Continued from St. Lawrence 5 6-4-25
Tibetan visualization techniques like Jungian therapy identify, elaborate, and reintegrate the archetype. It is possible to live the fullest life only when we are in harmony with archetypical forces and symbols.
Wisdom is the return to archetypes. Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words. Myth suspends all dualities, and is hence life renewing. “Mystical experience is an experience of archetypes” (Jung)
However, in deep mysticism all archetypes are destroyed. Archetypes are the ultimate pointers, as well as the final barrier.
The transpersonal bands are the point where the individual begins to touch Mind.
Through contemplation of archetypes one may achieve transcendence.
The archetype may act as guide, as well.
True self is neither body nor mind.
Beyond the transpersonal is Mind, God, Self.
In a transpersonal state one witnesses reality.
The final destruction of all duality is the “bottom breaking out of the bucket”.
In one sense you cannot see Mind, for it is the seer. Yet in another sense, you are never aware of anything but Mind, for Mind is all that is.
All therapies reverse the process of dualism-repression- projection, by helping the individual contact the alienated and projected aspects, reintegrate them, and thus make whole that level. Making shadows out of horrors, and then laughing at the shadows.
As soon as an individual cleans up one set of needs, the next set spontaneously emerges.
As a person descends levels there comes a call to transcendence. When the call to transcendence occurs, one must follow, or become meta-pathological.
One ultimately identifies with the highest values of the world.
Archetypical, Existential, and Shadow anxiety are different beasts, and not to be treated the same.
Consider the avoidance of death as the root of all man’s motivations.
Meditation as the casting up and out of demons is good therapy. Even the psychotherapies are part of the spiritual quest.
The third climax describes the ultimate therapy as healing the primary dualism of organism split from environment. This is the level of mysticism and mystic, the quest for the Holy Grail, the healing of organism and environment, subject and object. This is the place where God emerged from the void, and divided light from the dark. In healing the primary dualism, the search ends, realizing the sought is the seeker himself.
“Your every day, ordinary, consciousness is Tao, Mind”. The Bodhisattva is one who sees the Godhead everywhere and every when, in every person, place, and thing. He does not have to retire into solitude and trance to find God.
We are already “one with God”, for God is everywhere and everything.
“One”, whoever he is, and whether or not he is aware of it, is already in Buddha hood.
“Like an eye that sees, but cannot see itself or a sword that cuts, but cannot cut itself”.+
Bondage is identification with objects.
Both self and other are illusion.
Both being and non-being are illusion.
Mind, God being, is here and now, for God is infinite and eternal.
“The goal and the path are one”.
“Upaya” are experiments through which one can find Mind or God. The first Upaya is meditation on the genesis and conception of thought and emotion. Active, vigilant attention prevents the dissipation of energy in imaginative, intellectual, or emotive forms. When our attention is operating in the active, vigilant, mode, there is nothing to perceive, and the primary duality is annihilated. The inner dialogue ceases until the vigilance of attention lapses or ceases.
Meditation is an attitude of silent and vigilant expectation. A truly centered person could dissolve both suffering and disease.
Full attention can obliterate an insult before it hits home.
The three factors of non-dual awareness:
- active attention.
- stopping thought.
- passive, non-dual awareness.
Sri Ramana Maharishi teaches the suspension of the “I” thought. The “I” thought is suspended by asking “who am I?” Here one enters the cavern of the soul. The “I-I” or Mind appears.
“According to the strength of your inquiring spirit will be the depth of your enlightenment”.
The second experiment is: “slowly call “Amithaba” seven times – looking to where the thought arises, and thoughts will cease to arise.
Inattention, while meditating, allows images to arise. Zen meditation suspends such, not suppressing or destroying it. The doubt sensation is necessary, suspending thought, and introducing Mind, Self. In fact “I-Ching” means great doubt. “Great Doubt” induces the experience of Mind, or “Great Fixation”, in which prajna can burst forth at any time.
Meditate relentlessly, obliterate image without ceasing, and God will make His Spirit known to thee.
“Follow the stream to where it comes out of the mountainside, and continue to seek. Thereby the entire illusion will yield into perfect union with God”. Satori.
“To become consciously one with the unconscious”.
The second form of Zen meditation is “silent illumination”. This is the observation of thought, until thoughts cease, and passive awareness becomes ‘mirror like” introflection.
Is not the desire to annihilate self a manifestation of self?
“We wei” is the Taoist discipline of no discipline. The art letting the mind alone to move as it will, as this yields to mind fasting, then mental emptiness, and then to Tao, which is passive awareness. .
We are not our thoughts, mind, body, wishes, hopes, fears. These are all objects of perception, and thus cannot be the perceiver, for the perceiver cannot perceive.
The supposed mystery, so incomprehensible, is only due to seeking truth as an object.
Self is that within us that is trying to grasp and perceive.
That which you seek, and cannot find, is the seeker.
This which is seeking is that which is sought, and that which is sought is that which is seeking.
And here non-duality lives, the objective universe, and the subjective self merge in non-dual being.
One’s identity becomes everything that is experienced.
With the healing of each duality we become more responsible for our selves, and more capable of healing our lives and souls.
The solution to the question of life is the vanishing of the question.
We are in God, and God is in us, now, with no seeking necessary. We already exist in eternity, and eternal life.
If we will accept it, Ken Wilber will crown us with our divinity. He gives one his Buddha hood. Wilber not only shows us the way to God, but also that God has been, and always is, both of us and in us. Knowing God, possessing divinity, is simply letting it be so. Wilber is showing us that God is accessible, and yet no access is needed, for both He, and we, are infinite and eternal. “The Kingdom is at hand”. We are in the Kingdom, the Kingdom reigns in us, and it could be no other way.+
Next we have a report on a book about shamanism. The book is entitled “Dreamtime and Inner Space”. The author is Holger Kalweit. Shambala Publishing. 1988. The paper was written in 1991, as part of my coursework at Empire State College.
Essie Parrish, a female Native American shaman stated “once one learns of the truth of life, the inevitability of heaven or hell, guiding others becomes very important”.
When I love someone, or as would a saint, love and embrace all humankind, bearing to others God’s light of salvation becomes all important. True, bearing the gift of miraculous healing and inspired teaching is important. But most important is these gifts being signs directing souls to a saving and meaningful faith in God.
The shaman believes every physical object possesses an untouchable spirit. Through this everywhere present element of life, all creation is united. Even stones are thought to possess life. This reminds us of a passage Jesus spoke, “if the children be silenced, the very stones should shout praises”.
The empowered shaman teaches a psychology of vastly expanded limitations. The shaman suggests that man has access to a spectrum of spiritual and psychic possibilities exceeding our wildest dreams. The tribal shaman may be one of the few remaining sources of a functional, empowered, mysticism.
To the western mind, sickness and death are life’s greatest evils. The path of shamanic initiation is most always marked with physical trauma or disease. The tribal psyche can understand illness as a sublime transformative process. For western man/woman sickness is viewed as purposeless suffering. Not often does a man possess the necessary stature to understand physical malady as ultimately positive. For those who have never been physically or psychically traumatized, it is hard to understand disease a communication with God. The leper, the schizophrenic, the victim of cancer, all communicate through their disease. Disease often becomes a hall through which man communicates with God.
But this all creates a question. If man is perfected by disease, why is healing sought so vehemently?+ I cannot answer that question. Suffering must be regarded as a process of personal transformation, and personal transcendence.
The call to shamanism and insanity are often identical on the exterior. They may be identical on the inside as well. Who transcends to become a shaman, and who is lost in the misunderstood halls of mental illness is decided by God alone.
The path to shamanism is often beset with illness. And through this illness comes healing. The shaman is beset with sacred illness, through which mystical insights and powers arise.
Mass-energy cannot be destroyed or created. This can be applied in a spiritual context. In a spiritual context it means every prayer, every sin, every act of charity, and every false word will have a consequence. Here we see shamanic illness, caused by divine powers, and in turn causing a man to become healer and sage. The shaman experiences his sickness as a call to destroy this life within him. Then a new life might be born, to hear, to see, and to live more fully in a higher and purer state.
There exists a dichotomy. Man has always sought celestial power and wisdom, and at the same time resisting change. This is so because heavenly powers are purchased through great suffering.
The shaman heals disease, often, by empathetically absorbing the disease of another. Healing through empathy involves assuming and displacing another’s illness. Displacing disease means depositing the assumed illness where it can do no harm. Usually in a psychic-spiritual or physical location where it cannot be touched, nor can it escape. Somewhere out in the woods, or in a celestial sea between realms of creation.
On a psych ward, the empathic patient is doubly doomed. There is condensed disease, often with a constant influx of new inmates, and fresh disease. The empathy, absorbing infirmity, can be forced to his knees in unending prayer. Worse yet, he can be brought to the realm of living death, knocked off his feet by the power of dark disease alone.
Ultimately, disease destroys ego structures. there upon the initiate becomes capable of a higher level of service. This new level includes o.b.e.’s, which are used to let the shaman guide and heal his people.
The ritual of dismemberment is universal in shamanic initiation. It occurs by in actuality. One initiate was devoured by guardian polar bears. Another was held under ice covered water for five days. He was thereupon taken out of the water, still dry and warm. Another had his entrails taken out, cleansed, and reinstated.
The shaman has learned to travel to other realms, some would say “realms of the dead”. But this is a strange name for these other lands, for they are full of beings, all alive and living.
We descend now, through the dark spongy ground. Making our way through darkness. Fetal demons lay bound within the earth, on all sides, as we descend. There is a giant cough, a dragon roar echoing in a subterranean cavern. We are spewn from this dragons mouth through blue sky, landing softly in a great field of grass. The grass is thigh high, green, and billowing like waves in the gentle and pleasant wind.
This field is a on a hillside, surrounded by deep dark woods. But we, you and I, are here alone. I did not ask to be sent here, neither did you. Never the less, we are here.
I lay on my back, in the grass, under the warm sun. You lay your head on my chest. We are sleepy, laying comfortably, waiting. The singing of the birds is lost as I fall asleep. You sleep too. We are sharing the same dream.
We awake to the sound of a cannon shell exploding. Then another and another. A military jet plane is flying overhead. We know through spirit that we are on the brink of war. Nuclear war. In a flash we realize our purpose. Our world is headed for the social insanity and spiritual disease we call war. And must destroy the destroyer. But how?
I stand, awake now, and stretch. You touch your toes. Then we still our souls. You face me and the west, sitting half lotus. I kneel on the ground, facing east, and you. We begin to pray. And chanting we begin in a small way to wage war on war.
As we pray this way in the middle of the battle field, we enjoin the black silence of a trance. We have immersed ourselves in the velvet black sea. Quiet, black, oblivion. Here we know the answer to war, and famine, and disease. It is to enter where we are here. A black chasm, where are changed, and where we change the world.
Suddenly, I am aware of people all around us. As I open my eyes, the sun is rising over your head, like a halo. I look around, and we are surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people all pouring themselves out for truth and healing. My heart rejoices. I stand, and take your hand in mine.
We bow our heads in thanks to the Virgin. And raising our voices, hundreds of thousands strong, we begin to sing down, bring upon us, the Kingdom of God.+