CREDO

Fiat! – CREDO CLI

2012-01-01T14:32:00.000-08:00

In my coming 90th year, I go back to my 21-year-old self sitting on the fire escape in New York on West 13th Street and looking briefly at the sun. The thought came to me: The sun shines but IT DIDN’T HAVE TO!!! Existence is the primal YES!

It has to come before a ‘no’ can attempt to deny it.

Today, I realize that with my bicameral brain, it is virtually impossible, given the starry universe, to come to any cause-and-effect solution. The Big Bang must have had an origin, as well. Thus I am resigned to humility and repeat the Vast Certainty will have to do until I have a higher organ of perception! Perhaps that is the heart . . . ?

What touches me deeply is that humanity all over the world has wrestled with these problems. For many of us in the Western world, the Torah and the Old Testament are full of such questions, and so also have the indigenous people struggled with them. The Eastern civilizations, the Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Taoists, and Zoroastrians, all have their creation versions, and I do not doubt that a handful of enlightened beings know the truth but on another level.

Thus, I suppose, a certain humility is required until we cross over.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I remember that question being brought up by the red-haired country priest in my German Swiss school in Appenzell exactly 80 years ago (as of tomorrow). I was 10 at the time. My response was that it might have been laid by a hen that wasn’t yet a hen, which immediately begged the question of evolution! With a sigh, I gave up, and I am back to the fire escape on West 13th Street!

As today is the last day of this year 2011 and tomorrow is New Year’s Day, I woke with the word GRACE on my mind. This word is full of polyvalent meanings – the Oxford Dictionary lists 14! I am choosing the 9th:

(Theol.) Unmerited favour of God, divine regenerating inspiring and strengthening influence; (state of ~ ) condition of being so influenced; (fall from ~) lapse into sin or disgrace, etc.

This word, of course, is the source of gratitude. So we receive grace when we say grace! The Lat. origin is simply gratus, meaning thanks!

This brings me to the point I am trying to make: gratitude is the antidote to the fear most likely generated about the Mayan ‘prophecies” that the world is coming to an end in 2012! If Y2K is any example, we should remember not to panic!

The truth of the matter is that it is the astronomical end of the Age of Pisces, as the Point of the Vernal Equinox, aligned with the first visible star in the constellation of Aquarius, signals the beginning of the Age of Aquarius! This Age will last approx. 2,000 years. (The confusion prior to the astronomy involved, was that in 200 BC when Hippolytus proposed the succession of Ages, he didn’t know exactly which degree to begin.)

So to sum up, the Grace we need to feel and accept is the following : Simply expressed.

CATS WILL GO ON HAVING KITTENS!!!

There will be events, no doubt, that will tax our faith, but it pays to remember that we are not in the ultimate charge of existence itself. We need to be grateful for our existing in the first place! What needs to be ended is our ignorant insistence on fighting and killing, often in the name of this religion or that one, and the materialism of evil, greedy, and criminal behavior. The hope lies potentially in the balance of the opposite constellation sign to Aquarius: LEO! This, on Earth, is ruled by the Sun, as is every physical heart that gives us not only life but the capacity to

LOVE!

We need to remember what Christ and other Teachers taught us:

A new commandment do I give you: Love one another as I have loved you.

lovingly,
ao

Instant Cure for the Blues! – CREDO CL

2011-12-03T13:58:00.000-08:00

As some of you already know, I had a remarkable spiritual teacher – M. I met him on June 6, 1944, and my life changed from that day forward. I was 21, and today I am living into my 90th year. In all this time I have not once had a doubt concerning him. His teachings have guided me through thick and thin and many ups and downs. Last night I woke up and realized I was tired, and in considerable pain, and perhaps flirting with a potential depression, and realized that I have not shared his formula for this state of mind. It is very simple and it works:

DO SOMETHING FOR SOMEBODY QUICK!

So I am curing myself in this act of sharing! If you think about it, if you feel sorry for yourself, you enclose yourself in a static circle of self-pity. However, if you act on behalf of another, that dynamic opens you to a spiral, and Spirit flows through you in even the humblest gesture toward another person, animal, or even flower. You are no longer trapping the flow of loving concern and appreciation of others.

This idea is present in the spiritual advice of all religions, not just one! It underlies the concept of our common humanity: that to love another as sparks of the same flame is equivalent to loving the Mystery we call Spirit. So here is just one beautiful expression of it:

Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy.  O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

These words were written in the Thirteenth century endure and transcend any religious dogma. They are the words of a mystic and are common to all other mystics. They seem so appropriate to our desperate needs still today, eight centuries later.

May they bring light, love, and life to us as we move towards another Solstice!

lovingly,
ao

As Below, so Above – CREDO CXLIX

2011-11-01T14:24:00.000-07:00

The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus gives us the phrase “As above, so below,” indicating that archetypal processes operate on a descending level of planes. Now looking back over the years of my long life as I approach my 90th year to come(!), I see the thrust of my life’s work has been starting at the bottom and trying to demonstrate that the “great truths” of our earthly incarnation can be demonstrated as simple self-evidence! We can learn the greatest lessons from the smallest, humblest objects!

This is the basis of the wisdom of fairy tales, proverbs, and even jokes, which contain the essence of religious and hefty philosophical classics. In the past these contained not abstract but physical “object lessons.” Most people disdain them because they are so simple; and thus the more complicated language is used to reach sometimes absurd definitions. Here is a quote from The New Yorker I used in my first book, Jungian Symbolism in Astrology:

COROLLARIES WE NEVER GOT AROUND TO READING
From “Prolegomenon to a Theory of Religion,” by Gerald James
Larson, Journal of the American Academy of Religion

[3.1] The Definition. Within the context of these considerations, let me now proceed to a definition of Religion and to offer as well two corollary definitions that grow out of the basic definition. I suggest the following: Religion is a “complete system of communication” (or a “form of life”) showing in primarily “commissive,” “behabitive,” and “exercitive” modes how a community comports itself when it encounters an “untranscendable negation of . . . possibilities.”

I still have to laugh every time I read it!

What I am suggesting is a device to finding your own wisdom. If you are familiar with the basic tenets of alchemy or astrology, so much the better, but these are not necessary. Plain common sense will do just fine!

1. Look around the room and concentrate your attention on one thing. Ex: wrapping paper (a noun). Ask it: What do you do? (The answer will be a verb.) I conceal.

2. Think now of what this process suggests. Jot down your observations.

3. Its purpose may be to hide a gift, protect what’s wrapped. It differs from what it wraps. It hides the contents.

4. Thinking symbolically, what obvious example might you come up with: How about our body? How does it differ from its precious contents? Your consciousness? Your emotions? Your fears? The real unvarnished private you? Your unconscious? Your unique being!

In Jungian psychology the wrapping paper is the persona, the wrapping paper that we present to the world. My father, a Pisces, was a flaming extroverted friendly representative of the company he worked for. Cheerful, engaging, and successful. When he came home to the hotels we lived in in so many different countries, he became almost childlike, rivaling me for my mother’s attention! His mother died giving him birth, and he chose to turn my mother into his; this resulted in his having a mistress, much to my mother’s distress.

Actors are capable of changing the wrap by consciously assuming other characters. And, in a way, all of us assume different “roles” every day. This makes us socially adaptive beings. Only the very shy, introverted people use plain brown paper to hide behind.

It also is manifested unconsciously by alcohol! Drugs? Some introverts, when tipsy, become hilarious extroverts; some extroverts, on the other hand, become sentimental introverts. Extremes turn into opposites.

I disgraced myself in the hospital when delivering one of my daughters. I was given a whiff of something for pain, and as the doctor was stitching my torn cervix, I started singing at the top of my lungs, “Oh give me something to remember you by . . . !” Oh dear! I’m afraid this daughter has never forgiven me. I just became unwrapped!

lovingly,
ao

Fair is Fair – CREDO CXCVIII

2011-10-12T08:55:00.000-07:00

I learned about injustice at a very early age when still a toddler. I remember it vividly. My nanny accused me of wiping my own bottom with toilet paper, which she deemed her own duty. I had not done this, but besides the undeserved scolding, the shock that grownups were not infallible was far greater – in fact, cataclysmic! And so from the age of three to this day, I have been careful not to project 100% certainty on another human being! Nor do I carry the total conviction that I am always correct in my assumptions, which is often harder! Thus I am a true Scorpio, I guess. There is a story of some witty ancient Greek who said, “If everybody lies, can my statement be true?”

Our own bodies carry this warning in that everybody’s vision has a blind spot!

This brings me to the conundrum of the word fair, which can be used in more than one way. To some, it means just and to others, lovely. As both come under the sign of Libra, which is ruled astrologically by Venus, the connection becomes clearer. Its symbol is the scales upon which we weigh and balance things, thus it rules LAW. The sequence being this: if a matter is fair, it is just, therefore harmonious, therefore beautiful, therefore fair! Aha!

There is a story the writer Pearl Buck, who lived in China at the time, tells. She was on a station platform waiting for a train. She noticed a grandmother with a little grandson and a granddaughter. She saw the boy do something naughty and when she scolded him, he blamed his sister. She then took the granddaughter aside and whacked her. Then the old woman saw that Buck had observed the incident with shock. So she explained, “I want my grandchildren to understand that sometimes injustice falls into the lives of everyone in life and that is only fair.”

Too true! How many times have I myself felt the outrage that many kids express shouting, “That’s not fair!” And not just kids, today nations are wrestling with strikes and mobs and outraged citizens all proclaiming the same emotion. We yearn collectively for justice, and perhaps we need to remember the notion of karma, the Oriental concept of fairness dealt to us through our own actions.

I have a confession to make; it is one of the greatest ‘sins’ I have ever committed. It was to use truth as a lie! I was eleven and in a Swiss boarding school. Across from the house we boarded in was a small candy shop occupied by an understanding middle-aged woman. We girls would steal across to it and buy candy with or without our pocket money. If we didn’t have cash, she would enter the sum in a notebook and I always paid my debt. This adventuring was called Auskratzen, and looking back as an adult, I must assume that the teachers knew all about it. Anyway, while on a group walk, I boasted out loud, “I’m going to the candy store!” The kids were appalled because the teacher heard this. Then they all assumed it was an idle boast. It wasn’t! Later that very afternoon, I crept across the road and bought gumdrops. I was not caught and savored both the Gummisalat and my devious device. I had told a truth to serve as a lie!

Now I am almost 89 and still feel guilty – not of the deed but of the ethical dilemma. May the Fates forgive me! I have never done such a thing again. So there it is: a public confession.

I sometimes wonder, statistically how many people in the world have been punished, imprisoned, or put to death for crimes they were innocent of committing? This brings up the tricky problem of karma, the concept of paying eventually for the mistakes we have made, in any previous life even. Is there a difference between an ignorant misdeed and an intentional one? And what of cultural rules such as polygamy accepted or seen as adultery? These are interesting questions.

Sometimes, it is a matter of individual conscience.

One solution in avoiding projecting guilt onto children which I have learned from my adult ones is a simple one, worth repeating (!):instead of telling a child that he or she is a bad boy or girl for doing something wrong, simply say, “That is a NO!” Making the matter objective can avoid imposing a guilt complex! I wish somebody had thought of this 84 years ago!

We know the negativity of the Ten Commandments. Contrast this with the Buddhist alternative. I rest my case by including it here.

THE NOBLE EIGHTFOLD PATH

The Four Noble Truths
There is suffering in this world:
All suffering comes from attachment and desire.
There is a way beyond suffering.
The way is the Noble Eightfold Path:

RIGHT VIEWS
Free from superstition and delusion

RIGHT ASPIRATIONS
High and worthy of the intelligent; worthy of man

RIGHT SPEECH
Kindly, open, and truthful

RIGHT CONDUCT
Peaceful, honest, and pure

RIGHT LIVELIHOOD
Bringing hurt or danger to no living being

RIGHT EFFORT
In self-training and self-control

RIGHT MINDFULNESS
The active, watchful mind

RIGHT RAPTURE
In deep meditation on the realities of life

– Gautama Buddha , 6th Century B.C.

lovingly,
ao

Knitwits – CREDO CXCVII

2011-09-25T14:05:00.000-07:00

You might not realize what an argyle sock or a hand-knitted multicolored patterned sweater or more likely a machine-knitted one could teach you! Well, if you have such an item, turn it inside out and study the mess it seems to represent. There is wisdom hiding in that there wool. Honestly. It represents what most of us consider our daily if not our yearly lives consist of. That is, if you add in everything your conscious mind has to pay attention to all your waking hours, given your life up to now. There are times, at least as I approach my 89th birthday, that I despair about. Life does often seem just one damn thing after another. So I was ruminating as I picked up one of my colored socks off the floor and pulled it right side out before adding it to the laundry – a familiar task repeated hundreds of times during my life.

Well, guess what? It was as if the sock spoke to me and I had a profound and comforting attack of Jungian insight! What I had been looking at with was my ego, the part of all of us that deals with daily problems and joys, worries and fears, the whole kerfuffle of quotidian life.

What, if at the end we get to pull the sock right side out and see the pattern revealed that our Self, which dwells in our unconscious, has been knitting day by day!!

It undoubtedly will reveal a pattern that will have a genuine meaning and might even be illuminating the whys and wherefores that have long eluded us. Perhaps the patterns will reveal that it was not so much the actual events but the attitudes and emotional motives and strivings that add up mysteriously to one’s conscious or unconscious desires to do what was spiritually right.

All the millions of Earth’s human inhabitants have an Unconscious and many of us act according to the moral input of our time and place. So we may do the right thing for the wrong reason or the wrong thing for the right reason—a theme that has occupied many writers such as Dostoyevsky and Theodorakis. We judge and misjudge ourselves and others constantly! So, is there a solution?

For me, in my old age, there is one: LOVE!

Think back over your childhood and adult life. Are there not people, strangers even, that stand out in your life because they were kind? Kindness is a form of agape, or love that asks nothing in return, has no secret agenda, and is naturally sincere. I encounter it in many ways and gestures: the little boy who got off the school bus with some flowers for his waiting mother and, seeing me, hurried to pick some dandelions for me, which were given with shining eyes, or the cashier at the airport restaurant who looked at every tired salesman, and made a cheerful, genuinely personal remark.

In short, one doesn’t have to be religious to be kind. In fact, the Dalai Lama said it simply: “My only religion is kindness.” Having met him in Dharamsala, I can truly say that he embodies his words, adding humility. My husband had gashed his forehead on an awning; when His Holiness noticed this, and Walter explained, he smiled and said, “Then you will always have a reason to remember your visit to Dharamsala!” Lovingly.

lovingly,
ao

Three Big Little Words – CREDO CXLVI

2011-09-25T13:57:00.000-07:00

Let me introduce them before we consider their power: Meet:

and or but

Grammatically they are termed conjunctions because they join modifying words, phrases, or whole sentences, but their power is indisputable!

Consider “I like coffee and tea, but I like coffee for breakfast. Tea is best at tea time, but when I dine out, I like red or white wine, depending on the main course.”

These innocent little words can change meanings instantly!

Laurel and Hardy, David and Goliath.

Love and marriage – not the same as Love or marriage! or Love but marriage . . . ?

And can be healing, as in “Mommy loves you and I don’t like you chewing with your mouth open!” sounds better than “but I don’t like you chewing with your mouth open!” which is conditional.

Sounds simple but reread it as a four-year-old might hear it—subtle difference. In making it simple, I now suggest you imagine emotional confrontations between partners, employers, and employees, or political rivals!

“Shut up or else . . . !”

lovingly
ao

The Importance of Attitude – CREDO CXLV

2011-07-15T18:38:00.000-07:00

Owing to the repairs to this house caused by severe winter damage, the meditation room is still empty and awaiting fresh paint. In the meantime, I have made a mini-altar on the wide windowsill in my office. It is directly above a bookshelf, and yesterday my eye fell upon a book I hadn’t read in 28 years. Idly I pulled it out. It was Dr. Athur J. Deikman’s The Observing Self: Mysticism and Psychotherapy. As I riffled backward through the pages, my eye fell upon this gem of a page dealing with the value of teaching stories. The title was “Vanity” [Inflation] and it offers such a simple solution to this, I hasten to include it to relieve the many of us who get caught in trying to avoid the traps of pride/self-blaming. I think it is most worthy of sharing and hope you will agree!

Vanity

A Sufi sage once asked his disciples to tell him what their vanities had been before they began to study with him.
The first said, “I imagined that I was the most handsome man in the world.”
The second said, “I believed that, since I was religious, I was of the elect.”
The third said, “I believed that I could teach.”
The fourth said, “My vanity was greater than all these; for I believed that I could learn.”
The sage remarked, “And the fourth disciple’s vanity remains the greatest, for his vanity is to show that he once had the greatest vanity.”

After reading this story, I observed myself doing the same things as the fourth disciple by berating myself excessively for personal failing. As I was doing so, the story came to my mind like a mirror, and I understood the role of vanity in what I was doing. The context was different from the specific situation of the story, but the dynamics were similar. My understanding provoked a wry smile and ended my self-flagellation. Not long afterward, a male patient presented feelings of self-blame whose concealed vanity I was able to recognize, for the pattern was the same. He was castigating himself for having made a “mess” of his opportunities, particularly as he was generally recognized as being highly intelligent and likable. After listening to him for a while, I offered an alternative view: “I think you’re doing yourself an injustice. You’re not a good guy who is making a mess of things – you’re a mess who is doing a good job!”
He stopped in his tracks, wide-eyed, then threw back his head and roared with laughter. In the next session, he reported that he felt much better and had reduced his self-recriminations noticeably. My recognition of his concealed vanity, followed by an appropriate interpretation, was matched by his own recognition and decrease in his symptoms.

The example above is one of the switcheroo types, a total reversal. There is yet another way of changing attitudes, as demonstrated below in the Chinese classic the I Ching. I have interposed Jung’s words for Self and Ego where they are appropriate. It is important to remember that Jung’s definition of Self implies the spiritual “Divine Guest” dwelling in the Unconscious and giving us the hope of individuation.

I-Ching
From a commentary of Richard Wilhelm on the second Hexagram:
Kun –The Receptive.

The attribute of the hexagram is devotion; its image is the earth. It is the perfect complement of The Creative – the complement not the opposite, for the Receptive does not combat the Creative but completes it. It represents nature in contrast to spirit, earth in contrast to heaven, space as against time, the female-maternal as against the male-paternal. However, as applied to human affairs, the principle of this complementary relationship is found not only in the relation between man and woman. . . . Indeed, even in the individual this duality appears in the coexistence of the spiritual world and the world of the senses.

[Psychologically]

But strictly speaking there is no real dualism here, because there is a clearly defined hierarchic relationship between the two principles. In itself of course, the Receptive [Ego]] is just as important as the Creative [Self], but the attribute of devotion defines the place occupied by this primal power in relation to the Creative [Self]. For the Receptive [Ego] must be activated and led by the Creative {Self]; then it is productive of good. Only when it [the Ego] abandons this position and tries to stand as an equal side by side with the Creative [Self], does it become evil. The result then is opposition to and struggle against the Creative [Self], which is productive of evil to both.

The powerful symbol of the yin/yang above shows the role of the opposites perfectly contained within the circle of wholeness. Each hemisphere contains an inner opposite. From a Jungian perspective, the feminine yin contains a contra-sexual animus; the masculine yang, a feminine anima. Both are circumscribed by the circumference of the psyche as a whole. That is just one small application of this ancient Chinese symbol. It signifies balance in motion on every level – the very tides of time!

lovingly,
ao

The Mystery We Call God   – CREDO CXLIV

2011-07-03T09:57:00.000-07:00

One fish said to another, “I don’t believe in water!”

I once had a dream in Latin! It said: Cogito ergo sum ergo scivio deus est! The first part is Descartes’ famous saying I think therefore I am, but then it continues, therefore I [can] know God is!

I woke my dear husband up and he wrote it down on a scrap of paper. This message gave me sympathy for those who are agnostics or atheists. Having been both in my younger years it gave me a new way of countering the dilemma. There is a ‘Catch-22’ in their argument. Here it goes: the skeptic argues that since science cannot prove the existence of God, and evolution is provable, the conclusion must be that the cosmos came into being by chance.

This is a somewhat specious argument because – granted that he is right – he, himself, must also be the product of chance. In which case, of what possible value is his opinion!

I like the quote of an Indian physicist: “The greatest discovery of science in the 20th century is of its own limitations.”

I became an atheist in Portugal at the age of 11, having been overdosed with Christianity in European boarding schools. I solemnly announced this to my mother, who asked me why. I replied that no one was going to convince me that any old snake hung on a tree and spoke English. “Probably Hebrew,” my mother smiled and murmured, but then she paused and said, “Well, if you want to be an atheist, be a good one!” She told me there were other religions that might appeal to me more and encouraged my looking into them.

I followed that advice and started a systematic program forthwith of reading the holy scriptures of one religion after another, night after night, starting with the Old Testament and making notes in the margins of my red leather Bible. Unfortunately, this relic was destroyed ten years later by my daughter’s red setter who chewed it up to Leviticus! Alas, by the age of 20, I knew a lot about religion but had experienced nothing!

I went into an empty church in New York and wept. Three days later, my father suggested that I see this astrologer Hermes who had just helped him. My opinion at the time was that astrology was the superstitious twaddle of nincompoops, but as a lark, I went. Hermes, a most attractive man, lived in Little Italy within walking distance of the Hotel Holley on Washington Square. He drew up my chart by hand, looked at me, and said, “You have been looking for God all of your life.” Everything he said to me was accurate, and I was intrigued to say the least. He summoned me to return the next morning to meet his teacher M, and my life changed forever.

Since then I have spent seven more decades studying the matter. For me, one of the most valuable lessons I have learned from this is the dangers of literalism, and that the truth is revealed to us through understanding symbolic language and perceiving that what we presume to call God is not a noun but a verb, the very process of ongoing creation. Language, by its own nature, tricks us by turning verbs into nouns. “Swimming” is fun or “to swim” is fun, both as gerund or infinitive, become subject or object of a sentence acting as nouns, and still we are not even wet!

Obviously, I am no longer an atheist but I have deep sympathy for them – atheists have rejected the definition of God at the level beneath them. We all need to keep searching until we can move from believing there is no answer to the vast certainty that there is one, only we can’t apprehend it! Today I realize that the mind is ipso facto disqualified by its functioning through duality. It is the wrong instrument! The Tao that can be defined is not the Tao.

So what is the solution? To quote Jung, “The longest journey most of us have to take is from the head to the heart.”

As a wonderful old Hindu teacher said to me, chuckling, “Why, God is making love to you in every heartbeat of your life!”

lovingly,
ao

“Sweetness and Light” – CREDO CLXIII

2011-06-17T09:07:00.001-07:00

There once was a nun who was a hermit and lived alone six days of the week and only joined the other hermit nuns for Sunday Mass. She lived that way for many, many years. Then she came upon a book by Jung and began to read and read his work.

Gradually she began to have nightmares, terrible dreams which truly shocked her. Then finally one Sunday she encountered a nun who had always irritated her and so she hauled off and slapped her! The poor soul then had a near breakdown thinking that she had gone mad.

At her spiritual director’s suggestion she came to me to have her chart done. The chart revealed the enormous self-discipline and utter devotion to God but also the repression and denial of any relationship. I tried to make clear to her that her anger was in a strange way a blessing, because even though it was so negative, it was still a first step in relating. My friend Brewster, a Jungian analyst, said that saying “Damn you!” to God is a huge step in relating to God. In the Old Testament we are told to love God with all our heart, soul, and might, AND our neighbor as our Self (sic) – not as our ego. So the whole point of incarnation may well be to find God incarnate as the Divine Guest within us all.

Jung wrote over and over that only to choose sweetness and light and to repress all the darkness in us results inevitably in our projecting that darkness onto others. So, simply put, trying too hard to be good can be bad for you!

My dear son, Timothy, when he was 13, came home on holiday from boarding school determined to be a saint. For two weeks he was obedient to his father, helpful to his mother, patient with his pesky sisters. He slept on the floor, ate sparingly, and got a job doing work he really didn’t enjoy. At two in the morning, I passed his bedroom door and heard sobs. When I knocked and entered I found him pounding the floor with his fists crying, “It’s not FAIR! It’s not FAIR!” I asked him what wasn’t fair, and he replied, “I’ve tried to be good all these days, and I’ve fallen into the greatest sin of all! “What sin?” I asked. He moaned, “I think I’m better than other people!”

I didn’t think it was fair either, but I did pray for a solution. The next day, as I replaced an empty paper towel tube, the light shone through it. “AHA!” I stuffed Kleenex in one end and went to my son and told him to look through it and tell me what he could see. “Duh!” said he. Then I told him to take out the tissue and look again. He looked again and at me as if I were an idiot. But then he got it: the light shines through – not out of the tube. And the good we do and the love that we share comes from that higher Source – not out of us. To claim it is to identify with it and become inflated. This aha! has been an enormous help to me and others ever since, because the corollary is that when people are grateful to you or complimentary, you can shoot it back up to the Divine Guest, so one doesn’t get trapped in hubris or terrible attacks of mea culpa. The ego can be pleased enough if it can keep the pipe clear. To this day, I am profoundly grateful to my son’s efforts.

No, he didn’t grow up a clergyman, but he majored in philosophy and then in medicine and became a great psychiatrist.

lovingly,
ao

Popcorn! – CREDO CXLII

2011-06-06T14:05:00.000-07:00

By now, if you know my theory of finding the sacred in the commonplace, you will not be surprised by the title of this Credo. But in case you don’t, here is a condensed version:

Creation is the manifestation of ongoing archetypal processes. As mankind evolved people realized this and in order to speak of the processes, they gave them names, and because they were universal, they were considered divine, and thus the world over(!) they became gods and goddesses! If you study comparative mythology, you will know that the names will differ but the process of each will remain constant. And the seven original processes were ruled by the planets orbiting and reflecting the center, our SUN.

These processes are also to be found hidden in manifest things as well as subatomic realms – every atom has life at its center. Agrippa, the alchemist, wrote Virtutes divinae in res diffusae (Powers divine are diffused in things). The mysterious Hermes Trismegistus coined the phrase “As above, so below.” It seems as if my life’s work has been dedicated to finding them below to start with, because there they make sense!

My dream of Jung shouting, “CONSIDER THE OBVIOUS! I DID!” confirmed my mission. The word obvious comes from Lat. ob via, on the road. Christ said, “Nothing is hidden, having eyes you do not see, having ears you do not hear.”

With this in mind, I have discovered Sophia’s source of wisdom as delight! It is simple and anyone can play the game: I will repeat: Think of a zipper, for instance. The word is a noun. Turn it into a verb by asking it, “What do you do?” It answers, “I unite opposites going up and separate them going down.” I chuckled and thought Ego con-jung-o! I unite. So going up, a zipper unites and going down, separates opposites. I have already mentioned how my husband took to crying SYMBOLOS! in the morning as he put on his pants, and winked Diabolos at night. Uniting the opposites is a key to joy, and one way is to take any thing and discover its meaning. DIABOLOS, the process of the Devil or diabolic, separates any opposites, especially the Self (our Divine Guest in the psyche) and our ego (who we think we are). Remember, Jung says the Self dwells in our unconscious, so that’s probably why. The mind cannot reach it, only the heart.
*sym Grk. together; bolein, throw; dia ,Grk, apart: bolein, throw

So what about popcorn?

The great truth I learned from popcorn is quite obvious. Once it has popped, it can never go back again. So it is the equivalent of satori or samadhi or St. Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus or a baby’s first walking steps or any deep meaningful AHA! we all have experienced when a great truth emerges from our unconscious. We are permanently advanced with a pop!

One of Holy Wisdom’s (Hagia Sophia’s) messages is that the truth is also hidden in the commonplace, so my conviction is that if “As above, so below” is true, why not start humbly with the below. Besides, it is far more “delightful,” as Proverbs 8: 32-41 in the Old Testament assures us Wisdom is.

Try this: take any object and look at it, then ask it: What do you DO?

This is the feminine aspect of Wisdom at its spiritual level. (The Great Mother by Erich Neumann [Bollingen Press Princeton] is a great source on this.) Wisdom is feminine in all religions except Roman Catholicism, where the third person of the Trinity (God, the Father; God, the Son; God, the Holy Spirit) in Latin is Spiritus Sanctus, a masculine noun which takes a masculine pronoun, making the Trinity all masculine! On the other hand, the Greek paraclete translates literally as Comforter, which suggests the god-mother who mothers the messages from our indwelling Self into consciousness whenever needed, and her mythical counterpart, the Fairy Godmother, has the comforting presence and gift of transforming the invisible into the visible, and she carries a wand with a “star” on top! Her process is saving us by revealing the sacred in the commonplace. She always mediates between these two and gives the child in us practical advice!

The dark feminine archetypes, of course, are symbolically the witch, the bitch, and the sorceress, which in the male anima feed the collective negative and destructive actions recorded in our daily news. The many arms of the Hindu goddess Kali display both the powerful negative and positive aspects of the Feminine. Perhaps now, we can see this for what she truly represents. (It is essential to view such matters symbolically; literalism paralyzes meaning, hence the danger in all fundamentalism of concretizing understanding!)

My purpose here is simply to give some reason for faith in the future: we need to remember that:

Yes! has to come before No can deny it
.
The Sun shines and does not take back its rays.

And the Gnostic Gospel according to Thomas, so associated with Jung, tells us: Heaven is spread upon the earth, but men do not see it.

As to popcorn, next time you have some, ask yourself how many of your kernels have popped?

As for myself at 88, right now I feel more pooped than popped, so I think I will celebrate my “Scottish Communion,” put my feet up, and have some real popcorn myself!

Cheers!

lovingly,
ao

Unusual Encounters – CREDO CXLI

2011-05-23T08:51:00.000-07:00

Recent cyber communications have mentioned Thomas Mann, Freud, and Adler, and I suppose I should mention my surprising brief connecting with all three in meaningful ways.

In the summer of 1939, my parents and I – then 16 – spent the summer at the seaside Huis ter Duin hotel in Noordwijk, Holland. I was living one of the most exciting times of my life: tennis, riding, dancing, swimming, falling in love, being a naïve teenager, yet at the same time, writing poems that were being published in the Paris Herald Tribune that contradicted my outward persona. Thomas Mann and his wife and daughter Erika (who later married W. H. Auden) were also guests. Apparently Mann was intrigued by the contrast of my persona and my poetry, and he asked my father permission to talk to me. That given, he invited me to sit with him in one of those hooded basket chairs on the terrace overlooking the sea. Mind you, I had no idea of who he was. I saw a slight middle-aged gentleman with a grey moustache.

He began by telling me he had read my poetry and was curious to know if I wanted to be a writer? When I answered yes, he said that he was one himself and saw true potential in my gifts. Then he proceeded with some serious advice: Get up an hour earlier, start writing anything – just write at least 600 words – and make this a habit. This was something he did himself daily and with positive results. Discipline was the key! He said that if I followed this rule, I would have a career and contribute something to the world. I followed his advice until I went back to boarding school in Switzerland. In the meantime WWII broke out! My career was interrupted, but the Muse hovered for some time until I married in 1945 and she then fled 20 years!

Previous to this, in 1937, I had been utterly miserable in a boarding school in Providence, RI. A total misfit now again in uniform, I had traveled in Europe and North Africa with my parents, never ever more than three months in one place, and those were spent in European boarding schools. I was in the care of my wealthy “proper Bostonian” Uncle George Foote and Aunt Doris living on Beacon Hill. My parents continued traveling as my father’s job selling Mergenthaler Linotypes to print newspapers required this. He was now their Vice-president for Overseas. I was headed for “coming out” as a debutante. My reaction was troubling to say the least, and my Aunt Doris decided I needed therapy. The answer was Dr. Ruth Adler, daughter of the famous psychiatrist Kurt Adler. She was then a plump friendly woman with a short man’s haircut.

I liked her immediately because she understood the dichotomy I felt. I decided that the study of the psyche was right up my alley! One afternoon, we interrupted analysis and turned on the radio to hear King Edward the Seventh of England abdicate his throne in order to marry the divorced commoner Wallis!

The time I spent with Dr, Adler was validating and comforting. I will always be grateful to her!

I met Sigmund Freud’s granddaughter, many years later in Bath, England, when she attended a seminar I was giving in the 1970s in the actual building of the Baths. She regaled us with wonderful descriptions of Onkel Ziggy who secretly supplied her with lemon drops he kept hidden in his jacket pocket. She adored him.

My weekend workshop was given in the magnificent Regency building surrounding the mineral baths prized and built by the ancient Romans during their occupation. Their structure of the large rectangular pool is still surrounded by Roman artifacts. Above it stands the magnificent Regency building, which houses drinking fountains, comfortable rooms, and historic displays. My group met in a downstairs room, and close by was the W.C. used by Her Majesty the Queen. I was informed that Her Majesty travels with her own toilet seat that is installed for her when she visits the small mahogany-lined cubicle we were now free to use, as I remember. At teatime, we were treated to the delicious Bath buns that melt in your mouth.

I discovered the meaning of “to toast” at that time. Apparently Beau Brummell celebrated a yearly event when the Baths were reserved for the exclusive use of a number of naked “ladies” who swam in the nude to the delight of a select group of gentlemen. Beau thought their heads bobbing in the water reminded him of the toast cubes decorating a syllabub bowl filled with that custardy alcoholic beverage served at Christmas. So he raised his glass to the “Toast of the Town!” See what etymology can reveal!

Another association with Freud occurred during WWII when we were escaping in a caravan of two buses, as a group of Americans, from Switzerland to Portugal. The long hot trip through France was hindered by hundreds of refugees on foot or in cars loaded with mattresses escaping the Germans that summer of 1940. We were delayed at the customs at the Spanish border because when we were all strip-searched, a fat lady had placed a German Swiss newspaper between her bottom and the hot leather seat in the bus. The German typescript had offset on her behind! The officials thought it might be code, so we had to spend the night. Fortunately, a kind peasant couple invited us to sleep in their home. The three of us slept on their double bed surrounded by hanging garlands of onions.

Finally, we were able to board a train, but when we arrived in Madrid, we were in every sense looking like tramps. My father was tieless and his face covered by black stubble, as we entered the Ritz Hotel! Fortunately, our American Ambassador Weddell recognized my father and vouched for us. He was the one who had just engineered the escape of Sigmund Freud from Vienna to England. I remember the first thing my mother and I did was taking turns in a bathtub of cold water. The temperature was 110 degrees. We also stopped in bullet-damaged Barcelona, still recovering from civil war. We attended a bullfight. When we reached the border to Portugal, we encountered a Jewish refugee family: grandfather, father, son, all rabbis, two wives, and a small pale four-year old little boy. We gave them the last bits of chocolate and powdered coffee we had. The last we saw of them was at the dock in Lisbon, headed for North Africa.

We sailed home on the S.S. Excambion. We had a cabin, but the lounge had people sleeping side by side like sardines, among them the publisher of Time, and Salvador Dali and wife, who were very low-key and became friends, as did the governess and baby girl who ended up at the Ritz and inspired the character in the book about her: Eloise. I met them by chance later in Central Park. They were still there!

lovingly,
ao

Depression Cure – CREDO CXL

2011-05-13T13:38:00.000-07:00

With all the really bad news out there, both geological and political, it is not surprising that some of us sometimes give in to depression! And I include myself.

This early morning, in meditation, a remarkable nutty vision came to me. It was as if the entire Solar System were enclosed in a bubble, and beyond the bubble, the stars were all serenely in their place, and the words came to me, in Scots, “Dinna fash’ yersel, lass, the universe is still running on time!

That notion rings true and should give us all – no matter how terrible things are – another perspective. At 88½, obviously I realize that my entire life is about to be encapsulated and blown away, and I realize that all that remains is that which I have given away: life to four children resulting in further generations, words, spoken and written, and, throughout, the theme of love needed and received yet poured out in various forms. What about hate? Mysteriously, I can honestly say I hate no other. My Teacher M explained to me that after many lives, I had finally dissolved any hatred of people by having compassion on the future karma that they would have to endure. As I have suffered a lot of emotional pain in my life, I can view the lessons learned, but hating just never has been a problem. The evildoers in this world are destined for enormous karmic debt, and this should evoke compassion. “Hell” is living with extended negative consequences to negative actions. The difference is ignorance or conscious evil intent. A mistake is a loop in consciousness made to expose a greater surface to experience.

In my book The Dove in the Stone I recount the story of a conversation with my Teacher M in which he likens consciousness to a tree. Trees do not grow like poles alone. They have branches which go out at an angle from the trunk. The branches have twigs that bear leaves which are open to the sun’s rays and enable them to grow. And each leaf on the Tree of Life is an AHA! And that tree in Genesis is an apple tree. It blooms. And after time, bears apples. The apples fall from the tree and are its gift to the future.

My hates are connected to my own love of perfection – Moon in Virgo – and I hate making mistakes of any kind. So I am grateful for this: “Forgive them, they know not what they do.” Forgiving myself is another matter entirely Sigh.

Here is a poem that expresses my view:

The Poles of Eden

Do not let me mock you, dear
do not let me hope
do not let me gather
a mother and a father
nor ask them why
after the release of gold
after the silver of their peace
after the sadness and the sleep
they gave up, turned inward
each to each his leaden dream
and left you weeping in their deep
crying
screaming
shuddering
for comfort and for love to keep.

Godself has a great pair of pincers
half a woman
half a man
and where they close, where one and One
in pulsing pinch of promise
life begins and love began.

Oh, constant Adam, taste your apple
roll your tongue about those pips
and kiss sweet knowing Eve
upon her musing lips
sons and pentacles and steer
her womb will render
and chattel is what those sons
will hold most dear-
spliced and sliced out of spit and soil, and split
One into desperate two
you seek through sweat and shame
and serpent dream, and do-
and you, poor Eve, aborted all that pain
that Self might gain in Abel and in Cain
and Adam called you keening
back to rest - you were his soul
his hope, your breast
and Seth he rendered second
unto death.
Tell me, son, still young
and brown, and marked, and hairy
do you range the desert?
are you lonely?
do you range
where stone and spirit
make exchange?

if you quest and thirst and rave
for answer, seek the mountain
seek the fountain
in that initiating cave -
there you'll find a tomb will mouth
your prick of conscience
and swallow continents and questions
the pestilence of thinking
deeds and fears
you'll pass through such a death of seed to peace
where one in beauty bends to save
to lead you up bright steps
by night-webbed gossamer
to what you crave
and at that inner height
you'll find from apple's pride and root
from knowledge and apple tomb absolved
grown
now luminous, now numinous
your flowering Tree of Light
your sanctifying Fruit of Life -

Godself holds a branch of annulating fire
and flails his grain
with time and with desire

and when all and ever
will be spent
retted and rent
He'll gather from the chaff and ash, the spark
and spin it starwards up
to spiral out to shimmer in the dark
then rest and smile
know and be charmed by love
filled and fulfilled
for this
ah, yes
is Wisdom.
This is what She meant.

lovingly,
ao

The USA & the Four Elements – CREDO CXXXIX:

2011-04-24T13:40:00.000-07:00

If you look at a map of North America, there are three layers, occupied by Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The US is the largest section and most heavily populated. If you think about it, we are the part beset with severe problems involving the four elements. Canada seems almost the calm brow of our shared continent. One wonders if it’s the negative collective consciousness that is bringing about these constant attacks of nature? Despite the unreported good being accomplished in our country, the output of TV seems to favor the headline-grabbing news of crime, disasters, and discord of every ilk. The ads are often violent and give no regard for the positive. Just tonight, I wondered what a child of five or six would think of a man throwing a dart at another and killing him! An advertisement, mind you, for a dating firm. We seem to forget the impact of such ads on kids.

Here are the four elements as astrologically or symbolically understood. I have focused on the negative impact, which seems to be dominant at the moment.

AIR
which rules our collective thoughts.

We have high winds, tornadoes and hurricanes, and areas of serious drought:
 Confusion and indecision, hype and mendacity?

The antidote would be honesty, good faith, and optimism.

FIRE
which rules our collective actions.

At the moment we are suffering major fires in Texas, but there have been destructive major fires in several other states every year. California and Florida are recent examples.
Crime, murder, persecutions, and irrational behavior?

The antidote would be acts of courage, responsibility, kindness, and consideration

EARTH
which rules our collective economy and ecology.

We have earthquakes, mudslides, and volcanic lava.
Materialism, debt, greed, dishonesty, and conceit?

The antidote would be thrift, charity, honesty, and common sense.

WATER
which rules our collective emotions.

Heavy rains and destructive floods are common, as are blizzards.
We get carried away and react with mob psychology, swayed by ads and politics.

The antidote is self-analysis, transpersonal love, and resistance to group pressure.

* * *

Certainly, we are not the only nation to suffer but few other countries are beset with all four at once. For me, it raises the basic question, does human collective consciousness impact weather?

There is a lovely story called "The Rainmaker" Jung was fond of relating. Here it is:

The Story of the Rainmaker

The function and role of the rainmaker is best described in a story. The concept of the rainmaker comes from a story from Jung and for those not familiar with the rainmaker, the following story is taken from The Tao of Psychology by Jean Shinoda Bolen and was told to Jung by Richard Wilhelm. It is the story of the rainmaker of Kiaochau.

"There was great drought. For months there had not been a drop of rain and the situation became catastrophic. The Catholics made processions, the Protestants made prayers, and the Chinese burned joss-sticks and shot off guns to frighten away the demons of the drought, but with no result. Finally the Chinese said, "We will fetch the rainmaker." And from another province a dried-up old man appeared. The only thing he had asked for was a quiet little house somewhere, and there he locked himself in for three days. On the fourth day the clouds gathered and there was a great snow storm at the time of the year when no snow was expected, an unusual amount, and the town was so full of rumors about the wonderful rainmaker that Richard Wilhelm went to ask the man how he did it. In true European fashion he said, "They call you the Rainmaker, will you tell me how you made the snow?" And the little Chinese man said, "I did not make the snow, I am not responsible." "But what have you done these three days?" "Oh, I can explain that. I come from another country where things are in order. Here they are out of order, they are not as they should be by the ordinance of heaven. Therefore the whole country is not in Tao, and I also am not in the natural order of things because I am in a disordered country. So I had to wait three days until I was back in Tao and then naturally the rain came."
—C. G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, pp. 419–20

lovingly,
ao

Dealing with Adversity– CREDO CXXXVIII

2011-04-01T08:59:00.000-07:00

As so many people in the world are having extremely difficult times, any advice worth listening to seems welcome. Two voices from the past offer this on both a collective and an individual level. The renowned British historian Arnold Toynbee observed that it was not what happens to a civilization [country] but how it reacts that determines the outcome. A case in point, of course, was the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, which resulted from laxity and frivolity, political squabbling, contrasts between wealth and poverty, and many of the other symptoms facing our own country today. Those who are aware of history can think of many other examples, including some positive ones. Yet, many countries started out reacting positively only to fall into the power trap, such as Germany after WWI, resulting in the Nazi regime of corrupt socialism and the Soviet version which degenerated into tyrannical communism. Both countries began with meaningful ideology, and both ended with defeat from inner and outer forces. Then a new development cast off these by people coming out in thousands peacefully demonstrating and protesting tyranny. Today, indeed, we have progressed to the United Nations, the EU and NATO, and yet, the struggle continues, resulting in more violence.

Historically, in our own country in the late 1700s, a strange global sequence took place. Hindu philosophy had come to Europe for the first time and was translated into German coincidentally with the American Revolution, and, as a result, some New Englanders chose to go to German universities rather than England’s Oxford or Cambridge. There, they learned of ahimsa, non-violence. These Transcendentalists in Concord, Massachusetts inspired Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience, which was read by the young Indian Gandhi in South Africa, who went on to liberate India without firing a shot, which influenced Martin Luther King, and led eventually to the inauguration of our first biracial president, Barack Obama. Phew! Such is the power of ideas! Currently, we are now on edge observing a new rise of the Common Man in North Africa and the Middle East: the power of a united people spontaneously seeking freedom and democracy against a single tyrannical ruler. The concept already has inflamed at least eight different countries.

On the individual level, the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung put forward the same idea, saying it’s not what happens to us in life but how we react to it that determines our fate. Take note, we have a choice! We even say, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade!” An extreme example would be blind and deaf Helen Keller, but so many outstanding Americans have demonstrated this way of reacting, coming out of difficult circumstances in youth – one could almost name it a national trait.

Contrast this today, alas, with an increasing segment of our contemporary population that is succumbing to escapism in distorted pleasure-seeking drugs, porn, and crime. Also, the hours spent on TV and video games, to say nothing of the Internet, imply living an ersatz life. In the meantime, we are risking losing our planet through ignorant abuse, our own physical well-being, and our ability to relate to each other in a genuine way. Now, present economic adversity offers us “the kitchen table,” the rediscovering of families around it, and the challenge of reacting in a real and not synthetic way. Our frenetic national extraversion hopefully may adjust to rediscovering some of the rewards of looking inwards and a search for simple rather than "virtual" reality. This implies the need for a profound shift in our values, taking time “to smell the roses,” noticing the suffering and needs of others, of nature itself, animals, and the environment, and offering compassionate service to them insofar as we are able. As Mother Teresa remarked, we also need to remember that God is in everyone, and the importance of person to person. Such a reaction to adversity might indeed save our world.

lovingly,
ao

E pluribus unum – CREDO CXXXVII

2011-03-17T07:24:00.000-07:00

We are witnessing in the last few weeks a new phenomenon in North Africa and the Middle East. It is the power of the common man to use a massive peaceful crowd to overcome a despotic ruler. Gandhi’s “Salt March” was a forerunner, and, to be sure, the Eastern countries in Europe had the Velvet Revolution against Communism, but these were not as clearly defined as what is happening in North Africa. Here the composite Aquarian rule of the Common Man is placed against its opposite sign Leo, the single ruler. Thus begins the New Age in historical terms. Nation after nation, starting with Tunisia, has provided massive rivers of humanity that moved as one to protest against single entrenched dictators; Ben Ali, Mubarak, Ghadafi and others.

The Latin quote which is the motto of the USA, and on every dollar bill, translates as “Out of many, one,” and was also used symbolically previously by the Roman Empire, which had a bundle of arrows called the fasces tied together, giving rise years later to the term “fascist.”

At another level, the United Nations, and the European Union (EU) function as one out of many.

Those are all political examples, but the same process can be discerned in large business companies, universities, government branches in many countries. The USA, however, is a triad of checks and balances: the judicial, legislative, and the executive branches, headed by a single president, who nevertheless is subject to the people, as Clinton demonstrated . . .

Day by day, at present, history is unfolding this new phenomenon. It deserves our attention. The internet, Facebook, etc. are all abstract communities in which we participate without personal contact. The reality of the “other” is a matter of personal projection. Take a certain journalist: you read his pieces, hear his voice on the radio, and you form an imaginary man to fill in what’s missing. Then one day, you finally see his picture and are amazed at the difference from what you had imagined. Multiply this phenomenon by a billion and the unreality of what one thinks is going on and what really is becomes daunting.

Mother Teresa put it succinctly: I believe in person to person and God is in everyone. Aquarius believes in the latter but forgets the importance of person to person. You pay a toll and a little green light comes on with Thank You! An Aquarian guru I knew signed all his computer mail “with heartfelt love.” An Aquarian author I knew was writing a book about the seven mysteries of the universe, but forgot to water his horse, which sickened. As I myself have Aquarius rising, I have spent a lifetime trying to be practical! A need, something my very practical husband Walter finally conveyed to me. His method was very subtle: he never criticized me. No, but he would become very, very silent and when I noticed this, I had to ask – only then would he give the reason. This was very helpful actually because by asking I opened myself to receive the reprimand! Always followed, to be sure, by an affectionate hug.

We really only had two fights in eighteen years. The first was when we moved our joint belongings and discovered the number of musical records we both had. I said the long shelf was for his, and he said no, it was for mine. Aargh! In the end, there was room for both. The second argument was over the virtue or lack of it, of the Emperor Charlemagne! He was for me, a wise and heroic hero. In fact, when Germany invaded Holland in WW II I dreamt he was in a telephone booth and I was banging on the glass shouting, “What are we going to do?!!” For Walter, who grew up in Germany, Charlemagne was “the bloody Saxon butcher” who invited the Scandinavian nobility to a banquet and proceeded to slaughter them, a tale I refused to believe on the grounds that the order came from someone else, a woman whose name escapes me at the moment.

Back to the topic! What the present media offers us is the opportunity to live a new commandment: Love thy neighbors, they are yourself! Even in a family, our relationships are basically the result of mutual complex projections. We serve as multiple masks to one another! As I have written before, many of our relationships are based upon opinion. I remember an experience in India, looking down at night at a corpse being burned on a ghat. Some dogs, whose eyes reflected the fire, were snatching bits of flesh and devouring them. I thought of the hounds of hell. The next morning, I saw the dogs and puppies again, and they were just pooches wagging friendly tails.

So E pluribus unum has a caveat: A chain is as strong as its weakest link. A river of humanity is subject to mob psychology. We desperately need to remember the importance of the unum’s responsibility.

I am reminded of the Hindu image of Indra’s Net. The net is held together with a jewel at each nexus, and each jewel reflects all the others! It seems a prophetic holistic symbol for the fractals of today.

If the dichotomy of the last Age of Pisces/[Virgo] was faith/reason, the individual vs the collective is indeed the dichotomy of our already-arrived Age of Aquarius/[Leo].

We can celebrate this in a form of “Instant Communion”: by making a circle holding hands and swaying back and forth three times chanting “Yum! Yum! Yum!” followed by “Hugs to the left and hugs to the right!” This always ends any meeting in laughter and delight. Try it, as many have, and enjoy. By the way, we tried this with over a hundred Tibetan orphans in Dharamsala in India, and they knew exactly what to do! So now we can truly say it has Tibetan links!

lovingly,
ao

The Pearl Principle of Toynbee and Jung – CREDO CXXXVI

2011-02-14T07:48:00.000-08:00

This seems a moment in history to remind ourselves of one of the most significant ideas put forward in the last century! Arnold Toynbee, the famous British historian, put it this way (as I remember it):
It is not what happens to a civilization [country], but how it reacts to it that determines the outcome.

And to paraphrase Jung:
It is not what happens to us as individuals, but how we react to it that determines our spiritual growth.

This concept, collectively and individually, is probably one of the most important ideas that might sustain us as we live in these acutely challenging times! Egypt is a current case, in point.

There are many extreme individual examples of this: Helen Keller, born deaf and blind, or Nelson Mandela, the South African, who suffered decades in prison for trying to liberate his country from European colonization, who triumphed in the end and is now a revered heroic founder of this independent nation. These are just two well-known examples, but there are countless others all over the world.

I call it the Pearl Principle. It is the irritant in the oyster that produces the perfection, luster, and beauty of the pearl.

As so many, many people all over the world are suffering, one way or another, as countries under despotic rulers or victims of natural or manmade disasters, never was it more important to realize the enormous import of this philosophical, psychological, if not spiritual truth.

* * *

Speaking for myself, last evening I was wallowing in self-pity with a dear friend, bemoaning the physical and financial calamity of this brutal winter that has caused the virtual collapse of a whole room in my house, with leaks that cannot be stopped until April at the earliest! The prospect of moving the contents and files, packing everything in boxes, and this includes the meditation room upstairs that requires a whole new window – at 88 and unable to use my right hand, in constant pain, plus the current absence of my beloved secretary due to illness, etc. etc. – this prospect seems insurmountable, combined with the effort to finish collecting materials for the Archives of Smith College! Well, my friend added a well-deserved scolding, and I went to bed in pain and misery, only to wake up with the comforting insights of Toynbee and Jung! Bless them! Hooray for the Unconscious!

Thus, I hasten to share the wisdom of Arnold Toynbee and Carl Gustav Jung, in the hopes of potentially cheering just a few others of the millions of people who are suffering far greater pains than I am.

I must not forget my magic word Vivex! that forces me, without fail, to get up and go on, or my oft-quoted words of the Bishop of Woolwich, In we are and on we must.

Finally, I offer the consolation of looking up to the stars at night: the universe is running on time and this too shall pass. As the medieval French poet Francois Villon wrote, Ou sont les neiges d’antan? Where are the snows of yesteryear?

hopefully and lovingly,
ao

How to Love Your Enemy: Part I – CREDO CXXXV

2011-02-04T07:27:00.000-08:00

Now, there’s a tough commandment! Especially when the news of the day is so full of opposite factions striving against each other, to say nothing of killing them. After years of listening to clients and patients griping and growling about their antagonists, it seems a hopeless and unreasonable task.

It starts with blaming, which, of course is a form of projection, and this brings up the lines of wisdom in the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive others who trespass against us.”

But there is the problem of seemingly real evil and hateful behavior that makes the commandment perhaps seem too idealistic. Here is another way of looking at it:

This is based on the concept of karma, which is simple action and reaction. No “sin” is involved, and it takes reincarnation as a given. If you can allow these two to be a reality, you will know that when your “enemy” does something unspeakably cruel or evil, you should develop compassion for them because they will have to learn the hard way the next time around! That compassion amounts to loving your enemy, but it is not easy.

Yet, here are a few instances that come to mind. One was a young man with an angelic disposition who suffered all kinds of physical ailments and had a history of cruel mental and physical abuse as a child. Let Mark be a poster child for many, many similar cases in our world. It seems so totally unjustified. Consider the possibility that this is a “redemptive” life, and that by maintaining his good nature and kindness, he was erasing the past. In such a redemptive life, one may discover that one’s true nature is essentially to be kind. Here is an extreme example:

One of my uncles graduated with the Edward Sheldon from Harvard. Ned went on to become a famous American playwright and became wealthy in the 1920s. I corresponded with him at the age of 11, when I sent him, at the suggestion of my mother, a play that I had seriously written! I received a telegram critiquing it, and so when we went to New York, my mother decided we should meet. We went to the address on the Upper East Side, and took the elevator up to the penthouse. The small elevator door opened, and I was in for a shock! A narrow bier was in the middle of a beautifully furnished room, complete with a piano. The bier had four tall candles burning at the corners, and on it was the body of Ned. I felt scared until a hearty voice said, “Welcome, Penelope and Alice!” He was alive, handsome, and tan and looked twenty years younger than my Uncle George. He did not encounter the stress of everyday life and he was rolled out onto the rooftop to get some sun whenever possible.

What had happened to him was that when he was about 30, he had been suddenly overcome by a mysterious medical condition which left his body totally paralyzed for life and also blind!! To shorten the story, he continued to maintain his friendships with the literary and theatrical elite, without a trace of self pity, and took the time from that day on to befriend me, to encourage, and to guide me in times of adolescent crises. He became my spiritual confessor. I was to surface as an example of his kindness and wisdom in the biography written about him after his death, The Man who Lived Twice by Eric W. Barnes. Perhaps in the next CREDO I can tell the story, as it is an example of the unreasonable social mores of the 1930s. Ned always communicated by telegram, which in those days, consisted of a tickertape message pasted on a folded yellow Western Union envelope.

There is a saying, “Every saint was once a sinner.” One of the most controversial ideas that Jung came up with was that “Christ” might sometimes wear the mask of the “Devil” in order to teach us.

I suggest to anyone reading this, to look back over your own life and, in the privacy of your conscience, look at your own past and see where you might have made a mistake, a definition of which came to me years ago: A mistake is a loop in consciousness made to expose a greater surface to experience. My youthful error was that when I became conscious of a psychological or behavioral mistake, I thought I was free of it. Not so! I had to apply the new insight. I then had the idea of Christ’s seamless garment, presumably his aura; by contrast, most of us have holes in ours, but when we learn the lesson, we fill that hole and it’s on to the next one. This must be the distinction between being holey and wholly holy! (Forgive me!)

More in my next CREDO!

lovingly,
ao

Zodiacs – CREDO CXXXIV

2011-01-18T13:10:00.000-08:00

There is a big flap going on about astrology in the news. It is based on ignorance. To clarify matters: there are two zodiacs. The sidereal zodiac which is Sun centered and the tropical zodiac which is Earth centered. Astrologers use the tropical zodiac as we live on the earth! But that is only part of the wonder. At the moment of spring, when the sun appears to cross the Earth's equator, stop the clock, and observe. That moment is called the Point of the Vernal Equinox. Imagine a clock hand at this moment pointing out, past the Sun, to the actual stars of the constellations; you would find that it is moving counterclockwise 1 degree every 72 years. Where it lands determines the Age we live in, and it is moving backwards into the constellation of Aquarius, through the spatial interface, from that of Pisces. (This feature was discovered by Hipparchus of Alexandria in approx. 200 BC!) This motion is called the Precession of the Equinoxes.

The Earth-centered tropical zodiac moves through the signs yearly in the natural clockwise direction of Aries, Taurus, etc., so, you have a wheel within a wheel. It takes approx 26,000+ years for the Point to traverse all the constellations, and this is referred to as a Platonic Year.

The flap is caused by confusing the sidereal zodiac with the tropical one, which astronomers frequently do! The Ages have a collective impact on our history, mythology, and psychological evolution that I have outlined in my book The Heavens Declare: Astrological Ages and the Evolution of Consciousness. What is fascinating is that there is physical proof in history, archaeology, and mythology. For instance, during the Age of Taurus, the Bull was worshipped all over the world, and this coincides with the first evidence of humanity moving from a nomadic to a settling down in one place, thanks to agriculture, providing for “civilization.” People had land, and presumably prayed for good weather and no plagues, etc., thereby projecting a sense of property. Even today, we speak of the market being “bullish”!

However, the individual horoscope is based upon the tropical zodiac and is determined by the time, longitude, and latitude of an individual’s birth and gives a psychological guide to how a person is likely to process experience.

I realize that this is a complex explanation but, hopefully, it sheds some light on the matter!

lovingly,
ao

UFOS – CREDO CXXXIII

2011-01-09T09:34:00.000-08:00

There was a piece on AOL recently about UFOS (Unidentified Flying Objects), and I feel the need to express my experiences with them. My husband Walter and I not only saw them 7 or 8 times in the late 1980s and ’90s but discovered that a number of other neighbors also saw them but were too shy to mention them because they were afraid to be considered nuts! My husband was convinced they were aliens but, as a Scorpio, I am reluctant to define them, so what follows is an accurate description of what we saw, and I ask that you trust my veracity. I kept notes in a red book, which has since vanished, when I was moved from my upstairs bedroom when I became ill and was presumed to be dying.

The first time coincided with the night we watched The Pink Panther. We had gone to bed and the lights were out. We happened to look out the large picture window adjacent to our bed, and Walter noticed a very bright light, about the size of Jupiter, shoot across the sky and stop in mid-air, change direction and shoot across the treetops and stop again, totally motionless. This defied gravity! I volunteered to go down for our binoculars. In my absence, Walter noted that a plane moved slowly across the sky with blinking lights and the UFO went dark, but the minute the plane vanished, the UFO lit up again and continued to zap to and fro across the sky. I called two neighbors and they also witnessed it. None of us had seen such a spectacle before. Finally, my husband tired and said he would sleep but I watched for another half hour in a total daze of shock, thinking of the implications of what we had seen.

I will mention another time, a few years later that was outstanding. We were driving home from Connecticut, and, as we approached Monterey, we saw two of them over the treetops, so we stopped on the shore of Lake Garfield and turned off our car lights. This time we had a much clearer close-up view. These were pinkish in hue and were shaped like frisbees and rotating. It was as if they had windows around the rim. They continued to dance and dart around joyfully. At no time were we afraid.

My darling husband died in 1998, and I saw the last one after his death. I was still upstairs, and this UFO was very large, and came closer, and frightened me a bit with its brilliance and proximity. Since then I have not seen any because I fell ill and had to be moved downstairs. My teenaged grandson Cameron saw one later but since it moved in a straight line, I think it might have been a satellite orbiting on a mission?

Now years later, there are photographs, reports from airline pilots, and other witnesses in abundance, so there is no longer any doubt of their existence, and the general public no longer scoffs at them, it seems.

Winston Churchill confessed that he saw one years ago, but felt that revealing this would cause needless alarm in the British public.

Hopefully, in the coming years, scientists will come up with a plausible explanation but for now they remain Unidentified Flying Objects!

lovingly and truthfully,
ao

Candles – CREDO CXXXII

2010-12-19T09:29:00.000-08:00

As I have hinted before, archetypal processes are also hidden in physical objects, which suggests that looking at them symbolically can be positively illuminating (sic!). Nothing could be more apt therefore than a candle.
All the major religions have rituals connected to candles, so what is the reason?
(I suggest reading the following slowly and giving each line a chance for you to listen to your inner Self!)

Candles, like people, come in various, shapes, colors, and sizes. They all, however, have something in common: a central individual wick. (This wick can also be symbolic of Jung’s Self.) It is passive, until lit by a flame.

We have to light a candle! Invite Spirit . . .

The wick is at the center of every candle, regardless of shape.

When lit, the flame on every candle is the same flame. It is symbolic of Spirit.

The flame is fire, which links it to the Sun, the source of all Light, Heat, and Life. This fire is symbolic of the mystery many call God. And especially Love!

Transpersonal Love, or agape, is how we can express that “Vast Certainty” many call God. Every atom of manifestation contains that Light.

Darkness per se holds the Light, but cannot put it out.

A candle, therefore, is a symbol for the secret of what Love really is:
With a lit candle another can be lit many times.
Its Light helps us and others to see.

This flame has been handed down through cosmic time and space. It unites us to the bright starry universe. We do not know its origin.

The candle measures the fire safely. When fire is not controlled it is destructive.

The sun shines and does not count its rays. It needs darkness to be seen.

The sun shines. It didn’t have to!

Love is a mystery, shining through us not out of us.

The fires of hell are the flames of God’s Love rejected.
– Dorothy L. Sayers. (Oxford theologian and author)

So say a Blessing this holy Solstice Season and light your candle for the eventual true illumination of all humanity, for Peace, and for our understanding the preciousness of nature, and that we may increase our individual consciousness and spiritual awe of Love.

It is so simple to share. Even a kindly smile and wave will do! Kindness is the beginning.

Just remember this:
Love thy neighbor as thy Self for we both carry the same flame!

lovingly,
ao

P.S.: Don’t forget the animals! Especially these days!

Solstice – CREDO CXXXI

2010-12-01T08:16:00.000-08:00

The first Sunday in Advent marks the beginning of the Christian year. The four Sundays in Advent always come around the time of the Solstice on December 21, and there is a reason why. The Solstice, an astronomical feature, falls on December 21, and marks the entrance of the Sun into the earth sign of Capricorn, ruled by Saturn and which gave rise to the riotous pagan Roman celebrations called the Saturnalia. So the early Christian fathers, therefore, chose December 25th not only to supplant the Romans’ but also the birth of Mithra, founder of a rival religion. What all of them celebrate really is the event called the Solstice. And the outer materialism manifest at this time really implies something far more significant. If you think about it, it is the culmination of nine months from the first sign of Aries and it takes usually nine months for the gestation and physical appearance of a baby!

But there is an emphasis on materialism as well, and I am certain that few of us have missed the incredible, almost exclusive, emphasis today in the media on the importance of material sales, profits, and competitions for every penny. Not a word about the Solstice let alone the symbolic spiritual implications involved, So it seems important for us to remember what the Solstice really is and to regain the symbolic import given it by all cultures in the Northern Hemisphere through thousands of years.

It marks the shortest darkest day in the year! This year it will be for those on EST at 6:39 pm. This marks the moment when the Sun appears to stop and move northward (Sol-stice is Latin for Sun-still), bringing Light and the promise, through the coldest months, that we are moving towards spring, Aries! Slowly, by increments of 2 to 3 minutes each day this is the message of hope that new life will bring the greening, blooming, and fertility of the earth again. All of this in reality is caused by the motion of our Earth as it orbits yearly the Sun.

The event is recognized consciously by all the religions and is spiritually celebrated by Christians as Christ’s Mass; by the Jews, as Hanukkah; by people of color as Kwanzaa; by the Norse as Yule; by the Hindus as Diwali. Moslems, Zoroastrians, and Orientals all recognize it, as did the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians. Hope comes afresh with the return of Light.

It seems therefore, that we should and could lift our eyes from the bargains being touted everywhere, and realize the grandeur of our Solar System that, despite the never-ending wars and conflicts of humanity, continues to remind us that Light, Life, and Love are still there for us, and that there is a far deeper meaning to this recurring event. So maybe we could stop and remember that we have, like every candle, a center for Light in our hearts and like the wick, it carries the same flame of Spirit.

Thus, these four Sundays of Advent give us the time to appreciate the wonder that awaits us. Despite all our rushing around, it is comforting, unconscious or not, to know that this moment links us literally with the manifest depths of our Solar System, So Happy Solstice! It unites us all.

lovingly,
ao

Yes/No – CREDO CXXX

2010-11-22T07:25:00.000-08:00

We tend to think of these two simple words as opposites but they are not. Why? Because there has to be a YES for a No to deny it!

This involves a paradoxical metaphysical question which I certainly cannot answer, but who among us can put out LIGHT? Genesis I raises the same question and offers an answer in the First Day of Creation, when God says, “Let there be Light!”

This Fiat! begs the question, and the ego simply cannot answer.
I probably have related the huge attack of insight I had sitting on the fire escape in Greenwich Village in New York, in 1945.

The Sun shines and it didn’t have to!

It still boggles my mind. It is the ultimate question: The source of existence itself, the primal YES!

You can see the idea in a poem I wrote: “The yes must come before a no sounds.”

The immensity of this is such, I have no further comment, only the desire to share the wonder!

lovingly,
ao

The Wisdom of Zippers – CREDO CXXIX

2010-11-11T09:37:00.000-08:00

I thought I had already written a Credo on this topic, but am unable to find it. As it is such a fun way to share some insights, here goes.

One day in meditation, I wondered about the antonym for the word symbolos, which means joining together, and in Grk. that would mean diabolos [!!] which means separating. And these two archetypal processes come together in the zipper!

The wee tab of my last Credo, the Transcendent Function, obviously has a Descendent Function, so it was time to reconsider the Zipper. And this is what I learned: it is the best example for Jungian symbolic understanding.
Ask yourself, what makes one out of two going up? And two out of one going down? A zipper.!So the wee tab is ruled by Mercury and going up, it becomes the psychopomp [love that word!], leader of souls, and the Trickster, or worse, going down.

Well, I shared this insight with my beloved Polar Bear, my husband, and from then on, he would gleefully put on his pants in the morning and shout “Symbolos!” and at night, with a wink, reverse the action and whisper “Diabolos!”So this soon became a part of my lectures and showed that Jungian psychology can be a source of humor as well as wisdom.

Now to be serious, Jung called this function the coincidentia oppositorum or the coming together of opposites of any kind, showing the psychological importance of keeping both our positive and negative emotions in full sight, rather than the usual Christian choice of owning the good and denying the bad. Then the negative is cast back into the Unconscious and gets projected out onto someone else! Collectively, the enemy. This insight of Jung’s is vitally important, and it is the energy then that fosters our individual spiritual growth or the ascent of the zipper. It implies a profound humility on the part of each of us to acknowledge that we are not perfect on the one hand nor hopeless cases on the other, as long as we maintain the balance. Duality rules our existence in this manifest world except at the miraculous apex of union or what I call the occasional pook of insight given when a lesson is learned.

I believe I have shared what happened to me when I smugly became conscious of some mistaken attitude – I learned to my dismay I could not claim it until I had applied it! Christ is described as wearing a “seamless garment” or a whole aura. That image translates into a sort of sheath that the rest of us have with holes in it – not spots – and so to become conscious of our lack we need to be wholly present in order to become holy! Ouch!

So the danger is inflation and the wise course is to assume that, okay, I filled that hole, where’s the next one? At 88 years of age, I am no longer able of committing grave active sins, but I know what it is to “sin” on the installment plan!

I honestly think that ‘sin’ is an outmoded word. I prefer this definition: A mistake is a loop in consciousness made to expose a greater surface to experience. [Sayings of Gezeebius] Or the image of a tree whose vertical ascent is dependent on horizontal branches which grow, thanks to leaves exposed to the sun, each leaf crying Aha! Aha!

As I am now a very oooold tree, I am dropping my fruit willy-nilly, always remembering:

What you would grasp
let go,
only those seeds that fall
grow.

lovingly
ao

The Transcendent Function – CREDO CXXVIII

2010-11-11T09:06:00.000-08:00

As the archetypal processes work on all levels, I am going to show how simple some of Jung’s ideas can be explained by using simple things. So with apologies to those who already know, let me demonstrate the nature of the Transcendent Function.

Looking at the triangle above:

The base line can stand for the matter in question.
The side lines can represent any opposites: pro/con; conscious/unconscious, etc. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
The apex represents the solution!

It is like the little tab on a zipper, as it pulls the opposite sides together, it acts as a sym-bolos (joining)

This is another proof that the archetypal processes can be found all around us hidden in things! The secret is to look at any physical object (noun) and turn it into a verb by asking it, “What do you do?” (verb). Then listen to what it reveals . . . !

Try this with a pen, or wrapping paper, a cup, or a candle!! This is a great secret! Nothing is hidden, we are blind! “Having eyes, you do not see,” as Christ remarked.

-------------------------------------
Have been ill, hence delay in CREDOS, but I did want to share this thought! Will be 88 on the 13th! but as mentioned before, got A+ in cackling lessons!

lovingly
ao

The Sacred in the Commonplace – CREDO CXXVII

2010-10-11T12:46:00.000-07:00

Angela Morgan was an obscure western American poet who lived from 1873 to 1957. She wrote a poem that made its way into an old collection of mystical poetry called Lyra Mystica, which I happen to own and to treasure. In it is this remarkable poem that expresses something I have written a whole book about—The Dove in the Stone: Finding the Sacred in the Commonplace. You can imagine the kinship I felt with the author as she so poignantly expresses the same idea. I truly believe this poem deserves recognition! I think you will agree.

KINSHIP

I am aware,
As I go commonly sweeping the stair;
Doing my part of the every-day care—
Human and simple my lot and share—
I am aware of a marvelous thing;
Voices that murmur and ethers that ring
In the far stellar spaces where cherubim sing;
I am aware of the passion that pours
Down the channels of fire through Infinity’s doors;
Forces terrific with melody shod,
Music that mates with the pulses of God.
I am aware of the glory that runs
From the core of myself to the core of the suns,
Bound to the stars by invisible chains,
Blaze of eternity now in my veins,
Seeing the ruins of ethereal rains,
Here in the midst of the every-day air—
I am aware.

I am aware,
As I sit quietly here in my chair,

Sewing or reading or braiding my hair—
Human and simple my lot and my share—
I am aware of the systems that swing
Through the aisles of creation on heavenly wing,
I am aware of a marvelous thing,
Trail of the comets in furious flight,
Thunders of beauty that shatter the night,
Terrible triumph of pageants that march
To the trumpets of time through Eternity’s arch.
I am aware of the splendor that ties
All the things of the earth with the things of the skies,
Here in my body the heavenly heat,
Here in my flesh the melodious beat
Of the planets that circle Divinity’s feet.
As I silently sit here in my chair,
I am aware.
—Angela Morgan
lovingly, 
ao

Virtue – CREDO CXXVI

2010-09-27T07:19:00.000-07:00

When I was a teenager, the summer I spent with my grandmother in La Jolla, California, I had an early intuition: Virtue is really enlightened insight! Many years later, after a not especially virtuous life, I began to see the profound wisdom of this. I had grown up with religious assumptions of sin, guilt, if not hell, and that being virtuous was a trade-in for Brownie Points to heaven. This was the standard cultural background for being “ “good.”

Today, almost 88, and a lot wiser, I have learned that if one takes the message on its own worth, eliminating all religious aspects, it becomes a matter simply of common sense. Cause and effect! If you lie, you won’t trust anybody. If you hate, you will make enemies. If you steal, you will fear loss, etc. On the other hand, as I have written elsewhere, “A mistake is a loop in consciousness made to expose a greater surface to experience.” A tree does not grow like a telephone pole; it needs leaves, which grow on branches. It’s as if each leaf, exposed to the Sun of wisdom, is an Aha! helping the tree of life to grow.

So the concept of virtue noted above has to be redefined. The word’s origin comes from vir, Lat. for man. According to the dictionary, Plato distinguished four cardinal virtues: prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice. Christians apparently termed these the “natural virtues” and added the supernatural, theological, or Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity, or virtues infused by God.

All of these smack of Pollyanna, and, as I suspect, Jung would point out, ignore the Shadow of the opposites in the unconscious. This very day, yet another spiritual “Bishop,” a pastor, with a congregation of 25,000, is accused of sexually deviate behavior on the sly. This is a common theme, alas, and from the sad tale of the Roman Catholic priests, it seems to be a warning to all of us. Christ gave it the term of being a “whited sepulcher.”

Perhaps, such religious leaders start out sincerely and, as the kundalini force starts rising, it gets stuck in the first two chakras, which rule sex. Come to think of it, there are plenty of such characters who misuse the third chakra of “power”! The Inquisition is a collective example of that: In trying to exorcize the “Devil” in sinners, the “Devil” entered them! There is a huge difference between good and “good”. . .

Jung put it in psychological language but pointed out essentially that trying to be too “good” is bad for you. So what are we to do!! Perhaps the answer is just to be kind. That word in Old English was kinde and Dame Kinde was Mother Nature! In short, be natural, humble, and thoughtful of others – no Brownie Point agenda.

Not namby-pamby, mind you. “Tough Love” can also be kindness. We need to remember the Milk Stool Principle” (CREDO XXXVIII), that trinity of Love, Wisdom, and Power. Power actually can be a force for good when guided by Love and Wisdom. Think of Jesus chasing the moneychangers out of the temple.

Astrologically, Taurus (money) and Scorpio (sex) are opposites, and Jung advises us to try to balance all opposites, positive and negative, consciously. If we don’t, the rejected one falls into the Unconscious and gets projected out onto someone or some collective group and causes havoc.

If you imagine that I know the answer to all this, think again! Honestly, I only can raise good questions. But here is a prayer:

Invocation

O Holy Sophia, Holy Wisdom, Holy Joy
hidden for so long
come forth and reveal yourself in the world
and in our souls!

Help us to see with a loving eye
Help us to hear with inwit and intuition
Show us how to be natural and kind
Show us how to find ourselves in one another

Lead us from who we think we are
to who we really are

Let us learn from the flowers
that we need not strive so hard
Teach us to allow that Light from within
to unfold us as a gift like your Rose.

lovingly,
ao

P.S.: I realize that I may have referred to some unfamiliar concepts and terminology in this Credo! Note the words and google them. You won’t be sorry! In his autobiography, Jung refers to his curiosity being the words Why? and How come? which led him from passive acceptance to positive understanding. And look at the results!

The Only Way – CREDO CXXV

2010-09-19T07:36:00.000-07:00

It would seem that each of the three great religions of the Western World, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (in their historical order), have large groups of believers who believe that theirs is the "Only Way" to God or salvation. This has caused centuries of argument, wars, and persecutions. Each developed rules to be followed, guilts for not conforming, and threats. The problem is that the word "way" is always seen as a noun: a single road, a path. Yet, "the way" also has another meaning, as an adverb, or "how to", as in "This is the way to do it!" If you look at it that way, it opens the concept to as many people on earth who are interested in the actual meaning of life!

Furthermore, science tells us that every human being has a unique DNA, fingerprints, etc. Each individual reacts to life according to his own nature. Someone can give a lecture to a hundred people but it will be heard a hundred different ways. Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher of one-liners, put it this way: With our eyes open, we share the same world but with our eyes closed, each of us enters a private one. True.

Imagine a spiritual baseball park with an entrance for each religion the world over: we would have temples, synagogues, churches of all denominations with rituals and rules to go by. These could be considered exoteric or conventional forms of expression. So a devout Christian or Jew or Hindu could enter and, if truly successful, would exit into the park itself, where there are no divisions whatever! This is the esoteric surprise! Each of the great religions has this mystical dimension: the Jews, for instance, have the followers of the Baal Shem Tov, who, besides great love, had a great sense of humor. The Christians have the Mystics, including one of my favorites, the poet George Herbert; and the Muslims, the Sufis. Few realize that the most popular poet in the USA is Rumi, an irresistible Sufi, and there is also a humorous character who teaches wisdom called Mullah Nasruddin. There is a mystical dimension to Russian and Greek Orthodoxy, and in the East among Hindus, Budddhists, Taoists and followers of Zen, the characteristics are all kindness, love, and joy. Tolerance! In the Old Testament, Holy Wisdom, (Grk. Hagia Sophia) is described as "full of delight"!

This interfaith compassion is being expressed at the moment, in New York City by a Jewish mayor, a Moslem imam, and several Christians in the matter of the placing of a mosque two blocks away from the destroyed World Trade Center, a destruction instigated by a fanatic Muslim, Bin Laden.

By contrast, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, is a joyful man, who says, "Really, my only religion is kindness."

Let's try that!

lovingly,
ao

I - It / I - Thou – CREDO CXXIV

2010-09-02T09:23:00.000-07:00

We owe Martin Buber, the great Jewish theologian, philosopher and writer, an enormous collective debt! In those four short words, he has summed up the greatest problem of all relationships in the world and offers us the wiser choice.

Buber was a follower of Hasidism and, in fact, wrote about our mutual love, the Baal Shem Tov (see CREDO #117). He believed that you met the sacred in the commonplace and that we can meet the Divine hidden within ourselves and find it in others when you realize that, as I put it, the flame on every wick of Self is the same flame! I suspect that Buber was a joyous individual.

As I understand it, Hasidism in this country, several centuries after the Baal Shem Tov, has undergone a kind of enantiodromia, in that it now has very strict regulations for conforming.

Always remembering that the Latin for “I” is ego (!), it is easy to see how ubiquitous the I-It relationship is.

* It is the basis for all murder and wars of today.
* It is the basis in most business and educational relationships: customers, pupils.
* It is the basis in psychiatry and medicine, where patients are “cases” or even reduced to statistics.
* It is the way we perceive the living creatures we eat and animals in general.
* It is the way some of us regard people of other races or the poor.
* It is the attitude of the guy with the gun, thinking “Don’t take this personally, bang! you’re dead!”

Freud placed his patients on a couch. Jung did not. They sat face to face. For him it was always I – Thou, and he even spoke of the psychic space that two people generate, its content becoming the hidden third. Ego and ego meet and invite the recognition of the Spirit implied by the Self. It is as if we are all different lamps but the Light in each is the same Light.

Buber, like the Baal Shem Tov, knew the Joy of Wisdom and the Wisdom of Joy, that true religion was happy and full of delight and love, not just a preoccupation with endless study about definitions or raking one’s soul about guilt. I, for one, when I was eight years old, was indoctrinated with the latter issue in a so-called Christian school in San Remo, Italy, and I spent years feeling guilty. Even today I can feel guilty of not feeling guilty about something!

If you think about it, how careless are we in treating those who casually serve us as “its.” And, yet, each is a human being like yourself, easily comforted by being recognized as a “Thou”!

I may be repeating the story of the breakfast my beloved Walter and I had one early morning at a Hartford Airport hotel. I observed, as the tired salesmen and others went up to the middle-aged cashier, how she greeted each one, without fail, with a friendly comment and a big smile. There was a visible shift in attitude in the shoulders of each customer, as if a silent spark had been transmitted. When it was our turn to pay, I couldn’t resist commenting on my observation. She glowed almost mischievously at being found out! Yes, she admitted, it was her spiritual intent to recognize the human need for recognition. Today, twenty-five years later, I have not forgotten her. Martin Buber would have loved her.

Psychologically, I suppose, when we take the I-it stance, it comes from our unconscious need to feel superior or perhaps the fear that a stranger might otherwise take the Thou as a come-on, especially these days, But a quick smile can do.

As I am old and handicapped, I walk with two tall Scottish cromags (shepherd’s crooks), up our narrow dirt Hupi Road. I wave to each driver who passes, and most of them wave back or even stop to say hello. But a few summer people stare ahead and rush by. One knows right away that these are city people still encapsulated perhaps in the fear of any intimacy, though a crippled old lady shouldn’t really pose a threat! What they miss is that tiny spark transmitted by the briefest of I-Thou.

Theologically, it can be a moment of agape or transpersonal love, now celebrated in many Christian churches post-communion by greeting the ones standing close to you, a nice custom, that came much later in my experience.

It is summarized in Mother Teresa’s creed: I believe in person to person and that God is in everyone. In this Age of Aquarius, the person-to-person is in great danger of getting lost. Even this post is just words magically transmitted by technology!

Any road, as the Scots say.

I sign this
cyber-lovingly, and hope you get the “pook” I send trying to make it Martin Buber’s I-Thou!
ao

Gratitude – CREDO CXXIII

2010-08-26T18:09:00.000-07:00

As a child, I grew up with the fictional Beejum “Wise Old Man” Gezeebius, so any pithy saying was called a “Saying of Gezeebius.” One of those that came down in my family, thanks to my parents who invented the Beejumstan that ended up in my The Beejum Book, was, “If you want to be rich, count your blessings! I find myself reminded of that every day, especially with all the distressing world news that threatens to submerge us daily. Thus it is, that though old, weak, in pain etc., I am gently brought back to being grateful by that Saying!

As I savored my porridge and coffee this morning, I realized again that the word gratitude comes from the Latin gratia, meaning grace. Now grace is one of those words with a double meaning; we receive grace when saying grace! Aha!

So, it is by appreciating the love, beauty, and bountiful goodness of our earth and its inhabitants that is out there for us that we receive their blessings. Just writing these words this day when the world news totally contradicts them, seems like a Pollyanna absurdity. The irony is that this rings so true in the prophetic words of the “Gnostic Gospel according to Thomas”: Heaven is spread out upon the earth but men do not see it. Words written almost two thousand years ago!

Thus it is, that I recommend to anyone reading these words to take a daily moment to be grateful for something, if only that one is alive and able, as Jung reminds us, to make it consciously conscious through our appreciation.

The importance of gratitude was brought to my attention decades ago by one of the men who, in my opinion, has been a humble saint among us: Brother David Steindl-Rast. A rare combination of a Benedictine monk and a Zen priest! An Austrian by birth, he is one of the most accomplished scholars, teachers, and writers I know of. And he walks his talk, year after year.Today, he has a beautiful website, www.gratefulness.org! I met him in 1972, when we were both lecturing at Wainwright House, and subsequently many times. He invited me to spend a week at the Monastery of St. Clare in Memphis, Tennessee, actually a convent of forward-looking nuns. They were studying the Gurdjieffian enneagram and I was invited to see if there was any connection to astrology!

The convent was a commodious building, and the nuns were delightful. We assembled and the Mother Superior spoke eloquently about the geometric figure of the enneagram which has nine points. Each marks a psychological type. For three days I struggled to find the connection to astrology, and then suddenly I had a breakthrough: it had to do solely with the Moon, which is associated with the Ego. Then it made sense. While it is far too complicated to explain in a CREDO, what I want to concentrate on is the importance Brother David gives to gratitude!

Gratitude itself is a receptive matter. For me, it shares the physical attributes of a cup or a bowl, which can be filled and poured out. “My cup runneth over”are words from the 23rd Psalm; these are words that contain the essence of gratitude!

But as a Scorpio, I realize that just as the Moon reflects both light and the lack of it, a bowl may be filled with anything: poison, filth, etc. but few of us would be grateful for such contents! Though, some bowls are essential even there! The lesson is that psychologically speaking, we are constantly filling and emptying the cups of our souls, and sometimes we can make a more conscious choice. I thought of this as I savored my morning coffee, and of the simplicity of being grateful for those blessings that we receive and usually take for granted.

One of the secrets, I discovered, is that when you invite your Divine Guest to partake of any moment, you never lose it! I first discovered this on a lonely one-track road on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. My car broke down in a howling storm of wind and rain. I was totally stuck! For almost two hours I watched the terror and beauty of the elements, the greys, browns, and livid greens out the window. Finally, I called on my – what turned out to be – Divine Guest and invited it to share the experience, thinking it was too extraordinary not to share with somebody! I cannot express the awareness of what that moment meant! Not only was I making it conscious, but just the invitation sealed it with gratitude for that first instant of realizing the purpose of consciousness itself! Time and space evaporate as I write these words. I am still in that car, the rain pounding on the roof, and I am in awe of the reality of Spirit. And, of course, to the rugged wet-locked guy in his bright yellow mackintosh, who discovered me, tied a rope between his truck and my car, and set off for a garage in Portree. What we didn’t realize was that his tail lights were not working! So I had to guess when he might stop and I might bang into him . . . I was a wreck when after miles of curving narrow roads we drew into the garage and I was able to totter out and ask for the loo!

But I know forever in this life, that if you want to be rich, count your blessings of any kind. This is the secret of gratitude!

lovingly,
ao

Squaring the Circle – CREDO CXXII

2010-08-14T07:23:00.000-07:00

We all know that this is a geometric impossibility. Why? Because of the formula pi r squared. Pi never works out exactly. And yet on another level, 72 of us on Iona did it quite easily. And here is the story of how we did it:

Dr. William Tiller, a theoretical physics professor emeritus of Stanford University, discovered several decades ago that when two people hold hands, their biofeedback energy results are squared. So when ten hold hands in a circle, that energy would be a hundred. I would call that syntropy in opposition to the better known entropy. The interesting feature to this is that it requires human beings in accord with one another to be accomplished. And if this is indeed so, that energy can then be sent out to bless others, so there may be a way that we can help heal the world, and perhaps this is already happening in prayer groups around the world, unconscious of the physics!

It is the basis of the “silly” practice that I have indulged in called the yum-yum. As I did this in Dharmsala in India with over a hundred Tibetan orphans, who knew instantly how to do it, I can now call it an old Tibetan ritual! To those not yet familiar with this, it is a form of instant communion. People in a circle throw their heads back and cry an extended Y-U-M!! followed by putting their heads down and saying yum-yum-yum multiple times. This is done 3 times and then it’s” hugs to the left and hugs to the right”. I call this Instant Communion. Mother Teresa said, “I believe in person to person and that God is in everybody.” Well put! Most of us believe the second part more easily than the first, and it seems the yum-yum is a quick solution! Anyway, the custom, to my delight, is spreading and I recommend it to all groups. It always seems to end in laughter and affection.

Kindergarten teachers may have noticed that when kids play Ring-around-the Rosy, the energy of the group seems to level out, and the world over in Sufi dancing, Greek dancing, etc., etc., harmony is quickly established by holding hands in a circle. And if you add in Dr. Tiller’s explanation you can see the potential for syntropy in this suffering world. It’s worth a try and full of Sophia’s Delight.

If you think this sounds silly, it is! The origin of the word silly is the German selig, and, believe it or not, that word in German means holy!!

I cannot stress the value of etymology enough, the study of word origins! Oddly, both my friend the Jungian analyst Russell Lockhart and I came up with the idea that “Words are eggs,” meanings hatch out of them. He wrote a paper with that title, and Lonesome, the psychopomp rabbit in my The Beejum Book announced the same truth! So it pays to be silly. Seriously.

Nonsense can be a great teacher. Think of the courage of “Laughter in the void”!

Seriously, but always lovingly,
ao

The Historic Split – CREDO CXXI

2010-08-14T06:23:00.000-07:00

I have written recently in CREDO CV about the impact of Descartes’ philosophy in the late 1600s. The introduction of the Age of Reason put paid to the symbolic value of astrology. The result was that faith lost its proof and science its sense of the sacred, and it has taken several centuries to heal thanks to Jung and especially theoretical physics. The work of David Bohm, Rupert Sheldrake, Fritjof Capra, and Stanislav Grof come to mind. I have met or colectured with all except Bohm, though I attended one of his extraordinary lectures demonstrating the contrast between explicate and implicate order. I did, however, have a later conversation with him about Jung. Bohm was influenced by Krishnamurti. In his lecture he demonstrated with a large cylinder filled with a white liquid. When he rotated it in one direction, individual blue blobs appeared; when rotated in the other direction, they all vanished. Plicare means to fold. The implication (another plic!) being that the universe pulsates rhythmically over the centuries. All beyond yours truly, believe me!

In Paris at the time of Descartes there was even a symbolic enthronement of the Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame Cathedral. That legacy is still with us, with best-selling books touting atheism and the like. Psychologically, this is an enormous collective identification with the ego, center of consciousness, and an abysmal ignorance or denial of the Self, which, to be sure, Jung tells us dwells in the Unconscious and can only be accessed by the “heart.” The longest journey for most of us is the journey from the brain to the heart! Jung includes the spiritual dimension, the realm of the heart, in his psychology.

Astrology, thus, fell like a fallen woman to the streets and survived as fortune telling and had to wait really till the twentieth century to be rescued, a work that Jung, Dane Rudhyar, and Marc Edmund Jones (with whom I studied at the age of 22) as well as several others undertook. This led to astrology becoming my life’s work. I went on to develop it as an archetypal language of symbolic processes, taught at Jung Institutes, wrote two books on the subject, and lectured worldwide. For me the accurate chart will always offer a description of the way an individual is likely to process experience.

This revival started in the early years of the 1930s and by now, seventy years later, is firmly established and manifested in several professional societies, celebrated in annual conventions, and the source of many serious books. The popular version survives in newspaper horoscopes and a lot of other trivial publications. As I always say, we do not reject Shakespeare because some of the same words may appear on bubble gum wrappers or Chinese fortune cookies!

Personally, I credit Jung for having the enormous courage to study astrology and even place it in ancient history as the ur-mother of psychology! You cannot imagine the delight I had, after studying for years on my own and finding the mythological archetypes cognate with the planetary processes, in discovering that Jung had been doing the same decades before me! As the years have passed, and I am now in my late 80s, I realize more and more, the professional risk Jung took in not only pointing out the historic antiquity of astrology but also proposing its usefulness in psychology! Even today this notion is rejected by most of the other branches of professional psychiatry.

For me, this “cosmic science” reunites and heals the rational split that occurred four centuries ago. Richard Tarnas, whom I met at Esalen when I was teaching there, has written a vast scholarly tome of that title, which recently was awarded by the British as the best scientific book of the year! I cannot help but mention my efforts in the second section of The Heavens Declare, which is on the evolution of consciousness through the Astrological Ages, because it is backed up by archeological and mythological symbolism that is absolutely irrefutable.

The insights it provides are that the archetypal processes from the solar system to every manifest object in it are subject to the same invisible forces, and so eventually we may accept the idea that we live in a holographic unity. We can get an idea of this by changing an object from a noun – “pencil” – to a verb by asking it, “What do you do?” Communicate: a pencil communicates. This links it symbolically with the symbolic applications that are all the province of Mercury! So that pencil can be your teacher, and so can any humble thing your eye may fall upon. This is Sophia’s joke all right – truly nothing is hidden, we are blind. So when Jung shouted at me in that dream, “Consider the obvious! I did!” he gave me a huge hint! That many truths are simple, is a sort of revelation, is it not?

The world at present is seemingly in desperate straits, beset by all four elements: floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes, and now fire on a geographic scale in Russia that beggars description! The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? And yet according to TV news, the serious implications remain unmentioned. It’s “Death and Wheaties” for breakfast, all over again.

My only hope is in my teacher M’s advice years ago, back in the 1940s. He mentioned among many things:

1) Oil!

2) The importance of 1 x 1 x 1= 1, implying that each individual’s consciousness mattered and that transpersonal love was a secret to progress.

3) That the dichotomy of priest/congregation, teacher/class would give away to circular groups, where, as the pre-Socratic Heraclitus said, “With our eyes open, we share the same world; with our eyes closed, each of us enters a private one”. Unity/Diversity.

4) That organized religions must give way to spiritual tolerance! Interfaith!

5) He even hinted at a European Union as a solution to international peace and a common currency . . .

Remember, I was in my early twenties at the time, so much of this I recorded without fully comprehending, and yet I can see now how much of it has come to pass.

To sum up: There is only One Way and it is not a noun, it is a VERB applying to each of us. We need a new commandment: “Love thy neighbors, they are thyself!
Forgive the repetition – each of us has a Self, an individual “wick,” but the flame on each is the same flame!!

What concerns me most, at present, is the oblivion of most of my fellow citizens – we seem to be unaware that we need to stop our endless pleasure seeking and realize that the situations globally are truly serious and that it is time for applying 1 x 1 x 1 x 1= ONE!

lovingly,
ao

Sophia’s Winks! – CREDO CXX

2010-08-03T07:11:00.000-07:00

Some wise person remarked that there is another world and it’s hidden in this one! This is evident when strange synchronicities occur that seemingly break all the rules of chance. I will give three examples from my own life.

In 1964, we put our small development house in Westbury, Long Island, on the market and made the momentous and disastrous decision to move to Tucson, Arizona. Everything was packed into a truck, and I drove our station wagon hitched to a U-Haul. My son and husband were in the truck and my three daughters and our dog were in the car. I said good-bye to the house and got ready to climb into the car. As I rounded the trailer, there on our back bumper was my grandmother’s golden thimble, marked with her initials and birth date of 1854! We later returned to our empty house, broke and jobless, to start anew.

By 1972, I was divorced and lived now in a garage apartment in Glen Head. My oldest daughter, Abby, and family lived up the country road in a rented house. One afternoon she and her six-year-old son, Jamie, appeared at my home. They had walked across a field way back of my house. Jamie held out his hand and said, “Look, Gaga, what I found!” He opened his hand and in it lay seven old Chinese coins! Those brass ones with a square hole in them.

It so happened that I had long wished for them when consulting my copy of the I Ching. (I had been using three silver quarters.) Well, that was just the beginning. Eight years later, I was to lecture at the Jung Institute of Los Angeles. I had met Walter Andersen on the ship traveling the Mediterranean, and he had invited me to stay with him. As I carried my I Ching and the coins with me, I decided to introduce the oracle to him. I explained that he was to think of a question silently, then toss three coins six times, noting the sequence of heads and tails, and then look up the relevant hexagram in the book. He did as he was told, and when he looked up the advice, he burst out laughing! So now he could share the answer to his question. It was “Marry the maiden!” and so he proposed, and, sharing a hug and a kiss, he then 68 and I at 57 became engaged and were married that same October 25th!

By 1998, I had suffered a debilitating stroke the previous winter, and my darling husband had died on April 1st. Yet, I was to conduct another seminar on the Scottish Isle of Iona. I had been there already 22 times. I left New York in a wheelchair at the airport, kindly propelled by my co-traveling friend, Edith Spenser, but gradually got to walking with my staff Woodstock, very slowly yet gratefully on Iona. The weeklong seminar successfully concluded, Edith and I spent a few days in Oban before flying home. It was always my custom to do last minute shopping in the town of Oban, across the bay from Mull, and this time I had my heart set on buying a white cable knit woolen Aran hat. Each day, we managed to walk a little further down the main street, entering the shops. As it was September by then, no luck! The last day, we managed to get to Mactavish, my favorite restaurant, for a quick lunch, and thus fortified, I suggested that we walk back along the parallel waterfront for a change. So I hobbled around the corner and started back to the hotel. Now, in Oban, wherever there is a street corner, short ornamental green stanchions mark both sides. At the second set, there, on top of one of them, was a white hand knit Aran hat!! Without any hesitation, I knew it was mine for the taking, so I took it and have it yet fondly in my closet awaiting another winter! So, I call such events Sophia’s Winks, because when they happen it is as if at that moment the world perceived by the Ego at the circumference and the Self at the centerpoint of the mandala of the psyche flash as one in a our consciousness and remind us to keep going. They tell us we are on the right track, despite all our challenges and concerns.

At our last monthly Prayer Breakfast, we shared how these unexpected events happen in all our lives and perhaps, indeed, can be called Winks of Sophia or Holy Wisdom encouraging us to persevere. In every case, it seems, there is an element of delight involved.

lovingly,
ao

GLASTONBURY, Somerset, England – CREDO CXIX

2010-07-24T18:19:00.000-07:00

I was given a copy of Deborah Crombie’s book A Finer End, a detective story set in Glastonbury, which sparked the memory of this little-known bit of history. So I decided to share it!

In 1945, I happened to go into a bookstore in New York City and found a pamphlet on Glastonbury by a woman called K. E. Maltwood. In it, she described how in 1922 she had climbed the Tor and gone into an altered state and saw the zodiac hidden in the earth of Glastonbury. She managed to fly in a plane and took a picture of the area and, sure enough, found evidence that she was right. What she had discovered was that King Arthur’s Roundtable was actually the name for a complete zodiac represented by twelve figures outlined in the earth! The only exception was the substitution of a dog for the crab of Cancer. Dogs, however, are ruled by Cancer. Somewhere, I hope, in this house, I still have that pamphlet. The place itself dates back to 3000 B.C. but I have no date for the zodiac, which one presumes may go back to the time of the legendary King Arthur.

As the years passed, I further discovered that John Dee, astrologer, mystic, and alchemist to Queen Elizabeth I, had a fellow initiate confide in him that King Arthur’s Roundtable was hidden in the earth of Glastonbury!

In the 1980s, when I was at Oxford, I went into the famous bookstore Blackwell’s, one of my favorites, and lo and behold, on the bottom shelf of one of the stacks were two large yellow paperbacks on this very subject complete with maps and further evidence: graphics with outlines and further geometric wonders included, put out by R.I.L.K.O. [Research Into Lost Knowledge Organization]! Here in these books lies the proof.

Needless to say, I have visited Glastonbury several times and stood in the middle of that very zodiac. I have also visited the Chalice Well and drunk from its waters, and climbed the Tor where there are two famous old oak trees, Gog and Magog.

As I recall, the legend is that the biblical Joseph of Arimethia, a follower of Christ, traveled to Britain and to Glastonbury and placed a thorn staff in the earth, which blossomed on Christmas Day, I think, with white roses. There is no question in my mind whatsoever that Glastonbury is a power point and has drawn pilgrims to it over the centuries. It is not far from Stonehenge and Avebury, another Somerset center for standing stones, so the chances are that this has been a magical area ever since prehistoric times. As I understand it, it is now a site for crowds of young people who gather there for Glastonbury Fayre at the time of the summer solstice.

The great ruins of the Glastonbury Abbey still stand in mute testimony to an ongoing mystery. Before Ms. Maltwood, a man called Frederick Bligh Bond also had a mystical vision of what the monks at the Abbey were all about.

Nearby is another beautiful, still standing cathedral at Wells. The steps going up to its entrance show the wear of countless pilgrims and the sense of beauty and spiritual peace of Wells Cathedral is something never ever to be forgotten.

On a winter trip in the 1970s that I took alone, I stopped at a medieval inn. I was the only guest, and the landlord informed me that he would lock up and return in the morning; thus I found myself totally alone in this ancient inn. I confess, I slept very fitfully and woke in the night feeling both apprehensive and wary of every possible sound, but I met no apparitions. Still, it is a night I will never forget.

In my family tree, a number of my ancestors came from these regions, and I highly recommend the Salisbury area as a fascinating place to visit. P.S.: I do not know if R.I.L.K.O. is still doing research, but thanks to them there is now much more familiarity with such matters as ley lines connecting holy sites, standing stones marking places where they meet, etc. It seems the more we unearth about the ancient history of Britain, the more amazing discoveries we make. Here is a copy of a letter from Mrs. Maltwood, forwarded to my mother.
_________________________________

Copy: The Thatch, Royal Oak, Vancouver Island, B.C. [undated, presumably before 1976]

Dear Mr. Manley,

Many thanks for your interesting letter with these enclosures. You are very kind to tell me about the Orcutts.

If you are seeing them again, their daughter [Alice] might be glad to see the enclosed about my Guide, as it fits onto Philips Planesphere, from which I took it by pricking the stars through, onto the map of the effigies [the figures outlined in the earth]. If you hold it up against the light, you can see that the effigies were designed in each case to incorporate the constellations through which the sun rides.

I am sure you must have been hard-put to it, to answer some of her questions! Please let me know if I can help. I should be only too pleased to render assistance. The clipping from the local paper is well expressed. I am glad to have it.

With the Season’s greetings and best thanks,

Very Sincerely,
[signed]
K. E. Maltwood
_________________________________

lovingly,
ao

Hell – CREDO CXVIII

2010-07-21T12:37:00.000-07:00

Theologically speaking, hell seems to be a nightmare place decorated with every form of torture; Dante’s Inferno is the best travel guide. The Church for centuries has depicted it graphically and symbolically as a place no one would choose to go to, and so sticking to the rules and conforming strictly and consciously keeps society in order. Psychologically, there is a trap however, because we end up judging ourselves and others, and unconsciously this results in our projecting our Shadow on others, both personally and collectively, perhaps forgetting what even the Bible cautions: Judgment is mine saith the Lord!

Now, along comes Dorothy L. Sayers, the British detective story writer, a member of the Oxford “Inklings,” and also, believe it or not, a serious theologian! She happens, in my estimation, to have written one of the wisest things I ever read! It has to do with hell.

The fires of hell are the flames of God’s Love rejected!

The wisdom of that statement rings true, and it heals the split between good and bad and places us back where we truly belong. In my first Credo, I express my dislike of the various names we give to the Mystery and offer an expression used by my grandfather Basil King in one of his brief novels, In Abraham’s Bosom. In it a character speaks of “a Vast Certainty!” and ever since I came across it, it is what I consciously term the Mystery. “The Tao that can be defined is not the Tao,” and since our egos function through duality, we cannot define God! So we either humbly accept or reject that “Vast Certainty.” And that, as I come close to stepping out of my mortality in this life in my 88th year, is what I have come to. But Sayers’ words are worth considering. I truly needed to share this before I depart!

It requires no definition but also no doubt! It works for all creation and every religion and every person. It is what Jung meant when he said, “I do not believe . . . I know!”

lovingly,
ao

Great Teachers: The Baal Shem Tov – CREDO CXVII

2010-07-13T06:03:00.000-07:00

If you look up the Baal Shem Tov in any current reference book you get volumes of serious information, so go ahead, but you won’t get that from me! Not a one mentions the joyful, humorous, and wise Jewish saint that he was. My love for him is intense because he exemplified the Joy of Wisdom and the Wisdom of Joy, the title of many lectures and seminars I used to give. Religions generally take themselves so seriously or theologically that they totally forget that description of Holy Wisdom in the Old Testament. Let me quote from the British Jungian analyst Alan McGlashan’s book The Savage and Beautiful Country. I met him when he spoke at the Jung Foundation in New York and again when I lectured to the Jungians in London. He was a love.

Delight is a secret . . . delight has a glancing, dancing, penetrative quality, the quality of Sophia, the consort of God, as when she sings –

“From the beginning I was with Him
forming all things: And was delighted every day
playing before Him at all times: Playing in the world;
and my delights were to be with the children of men.”

Playing in the world! That is what Wisdom does. And this is what those sad, resigned ones . . . the will-driven, over masculinized betrayers of life miss.

Delight is a mystery. And the mystery is this: to plunge boldly into the brilliance and immediacy of living, at the same time as utterly surrendering to that which lies beyond space and time; to see life translucently.

To which, I can add my own delight in finding in Skeats’ An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, the following : Silly, adj. simple, harmless, foolish . . . allied to O. Lat. salvus, whole, complete, safe. The German cognate is selig which means holy, sacred.

In the biography of the Baal Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name) called Nine Gates by Juri Langer, he was born in Okup in 1689 in the disputed territory of what probably is today Ukraine. Whatever. When he was young, he observed his fellow Jews all spending hours poring intellectually over the Talmud, when he had an epiphany! God was not to be understood as a concept but in the delightful reality of the experience of nature, of beauty, and joy. So he literally began to dance and worship with a strong sense of humor and delight. He became the archetype of the Jewish comedian ever since, but always with a twist of holy wisdom. Here are some of my favorite anecdotes:

He was always concerned about those in poverty, so one evening he approached some drunken Cossacks in a tavern begging some money to help them. They responded by ridiculing him and throwing him to the floor. He picked himself up and said, “Well, that was for me. Now, what have you got for the poor?” The Cossacks enjoyed the joke so much, they emptied their pockets and hailed him out the door.

Another tale concerns a beggar coming to the door of his home, but he had no money to give him. So he went into his bedroom and took a necklace of his wife and gave it to the startled beggar, just as Channa discovered what her husband had done. She had a fit! So the good man ran to the door and yelled to the departing beggar: “Guess what? It is very valuable – see that you get a good price for it!”

My favorite though is this account: By now, he was well known in the district. He went to a neighboring town and a large crowd was waiting for someone. When he asked about it, he was told a holy man. Greatly excited, he joined the crowd, looking this way and that, shouting “Guess what? A holy man is coming! A holy man is coming!”

His followers started what today is known as the Hasidic tradition, but as Emerson once pointed out, most institutions are the extended shadow of one person, and today, as I understand it, the Hasidim are bound by more rules and regulations than any of the others.

Islam has an equivalent legendary saintly humorist in Mullah Nasruddin, whose delightful teachings have been gathered by Idries Shah. Mullah lived in Turkey in the eleventh century and taught at the time of William the Conqueror.

The Celts defined the goddess Brid as the goddess ruling wisdom, weaving flax, and laughter!

The ancient Greeks gave us the twin masks of Tragedy and Comedy, and their ancient plays reflected this.

Physically, I understand that the synapses (?) in the brain governing laughter and tears are so close that sometimes we laugh so hard, we shed tears.

Shakespeare seems to have understood this because in almost every tragedy he wrote, there is at least some delightful and humrous relief.

The archetype of the Holy Fool is still with us reminding us of the necessity of loving humility and the courage of “laughter in the void”. It seems that laughter is a human attribute and actually a key to peace, if you think about it.

We are living in one of the most tragic challenging circumstances on our planet. It is hard, if not impossible, to see any humor in it. Yet, humor endures and we need its balance. I am reminded of the man on the sinking Titanic calling out: “Anyone want to buy a watch?” And nature quietly spreads its delights everywhere, especially in the miraculous beauty of flowers. The Gnostic Gospel according to Thomas tells us that “Heaven is spread upon the earth but men do not see it.”

Surely this points to the mystics telling us something that Jung always reminds us of: serious groups are a good beginning, but the joy and delight of individuation happens to us one at a time. Christ reminds us that we have to become as little children to enter the kingdom of heaven.

It seems that like popcorn, once you’ve popped, you are transformed!

lovingly,
ao

Parenting – CREDO CXVI

2010-07-10T07:09:00.000-07:00

I learned some interesting techniques that my mother taught me and even more from my own children as parents. I think they are worth sharing with others.

• When I had a two-year-old tantrum, my mother would simply drag me in front of a full-length mirror and hold me there. Eventually my fury would turn to giggles and the tantrum was over!

• When I dawdled about getting ready to leave, she would taunt me saying, “Of course, you can’t pack your own suitcase, etc.” I showed her!

• When she thought I would enjoy a book, I would usually demur, so she would hide it and let me discover it.

• When I was six in Paris, I was impossible. Mother would stop and ask, “Now, if you were the mother and had a child like yourself, how would you handle her?” Immediately, I would be intrigued and stop and give her an extremely sensible solution! (I found this account in a letter she wrote to my uncle!)

From my son and daughter, I learned how to take a lifetime of guilt complexes placed on so many children who are told how naughty or bad they are. Switching to a neutral position, one simply says:

• That’s a no! Or if they want to do something inappropriate,

• That’s not going to happen.

• Praise and recognition of achievement. For the very wee ones, just clap hands! They usually join in.

• Oops! is a very convenient expression . . .

lovingly,
ao

The Wounded Healer – CREDO CXV

2010-07-09T13:15:00.000-07:00

I woke up in the middle of last night realizing I had made public the name of my dear, now departed friend Brewster in my last Credo, leaving him all those years ago in Dadaji’s corridor. I had named him only to honor him with the gratitude I have never ceased to feel. So now I want to follow up with what happened to him.

Briefly summarized, in time, he met and married a most lovely woman, Sandra, who had analyzed with Dr, Edinger. Their courtship flourished close by to me, and in the end, he was restored to a finer, deeper, and wiser man. He became a much loved and respected rector of a church, not far from the Berkshires, in neighboring New York State. He continued helping others with Jungian therapy, founded an organization that sponsored lectures and workshops, and grew into the wonderful person he was meant to be, aided actively by the warmth and intelligence of his wife Sandra.

The point that I am trying to make is one that both Jung and Edinger have written about: that to become a complete person, we need experience, and only then can we be of help and service to others, because it takes one to know one. Sometimes it is called “the Night Sea Journey.” It was the underlying premise of Bill, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, who was influenced by Jung. It is the biblical motif of Job in the Old Testament, about which Jung wrote so eloquently, and again the ultimate myth of Chiron in Greek mythology.

I am certain that many of you who read these Credos are familiar with the stages of suffering every one of us has to go through, and I share this notion to help anyone still in the process. The best counselor is the one who has walked the talk. Suffered and not succumbed or lost faith! And sometimes the pain is excruciating! I know this for a fact.

No one can help others truly by reading a textbook about how to become a psychologist. Or just passing tests on statistics. Wisdom involves becoming truly human and ultimately finding refuge and comfort in the discovery of the spiritual dimension of true healing, namely Love.

The Jewish philosopher defined it in a nutshell: Is the relationship “I-it or I-thou”? Jung stressed the importance of the latter and likened true therapy to the odd alchemical model of the lovers enclosed in a vessel or bottle! If the coniunctio is kept safe in the vessel, it is a sacred encounter, but the minute the vessel is broken it falls down into the duality of everyday life and the results are all too familiar!

When I was young and eager, I studied and read and read, and I remember my chagrin when my Teacher M shook his head and said I would not find what I was looking for by just reading, I realized that unconsciously what I termed the pook! was missing – in other words , the aha! that comes from the Divine Guest.

The proof of this surely lies with the wisdom of native “illiterate” people all over the world who are spiritually far more advanced than we are! They are the ones who learn from the greatest teacher of all – Mother Nature, Dame Kinde, Hagia Sophia.

In conclusion, I want to reiterate the model that Brewster provides us and the important role of the strong loving presence of the feminine that Sandra played and still does.

In my generation, it was an enormous matter to have a man be interested in one’s soul! So the projection onto the therapist was often a given and hard for a man not to be charmed by, thus falling into inflation and the breaking of the vessel. Ultimately, the best healing comes from the other simply holding up a mirror, which reminds me of my own mother, who, when I was having a tantrum as a two-year old, would drag me screaming in front of a long mirror and force me to watch myself! I usually, as I remember, ended up giggling.

So here’s to the Wounded Healers of the world and a salute of gratitude to my dear friend and psychopomp Brewster!

lovingly,
ao

Great Teachers: Dadaji – CREDO CXIV

2010-07-07T17:53:00.000-07:00

We met him in Ventura, California, in 1982. He was the most exceptional Hindu I ever met, and you will just have to take my word for the incredible feats I am about to relate. There was a meeting of Indians in a private home. There were only four Caucasians present. We sat in a ring and he gave a lecture. He didn’t sound very special, just a dark, wavy-headed man, but as we bid him good night, he drew me down and whispered, “Come back tomorrow morning early.” So, I did. He drew me into a private room, and we had a spiritual conversation. It was as if we were continuing where we left off the last time. Then he asked me if I would like to know the name of God? I was to move to another room.

This room turned out to be the host’s baby’s nursery. Besides the crib, Dadaji had a small altar with flowers, fruit, a small oil lamp, and a few small ornamental bronze deities. I sat in a chair; he chanted a prayer, then took a small piece of paper and wrote a name on it in red ink. When he handed it to me and I unfolded it, it was totally blank! He smiled. Hypnosis?

Then he instructed me to return that evening with my husband. Each of us was to bring a simple sealed jar of water. The trip to and fro was about 30 miles, each way, but I agreed. Accordingly, I filled an empty mayonnaise jar and another, and we returned.

This time, the same group was gathered, and we were summoned in, one at a time. The rest of us meditated silently. When Walter returned, he looked amazed, but I was immediately next. This time, Dadaji was seated in a dark room lit by a few candles. Another low altar was in front of him with flowers and fruit. He smiled radiantly and asked for my jar. I handed it to him, determined to watch closely, which I did. To my astonishment, he took the jar, and prayed over it, and without opening it, it started to sweat water on the outside as he rubbed it! Then with a beatific smile he handed it to me, blessed me, and indicated I was to leave.

When I returned to the group, we sat again quietly. The Indian next to Walter whispered, “Open it!” When Walter opened his jar, a beautiful fragrance wafted out. When I opened mine, another fragrance, but it was different! When we came home and opened them again, the fragrances were still there, and we had been told it was safe to sip. I could not help but think of Jesus and his changing the water to wine at the wedding in Cana. This was still possible!

We soon became good friends and attended informal gatherings, only to discover how loving and humorous he was. He showered us with his books, which I still have. Also a printed portrait, framed. He was reluctant on one occasion to have his photo taken. At last, he relented, but when the film was developed it turned out to be that of a holy man with a beard! In India, he ran a small toy store! He was married. His real name was Roy Chauderi. He lived the life of a simple householder, but once a year there would be a special ceremony where, in the presence of hundreds, he would transform milk into an edible substance. Though I went to India twice, I never made it to Calcutta.

However, he came to the East Coast to Connecticut, and we were invited to visit several times. There he would have an audience, one on one. Brewster, a Jungian analyst and Episcopal priest, and the very one to invite me to lecture at the Jung Foundation in New York, thereby changing the course of my entire future, came to see Dadaji. He had been through hell, lost 40 lbs, and was at the lowest point in his life. He had been kicked out of his professional position, having been publicly accused by his angry significant other of sleeping with one of his patients. Not quite true, as she had quit before this happened, but true enough. So he arrived a broken man and went in to see Dadaji. When he came out, his blue denim shirt was soaked in front and the fragrance was overwhelming! Apparently, Dadaji had stroked the front of it and the fragrance came out of his hands like oil. In India, this is called Padmagandi, and other gifted gurus have the same gift.

As I had been a friend of both Brewster and his angry partner, I urged her to visit Dadaji. When she walked down his corridor, he waved and ordered her to stop. He told her she might return in a couple of years, but he could not see her that day. I had said nothing to Dadaji about the situation of either one of them.

Walter, who was a Reiki practitioner, had compassion for Dadaji, who was clearly exhausted, so Dadaji agreed to let Walter treat him. It helped enormously, and so the two men became dear friends. We were invited several times to visit and had the pleasure of meeting his wife.

Needless to say, this encounter forced me to rearrange much of my opinionated mental furniture! I am by nature a skeptical Scorpio, but I now have a true Saying of Gezeebius: Always keep an open mind and a good crap detector! This has served me well and, by now, you should know that what I have written here was truly witnessed by me. He was an extraordinary human being, and his teachings were wise and loving. I still hear his laughter and feel the warmth of his hugs. Though he is no longer in the flesh, his spirit, love, and teachings continue. He is the one who called himself an anti-guru guru! He told me that everyone has the same access to the Truth; the only problem is that we are unconscious of it, so time is kind by coming in minutes, hours, and days as we live to say aha! In that way, Jung is saying exactly same thing: the Self knows but it dwells in the Unconscious! As you know, by now, I think of this as a candle. Everyone has an individual wick but the flame on every wick is the same flame!

Imprisoned Splendor

Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise
From outward things, whate’er you may believe.
There is an inmost center in us all,
Where truth abides in fullness; and around,
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,
This perfect, clear perception which is truth
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh
Binds it, and makes all error: and to KNOW,
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape,
Than in effecting an entry for a light
Supposed to be without.
– Robert Browning (1812–1889), from Paracelsus

lovingly,
ao

Time for a Laugh! – CREDO CXIII

2010-07-03T13:57:00.000-07:00

Here are three true stories that bring a smile whenever I think of them.

Years ago, my father, who was the International VP for The Mergenthaler Linotype Company, received a telegram from a prospective client in Bucharest, Romania. He had obviously consulted a dictionary!

DEAR MR ORCUTT I AM SO LOOKING FORWARD TO HAVING INTERCOURSE WITH YOU IN THE TWILIGHT OF JUNE 25 STOP SINCERELY YOURS . . .
*

When I was nine, we were staying at the best hotel in Oslo, Norway. I was to take a nap. My mother, who apparently didn’t quite trust me, chose to check on me by bending over outside my bedroom door and peeking through the keyhole . . . just as the manager turned the corner showing some prospective guests to their own room further down! (Serves her right, sez I!)
*

I am in the process at the moment, of clearing out my files in preparation for bestowing my papers to the Sophia Collection of Smith College on the occasion of my Aberduffy Day (death). Two days ago, I came across a letter describing my arrival at JFK from a trip to Ireland in 1980 with Mary Andersen, my soon-to-be daughter-in-law, and my nine-year-old grandson, Jamie Samuels. As you may remember from a previous Credo “Naming,” it was a family necessity to give names to our luggage, as my parents and I traveled and separated so frequently, they needed a convenient way to identify luggage.

Mary had taken off on this trip with a drab grey suitcase that looked as if it had taken vows of poverty – so I named it “Mother Teresa.” Mary explained she did this intentionally because no one would want to steal it. However, once in Ireland, she stocked up on Irish goodies and had to buy a bright red suitcase.

When we arrived, the crowded plane disgorged our luggage on three different carousels so the three of us each monitored one of them. Jamie got quite excited, and he shouted “I found Mother Teresa but the Cardinal hasn’t come!” Standing, right behind me, so help me, were two priests and a nun!! They got all excited as well, craning their necks at the prospect of such distinguished passengers! Needless to say, I didn’t have the heart to explain the matter further!

Enjoy!

lovingly,
ao

Light in the Day – CREDO CXII

2010-06-21T07:18:00.000-07:00

I can think of two teaching stories that involve light being lit in the daytime, and they are poles apart. The first concerns a Sufi saint called Rabia who lived in Basra, in Persia (now Iraq), in the late eighth century. She is reputed to have run through the streets carrying a flaming torch in one hand and a pitcher of water in the other. When asked about this crazy behavior, she cried out, “With this flame I want to burn up heaven and with this water I want to quench the fires of hell so that neither ambition nor fear keeps us from loving God for Himself!”

The second tale concerns Diogenes of Sinope, the very astute but eccentric ancient Greek who lived during the fourth century BC. He is the one who walked the streets of Athens carrying a lit lantern. When challenged for his nutty action, he retorted, “Not at all, I am simply looking throughout this city for an honest man!”

It seems to me, that we should take up a national collection for a statue of Diogenes to be fashioned and placed prominently in front of Congress in Washington, DC! It could remind not only our government but each of us citizens, of every age in life, of the importance of honesty and integrity.

We fail to realize the consequences of our negative actions. The liar and the cheat end up trusting no one; the thief swaps stolen goods for the constant fear of being caught. Put bluntly, if one can put the question of “morality” aside: virtue is truly only enlightened self-interest!

This logical approach is the basic notion of karma or cause and effect, but we have, over the centuries, put lack of integrity under the concepts of sin and guilt and religious ideas of divine wrathful if not human punishment. It just seems to me, that a new approach in education might prove helpful. That way, we could get on with the spiritual fulfillment of loving our neighbor because he “is thyself” and concentrating on saving our planetary home, the earth, and respecting animals not just as objects for monetary greed alone but as the living miracle each one truly is. In some ways perhaps, the Internet seems to be pointing in the direction that everybody is everybody!

Lest this seem idealistic nonsense, we could learn from the practical pygmies in Africa – some of them are said to hunt and kill for food, but offer up a prayer for each victim in gratitude and ask that it return to the “group soul” from which it came.
Rupert Sheldrake, scientist and spiritual individual who studied with Bede Griffiths in his ashram in India, is the author of Morphic Resonance. I was blessed in meeting both at the International Transpersonal Conference in Bombay. The basic premise is that when a group of animals reaches a certain collective number, it can simultaneously change its behavior as a group. This opens a new concept of evolution, and includes us as animals. A popular rendition is the story of the Hundredth Monkey. Briefly summarized:

The Japanese Macaque is a very intelligent species. It is the only animal other than humans and raccoons that is known to wash its food before eating it. Researchers studying this species at Koshima Island in Japan left sweet potatoes out on the beach for them to feed on, then witnessed one female, named Imo (Japanese for yam or potato) taking the food down to the sea to wash the sand off it. After a while, others started to copy her behavior. This trait was then passed on from generation to generation, until eventually, all except the very oldest members of the troop were washing their food and even seasoning their clean food in the sea. She was similarly the first observed balling up wheat with air pockets, throwing it into the water, and waiting for it to float back up before picking it up and eating it free from dirt

The story has been disputed, but the idea is sound, and gives us hope that if enough human beings wake up to the futility of dishonesty, greed, and war, we might yet save our planet. Stay tuned and pray that this can come to pass!

lovingly,
ao

Being and Feeling – CREDO CXI

2010-06-11T07:25:00.000-07:00

I have a dear and insightful friend (who, despite my objection, insists on anonymity); she shared a unique thought with me just the other day. I had leaned back in my chair after a long day’s work and, with a great sigh, exclaimed, “I am exhausted!” To which, she countered, “No, you’re not! You feel exhausted.”

She then proceeded to point out the distinction: I am implies a permanent condition, and I feel implies a transitory one. Transposed to Jungian terms, the Self is and the Ego is what is feeling. What I was really saying therefore was that I was identifying with my ego, which I readily admit!

It is the Ego on the circumference of the mandala of the psyche that feels, and to say I am exhausted is to confess unconsciously that one is identified with one’s ego, and to forget the reality of who one really is. Granted, that is the Self, according to Jung, which dwells problematically in the Unconscious, so it’s a Catch 22 paradox and no wonder that we tend to misspeak! The Self is unable to be exhausted! However, I see the wisdom of my friend’s distinction, and realize that this can truly aid us in a spiritual way by helping us remember who we really are.

The steady Light of the Self can always reveal and help us watch our egos feeling happy, depressed, angry, or worried. By the same token, the Ego can turn in reflection and meditation to transcend the feeling and sometimes reach that Peace that passeth understanding!

For most of us, including myself, this is a huge challenge, but the difference between Being and Feeling opens up a huge insight for me, anyway, of what the Scriptures of all faiths are trying to teach us. To be convinced that it’s okay to feel because that’s our individuation in action, never mind our typology, but that by spending a few minutes daily visiting our Divine Guest at our center, we can derive comfort, and a source of wisdom and hidden strength – something sorely needed these days of turmoil and disaster.

To be con-scious, etymologically, is to know with! Perhaps, that’s a hint to knowing that we have an unconscious companion, that source of Light always available to us.

As an oooooooold lady now, I look back on the many times I felt lost and helpless or overwhelmed with happiness, and see that time has made most of those memories intangible. Ann Foley said it best in one of her books: Things are changed by what comes after!

lovingly,
ao

2010-05-26T07:11:00.000-07:00

Great Teachers: Muktananda – CREDO CX

2010-05-21T09:46:00.000-07:00

We first met him in California in 1980. We went to a lecture he was giving. Physically, he was a small dark Hindu with expressive eyes and a black dot over them. One certainly got the impression that he projected a powerful aura. He was both gentle yet sharp as a tack! As the custom was to bring a gift, or prasad, which was cast into a large woven basket, Walter brought him the last rose from our garden in La Habra, and Muktananda held it the entire time. Each of us came up to greet him, and I was introduced as a Jungian astrologer. His words were translated by his niece, who later headed the American ashram, I believe. I do not remember what he said all of thirty years ago, but I certainly remember the impact of his presence! A year later, I was invited by my friend from Esalen, Stanislav Grof, to speak at the International Transpersonal Association Conference in Bombay, and after the conference a few of us accompanied Grof to the guru’s ashram in Ganeshpuri.

It was the festival of Shivaratri, and hundreds, if not thousands, of people were attending and celebrating. We lined up to meet him, and when it came to my turn, he pulled me down and bent over and whispered to me, “Will you do my chart?” I was astonished by his memory, and so I decided to stay. I had had a dream about him several months before, in which he was seated in a marble room on a throne and had drawn me onto his lap and asked me if he could use my body to speak through. I replied that I would have to think about it. (I was in training analysis with the Jungian Dr. Christopher Whitmont at the time, and when he heard the story he chuckled and said I was making progress: “A few months ago, you would have said. ‘Sure, any time!’”) Imagine my surprise, when I found that room and throne just as I had dreamt it.

Needless to say, I had no materials to do his horoscope, but among the many Western disciples these were found, so I drew up the chart, and waited to be summoned. During the several days of waiting, I had the opportunity of absorbing the remarkable flavor of the ashram, which was beautiful in every respect. There were many disciples from the States and Europe as well as Indians. Every evening, there was kirtan, and the men and women separated into groups and sang and danced in ecstasy. The whole ashram was spotless and well-ordered, and one sensed a strong positive collective energy. I eagerly attended Muktananda’s daily teachings.

Finally, I was summoned. By then, I had the impression that he was considered a divine being, so how was I to do God’s chart! When I entered his room, he was eager but looked exhausted, so I decided just to give him practical advice. I counseled him to seek the company of children and animals, who would not project divinity upon him. Little did I realize that as a Taurus, he had a stable with pet cows! The interpreter was Noni, a Persian, I think, with a sparkling sense of humor. We connected immediately. I asked Muktananda if he had thought of acting out parts of the epic Mahabharata in the ashram. His face lit up. “Yes,” he explained, “and I always played the part of God!” to which, I responded, “Think what fun God had playing Muktananda!” Noni’s translation was perfect, and he burst out laughing. We were off to a good start.

I decided to tell him an adapted version of a Mullah Nasruddin story that had formed itself in my mind a few years previous, back on Long Island. Mullah was an eleventh-century Sufi “Idiot Sage.” So I told him the following story:

Mullah was recently in Istanbul telling his famous funny teaching stories when his friends accosted him and rebuked him. “Mullah,” they said, “you have to stop all this. Don’t you realize this is a New Age? You have to be serious now, you need to find yourself!”
“I do? How can I do that?” “Well,” they answered, “we hear that the quickest way is to go to America and attend this guru Muktananda’s ashram in South Fallsburg, New York” “Oh well,” agreed Mullah, shaking his head ,”if you say so.” Then he sold his donkeys and bought a ticket to the USA. But a month later, he was back in Istanbul, telling his funny stories worse than before. “Mullah, what on earth happened?” asked his amazed friends.
“Well,” grinned Mullah, “I can’t tell you how grateful I am to all of you. I went there, and did all the meditations and yoga exercises to get to the center of my self, and guess what? I discovered that God is the biggest jokester of all. “How come?” asked his friends.
“Well,” grinned Mullah, “you won’t believe this, but after all that searching, when I got to the very center of my Self, guess what? I wasn’t there!”

I was rewarded by Muktananda bursting out laughing! He got up and instead of giving me shaktipat, a tap on the head leading to instant enlightenment, he folded me in his arms and gave me a warm hug and a kiss, and an invitation on the spot, to ride with him in his golf cart to visit his cows. With a wink to Noni, I asked for a Sanskrit name and suggested ‘cowpatti’(!). “No, no,” he exclaimed, “Gomati!” which means Mother Cow. With that, we drove off to see my namesake at his stable and to receive the gift of a picture of him and her, and a lovely scarf. What a privilege!

I owed a lot to Noni, who it seemed had, despite his yearning for enlightenment, a problem with “wine, women, and song.” So, to teach him a lesson, when he was with a woman and at the very climax, he went instead into samadhi, the bliss of which renders one unconscious! He looked appropriately sheepish, when he told me the story, revealing Muktananda’s powers.

Years later, before Muktananda died, his reputation was sullied by, what I believe, a misunderstanding. He was reputed to have slept with young women on occasion. What Westerners do not understand is that old men in India sometimes lie chastely with young women to recharge their astral energy. If you are smirking as you read this, it is true. Perhaps, he did not explain this because he might have wanted his disciples to withdraw their projection onto him and thus find their own Light within. Who knows?

All I can say is that to encounter him was a true blessing. I am especially grateful to him for explaining to me that one of our physical goals is to unite the essences of the pituitary and the pineal glands in the brain, thus producing the Blue Pearl of samadhi or ultimate spiritual bliss, also known perhaps as the ultimate result of uniting the subtle spinal nerve currents of ida and pingala in kundalini.

I highly recommend his books; his center is ongoing in South Fallsburg, New York, though I have never been there except with Mullah Nasruddin.

lovingly,
ao

Pluto: My Descent – CREDO CIX

2010-05-03T09:31:00.000-07:00

I cross the rivers of Hades
in sleep:
Cocytus, Phlegethon, Acheron, and Styx,
by-passing the blisses of Letho.
Pluto is waiting
black-eyed and curious.
Few people come down this far, he comments.
He is dark and powerful, as I expected,
but he looks wan of skin and somewhat strained.
Why have you come? The plumbing is very bad here.
It is. The cavern walls are streaming
with tears and flashing with slime
and the usual assortment
of creeping red-eyed monsters are
mewling about, obviously not housebroken.
but I am no longer afraid. This is urgent.
I come to learn of evil, I tell him.
I might be called evil because I looked down here before.
So, replies Pluto. Then you have come to the right place.

I sit on a block of stone and he begins.
Everyone at birth has his own share of Hades,
furnished to taste and prevailing custom, of course,
yet caves are most popular and suitable
as symbols of depth, dark, and unknown terrors.
You are all united by a threading river of fire.
Each of you receives a packing case
shipped down to order.
Charon has quite a sideline,
another Greek shipping magnate!
and in the case: -"
He counts on his fingers.
Rituals, murders, fears of the race.
tortures. screams, tabus of the tribe.
repressions, distortions, guilts of the family,
and, of course, your personal residue.
Quite a Pandora's Box!

Share and share alike, a human debt
to the generations.
These are released, my friend, by degrees.
Some run about the dreams of childhood,
Some sit and whine in the dark corners of the mind.
Did you not tremble as a child
alone with howls and bears and gropings?
Did you not throw shames down here yourself
for your children's children?
Here is your collection. Here.
All to be faced sooner or later.
You would not believe
the stuff that gets thrown down here
century after century!
Here it festers nicely and seethes and makes power.
But how you use this - ah, that is your affair.

He leans toward me, glowing with emphasis.
What you call evil is primeval energy misunderstood.
He lets the flames of his words sink in.
Why, I ask softly, why you?
Pluto gives a twisted smile as if the question pleases him.
I was the proudest. I wanted the impossible work.
Few know that I exist or care to redeem me.
Persephone never remembers messages!

Would you not want to come up to the sun?.I ask.
At times I do but it saddens me
I grieve for months.
Pluto, I ask, must we have this dark kingdom?

A three-headed dog with phosphorescent fangs
appears. I hold out my hand
and it lays its hideous heads piteously
Without my dark, Pluto continues,
you would have no desires.
No strengths in your urges, ambitions, or achievements.
Even spirit needs my sinews for earthly matters.
When you use me, I am called good. I become
almost natural. But when I use you
I am called horrible, insulting names
which vary with religions.
Remember all virtues carried to excess become vices.
That can be tricky!
Either way, I am admired, feared, or damned
but love --?
He gives a short laugh and comes close to me.
Cerberus, for such is his name, slinks away
his tail beneath his tattered legs.

Pluto undresses me;
I moan in my sleep.
He put his dark hands on my breasts
but playfully I put my arms around him
and gave him a hug and a kiss
which he needs more.
He hasn't been hugged in eons!
His voice shakes.

Orpheus came down here once.
Let me tell you that
his lyre sang sweeter songs
ever after
because he sang of the Oracles of Night
and lost Eurydice.
He sang for beauty forever denied him
trusting not that it followed behind.
The trees, the grass, the flowers, the springs,
even we held our breath and our tears,
but it was not to be!
Sing of me upon your return, I beg you,
for I am redeemed by art.

I dress again
And Pluto even buttons me up the back.
I give him a chocolate bar, which is all I have
I pity you with all my heart, I tell him.
I will try to understand and to love you.
He rises then majestically and opens his cape.
A swirl of black stars of onyx
falls around me, and I am mortally afraid.
Faintly I hear him singing:
For I am redeemed in you by art, and
I am also fond of pomegranates.

I cannot bid him farewell
for I am gasping up the stairs of my night
into day.
Strangely, I feel cleansed when I awake
and so I reach for paper
and set this down.
– a.o.howell

Archetypal Processes XI: Pluto – CREDO CVIII

2010-05-03T08:00:00.000-07:00

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious. – C. G. Jung

Pluto’s Greek name is Hades, and both names mean wealth, which may come as surprise! The archetypal process of Pluto is transformation. I am going to reprint a most powerful poem by the little-known English Victorian Edward Carpenter, because it describes what we have to do individually and collectively with the “evil” we seem to have to deal with as one of the reasons for our privilege of incarnation. Here it is:

SATAN

And at last I saw Satan appear before me – magnificent, fully formed.
Feet first, with shining limbs, he glanced down from among the bushes,
And stood there erect, dark-skinned, with nostrils dilated with passion;
(In the burning, intolerable sunlight, he stood, and I in the shade of the bushes);
Fierce and scathing the effluence of his eyes, and scornful of dreams and dreamers (he touched a rock hard by and it split with a sound like thunder);
Fierce the magnetic influence of his dusky flesh; his great foot, well-formed, was planted firm in the sand—with spreading toes;
“Come on,” he said, with a taunt, “art thou afraid to meet me?”
And I answered not, but sprang upon him and smote him.
And he smote me a thousand times, and brashed and scorched and slew me as with hands of flame;
And I was glad, for my body lay there dead; and I sprang upon him again with another body;
And he turned upon me, and smote me a thousand times and slew that body;
And I was glad and sprang upon him again with another body –
And with another and another and again another;
And the bodies which I took on yielded before him, and were like cinctures of flame upon me, but I flung them aside:
And the pains which I endured in one body were powers which I wielded in the next; and I grew in strength till at last I stood before him complete, with a body like his own and equal in might – exultant in pride and joy.
Then he ceased and said, “I love thee.”
And lo! his form changed and he leaned backwards and drew me upon him,
And bore me into the air, and floated me over the topmost trees and the ocean, and round the curve of the earth under the moon –
till we stood again in Paradise.
– From Edward Carpenter, The Secret of Time and Satan

Goethe expresses the same idea in his Faust when he has Mephistopheles complain, I am a part of the Spirit that always contrives evil and always ends up doing good! and I am the Spirit that always denies. Which reminds me of the epiphany I had on the fire escape in Greenwich Village in 1944: A Yes has to come before a No can sound!

My intuition about Pluto’s process is that it rules our Collective Shadow! – all the karma of the millennia, the cruelty, murder, rape, torture, meanness, greed etc. etc. – and that the myth of the Herculean “Cleansing of the Augean Stables” applies. Jung, bless him, suggests that as we work upon our individual Shadow, we withdraw that much darkness from the collective one, so there is one of the purposes of human incarnation. This is where the true meaning of transformation comes in.

Alchemy calls it the nigredo and maintains that this blackness hides the gold, non auream vulgarum, not physical gold, which explains the irony of the names Pluto and Hades meaning wealth!

Whenever we see those black curling clouds like the ones issuing recently from the Icelandic volcano or burning oil or rubber, we are reminded symbolically of the destructive power of this archetype.

The planet Pluto has just entered the earth sign of Capricorn. It is at present the furthest out, and it was discovered in 1930 by Percival Lowell. Its orbit is 248 years, so we really don’t know completely what this process entails. So far, the trans-Saturnian planets have shown their negative processes quite clearly at first, and no sooner was Pluto discovered when the Plutonian Holocaust unfolded, the massacres of WWII, and the atom bomb based on the use of plutonium! The threat of nuclear warfare seems symptomatic, does it not?

As I write, our whole country seems under nature’s siege, but the oil spill is manmade. It is hard for me to see a positive side to any of this, but the only cure is the change in the collective consciousness of humanity. Every atom of creation contains a point of light. I challenge anyone reading this to take a moment to examine your seven highest priorities or values. Write them down, and, oh, may Love be one of them!

lovingly, (what else!)
ao

Archetypal Processes X: Neptune – CREDO CVII

2010-04-30T10:21:00.000-07:00

Watch a rerun of the movie Gone with the Wind. The actors are all gone, yet they are still visible. Take a glass of water and pour a teaspoon of salt into it. The salt disappears but is still there. This is the essence of Neptune’s processes: illusion and dissolution! Neptune offers an alternate level of reality. The thing to remember is that unlike Uranus, which is a higher level of Mercury’s communication, Neptune’s process involves images or imagination. As the higher octave of Venus, its impact is basically only transiently visual.

As I hinted in the previous CREDO on Uranus, Neptune is the companion and opposite of Uranus. Neptune was discovered by two German astronomers in 1846. After much observation of its historical impact, it has come to be viewed as ruling the yin process of dissolving, in contrast to the active yang of Uranus.

At the mid-40s of the nineteenth century, the Romantic Movement was in full bloom in the Western world. The visual arts, which heretofore had always been clearly defined, gave way its borders to loose and shaded swaths of color, giving permission to such great artists as Cezanne and Monet; music, which had always had clear standard rhythms, surrendered to such as Debussy; literature gave us Goethe and Schiller, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley. Coleridge’s lines In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree: where Alph the sacred river ran . . . were written under the influence of drugs, which are ruled by Neptune.

Goethe’s The Sorrows of Werther, a tragic romantic bestseller, was the first book to be hailed worldwide. As evidence for that, my own ancestor, sea captain Thomas Holden, brought back from China six framed illustrations of it, hand painted on glass. These required painting the eyebrows before the face, requiring enormous skill, and the features have a slightly Chinese cast. This was the period of Die blaue Blume, the blue flower, a name given the Romantic Movement. America became a contributor as well with Poe, Melville, Emily Dickinson, and of course the Concord Transcendentalists Emerson, Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott. I hope you get the idea of the “spirit shift” that took place. A kind of early globalism was afoot, as the first translations of Hindu philosophy had finally reached Germany.

In science, the Curies discovered radium. Ether was found to help in pain-free operations, and idealism of all kinds, led to the Civil War and the abolishing of slavery, and one of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln.

There is not room here to add the equivalent shift in Russia, but just think of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky!

The end of that century gave us Freud, Adler, and Jung and the discovery of the inner psyche, which has been likened to the outer process of the discovery of the interior of the continent of Africa. One could say that globally and culturally speaking, the nineteenth century was one of the most significant in history.

If Uranus rules occultism, Neptune rules mysticism. The impact of the Eastern religions began to impact the West, and for the first time in centuries women teachers outside of the church began to be known – Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Movement; Mary Baker Eddy founded Christian Science in Boston. She came first to my great-grandfather John Wilson of the University Press in Cambridge with her manuscript of Science and Health, which he published. The list of shifts in the collective is endless!

The main essence of Neptune is actually the shifting of consciousness, but this leads us, alas, also to many negative aspects of Neptune: drugs of all kinds, including alcohol, leading to escapism. To quote William James, “Alcohol is the poor man’s search for mysticism.” These drugs are still with us.

In the twentieth century, Dr. Stanislav Grof’s work with LSD has led to holotropic breathing, which alters states of consciousness. This I witnessed personally when I was teaching at Esalen. A group of South American doctors hyperventilated to music and within minutes were having visions of past lives!

Neptune rules transient images, from dreams to the ersatz reality of movies, of television, and the inner ersatz provided by cocaine, meth, or fumes of glue. Yes, even perfume is ruled by Neptune, as are oil, gas, fog, clouds, and the faculty of imagination per se. Add to the list psychics, ghosts, photography, oceans, poetry, dance, music, and best of all, yoga and meditation.

The most profound contribution is our growing awareness of the esoteric side of all the exoteric religions, called mysticism. For Islam, it is Sufism; for Judaism, the Kabbala; for Hindus, Vedanta; for Christians, the emerging Inner Christianity. The Roman Catholic Church, with its rejection of married priests (stay tuned!) nevertheless has had its great share of mystic saints and visionaries, such as St. Francis and St. Teresa; the latest perhaps Teilhard de Chardin, in particular. His work, however, remained unpublished or unaccepted until after his death!

Even our sense of time passing is Neptunian. It is a paradox because it is always NOW! Neptune’s process, of course, has always been with us, but now we recognize it: Neptune is the ruler of Pisces and the entire Age known as the Christian Era, now coming to a close. It ushered in Jesus Christ, and his life of love and suffering death gave a complete reversal to the preceding Age of Aries, with its psychological coming of the Ego. The difficult message is that the human Ego as center of consciousness is needed to point to the Christ Within or atman, the Jungian Self, but must learn to surrender to it. All these proper names are just labels, and we should remember that they hide archetypes with many other names. Mystics know, experience, and love. Tolerance and interfaith is natural to them.

In the past, Dionysus, Bacchus, the worldwide ecstatic dances, past and present, Woodstock included, the contemporary power of singers to mesmerize crowds – all these are Neptunian, as is idealism and the concept of agape or transpersonal love, compassion, personal acts of random kindness. Spiritual gatherings, prayer groups, the many study centers all over the world fostering inner growth, all have Neptune in common. Today, it almost seems that to be spiritual is more meaningful than to be religious. The only difference seems to be that the strict dogma and dos and don’ts of religion are being rejected as hampering genuine individual growth. We seem to witness this in the drama of Fundamentalism of all stripes digging in and resisting the inevitable coming of the shift to individual responsibility to the collective!

We need to realize that a new Aquarian commandment is emerging:

LOVE THY NEIGHBORS THEY ARE YOURSELF!

Having no DSL, I am unable to participate in Facebook, Twitter, and the like, let alone texting or iPods, but the downside of these might be that a great part of a whole generation is living by choice in a Neptunian world of alternate reality and that the four natural elements of Nature will be required to bring us back to the significance, as Jung points out, of In-carn-ation, coming into the gift and privilege of flesh and blood in a material life. The recent volcanic eruption, the earthquakes, floods, fires, and tornados seem to suggest this. As I was writing this, Neptune’s fury is being expressed in the dangerous explosion and catastrophic oil spill threatening our whole Gulf Coast!

Now that I am facing my departure from my painful wreck of a body at 87, I am only too keenly aware. Not yet! I pray, I still have more CREDOS to come!

lovingly,
ao

PS, I feel a need to apologize for trying to express too much in too little space. Please forgive this! I just hope that you can catch one seed of thought and nurture its meaning so it can flower in your own soul!

Archetypal Processes IX: Uranus – CREDO CVI

2010-04-23T07:54:00.000-07:00

The Precession of the Equinoxes is very complicated to explain. Basically, the 12 constellations of the sidereal Zodiac, the great ellipse of the visible stars discovered by Hipparchus in the second century BC, occupy varying arcs of space. The Point of the Vernal Equinox is determined by the moment the Sun appears to cross the celestial equator, the projection of the Earth’s equatorial plane onto the celestial sphere of the Zodiac. At that instant, the Sun, obviously, is in the Zodiacal plane, and if you draw a line like a clock hand from the Earth through the Sun it will intersect the Zodiac at the Point of the Vernal Equinox. However, this Point is not fixed; due to the Precession of the Equinoxes, it transits backward through the constellations of the Zodiac at the rate of 1 degree every 72 years. This backward movement, indicated by the word precession, is caused because the pole of the Earth, the axis of rotation, does not stay in a fixed orientation, but moves slowly in a circle, taking about 26,000 years, Plato’s Great Year, to complete the circle. At the beginning of the Age of Aries, which was arbitrarily set by Hipparchus and has created much confusion, the Point of the Vernal Equinox was at 0 deg. of the constellation Aries, but due to the Precession of the Equinoxes it currently has almost finished moving through Pisces and is approaching Aquarius. So the “dawning” effect comes as it crosses the interface and approaches the first star in Aquarius, rumored to be in 2012! Phew!

Thus, in a way, the discovery of Uranus could mark the real dawning of the “New Age” of Aquarius, the Age of the Common Man. This happened in the year 1781, and a German musician called Wilhelm Herschel was playing the oboe in an orchestra in Bath, England. He was an amateur astronomer who built his own telescope. One night, he thought he might have discovered a new planet, and he must have exclaimed “Ach, Du lieber!” He communicated this to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, and they checked it out and must have exclaimed, “By gum, he’s right!” There was no religious conflict whatever, just enlightened science.

It would seem, however, that we don’t discover new planets until the collective consciousness of mankind is ready to deal with its process. Everything about Uranus is contrary, even its moons. Its slogan could be Why not? Its discovery coincided historically with not only the American and the French Revolutions but also the Industrial Revolution, the end results of which were not only to overthrow monarchies in favor of democracy but, in time, to free millions of women from hours and hours of housework and enable them to pursue their intellectual and artistic interests, something hitherto only the wealthy could afford! We should be grateful. Just think of the slogan of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity! All are Aquarian concepts, and Uranus rules Aquarius. (Previously, it was ruled by Saturn, which was thought to rule both Capricorn and Aquarius.)

This period was the time of the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, the founding of what was to become the United States of America and the republic of France. It should be noted however that the oldest modern democracy was that of Iceland in 930, with its Althing or representative governing body, followed by Switzerland on August 1, in 1291. The ancient Greeks, of course, had the idea first, only to be subsumed by Alexander the Great’s empire.

Herschel wanted to name the new planet after King George the Third, but then it was suggested that the planet be called Herschel. However, it seems, he demurred. Somehow, the sequence of Roman gods ending in Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Herschel didn’t seem fitting! To this day, though, in India, the name Herschel is mentioned. Oddly, the glyph for the planet resembles both an H and the early television antennas, and television broadcasts are ruled by Uranus! The images, though, are ruled by Neptune.

Uranus soon became the ruler of the sign Aquarius, the symbol for which is the double row of waves, which suddenly makes sense as invisible waves of energy. Electricity, telegraph, telephone, radio, today’s texting, and all such communication are ruled by Uranus, as the higher octave of Mercury.
Some astrologers feel that Prometheus would have been a better choice of name, because the nature of the Greek god Ouranos was of the older generation of gods. He was the sky god, whose wife was Gaea, the earth goddess. Prometheus was the god who brought fire to mankind.

Uranus has a positive, yang, nature. It rules the occult. The next planet out is Neptune, which has a receptive, yin, nature. It rules mysticism.
Parents of children in whose charts Uranus is prominent should be aware of this. I myself have Aquarius rising and Uranus (fortunately intercepted in the first house, which internalizes its process), so, as a child, I would instinctively do the opposite of what I was told to do! My mother caught on, and got around this by daring me to do things. “Of course, you couldn’t pack your suitcase in time for us to leave . . .” I showed her! When she wanted me to read a book, she would hide it, and I would find it myself, and so forth. I drove my beloved husband Walter nuts trying to follow his directions in backing a car into a tight space. On the other hand, Uranus rules intuition and may account for a few insights. Needless to say, it rules astrology.

Everything going on in the world today points to Uranus: space exploration, technology, Facebook, Twitter, texting, sex without emotional involvement, globalization. The new direction seems to be that everybody is going to discover they are everybody! As the Age of Aquarius looms, we need to heed what Mother Theresa put in a nutshell. She said: I believe in person to person and that God is in everyone.

The opposite sign to Aquarius is Leo. Aquarius is an air sign, transpersonal, intellectual, unemotional, so the fire sign Leo is the balance offered by ‘person to person’ and the importance of Love! I am amused when I put money in the tollbooth and the green light flashes Thank You! or when people, such as myself, sign off with love on a computer, though I mean it! Social Security checks can arrive in an envelope but there is no love in it. All this is Aquarian. This is the Shadow of the coming Age: the lack of Love. Our architecture demonstrates it. Windows in skyscrapers don’t open, air conditioners can then circulate disease, etc. We cheat nature with plastic but are conquering outer space. Children are glued to texting rather than meeting and socializing.

Years ago I had an Aquarian friend who was writing a book on the seven mysteries of life but forgot to water his horse, and it died of thirst!
The potential healing, I trust, lies in the squaring earth sign of Taurus. The Green Movement, with its wind propellers for energy, the solar roofs, and attempts at organic rather processed foods, hopefully also will generate a greater reverence for nature, life, and love. Not a return as such but another spiraling into the appreciation of meaning in life. I cannot do better than to again recommend the book by the atomic physicist Gerald L. Schroeder, The Hidden Face of God, which in exploring the subatomic world (Uranus/Aquarius) ends up, without a word of preaching, in proving the undeniable existence (Sun/Leo) of Spirit.

Lovingly, a Scorpio with Aquarius rising,
ao!

The Four Elements: Earth, Fire, Water, Air – CREDO CV

2010-04-14T09:44:00.000-07:00

I had a visit recently from a well-known Christian theologian and scholar, a dear friend, and I happened to mention the repetition of motifs between the Old and the New Testaments, in the Bible. For instance, the three sons of Noah: Ham for the Hamites, the blacks; Shem, the Semites, for the Jews; and Japheth, the Japhethites for the rest of us. (The yellow and red folks were not yet encountered.)

These were obviously eponyms, as are the Three Magi or Kings or Wise Men, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, who come to Bethlehem to present the newborn Jesus with gifts of myrrh, frankincense, and gold. Both groups represent humanity symbolically.

Even more remarkable is the Old Testament coincidence of the vision of Ezekiel I:10 mentioning the sequence of the man, the lion, the ox, and the eagle. These happen to be the astrological icons of the four fixed signs and their elements: air, Aquarius (man); fire, Leo (lion); earth, Taurus (ox, bull); and water, Scorpio (eagle). In the wheel of the zodiac, these four signs form the fixed cross of those four elements. These are repeated in the cardinal and mutable quaternities, making up the twelve signs of the zodiac. Each of these four is expressed through one of the three modalities (cardinal, mutable, or fixed) of each element, like the Hindu gunas. Water, for instance, can be fixed ice, mutable liquid, or cardinal vapor. Jung, himself, puzzled over the symbolic import of three and four. Astrology holds that answer for me. Three answers the question HOW? Four answers the question WHAT? Four is the number of the manifest world. Squares and cubes can be measured.

At this point, it should be noted that having only four elements, when today there are over a hundred, was not a sign of ignorance but a description of profound archetypal and symbolic process, as today in Jung’s four functions.

In the New Testament, they reappear as the icons for the four Gospels!
Matthew – Aquarius (man), air; the teachings of Jesus Christ.
Mark – Leon (lion), fire; the actions of Jesus Christ.
Luke – Taurus (bull), earth; the natural earthly life of Jesus Christ.
John – Scorpio (eagle), water; the mystical, esoteric aspect of Jesus Christ.

Those of you familiar with art will recognize these icons in medieval manuscripts, and if you have been to Venice, you will have seen St. Mark’s Cathedral and the raised statue of the lion.

Marie-Louise von Franz pointed out that in medieval monasteries the monks would meditate and discuss certain parables and sayings of Jesus from each of these four points of view. My own CREDO LX, “The Global Return of the Prodigal Son,” is an example, come to think of it, of applying the motif politically.

Jung’s Four Functions of the psyche follow the same pattern:
Intuition – water, the direct, nonrational expression of Self,
opposite to
Sensation – earth, the practical expression

Thinking – air, the intellectual expression
opposite to
Feeling – fire, the personal opinion expression

We must remember that we each have all four functions, but one tends to dominate and acts as the superior one, while the inferior one may operate even unconsciously.

Once, in a workshop, I put a china cup in the middle of the circled group. I asked them to write down their observations in single words. They had three minutes, and I used a stopwatch. The results were astonishing! The sensation people described its composition and uses, the thinking people, its origins and symbolic references. The feeling people described their personal opinion of its aesthetic qualities, positive or negative, but the intuitives, without exception, wrote down words that when read out could not by themselves conjure up a cup!!

I even humorously would assign the four elements to biographies of Jung: M-L von Franz’s intellectual Jung: His Myth in Our Time – air; Barbara Hannah’s earthy Jung: His Life and Work; Laurens van der Post’s mystical Jung and the Story of Our Time – water; and Deirdre Bair’s comprehensive book outlining his life’s actions, Jung, a Biography – fire. There are now many biographies, but each will fall into one of these categories, depending on the superior and auxiliary functions of the author.
Phew! That’s more than enough and I hope not too much!

lovingly,
ao

Archetypal Processes VIII: Saturn – CREDO CIV

2010-03-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

Saturn’s concretization of the archetypal process is that of contraction and acts as a balance to Jupiter’s expansion. In the body, Saturn rules the skeleton and the skin, the former giving structure, the latter limits. For millennia, it was itself the limit to the solar system until the discovery of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto opened up the higher levels of the original group starting at the end of the eighteenth century.

If Jupiter is always shouting ‘yes!’ Saturn is warning ‘no’. His icon is the old man with the long white beard. The beard is repeated in every frozen waterfall or icicle. And, indeed, Saturn rules Capricorn, the tenth sign of the zodiac. So if a human life is symbolically associated with Aries, the first sign, it takes nine months to become manifest or incarnated. This explains the pagan festivals at the winter solstice (Dec. 21) and why the church fathers chose that period for the Incarnation of the baby Jesus at Christmas. Today we seem oblivious to how much astronomy, the basis of astrology, determines our daily life. If you think the gods are just history, just see how they live on in the days of our week! Hidden in all this is the rule of the octave, which, like the musical scale, renews another level of the cycle. I take up the symbolic import of each of the first nine numbers in my book The Web in the Sea.

In the popular image of Saturn’s grim reputation – death, cold, miser, pessimistic curmudgeon who suffers poverty, sickness, denial, etc. – we tend to ignore the gold hidden in the lead. Every snowflake is a miracle of beauty, and Scrooge is redeemed by love in the end! Saturn’s Greek name is Kronos, which is the root of chronological time. Old Father Time, the Grim Reaper, etc. But its place of exaltation is Libra, ruled by Venus. Aha! Think of how many stories are based on the softening of a crusty old geezer by a little boy or girl: Silas Marner, for one, Little Lord Fauntleroy, King Lear, A Christmas Carol. The secret of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is based on the alchemical challenge of changing lead to gold, or in psychological parlance turning challenging experience to a lesson learned the hard way. This, to me, explains the extraordinary humorous expression of Jung’s that when the devil takes off his mask, Christ is revealed behind it! And Goethe in his Faust has Mephistopheles, the devil, bemoaning the fact that every time he tries to do something bad, good seems to come out of it in the end! The hint is that the best way to learn something is “the hard way”! Ain’t that the truth!

The secret of the Solar Gold is Love! The old Piscean way of teaching children through guilt and sin and punishment, is being displaced mercifully by telling a child that he is naughty is simply to say “That’s a NO!” and the withdrawal of permission as “That’s not going to happen!” Parents take note of this and spare your kids a few complexes! Practice ad rem rather than ad hominem.

The process has been conflated in the names of Satan and Saturn, but satan is Hebrew and he was an archangel who fell from heaven because of his pride. The name means “adversary.” Saturn comes from Latin serere, meaning “sowing seed.” In addition, the familiar caricature of the devil as a creature with horns and a tail has its origin in the nature god Pan! Early Christianity thus dissuaded the pagans from worshipping nature, stressing this world was a sorry place. Even today the liturgy speaks of “renouncing the world and the devil.” The Catholic priest Matthew Fox was excommunicated for writing a book called Original Blessing: A Primer of Creation Spirituality. He then became an Episcopal priest and is renowned for teaching the sanctity of nature! There is also a lovely chapter on Pan in The Wind in the Willows, the children’s classic by Kenneth Grahame.

The Greek word pan means “all,” as in Pan-American or panic.

Psychologically, Saturn’s process is exemplified by gravity, a serious approach to life, and a lack of humor. The late great Jungian analyst Edward F. Edinger had Saturn conjunct his Ascendant, so his persona was indeed grave when one first met him, and he was a fountain of structured wisdom in his books. In the early ’70’s, his book Ego and Archetype came out and had such a powerful impact on me that I began to have dreams about him. I began to write to him. One of the funny dreams was that we were talking on the phone, but my phone was half a coconut and he said he was talking on the other half. To my surprise, my telephone rang and it was he, and he said, “Mrs. Howell, I think we must take the coconuts seriously. It is time we met.” We did, and I actually made him laugh, and the direction of my life was set for good. The coconut is hard, dark, and hairy on the outside but filled with white, nourishing sweetness on the inside! Saturn’s process in a dream! So, as you read this, take a moment to look back on your own life and see if good did not eventually result from what might have seemed calamitous at the time.

Jung, himself a Leo, had Saturn rising in Aquarius, giving his 23 volumes on psychology an enormous historic scope. Now, his The Red Book reveals the personal struggle and the vast artistic range and discipline that he had. The editor, Sonu Shamdasani, is a Capricorn(!) and his incredible scholarship, revealed in his copious footnotes, is staggering. He is a dear friend, and I was deeply touched when a reader informed me that one of those footnotes includes a reference to one of my books. It means so much to know that I am an atom in that masterpiece!

The psychological truth is that alchemy, concerned with the transformation of lead (Saturn) into gold (Sun), tells us that Love is imprisoned in experience, and that as we express love toward others and nature, the inner transformation takes place in us. Dame Kinde is the Old English for Mother Earth. To be kind is natur-al. His Holiness the Dalai Lama says, “My only religion is kindness.” When one meets him, as we did in Dharamsala, in India, he radiates the spiritual warmth of kindness.

The archetypal process, above all, deals with incarnation, the manifestation of the material world, which actually is illusionary and in constant atomic flux. Nevertheless, without time/space the ego would not have anything visible and tangible to work with. When Mars is exalted in Capricorn, the archetype is homo faber, man the maker, as in the gods Vulcan or Loki. If you think of the patron saints of this and that, you can see how the gods have become Christian! You cannot kill an archetype!

Now that I am ooooold, I am more and more aware of Saturn’s final touch approaching, I will not die; I will celebrate my Aberduffy Day, the gift of that dream I had and wrote about in my CREDO IX.

lovingly,
ao

Saturn: The Wise GuySaturn: The Wise Guy

“Beware, beware, beware!”
drones Saturn, but he means it.
He's wearing his black and grey pinstriped overalls
today and his beard is yellowing.
“Beware of righteousness!
Have you ever been deceived by an empty milk carton
that looked virgin, proud and full?
or broken into an empty egg — that old child's trick?
Let me tell you something
the minute you think you have the last
brick, stitch, or word, I see a light on the computer over there.
Then I know it's time overripe for the Undoing.
I may move slowly, dearie, but I never missed
an Undoing yet.”
It's sort of my specialty, don't you know!
He chuckles
tries to light a pipe but the match burns to its end
as he talks.

“Beware of judging !
There is a fence of rulers around my place
each one labeled with a name.
I saw yours the other day. Yup, it's getting longer
that's good. What's it for?
To measure you with your own measure
at the end.
Oh, judging is the hardest thing to avoid!
People do it all the time. I know.
That's why I don't touch it. Never. Never.
I let folks do it for themselves.
The judge is there all right
but the worst of it is he will be wearing
your face!
That's a terrible shock for most folk.
It gets 'em every time. Mebbe that's why it's called
The Last Judgment.
Nobody, I reckon, wants to try that twice!

“Beware of forcing!
That always makes for a mess. You get mad
stamp on a plank and it hits you.
You steal and find yourself robbed of sleep.
You lie and end up trusting nobody. It don't pay.
It's not just a matter of this Save-your-soul bit.
It's just playing it smart both ways. The way I see it
virtue is enlightened self-interest.

“I'm thinking of putting up two big signs somewhere:
NOTHING, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, FOR FREE!
YOU GITS WHAT YOU GIVES!
I could sign it Karma to show we're up to date
around here.
But folks won't go for this. No money in it.
All this buy now, pay later —
SIN ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN!
They could call it Stupidity-of-the-Day
have a Stupidity-of-the-Month-Club
With a Free Sin for a Bonus.
Now that might sell real good. "Save up for that nice trip
to where it's WARM!" Get it?
He rubbed his hands over that one.
Nah, that's too new-fangled.
Here we have crime make its own punishment.

“Switch that light on, will you. See each
shadow fits the substance. Neat.
Oh, it's all in the good books, all right.
We play fair around here. But nowadays folks think
it's junk mail or advertising, I hear.
I'm not much of a reader myself.
My specialty is the hard way, don't you know.

“Beware, beware, beware!
drones Saturn, his rheumy eyes looking at me.
he holds out his arms not unkindly.
Come here, little girl, let me look at you.
You haven't understood one word, have you!
Don't matter, you'll go your own way of course.
Only don't come running to me, hear?
I'll only tell you I told you so”

a.o.howell

Archetypal Processes VII: Jupiter – CREDO CIII

2010-03-22T07:54:00.000-07:00

When you expand think of contraction, and your work will have fullness of form. When you contract think of expansion, and your work will have the beauty of effortless ease.
– Advice from a Chinese artist

The next two archetypal processes are those of the next two planets, Jupiter and Saturn, whose glyphs are reversals of each other: Jupiter has the cross with the crescent above the left cross arm; Saturn has the cross with the crescent below the right arm, indicating that the two balance one another.

Jupiter, the Roman god, is the same as Zeus, the Greek one. You find this archetypal process embodied also in the Laughing Buddha and in our own Santa Claus!

When I was fifteen and at an American boarding school for a change, I fell and damaged my kneecap and was unable to participate in sports. So for fun, I decided to make a family tree of the Greek deities. I soon discovered, because of the huge number of Zeus’s progeny, that I had to resort to a huge piece of wrapping paper! His sons and daughters were so many and fathered by him in such varying disguises, that I soon learned his gift for expansion and basic benevolence and generosity were almost limitless! So enthusiasm (the word comes from en theos, filled with the god), wealth, and jollity all are part of that process. Shakespeare makes him Falstaff. The only possible negative is excess; we become gluttons, and physical obesity or psychological greed can be the outcome. I, myself, have Jupiter conjunct Mercury, which translates into too many papers! Now that I have been unable to use my right hand for thirteen years, my karma has caught up with me. My desk is a constant shamble. I put two sheets down and find twenty next morning. With help, I am clearing out nine overflowing files and odd bits and pieces in every corner. Plus that, kind people send me copies of their manuscripts, etc., etc. I confess I am too interested in too many directions.

I haven’t even mentioned the library or the records and tapes! Some of the latter my beloved husband collected.

Psychologically, speaking esoterically, it seems that this archetypal process blesses us with what we have acquired previously in the way of expertise, whether it be intuition or a gift in art, sport, counseling or cooking, parenting, or eating and drinking. The lesson is that this expansion desperately needs Saturn’s limits to control it.

Jupiter is the largest planet, and this may symbolize the tremendous jovial goodwill and enthusiasm of the process. Jove, by the way, is another name for Jupiter.
Aha! must also be countered by uh–oh, because the negative of Jupiter, as I have pointed out, involves excess! The myth of King Midas is a teaching story. His greed resulted in everything he touched turning to gold, including his food! He fortunately learned his lesson and was released by the god Dionysus and told to bathe in a certain river.

The current poster boy for this has surely been Madoff who found a criminal path to the “Midas touch”! But there are other wealthy celebrities: an actor who collects so many cars he has a special warehouse to store them in. There is a difference between an art collector who shares the beauty he has and a collector like Scrooge McDuck! It is the difference between greed and appreciation.

Death, Saturn’s realm, separates all of us from all things material, so in the end we can only keep the intangibles; thus the process of Jupiter rules philosophy, religion, education, philanthropy, and also athletics! These are all gifts that keep on giving on one level or another. I think of Andrew Carnegie and the author of an autobiography titled Tell them it was wonderful! Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with its chorus of Joy, joy, daughter off Elysium . . . is the hymn of this beneficent archetypal process!

My first husband was Saturnian, and my beloved Polar Bear, Walter, was positive Jupiter personified, which all who knew him, including my grown children, would affirm. He was big, strong, hearty, kind, generous, and supportive. I remember him binding a bending plant in the garden carefully to a stick. His pleasure was in spreading a big smorgasbord for us all to eat. This was symbolic. He had had a difficult life, yet always met every challenge with faith and courage and kindness.

The archetypal process embodied in Jupiter is that of fundamental optimism, that ultimately a yes! has to sound before a no ! can deny it. This represents the force for good that prevails down through the centuries, that faith, hope, and love will keep us going no matter what, and that Saturn is there to keep exuberance in check with prudence, sobriety, and wisdom.

lovingly,
ao

Archetypal Processes VI: Mars – CREDO CII

2010-03-09T07:58:00.000-08:00

Always remembering that the gods are the concretization of invisible archetypal verbs, Mars embodies action. The interesting and possible hint to a holographic solar system is that the planet Mars exists, and not only that, reveals – as do all the other planets – how any individual is likely to act! Not only is “As above, so below,” but I would add, “As within, so without!” All of this happens synchronistically, mind you, not through fateful causality. It is just a plain fact that where, say, Mars (or any other planet) is, one can tell how the individual is likely to express the process psychologically. In most cases this is unconscious, but the choice is given us to become more conscious. Jung knew this, and, despite the ridicule that still exists among most scientists (though not all!), where Mars is placed by sign, aspect, and house in a person’s chart, clues are evident to the way a person is likely to act.

The reason for the skepticism goes back to the “Age of Reason” when science lost its sense of the sacred and the sacred lost its proof! Theoretical physics is now moving to heal the split. David Bohm, whom I met, Fritjof Capra, Stan Grof, whom I co-taught with, and the scientist and mystic Gerald L. Schroeder, author of The Hidden Face of God, come to mind. There are many others. So, please try always to keep an open mind and a good crap detector! They balance each other.

Mars, in the body rules the muscles, the penis, and the nose; the throat is ruled by Venus, as ruler of Taurus ( throat) and Libra, while Mars rules Aries (head) and Scorpio, the lovely land of Genitalia. When a boy matures, his voice changes; when a man is hanged, he has an erection. When a woman has a high piping voice, she may be out of touch with her lower two chakras, the sexual area, so rightly important to Freud. (Swami Rama of the Himalayan Institute pointed out that Adler was the psychologist of the third chakra, Manipura, the center of the power principle, and Jung of the fourth or heart chakra, the first above the abdominal cavity, and, I suspect, on up].

The process of Mars is positive, yang, as opposed to that of Venus, which is receptive and yin. The glyphs of each are reversals of each other. Yes, it takes two to tango. Thus as the psychological inner feminine or anima is to a man, the internalized masculine of a woman is Mars expressed in her animus. If you have heard of a woman with a “negative animus” or an “animus ridden” woman, this is what Jung meant. I confess that with my Mars in my Twelfth House, I suffered the former, as I found out in analysis. I just wouldn’t fight, except for principles since it is placed in Aquarius. Physically, I am basically a coward. As a handicapped woman of 87, I suppose, I now have an excuse.

Mr. Milquetoast, of cartoon fame, and Dickens’s Uriah Heep are male examples of a weak Mars, but all the splendid heroes, every one, mythic, human, or imagined, is Mars personified, and all the heroic women, likewise have a positive animus to thank. From Britannia to Brunhilde, to the martyred saints and wartime journalists of the present, all express Martian characteristics as well as the soldier, the Crusader, the athlete, the knight, and also the passionate lover.

If you think about it, the penis and the revolver have the same shape and function!
One shoots life and the other shoots death. So the glyph of Mars can be seen as a shield and a spear or a penis. I love to point out that Mars in Libra, ruled by Venus, produces the Sword Dance of the Scots, or the elegance of fencing. I knew a man who had Mars in Libra who engraved wedding invitations (Libra) on copper (Venus) with a metal burin point (Mars)! The archetypal god Vulcan personifies Mars in Capricorn, homo faber, man the maker.

The negative is also paramount – the Villain! The negative archetype of Mars as ruler of Aries would be the tyrant, bully, reckless adventurer, etc. As ruler of Scorpio, the sadist, the murderer, the spy, the traitor .Remember please, this is not a description of any individual but of the archetype!

The importance of action as a process collectively cannot be overstated. Without it, nothing would ever get done. Just yesterday, a man friend told me that at a workshop he learned that men always ask what the other guy does. Men act. This results in all competitions from wars to sports to initiating progress throughout the world. As Heraclitus observed, War is the great accelerator. It certainly rules testosterone!

The chart of the USA has Mars in Gemini, which rules children, and we are a Cancer nation, ruled by the Moon or Mom, so there is a preponderance of puers, the psychological equivalent of men who are eternal boys. They are still under the spell of Mom. My friend Robert Bly, with whom I taught decades ago in his summer seminars, addressed the many puers who attended them with humor, telling them they were still flower children who wanted to be carpenters and play the guitar! He then wrote a guidebook for them called Iron John. It became a best seller. Philip Wylie wrote a book on Momism, pointing out the power wielded by mothers in our country, their icon being apple pie.

I cannot resist repeating the true story of buying a box of cereal that contained a decal of a Mars-red “Million Dollar Man” knocking falling boulders off his shoulder, and when I bought another box, the decal was of a blonde woman in electric blue jumping over a wire fence. On the back of each was printed DO NOT APPLY WHERE MOM WOULD NOT APPROVE! Now, cereal is named for the archetypal Mother Goddess Ceres. The box is an enclosure (Moon), as is the womb or a house. The chart of the USA has Mars in Gemini (see above) and our Moon is in Aquarius, but the country is ruled by Cancer (July 4, 1776), so the Sun is in the sign ruled by the Moon. I photocopied them and sent the originals to the Jungian analyst Dr. Edinger. You can see what fun it is to think symbolically. I am 87 and almost housebound at this point, but I am never ever bored!

lovingly.
ao

Archetypal Processes V: Venus – CREDO CI

2010-03-09T07:19:00.000-08:00

If Mercury’s process is communication, that of Venus is relating. As a planet, it is the second one between us and the Sun, and her partner Mars is the first one to orbit it after our Earth.

As a goddess, which concretizes the process, Venus rules Love but also War! This demonstrates the two extremes of relationship. When I would teach a group about this process, I would have a woman and a man stand in the middle of our group and act out the many ways they could relate: shaking hands, dancing, scolding, turning their backs to each other, hugging, kissing, slapping, punching, etc. It was always a fun class, believe me, but it proved the point.

The Sun and Moon form the highest pair, but Venus and Mars are the mortal heroine and hero. Their relationship is the next level of opposites, the level of eros rather than agape, so sexual expression is included and necessary for human reproduction!

The positive archetypal process is that of beauty and so Venus is associated with all the arts, and where there is beauty there is also harmony; and where there is harmony in relationships, there is justice, so Venus also rules Law. The sculptural icon of the blindfolded woman holding the scales is Venus in her role of balance. So in astrology, she rules the sign of Libra, the Scales, and the opposite sign to Aries, whose ruler is Mars. In society, therefore diplomacy and legal affairs are expressions of seeking a just balance in social relationships.

Children, as such, are ruled by Mercury until puberty separates them, and emotions take on a new dimension.

In Jungian psychology, Venus is expressed as a man’s inner feminine – his anima – and Mars in a woman is her internalized masculine animus. We can recognize this in Lucy in the “Peanuts” cartoons! You may have observed at a party where sufficient alcohol is consumed, some men become very sentimental and women quite intellectually strident. Some of you may be familiar with Jung’s close friend Toni Wolff’s brilliant short work The Archetypal Structure of the Feminine. I will give a very brief summary of the work in her terms and then a more graphic interpretation. She proposes a quaternity thus:

WIFE/MOTHER l AMAZON

--------------------------------------------------------------------

HETAIRA MEDIAL WOMAN
[seductress] [priestess]

===================================================
*Note that the two on the left need a man to define them; those on the right do not!
You can also break these down into the following, including my version of the negatives

WIFE/MOTHER “ANNIE OAKLEY”
Moon Moon + animus
-Witch - Ballbuster

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SOUTHERN BELLE WOMAN UNTO HERSELF
Venus: Geisha Girl Venus: Virgin, Nun, Inspiratrice,
Wise Old Woman
- bitch - Sorceress

=================================================
* I have written at far greater length about these archetypes in my book Jungian Symbolism In Astrology. The interesting thing is that men project their anima onto one or the other but most often get split, as did Jung himself, between the two on the left. He has the wife for permanent family security and helps himself to the hetaira on the side. The news is chock full of this predicament at the moment. In Europe this is more accepted as normal, but in the USA women have a great deal of anguish, thinking themselves a failure and projecting envy on whichever they are not! One has to pity the hetaira as she ages!

It is also quite interesting to note the collective impact. My generation was supposed to be content with the Wife/Mother role but we went to workshops and moved over to the independence of the Amazon. Then came the angry young women in the ’80s who started out as Amazons and filled my office later as their childbearing years were closing in.

Some of the most amusing words Jung ever wrote concern the quaternity of many marriages: the relationship of husband and wife and their contra-sexual anima and animus!

The Jungian analyst Jane Wheelwright wrote a wonderful work on the choices of elderly women, For Women Growing Older – the Animus. Either they introvert their animus and become family matriarchs or extravert their animus and serve the collective, which I suppose is what I am trying to do!

lovingly,
ao

ARCHETYPAL PROCESSES IV: Mercury – CREDO C

2010-02-26T10:00:00.000-08:00

Life is a tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think.
– De la Rochefoucauld.

Neither the Sun nor the Moon is a planet. The Sun is a star and the Moon, a satellite of the Earth. Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun and its process is communication. Venus, the next planet, rules relating. The Greeks called them Hermes and Aphrodite. Both of them are situated between the Earth and the Sun.

The archetypal Mercury, alas, is reduced visibly today to delivering flowers and his caduceus to the symbol of the medical profession, but his process is ubiquitous in our bodies and the entire world of opposites and connections; above all it introduces the role of comedy and humor. The process points above all to duality, and the symbol of the sign it rules is II, Gemini. A more grounded sign it also rules is Virgo. If one looks carefully at the visible figure, Hermes has a winged helmet to symbolize thought. We have a two-fold brain, a two-fold nervous system, and our thoughts are quicker than his archetypal mimic, Mighty Mouse! His feet are also winged, indicating the speed of thought, and he holds the potent symbol of the caduceus, the staff holding the entwined serpents, topped by a star and a dove by the alchemists. The caduceus seems to bear a prophetic resemblance to DNA and the chakra system. The process also rules the hands and fingers. I remember a time when I was waiting for a delayed train with my ten-year-old daughter Jennifer. We used the time to count the number of ways one could use the hands to communicate! We were up to 75, including waving, saluting, clapping, vowing, pointing, scolding, tootling, etc., and had we included the hand signing for the deaf … well, you get the idea!

In the outer world, the process appears above all in the written word in all its forms and, you might not realize that writing was invented during the Age of Gemini, appearing in Egypt as hieroglyphics and Sumeria as cuneiform, and history began! History enables one generation to communicate with another. However, Mercury does not rule such recent things as the Internet, nor does Venus rule television. These are ruled by the higher octaves of Uranus and Neptune, discovered only two centuries ago.

In mythology, the oldest story, the Epic of Gilgamesh, recounts the dramatic taming of a wild man, Enkidu, the evolving friendship of the hero Gilgamesh, and their adventures, and points to the tragic ending of the realization that death awaits us all. When we read this together in a ninth-grade class, some of my students were in tears! Many of the motifs in the Epic are repeated in the Hebrew Torah and Genesis in the Old Testament. Abraham came originally from Sumeria.

What this pair of friends starts is the motif of the archetypal “twins” of buddies in human culture. My Dictionary of Mythology has at least three pages of them! Castor and Pollux, David and Jonathan, Balim and Balor, Roland and Oliver, down to Max and Moritz, Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, et al! These latter also point also to the role of humor, of comedy, jokes, puns, and even punctuation marks. Take the sentence Lydia is a good woman. Then contrast it with Lydia is a “good” woman. Note the “ ” are wee Geminis!

The metals associated with the original group are telling: Sun/gold; Moon/Silver; Venus/copper; Jupiter/tin; and Saturn/lead. Only Mercury is mercury, not only not a solid nor a liquid but also a toxin. To identify with intellect alone can be toxic, indeed. I think I have already shared the only time I dreamt anything in Latin. It was Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum, but the dream added ergo scio Deus est! I think therefore I am, says he, and I am told therefore I [can] know that God is! I woke up stunned and asked Walter to write it down, which he kindly did.

So Mercury alone is in the middle, connecting them all. He is both asexual and hermaphroditic. As a positive archetype, uniting the opposites, making two into one – the zipper going up! – he is the psychopomp (love that word!) or Leader of Souls, but going down, making two out of one, he is the Trickster or worse, the Devil. Even today, cartoons convey this archetype as wickedly humorous, with horns and tail, a corruption perhaps of Pan. I remember looking forward, as a child, to his appearance in the puppet show in the park in Paris. In the Middle Ages, his antics seemed to prove that the harder he tried to be bad, his actions turned out to be good in the end. His favorite word was ‘No!” as Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust tells us point blank: Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint. “I am the Spirit that ever denies!” (Perhaps he was a Republican!) He also bemoans when asked who he is, by replying: Ein Teil von jener Krafft die stets das Boese will und stets das Gute schafft. “I am part of that force that always wills evil, and yet ends up creating good!”

In my The Beejum Book, Lonesome, the rabbit guide, is always given to saying “now and then,” “up and down,” “here and there.” Mercury is familiar in many contemporary figures such as the Roadrunner, Wiley Coyote and their equivalent; he is a fixture in every culture’s mythology: the Norse Loki, the Hindu Ganesh, even Til Eulenspiegel is a German archetype.

For heavy duty evil, we look to Pluto/Hades, yet both names in Latin and Greek mean “riches.” This is the wealth implicit in the alchemical nigredo, the black shit, as it were, that like manure in time can fertilize growth on many different levels.

We have witnessed just recently the morality play of the golfer Tiger Woods as a Prodigal Son. Whatever you may think, I truly believe his remorse is genuine.
Dorothy L. Sayers, the detective story writer, was also an Oxford Inkling and friend of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and that group. Few realize that she was also a theologian, and a Gemini, to boot! She authored one of my favorite quotes:

The fires of hell are the flames of God’s love rejected.

lovingly,
ao

ARCHETYPAL PROCESS III: The Moon – CREDO XCIX

2010-02-17T09:48:00.000-08:00

The Sun and the Moon form a hierosgamos, as Jung would call it, a sacred marriage: the archetypes of the King and the Queen in alchemy and fairy tales. Why, is a lengthy subject! The Sun is a star and the Moon is a satellite of the Earth, reflecting the Sun’s light differently every minute as it rotates the Earth every mo(o)nth. The Sun is static, as it centers the solar system, but the Moon is in constant motion; the number associated with the Sun is 12 but there are 13 lunations in a year. So the Moon kicks the wheel, as it were, and keeps things happening as it reflects the light of Spirit into our every moment. The ancient Sumerians already noticed the relationship of women’s periods every month and so assumed that the Goddess was resting during the dark of the Moon. Cramps? But they also observed the four stations of its light and came up with the idea of weeks of seven days, which we observe to this day.

The Moon’s physical impact upon the Earth is incredible. Not only the impact on the tides, but on liquids everywhere, including our bodies. Studies have been made that a wee tide can be observed in a cup of tea, that the city of Moscow rises and falls an inch or two, that sap in trees rises at its behest, that the green of vegetables responds to a waxing moon and root vegetables to a waning one. Posts are better set on a waning moon, bamboo knots at full moon, and most human contracts signed at the dead of the moon (12 hours before a new moon) come to nothing. All this was considered old wives’ tales, but science and many farmers know the reality. Years ago, Russian soldiers would play a trick on their buddies by leaving their steel (not stainless steel) razors on the windowsill at full moon, dulling them. There are volumes of further examples.

Psychologically and astrologically, the Moon is logically our Ego, acting as the matrix of consciousness. This may be a matter of dispute today, but my diagram (see CREDO XCVII) proves what the Kabbalists and such great astrologers as Dane Rudhyar and others agree upon.

Identification with the Ego is the huge problem of our time. Our inner Sun is the individual wick holding the flame of our Divine Guest, which is the same flame shining through the personal lamps of our psyches, but when we identify with our Ego, we think that’s all we are. After all, the Self lies in the Unconscious. Jung said that the longest journey most of us make is from the consciousness of the head to the heart, where only Love can approach the mystery.

The Moon spends about 2½ days in each sign, and in our charts it progresses every 2½ years and maintains a time relationship with the transiting of Saturn around the zodiac, so life comes in at least three stages if lived to the full. At 87, I am almost there!

Simply summarized, the first 28 yrs seem to be spent picking up the karma or lessons learned or yet to be learned. Our childhood seems to make us choiceless recipients of parents, siblings, neighbors, schools, and environment. However, by age 7, there is a shift in individual consciousness, and there are rituals in various cultures to mark this. In Hinduism, boys are given a red string to wear, signifying a shift from the mother’s influence to that of the father. Roman Catholics offer Confirmation rituals at that age. At 14, or whenever the individual Moon opposes its natal place, a girl is likely to have had her first period and a boy’s voice changes, and both acquire the characteristics of adolescence: pubic hair, breasts in girls, muscular growth in boys. Psychologically, esoteric teaching has it that we acquire another sheath in our aura. The “tomboy” in girls vanishes and they become more emotional and vulnerable, and often frictions occur among them; boys become more rebellious and form teams or gangs, or undergo ceremonies of joining their tribes, as among natives or more formally the celebration of a Bar Mitzvah. The underlying premise is that the adolescent is readying himself to become an independent, responsible adult. Jung adds the important concept that the inner feminine in a boy becomes his anima and the masculine in a girl becomes her animus. These, in turn, get projected out onto the opposite sex with varying amount of intensity and form the stuff of human comedy or tragedy according to which scenario adults knowingly observe. I was a classic tomboy myself who underwent such a transformation, projecting, I seem to remember, a serious passion for an actor in Mutiny on the Bounty in 1936, whose name I think was Franchot Tone! These are broad strokes, but I am also convinced that the genuine suffering some children go through over a broken doll or toy may well be a reliving of a memory of some poignant loss as an adult in a former life! Who knows? As you read this page, you probably think of all the exceptions, and collectively there are indeed so many shifts in history, but the physical realities persist: Women act out their clock far more visibly than men, especially as they age. It is harder for men, yet old men visibly soften and old ladies often grow random whiskers.

Today, we accept the reality of the gay issue, which has always been part of humanity. Think of Sappho of Lesbos, and realize that in ancient Greece gay warriors were welcomed into the military, because of their fierce desire to protect their lover!

The second 28-year cycle comes with Saturn’s first return. It dawns on us that we are mortal! If our karma was metaphorically to eat boiled eggs and we didn’t do that the first round, we now get them scrambled or poached, but it’s still “eggs” on another level! Here we become the true heroes or heroines of our lives, going to work, starting families, dwelling away from our parents, acquiring, above all, new experiences, and usually identifying with our Ego, until at some point we begin to think that life is just “one damn thing after another,” and finally we may experience an emotional crisis that forces us to look inward to seek that center of Self, which, don’t forget, dwells elusively in the Unconscious. If you remember the diagram, the Ego is on the circumference, going around in circles, searching (and both of those words come from the Latin circare, meaning to circle). But we look and hopefully find the radius of “the Only Way” of Hagia Sophia, the feminine gift of Spiritual Wisdom, which is also full of joy. All cultures speak of Wisdom as feminine. There is a whole chapter in The Dove in the Stone devoted to her many other names. Only the Roman Catholic Church translated Sophia into spiritus sanctus, a masculine noun (!) that made all the referring pronouns of the Trinity male. I rest my case. The Greek and Russian Orthodox did not agree! The Dove is the only visible symbol in Catholicism pointing to the feminine, all of which Jung has written about.

The third 28-year cycle is the most important of all! If you think of the first in terms of an apple tree blossoming, the second the long summer of green apples, the third is the ripening of the fruit and the apples falling to the ground – the gift to the future of others. You can understand why Jung felt old age the most important one of all. The idea of people retiring and playing shuffleboard, or being put away in rest homes, etc., seemed to him a tragic waste. Unfortunately, today we have the specter of Alzheimer’s and dementia on an unforeseen scale. I, myself, thanks to a horrifying toxic reaction to doxxycycline last summer was paralyzed briefly, and aged almost 10 years in three months! plus other stressful matters, facial shingles, hip displaced, computer crash among them! Now I have a bad case of forgetting names!! This, combined with lack of use of right hand and ongoing paresthesia for 13 years, makes every day a challenge. But I am blessed with help on many levels and so am able to continue so far with these CREDOS …

Jane Wheelwright, Jungian analyst, wrote a short book on the animus in aging women. She pointed out that when it becomes extraverted it enables the woman to give of herself to others and the collective, but, if not, the woman may become a dominating matriarch or worse, a complainer and a burden to others. I am struck by the number of Jungians alive today, living to the full as they age. In the past three decades, we had the privilege of meeting analysts James Kirsch and Werner Engel in their nineties, Margit van Leight-Frank, Edith Wallace, and the dear man who lived to be 100, James Henderson. The other profession I might mention is that of symphony conductors. It must be the power of music filling them with good vibrations!

Forgive my rambling, but as I am 87 now, I have been blessed by meeting so many wonderful people and going to so many places in the world, I feel such gratitude! My grandma King was born in 1854! and when I was 16, I met Emilie Bardach in Switzerland, who was the last love of Henrik Ibsen! I have also been “one touch away” from so many great souls.

When I lectured to 1200 people at the ITA Conference in Davos, Walter and I sat out later under a pine tree to picnic. Marie-Louise von Franz passed and bowed under the branches and without a word kissed my cheek and walked on!

I truly have been blessed!

lovingly,
ao

Archetypal Process II: The Sun – CREDO XCVIII

2010-02-01T10:19:00.000-08:00

As the Sun shines upon my heart, so may my heart shine upon others! – The Upanishads

One Sunday in 1945 I was sitting on the fire escape outside of my flat in Greenwich Village, and I had an epiphany. The Sun shines and it didn’t have to! What started existence in the first place??? What makes a YES! necessary before a “no!” can come to deny it. There has to be something to deny … This may sound crazy but it took my breath away. This then was the essence of that mystery word FIAT! This was also before I studied Astrology and eventually began to understand it as a symbolic language of archetypal processes.

With that in mind, stop and think about the Sun in the Solar System. 1) It is the only star; 2) it actively gives out light, heat, and life; 3) the circumambulating planets are receptive and reflect that one light in different ways; 4) its astrological glyph is a circle with a dot in the middle; this glyph you find is also used for gold, which never tarnishes (aha!); 5) it is associated with the greatest value; 6) in the body, it rules the heart and when the heart stops, we leave that body for a return to a greater life; 7) it rules the spine and the right eye in men, the left in women; 8) in mathematics it rules One which is in every number and 12 as in the Zodiac, the Constellations, the Tribes of Israel, the disciples of Christ. (For many more, see my The Web in the Sea); 9) in geometry, it rules the point and the circle; the sphere and the dodecahedron. It is hidden in every atom as energy!

1) In alchemy it is the goal of transformation of lead (Saturn) to gold but non aurae vulgaris, not “ordinary” gold. Think Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice! 2) In the Rosarium at the end is the picture of the Sun looking to the right as if acknowledging a greater invisible Source. 3) In Jungian psychology, it represents the goal of individuation which I, personally, see as the “Divine Guest” that lights every wick of the individual Self. The flames of that “fire” are all the same flame! 4) In myths and fairy tales it rules kings, royalty, solar heroes (think Joseph Campbell) avatars, Leo as lion king, fathers, emperors, figures of power and authority, chiefs, and, collectively, monarchies and governments, CEOs. A common mythical theme is the country ruled by an usurping King (ego) and the country is in bad shape!

Given the fact that if the Sun were to go out, it would take only 8 minutes for us to find out(!), it is not unreasonable for people to have been Sun worshippers for it is a visible testimony to the source of our being. The Roman Sol Invictus is an example.

Nowhere is the current split between science and religion more evident than in the scientific, astronomical attitude towards this heavenly center! By science’s self-limiting definition, it cannot allow itself to speak of the word Love! And yet on another level that is the mystical truth our Sun gives proof of.

God is making love in your heartbeat twenty-four hours a day! as Dadaji pointed out. For anyone questioning the existence of God, keep in mind that the best we can do is what Jung spoke of as the imago Dei or our personal image, which varies according to our current experience. For me, as I expressed in my very first CREDO, the only way I can approach the matter is I feel it as a “vast certainty.” “The Tao that can be defined is not the Tao.”

That there are many different kinds of Love is obvious: Eros – physical; philia – brotherly; agape – transpersonal.

The Hindus take it for granted that there are different ways we approach the matter of relating to God: 1) as father to son; 2) son to father; 3) friend to friend; 4) mother to child; 5) Beloved to Beloved!

All the archetypal processes have negative aspects in common: weakness, excess, or Shadow. In the case of the sun in its symbolic role in human nature (notice lower case!) in the chart or psychological expression, weakness denotes an obscuring of the light, as in a dirty glass lantern; the result is cowardice, Mr. Milquetoast, lack of self-confidence. Excess on the other hand, results in a bombastic nature, a Know-it-all, a show-off or a tyrant. Hidden in all three is hubris, pride, the conviction that “I am the doer.” The Shadow is pride; Satan is a fallen Angel.

I have written the true story of the thirteen-year-old boy who, influenced by his religious studies at school, came home determined to be a saint. He gave up his bed, slept on a mat, became a vegetarian, got a summer job requiring long bike rides in the heat. He was obedient to his father, helpful to his mother, and patient with his pesky sisters. About a week later, his mother got up in the night to go to the bathroom, passed his door, and heard sobbing. She knocked, entered, and found him pounding the floor and crying, “It’s not FAIR! It’s not FAIR!” He explained further, “I’ve tried to be good and now I’ve fallen into the greatest sin of all! I think I’m better than other people!!!” The mother tried to comfort him, but when she returned to bed she was puzzled as to how to help him. She prayed for an answer, and, in a way, her reading Jung might have helped.

The next morning, she had to change the empty paper towel rack. As she took out the cardboard tube, the light shone through it. She had the answer! She stuffed one end with a tissue and told her son to look through it. “Duh!” said the boy. Then she whipped out the tissue and told him to look again, “Duh!” Then she explained, “The light comes through the tube not out of it!” I may have told how this helped me myself when dealing with applause, at lectures – you just send it back up the tube to your inner Sun, the Divine Guest.

I may have told this story before, but it later entailed a synchronicity. A group of friends that have met monthly at our home for over twenty years for discussions wanted to give me a birthday surprise. Each came with a written tribute and began reading them, After about four, I grinned and told them the story above. As I was telling it, my daughter Beth walked in with an empty paper-towel tube and threw it on the burning fire!!! She is unable to attend because she has to go early to her job, so her appearance alone was a surprise. Believe me, I now keep such a tube in my study as a teaching prop to this day!

So as each of us has an individual centerpoint or wick of Self, the flame of the inner Sun is the Divine Guest who is waiting to be recognized consciously as bringing Love as well as Life to your heart!

lovingly,
ao

Archetypal Processes I: The Concept – CREDO XCVII

2010-01-29T07:53:00.000-08:00

The Emerald Tablet of Trismegistus gives us the saying “As above, so below”; Jung, in my opinion, gives us the horizontal of “As within, so without,” making a linear cross , and the quaternity is symbolic of the manifest world. It can be measured.

Processes are active verbs. They start out as abstractions, which even primitive man recognized, and since they were in nature, they were considered divine and given different names of gods and goddesses in different cultures, because the necessity of speaking about them required reifying images with names.

A quick example of what this means is expansion, ruled by the planet Jupiter, which Roman god goes by many different names: Jove, as in jovial, and the French jeudi or the Norse god Thor, as in Thursday. Every culture has a name of this gift-bestowing process. We recognize the positive Santa Claus, or Falstaff. In the natal astrological chart, it shows generally where a person’s enthusiasm lies. That word breaks down to the Greek en-theos, to describe being possessed by a god within. Too much expansion runs into excess, physical obesity, gluttony, etc. I have Jupiter conjunct Mercury (communication) and so suffer from an excess of books and papers, now made worse by only being able to use my left hand!

This process will be delineated later, but I hope you get the idea. To use a homely analogy: a cake baker sometimes uses a frosting bag with adjustable tips. The frosting itself is the same sugar but it now can be expressed in large, small, rippled, star-shaped spurts. Well, energy or prana is one force but it can be expressed in many different ways. The center of our Solar System is the radiating source of light, life, heat, and love. The planets reflect that light in different ways. Saturn’s lead, Jupiter’s tin, and Venus’s copper are symbolic ways that the radiant sun’s energy is reflected on our earth and every living creature and every atom hidden in matter. Mind-boggling! However absurd this sounds scientifically, the fact remains that these elementary processes do exist and function in outer nature and inwardly in each of our psyches. I have studied and lived reflecting on this for sixty-six years, only to become more and more convinced that this cosmic science we call astrology is in fact a symbolic language of archetypal processes. It is far, far more than just dealing with individual charts. It is in fact not only a spiritual guide to individuation, but a faint glimpse into the proof positive or “vast certainty” that some greater force is at work and that there is even a menu for the evolution of consciousness, a topic addressed in my The Heavens Declare.

Somebody rightly said, There is another world and it is hidden in this one! Jung coined the concept of synchronicity as the meaningful coincidences that occur and flabbergast us by being so improbable. I call them Sophia’s Winks! And if you are reading this CREDO, chances are that you know full well what I am describing.

I remember an incident in Heathrow Airport in London. I had to go to the Ladies. As I opened my cubicle door, a friend and member of a spiritual group in the USA walked past that narrow aperture! We had no idea either one of us was in England. She was on her way to Berlin and I was returning from Scotland to New York, as we discovered over a quick last cuppa in the busy airport. We had not seen each other for several years!

Another instance was when I traveled with three young students of mine on Long Island , New York, to the Scottish Hebrides. We were in a rowboat off the west coast of Skye. There were three other men in the boat. As we headed to a remote peninsula, one of the men looked at one of my boys and said, “You must be Peter Murnane!” He was. The man had been a college friend at Yale with Peter’s father, and this boy was the image of his father. Coincidences happen; meaningful coincidences are synchronicities.

I mention these examples only to suggest that our lives seem to be lived at more than one level, and these Winks are indicators that we need to pay attention. Life consists of two halves: an event and its meaning. To live a symbolic life, as Jung highly recommends, is to look for the meaning! He wrote:

Now, we have no symbolic life but we are all badly in need of [one]. Only the symbolic life can express the daily need of the soul, mind you! And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this mill—this awful, grinding, banal life in which they are “nothing but.”… They are simply sick of the whole thing and that is the reason people are neurotic … and therefore they want sensation. They even want a war.… They say, “Thank heaven, now something is happening that is bigger than ourselves!”… Life is too rational, there is no symbolic existence in which I am something else, in which I am fulfilling my role, my role as one of the actors in the divine drama of life.
Have you got a corner in your house where you can perform the rites, as they do in India … even a private spot where they can lead a symbolic life, renew their vows or meditate.

Thus, it is my intention to write a series of CREDOS examining some of these basic processes and linking them to the planets they represent. Hopefully, we will begin to see how our Solar System may indeed be a hologram uniting infinite diversity as expressions of the One, as in uni-versal. To me a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an invisible spiritual meaning. Uniting the two is the function of living that symbolic life. The true meaning of sym-bolos in Greek is putting things together, and its antonym is dia-bolos! This literally means separating, the function attributed to the devil which separates the radius of Sophia’s Wisdom connecting the ego at the circumference and that mysterious centerpoint Jung called the Self, which like the individual wick in a candle holds the same flame of Spirit.

We have to remember that a diagram is read with the right brain but what I am writing, you read with the left.

So keep in mind that processes are active verbs. As Heraclitus says, “Everything flows. The river remains though the waters flow.” Thus the diagram is describing an active process!

lovingly, ao

Sophia’s Devices VI: Sacred Geometry – CREDO XCVI

2010-01-15T07:13:00.000-08:00

Heaven’s way is round, earth’s way is square.
– Lu Wu-pei (Chinese poet)

As the ancient Greeks proclaimed, “God geometrizes.” By that they meant that nature unfolds according to discernable patterns of consistent nature, true now even in the subatomic world. In addition, a symbolic value is implied. Unfortunately, I am unable to do justice to this, being limited to my computer, but I have written a book on the topic called The Web in the Sea: Jung, Sophia, and the Geometry of the Soul. It is a sequel to The Dove in the Stone: On Finding the Sacred in the Commonplace, so you know it is more conversations with Walter on Iona, but with illustrations of circles and squares, et al.

However, I can give you an idea: Draw a circle and look at it. Can you see the whole circle? If you think you can, think again. What is the formula for a circle? It is π r squared and pi never ever comes out. So a circle is a mystery and stands for Spirit Unmanifest, which, no doubt, is the reason that Jung called the psyche a mandala and Joachim of Floris wrote, God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere! This even hints at the suggestion that our solar system may be a hologram, hinting that everything is contained in everything! Phew!

Emerson wrote a whole essay on “Circles,” pointing out that every circle can be encircled by another, and we have the saying: “He drew a circle and shut me out; I drew another and brought him in.”

In the history of mathematics, the introduction of zero was a huge step!

The three-dimensional of a circle is a sphere, and the dodecahedron fits into it with 12 sections! This hints at the nature of the Sun and the 12 Signs of the Zodiac. However, since this is symbolically static and radiant, the Moon adds its orbiting of our Earth, making 13! And this past December (2009), we saw that “blue moon” with two full moons in one month. Incidentally, the number 13 gave rise to all kinds of negative feminine projections in the superstitious Middle Ages, which surprisingly continue to this day. Friday (Freya’s or Venus’s day) the 13th was the double feminine whammy!! And even today, some hotels just don’t have a 13th floor!

So the circle is an abstract concept. The visible constellations are actually an ellipse, as is the twisted form of the lemniscate or symbol for eternity. However, many things in nature are circular: the eye is circular and raindrops form circles, and the scorned dandelion’s pouf is a miraculous life-giving wonder! A streetlight shining through falling snow is a sermon in silence.

It takes a compass to draw a circle. One point is stationary at the center, the other sweeps the circle. The visual result yields the glyphs of the Sun and the metal gold, and sheds light on Jung’s symbol for the mandala of the psyche, the point being the wick of the individual Self, which holds the same flame of the Spirit in every individual.

Perhaps you are familiar with William Blake’s powerful work depicting God holding that compass.

The square is symbolic of the manifest world. Why? Because it can be measured. The carpenter’s square and the compass are the symbols of the esoteric Ancient Order of Masons indicating that they knew of the symbolic import of these two factors for centuries.

The three-dimensional forms of the circle and the square are the sphere and the cube.

The Golden Rectangle employs both a compass and a ruler. There is no way I can convey the miraculous results of this figure! The Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens is built in every detail according to its formula! It engenders not only the four proportions hidden in a pentagram, but also the spiral that one finds in a nebula, the water swirling in your toilet bowl, or the cowlick on a newborn’s head! The unfurling of a rose, the setting of seeds in a sunflower, and on and on. These geometric insights were familiar to the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Sumerians but were lost during the destruction of European civilization by the barbarian Goths, resulting in the Dark Ages, but were kept alive by the Islamic world and restored to Europe when the Moors invaded Spain around A.D. 711, which led directly over the following centuries to the Renaissance and, among many others, to a mathematician called Fibonacci. He discovered the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, in which each subsequent number is the sum of the two before, starting with 0 and 1: 0, 1, 1 (0+1), 2 (1+1), 3 (1+2), 5 (2+3), 8 (3+5), 13 (5+8)….. The ratio of each successive pair of numbers in the series soon converges on the Golden Number (phi), 1.618, the ratio expressed in the Golden Rectangle.
Here is my tribute to Fibonacci:

Fibonacci at my kitchen door
Fronds of one stock furl
mathematically considerate
of each other's surging
into space
their rectitude
the straightest lines in nature
their modesty in touching curl
of heads bowed
in proportion's acknowledgement
of place
I am undone, dear Fibonacci,
by this green and silent sermon
of humble harmony's
return
an old testament of ordered law —
a new testament of beauteous portent
a family of fern.

lovingly,
ao

Sophia’s Devices V: Astrology, the Cosmic Science – CREDO XCV

2009-12-11T08:39:00.000-08:00

I have related in my book Jungian Symbolism in Astrology and elsewhere how I came to be converted from viewing astrology as “superstitious twaddle for nincompoops” to spending the next sixty-five years of my life studying it, teaching it to Jungian analysts, lecturing worldwide, and writing about it in my books! So I will concentrate on it as a majestic topic uniting the visible cosmos with its invisible meaning. Astrology transcends people’s individual charts. It is at least 5000 yrs old and has evolved through the collective unconscious and sheds wisdom through each of those Ages right up to the Age of Pisces and the coming “New Age” of Aquarius. If you are sick of hearing about the New Age, relax, we have 2000 years of it to come!

So my definition is Astrology is a symbolic language of archetypal processes. The astrological horoscope or natal chart is a description of the way an individual is likely to process experience. In other words, no two people are exactly alike. Even born at the same moment, one will go to the drugstore while the other takes a nap. As Heraclitus put it, “With our eyes open we share the same world, but when we close our eyes, each of us enters a separate world,” Jung warns of predicting because many complexes can be dissolved through consciousness; otherwise we have to live them out as fate! Three factors are requisite: latitude, longitude, and exact time of birth plus the gender of the person.

Up until the Age of Reason, in the seventeenth century, astrology was what united science and religion. For centuries Christian cathedrals and early Jewish temples had zodiacs on their floors, and the 12 tribes of Israel and the 12 disciples each were allotted to a sign of the zodiac, but when the split occurred with Descartes and others, religion lost its proof and science lost its sense of the sacred. Now, in the last hundred years, thanks to theoretical physics, Jung and many others, we are beginning to see the reunion of the two taking place on a new level.

We do not reject Shakespeare because of comic books, though both share the same words and even some of the archetypal characters. Unlike many other mantic or psychic devices, such as tea leaves, crystal balls, etc., astrology is soundly based on the visible planets orbiting a visible Sun whose positions are measured mathematically through time. But I confess I get a symbolic kick out of looking in an almanac and seeing the Sun’s glyph depicted as a circle with a dot in the middle and finding the same glyph for gold in metallurgy! The same symbolic implication is the wick in a candle and the individual Self that Jung describes as the center of our own unconscious psyche’s mandala. And each Self holds the Same (!) Flame of Spirit’s Life, Light, and Love that I call our Divine Guest to avoid the differing names given it in different cultures.

I find all these matters to make sense, to be symbolically obvious. God geometrizes indeed.

Most of humanity these days is too preoccupied with enormous social and environmental problems to remember and appreciate that our solar system is still running on time. The Sun appears to rise daily, the Moon orbits the Earth every month, and the seasons come and go every year. The Point of the Vernal Equinox precesses (not processes) through the 12 visible sidereal constellations at the rate of 1 degree every 72 years. This message of cosmic order should be a source of comfort. (The word kosmos comes from the Greek and actually means ‘beauty,’ as in cosmetics.)

As I am writing this in December, the whole idiotic argument about whether schools, for constitutional reasons, should abstain from religious or even secular displays and music celebrating the season! What most people don’t realize is that the entire basis for celebration is astronomical – the Winter Solstice – when the Sun appears to suffer the longest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and yet begins to return the Light anew. Hence all the Light symbolism! December 21 marks the entry of the Sun into the sign of Capricorn, ruled by Saturn. Pagans for millennia have naturally welcomed this event, and the Romans literally called it Saturnalia and whooped it up, big time. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, it was easiest to arbitrarily supplant this with Christmas, which symbolically equates the birth of Jesus Christ as the coming of the “Light of the World.” The actual date, even year, of his birth still is a mystery. One thing only is certain – the astronomical event of the Winter Solstice, and the rejoicing of all of us that the days will be getting longer and spring will come again.

When my children went to school, they sang all the carols, Christian, Jewish, and secular, and celebrated Santa Claus, who as the disguised archetypal Jupiter, the beneficent opposite to Saturn, ho-ho’s his way, bestowing gifts and good cheer. If you don’t believe me, look at the actual planetary glyphs or symbols. They are the same, only reversed! They balance each other’s processes of contraction/expansion.

Saturn, who is depicted as an old man with a long white beard, rules the material world and matter. Symbolically, it takes nine months for a new life (Aries) to manifest in a body. Capricorn starts the tenth sign. Saturn is also the Grim Reaper or death, proving our body is temporary, and, wouldn’t you know, Saturn’s Greek name is Kronos, which rules chronological Time! Saturn’s process is contraction.
Jupiter, rules Sagittarius, and the processes of expansion, fecundity, religion, optimism, and joy. These archetypes manifest themselves in literature in characters such as Scrooge and Falstaff, and, by now you should know which is which!

The Chinese advised the artist: When you think of expansion, use contraction and your work will have good form. When you think of contraction, use expansion and your work will have the spirit of effortless ease.

To close, a friend of mine decried the loss of these archetypes in our daily lives, and I had to laugh – each day of the week is named for a planet with a god’s name:

Sun-day, Fr. dimanche, Lord’s Day;
Mon-day, Moon’s day, It. lune-di;
Tues-day, Norse for Mars or Fr. mar-di;
Wednes-day, Norse, Wotan’s Day or Mercury, mercredi, Fr. (the German Mittwoch or midweek, is Mercury’s function as both/and);
Thurs-day, Norse for Thor or Jupiter, as in It. giovedi, Jove’s day;
Fri-day, Norse goddess Freya, or Venus, as in Fr. vendredi;
and finally Satur-day!

Writing this on Mercury’s Day. I could mention that the ancients also had planetary hours, starting with the Sun’s rise. Years ago I made myself, for fun, a bracelet with colored beads: gold, silver, red, white, blue, green, black, so I could watch the rotation. I know, I was eccentric, but that is Uranian, the higher octave of Mercury, and I have Uranus rising in Pisces in my First House and Aquarius on my Ascendant. Uranus, now rules Aquarius, and Aquarius rules astrology. Figures! Now I have hunger rising and will stop for lunch!

Lovingly,
ao

Toys, Games – Chaos, Order, and Motion: Sophia’s Devices IV – CREDO XCIV

2009-11-25T09:47:00.000-08:00

“The unexamined life is not worth living” could have been one of Jung’s mantras, and I learned early from him to ask the simple question “why?” or “how come” and then look for a symbolic answer. And this is fun! What demonstrates chaos and order at the same time? How about a kaleidoscope? The Greek word translates into “a seeing device of beautiful image.” It is a toy and I hope you can find one. It is a colorful cardboard tube containing two vertical mirrors set at an angle. At the bottom is a cluster of small transparent tiny shapes of multi-colored glass or plastic held in a translucent bottom that can be shaken around. At the top is a peephole. When you look through the hole the bits and pieces form gorgeous mandalas of geometric shapes which change as you rotate the tube. Were you only to see the one end of random bits, you have chaos but reversed is breathtaking beautiful order in motion. The one I have is cheap, but I have seen more expensive ones made with real glass. I keep one in my office to prove a point now and then.

Another example that comes to mind is knitting, especially with different colored wools to make a patterned sweater. As you knit the right side it forms beautiful order but the inside or wrong side is a total mess of seeming chaos. When I could knit, and I loved to! before my stroke, I used to think that most of the time my self-estimation was of the chaotic mess, and I would hope that when I died, some pattern could emerge. I also remember my grandmother had a Chinese silk embroidered little hoop that was supposed to serve as a sconce for a wall light. The embroidery was the same on both sides! It was so fragile it eventually fell apart but not before delivering the message of an avatar’s example, a Buddha or a Christ, who wore a “seamless garment.

Children’s games are another source. Take Ring-around–the-Rosy (Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!). Nobody’s perfect. But from another point of view, when children hold hands in a circle, the energy is distributed and may reach a niveau of collective energy which helps the teacher. When grown-ups form a circle, I have already pointed out that each individual sees the same circle from a unique perspective, and I quoted Heraclitus saying With our eyes open we share the same world, but when we close our eyes each of us enters a separate world. Later I learned from the Stanford physics professor William Tiller, who discovered through biofeedback, that when two people hold hands the energy is squared! Then on Iona with a group of seventy two participants, I shared this, and realized we had solved the insoluble riddle that one cannot square a circle!! I probably am repeating this anecdote but in this context it shares an insight on Ring-around-the-Rosy, and further on the dichotomy presented by the coming 2000+ years of the Age of Aquarius!

Aquarius rules the “Common Man” and the global collective – we see this development happening all around us – the opposite constellation is Leo, which rules royalty and the imperial Self of the individual. In North Korea, when you see squadrons of men marching as one, that is Aquarian, and individual opinion seems difficult to come by. This was the ideal of Communism, but with time, the opposite, an elite (Leo), inevitably emerged. Technology is Aquarian: We get Social Security in an envelope but there is no love (Leo) in it. So a flashing light that says “Thank you! “is a poor substitute for gratitude. Now we have the Internet with Facebook, Twitter, etc., presenting the so-called civilized world with a “virtual life” rather than a natural, real one. It will take some time before the balance is restored. Obama is a Leo with Aquarius rising and undoubtedly used Aquarian know-how not only in trying to get elected but in trying to set our sights on a peaceful global community. Lincoln was also an Aquarian, I might add.

I hope I can be forgiven for repetition, but Sophia’s wisdom is at work in every candle. Each individual has the wick Jung calls the Self, but the flame on every wick is the same Flame!! So the Christmas season abounds in light symbolism. Why? What we forget is that for millennia we have welcomed the return of the Sun at the winter solstice on December 21 and that Christmas was consciously designated to replace the pagan festival of Saturnalia after Rome became officially Christian. Saturn rules Capricorn, the most material sign of the Zodiac, so the rebirth of the Sun coming at this darkest time, had symbolic meaning also for pagans throughout history. The Gospel of John speaks of Christ as that true Light which lighteth every one that cometh into the world.

Hanukah is a festival of light as are Hindu traditions involving floating lighted candles down rivers at Diwali.

In Gerald Schroeder’s masterful scientific book The Hidden Face of God, he describes the light in the subatomic world. He doesn’t have to preach. There is Light hidden in darkness, where Jung points out, One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but in making the darkness conscious.

Sophia’s Wisdom extends even further. I remember my ninth graders expressing boredom on an absolutely still day and using that to defend the use of “Speed,” a drug popular at the time. I stopped them in their tracks with the following information, which emphasizes her paradox of stillness and motion:

1. When you, like Newton, drop an apple or a stone, gravity seems to draw a straight line of descent; however, is it really?
2. Our earth is rotating at 1000 mph.
3. The earth is orbiting the sun at 60,000 mph.
4. The Sun and Solar System are moving at 481,000 mph in the Milky Way.
5. The Milky Way is said to be moving at 1,350,000 mph!!!, or so I have read.

I’d like to close with a funny dream I once had:
It is night and I am in a hotel. The manager is conducting me down a hall to show me the rooms. The odd thing about him is that his head is a small blazing sun. He proceeds to open the door to a closed room, sticks his head in which lights it up, and says “I can’t see anything dark in here!” He repeats this each time.

I woke up laughing and then realized a Solar God cannot know darkness, so the domain of Sophia’s feminine Wisdom of the Moon provides the dark in which the Sun’s light can be reflected and constantly changed during each mo(o)nth. If everything were light, we would not be conscious of it. The paradox is that sunrise is actually earthset! And vice-versa. The sun is always shining and steady, at least, in its centering of our solar system. Earth as a planet is the one constantly moving in orbit.

Today, the astronauts are able to move outside the spaceship as if nothing were happening, and yet they, too, are subject to orbiting the earth at 20,000 mph! Now if someone could explain to me who or what the Prime Mover was or how motion ever began!

As Galileo put it, E pur si muove and Heraclitus was spot-on when he remarked “Everything flows.” But, guess what, now I am going to stop!

lovingly,
ao

Sophia’s Devices -III: Myths, Legends, Fairy Tales, Parables, and Fables – CREDO XCIII

2009-11-16T09:51:00.000-08:00

Many of us may have grown up dismissing all of the above as fanciful nonsense from the past – just not true! Jung however points out that myths are “true of the psyche.” Marie-Louise von Franz, whom I met in Davos, wrote extensively on the psychological import of fairy tales. Jesus and all other avatars taught with parables, and good old Aesop did it with fables. It seems that hiding psychological wisdom in these devices endures because everybody enjoys a good story, so they last, but “having ears we do not hear” until we learn to think symbolically. That is the key!

A Hindu example is “Two birds sit in a tree. One of them eats the fruit and the other one watches.” Think about that from the psychological point of view or from the philosophical point of view, etc. It contains, for me, the whole essence of Herman Hesse’s novel Narcissus and Goldmund! Two schoolmate boys make a deal: one goes out into the world and the other enters a monastery. They agree to meet again when they are old and compare notes. . . What does the saying suggest to you? Are you an extravert or an introvert? As for myself, I have decided I’m an ‘ambivert’(!), extraverted with people, deeply introverted when alone.

The hidden wisdom in all of the devices above is revealed when we think symbolically because this demonstrates the different levels of understanding. The story of the lion that is suffering from a thorn in his paw and is rescued by a kind child was always one of my favorites. One version has him meeting the same lion in the Roman Coliseum. The man expects to be martyred but the lion recognizes him and comes over to lick him fondly. I think George Bernard Shaw wrote a play about that.

On a more controversial level is the whole story of the Exodus in the Old Testament. Some historians today maintain that this story of the Hebrews fleeing Egypt is an allegory, on the grounds that there is absolutely not a shred of historical proof of it given by Egyptian records, which are extensive for the period. Stay tuned. My own take is that this story is set during the Age of Aries the Ram, when the concept of the ego (Aries – I am!) and its opposite Libra (law) emerged. It was the great Age for Judaism. Remember Abraham substituted a ram for Isaac’s sacrifice, and altars with rams’ horns were built, and even today the shofar that is blown is made of a ram’s horn! Moses, stand-in for the ego, led the people to the Promised Land but could not enter it, a psychological truth. Up until the last eight centuries of the Age of Aries, 800 BC, only rulers or eponymous figures were given names, and the concept of universal laws rather than local ones flowered then in the Code of Hammurabi, the Roman Twelve Tablets of Law, the Ten Commandments, and the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path. Also, at the end of that Age, the huge number of named individuals indicated the final triumph of an anthropocentric era, and actual men and women entered history for good in countless fields of endeavor. Jason and the Golden Fleece (ram!) seems another reference to Aries the Ram, and Greek coins of the time have Athena with ram’s horns on them. (For lots more, read my book The Heavens Declare: On the Evolution of Consciousness through the Astrological Ages.) We owe the actual discovery of the Precession of the Equinoxes, that Platonic Year of 26,000+ years, to the astronomer Hipparchus of Alexandria, an incredible feat!

Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper, and many of the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, contain much symbolic wisdom, and perhaps I might include my own efforts in my “children’s” The Beejum Book, which has also been studied by several groups of grownups for several weeks, and the chapter “Figg Newton’s Tale” has been taught at two universities, one in a class of cognitive psychology!

I find it sad that the Fundamentalists in many religions take every word literally in their sacred scriptures. This concretizing is a form of idolatry. It keeps the story at the level of kindergarten and by the time the child is in college, he or she is apt to chuck the whole idea as nonsense. And yet if you read my CREDO LX, “The Global Return of the Prodigal Son,” you can see that parable even has political applications.

I cannot stress Jung’s emphasis on thinking symbolically enough! He wrote extensively on the subject and maintained that leading the symbolic life was the key to individuation because it united any external events and objects with their inner meaning. In the end, after all, when we die, all we can take with us is the intangible import of it all. As I will be 87 tomorrow, I can honestly say this with some conviction!

I feel that the purpose of my own life has been to prove that the Sacred is also to be found in the commonplace and that is the easiest place for us to start finding it. Love can be found and expressed in kindness, as well as passion. If you think about it, kindness has no secret agenda. It’s such a simple thing, and I learned this from a fairy tale and as an old lady from a six-year-old little boy, who got off the school bus with a bunch of wild flowers for his mother meeting him. When he saw me, he rushed to the edge of the road and picked some buttercups so I, too, would be happy. I am still blessed, not by the actual buttercups, but by the memory of his kindness. My life has been punctuated with such examples, as well as hideous examples of the opposite.

As a former teacher of children, I cannot resist giving the reader an assignment! What story, parable, or fable was meaningful to you as a child and has guided you unconsciously ever since? If you can remember it, you have been touched by Sophia whose disguise is often the Fairy Godmother, that archetypal aspect of feminine wisdom that mediates between the visible and invisible worlds, always with our spiritual benefit in mind.

This is the first of Sophia’s levels and leads us to understanding that the “Vast Certainty” of Spirit operates on ascending stages of discovery and is constantly challenged by the destructive aspects of dia-bolos, hateful ignorance, the antonym of symbolos. The thing to remember is that there has to be first a yes! for a no to deny it!

The most serious level of Sophia’s devices has to be legends. The difference between a myth and a legend is that myths tend to involve supranormal beings and deities, whereas legends involve human beings. It seems every unique culture has one and they are of heavy duty import. The Hindu Mahabharata, The Teutonic Walkyrie Cycle, the Norse Sagas, the Irish Leobhar Gabala Eirann, and the Christian Legend of the Holy Grail, to name only a few. Each, in its way, is filled with esoteric levels of interpretation and reveals a different facet of humanity.

lovingly,
ao

Sophia’s Devices II: Alchemical Processes! – CREDO XCII

2009-10-30T10:03:00.000-07:00

Don’t be alarmed. Just realize that you’ve been using them all along, which I will explain later on. Alchemy is the name given many, many centuries ago to the discovery of those archetypal processes that are basic to our existence and operate on every level. The popular image is that of a medieval man attempting to turn lead into gold. By now, dear readers, you will remember how often I write of them and the importance of viewing them symbolically. Astrologically, Saturn rules lead and – you guessed it! – the Sun rules gold, which never tarnishes.

Jung studied the matter assiduously and wrote copiously on the subject because he saw the psychological symbolism of the individual’s vicissitudes of experience (Saturn) as the struggle for spiritual growth or individuation. He found that his patients often dreamt alchemical images, which in turn, mirrored the problems and solutions necessary for growth. Solutio is one of the alchemical terms. Shakespeare and Goethe, both literary giants, were familiar with the “science” and the late great Jungian analyst Edward F. Edinger wrote a whole treatise on Faust and also on Paracelsus. Jung was pooh-poohed for his interest, but has hopefully been validated more recently.

My purpose today, in connection to Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom, is to point out that if you have ever been cooking in a kitchen, you have been practicing alchemy. All that is necessary is to attach the Latin terminology to a few of the processes. The gold in this case must surely be the secret ingredient: Love! Also the nourishing of life.

One of my very earliest memories of my mother was in the kitchen when I was three. It must have been the cook’s night off. (I never saw my mother in a kitchen again until twenty-four years later because when I was four we left the only home I ever knew for our traveling days, and hotels, nannies, and boarding schools, etc. for me.) Mother had cooked some soup and was eating it, and I sat across the table which, in my memory was as wide as a billiard table! I wanted a taste, so she filled a spoon, blew on it, and reached across with a smile and fed me with love. Needless to say, she never was domestic. My father ended up cooking, making a ghastly mess, and Mother cleaned up. No dishwasher! But that once is still a most meaningful event.

The alchemical term coagulatio describes what happens when you turn raw eggs into scrambled or make Jello; the liquid mixture becomes more solid, or the batter becomes a cake.

Sublimatio occurs as the hot water for tea lets off steam.

Putrefactio takes place in the rottings of the garbage pail.

Distillatio is what you are performing if you make homemade beer or if you made coffee years ago in those glass globe coffeemakers that sent the boiling water up a tube to the top one and you put the coffee in and turned the heat off. Meditation, for me, is the equivalent! You send the consciousness to a higher level, and the Powers-that-Be put a message in and you go about your day until brrrrbrrrbloop, the Thought comes down. The only problem was that I might be getting into the tub or driving in traffic at the magic moment! But I find that if I have a question, it rarely gets answered on the spot. Alas, this system has cost me many insights. Like dreams that vanish on awakening.

Separatio – just peel and core an apple, or debone a fish.

Solutio – dissolve sugar in your coffee or honey in your tea.

The point I am trying to make, is that these basic archetypal processes are hidden in everything occurring on our planet – they are the varying ways energy expresses itself and go by an infinite number of names. The key to perceiving them, as Jung points out, is to be able to think symbolically. Can you remember those IQ tests that list church, house, womb, knife and ask, which one does not belong? You pick knife. Why? Because all the other three contain. The astrological shortcut is the sign of Cancer, ruled by the Moon as Mother, the archetypal container. This understanding can extend all the way to Mother Earth and Mother Nature. In prehistoric archeology, and the Age of Cancer, figures of the Mother Goddess had animals, birds, and stick figures carved into them. Psychologically, the Good Mother/Bad Mother complex has connections to the placement and aspects of the Moon in a man’s or a woman’s chart. There is a difference.

In alchemy the container is the vessel; in the Taoist symbol of the yin/yang, it is the circumference that holds the opposites of light/dark, each holding a tiny circle of dark/light. The entire manifest world belongs to Hagia Sophia, and the struggle of opposites is played out in history and the daily news. Humanity today is out of balance with nature because of our ignorance. Primitive man saw the opposites of womb/tomb and covered the dead with red powder to illustrate the blood of rebirth. Capricorn, ruled by Saturn, is the opposite sign to the Moon-ruled Cancer and rules, among other things, what the Dutch call stoffeljik overschot, stuff left over or mortal remains! In other words, we come into the world naked and live a manifest life but leave everything behind. I believe I have already quoted the Tibetan lama who said we make a huge mistake in making verbal opposites of Life/Death. It should be Birth/Death and both are part of that Greater Life.

It should be noted that the Moon transits everybody’s chart once a mo(o)nth and Saturn transits it every 28/29 years. I think it was Lincoln who said, “The years know much that the days don’t know.” So there is a “menu” to life. The first 28-year stage consists in dealing with what psychological gifts/lacks (karma?) we have; the second, in acquiring new experience and dealing with what we missed in the first stage; the third, combining the results of the first two, and offering that consciousness to the world. As an apple tree blossoms, grows a long summer of little green apples, and drops the fruit and seed for future generations. So by 60, ideally, you should be sharing. Personally, I think I’m making cider by now! Only a few more days and I’ll be 87! The cackling lessons are almost done! I graduate on November 13. Needless to say, this is the ideal plan for psychological evolution, but it is very obvious that the exceptions far outnumber the rule! No two people are alike. All we have in common is time, a mystery itself.

The phone just rang. One of my granddaughters’ water just broke and the world awaits a new incarnation as I write. Awesome! And one of these days, someone is likely to tell you I have departed. Just remember I refuse “to die.” I am going to celebrate my Aberduffy Day. (Later – Arabella just arrived in Maine!)

lovingly,
ao

Knowledge, Understanding, and Wisdom – CREDO XCI

2009-10-20T08:41:00.000-07:00

Let me start with Wisdom, because for some reason people often think I am “wise.” This may be because in less than a month I will be 87, which is old and ready for cackling lessons(!) or because I am still semiliterate, but I wish to straighten out the matter for good. I am wise in one respect only: I know for sure how much I don’t know!! So, there, just remember that.

In Beejumstan, the land of my The Beejum Book, there is a character called Virgo Prunefiddle, a lady elk. She carries a large leather bag full of “facts”! Period. Ten thousand Lithuanians wear bed socks. A horse has no toes, etc. The problem is that for a fact to be meaningful, it has to relate to something further, or So What?

There is a gap between knowledge and understanding. Many think reading some texts equips you to be a teacher or a therapist, but book learning needs life experience to yield understanding. “Emotional Intelligence” as Daniel Goleman puts it. If you think about it, there is a huge imbalance between knowledge and understanding, and it is getting worse every day as technology makes leaps and bounds, and meaning, in the deeper sense, is lost. A dangerous example is our overuse of plastic which doesn’t deteriorate or the worst – the use of drones in warfare to kill human lives!

A sacrament could be described as an outer and visible sign with an inner and spiritual meaning. Science alone covers three levels of knowledge and by its own definition stops, but the fourth remains unspoken. This is meaning which leads both to potential understanding and greater wisdom.
Science 1) Observes and studies. 2) Experiments and proves. 3) Draws conclusions and makes assumptions.

Spirit 1) Intuits symbolic meaning. 2) Our Divine Guest, (Jung’s Self) teaches us from within, i.e., Sophia’s process of Wisdom. (The word science comes from the Latin scire, to know.)

Nothing is hidden but we are blind, and “having eyes we do not see!” which is what I learned from that dream in which Jung shouted at me: “Consider the obvious! I did!” When I checked the root of obvious, I found it comes from Latin ob via, on the road, which is where Petrus Bonus, the alchemist, says the Philosopher’s Stone is said to lie, “and wagon wheels roll over it!” I have written this before, but not in connection with science. Let me bring this down to a kindergarten level. Suppose:

1. We wind up a long length of string into a ball.
2. Hanging on to the string, we let the ball drop.
3. The drop is far quicker than the winding up.
------------------------------------------------------------
Meaning? An analogy that applies to making mistakes?

Years ago, I was chapel lady for a group of Sunday school kids, K–3rd Grade. The reading included the mysterious saying of Jesus: “To him that hath shall be given but to him that hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away from him.” There was dead silence. Then a little boy held up his hand. “If he had stuff in a bowl and turned it upside down, what he had would fall out.” Brilliant! Perhaps the bowl is symbolic of our need to be receptive? The bowl in every kitchen can now instruct you further! Yang/yin?

This is my source of delight lately. I look at things and ask, What do you do? Then the archetypal process takes over and you have released the noun to become a verb.
Agrippa, the alchemist, wrote Virtutes divinae in res diffusae. Divine powers are hidden in things. I used to write that quotation on the top of every blackboard at every lecture. But recently in my old age, I see the entire manifest world concealing this wisdom everywhere I look! I am beginning to see! Shakespeare expresses it best in As You Like It:

Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
I would not change it.

This all started for me in giving names to things (see Credo 82). This may seem silly to some of you, and yet the word silly comes from the German selig, which means holy, blessed. As it is, many give names to their homes, cars, boats, so why not more intimate things? The whole point is that it helps us to learn wisdom from wrapping paper, window panes, pencils, the spiral of water going down an emptying bathtub – that one yields the mathematics of the Spiral Nebula, the nautilus shell, the Golden Rectangle, and the shape of the Parthenon! Phew! God does indeed geometrize!

This is a Geometry of Being, and these archetypal processes can be found anywhere you look if you know the secret. It helps to know astrological processes because they make the linking go quicker. Remember my definition: Astrology is a symbolic language of archetypal processes! The zipper demonstrates this perfectly. Sym-bolos means putting two and two together: going up the zipper unites the manifest with its meaning, and the wee tab is Jung’s Transcendent Function! Going down, it becomes dia-bolos! which separates the two through doubt and cynicism, ridicule, and we are left with a dead world of matter only. Think this through. But even the word matter comes from mater, mother (Goddess!) Sophia is giggling and so am I!

I hope you see how etymology, the meaning of words, is another of Sophia’s clues. My friend Jungian analyst Russ Lockhart and I both came up with the phrase “Words are eggs,” because they hatch out hidden meanings. Another “obvious”!

lovingly,
ao

Gimme! Thanks! Oops! Wow! IV. Wow! – CREDO XC

2009-10-05T07:40:00.000-07:00

To complete Rabbi Marc Gellman’s brilliant description of the four types of prayer, Wow! implies genuine appreciation and praise. Today we would say we are “blown away” to such a degree that only spontaneous prayer can thank God (and the Holy Wisdom of Hagia Sophia especially) for manifesting the matter (mater!). Certainly all the religions, every one, are filled with poetic psalms, hymns of joy and gratitude, leading me to link Wow! with our appreciation of beauty, which extends the matter perhaps beyond the purview of religion per se to the vast world of human creativity – to music, to dance, poetry, to painting, sculpture, and sacred architecture! Also, to the world of seasonal festivals, common to humanity everywhere. These are all tangible or visual expressions of praise and things we celebrate year in year out. The shadow here, of course, is that today so much of it is lost in commercialism, yet, as many of these feast days are set by our planet’s rotation around the Sun, in the ultimate sense, the grandeur is there and our physical bodies are impacted. The heavens, indeed, do declare!

We have only to think of Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid of Egypt, or the Gothic cathedrals of Europe; or Bach, Handel’s Messiah, Shakespeare, Goethe, Michelangelo, to name the more obvious ones, but now we know of Macchu Picchu, the great temples of Asia, and the Vedas, The Bhagavad Gita or our own Emerson, Thoreau, Steinbeck, and Jung himself. Why not the Beatles! The list is endless, but the underlying idea is that Wow! is a human expression of consciousness, a reaction to amazement and awe, whether it be seeing a man walking on the moon or seeing a newborn baby boy’s wee eyelashes or the expression of a child seeing its first tree on Christmas morning!

For me (almost 87!), the world of I-pods and Blackberries, etc., is a Wow!-a-day but this differs from a night full of stars, the sight of perfect symmetry in a flashing snowflake, the miraculous patterning of a goldfinch’s feather, the gorgeous palette of autumnal colors in the trees at the moment. To me, these are silent gifts of prayer that nature gives every moment of every day. The ocean with its tides of breathing! Lovers discovering love!
I am at a loss for words, but suggest at the end of reading this CREDO you take a deep breath and close your eyes, and make a start on what creative example of the universe you might have overlooked. Making these Wows! conscious is itself a prayer. Here is a sample from just the Wow! of memory itself:

A pleasant English summer a life ago

A pleasant English summer a life ago –
a weaving of ovals green
above the riverflow
a dappling of those chips of blue
and gold below
all from a summerswifted evening glow –
a bending of the fluted waving grasses
where the carapaced slow beetle walks
lurching its scarabed angles
through the stalks

wrens in the dusty hedgerows
wagtails, linnets, buntings
darting soundlessly about a
somnolence of sheep
marking the leys of our longing now
to sleep –
oh, what were we waiting for
those summerhays ago
lying aneath the beeches
near the river's summerglow!
The old manse, the pilgrims' eaves
and bedding by the silvers of the starcut leaves
still life, life still
our faces framed by hands and leaning each to each
hushes, whispers, hushes on our tongues
as we let each other in
reaching for – so simply, softly, softly –
the sweetness of each other's skin

what were our pleasures then
drowsing the lovelit night
waking to the scattered pealing
of a morning's feathered light!

marigolds and hollyhocks and
dew-drenched bending roses
flax, weld and foxglove
and the river moving time along
reflecting and collecting
all that lovely, lovely summersong

thinking now in winter
of our older saddened eyes
parted and yet joined
by grey and sodden city skies
I pluck insistence so
from that which summering in dreams
while ever singing deeper, deems
to bear us forth where heaven seems
still flashing in the endless rippling riverflow:
all love that time would let us know
that pleasant English summer, only a life ago!

lovingly,
ao

Gimme! Thanks! Oops! Wow! III. Oops! – CREDO LXXXIX

2009-10-02T09:28:00.000-07:00

Continuing this commentary on the four types of prayer, defined so brilliantly by Rabbi Marc Gellman, maybe a word should be added about the blessed role of humor in the great religions, because it is an important factor and, in my opinion, a desperately needed one. Wisdom and joy are placed together in the Old Testament, and there is a glorious tradition in the story of the Baal Shem Tov, who woke up one morning and decided to dance and rejoice and celebrate God in every way possible rather than pour over books and debate all the time. Just one story illustrates this. He entered a tavern to beg money for charity, whereupon a bunch of drunken Cossacks beat him up. He then picked himself and said, “Well, that was for me. Now what have you got for the poor?” At which, the Cossacks roared with laughter and emptied their pockets. He became the source for Hasidism.

In Islam, there is the Sufi “Idiot Sage” Mullah Nasruddin, whose teaching jokes still amuse us after one thousand years and are to be repeated in new versions to this day. He was looking outside his house desperately for something. “What are you looking for?” “My key.” “Where did you lose it?” “In my house.” “Then why are you looking out here?” "Because there’s more light out here!”

I have met many Buddhist lamas in my life, but have yet to meet one who is not cheerful. There are smiling Buddhas. When we met His Holiness the Dalai Lama in India, my husband had a bloody scar on his forehead. “What happened to you?” asked the Dalai Lama. Walter told him that because he was tall, he had walked into a shop awning. “Well,” smiled His Holiness, shaking his hand, “that will give you a good reason for remembering Dharamsala!”

Christianity has had the worst time of it. A family story tells of a Puritan forebear who reprimanded his little boy for saying his soup tasted delicious by pouring cold water into it. It was the Sabbath. But C. S. Lewis lightened us a bit, and today, bringing laughter and delight, we have the great and fun-loving spiritual works of British writer Timothy Freke, now a dear friend of mine. As you can see, especially today with one calamity after another, we need to remember that humankind is the one species that can laugh. It is a sacred gift. Even as the Titanic was sinking, someone quipped, “Anybody want to buy a gold watch?” It takes guts to find “laughter in the void.”

So now to the matter of Oops! which translates to the solemnities of penitentia, or asking forgiveness for our manifold sins. For this we have Ramadan, Lent, Yom Kippur, and many, many of our daily prayers that beg for forgiveness. The Episcopal “General Confession” still gets me in the middle of the night – at almost 87, I am no longer able to sin big time (I sin on the installment plan!), but the one that gets me is “Forgive me for those things I ought to have done and have not done!” That is an abyss!

It seems to me that much of what we do starts with ignorance, and I learned this from a tree: A mistake is a loop in consciousness made to expose a greater surface to experience! A tree intends to grow vertically, but branches out more or less horizontally with twigs bearing leaves exposed to the sun. And each new leaf is an aha! of consciousness, and thus it (and we) grow! Neat!

Secondly, there is a mysterious statement in the New Testament that Christ wears a seamless garment. To me this suggests a whole aura, which has led me to think that if we enter this world with an aura with holes in it (metaphorically speaking) they might represent our past failings and so we try one by one to fill them up. Well, I first became conscious of one and felt very pleased with myself. Oops! I discovered that wasn’t enough. I had to actively practice and apply what I had discovered in order to truly mend that hole.

There are both physical and mythological allusions to this. Each of us has an optic “blind spot.” That’s a fact. And there is the story of Achilles’ heel – his goddess mother held him by the heel and dipped him in the River Styx to make him invulnerable. Oops! Where she held him left him vulnerable. The Teutonic hero Siegfried bathed in dragon’s blood to become invulnerable but a leaf fell on his back, witnessed by someone, and so, Oops! a spear conveniently found that spot. Another Norse, and lovable one, was Baldur, who was protected by all that grows, except the mistletoe, which didn’t count. He was killed by an arrow tipped by mistletoe. Oops! And Chiron, the patron of all “wounded healers”! His story gives us the clue to our redemption, because unless you have experienced the mistake you cannot really help another person. You cannot become a good therapist just by reading a text!! Your personal journey of suffering only gives you that gift. It takes one to know one! This is what “Bill” learned from Jung and applied to Alcoholics Anonymous, and this is only one example. “Every saint was once a sinner” about covers it.

As I see it from an astrological point of view, our lives unfold in stages of 28/29 years, the times it takes Saturn to transit all around our charts. Supposing your karma or lesson (symbolically speaking) involves “eggs.” In Stage I, you have little choice of parents, neighbors, etc. So you have to eat your eggs hard-boiled. If you don’t succeed, then in Stage 2, as you move out into new experiences, the eggs come at you scrambled but the motif is still eggs! By the age of 56, hopefully you have recognized them and are able even to enjoy poached eggs and serve eggs up in cookies and cakes to delight others, or else you may end up in Stage 3 with a reputation as a “bad egg”! Obviously, the trick is not to repeat the same mistake over and over. Unravel the meaning of what those “eggs” represent. Fill one of those holes in your aura and move on to the next one.

Finally, a word I have not mentioned, and that is the damage done to kids with the words sin and guilt! I watch with admiration as some wise parents, applying tough love, instead of saying “Bad girl or boy!” simply say, “That’s a no!” or instead of telling them they won’t get what they want, simply say, “It’s not going to happen.” I myself watched a young mother whose child crashed his tricycle into a tree stopping and diverting the child’s tears by saying, “Oh, the poor tree!” The child realized it wasn’t the tree’s fault and tried to comfort it. These are simple steps to start the very young off without the onus of guilt and a lifetime to come of unconscious shame, anger, hatred, and blame. It’s worth a try.

The secret of redemption is indeed “Oops! My blame” Almost two thousand years later, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us” is still hard for many of us, but it remains the only way to go. Do no harm.

lovingly,
ao

Gimme! Thanks! Oops! Wow! II. Thanks! – CREDO LXXXVIII

2009-10-02T09:07:00.000-07:00

Continuing with Rabbi Gellman’s pithy contractions of the four kinds of prayer, I would first like to salute anyone of any faith who combines religion and wisdom with joy and humor.! He is a true son of Hagia Sophia, who is described in Proverbs as co-creator with God, full of delight and wanting to be friendly with humankind. Also Gellman is a member of the “God Squad” with the Roman Catholic Monsignor Tom Hartman, which implies interfaith. I say a hearty Mazel tov! to them both. Please, dear readers, check him out!

Sad to say, I think thanksgiving is the least-practiced prayer. Our ego is so occupied with worrying and wanting more, and yet it is only by saying grace (gratias) that we can receive it and consciously acknowledge how blessed we are! The problem arises with self-pity and envy. This comes through comparing ourselves with others negatively instead of positively. As many of us, particularly in these hard times, are consumed with economic or health-related problems, we look to the richer, younger, healthier ones and fail to allow the misery of a greater proportion of the world’s population to intrude on our own predicaments. As the news of this increasing global misery is displayed constantly, we tend to insulate ourselves. So the poster child of this dilemma is Madoff, perhaps, who did this all to himself! “What profiteth it a man if he gains the world and loses his soul thereby?”

After many years of pondering, I have come to realize that the only thing we collectively as human beings really have – and take for granted! – is our level of consciousness. Without it, we would be unable to be aware of anything, let alone the Great ONE or our Creator! So essentially we need to give thanks for that one basic necessity.

Without it, we might never know the unending mystery of Love!

Without it we might not be aware of the gift of Life itself.!

Without it we would not know Light from dark, or the abundant beauty of nature or the joys and privileges of our senses.

Without it we would never know the freedom to create art, literature, music, architecture, the gifts of kindness, comfort, and healing!

That we misuse it is, of course, the matter of our free will.

I am tempted to repeat Jung’s story of being in the jungle in Africa, sitting by himself and thinking he might be the first man to be sitting in that very spot watching the animals and feeling the hush. He asked himself what was he contributing? And it came to him that he was making it conscious! He became conscious of being conscious!! Now, if you haven’t already tried this – stop reading and do it!

So about twenty years ago, I had my own powerful revelation which I related in my CREDO XIII, "God Can’t Eat a Poached Egg" (q.v.).

The following quote comes from a small book called In Abraham’s Bosom by my grandfather Basil King. The words are spoken from “the other side” to the main character, a crusty agnostic, as he lies unconscious.
I found the book by chance and opened it to this, but I am taking the liberty of changing his word God to Spirit. I think Grandpa is giving me permission!

Go back to what we said as to sight being not the action of a temporary optic nerve. We see Spirit by what we understand of It by Its attributes; and we measure Its attributes by their beauty and goodness and practicality. Wherever there has been a blessing to enjoy, you’ve seen Spirit. Whenever love has cheered you or kindness helped you, you’ve seen Spirit. In sunrise and sunset and moonlight and starlight, and trees and fields and harvest and flowers and ice and snow and air, and health and beauty and generosity and friendship, and all that gives to existence, you’ve seen Spirit. It hasn’t been invisible. There is not one world in which It is not. There is not a life with Spirit and another life away from It. There is only one world and Spirit fills it; there is only one life, to which Spirit is All-in-All.

More blessed are they who learn to live in Spirit as in the One Vast Certainty – which created everyone, and supplies everyone and upholds everyone and loves everyone; and does it all with unlimited intelligence and might.

So, as the center of consciousness, according to Jung, is our ego, it is up to each of us to offer thanks and offer it to our Self, which like the individual wick in every candle holds the SAME FLAME of that Vast Certainty!

lovingly,
ao

Gimme! Thanks! Oops! Wow! I. Gimme! – CREDO LXXXVII

2009-09-28T06:32:00.000-07:00

This brilliant reduction of the four kinds of prayer, we owe to Rabbi Marc Gellman of Temple Beth Torah on Long Island, NY, as reported in an article on prayer by Zev Chafets in the spectacular Jung edition of the New York Times Magazine (Sep 20, 2009) celebrating the publication of Jung’s Red Book. The formulation is so succinct that I thought it should reach a greater audience. Volumes of theology have been written on prayer in all faiths, but, when it comes right down to it, these four one-syllable words cover the matter perfectly and suggest that hopefully our Creator might have a sense of humor, as well as compassion. It surely is an example of “laughter in the void” – after all, laughter is restricted to humankind, as far as we know and the Wisdom of Hagia Sophia is full of delight.

Gimme! is probably the hands-down winner of the four and one of the most ancient. The earliest Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics reveal that prayers of petition were common to all. Farmers prayed to the gods for rain, no locusts, and good harvests back then; lovers for loved ones; mothers for their babies. This reminds me of an incredible conscious experience of the collective unconscious that I once had. It was during the Vietnam War. My son, Timothy, who could have been safe from the draft as a student at Stanford University, was a pacifist who went to extraordinary legal efforts to enlist in the army as a Conscientious Objector and finally succeeded in being sent to Vietnam “in order to help rather than harm.” He came home on leave before his departure, and the final parting took place on the doorstep of our small development house. There he stood in his uniform saying goodbye, and I, his mother, knowing he would be unarmed, put my arms around him to hug him. As I did so, an extraordinary experience occurred: I was overwhelmed in that instant by knowing I was one with every mother throughout history – past, present, and future – sharing an archetypal experience known only to mothers sending a child of their womb and heart into danger unknown! Believe me, it left me shaken. We were to be blessed in that he served as a medic, volunteered in his free time in a Vietnamese hospital, and gravitated to such an interest in medicine that when he finally returned to Stanford, he completed his philosophy major and moved on to the lengthy procedures of medical school. Today he is a distinguished psychiatrist, working with veterans of subsequent wars and using his idealism in a bold new educational plan for the medical field.

But I digress! If we pray at all, chances are we are praying for something or someone. If you could visualize the collective “gimme prayers” of the world, they would form a global aura for sure. Perhaps the greatest one of all is - for Peace! Give just a moment to think about your personal history of gimme! prayers from childhood up … How were they answered, how have you altered their content?

In my The Beejum Book is a chapter titled “The Gimme Attack.” Teak , aka ao, was six and in Athens and wanted something so badly, she ruined peace altogether. My mother, bless her, handled it so well that eighty years later I remember the lesson!

Today, I would add that the function of the ego is to want and want. As we grow older and wiser, the nature of our needs becomes, hopefully, nobler. The Christian Lord’s Prayer covers all four of Rabbi Gellman’s definitions, and likewise the Buddhist prayer for the Noble Eight-Fold Path (in Credo LXXXVI). Years ago, I met a wonderful anti-guru Guru, Dadaji. I still remember his pronouncement: “There is only one true Guru! It is the Self [Divine Guest]! At that level you know everything, only you don’t know that! So we live in time and space and remember as we grow.” (Which is what Jung says.) And I had an attack of insight on the spot: Is that why rain comes down in drops and not in one great SPLAT? At that Dadaji cracked up and gave me a hug. “Eternity hides in the fact that it is always NOW, but time comes in minutes, hours and days, and years. The mind can stretch them out or encapsulate them in a memory of a time frame. It is a paradox.” This I remember figuring out in Rome when I was seven, but I missed the Now part!

A lifetime later, I wrote a poem called “Paradox”:

Paradox

How wealthy I am
in such a lack

how rich
in the specific of poverty

I have everything this day
but you to share it with

and so it seems I have nothing –
yet, knowing such ever-brimming loss
places me beyond my peers of need,
somehow
it is like having all of never
into which to set a now.

lovingly,
ao

Gadzook and the Shadow – CREDO LXXXVI

2009-09-21T09:14:00.000-07:00

In a corner, high on a bookshelf is a large stuffed toy of a wizard elf with a bulbous nose, a white beard, a peaked hat with stars on it, and a blue jacket with facing silver moons. I named him Gadzook. He was the gift of a grateful client, the first one I shared the great aha! that came to me about one way of approaching one’s Shadow. And I owe it all, of course, to Jung but also to the archetypes of astrology.

Jung defines the Shadow in this manner:
Everyone carries a Shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.... If it is repressed and isolated from consciousness it is liable to burst forth suddenly.... At all accounts it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions. (CW 11, para.131)

This described my dilemma perfectly. For decades, so often when I would want to do something, an inner voice would come up and tell me why I couldn’t. Over and over. In a granted moment of grace in active imagination, it was as if all my most negative opinions of my own character added to the shame of my physical shortcomings were formed into a horrid homunculus of a little dwarf and cast down into a dark cellar of denial! Aaaargh!

So one day, when I hear this voice telling me why I can’t, I rebel and shout I know why I can’t, how about telling me how I can!! Well, a miracle occurs, a hatch opens and up comes this pale old creature and remarks, “Well I’ve waited fifty years for this! Now, come along, let’s get to work and let me help.”

From the astrological point of view, I suddenly realized that Saturn rules the Shadow and that I should have remembered that every member of our solar system has a positive as well as a negative archetype. In the case of Saturn, the negative always comes first: the Cruel Judge! I even would tell my suffering clients when they would be putting themselves down, to quote the blacks in the play Green Pasture, who cry out, “Here comes de jedge!” But Saturn also has a positive archetype – The Wise Old Man! Aha!

So by combining these two, I learned that the secret lies in befriending one’s Shadow, though only when it is a matter of genuinely good intentions. As Edward C. Whitmont, the late and my beloved analyst, confided, “Whenever I learn something, out of nowhere a patient appears who needs to know that very thing!” Sure enough, a man appeared with whom I could share this latest attack of insight, and, out of gratitude, he brought me the gift of Gadzook! Now the friendly creature has presided over every session I have had since, and I think the good humor he engenders may help my clients relax and realize that to be introduced to the way they are likely to process experience might well induce a chuckle of conscious recognition.

Those of you familiar with dealing with the Shadow will recognize that this was only an unconscious aspect of it, namely my negative animus, and would be quick to warn the practice of inviting too much, too quickly. It is far wiser to contemplate the Seven Deadly Sins one at a time, and examine one’s conscience. These were defined in the fourth century by one Evagrius of Ponticus, sometimes considered a forerunner of psychology.

• Gula – gluttony of any kind
• Fornicatio – lust of any kind
• Avaritia – greed of any kind
• Tristitia – despair
• Ira – anger
• Acedia – apathy, sloth
• Vanagloria – pride (the worst of all!)

I, personally, prefer Buddha’s Noble Eight-Fold Path, which I try to recite nightly before sleep. I find it so much more positive than any commandments. I have shared it in a previous CREDO but it bears repeating!

THE NOBLE EIGHT-FOLD PATH

The Four Noble Truths

There is suffering in this world:
All suffering comes from attachment and desire.
There is a way beyond suffering.
The way is the Noble Eight-fold Path:

RIGHT VIEWS
Free from superstition and delusion

RIGHT ASPIRATIONS
High and worthy of the intelligent; worthy of mankind

RIGHT SPEECH
Kindly, open, and truthful

RIGHT CONDUCT
Peaceful, honest, and pure

RIGHT LIVELIHOOD
Bringing hurt or danger to no living being

RIGHT EFFORT
In self-training and self-control

RIGHT MINDFULNESS
The active, watchful mind

RIGHT RAPTURE
In deep meditation on the realities of life

lovingly,
ao

Thomas Berry and Gerald L. Schroeder – CREDO LXXXV

2009-09-21T08:59:00.000-07:00

Thomas Berry was more than a man; he was an oak tree in motion. He was many things: a Passionist priest, a scholar, a Fordham professor, a copious and passionate writer, an international force, years before others of us, to warn the world of the potential loss to humanity of our home here on Earth through ignorance of the preciousness of our planet and the sacredness of nature! That is a run-on sentence, I know, but Tom was a run-on man.

I met him once at his home on the Hudson River overlooking the Palisades, and, yes, he pointed out his favorite tree, a huge oak. We had a long conversation; I could never forget him. He followed up our meeting by sending me for several years his bound mimeographed writings in pale blue covers. Each time I received one, his dignified face, so like a stone cliff, would come to mind. For me he was Saturn exalted.

The very night I met him, I had an extraordinary dream:

Tom takes me into a book-lined chamber and explains to me that in it are all the sacred writings ever written all over the world. Then he asks, “Would you like me to show you my God Machine?” He points to a black metal standing box about the size of a two-drawer file. The top section is open. Tom flicks a switch and reveals a little stand. “I can take any book and place it on this stand, push this button, and the book will turn to crystal and the words in it that are true will turn to gold.” So he takes several books and demonstrates this. Some have more layers of gold than others. I marvel.

Then he says with a smile, “I could put a year of your life or a month or a day on it as well, but you would have to realize that we all need the plain dark of the crystal, ruled by Saturn, the god of time. It is what holds the gold.

I woke up before the test! But as you see, I have never forgotten the dream. My conclusion is that God must have a vast library with a section of rare books, first editions, and heaps of paperbacks!! And yet each one would have unique contents and has the potential to be “an open book” or “read like a book” for the instruction of others. Some will probably be more influential than others for positive or negative reasons, which brings me back to that same old question: Do two people read the same book? See the same picture? Hear the same conversation or speech? The answer is obviously, no. Each of us processes the same experience uniquely, which in one whap describes how unity through motion becomes diversity. This is the profound underlying grandeur of cosmic creativity, so obvious (aha!) we tend to overlook it. A billion manufactured butter knives or Coke bottles might look the same; a google of molecules forming different elements may be standard matter, but the minute they are used in unfolding time they too become unique. Panta rhei – everything flows, as the pithy pre-Socratic Heraclitus pointed out millennia ago, and remember, he’s the one who remarked that with our eyes open, we share the same world, but with our eyes closed each of us enters a private world.

I can’t help wondering if Thomas Berry and Gerald Schroeder read each others’ work. Tom can no longer be asked but Gerry can.[ He says he hadn’t.] Both men approach this world of ours wanting to prove the holiness of nature. Both are profound scholars and cosmologists as well as spiritual mystics. Gerald is the author of one of the most awesome books I have read in the last forty years, The Hidden Face of God.

I discovered Gerald Schroeder through listening to a Roman Catholic priest describing the book on television. As I didn’t catch either the title or author, I queried the station which led me to Father Dubay, who enlightened me. I googled Schroeder and wrote him an e-mail, and thus discovered that he grew up in Jericho, Long Island and watched the Green Vale School bus drive past his door – the school where I taught! He graduated from M.I.T., married a Jewish girl from Connecticut, now a distinguished author herself. They moved to Jerusalem, had five children. He is now an honored scientist, renowned in the worlds of astrophysics and microbiology (which covers a lot of territory!) and is also a mystic, a kabbalist, and now an Orthodox Jew.

The reason I love and honor the book is that it is an exploration, written simply enough for a layman, of the complexity of the subatomic world in which we live. The incredible beauty he reveals proves the validity of the word kosmos, which is Greek for beauty and the root of our word cosmetics. Schroeder has no need to convince us that the extraordinary intricate interactions of the subatomic world are absolutely impossible to have come about by “chance.” He does not preach; he doesn’t have to.

I remember lying out in a field one night when I was twelve, in Teufen, Appenzell, at the Swiss boarding school I attended. With me was a classmate, Dorothy Atherton. We were discussing what we wanted to do when we grew up.

I told her I wanted to unite religion and science – ha! What I didn’t realize at the time was that we were lying under the stars! So my path was through the cosmic science of astrology as a symbolic language of archetypal processes and the chart as a guide to the unique way each individual is likely to process experience. Normally, we do that unconsciously, but the option is given us to use it as a diagnostic tool in Jungian analysis. Teaching this has been my life’s work, as well as the topic of several of my books. You can imagine my delight, when I first began the serious study of Jung, to find that he had made a serious study of it all and even consulted the charts of his patients when he was stuck!

I began my studies in 1945 with Marc Edmund Jones, so in a way I was an early pioneer in promoting the serious work of rescuing astrology from its popular reputation as superstitious twaddle for nincompoops. I wanted to become an analyst, but Dr. Edward F. Edinger (bless him!) insisted that I would be of greater service to Jung sharing the value of astrology as a diagnostic tool and a guide to individuation. This is how I eventually came to teach the subject at several C. G. Jung Institutes in this country and also with countless lectures at universities and conferences, as well as a few Grand Rounds in Psychiatry. I spoke at the International Transpersonal Conference in Bombay, but the biggest one was to twelve hundred in Davos, where I was surprised and deeply touched by Marie-Louise von Franz, who, when Walter and I were picnicking out under a fir tree, silently bent under a branch and kissed me, as she passed by!

Thus, I hope you can see why I am in awe of the far greater accomplishments of Thomas Berry and the ongoing ones of Gerald L. Schroeder! What we have in common, along with many others today, is reconciling faith and reason, the outgoing dilemma of the Piscean/Virgo opposition of the ending Age.

lovingly,
ao

The Spiritual Alchemy of Sports – CREDO LXXXIV

2009-09-04T07:45:00.000-07:00

Recently, I invited some men to comment on sports from a Jungian perspective. Only one came up with an answer that revealed the potential solution. In his e-mail he wrote “Sports is the sublimation of combat.” But, he seemed to overlook the fact that sublimation is an alchemical process. I remember reading in Volume I of Parabola (1976) an article by the now late Jungian analyst Edward F. Edinger, and I found that I still have it! In it, he wrote:

Two outstanding and inter-related instruments of civilization were created by the ancient Greeks – the sacred games and the ritual drama. It is indicative of their psychological similarity that we refer to both games and drama by the same word, play. These action-forms give human energies a second world [level] in which to function. We are apt to forget the crucial role that games and athletic contests played in civilizing the aggressive energies of early man. . . . In the beginning, the games were always dedicated to a god, indicating that the athletes’ efforts were being offered up to a transpersonal meaning.
–“The Tragic Hero”

This offered for me the solution to my puzzlement at why in archetypal astrology Sagittarius rules both religion and athletics. The icon of the fire sign Sagittarius is the centaur, which symbolizes the triplicity humankind represents: animal body, human, and the aspiring, uplifted bow and arrow aimed at the heavens. So this sign rules both religion and physical sports. The air sign Gemini, the opposite sign, in contrast, rules mental games: cards, chess, checkers, etc., but also drama, the duality of tragedy and comedy. The glyph is II(!), and the icon represents the twins Castor and Pollux.

The word play is common to all of them, and most Sagittarian games involve a solar shaped ball or puck, perhaps suggesting that the One is safely divided into uniting the Two. The Jungian coincidentia oppositorum? Heraclitus did say that “war [combat] is the great accelerator.” Alas, the negative cannonball and the bullet are the Shadow. The penis (Mars) shoots Life and the pistol (Mars) shoots Death.

So where does the alchemy come in? In the case of all these games, they must be contained (like the duality of Jungian analysis!) in the safety of a vessel where the sublimation takes place. If that glass is broken, the action falls down into everyday reality. Games erupt in riots among spectators, and, yes, mental contests can also have the same result. For this, I can give personal experience. When I was married only two weeks to my first husband in 1946, we were playing backgammon in the hushed drawing room of the Harvard Club in New York, of which my father was a member. It was occupied mostly by men reading papers and smoking pipes. Now, I had an extraordinary gift with dice and I was winning by far. When I threw doubles yet again, he suddenly took the entire board and threw it on the floor, noisily scattering all the pieces, shocking us all! Years later, I played cards with a teenager who, when losing, just threw all the cards in her hand and on the table to the floor.

In the case of the analytic vessel, we all know what happens if analyst and patient act out the intimacy often built up in safety during analysis!

I remember that when I was a child growing up in hotels my mother and grandmother never played Russian Bank, a card game, in the lounge but always upstairs where they could affectionately insult and mock one another. Eventually, I was old enough to play and during the game only was allowed to do the same! This was an unconscious application of alchemy, to be sure, but the action was limited to the safety of that vessel.

This may explain the etiquette that built up in the Middle Ages during tournaments and even tennis, where the handshake formally ended the game. (An interesting historical note: Henry VIII and Francis I of France had their first falling out as teenagers over a game of tennis.) The tradition also lives on in the formal high fives ending some sports to this day. The concept of fair play and being a good sport emerged. Contrast this with killing people with drones or transpersonal bombs.

In the Olympics, the sacred symbolism persists in the solar gold, lunar silver, and bronze medals awarded to the winners.

I can’t resist adding another astrological footnote concerning the opposite signs of Aries, ruled by Mars, the martial god (archetype), and Libra, ruled by Venus, the goddess of beauty (archetype). These two are sword dancing and fencing. Both raise the sharp weapon to a level of serving an art form. My husband engraved wedding (Libra) invitations on copper (Venus) plates with a sharp steel-pointed (Mars)] burin. These were done by hand for Cartier, the jewelry store, in New York. His chart had Mars in Libra! Go figure.

As this is written at the height of the games of another sport season, early September, I hope you can see the symbolic, archetypal, and alchemical value in their performance – they are indeed a peaceful alternative and sublimation of combat badly needed in this time, yet again, of violence and wars. In ancient Greece, all military action was suspended during the time of their Olympic games. Would that we could do the same!

lovingly,
ao

The Consequence of Naming Things – CREDO LXXXIII

2009-08-28T06:47:00.000-07:00

I once asked Dr. Edward Edinger, now the late great Jungian analyst, about projection, and he told me all consciousness is projection. This can be further differentiated by the fact that no two people see exactly the same thing because 1) all of us will process what we see, hear, and feel in different and individual ways, and 2) our charts are descriptions of the unique way each of us processes any experience. This is the miracle of unity and diversity, if you think about it. However, some of us are more conscious than others, and, of course, what we choose to be conscious of is greatly determined by our Unconscious!

A toddler learns by naming. So does a student of a foreign language. Naming unites an object with our consciousness. Consciousness, per se, words, and the human bicameral brain are all ruled by Gemini, whose symbol is the Roman numeral II. Words and names both separate and communicate. My brilliant British friend, author and spiritual being Timothy Freke, just discovered the names of Yuk and Yum!! They sound like Beejum Tibetan twins, but those words describe Jung’s projective “feeling function” in a nutshell. Brilliant!

The Chinese sage Lao Tzu (604 BC) wrote the following in his Tao te Ching, translated here by Witter Bynner:

I
Existence is beyond the power of words
to define:
Terms may be used
but are none of them absolute.
In the beginning of heaven and earth
there were no words,
Words came out of the womb of matter;
and whether a man dispassionately
sees to the core of life
or passionately sees the surface,
the core and the surface
are essentially the same,
words making them seem different
only to express appearance.
If name be needed, wonder names them both:
from wonder into wonder
Existence opens.

So the concept of names, their differentiation, and consciousness is not exactly new. My hope is to point out that the things named also have a function for us! They are not just to be bought, sold, or possessed, they need to be listened to! They can be our teachers because they are manifest proofs of archetypal processes. The Emerald Tablet of Hermes gives us the words: “As above, so below . . .” so if we start with below and think symbolically we can unlock a wee bit of the above of that “heaven spread upon the earth that men do not see,” which the Gnostic Gospel according to Thomas refers to. The trick is to pay attention to what Jung implored us to do and wrote volumes about: to think symbolically and thus climb, step by step, to understanding and wisdom. Or as I have applied this, in what a zipper taught me!

This idea could help us, having eyes, actually not only to see the “heaven spread upon the earth” but might help transform our attitude to the material world that we are so busy consuming, abusing, and destroying! My whole preceding chapter of nonsense has this sense hidden in its nonsense because by naming a few objects, we were stumbling onto the realization that these objects had hidden gifts for us!

The alchemists knew this. Paracelsus taught it, and it was Agrippa who wrote, Virtutes divinae in res diffusae – divine powers are hidden in things! I used to write this on top of the blackboard at every lecture. The reference in the preceding CREDO to the same geometric spiral of the cowlick, the nautilus shell, and the spiral nebula are concrete proof of this – you cannot deny it! So Mother Nature, whose name mater hides in our word matter, is waiting through eons for us materialists to acquire fewer things and stop and learn from what we already have. This is Sophia’s game! Her delight! It is as if every thing is symbolized by wrapping paper. When you unwrap the gift, out comes a surprise! In short, there is a whole new way of applying “materialism.”

So how do we go about it? Stop reading and look for any object and say to yourself, “I know what you are, but what do you do??” Then listen.

This is the flowback of projection, which is active; now one is in a passive and receptive mode. The object can be a natural or a manufactured object, makes no difference. What you are doing is simply turning a noun into a verb. (The word noun comes from Latin nomen, the root of English name). A movie filmstrip is a sequence of “stills,” but when they move they tell a story . . . As the pre-Socratic Heraclitus wrote, panta rhea, everything flows. Nouns stop the flow. (Mercury, ruler of Gemini, as Trickster!)

One of my books, The Dove in the Stone, has the subtitle “Finding the Sacred in the Commonplace.” The title comes from a Hermetic treatise, because it was heresy for the alchemists to maintain that matter has spirit. The priest Matthew Fox was excommunicated from the Catholic Church, just a few decades ago, for saying the same thing! But the time has come for a whole new attitude toward the material world. If this idea can spread, this earth and we ourselves could live to see a whole new world.

Native people all around the globe know this instinctively but the so-called civilized world has forgotten or rejected their insight and continues to stress building an economy bent on getting and having more and more things instead of pausing to listen to them, to learn from, and appreciate the wisdom they conceal. From wonder into wonder existence opens!

lovingly,
ao

P.S.: Lest I be accused of anthropomorphism, I am conscious of the playful projection, but when it comes down to it, it is the archetypal processes that I am honoring. I can see, however, how unconscious projection can lead to the making of idols. Quite a lesson!

The Joys of Naming Things – CREDO LXXXII

2009-08-24T06:39:00.000-07:00

It must have started in 1927, when my parents and I began traveling the world. With our constant separations, they had to cable directions about luggage, so each suitcase was given a name. A typical yellow folded telegram would arrive, and my mother would unfold it and read typed on the white strips such words as HAVE CHECKED DRAGON AND PLATYBUS PARIS GARE DU NORD STOP PICK UP FOR ROME LOVE REG. I remember Mother got in trouble with the Egyptian government when she wired SENDING DROMEDARY BY BOAT TO PIRAEUS LOVE PENELOPE. She was told she could not ship an animal without a permit! I had the Camel because it humped when full and the Kangaroo (pockets in interior) and my beloved Spy Bag, an over the shoulder strapped leather pouch. So naming things came naturally.

Walter, my beloved husband, the Polar Bear, understood immediately. He had the Moon in Gemini. When we married in 1980, having met on the ship cruising the Mediterranean that I was teaching on, he lived in La Habra, California and I on Long Island in New York. So after the wedding, he went back west and bought a bigger house, and I traveled shortly to a whole new life.

Walter showed off our new home but was very apologetic about the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink. (I had never seen one!). It seemed he had put three orange remnants in it and they came up in the washing machine! So I named it Prokofiev, for the composer who wrote “Love of Four Oranges.” Happily, we took to “feeding Prokofiev” and he would go growlrowlgrowl from then on. When we moved east, I actually felt terrible at parting from him! I had brought Brother Lawrence, the new brown plastic garbage bin that held our ice at the wedding. I think I have mentioned the connection before. Brother Lawrence was the monk who wrote The Practice of the Presence of God in Paris and felt closest to God in the kitchen. He is still with me in mine.

When we came to Rosecroft in 1983, we purchased a freezer. Walter called it Niflheim and explained, as a Norseman himself, that this was a reference to the Norse myth of creation. It seems the world was covered with ice and given that name. Then a heavenly cow licked the first man and woman out of the ice, which is the origin of our “cowlick,” the first thing to show at our birth! Then I pointed out that the geometric whirl is the same spiral as that of a nebula in the heavens or the whirl in the water flushing down a toilet, or the way a chambered nautilus grows. So Niflheim is still a fixture in “Switzerland,” the laundry room that is neutral territory between our house and the house of my daughter Beth and her family next door. My icebox is the Igloo, and the bathroom downstairs is Tivoli, named for the child’s wallpaper featuring toy wooden soldiers in red/blue and ballerinas. For me, Tivoli is Copenhagen’s original nineteenth-century fun park plus the Royal Ballet the city is famous for. My daughter Beth disapproves of the wallpaper, but I chose it because when my clients come for a reading of their chart, they first often are apprehensive and go piddle. One sight of that wallpaper clues them in –that there must be some humor in this house – and there is!

Upstairs, we had a group of stuffed animals that turned out to be archetypal. After my stroke, I could no longer make my bed, so Walter made it and took to arranging the critters in different ways every morning. The very last time, I came up to find the wee hedgehog, Dr. Zweistein, on the baby pillow with a bottle of my “Stinkum,” my Grandma King’s name for perfume. The two bears, Rosie and Rofty (a polar bear); Oxo, the bison; and the two camels, Camille and Kahlil, were all in a circle around the pillow paying close attention. At my look of inquiry, Walter explained: “He’s giving a lesson in aroma therapy!”

Camille, the smaller camel, deserves special mention. On the ship, there were a number of middle-aged single women who all liked the handsome white-haired widower. To make them happy, he would joke with them and promise their fathers ten to twenty camels if they would become wife Number 3,.7, 8, etc.! But at 9 o’clock pm, I was No.1!! He kept us all in stitches. So at the wedding reception, the cake was brought in topped by a foil pyramid, and Roger Woolger, a Jungian analyst and the Best Man, explained that at the church wedding I had been only a proxy bride. The real one was under the pyramid. Ta dah! He lifted it to reveal Camille with a little bridal veil. There she was and, believe it-or-not, she traveled with us everywhere for eighteen years, went to the hospital with Walter each time, and was tucked under his arm on the gurney as he drew his last breath!

So even on his Aberduffy Day, Walter conveyed a smile for comfort, and today Camille presides on a shelf next to my new bed in my new bedroom downstairs.

You can imagine the whoop of joy I gave when I read in one of Jung’s biographies that he also gave names to his pots and pans and spoke of das Tuecke des Objekts, the mischief of objects, if they are not treated with respect (read affection?). If you have read my The Beejum Book, you can surely see that he was a Beejum himself!

lovingly, with a fond smile,
ao
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Just remember that nonsense is every bit as important as sense, because sometimes it’s the last resort to help people come to their senses!” Lonesome, the rabbit psychopomp’s advice to young Teak, The Beejum Book, p.47. A sensible consequence to this Credo follows in Part II .Be sure to read it!

Love is never wasted – CREDO LXXXI

2009-08-24T05:32:00.000-07:00

A helpful friend was aiding me in clearing out and reorganizing my stationery cupboard, which, before my stroke, was my secret delight and an example of a triumphant Virgo Prunefiddle. However, since my stroke thirteen years ago and the resultant loss of the use of my right hand, the cupboard has become a shambles. The task triggered my memory and the origin of my passion for stationery.

Seventy-nine years ago, I was sent to an English boarding school, St. George’s, in San Remo, on the Italian Riviera. It was a so-called Christian school set in a marble mansion built as a winter residence for Russian nobility. It had a glorious garden and view of the Mediterranean. There I was physically and psychologically abused. Cut off completely from my parents and unable to write an uncensored letter, I suffered in despair. I was eight and a half years old. (I have written about this in a separate chapter and would be willing to send it as an attachment to anyone interested.) The whole experience turned me away, big time, from Christianity. But hidden, it was my first experience of love from two strangers, and since then I have realized that such love is never wasted or even diminished by time.

These two women have a special place in my heart. One was the Italian seamstress who mended our clothes. I first encountered her when I was sent down to the supply closet for fresh paper. This closet had the marvelous fragrance of stationery stores. I could see stacks of pencils and pads, notebooks and drawing paper, clips in boxes, all neatly in place. When I ventured further into the basement room, there sat a voluminous woman all dressed in black. She smelt of honest sweat and garlic and unabashed affection. Seeing how small I was must have touched her, because she would never fail to put aside her sewing and sweep me onto her lap for a swinging hug. She would croon, “Che bella piccola! Che carina! Aleechay, vieni qua!” which translates loosely into words of endearment and approval. I would curl up and cling to this earth mother and shower her with kisses and laughter. Pretty soon, I would learn to rip the hems of my uniforms on purpose to be sent down for more doses of maternal love. I still love and bless that dear woman for understanding the needs of a lonely child. Dear Maria, you taught me to love the smell of garlic! Not only that, but a passion for stationery, and my first lesson that no love is ever wasted. Such was the gift she still gave me yesterday as I gazed into the past delights of my very own cupboard.

The other woman was called Matron. She was the school nurse. She was Scottish, and dour, and had a purple nose. She growled and she twinkled; she was gruff and caring at the same time. She made you feel safe and secure. Perhaps we each understood the suffering in the other.

After a few months, a terrible thing happened. At assembly we were told that Matron had suddenly died and was no more. It came as an enormous shock. It was, perhaps, the turning point for me. My best friend, Patsy Cliff, also my age, knew what biblically was called for: sackcloth and ashes! So we locked ourselves in the playroom, dumped our toys out of burlap bags, stripped and sat down in the fireplace and covered our faces with ashes and wept grimy tears. Never was anyone mourned more sincerely for about three minutes. Then we looked at each other and saw what a mess we were and began to giggle. After cleaning up in the bathroom, we went out in the hall and played leap-frog and were reprimanded severely by a teacher for irreverence and given two demerits each! But today almost eighty years later, I can close my eyes and feel the love that Matron gave me. It was her knowing look of secret recognition of the potential good seen in a naughty child. My soul felt realigned briefly in her presence. These were two strangers.

Since then, I myself have loved and lost in numerous hopeless love relationships and yet in every case turned them into lifelong enduring friendships and vice-versa. One of them described himself as offering “stepping stones” to the real thing that would come along, as it finally did when I was fifty-eight years old and met my so beloved Walter, who was sixty-nine!

In years of counseling others, I have heard so many versions of lost loves and have noticed the difference between those who react with anger or bitterness and those who truly try to understand and want the best for the other. The first group love out of hidden need, which is not the love that lasts, but the second group send out the message that their love gathers itself into a gossamer container, impervious to time or even future lives, that somehow is or will be available to the recipient when ready to receive. Such love is never wasted. Trust me!

As a teacher of kids, I had love for many of them. It is the fate of so many teachers that they give of themselves to their students only to lose them forever. But not always. One of my sixth grade students, came back, now a mother herself, and reminded me that I had told her that she had a flame inside her that no one could blow out! Am blessed to still be in touch with quite a few.

You can see what I learned from discovering Bronson Alcott’s book which, I was able to republish more than 150 years later as How Like an Angel Came I Down. Alcott loved his students and was rewarded by a letter from an eight-year-old boy, which Elizabeth Peabody added in 1834 to the appendix of the original Conversations with Children on the Gospels. Here is how the boy concluded his letter:

The comparisons in your letter, I think were very good – the one that struck me most forcibly and which I have before mentioned in my journal, was the Looking Glass of Circumstance, which I think meets the subject. In this letter you have fully convinced me, that we should not too often commit the dreadful sin of seeking all good without, and not beholding it within our imagination.

From the Jungian perspective, true love comes from the Self of one to the Self of the other. Alcott demonstrates that true teaching does likewise. Most relationship functions on the ego-to-ego basis, including that of teaching. It might be helpful for any readers of this to take a moment to reflect on those people they can call to mind who have recognized the Divine Guest in them or who have tasted the enduring joy of love that lasts. Esoterically, this is the nature of the catena aurae, the Golden Chain, the one of lasting, living filaments that links us forever with the wisdom and love of the great Givers of Gold, those Teachers, all composers, in different fields and times, of lasting inspiration. .

God’s grace is like an ever-blowing breeze, all we have to do is lift our sails to catch it! – Sri Ramakrishna

lovingly,
ao

The Bottle Game – CREDO LXXX

2009-08-17T06:07:00.000-07:00

I learned about this game from Penny Harris in 1944. Penny was a petite woman of my mother’s generation. She knew M before I did, and he called her Nickel. Widowed and a mother of three sons, she was an heir to the Borden milk company, and had a lovely apartment on the upper east side of New York and a beautiful old home in Connecticut. Bill Regan, M’s closet companion, had been a close friend of her husband, and was now back at West Point teaching during the war. I mention these two because it reveals the kind of people that surrounded M. Penny was a Gemini and, as I was by far the youngest in the group, we became fast friends and almost like kids together. Penny struggled mightily with the highly erudite and esoteric material we studied. Her disposition was to being loving and generous. For instance, she gave M her own large bedroom in her apartment and slept in a maid’s room so that he would have the space for a meditation center and the comfort he needed for his work. He was already in his seventies when I met him. As it was up to me to translate the concepts and terminology of, say, the Kabbalah, by hindsight, I see that this was an introduction to my life’s work: helping the concepts of the Above make more sense to the Below. A kind of spiritual algebra … I was deeply touched when she once turned her beautiful blue eyes to me and said she wanted to be my child in our next lifetime! It was Penny who told me about the Bottle Game.

This was a game played at parties during the “Flapper” era of the post WWI days. It helped if the players were in a playful mood. As Penny described it, I began to see its value on an entirely different and symbolic level. I recommend it highly to any of my readers involved in giving workshops. It is certainly a good example of Sophia’s delight in making wisdom fun. Here’s how it goes: a row of eight empty bottles is set up about two feet apart. An innocent volunteer is chosen to prove that he/she can slalom the row without knocking over any bottle. This is carefully practiced three times. The volunteer is then taken to another room and blindfolded while the host explains the rules of the game. Then the volunteer is brought back and set exactly at the head of the row and challenged to slalom again while blindfolded. The other guests are instructed to make soft positive and encouraging remarks during the time the volunteer triumphantly manages to succeed. At the sound of applause, the volunteer removes the blindfold, and surprise!! No bottles!!!

The bottles seemed to me to represent many of the unconscious, built-in inhibitions we all absorb in our youthful development placed there by family, education, religious doctrine which are accepted, perhaps misunderstood, but left unexamined. As a workshop proceeds, it may be helpful for participants to list and perhaps discuss some of these. I will never forget one woman who burst into tears when she removed her blindfold. Her reason? “I was totally convinced that the bottles were there! How can a person be that wrong!” I rest my case.

I think we need to distinguish cultural mores and apply psychological and spiritual tolerance. An example is that a Muslim is permitted more than one wife, but Christians are not. An Orthodox Jew may commit a sin if he eats pork or shellfish, good advice in the light of trichinosis and a hot climate, but today it may seem unnecessary to others. I think I have already mentioned the factor that turned a boy into a lasting agnostic when he was forbidden to attend chapel wearing white socks at his boarding school. One of my own daughters was turned away for forgetting to wear her beanie! On a more serious note, the ubiquitous scandal of priests molesting altar boys has undermined their teachings of Jesus. On the positive side, the gradual shift in the acceptance of Christian women as priests in several Protestant denominations has only happened during my lifetime, and as a student of history, I find it fascinating that one century’s heretic is another’s saint (Joan of Arc, Mary Magdalen), and that goes for scientists such as Galileo and even some recent political leaders like Mandela. One of Pope John Paul II’s finest acts was his public repudiation of the condemnation of Galileo and Luther.

In closing, I really have to recommend the “Milk Stool Principle of Love, Wisdom, and Power” (Credo XXXVIII) that can help keep us more balanced and spiritually sound. The ‘Shalt-nots!” need to be replaced by our own positive personal conscience, responsibility and tolerance – my personal favorite being Buddha’s “The Noble Eightfold Path” (see Credo LXXI), which can apply to anyone. I am also partial to the kindness suggested in this Sufi counsel:

Before you criticize, pass your words through three sieves:
Are they true?
Are they kind?
Are they necessary?

lovingly,
ao

Buddhism, Jung, and the Ego – CREDO LXXIX

2009-08-14T08:26:00.000-07:00

The following quote from the late Tibetan Lama Dudjom Rinpoche reinforces the message of a recent Credo, adding the spiritual application. I was struck by this as I was reading his book of lectures Counsels from My Heart. Here is what he said:

What is the root of all this, the source of both good and evil? The doer of all virtue is the mind, when it makes positive use of body and speech, its servants. The doer of all evil is also the mind, when it uses body and speech negatively. The root and cause of good and evil is in the mind itself. Nevertheless, in a sense, this mind of ours is something unknown to us. It does anything and everything, like a lunatic running here and there at the slightest impulse. This is how it accumulates karma.

The mind is the root of every defilement. It is here that anger is born; and from anger, every kind of hurt and injury to others: fighting, beating, and the rest. The mind is the soil in which all this grows: all malevolence, envy, desire, stupidity, arrogance, and so forth. That is why the Buddha told us to get a grip on our minds. Having realized that the mind is the root of all affliction, we must be vigilant in keeping it under control, holding down our defilements as much as we can. We have to be completely focused on this, gaining mastery of whatever arises.

The mind can move in a positive direction as well. . . . Through the practice of the Dharma, the mind can also accumulate the causes of its own liberation and that of others. Therefore, since the mind is the root of both good and evil, it stands to reason that it must be corrected and transformed. The examination of one’s mind is thus the principal feature of the practice.

The interesting point to me is that if you substitute the word ego for mind, you would hear Jung saying the same thing! He defines the ego by the psychological terminology of “center of consciousness” and also sees it as functioning through duality. (Astrologically, the brain is ruled by Gemini, whose glyph is II.) When we identify with our ego, we give it our name, and it serves us daily in making it possible to live in the manifest world. We do get an involuntary break every time we sleep or are rendered unconscious. It is the part of our psyche that constantly is having to make choices, not only in practical matters, but also in allowing ourselves to be influenced by the emotions Dudjom describes above. In terms of my diagram, the ego, that small circle divided by the circumference, half looking out to the world and half looking inward to the psyche, goes round and around searching. But there is a conscious decision that we can make that is helpful: meditation!

One of the purposes of meditation is to become aware of our ego or “monkey mind.” Every religion has some form of it. Many, though, confuse it with prayer which is active, whereas meditation is receptive, a surrender to something greater than one’s mind. At first, we usually have trouble concentrating, but eventually awareness grows and you ask, “Who is watching?” That is the breakthrough! Who indeed? In this magic moment the radius to the centerpoint of Jung’s Self becomes a reality in Hagia Sophia’s process of in-tuition. Holy Wisdom, Holy Spirit, name it what you will, is the “Only Way” (process, verb!) that connects us to that wick in us that holds the universal flame of Spirit. And, as Jung points out, this center dwells in (sigh!) the Unconscious! The mind can reason that there must be something going on, but what? “The Tao that can be defined is not the Tao.” So, to repeat what Jung said, “The longest journey for most of us is from the head to the heart.” To meditate is to visit a place of love and eventually a state of bliss. Now Teachers and mystics have all pointed this out in every culture and every age, one way or another, but Jung clothes it in psychological terms because so many of us are ego identified and unhappy, lost and not conscious of why. Now, I am probably stepping on many toes, because there are so many instructions and how-to’s to meditation, but, honestly, forget all that to start with – just light a candle, close your eyes, and sit and listen to and receive the Silence, “that peace that passeth understanding.”

One of my favorite stories is that of one of the greatest intellectuals in history, Thomas Aquinas, who pursued and exhausted the philosophical proofs of God. At the end of his life, he had a spiritual experience that knocked his socks off! He came out of it declaring that all he had written was “as straw”; he surely had gone from the mind to the greater mystery of the heart. The Hindus would say that he practiced jnana yoga, the path of knowledge. They also tell us that there are different approaches to that “Vast Certainty”: bhakti yoga, the emotional approach of devotion; raja yoga, the totally committed path, taken by priests, monks, and lamas. A fourth, karma yoga, is to live in the world and give all of the fruits of your actions to God – my path, for sure.

Another person, lesser known, I admire immensely is Brother Lawrence, who was a French lay monk in Paris in the 1600s. He wrote a small book called The Practice of the Presence of God. He felt closest to God in the kitchen! It is a paean of delight among his pots and pans and profoundly spiritual in its joyful practice. Perhaps Julia Child is his reincarnation!

In his honor, I have a brown plastic garbage can which held the ice at my wedding to my beloved Walter in 1980. It has a label pasted on top + Brother Lawrence +. So he is a real and daily reminder in my own kitchen.

In conclusion, I am just trying to point out that one can consider oneself of no consequence and meditation to be a lofty and unreachable pursuit, but that is not the case. Each of us, if we are alive and conscious, is precious and unique, so all it takes is to be conscious of the gift and ultimate purpose, perhaps, of consciousness. As the Hindu Dadaji put it, “God is making love in your every heartbeat twenty-four hours a day.”

lovingly,
ao