5:30 am. I've been reading Barbara Kingsolver, and then Tom Robbins books in the mornings and evenings, and together with a return to saying my mantra and occasional meditation (tho not a firm habit again yet), its all helping me get my priorities back in order and my perspective back straight.
I just finished Skinny Legs and All [by Tom Robbins] and want to record the message of the seven veils, the illusions destroyed by each one, so that I can more easily keep them in mind. They are things I've known a long time; Heck! I first read the book in 1991 or 1992! But we forget. The illusions are so powerful; they creep back in without our realizing it. Another reason daily meditation is necessary – eternal vigilance against maya.
Veil One –
Life is a sexual dance. Sex requires male and female as equal partners. Even molecules bond. There is even molecular rejection. And as we know now, the female has more control than we ever gave her credit for (eggs choosing the sperm) and more than the male in many cases. It's hard not to read patriarchy as a massive attempt to compensate for insecurity about inadequacy. Any religion that doesn't acknowledge, openly, the female aspects of the Divine is a religion based on fear.
I am becoming even more of a feminist because I've about had enough of the double-talk, the hidden and commonly accepted sexism.
Veil Two – Humans do not have dominion over plants, animals and minerals. "Humanity was a function of nature. It could not, therefore, live separately from nature except in a self-defeating masquearade. It could not live in opposition to nature except in a schizophrenic crime. And it could not blind itself to the wonders of nature without mutating into something too monstrous to love" p.404.
Veil Three – This is one it is really hard to remember. "It is futile to work for political solutions to humanity's problems because humanity's problem's were not political" p.405. They are [the problems], of course, philosophical. Trying to solve philosophical problems politically means solving them over and over and over. I realized this a good year ago. Stopped reading the paper, stopped getting so excited about the news. But when I stopped doing my own spiritual work, I got caught up again, and began all over to try to solve the problems in a wrong-headed way.
Veil Four – Religion is the improper response to the Divine. Religion tries to pin down something forever in flux. "To say that the Divine was Creation divided by Destruction was as close as one could get to definition. But the puny of soul, the dull of wit, weren't content with that" p.407. "The Divine is expansive, Religion reductive." "Since religion bore false witness to the Divine, religion was blasphemy" p.408.
Veil Five – Money is an illusion. 'Nuf said.
Veil Six – Time – past and future don't exist. All is present. Time isn't linear, etc. No "after" life, no after. No judgment day. All days are judgment days.
Veil Seven – Everyone has to figure it out for themselves. Apparently many times!!!! How I wish I could keep my insights fresh every day! Live them as easily as think them!
I'm reading Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy, and in The Manticore David's analyst, a Jungian, says "The unconscious chooses its symbolism with breath-taking artistic virtuousity" p.179.
I was getting sleepy, so shortly after I read that, I closed the book and my eyes and I asked my unconscious to tell me something about myself in a richly symbolic dream. I asked specifically for a metaphor – I wanted a show of this artistic virtuousity. How it delivered! And in a 10-minute nap!
[There follows a long description of a detailed and vibrant dream – full of symbols (about barbecuing, of all things) – which I realize is about a personal relationship]
What really, really pleases me is how receptive and friendly and downright accomodating my unconscious was! Can we build on this? I am certainly going to try. I don't know why I never thought of just asking myself for what I want!
Still reading Robertson Davies. What's Bred in the Bone right now. Tell's the story of Francis Cornish through the eyes of the Recording Angel and his personal Daimon. And in addition to some of the other things I've been thinking, and other things I now believe, it's shed new light on my own biography.
If we look at our lives as things planned, to a certain degree, by our larger Selves, to teach us particular things . . . or to put it less pedantically . . . If our souls, our Selves, have at least a moment of knowing the greater picture, the full spread and direction of our many lives between one life and another, and if they (we) can then choose, to a certain or full extent the circumstances of our next life, such that it will provide the opportunities to grow in the directions we most need `or will satisfy a hunger or thirst we most feel, or however it actually works – then very little of our lives in the early parts at least can be said to be due to chance.
We've chosen them for reasons. And might that extend through much of our life? Might not we have laid out a pattern that would unfold? And if so, how different would that really feel from having a personal daimon, or a guardian angel (two very different kinds of beings) guiding, interfering and making things happen?
In the book, the daimon talks about how he purposely provides Francis with some very unpleasant experiences, a generally unhappy childhood, an extended illness later (age 10-11) to allow him an escape from the small minds at school and give him time for reflection and creativity.
Why? The Recording Angel asks if he has no pity, if he/it isn't cruel, etc. The daimon replies that those are human attributions, that what he's creating is something special, and that greatness isn't born from happy childhoods, free of reflection, etc. Humans do not come to know themselves or to know charity, art, compassion, truth, or wisdom from easy lives.
Something in me felt a joyous leap of recognition and freedom as I read these words. What a wonderful way to approach the past. I am not a victim. The troubles I had as a child – the molestation, etc., were things I was giving myself – gifts, to help me become more fully human. Hell, I even gave myself a sickness of long duration so that I could write a novel at 12! Forget the petty, drivelling, conventional morality that for so long made me feel guilty about that! About lying to my parents and doctors about being sick and celebrate the guts of a child who dared to grab what she needed from a world that was too routinized and institutionalized to give it to her!
And the same applies to R [the abusive boyfriend] and the drug use and the selling of sex and all the other experiences I've had – probably – well of course not probably!!! Dummy! The shingles and the PHN! All the pain and every other single thing.
The pattern isn't clear at all to me right now. I think that it's related to myth. I haven't a clue what kind of a myth I am. But it's about time to start finding out. I know this is big, because I had been allowing myself to start feeling like a victim again. I've been struggling so hard and feeling so embattled and dragged down.
I refuse! I reject it! I refute it! I am the Self of my own life! Nothing happens but by my own will – conscious or un. If there is pain and unpleasantness, I must need to feel it for some good reason. But I'm not going to blame it on fate, or God, or anyone else. And I'm not going to wallow in self pity, either. Look what beauty all the childhood pain brought into my life! What in the world is there to be pitied about?! Would I rather be one of those self-righteous, self-ignorant morons walking around? Brahman forbid! I'll take the pain and mess any day.
I don't imagine I'll be able to let go of the complaining and sniping immediately, but I'm sure going to try, because I am heartily sick of being unhappy. Goodbye to the stinky pity-pot.
Gave my last finals yesterday.
I've been thinking a lot about my own spiritual/psychological life. What is the next step? It is to find my myth, the myth that is living me; the mythic, or allegoric, or metaphoric pattern that shapes/informs my life. How does one go about doing that? There are so many myths, so many mythic traditions. Why should I believe a Swiss psychiatrist identified all the relevant ones? Still, I do think that Jung is a frutiful place to begin, but I'm not looking to adopt his whole system. I don't want any one else's system. I think I have finally truly understood what it means that these ultimate answers must be worked out individually by each of us.
Wish that I had more time to devote to these things during the semester. It isn't just Jung; I need an education in allegory and the allegorical symbols used in art, especially in the middle ages and Rennaissance. I want SO much to be able to read those paintings, to understand them for the stories they told to the people of the time. I wonder if I could sit in on a few art history classes? The problem is, the professors here probably don't even know how to read the allegories unless it is their own little niche of expertise. They teach history and technique and composition and color and light and other important things I am not focused on right now.
See, if I could learn to think allegorically, even kind of medievally, I might be able to see a pattern in my life that would be meaningful to me. Like Cornish, my mind is not necessarily the most comfortable in the idiom of today. Maybe none of our minds are. And maybe, by stumbling around in the religion of our history, I can find something that works on multiple levels.
Be careful how you interpret that.
- By "religion" I do not mean anything organized, but more the patterns – maybe the psychological or spiritual or (isn't there a better word?) _________ patterns that underlie the European search for meaning which has expressed itself in the mythologies of many cultures, along with their superstitions and folk tales, their local saints (who are often just their indigenous religious figures dressed up in Christian clothes), the ways in which they interpreted Greek and Roman myths in their art in later periods, their astrology and cosmology, etc.
- The pattern I'm searching for is above all the one for my own life. It is ultimately only my own life I am in charge of, responsible for, and have any hope of being able to understand.
- Having said that, if I found a useful methodology – well, I am a social scientist trying very hard to understand human development, especially the development of identity. If I found something that worked for me personally, I'd want to see how far it could be stretched professionally, or at least communally. Write a book, maybe.
So for now it seems my routes are to learn the languages of symbolism and allegory and to become familiar with the myths. That is so that I can take the next step, which is to begin thinking about my own life in those terms.
For example, if my life were a fairy tale, who would the characters be? Or if it were an allegorical painting in the Pre-Raphaelite style, who would be in it and how would I represent them? Would it have a biblical theme, given my childhood? Or a pagan/classical theme given my later sensibilities? A King Arthur/Grail Quest theme given a long-standing obsession? Who would be the heroes and who the monsters? Who the hidden beauties? The betrayers/false-faces? These are the kinds of questions I want to be asking myself, and thinking about, and struggling (?) with.
Struggle. Do I even like that word any more? Why do I need to struggle? I am doing exactly what I am supposed to be doing, when I'm supposed to be doing it, and I'm excited about it and looking forward. What does "struggle" have to do with anything?
Here's a quote out of context. Its about a real horoscope, which would be fun to have done, by someone who knows what they are doing and speaks this ancient language of symbols: "Your Saturn has the same relationship to your Moon that Mars has to your Sun, but it's a giver of spiritual power, and takes you deep into the underworld, the dream world, what Goethe called the realm of the Mothers. There's a fad now for calling them the Archetypes, because it sounds so learned and scientific. But Mothers is truer to what they really are. The Mothers are the creators, the matrixes of all human experience" p.308, Davies, What's Bred in the Bone.
That's essentially what I want to do. I want to journey to the Mothers, and humbly ask them if they will let me know anything. I am sick nigh unto death of the fathers.
Now I'm reading my old book on myth by Leonard Biallas. What a wise person! Many of the things I highlighted at age 20 or 21 I still find important today. He really seems to understand this process I'm going through – have been going through for at least 2 decades now, of trying to discover who I am. To discard what is "not essential to me," but to embrace both the light and the dark that are truly parts of myself. I don't want a religion that is aimed only at making people good. I want one that aims at making people whole. Making them "real" "honest" with themselves and with others. I guess I'm looking for the word 'authentic.' As in Hinduism – a dialogism, a dialectics that transcends dualities.
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