Don’t they know? They are all just electromagnetic pulses All just embryos in the body Of motherMatterMaterMatrix Placental playscapes practicing for ultimate Power in the Now Or Never
Don't they know? They all suck from the teat of the Same name What’s the Formula for this false Game? What’s the concoction that allows the blame To be placed outside Fingers pointed in chiding derision Forgetting that the Self Makes its own decisions And needs no Other to order decrees A sovereign Being earns its degrees On the zodiacal wheel No permission needed from any Pretense of Real Power This is Ours It’s now and Flowers Unfold when the hour is too old To cower any longer behind the soul Of latency The Elect of Life Electricity Spermatic emphatic God of pregnancy Sparks divine creation In Magnetic womb , Magdalenes elation To carry the sonic boom Of natures embodied satiation
Sacred Sacred ….. Scared with hatred and fake matrix Manipulation They all scream All hide in foggy dreams denying Their own hand in this plagiarism The Cluster of Cells where In-dwells the Hint Of sacrificial embodiment Asks only to hold the mirror
Do you know? Do you know Who you are? Are you a gob of flesh Staring into the abyss of imprisonment Angry at fragments of your own Disillusionment? Fears and tears and shame from years Of traumatic wounds And dismemberment? Are you a pulsing electromagnetic spectacle Of stardust impregnated into the divine mother I-And-US Unfolding embryonic supersonic lust For Life Wandering Waves of cosmic Dust Dancing the dream of Being As Body Bleeding with the intense need To See The True Seed that grows within This multidimensional PlayPen Again and again.
What’s the Formula for the artificial Algorithm That tosses you to and fro From -ism to -ism Falling prey to the slayers Of minds beauty And truth And dangling your sovereign self From the tight noose Of proof That red fish blue fish One fish two fish Keeps the Me And the You Twisted Into dichotomy Wishing for ancient sanctions So patiently Doctoring reality To give permission To step out of this glistening Wet-dream Steeped In sterile Seeds Injected into bodies That no longer Bleed. Free. The Self. And See. Differently.
….and awareness on thru-out the day, are the things that are the most alive within us at those moments, so yes, they are definitely dynamic, and multi layered, just like dreams, and I’ve found that I will exhaust a dream symbol and then a deeper level of awareness belonging to the symbol manifests, and so on, till the same thing means ten different things, depending upon the plane you are connecting with it on.
I like to think of objects as flirting with me, what I would say as happening when you noticed the smokestack and sidewalk being alive, when an object or even sensation catches your awareness, and you are attracted to it, for whatever reason, I would say it is flirting with you, with your awareness, and if you flirt back, you can go into a really deep experience, either of communion with the object or you can be put deep in touch with the corresponding impulse/object within yourself. I see those moments as potential portals to other dimensions of energy and awareness if they are utilized. It’s like lucid dreaming, twenty four hours a day, if I’m aware of objects in life the same way I’m aware of them in dream, and I navigate via my flirtations with the world around me, I remain lucid and clear and vibrant. It’s when things no longer catch my awareness, when they no longer needle their way into my attention, that I know I’ve become dull and stagnate, my energy is blocking the penetration and invitation of the object that is offering a chance of exhcange and communion with me. I know for a fact in my own experience, and from what I’ve heard and read, that objects dont appear the same on every vibrational level/plane, for example, when I am having an out of body experience, I may be in my own bedroom, but its not EXACTLY the same, each object tends to have an essential quality, and that quality is expressed differently depending upon the level of density of vibration it is percieved in. So a lamp may be a bit different, in structure or size or color or whatever, though it is in the same spot. Same with a couch, etc. So I have found that some of my objects in my home become more and more related to me thru percieving them on a more conclusive level of vibration/awareness, I see more of their essential quality, that is, and so I feel more in tune with it, more than just as an object taking up space, this is true for outer environments too. I have found that the deeper you go, into the frequency of awareness, the less definite things are in relation to the outside, concensual world. So if I am out of body and I am still at a density that can nearly move an object, or that may possibly appear to someone as an apparition, the environment I’m in will nearly exactly reflect the 'waking world’. But if I move, with more and more clarity, energy, and concentration, to a higher frequencty, the more and more shadowy the realms become and the more fluid my body becomes, and the more things are happening at onece, and you would need a deeper and deeper capacity to hold and channel universal energy at this point in order to hold your awareness at that level. So that to me explains why accounts of out of body travel/projection vary so much from person to person. Because depending upon the level of vibration of the persons 'soulbody' energybody dreambody whatever you want to term it, double, or whatever, the environment and the sort of experiences will correlate. So those who have a better capacity to hold highly charged energy and awareness would tend to have more experiences on the 'higher' planes, and it seems that the "higher' or more intense the vibration, the harder it is to navigate concsiously, that is why discipline/practice/and healthy living contribute to a deepening ability to traverse more intense layers of experience. You can contain more of the world around/and thus inside you.
Someone who doesnt have the capacity to hold energy sufficient to stay in a certain 'plane' would tend to have a negative experience of it, because the frequency bears down upon one with intensity, like pressure, that is so 'painful' that you can’t stay aware at that level for long … it feels like a huge current of electricity running thru you, numbing you with pain, until you drift back 'down' to a level more in keeping with your current 'charge' capacity, hmmm. I find that I used to be thrown into a high level energy when I smoked herb, I would have access to deeper vibrations. However with long term use, I have now found that it deadens my energy and dulls it and makes it heavier and denser, so that instead of boosting me, it blocks me….
~Charleen Johnston, excerpt from a correspondence with a friend in 2002
“Seaming is interwoven into everything I do….I consider myself a Patchworker of Dreams….I pull disparate parts together in new and playful ways, whether my base material be Fabric, Thoughts, Feelings, or Movements. I am Self Taught, a Self Taut InTensions of Multiple DiMensions playing with the poles of the Line, the Cycles of the Sine, the Twists of the Twine. When I create clothing or costumes, I almost always use reCycled materials. These pieces of clothing or fabrics hold the Stories of those who have Worn them or used them. I can feel these stories, they whisper to me, they scream at me, they want to be redeemed, reDeemed necessary and functional. Torn apart at the seams and merged with other Pieces of the dream, and reFashioned into a new expression. A more fun and unique, quirky, comfortable, playful and passionate arrangement. This process is not unlike the deeper mysteries of Spirit clothing itself in the garments of Body….The Soul is in the Seams….the Memories of the places in which we have Grown Together, Come Apart, Merge and DiVerge and play as inFinite Stars of the Dream. The 5 most basic elements of Fabrication are Scissors, Needle, Thread, Fabric, and the Self Who guides the Seams. The Fabric itself, is made up of Thread, and one could say that in taking the fractal deeper to source, the Loom is the higher octave of ‘fabric’. The Loom is the primordial structure on which the warp and weft of the the threads of Self are woven. That initial fabrication then becomes the malleable material in which we Play. But lets not go too deep quite yet.”
Time Sculpts Space Into Tender soft Penis Warm Tired Worm Tenderized As a an Old Self Returns to innocence
prepares to receive new blood in new wombs as newborn babes with new soft worm, Warm germ in all beings
Til Shakti dances circles ‘Round Shivas slumber Forcing Him to reMember And the rising fu(h)ror Of Hard stone phallic pillar of eager thrust into a new dawn of being
Awakens
Full of Rapture And forces into full Stature
a Seeding Self
Aching to Penetrate The Mysteries Of The Primal Dark Her Who Holds the Stark Contrast Of His Force
I can make a short story long in no time at all. So here are my thoughts:) ( from a comment on a post elsewhere)
Whenever it becomes trendy and ‘leave this platform now for your own good’ starts to get passed around, it’s still just another game being played. Those who already truly know it’s all a big labyrinth are not really afraid of being analyzed or algorithmicized, those who don’t really understand it, are never going to read someone’s post about it and suddenly grasp all the fundamentals of how this neurolinguistic reality creation works. Anything can be a tool and be useful, depending what the intent is. If people in general havnt by now been creating and sustaining living flesh body networks of support and friendship and play and community, leaving fb or any other social media isnt going to magically bring sudden connection and wonder to their daily immediate life. It’s starts from the inside out. And it starts from every single choice one makes from the time they wake up til the sleep. If every choice isn’t made to reflect a devotion to one’s integrity , there is a Gap in the ‘vas bene clausum’ that allows manipulation from the outside. We are about to be tested on a level that is going to frighten many, but there will be plenty who rise to the occasion and feel alive for the first time. Buckle up:
There’s so much information overload right now, by design, and it is not for ‘lack of knowledge’ that keeps people incapacitated, but an over saturation of the nervous system which is unable to filter out the noise or discern what is practical applicable or usable. Intentional overwhelm of the system is a NeuroBioWeapon and is working wonders. We can’t save people or fix a system by talking more and more on social media, but by living what our words are attempting to convey.
As for privacy, we already know where this next stage of mutation for the collective experiment is going. We’ve been there for a long time and ‘activism’ and ‘changing laws’ isn’t going to give anyone privacy back. Hiding from it all won’t work either. Gone are the days even of moving out in to the wilderness and forgoing tech and escaping the giant Eye of the Panopticon.
One must first remember Who and What One truly is. And that only happens when for whatever reason, they are forced into the abyss and make the choice to leap.
It is actually possible to communicate with these frequencies , which are being emitted and used as a technocratic prizm prison infrastructure , consciously and personally, in the same way one can interact and communicate with ‘the invisible powers and spirits and angels and other-dimensional beings’. There is little difference. Is that perhaps the real challenge? To make of one’s vessel a neuroSpiritual shapeshifter which can interface with the both the Organic Grid and the Synthetic Grid, and be outside the Game of Control?
Any stuck energy in the fascia crystalline matrix of the template will keep one stuck in the ‘trigger points’ gathered for lifetimes(s). And this controllable: controlled by Fascia-ism;)
For me, I decided long ago I would play the game with humor. I’ll be so many selves the system can barely keep up with which face is which me at any given time; the ‘internet’ is a ‘living’ system and what is put into it is there for good whether we have a computer to access it or not: just like the ‘Akash’ or living etheric databank of all Life and Memory. What we put into it is importantl for reasons that have nothing to do with altering other peoples thoughts or beliefs etc.….
and since I have made it my life mission to turn myself inside out, and become utterly transparent in the act of telling all of my private mythologies as an alchemical ritual of unraveling the skin bit by bit, so that when I shed this serpentine skin as a Seed back into my Mother Matter Matrice , I will create a condition in which the Soul will grow again with less of the ‘past’ to drag back thru the Measured Maze of Maat ;
I don’t fear exposure of any kind. Perhaps that is how the panopticon retains its power, the fear and the shame and the inner conflict within each.
We can only dismantle the prison from the inside……. If one is not even free in one’s own psyche and embodied temple, how can one expect to Free the Collective?
That’s the issue though, falling for so much division on the outer world stage that the individual is glued to the screen bouncing from one reaction to the next, while their nervous system and DeoxyRibo is rebuilt bit by bit by the very hand that plays the puppeteer .
I personally do not believe that a human spirit that is truly in touch with its own sovereignty can ever be overcome by any govt or other so called ruling elite or hidden hand. There is a magic and mystery to this adventure here that is very irrational and fears not Chaos, it is the heart of the dark feminine wisdom itself, and it cannot be harmed by the deluded blind intellect or those who try to arrange life in its patterns.
I came thru the other side of that and learned that it’s not about Transcending but about Integrating. Spirit plays here for its own reasons, and is drawn to this Earth Flesh Playground because it wants to Feel Deeply and experience visceral Life. Being a very plutonic underworld person but aiming always for the spirit when I was in my 20s, it took a lot of delusional wake up experiences to Own all that I had believed myself to have transcended. All that stuff I thought I had evolved past, I had simply dissociated from, and the force of its wrath at being ignored and suppressed made its fury known in physical symptoms and deeply imbalanced emotional reality with a dash of incredibly Underworld-like navigations thrown in. The higher I thought I was flying in those years, the more pure i thought I was, came at a price and it was collected by the Dark Feminine in 2018. And since complete dissolution and and finally Truly making friends with the parts of the Self that I had trapped in deep subterranean caves and dungeons , with compassion, and awareness that it was a matter of freeing bit by bit, those fragments from all timelines trapped in my Prizm Cell.Ves. Instead of ‘Mind over Mattering’ my body and pushing it to extremes, instead of convincing myself I was pure and lofty and fully my idealized Spirit Self-the Puer( my online and business name even used to be Puella Eterna for 13 years)- i became engaged in the true Alchemical Work. I Realized how abusive I had been to Psyche and Body all those years ( and lifetimes) of denigrating the dark hungry fiery tempest of my soul, the Feminine, thinking I could Will Myself into the magical spheres of the heavenly abodes:.:::: I have always been easily carried away on the wings of spirit, can easily disembody into OBE states etc. What I came here to do, Now, was to actually Make This Body Fully Conscious , for it is the Marriage bed of Eros and Psyche, and the Alchemy of Life uses all vibrations to create.
When I made friends with the depth of my own Pain and Anger and Lust for Aliveness, Lust for Intensity of Being, and my own Arrogance etc ( Scorpio ascendent/Mercury conjunction, sun/Uranus Scorpio conjunction( all ruled by mars) and all in the 1st house( house of mars/Aries), with an Aries moon( mars ruled) and Mars aspecting strongly every planet in my chart = I was a complete Fool to imagine that I was a soft and ethereal spiritual angelic figure floating in the higher spheres…..:. I am a child of Mars, and Mars at its best is the Blood and Passion and Vitality to Exist and Move in this Realm, Mars is the defender and protecter of all that is sacred in creation, it is Raw, Brash, Authentic, Physically Vital, Mentally Agile, Temperamental….and Serves the Feminine……
When I truly came to Know Myself and stopped building castles in the sky, but used my archetypal Mercurial nature along with Mars to go to the Underworld and reclaim the very Selves I had locked up thru this Infinite Game over Time, I came Alive and learned what real Power is.
That’s my journey. I have compassion for that person I was and thought I was, but I have made my Vow, to Die in Battle, as a Sacred Warrior, and a Warrior must be in touch with his/her Fire and Anger and lust and Blood and sacrifice it on the alter of the Feminine Creation…..
( of interest is the relation of mars and Saturn… Mars/Blood is made in the Marrow of the bones/Saturn…… Mars is the Warrior who serves The Saturn Kingdom, which is the very energy that gives Form to the life principle:= in my chart, My mars is in Sagittarius/conjunct Neptune ( the spiritual warrior) in the second house( using the physical body/ it’s values and resources) And is Square( tension) (serving) Saturn in Libra which is also conjunct to almost a degree…… in the 11th house/ community and the larger stage of service to the people: It’s all written in Light Codes we wove ourselves into.
My heavy 12th house/ underworld where Pluto/hades sits exactly to the minute almost, with Venus, is my Lifelong lesson…..spiritualizing and completely transforming the Sexual and Aesthetic principles……using the raw lust and vitality of The black Goddess Black Carbon through Dionysus protean morphing Imaginal spheres under intense pressure to create the Diamond Body.:::: the twin Sisters of Carbon666 and Daimond ….. the Treasures hidden in this Earth and this Flesh and this Game of Matter Mater Mother Matrix Maat.
The Psyches realm is a dark realm that takes in everything….light and dark and everything in between. It likes the humus of earth, the compost, the shit of life, the messy smelly sweaty fleshy human realm of bodies bumping into bodies in sensate expression , playing with selves in Carnes Nation, the carnal nest of alchemy, where Soul is the Imaginal Playscape and Spirit must come Down To Earth to Play with Form.
I spent so much time out of body for the first 26 years of my life; I’m now happily Wed in the alchemical marriage bed knowing the Great Work goes on and on and on, and my relationship with Saturn has transformed my life into one of beauty: I used to balk at Saturn and his crusty old crystallization and constriction of my ever-so Icarus-like ideals……
But….
I am the Sacred Warrior who Serves the Divine…:.I serve the King and the Kingdom and Protect and Honor the Queen and her Queendom… because as the Mercurial Martian or the Martian Mercurius……..the Foolish Warrior or the Warrior Fool, my realm is not just the heavens but I travel between the Yooer and the Lower and The middle realms and so I just be able to hold the Tension of all Their Frequencies.
An honest person is one who knows his own capacity to Lie but chooses Truth…..a Strong person knows his own capacity for Violence but chooses Restraint….a Wise person is one who knows his own capacity for ignorance and knows he is a Fool…..a Peaceful person is one who knows his own Anger and so is not blindsided when least expecting it, and thus knows what it is to be Gentle.
May the black moist Fertile Soil keep your Roots nurtured as your branches reach for the Sky ⭐️🙌⭐️
Aho.
10-18-24
My friends post that my response is in reference to.
another way of saying what I expressed, is that as a Waving Being who Becomes Particular….in this journey of Embodiment through the entire Spectrum of Light and Frequency….. is that I am in the Prizm Cell of All my Lives in All Realities, in All Times and Spaces……expressing through this Body, Now, which is made up of All of Me~s, all the Cell.ves and Organ~I~zed Cohesions holographically …. In terms of Light… Infrared all The way thru UltraViolet….we also Embody as Sound and All variations of frequency.
Infrared penetrates all the way thru Earth and hence Body, ‘the smokeless fire’…..the realm of the Djinn….. that is where we have the Dark parts of ourCellves ….not Evil…..Darkness and of a different spectrum …..Ultraviolet more akin to our Angelic SidesOfSelf..,;;
When we seek the UV and demonize the Infrared, we get trapped in the Prizm of our own fragmentation…..we disown a huge amount of the deepest aspects of Being, whilst grasping for the Angelic Aspects: They have their Realms for a reason.:::::.
When I speak of going deep into the underworld, to mine the treasures of Pluto/Hades in the darkest layers of Self trapped and submerged and cast off in this infinite journey, I speak of going into the Infrared WaveForms of Self that are as much Me as the UV or higher vibration LightWaves that are of a very different nature, but equally Me.
Fire & Light
Is a poetic way of playing with it
In my lifetime of ‘out of Body’ experiences and traversing in the high frequency Light of detachment and lucidity, the permeations are very different than when I go deeply ‘in body experience’ which is raw and primal and Fiery and red heat of Feeling….
Our Bodies give us a Playground where we bring All Of these Refractions of Self into one Expression , as a Tether, if you will, to Come To Terms With Self Literally To Bring to Term Our Self Like a Mother carrying To term Her Baby
New creation.
The more we Integrate and ReClaim all the fractured frequencies that issue From our own Spark of Existence as a Being Who Is,
The more we Free those frequencies to Nourish all Of Bodies In all Of Times.
If the very Elementals/elements that make up my fleshly abode are brought into a cohesive net of Understanding and Loving Awareness, as they go on in their journey and become part of other bodies and abodes, they themselves are able to bring healing …
Like the Dwarves who live deep in earth and who are like elementals in a sense
And Elves who are like the perfected or angelic higher selves
And the HuMan, here in the Middle Earth,
Thigh we are all of them Depending on which Angle Of the Arc We Shine our I’s From
“To sense penetratingly we must imagine, and to imagine accurately we must sense.”
James Hillman
( Continues in photo captions)
“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
(Continued in the Captions for each photo)
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).
🔥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.🔥
Images of the soul show first of all more feminine connotations. Psyché, in the Greek language, besides being soul denoted a night-moth or butterfly and a particularly beautiful girl in the legend of Eros and Psyche. Our discussion in the previous chapter of the anima as a personified feminine idea continues this line of thinking. There we saw many of her attributes and effects, particularly the relationship of psyche with dream, fantasy, and image. This relationship has also been put mythologically as the soul's connection with the night world, the realm of the dead, and the moon. We still catch our soul's most essential nature in death experiences, in dreams of the night, and in the images of "lunacy."
The world of spirit is different indeed. Its images blaze with light, there is fire, wind, sperm. Spirit is fast, and it quickens what it touches. Its direction is vertical and ascending; it is arrow-straight, knife-sharp, powder-dry, and phallic. It is masculine, the active principle, making forms, order, and clear distinctions. Although there are many spirits, and many kinds of spirit, more and more the notion of "spirit" has come to be carried by the Apollonic archetype, the sublimations of higher and abstract disciplines, the intellectual mind, refinements, and purifications.
We can experience soul and spirit interacting. At moments of intellectual concentration or transcendental meditation, soul invades with natural urges, memories, fantasies, and fears. At times of new psychological insights or experiences, spirit would quickly extract a meaning, put them into action, conceptualize them into rules. Soul sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience. It moves indirectly in circular reasonings, where retreats are as important as advances, prefer- ing labyrinths and corners, giving a metaphorical sense to life through such words as close, near, slow, and deep. Soul involves us in the pack and welter of phenomena and the flow of impressions. It is the "patient" part of us. Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It Is water to the spirit's fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit into the depths of passions to extinguish its certainty. Soul is imagination, a cavernous treasury-to use an image from St. Augustine -a confusion and richness, both. Whereas spirit chooses the better part and seeks to make all One. Look up, says spirit, gain distance; there is something beyond and above, and what is above is always, and always superior.
They differ in another way: spirit is after ultimates and it travels by means of a via negativa. “Neti, neti," it says, "not this, not that." Strait is the gate and only first or last things will do. Soul replies by saying, "Yes, this too has place, may find its archetypal significance, belongs in a myth." The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows.
I have drawn apart soul and spirit in order to make us feel the differences, and especially to feel what happens to soul when its phenomena are viewed from the perspective of spirit. Then, it seems, the soul must be disciplined, its desires harnessed, imagination emptied, dreams forgotten, involvements dried.?? For soul, says spirit, cannot know, neither truth, nor law, nor cause. The soul is fantasy, all fantasy. The thousand pathologizings that soul is heir to by its natural attachments to the ten thousand things of life in the world shall be cured by making soul into an imitation of spirit. The imitatio Christi was the classical way; now there are other models, gurus from the Far East or Far West, who, if followed to the letter, put one's soul on a spiritual path which supposedly leads to freedom from pathologies. Pathologizing, so says spirit, is by its very nature confined only to soul; only the psyche can be pathological, as the word psychopathology attests. There is no "pneumopathology," and as one German tradition has insisted, there can be no such thing as mental illness ("Geisteskrankheit"), for the spirit cannot pathologize. So there must be spiritual disciplines for the soul, ways in which soul shall conform with models enunciated for it by spirit.
But from the viewpoint of the psyche the humanistic and Oriental movement upward looks like repression. There may well be more psycho- pathology actually going on while transcending than while being immersed in pathologizing. For any attempt at self-realization without full recognition of the psychopathology that resides, as Hegel said, inherently in the soul is in itself pathological, an exercise in self-deception. Such self-realization turns out to be a paranoid delusional system, or even a kind of charlatanism, the psychopathic behavior of an emptied soul.
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