genetically, not biochemically in the information of DNA codes, but directly in Dionysus’s own art form, theatrical poetics. This means the dream is not a coded message at all, but a display, a Schau, in which the dreamer himself plays a part or is in the audience, and thus always involved. No wonder that Aristotle placed psychotherapy (catharsis) in the context of theater. Our lives are the enactment of our dreams; our case histories are from the very beginning, archetypally, dramas; we are masks (personae) through which the gods sound (personare). Like dreams, inner fantasy too has the compelling logic of theater.
James HillmanDionysian consciousness understands the conflicts in our stories through dramatic tensions and not through conceptual opposites; we are composed of agonies not polarities. Dionysian consciousness is the mode of making sense of our lives and worlds through awareness of mimesis, recognizing that our entire case history is an enactment, “either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical- comical-pastoral,” and that to be “psychological” means to see myself in the masks of this particular fiction that is my fate to enact. Finally, to view ourselves from within a drama refers to the religious origins, not only of drama, but of the mythical enactments that we perform and name with the mask of “behavior.”
Salt is the mineral substance or objective ground of personal experience making experience possible. No salt, no experiencing- merely a running on and running through of events without psychic body. Thus salt makes events sensed and felt, giving us each a sense of the personal–my tears, my sweat and blood, my taste and value.
The entire alchemical opus hangs on the ability to experience subjectively. Hence it is said in The Golden Tract: “He who works without salt will never raise dead bodies.” The matters are only macrocosmic and chemical, out there, dead unless one works with salt. These intensely personal experiences which give taste and flavor to events are nonetheless common to all-both mine and yet common as blood, as urine, as salt. In other words, salt acts like the ground of subjectivity (“That which is left at the bottom of our distilling vessel is our salt-that is to say our earth.”). It makes possible what psychology calls felt experience. So, we must turn to this same ground to mine our salt.
James Hillman, Salt
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Felt experience takes on a radically altered meaning in the light of alchemical salt. We may imagine our deep hurts not merely as wounds to be healed but as salt mines from which we gain a precious essence and without which the soul cannot live. The fact that we return to these deep hurts, in remorse and regret, in repentance and revenge, indicates a psychic need beyond a mere mechanical repetition compulsion. Instead, the soul has a drive to remember; it is like an animal that returns to its salt licks; the soul licks at its own wounds to derive sustenance therefrom. We make salt in our suffering and, by working through our sufferings, we gain salt, healing the soul of its salt-deficiency.Salt requires a pinch, feeling the pinch of the event that stings; lead seems to require time, waiting it through. What results from the salt cure is a new sense of what happened, a new appreciation of its virtue for soul. Salt may also be mined from whatever is stable. As the principle of stability whose alchemical sign was a square, salt can be mined from the rocks of concrete experience, those fixities which mark our lives with defined positions. These places are not merely solid facts-my degree, my property, my car accident, my war record, my divorce; these are also places where psychic body is salted away and stored. These rocks, when recognized and owned, belong to the history of my soul, where it has been salted down by the fixities of experience, giving a certain crystallization to my nature and keeping me from inflammations and volatilizations.Though we do not make it by fire, we do make salt by means of dissolutions. Salt is soluble. Weeping, bleeding, sweating, urinating bring salt out of its interior underground mines. It appears in our moistures, which are the flow of salt to the surface. “During the work the salt assumes the appearance of blood” (CW’ 14, 8337). Moments of dissolution are not mere collapses; they release a sense of personal human value from the encrustations of habit. “I too am a human being worth my salt”-hence my blood, sweat, and tears.Viewed from the perspective of salt, early traumas are moments of initiation into the sense of being a me with a subjective personal interior. We tend to fixate on what was done to us and who did it: resentment, revenge. But what psychologically matters is that it was done: the blow, the blood, the betrayal. Like the ashes which are rubbed into the wounds at initiation rites to purify and scarify, the soul is marked by its trauma. Salt still is touched to the body in Christian Baptism, and eaten still at Jewish Pessach in ritual remembrance of trauma. A trauma is a salt mine; it is a fixed place for reflection about the nature and value of my personal being, where memory originates and personal history begins. These traumatic events initiate in the soul a sense of its embodiment as a Vulnerable experiencing subject.The paradigmatic story of “looking back” is that of Lot’s wife. (Lot and Lot’s wife were even used as alchemical terms for salt- Jobnson’s Dictionary.) Because Lot’s wife could not refrain from looking back at the destruction of Sodom from which they had been saved, she was turned to a pillar of salt. Jewish commentators on the tale say that her mother-love made her look behind to see whether her married daughters were following; and Christian comments on Luke 17:32 also see the source of her move in remembrances of family and relatives, personal subjectivities of feeling. Evidently, family fixations are also salt mines. The disappointments, worries, smarts of mother-complex love–the evening with the photograph album, the keepsakes- are ways the psyche produces salt, returning to events in order to turn them into experiences.The danger here is always fixation, whether in recollection, childhood trauma, or in a literalized and personalized notion of experience itself: “I am what I have experienced.” Paracelsus defined salt as the principle of fixation (Il:366).
ALchemical psychology remarkably condenses the two traits of the lion heart–the conformity of its thought and its objectification- into the alchemical substance, sulfur, the principle of “combustibility,” the magna famma. “Where is the sulfur to be found? asks Kramer, a fourteenth-century English Benedictine. “In all substances, all things in the world–metals, herbs, trees, animals, stones, are its ore.
Everything that suddenly lights up, draws our joy, fares with beauty–each bush a god burning: this is the alchemical sulfur, the flammable face of the world, its phlogiston, its aureole of desire, enthymesis everywhere. That fat of goodness we reach toward as consumers is the active image in each thing, the active imagination of the anima mundi that fires the heart and provokes it out.
(James Hillman, Thought of the Heart )
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At the same time that sulfur conflagrates, it also coagulates; it is that which sticks, the mucilage, “the gum,” the joiner, the stickiness of attachment. Sulfur literalizes the heart’s desire at the very instant that the thymos enthuses. Conflagration and coagulation occur together. Desire and its object become indistinguishable. What I burn with attaches me to it; I am anointed by the fat of my own desire, captive to my own enthusiasm, and thus in exile from my heart at the very moment I seem most to own it. We lose our soul in the moment of discovering it: “Sweet Helen,” says Marlowe’s Faustus, “make me immortal with a kiss./Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!” Hence Heraclitus had to oppose thymos and psyche: “Whatever thymos wishes, it buys at the expense of soul.”Psychology now calls this love in the heart of the lion compul- sive projection. The alchemical basis of this kind of projection is actually the sulfur in the heart that does not recognize it is imagining. The objective himma is literalized into the objects of its desire. Imagination is thrown outward, ahead of itself; and the task is less to take back these kinds of projections -who takes them back and where are they put–but more to leap after the projectile reclaiming it as imagination, thereby recognizing that himma demands that images always be experienced as sensuous independent bodies. There are styles of projection: it is not a unitary mechanism. Cordial projection requires an equally leonine mode of consciousness: pride, magnanimity, courage. To desire and to see through desire–this is the courage that the heart requires.As Jung says: “Sulphur represents the active substance of the sun… the motive factor in consciousness, on the one hand Will and on the other Compulsion” (CW 14, S15t). Compulsion becomes will through courage; it is in the heart that the operations upon sulfur are performed. We shall come back to these operations in the second part. For now it is enough to recognize compulsive projection to be a necessary activity of the sulfur, as the way in which this heart thinks, where thought and desire are one.Our lion rages and our sulfur burns. Our saint is eaten by lions. We cannot let loose our aesthetic outrage in its simple form. Alchemical psychology recognized this need for work on the lion. Alchemical psychology considered the black and red sulfurs, and the green lion, in desperate need of subliming. One well-known method cuts off the green lion’s paws, depriving it of its reach into the world. Yet it stays alive as a succus vitae in the heart, for “green is the color of the heart and of the vitality of the heart,” as we know from Corbin. The color of the himma must be green like the natural driving sulfur that is also the green/red copper goddess Venus. This ardent green has to be enlightened, the sulfur chastened: a whitening of the heart.To make white the heart is an opus contra naturam. We expect the heart to be red as its natural blood, green as its hopeful desire. This heart operation originates in the dilemma presented by sulfur: the imagination captive in its sulfur that both burns and coagulates at the same instant, imagination held fused into its desire and its desire fused with its object. The himma blinded, unable to distinguish between feeling and image, image and object, object and subject, true imagining and illusion.Alchemy often speaks of subliming to a sulfur white as snow. This is not only an operation of calming and cooling, the “Doves of Diana.” In fact sublimation requires going with the fire, like curing like, raising the temperature to a white heat so as to destroy all coagulations in the intensity of the desire, so that what one desires No longer matters, even as it matters most, mattering now sublimed translucent, all flame.
I am the pupil in the center of the eye I am the pupae in the center of the sky I am the purpose of the moon and the mind I am the purplepink lustre of the rotting rind.
I am moved not by your manipulation I am smoothed not by your capitulation I am removed from your observation I am soothed by your undulation.
But what does this mean, what does this mean Where does this lead me, the silver queen the rampant wanderer of time and rhyme the vagabond rambler through moistened minds?
And where does this take me, what forgotten land what does this make me, and by whose hand where will I lay my weary head my friend when the path that I tread winds to the end?
Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It's still going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time.
For example, it never occurred to me before how many faces there are. There are multitudes of people, but there are many more faces, because each person has several of them. There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, gets dirty, splits at the seams, stretches like gloves worn during a long journey. They are thrifty, uncomplicated people; they never change it, never even have it cleaned. It's good enough, they say, and who can convince them of the contrary? Of course, since they have several faces, you might wonder what they do with the other ones. They keep them in storage. Their children will wear them. But sometimes it also happens that their dogs go out wearing them. And why not? A face is a face.
Other people change faces incredibly fast, put on one after another, and wear them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply; but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one. There is, to be sure, something tragic about this. They are not accustomed to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week, has holes in it, is in many places as thin as paper, and then, little by little, the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on.
But the woman, the woman: she had completely fallen into herself, forward into her hands. It was on the corner of rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I began to walk quietly as soon as I saw her. When poor people are thinking, they shouldn't be disturbed. Perhaps their idea will still occur to them.
The street was too empty; its emptiness had gotten bored and pulled my steps out from under my feet and clattered around in them, all over the street, as if they were wooden clogs. The woman sat up, frightened, she pulled out of herself, too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there: its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bare flayed head waiting there, faceless.
Dreamtime January 26, 2017 (Holographic Explorations)
I am in a very subtle dimensional space and my intent is to explore various particles of my Body, I focus my energy and travel into different parts of my self, each fragment containing the Whole. I feel as if I am recalibrating and retuning myself, so that I can align with my Will in a way that will have positive repercussions for my waking world. There is a theme also of astrological axis'. I am exploring energetically my particular blueprint/program for this current RPG consensus reality.…..pondering how I can best use the Code I wrote myself into, upon entering this dimension at birth. There is a Code for every expression of Self here, and it expresses itself via the natal chart in each person that comes to Embody that Facet of the Whole. Like a computer program, each code is made of basic archetypal energies/ sourceSelves that act as a script……that our embodiment plays out in an unfolding Drama. I focus on my fixed axis of Asc/Scorpio Dsc/Taurus MC/Leo/ IC/Aquarius…and the fact the nodal axis is exactly conjunct the vertical MC/IC axis.and that the 'rulers/archetypes/source codes' of each of the fixed poles are conjunct each other.ie the ruler of my asc/scorpio (pluto) is exactly conjunct the ruler of my Dsc/Taurus (Venus) in the 12th house and the rulers of my IC/MC axis (Sun and Uranus) are exactly conjunct in my 1st house. 12th being akin to the formless/ the 1st as Self, thus the two acting to bring the poles together. So all four rulers are in deep communion. I see the vertical axis depth of Being, and the horizontal axis as Breadth of Being. Vertical axis/spine/nervous system/world tree...horizontal axis extended arms/creative linear expression of one particula facet of SElf in a manifested world. 'Man cannot live by Bread'th alone' ; ) I also reflect upon the fact that my Mars is exact conjunct the 'galactic center' or 'black sun' or 'great central sun' or 'dark rift' or center of milky way. I realize this is like a direct connection to the central core processor of this holographic playscape creation program .
..I ruminate on the metaphor and reflection of the Trip event, ( age 19 eating 13 hits acid and the experience that was catalyzed) ….which was strongly energized by Astro-transits…. And being plugged in to the Universal Telephone…overwhelmed by the codes and equations of this creation, to the point where I had the choice of whether to come back into the game, or to continue on surfing the fractals in an entirely different focal point of Self. All this is going through my lucid dreaming awareness, and I then realize that I was sleeping with my right arm straight above my head, and my left along the side of my body, and that I do that often, and that it seems connected to the circuit of energy connection between my dreamingbody and physical body…as if I am plugging in. I am then in a dual state of awareness of my physical environment and my Dream environment, which is more like a holographic field of information. As I begin to stir from the Dreaming, I analyze the fact That the more I learn to penetrate the Codes that make up my Earth body design and formation (natal chart energies as particle expressions of that exact moment in the 'universe' expressing itself in this dimension as Charleen while in the deeper dimensions expressed as Waveform fluid fractal self)…the more fully I can express That Which I Am.So do we choose which facet of the universe we want to experience, and live out as Self, and then step into the script/program........or are we chosen?
🔥From the outside, the appearance of the daimones seems to offer ethical relativity: a paradise of seductions and escapades. But this fantasy of ethical relativity betrays a consciousness that is not yet inside the imaginal world, that does not Know Thyself from within its images. In other words, the question of ethical relativity which raises its head whenever one speaks of a “pandemonium of images” and a plurality of gods is answered by the dedication which the images demand. It is they-not we–who demand meticulous crafting into jeweled idols; they, who call for ritualized devotions, who insist they be consulted before we act. Images are the compelling source of morality and religion as well as the conscientiousness of art. And, as we do not make them up, so we do not make up our response to them, but are “taught” this response by them as moral instances. It is when we lose the images that we become moralistic, as if the morality contained within the images becomes a dissociated, free-floating guilt, a conscience without face.
When an image is realized-fully imagined as a living being other than myself-then it becomes a psychopompos, a guide with a soul having its own inherent limitation and necessity. It is this image and no other, so that the conceptual questions of moral pluralism and relativism fade in front of the actual engagement with the image. The supposed creative pandemonium of the teeming imagination is limited to its phenomenal appearance in a particular image, that specific one which has come to me pregnant with significance and intention, a necessary angel as it appears here and now and which teaches the hand to represent it, the ear to hear, and the heart how to respond. There is thus revealed through this engagement a morality of the image. Psychological morality which derives from the imaginal is no longer a “new ethics” of shadow integration by means of that same old Kantian ego and its heroic wrestlings with abstract dualisms. The ego is no longer the place where morality resides, a philosophical position that had wrested morality from the imagination thereby demonizing it. Instead, it is the daimon who is our preceptor, our spiritus rector.🔥
Dreamtime Astral Adventure February 8 2013…..early morning Dreaming. “I Must Find and Wake Lisl”
NOte: Was at lisls til a little after 2. Had drank a shot or so of cherry moonshine and a beer, but nothing more. Felt very alert and lucid, not typical for being that late. We had been speaking in depth about various things like consciousness and OBE etc. When I got home, I spoke to the Purple Sage Trout and afterwards was totally bombed and came in and went straight to bed. I was so tired and heavy, and as i took off my shoes I thought to myself ‘good god, i just wanna lay down and sink into my pillows….fuck dreaming and whatever else, all I care about is a long deep sleep in the black void’ …..I laid down around 3am. Shortly after falling asleep, this is what I experienced
⭐️I am in the course of a normal ‘dream’ and I suddenly catch on that I am ‘dreaming’ and immediately the very ‘air’ changes around me, It is like walking thru a mist into a more vivid reality, almost like the dream dissolves away all around me, and I can see the ‘pixels’ start to oscillate higher or and I feel that I am going incredibly Lucid and get super excited. The first thing I do is stretch my arms above my head and ‘lift off’ with my Intent, shooting straight up into the sky. As I am traveling up at great speeds, I think to myself, ‘I cant imagine I will be able to retain lucidity in the Astral very long, so I better get straight to what I want to do’….
Once I get up a certain distance, im looking below at earth and I dive straight down……im gathering momentum and intensity, rocketing toward earth, eyes open, energy rushing past me til I am inside the vortex, riding the wormhole down faster and faster; at a certain point I focus my intent and INTEND to find Lisl. As I am swirling thru at immense velocity with my Intention to Find Lisl I repeat to myself ‘I am with Lisl I am with Lisl’ trying to tune into her and make my way there. Instantaneous, often…..when there is no conflicting or subconscious thoughts that make ones path stray. But when I ‘arrive’ at destination, out of the vortex/wormhole…I am in a large building, industrial style. I know I am not in the vicinity of Lisls, and so wonder where I can be, how did I ‘think’ or ‘intend’ myself to this spot. So Im exploring the building a little bit, very conscious of the fact that its been a long time since Ive had enough focus and ability to keep my Astral Aware and Vivid. I find It strange that I was able to get OBE while so tired and under the influence of smoke…which often makes it harder for me.
Im enjoying walking thru the building but start to get impatient so I just go up thru the ceilings and layer thru layer til I get to the roof. I look out over the landscape and I do not recognize it…..its not a big city but its not a tiny place either. I am trying to orient myself, thinking….which direction to Lisl? The whole time my focus is on trying to Find LiSL….determined to get to her and get her awake in the astral. I give up on physically trying to orient myself. I go to method 2 and close my ‘eyes’ and INTEND to be with Lisl…..I dive from the building to build focus and momentum and again find myself in the Vortex and I just keep my Intent focused on Lisl. This time i find myself around some people. I have drawn attention from some folks who come over and are interested in what or who I am…..their energy turns to somewhat threatening, and I am trying to ‘push back’ and I struggle with them, trying to ‘fight’ them away or something, its doing no good, their force is stronger the more I resist. SO I suddenly remember (its been a good while since Ive consistently done astral travel/adventures) that they can do nothing to me when I am in the Love vibration….Immediately I hold up my two palms, toward them, and INTEND (hard to explain other than knowing the feeling of using energy with INTENT and the art of INTENDING which is a little different energetically/astral than what many think of as INTENTIONS etc on this plane) Love coming from my palms toward them. Immediately they are kept at a distance, they cannot come past the ‘barrier’ of love that is coming from my hands and that I am now surrounding myself in. As I do this, I also remember that I can travel via this energy in a different way. I want to get out of wherever I have found my way into, im obviously not welcome there, and I put palms toward earth, and Intend again, the love energy, and the force propells me like a rocket up into the sky……
Im playing with this energy, practicing maneuvering with the force of my Intent as manifest thru my palms….and getting better and better able to modulate myself. I then, again, create/stretch into a Vortex and am just letting it take me wherever it goes, thinking that maybe I should just follow wherever my subconscious is wanting to take me….its like resting in an all embracing ocean of vibration……but with the feeling of vast movevement all around me. I stop. Everything is crisp and lucid. Im on a hill, and way off in the distance I can see lights and what seems to be a city….I am drawn to it, in a playful manner, and I think to myself that ‘wow, im still Awake in the AStral, and its already been quite a while….”
I dont want to lose focus so I stretch method up into the sky again and dive back down, generating velocity which helps me to stay focused and alert and not fade into ‘dreaming’….so i decide I will take a little fun flight over to that city way in the distance. Instead of flying the way I usually do though, I play more with the IntentLOVE from my palms and I lay on my back, though hovering in the air about 10 feet above the ground…..I ‘boost’ myself, again taking off like a rocket, backwards, and as if laying looking at the sky. Its almost like sledding on an air current. As I get close to the city I think to myself ‘this is NYC!!!!’ and I boost up so I can get a better perspective and Im way above so that I can get the birds eye view of the lights and all that. I revel and feel so free and joyous. But i also realize time is running out, there is a sense of urgency of not letting this Lucidity go to waste. I have ‘work to do’.
So again, I try to get to Lisl. I end up in some house. There is someone asleep in a bed, I guess Im in a bedroom. Its still dark, very early morning Im guessing….but inching closer to dawn. I dont want to be where I am, because I am aware that I do not know the person asleep and I am trying to find Lisl, not a stranger. I am starting to lose Focus, my Energy is waning, and as I try to go thru the wall to pass right thru I bump it at first. I gather myself, try to generate energy so I dont completely fade into ‘dreaming’ and I am able to pull myself thru the wall…..not smoothly like when i have alot of Intent stored up/Energy….but almost like trudging thru, though im only passing thru a maybe 1.5-2 foot wall. It takes me a little bit to get myself thru it, as if my Density is intensifying, my ability to vibrate high enough to keep percieving and having access to my Awareness and Lucidiy is shifting. But I get outside and Im then looking up into the sky, there is one ‘star’ that seems huge to me, or is in some way ‘different’ with my astral eyes, it seems like its Calling Me….like Its beckoning. I think to self, ‘well I will see if i can get all the way up there and maybe from that vantage point I can figure out which direction to go for Lisl’, since I obviously cannot keep stray thoughts from redirecting my attempts to get to her. So I zoom up toward this Star, all the while focusing on Lisls Energy, and trying to tune in, so I can match vibration and ‘be there’ (which is usually how I do it)……but I end up just playing in the air, way out in space, practicing shifting my energy and intent and using my hands for focusing Love and all that.
Im then back in a flash to my apartment……I know that I am nearing waking, I cant maintain the Consciousness or the Energy/Astral Focus….but I dont want it to end, Im fighting against it….and I literally reach up thru the ceiling, hardly able to get off the ground at this point, but manage to get my hands thru the ceiling, and can feel each individual layer of the spackle and the boards and etc etc….very slowly and laboriously pulling my way up thru……to where I feel like im caught halfway, dangling out, because I am unable to keep the vibration high enough to maneuver anymore. Then I snap awake.
Thrilled about the experience. Its about 6am. I look toward the window….I can see very light snow falling, just barely, and I think to myself ‘well, here we go STORM!’ then I lay for awhile going over and over the experience, with a massive amount of excitement, yet wonder, at how i managed to have enough lucidity to go Astral, so late at night and so tired and after being ‘not clear headed’ when falling asleep. The core of the dream was that It was So important to find Lisl so I could not only excitedly tell her I was OBE-ing….but to help her ‘get out of her body too’, if I could do that, it would be way easier for her to manage the experience herself next time. Its like creating a neuronal path, once the ‘door is opened’ its easier and easier to move thru it at will.
Anthropologists describe a condition among "primitive" peoples called "loss of soul." In this condition a man is out of himself, unable to find either the outer connection between humans or the inner connection to himself. He is unable to take part in his society, its rituals, and traditions. They are dead to him, he to them. His connection to family, totem, nature, is gone. Until he regains his soul he Is not a true human. He is “not there." It is as if he had never been initiated, been given a name, come into real being. His soul may not only be lost; it may also be possessed, bewitched, ill, transposed into an object, animal, place, or another person. Without this soul, he has lost the sense of belonging and the sense of being in communion with the powers and the gods. They no longer reach him; he cannot pray, nor sacrifice, nor dance. His personal myth and his connection to the larger myth of his people, as raison d'être, is lost. Yet he is not sick with disease, nor is he out of his mind. He has simply lost his soul. He may even die. We become lonely. Other relevant parallels with ourselves today need not be spelled out.
One day in Burghölzli, the famous institute in Zurich where the words schizophrenia and complex were born, I watched a woman being interviewed. She sat in a wheelchair because she was elderlyand feeble. She said that she was dead for she had lost her heart. The psychiatrist asked her to place her hand over her breast to feel her heart beating: it must still be there if she could feel its beat. "That," she said, "is not my real heart." She and the psychiatrist looked at each other. There was nothing more to say. Like the primitive who has lost his soul, she had lost the loving courageous connection to life--and that is the real heart, not the ticker which can as well pulsate isolated in a glass bottle. This is a different view of reality from the usual one. It is so radically different that it forms part of the syndrome of insanity. But one can have as much understanding for the woman in her psychotic depersonalization as for the view of reality of the man attempting to convince her that her heart was indeed still there. Despite the elaborate and moneyed systems of medical research and the advertisements of the health and recreation industries to prove that the real is the physical and that loss of heart and loss of soul are only in the mind, I believe the "primitive" and the woman in the hospital: we can and do lose our souls. I believe with Jung that each of us is “modern man in search of a soul."
Because symptoms lead to soul, the cure of symptoms may also cure away soul, get rid of just what is beginning to show, at first tortured and crying for help, comfort, and love, but which is the soul in the neurosis trying to make itself heard, trying to impress the stupid and stubborn mind--that impotent mule which insists on going its unchanging obstinate way. The right reaction to a symptom may as well be a welcoming rather than laments and demands for remedies, for the symptom is the first herald of an awakening psyche which will not tolerate any more abuse. Through the symptom the psyche demands attention. Attention means attending to, tending, a certain tender care of, as well as waiting, pausing, listen ing. It takes a span of time and a tension of patience. Precisely what each symptom needs is time and tender care and attention. Just this same attitude is what the soul needs in order to be felt and heard.
So it is often little wonder that it takes a breakdown, an actual illness, for someone to report the most extraordinary experiences of, for instance, a new sense of time, of patience and waiting, and in the language of religious experience, of coming to the center, coming to oneself, letting go and coming home. The alchemists had an excellent image for the transformation of suffering and symptom into a value of the soul. A goal of the alchemical process was the pearl of great price. The pearl starts off as a bit of grit, a neurotic symptom or complaint, a bothersome irritant in one's secret inside flesh, which no defensive shell can protect oneself from. This is coated over, worked at day in day out, until the grit one day is a pearl; yet it still must be fished up from the depths and pried loose. Then when the grit is redeemed, it is worn. It must be worn on the warm skin to keep its luster: the redeemed complex which once caused suffering is exposed to public view as a virtue. The esoteric treasure gained through occult work becomes an exoteric splendor. To get rid of the symptom means to get rid of the chance to gain what may one day be of greatest value, even if at first an unbearable irritant, lowly, and disguised.
BlissNinja 