Immanent Function

This online book and its partner, Answering James Joyce: Full Moon & New Earth, evolve Jung’s thoughts on depth psychology. In particular, they revision the closing sentence of Jung’s 1951 essay, Depth Psychology. (In Collected Works, vol 18, pp. 477-486) He closed that essay with the following:

The goal of the psychotherapeutic process, the self-regulation of the psyche by means of the natural drive towards individuation, is expressed by the above mentioned mandala and Anthropos symbolism.

After 40 years of singing, teaching and healing, I have seen enough evidence that Jung’s goal of the psychotherapeutic process works, but is hard to sustain in a culture that is split off from Earth, Ancestors, and the cosmos. It was a problem noted by Mesmer (1734-1815) in his own work. He noted how often successful healings of his patients were soon undone when they returned to the family structure. It runs deeper than the family. It’s not only grandparents, mothers and fathers who pull individuals back into unhealthy patterns. It’s American and Western culture at large.

The self-regulation of the psyche by means of the natural drive towards individuation is supported when the family and culture can ritually participate in the self-regulation of our planet as it moves into, through, and out from seasons, years, centuries, millennia, Ages, lifetimes in mutual relationship with all life. Immanent function gives you a language and psychological framework to support a cultural and family self-regulation of the psyche by means of the natural drive towards individuation.

The Immanent Function, (Rated R), then, is a how-to manual how to exit patriarchy and to enter into the symbolic life of the emerging participatory world view. The mythology we are living is called the Creative Mythology in the works of Joseph Campbell. You need yourself and at least one other person to awaken to this path forward together. We are all born to bring forth a flourishing planetary humanity at home in the cosmos revealed by the Parker Solar Probe’s touching the sun, the James Webb Space Telescope, by human awareness of our impact on the planet named, the Anthropocene Epoch. This how-to manual is able to carry Western Culture forward as one culture among many on the planet. The gift of Creative mythology is that it encourages a sense of adventure before the marvels of the depths of the cosmos trillions of times more abundant than our ancestors knew. We are called to wage creation, creativity, and life, even in the face of those who would wage destruction, weaponization, and death. Joseph Campbell defined Creative mythology as:

Creative mythology, in Shakespeare’s sense, of the mirror ‘to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure,’ springs not, like theology, from the dicta of authority, but from the insights, sentiments, thoughts and vision of an adequate individual, loyal to her/his/their own experience of value. Thus it corrects the authority holding to the shells of forms produced and left behind by lives once lived. Renewing the act of experience itself, it restores to existence the quality of adventure, at once shattering and reintegrating the fixed, already known, in the sacrificial creative fire of the becoming thing that is no thing at all but life, not as it will be or as it should be, as it was or as it never will be, but as it is, in depth, in process, here and now, inside and out. [in, Creative Mythology, p. 6]

(Creative mythology) is to be of the whole human race, which is rapidly becoming a social as well as spiritual necessity as the monadic structures (cultures bound by horizons/forcing their horizons onto others) of the past dissolve, is derived from contemporary life, thought and experience, anywhere and everywhere, and the moral order to the support of which they are to be brought shall be the monad (axis mundi/atmosphere/hillsphere of Earth) of mankind (all humanity). [Inner Reaches of Outer Space]

…as in the case of Parzival, the guide within will be his/her/their own noble heart alone, and the guide without, the image of beauty, the radiance of divinity, that wakes in his/her/their heart, amor: the deepest, inmost seed of his/her/their nature, consubstantial with the process of the All, “thus come.” And the criterion of achievement will be…the courage to let go of the past, with its truths, its goals, its dogmas of “meaning,” and its gifts: to die to the world and come to birth from within. [Creative Myth, p. 678]

What follows is the written partner to the ten songs on my musical album, The Immanent Function. In Cleveland, Ohio, in 1887, Michelson and Morely conducted their experiment that hoped to detect a stationary luminiferous aether (aether wind) through which light traveled. Aether was Aristotle’s last remaining element thought to exist. The experiment failed to find any stationary luminiferous aether. The speed of light is constant in all directions. The loss of luminferous aether was considered a great failure. However, explaining the behavior of light in a cosmos without luminiferous aether led to Einstein’s universal law of gravitation published in 1915. Einstein proved the now four-dimensional reality of our cosmos based on observations of the odd orbit of Mercury, the bending of light in gravitational fields, and gravitational time dilation.

Since 1915, all life as we know it is “gravity-soaked.” Gravity is therefore, a trans-immanent reality. Immanent Function offers many psychoid, which means, soul-like, celestial metaphors for trans-immanent human experiences that occur when we imagine gravity as love, as in the Christopher Nolan film, Interstellar. This revisioning into a soul-like/celestial culture calls us to deepen the roots of the Western mind into, through, and prior to, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. We can remember and experience our paleolithic embodied consciousness now. Names for doing this are re-Indigenization, de-colonizing, ethnoautobiography, among others.

Welcome and I invite you to listen to a soundtrack for our soul-work for next decades first.

Here is an excerpt from the press release from Cool Cleveland

He’s now released his 20th album, called The Immanent Function, with a music video for the song “The Magnification.” Reynolds co-produced the album with veteran producer Chris Keffer at his Magnetic North Studios, and he drew on the talents of an all-star cast of local players including Rod Reisman, Colin Dussault, Jen Groman, Paul Kraker, Bill Kraker, Chris Cummings, Brian Davison, Bill Wildman, Sukhjit Chauhan, Moss Stanley, Blake Kniola and Chris Hanna.

He calls the album’s 10 tracks, “a soundtrack for the rite of passage we are now living.”

1. The Magnification

2. Marilyn of the Whirlwind

3. Belikane

4. Creation

5. Of Your Lover’s Hopes

6. Highway Home

7. Ignatia’s Angel

8. Alive and Well

9. Remember Us

10. Rejoindre Aux Etoiles

    (You can get the songs here)

    The Immanent Function

    The Immanent Function is:

    Synchronistic, embodied becoming together when two or more choose to gather for the happiness of all beings. The immanent function is the partner to C. G. Jung’s transcendent function. Individual consciousness participates in trans-immanent communion merged with the collective ecological conscious and unconscious. When in partnership, the immanent and transcendent functions make manifest the awe that opens the human heart to the Mystery of life. Their intermingling is recognized by an ensouled, living atmosphere of warmth, love, surprise and humor that makes life-cycles worth living in enduring planetary and interplanetary relationships. This is a mythology of Einstein’s theory of gravity.

    Anomalous, synesthetic, paranormal, psychokinetic, miraculous, prophetic, ritual, numinous, transcendent sexual, aesthetic arrest experiences that are immanent to the transcendent occur in the midst of their union — trans-immanence. This is a declaration of the reality of the new Earth. The moon and Earth are a gravitational pair whose orbit together around their barycenter and the barycenter of our solar system brings complementary phases of new/full, waxing crescent/waning gibbous, waxing half/waning half, waxing gibbous/waning crescent, full/new, waning gibbous/waxing crescent, waning half/waxing half, waning crescent/waxing gibbous, new/full, complete each other. Like Beloveds, Earth and moon complete each other as we journey within the solar system within the protective heliosphere of our yellow dwarf star. As we journey within the protective heliosphere of our yellow dwarf star, we cycle above, within, below, the galactic plane, about the galactic center. May our life-giving, life-sustaining, protective celestial star system that is balanced at the stillpoint of its barycenter be known as, The Heart of the Heavens. May we create together a life-giving mythology of the atmosphere in which mysteries are known to join us with our galactic neighbors.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Immanent to the Transcendent, Numinous, Aesthetic Arrest, Mystical Experiences

Collective Ecological Unconscious and Conscious

Read Into Immanent Function

Awe That Opens To The Mystery Of Life

Immanent And Transcendent Functions

Vulnerable Potency Potent Vulnerability

Reclaim Ecomasculine Nature

Towards New Consciousness

Geometers May Enter Here

For You Who Are Curious

Becoming Together and Synchronicity

What Is The Image?

Stars Behind The Blue

Ears Ringing Heads Humming

Opening Up Entering In

The Dreaming Shaft Of Radius Mundi

Phallos As Two

Someone Over The Rainbow

Anomalous Experiences

State Of The Union

Sacred Clowns And Archetypal Wisdom

Synesthetic Experience

The Shaft Of Phallos and the Shaft Of The Sacred Feminine

Paranormal and Psychokinetic Experiences

Review Of The Literature

An Infinite Hypersphere, Axis, And Curved Surface: The Turning Point

Decolonize God and Goddess

Mediation Is Wisdom

Urth

Decolonize Self/World Image Now

Planetary and Interplanetary Relationships

Sphere of Urth: The Energy Fields Of The Two Partners Become One

COEX Constellations Are The Gates Of The W Axis

Miraculous Experience

COEX Of Day And Night, The Seasons, And The Moon

Prophetic Experience

All The Love We Make

Gaia Is Two

Introduction

At the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, we enjoyed a shared clearing atmosphere, shared ecosystems that no longer shook with human activity, a marvel of clearing and clear-running ‘cricks,’ rivers, global waters - even the canals of Venice. Our collective and common sense witnessed the noisy spring of 2020 with all ecological life returning. This miracle of nature and its paradoxes of human illness and contention are the key to when we are.

Covid and other global strife can be imagined as a collective initiatory ordeal of a planetary spiritual emergency towards a new life that has similarities to many forms of spiritual emergency of our species. Joseph Campbell, in Thou Art That described our work at this time as a journey to this new life that we all must make:

The mystical theme of the Space Age is this: the world as we know it is coming to an end. The world as the center of the universe, the world divided from the heavens, the world bound by horizons in which love is reserved for members of the in-group: that is the world that is passing away. Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and complacency are coming to an end. Our divided, schizophrenic world view, with no mythology adequate to coordinate our conscious and unconscious — that is what is coming to an end. The exclusiveness of there being only one way in which to be saved, the idea that there is a single religious group that is in the sole possession of the truth — that is the world as we know it that must pass away. What is the Kingdom? It lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us.

The journey to this new life — and it is a journey we must all make — cannot be made unless we let go of the past. The reality of living in space means that we are born anew, not born again into an old-time religion, but to a new order of things. There are no horizons — that is the meaning of the Space Age. We are in a free fall into a future that is mysterious. It is very fluid and this is disconcerting to many people. (p. 107)

The term, addict, in its Latin roots means, to surrender the voice. Our cultural ways force the surrender of individual voices and promote deafness to the voices of all but a few who claim authority. Ad-diction can be released to the past.

The world divided from the heavens, the world bound by horizons in which love is reserved for members of the in-group, belongs to a 5000 year old ecocidal pattern that began in Sumer between 3500-3000 BCE. Its methods to limit love’s infinite horizons of life to an exclusive group are known. Joseph Campbell described them this way:

It has been the chief concern of all these power groups, in the interpretation, formulation, and enforcement of their own rites, not so much to foster the growth of young individuals to maturity as to validate supernaturally, and to render religiously unchallengeable, their own otherwise questionable authority, whether as dynasty, as tribe, or as churchly sect. The timeless symbols, taken over and re-combined, are applied systematically, and with full intent, to the aim of subjugation through indoctrination. A totally new order of state beliefs and rites, to the glory of some name or other, is superimposed upon the old, life-fostering order of the family and spiritual rites of passage and initiation; a ‘faith,’ as it is called, is proposed for belief.

The Waste Land, let us say, then, is any world in which (to state the problem pedagogically) force and not love, indoctrination, not education, authority, not experiences prevail in the ordering of lives, and where the myths and rights enforced and received are consequently unrelated to the actual realization, needs, and potentialities of those upon whom they are impressed.

It is upon us to foster the growth of young individuals to maturity, to reclaim the old, life-fostering order of the family and spiritual rites of passage and initiation.

The music and text, Immanent Function, invite you and at least one other person to come to a trans-immanent Turning Point yourselves. Find here the language and concepts to co-extricate yourselves from a 5000 year old mental Wasteland. Here is encouragement to co-create a way ahead for the happiness of all beings. In ad-dictive culture, the numinous voices that are surrendered are the free will to choose life, the innermost meaning of the words, spirits of all beings. All beings have said, “Yes” and risked all for this life. We have all been invited here.

The 5000 year old habit promotes dissociated transcendence beyond life with extreme prejudice against the immanent here and now. It is a mental blade that cuts us from participation in life at a depth where we share in the loving intentions and generosity of the Source of all that is because we are that. The Cherokee Morning song that sings, I am of Great Spirit, it is so, is an example of what we have lost. Our yes to life is as courageous as the Yes that brought the body of the cosmos into being. They are of the same intention, in the same Spirit. In the various forms of the now-dying mental habit, our life was made and put here by something spiritually and/or chemically that is deaf to our choices in the matter.

The Space Age is central to all of this…we had the great symbol of change that has taken place. Men stood on the moon and looked back and by television we were able to look back with them to see earthrise. This is the symbol that enabled us to feel the truth of the discovery that Copernicus made more than four centuries ago. Until then, we may have agreed theoretically with Copernicus but his map of the universe was not available to us, except to mathematicians and astronomers. It was an invisible idea and we could go on thinking, as we did, about a religious idea in which everything was divided along the same lines as the heavens and earth were divided.

This divided model allowed us to think that there was a spiritual order, separate or divided from our experiences…With the moon walk, the religious myth that sustained this notion could no longer be held. With our view of earthrise, we could see that the earth and the heavens were no longer divided but that the earth is in the heavens. There is no division and all the theological notions based on the distinction between the heavens and the earth collapse with this realization. There is a unity in the universe and a unity in our own experience. We can no longer look for a spiritual order outside our experience…it signifies the return of Mother Earth to the heavens. [p. 105, in Thou Art That]

Immanent Function in sound and word occurs as a next incarnation in my creative life that began in 1977. Creative life gained in importance with September 11, 2001, Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and insists now for a new courage after the triggers of world events in 2020. Here are key albums in my catalog:

I invite you to begin by listening to the clip below, Marilyn of the Whirlwind. All that comes after fits easily into the trans-immanent psychic fields.

Read Into Immanent Function

(scroll to top)

The life-experiences that led to my formulation of Immanent Function have been best nourished and described by music throughout my life. I was born into a musical family with a folk tradition. (That’s us in Porterville, Mississippi, in the photo for The Magnification) It’s as if I have memories of hearing my mother sing and feeling the joy when I was still in utero. I have lacked for language to speak about the best experiences of my life. When you sing with a circle of persons with love, the music is all around you and inside of you. Your own voice is part of and carried by it all. The longer you sing like this, the more you begin to feel into a life on Earth that sings this same way. Even when you sing a solo or with a smaller group for an audience, when the love is there, the same experience occurs. Though you might have felt isolated and lonely at the start, after being in good music, the whole world returns as the revelation that it is.

Next, please listen to, Remember Us. The teachings in the reading are actually more a remembering of how it feels to be a sacred being in a sacred world.

How old am I? For how long have I been sleeping?

You stir my soul with language that I remember speaking.

I feel your hand shake me. I feel so far away.

I’m desperate to reach you, to see the light of day.

Help me remember us. Help me remember us.

Help me remember this.

Help me remember us. Help me remember us.

Help me remember this.

I hear you call me with a name I don’t understand.

I feel our love strongly, can’t find words to explain.

Across the table, I see you. Tears rise in your eyes

And the bird of the rooftop sings of love that never dies.

I will remember us. I will remember us.

I will remember this.

I will remember us. I will remember us.

I will remember this.

I will remember. I will remember. I will remember this.

How old am I? For how long have I been sleeping?

Please skim the entire definition of The Immanent Function. There may be unexpected words. If so, merely note them and avoid getting snagged or blocked. You only need a mental postcard of where we are headed. Throughout the essay, there are short definitions and stories that explain terms from the definition.

The Immanent Function is:

Synchronistic, embodied becoming together when two or more choose to gather for the happiness of all beings. The immanent function is the partner to C. G. Jung’s transcendent function. Individual consciousness participates in trans-immanent communion merged with the collective ecological conscious and unconscious. When in partnership, the immanent and transcendent functions make manifest the awe that opens the human heart to the Mystery of life. Their intermingling is recognized by an ensouled, living atmosphere of warmth, love, surprise and humor that makes life-cycles worth living in enduring planetary and interplanetary relationships. This is a mythology of Einstein’s theory of gravity.

Anomalous, synesthetic, paranormal, psychokinetic, miraculous, prophetic, ritual, numinous, transcendent sexual, aesthetic arrest experiences that are immanent to the transcendent occur in the midst of their union — trans-immanence. This is a declaration of the reality of the new Earth. The moon and Earth are a gravitational pair whose orbit together around the sun brings complementary phases of new/full, waxing crescent/waning gibbous, waxing half/waning half, waxing gibbous/waning crescent, full/new, waning gibbous/waxing crescent, waning half/waxing half, waning crescent/waxing gibbous, new/full, complete each other as we journey within the protective heliosphere of our yellow dwarf star. Like Beloveds, Earth and moon know each other as we journey within the solar system within the protective heliosphere of our yellow dwarf star. as we journey within the protective heliosphere of our yellow dwarf star. We cycle above, within, below, the galactic plane, about the galactic center. May our life-giving, life-sustaining, protective solar system be known as, The Heart of the Heavens. May we create together a life-giving mythology of the atmosphere in which mysteries are known to join us with our galactic neighbors.

The best entryway into Immanent Function is to read your way into it. The words below lead you there. Here are some opening words from David Bohm to help notice the recurring pattern enacted by Immanent Function:

At present, people create barriers between each other by their fragmentary thought. Each one operates separately. When these barriers are dissolved, then there arises one mind, where they are all one unit, but each person also retains his or her or their own individual awareness. That one mind will still exist when they are separate, and when they come together, it will be as if they hadn’t separated… It’s actually a single intelligence that works with people who are moving in relationship with one another…If you had a number of people who really pulled together in this way, it would be so remarkable.

in Jaworski, Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership, p. 100

In Bill Russel’s 1980 Second Wind:

Every so often, a Celtic game would heat up so that it became more than a physical or even a mental game, and would be magical. That feeling is very difficult to describe, and I certainly never talked about it when I was playing. When it happened, I could feel my play rise to a new level. It came rarely, and would last anywhere from five minutes to a whole quarter or more…It would surround not only me and the other Celtics, but also the players on the other team, even the referees.

At that special level, all sorts of odd things happened. The game would be in a white heat of competition, and yet somehow, I wouldn’t feel competitive — which is a miracle in itself. I’d be putting out the maximum effort, straining and coughing up parts of my lungs as we ran, and yet, I never felt the pain….It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion. During those spells, I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken….My premonitions were always consistently correct and I always felt then that I not only knew all of the Celtics by heart, but also all the opposing players, and that they all knew me. There have been so many times in my career when I felt moved or joyful, but these were the moments when I had chills pulsing up and down my spine.

In Passion of the Western Mind, Richard Tarnas describes Immanent Function this way:

…the inner direction and goal of the Western mind has been to reconnect with the cosmos in a mature participation mystique, to surrender itself freely and consciously in the embrace of a larger unity that preserves human autonomy while also transcending human alienation.

 In my 2001 Urrealist Manifesto:

There are always invisible visitations that enter the manifold space. Something divine can come to the table. These emerge as as-if presences, are felt as shifts in time, are perceived when turns of phrase come forth thick like sandwiches, trailing scintillae, are recognizable where the cramped and restricted ease with re-newed life. In Urreality, the full body begins to awaken to the conversation, golden chills wash over the shoulders, warm the heart, draw attention to depth. There is a sense of clarity about the face, a clarity of sensing. One is aroused and even the sensate world unveils herself delighting to be seen and truly appreciated. The heart flutters.

In Michael Olin-Hitt’s 2011 book, A Fish Made of Water: An Oracle’s Guide to the Spiritual Universe, the Messenger for which he is an oracle states:

To be fully human is to be aware of the Self beyond the self. It is a selfless Self, a sacred Self. You may wonder how can the Self be selfless? It is an identity that stretches beyond imagination, beyond reason, beyond sensibility. When you come in contact with the sacred Self, you realize that you are indeed connected to all that is, and your sense of self appears to disseminate, and you extend beyond the boundaries of your bodies, you extend beyond the border of your awareness. It is a mystical union with the Holy.

To surrender the self and receive a selfless Self is the heart of all religions.

You need not follow a specific religion to reach this place, but it is a journey that takes discipline, you must be willing to release the sense of self that is your identity in society, and you must go beyond your identity as a spiritual being. (p. 77)

In his 2015, Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of An Obsession, Ian Bostridge writes from within the nuanced shadings of his own experience:

It’s sometimes said that the measure of a great singer is that if feels as if he or she is singing to you alone: in somewhere like London’s Wigmore Hall this can often be quite literally true, and this resource—the address to the individual as well as to the mass—is a crucial part of the aesthetic transaction. (p. 153)

In Jorge Ferrer’s 2001 Revisioning Transpersonal Theory:

It became gradually obvious that the revision I was proposing could be more accurately conveyed not so much in terms of an epistemic turn, from experience to knowledge, but a participatory turn, a shift from intrasubjective experiences to participatory events which can be equally understood in both experiential and epistemic terms. Human participation in transpersonal and spiritual phenomenon is a creative multidimensional event that can involve every aspect of human nature, from somatic transfiguration to the awakening of the heart, from erotic communion to visionary co-creation and from contemplative knowing to moral insight.

In Chris Bache’s 2009, The Living Classroom:

It’s as if the floor suddenly falls away. The atmosphere in the room becomes supercharged, and everyone seems to congeal into a unified state. My mind becomes unusually spacious and clear, and my students’ eyes tell me that they have moved into a particularly receptive state. Our hearts seem to merge, and from that open field of compassion comes a slow stream of thoughts that I, as spokesperson of the group, unfold and work with. In these transient moments of heightened awareness, I sometimes have the acute sensation that there is only one mind present in the room.

In Joseph Jaworksi’s 2011 Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership, Jaworski, describes his own experience during a trial:

I began speaking straight from the heart and was operating on a level that was higher and totally different from the normal, rational, linear plane represented by the days of work that had gone into my prepared remarks. I hardly remember what I said, but when it was over, there were tears in my eyes and tears streaming down the faces of the jurors. We won the lawsuit against all odds. Most observers said it was because of the final argument. All I know was at the moment I stood before the jury, I had a feeling of accord with my young associate, my client, and all the members of the jury. As I look back on my experience as a litigator, I realize that my very best performances happened when I operated at this level. My very worst performances happened when I operated at a purely rational level. (p. 54)

Jerzy J. Maciuszko, in his 2013, Poles Apart, recounts a mysterious event that occurred while he was a Polish prisoner of war playing music in Nazi Stalag IVB:

One day, however, something uncanny occurred. During the rehearsal of the second symphony, the whole orchestra, including the conductor, went into a kind of trance. We played and the conductor went on conducting without stopping. We were out of tune and went on. Someone’s string broke. He put his instrument on his knees and we went on. We played the whole symphony uninterrupted until the very end. When the finale finally came, we all felt we had gone through some kind of transcendental experience.

The first few days after it happened, no one talked about it. Gradually, we felt we could speak on the event and wondered what actually took place. Perhaps, for an instant, we had forgotten where we were. We had forgotten about everything and were transported somewhere else.

Nelson Mandela:

A traveler through a country would stop at a village and he didn't have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have various aspects. Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve?

Ilio Delio using the term, catholicity, in her 2015 book, Making All Things New: Catholicity, Cosmology, Consciousness. For her, catholicity is recognized by:

…one who sees the world in its divine depth, which is shown precisely in the worldliness of human activities and earthly affairs. This means to be conscious of the larger dimension of our efforts, laboring in the midst of the world, so that our activities become part of the unfolding of the earth process itself. Human activity is to benefit all of life, human and non-human, seeing in nonhuman creation the inherent dignity of all creatures and our mutual relatedness to all created things…

She described her own experiences of catholicity/Immanent Function at a jazz fest and a baseball game :

The park where the festival was held was blanketed with people, a large human quilt of vibrant colors, a patchwork of young and old, families and single persons, women and men, all part of a large whole drawn together by a trio of musicians. People of various ages spontaneously started dancing on the walkways, as the lively rhythm of the music shook the earth beneath their feet: they danced with one another — old to young, black and white, disabled, feeble, geriatric, and postmodern to one another. For a moment, I had an experience of what a 'christified' world might look like, a world of many different persons, nationalities, cultures, and religions, sharing the earth, joining together in the rhythm of life. I had a similar experience at a Nationals baseball game several years ago. People of all ages, sizes, cultures, colors, and languages all gathered under the same roof, sporting the Nationals logo on baseball caps, tee-shirts, sweatshirts and gym shorts. When the team made a home run, thirty thousand people shouted and cheered with enough energy to launch a rocket. (p. 95 & p. 99)

James Hillman offers personifying as the way the soul/anima lives the individual:

The more profoundly archetypal my experiences of soul, the more I recognize how they are beyond me, presented to me, as a present, a gift, even while they feel my most personal possession. Under the dominion of anima our soulfulness makes me feel unique, special, meant — yet paradoxically this is when we are the least individual and most collective. For such experiences derive from the archetype of the personal, making us feel both archetypal and personal at the same instant.

My so-called personality is a persona through which soul speaks. It is subject to depersonalization and is not mine, but depends altogether upon the special belief in myself, a faith given through anima personifies me, or soul-makes herself through me, giving me, giving my life her sense — her intense day-dream is my “me-ness” and “I” a psychic vessel whose is existence is a psychic metaphor, an “as-if being”…

Personifying is a way of being in the world and expressing it as a psychological field, where persons are given with events, so that events are experiences that touch us, move us, appeal to us. [Personifying in Re-Visioning Psychology]

In The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding Life Purpose Through Nature, Ritual, and Community, Malidoma Some wrote how what I am calling Immanent Function is a normal practice in his tribe, the Dagara:

For instance, when women get together to make pottery, they are acknowledging that their ability to create is a part of nature’s design, a part of their purpose. Before a woman participates in the work with clay, which is the earth, she will first gather the signs and images she has seen in nature, and she will bring these signs into the circle of other women. In the interest of producing something that is an extension of their wholeness, the women will begin by chanting and singing together, echoing one another. The work is not in the form of a production line, even though a production line would have yielded more than enough of these practical containers. Nor do the women work alone. Each person has clay. They are seated in a circle, and they chant until they are in some sort of ecstatic place, and it is from that place that they begin modeling the clay. It is as if the knowledge of how to make pots is not in their brains, but in their collective energy. The product becomes an extension of the collective energy of the circle of women.

I have watched this process unfold countless times. The women can sit all day in front of two dozen mounds of clay, doing nothing but chanting — until the last hours, when in a flurry of activity all kinds of pots come forth. (p. 67)

Immanent Function opens unexpected paths for Western culture to return to right relationship with our planet together. What Russell calls, magic, and Tarnas calls, a mature participation mystique in the embrace of a larger unity that preserves human autonomy while also transcending human alienation, what I call, Urreality, and Ian Bostridge, a crucial part of the aesthetic transaction, Jorge Ferrer calls, a participatory turn, Chris Bache calls, a mindfield of shared collective consciousness, what Jaworski describes as when barriers have dissolved, and there arises one mind, where they are all one unit, but each person also retains his or her own individual awareness, what Bohm calls, collective intelligence, what Maciuszko described as, all persons feeling like they passed through a transcendental experience, Mandela’s Ubuntu, Delio’s catholicity, Hillman’s personifying, Some’s product which becomes an extension of the collective energy of the circle of women — are all examples of individual consciousness participating in communion with a nourishing human collective. This is individuality as I understand it. This is not individualism.

However powerful this form of relationship may be, it is incomplete until that human unified state includes our planet, all biological life, seasons, moons, climate of the ecosystem in ways you can also feel in communion your own being. Our sacred experiences are in circulation with the regional ecological whole and that whole also participates — individual consciousness participates in communion with the collective ecological conscious and unconscious. When in partnership, the immanent and transcendent functions make manifest the awe that opens the human heart to the Mystery of life.

The American soul continues to pave over, to can up, to wall-off, to close down wholeness. Our recurring national pattern of collective human experience split off from ecosystems, Ancestors, and Indigenous wisdom, has emerged most recently in what the Indigenous have named, the black snakes, referring to the pipelines, like the DAPL at Standing Rock, being forced over their lands.

The split in the American collective soul began at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801. Christians gathered there for a revival that set the tone for most of what has followed. This essay’s urgency is because of the dangers of religious renewal in the United States. The mindfields of large gatherings soon turn Apocalyptic when they are Bible-based. Post-COVID-19/post-Black Lives Matter, nuclear-armed Americans have a soul-responsibility to set aside the Doomsday carried here from Europe - personally and collectively.

There is a clue for healing in Stephen Mansfield’s, Lincoln’s Battle with God, published in 2012.

In this eye-witness account, you can get a sense of the transformative power of ritual and also the transformative power of nature. In the account below, the two powers are at odds. Human beings are split from their own Nature. Mansfield writes:

Though Barton Stone conceded that there were many eccentricities and much fanaticism in the excitement, he was also sure that the good effects were seen and acknowledged in every neighborhood. Stone, of course was an advocate of the revival. The report of a skeptic would be helpful too. James B. Finley attended Cane Ridge to critique. He left unchanged but impressed:

“The noise was like the roar of Niagara. The vast sea of human beings seemed to be agitated as if by a storm. I counted 7 ministers all preaching at one time, some on stumps, others in wagons. Some of the people were singing, others praying, some crying for mercy in the most piteous accents while others were shouting most vociferously. While witnessing these scenes, a peculiarly strange sensation, such as I have never felt before, came over me. My heart beat tummultuously. My knees trembled. My lip quivered and I felt as though I might fall to the ground. A strange, supernatural power seemed to pervade the mass of mind there collected.

Soon after, I left and went into the woods and there I strove to rally and man-up my courage. After some time, I returned to the scene of the excitement, the waves of which, if possible, had risen still higher. The same awfulness of feeling came over me. I saw at least 500 swept down in a moment, as if a battery of a thousand guns had been opened upon them. Immediately followed shrieks and shouts that rent the very heavens. My hair rose up on my head. I fled into the woods a second time and wished I had stayed at home.”

Fortunately, there is a growing body of evidence that the union of Immanent and Transcendent Functions are the archetypal ground of a now-universal experience that is reflected in Near-Death Experiences. The reason this is important is because it implies that we do well to cultivate the deep experiences of participation in the Immanent/Transcendent union because this activity is our own living-likeness to what is now being shared as regards what occurs in our lives nearing-death, near-death, after-death, between-lives, and pre-birth:

When I nearly drowned in the ocean at seventeen, my whole life was there within the light — but instead of a sequence of events, it came all at once. I learned that time as we think of it doesn’t exist, nor does the separation between us…In fact, it was almost as if there was no “other.” I say almost because I had self-awareness, but knew my awareness lived within an intricate pattern that existed eternally, everywhere.

That eternal, omnipresent “intricate pattern” of which Roxanne speaks, in which her self was embedded is something that many NDErs come to apprehend directly, has immediate implications and effects. Another NDEr friend of mine, Fler Beaumont, from Australia, whom I met while on a lecture tour there in 1993, also happened to write me recently about this same matter…she told me with pithy awareness: “I feel an empathy with everyone and everything and am aware of the interconnectedness and oneness of all.”

Such sentiments, as I have implied, are not only common among NDErs in the wake of life reviews, but also are extended to all life, and not just to other human beings. Tom Sawyer himself was explicit on this point:

You do have (an) effect on plants. You do have an effect on animals. You do have an effect on the universe. And in your life-review, you’ll be the universe and experience yourself and how…(you) affect the universe…The little bugs on your eyelids that some of you don’t even know exist. That’s an interrelationship, you with yourself and these little entities that are living and surviving on your eyelids. When you waved a loving good-bye to a good friend the other day, did you affect the the clouds up above? Did you actually affect them? Does a butterfly’s wings in China affect the weather here. You better believe it does! You can learn all of that in a life-review. (pp. 176-177)

Immanent To The Transcendent, Numinous, Mystical Experiences, Aesthetic Arrest

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Immanent refers to coming to, deeply delighting in our senses in the now — All that you taste, see, smell, hear, feel, know, intuit. Pink Floyd’s song, Eclipse, that closes out The Dark Side of the Moon, is an enjoyable first step into the concept:

All that you touch, and all that you see, all that you taste, all you feel, and all that you love, and all that you hate, all you distrust, all you save, and all that you give and all that you deal, and all that you buy, beg, borrow or steal…

This definition of Immanent started by Pink Floyd’s Eclipse is fulfilled when our senses merge seamlessly with the infinite that you can feel as radiant Beauty. William Blake wrote in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell (with apologies for patriarchal use of “man” for “human being”):

The cherub and his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite, and holy, whereas now it appears finite and corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment. But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged. If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern.

St. Bartholomew is a Catholic saint who was flayed. He is draped in his own skin. Here is a cautionary image to show the divide between a culture that prejudices the transcendent and beyond over the here and now. In the word association tests that proved the existence of the unconscious, our own skin, breathing and heartbeat are woven with memories. The memories woven in our flesh, breath, blood, unify us with immense depths of meaning. Bartholomew, here, gives us a warning and an invitation to value our own skin. In order to understand Immanent Function, you need a working knowledge of the unconscious and a willingness to live in relationship with the more expansive realities of soul whether called, psychoid or celestial.

Mary Louise von Franz tells the story best:

As is well known, Jung developed and changed the so-called association test experiment of Wilhelm Wundt. In this test, a list of a hundred words is put together, one part of which is composed of words to which the test persons are expected to be relatively indifferent (like, table, chair, water, glass, and so on.); the rest of the list are words that might well hit some kind of emotionalized content. The test person must associate something to each word as rapidly as possible, as for example: table--chair, glass--water, light--dark. As soon as a complex is touched, the response time slows down extraordinarily. When an important complex is touched, even the answers to the following words slow down, which is called a "perseverance phenomenon." Later this test was combined with the psychogalvanic experiment. The breathing curve or the electrical permeability of the skin can then be measured, and here a similar phenomenon is encountered: at the moment when a perseverance -- a delayed answer -- shows up, curve deviations will occur. These are measures not of the psychic phenomenon, but rather of the physiological phenomena resulting from emotional excitement….

She explains that although the test was intended to show evidence of brain lesions, Jung found within it an unexpected new direction:

He concentrated instead on illuminating the purely psychic context of delayed responses. In this way, he discovered that in the psyche there exist "complexes" -- a word well known by now -- that is, emotionally intensified content clusters that form associations around a nuclear element and tend to draw ever more associative material to themselves. They behave like unconscious fragmentary personalities. Whenever these complexes are touched off, as I have indicated, physical changes also take place... Although the complexes, as contents of the unconscious, are unconscious, they can nevertheless behave in us like additional "consciousnesses" or "personalities."

This fact was first discovered by Pierre Janet, through whose efforts a very fragmented hysteria patient of his was able to recount her conscious processes orally to her doctor, while simultaneously writing down with her left hand what her unconscious was saying. She could also to some extent enable a second unconscious person, a complex, to express itself. And here it became clear that the manifestations of this second person (in this case it was simply a complex that was very strongly repressed) also possessed a certain consciousness, a certain ability to reason and to calculate and had affects, etc., as well. Jung referred to the "consciousness" of the unconscious personality as a "luminosity." Complexes possess something resembling a very diffuse, unclear consciousness. This is clearest in cases in which an unconscious complex makes an "arrangement," which is something that can be observed in strongly fragmented personalities...

Now, Jung's second great discovery lay in not seeing the complexes as something purely pathological, as the psychiatry of his time was inclined to do, and as Freudian psychology did as well. Rather, he assumed the existence of normal complexes. In other words, our psychic system is composed of various complexes, of which the ego complex is only one among various others, and this is normal. Every human being has complexes, and these are not in themselves the cause of psychological illness -- only under certain circumstances. They are part of the normal psychic makeup. These normal complexes that everyone has are what Jung called archetypes.

...The third element in the makeup of the psyche is what Jung called the psychoid system. By this he meant that which in psyche that is completely unknown, or, we might also say, unconscious material that never comes in contact with the threshold of consciousness, the really absolutely unconscious, that which by its nature is unknown. But Jung uses the expression in a specific sense. In his view, the psychoid system is the part of the psychic realm where the psychic element appears to mix with inorganic matter.

There is a big difference between living in a culture that has cut off the infinite depths of and living in a culture where the sensual, the sacred immanence of life is a commitment we make to our ritual cycles. It’s hard to make it to Earth. It was only in 2013 that I finally got here. I was 52. It was during a men’s initiation retreat when I asked the community there to help me make it to the Earth. To prepare for the ritual, the retreat leaders asked me what kept me from the Earth? I replied: the middle-class ways of American life, the Catholic church, the science, books, and ideas that I was taught. They accepted my answer and encouraged me to reflect more deeply. Was there anything I may have left out keeping me from Earth. I replied, myself. I can’t come to Earth by myself and I have kept myself away without realizing it because I need a loving community and have not thought about it.

In the ritual, I symbolically fought my way through the layers and when I reached the end of how far I could go on my own, pairs of hands reached to grab me. The community carried me to the Earth outside the building where we were. I wept upon the Earth, feeling as if I had never been welcomed here before. I have learned the hard way that to steward my soul and the Earth in my life, I must participate in Earth-based rituals each month at least and remember my dreams each morning. It’s hard to come to Earth and it takes much more than simply being born here.

There is an excellent resource as regards the transcendent. Chris Bache in his LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven, shares culturally transformative direct knowledge. Transcendent refers to all that is beyond personal, biological, biographical knowing.

Our culture has prejudiced the transcendent above and beyond the physical universe in the here and now since the Axial Age that began in 500 BCE. Immanent Function is my contribution to balancing this over-reach. Bache poignantly reflects at the end of LSD and the Mind of the Universe:

Despite my best efforts to stay grounded in my journey, despite all the spiritual practice I had done, all the reflection and writing, somewhere along the way I had lost the critical balance between transcendence and immanence, between going beyond the physical universe and living in it. Ironically, I had replicated within myself the very failing I had criticized in the religions of the Axial Age. I had become so enraptured with the world beyond space-time that I lost my footing inside space-time. I had pushed so deeply into the Great Expanse that I was suffering not from too much God, because all is God, but from too much transcendence.

What a delicate balancing act. A little transcendence is a good thing. It is healing, reassuring, and illuminating. It can remind us who and what we are. It can teach us what we are doing here and what ”here” is. But if we drink too deeply from the well of transcendence, it can undermine our sense of belonging to the Earth, and this is an equally important truth. Most of the spiritual seekers I knew wanted more transcendence in their lives; I was recovering from too much transcendence. (p. 303)

I am also a citizen of Ohio where Chris Bache lived and taught. I think in the above text, he takes on a collective suffering that belongs to all of us in the region. The collective habit of mind he criticizes in Axial religions is the fundamental mode of mind in American culture around the Great Lakes. I have spent far too long haranguing the religious, educational, healthcare, and government institutions for whom Bache’s Gifts as regards the evolution of humanity should be a chief responsibility. The same struggle and mistakes he shares are also mine and I have had the same experience most of my life in Ohio. For now, I think the best ways forward are in supportive relationships, much like those found in Recovery. I think this is an update of the Temperance Movement now living in ways that are immanent to the transcendent.

Immanent to the transcendent, then, is immanent in such a way that both merge - transimmanence. Jung called this, psychoid. I think this is what Richard Tarnas means in his update of the prefix, trans:

As the transpersonal field moves to an understanding of human spirituality as more profoundly encompassing and participatory, many have begun to see the very word 'transpersonal' as needing to be addressed, and perhaps fundamentally redefined. For as we integrate more fully the amplitude and immanence of the sacred, we better discern that spiritual power moving in and through the human person in all her, his, their living, embodied, situated specificity: psychological and physical, gendered, relational, communal, cultural and historical, ecological and cosmic. In this understanding, 'trans' recovers its original Latin larger range of meanings -- signifying not only beyond, but also "across," "through," "pervading;" so "as to change," "transform;" "occurring by way of."

Here 'transpersonal' multivalently acknowledges the sacred dimension of life dynamically moving beyond as well as within, through and by way of the human person in a manner that is mutually transformative, complexly creative, opening to a fuller participation in the divine creativity that IS the human person and the ever unfolding cosmos. It is precisely this spiritual dynamism in the human person embedded in a spiritually alive cosmos that empowers, and challenges, the human community's participatory cocreation of spiritual realities, including new realities still to unfold.

C. G. Jung in his essay, The Soul and Death, takes up trans as well:

…I must confess, however, that the so-called telepathic faculties of the psyche have caused me many a head-ache, for the catchword, “telepathy” is very far from explaining anything. The limitation of consciousness in space and time is such an overwhelming reality that every occasion when this fundamental truth is broken through must rank as an event of the highest theoretical significance, for it would prove that the space-time barrier can be annulled. The annulling factor would then be the psyche, since space-time would attach to it at most as a relative and conditioned quality. Under certain conditions it could even break through the barriers of space and time precisely because of a quality essential to it, that is, its relatively trans-spatial and trans-temporal nature…I have referred to this group of phenomena merely in order to point out that the psyche’s attachment to the brain, i.e, its space-time limitation, is no longer as self-evident and incontrovertible as we have hitherto been led to believe.

Celestial is another way to speak of Jung’s psychoid nature, Tarnas’ evolution of “trans.”

Numinous, is a noun and adjective. It refers to powers and experiences of them that open mind and heart to the Mystery of being. The psychological definition was established in 1925 in Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational. Otto defined the numinous as: Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans. (The Terrible and Fascinating Mystery)

The advantage of the terms numinous, holy, is that they give adequate language to describe sacred experience. In the Bible, for example, the angels always say to the human beings, Be not afraid. The angels are saying this because they can tell they are scaring the living shit out of the person they are visiting. Following Campbell, the numinous is able to waken and maintain in the individual an experience of awe, humility, and respect, in recognition of that ultimate mystery, transcending names and forms, “from which,” as we read in the Upanishads, “words turn back.”

Direct experiences of the numinous are mystical experiences, thus, religious experiences. It has been established for our psychological reality since 1905 by William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience. He identified four qualities of mystical experiences:

Ineffability: The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state of mind as mystical is negative. The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.

Noetic Quality: Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for aftertime.

Transiency: Mystical states cannot be sustained for long.

Passivity: Although the oncoming of mystical states may be facilitated by preliminary voluntary operations, as by fixing the attention, or going through certain bodily performances, or in other ways which manuals of mysticism prescribe; yet when the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.

James set a foundation that mystical experiences come to us through the unconscious:

Disregarding the over-beliefs, and confining ourselves to what is common and generic, we have in the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come, a positive content of religious experience which, it seems to me, is literally and objectively true as far as it goes.

The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely “understandable” world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong.

Yet the unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change. (pp. 505-506)

The prejudice for transcendence that Chris Bache owned up to in himself also appears in Rudolf Otto’s original defining of the numinous. Western culture, itself, has reclaimed the numinous experiences of embodied belonging to Earth. It is with deep gratitude to my transcendence-seeking elders that this writing on Immanent Function carries forward their wisdom of the past. For there are vital, life-affirming mystical experiences in the revelatory immanence of love making. Immanent Function also invites the return the revelatory immanence that has always been kept alive in indigenous traditions. Otto’s original definition of the numinous was that it was not known through the body, nor the senses. Due to lived experiences, I am expanding the original definition of the numinous and affirm embodied Delight in Relationship for the good of all relationships, past, present, and future.

Aesthetic arrest is when you are completely stilled, arrested by Beauty with the capital “B.” James Joyce is already inside the mind from which I am writing to you now. He used the arrest experience in his literary works. He learned by knowing, in the Biblical sense. Nora Barnacle and James Joyce knew each other deeply. Their shared arrest experiences included love-making. He longed to bring their revelatory immanence back to Ireland where he knew that the delight they were learning was meant to be for all aspects of culture. My brither, Seamus Lafferty, The Lafferty, taught me the following about the duties of a bard in which aesthetic arrest is one of the bardic secrets:

The Three Memory Feats of the Bards of Britain:

To know the history of Britain and Cambria; to use language in all of its glory; to keep alive the genealogies and the descent of noble men.

The Three Foundations of Bardic Knowledge:

The knowledge of song; the knowledge of bardic secrets, the wisdom within.

The Three Pleasures of the Bards of Britain:

To speak knowledgably, to act wisely, to bring peace and harmony.

Joseph Campbell honors embodied numinous experiences/aesthetic arrest in his writing of love’s role in awakening the noble heart:

As in the poetry of the troubadors, so in Gottfried’s Tristan, love is born of the eyes, in the world of day, in a moment of aesthetic arrest, but opens within to a mystery of night…Love is born of the eyes and heart: the light world of the godly gift of sight and the dark of the grotto that opens within to infinity. Hence, if the goddess Amor is to be served, neither light alone, nor darkness can represent her way, which is mixed: neither Galahad’s couch to Sarras, nor the crystalline bed Tristan’s cave, but as long as life lasts—and life, after all, is her field - Gawain’s Marvel Bed of bolts and darts (Anyone seeking rest, states the author, had better not come to this bed!) is the hard war-saddle of Percival’s turtle-dove-branded charger. At the moment of the waking to love, an object apparently without, “passes [in the words of Joyce] into the soul forever…And the soul leaps at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.” Condwiramurs, conduire amour: the guide, the summoner, will have opened a prospect to the castle the passage to which, however, will have to be earned. And according to this mythology, the one way is of absolute loyalty to that outward innermost object. By this alone can the two worlds be united. (p. 357, in Creative Mythology)

As I mentioned above, Jung’s term, psychoid, describes Campbell’s the two worlds united. When we add the material world, its naturally occurring four states of solid, liquid, gas, plasma, as well as the human-created Bose-Einstein condensate, we get not only Jung’s trans-spatial and trans-temporal nature of psyche, but to them can add the trans-immanence described by Tarnas in his further development of the trans in transpersonal psychology:

…the sacred dimension of life dynamically moving beyond as well as within, through and by way of the human person in a manner that is mutually transformative, complexly creative, opening to a fuller participation in the divine creativity that IS the human person and the ever unfolding cosmos. It is precisely this spiritual dynamism in the human person embedded in a spiritually alive cosmos that empowers, and challenges, the human community's participatory cocreation of spiritual realities, including new realities still to unfold.

All this together makes for a conscious waking, dreaming breathing planet Earth with its lunar Beloved co-traveler.

Awe That Opens To The Mystery Of Life

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After satori, then practice can begin.

— Zen saying

This story is a revisioning of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The crux of this update is that my experience of the light of clear-mindedness that Plato described as an ascent in The Republic, did not describe my moment of knowing - gnosis. As of this writing, my knowledge came through images in an illuminated and creative underground. My experience was in the metaphors of dreaming and the underworld, as described by James Hillman’s Dream and the Underworld. I experienced a union of waking and dreaming consciousness that I understand as the Name, I Am Who Am, known by psychological experience. My return to life was not like returning to the people in darkness of Plato’s Allegory. My return was an embodied seeing/feeling into and through a now richly flowing radiant Nature. The metaphor that best fits my return to life as usual was that I felt like I had become deeper. The people I experienced were of varying depth and shallowness.

This journey of revival was in June of 1986. I went to France to study with Bowling Green State University’s summer program with Drs. Michael and Lenita Locey. Our group stayed with French host families, took classes at Institut de Touraine, and traveled. This was also a romantic trip because Paula, my wife of three years at that time, also joined in as a fellow student. There have been periods of my life when the stars seem to align and summer of 1986 was a constellation like that.

One of the excursions we made was to Les Eyzies, a village on the Dordogne river in the Dordogne region of France. There has been an uninterupted habitation in La Dordogne for 55,000 years. Beneath the provencal and Cro-magnon layers of artifacts there are Neanderthal traces of life. For this reason the Musee Nationale de la Prehistoire is there.

Just outside Les Eyzies is a Cro-Magnon painted cave named, Font-de-Gaume. On a warm June afternoon at Font-de-Gaume, I experienced an initiation into the old ways, in the sense of a primal, 20,000 years old indigenous way of being. It was the most pivotal day of my life.

If you visit Font-de-Gaume today, the tours are limited to 12 persons and feature only a partial visit compared to those of the 20th century. In 1986, the public was still able to enter into the very heart of the grotte.

Our underworld guide that afternoon was a lovely blond Francaise. You could tell she knew something about how the painted caves were used for rituals long ago because of how she staged our visit. Once the group stepped through the wooden gate that protects Font-de-Gaume, she shut the door. We were plunged into darkness.

She calmly kept speaking out of what had suddenly become disorienting. She advised us to hold onto the shoulder of the person near us. We could hear her footsteps pass around us into a deeper darkness. She invited us to just follow her voice through the passage that led futher beneath the hillside. It was very much a journey winding back in time. To my eyes, the blackness took on a luminosity and everything took on a merging of literal with metaphor. Underground and Underworld were present in how sides of the tunnel were smooth and warm to touch, even as they felt uterine.

We stopped.

She was silent for a bit.

Still calmly, yet confidently speaking out of the nothingness, she asked us to stand shoulder to shoulder and face in the direction of her voice. After a pause, she said:

Ce que vous allez voir n’a pas change depuis vingt mille ans.
(What you are going to see has not changed in twenty thousand years.)

She switched on the lights and before us…..

*

To my left, our fellow student, Juanita cried out:

My God, I’m having a mystical experience!

The heart of Silence collapsed.

In that illumination, I too was opened to a numinous awe of Eternal Beauty. No language, sound, nor art can fully describe my rapture. In those moments, I knew, yet Remembered too, a seamless surface and depth, an Immanent Transcendence. My awareness was one of both being and seeing. By this I mean that it included who I am, was and will be. Because of this initiation, I know Eternity because I have remembered that I am Eternity evolving. It felt like 20,000 years when I was last here was just a moment ago.

Within a 45 minute tour to Font-de-Gaume, a perfectly functioning Western education grounded in Newtonian science was decisively dissolved. In a flash, I had suddenly died, transformed and been reborn into an accidental Cro-Magnon/Neanderthal heretic.

The transformation did not end as we left the cave. Re-emerging into the upper world of the 20th century, I enjoyed a simultaneous seeing and feeling into all the life around me. I could sensually feel the historical and geological ages beneath my feet. Those layers themselves rested upon, as if rooted into a timeless symbolic ground. I understood the shapes, colors, motions and intentions of each tree, bird, plant, breeze. I knew how the underlying summer’s pattern within and around us in-formed all events. In the Depths of it all, hummed a constant and faithful Silence.

For the next 4 days, my wholeness continued. Paula and I were also trying to conceive our first child. The love-making of those days was of the same Depths where we were husband and wife participating in life, human, divine, animal. Though I have started to write about those days now, at that time, I did not admit my transcendent sexual experiences to anyone.

The rest of our time in France, I worked on a song to better integrate and share it. I had been reading a lot of Alan Watts and stories from Zen. I chose the word, Satori, for the song title. Satori in Zen means awakening. In the closing days, I had an odd bookend to the journey. I went for a walk at night alone. It was a starry night and I rounded a corner to see a yard strewn with Gallo-Roman and medieval fragments of sculptures. What caught my eye was a marble head that seemed to be pushing upward out of the ground. Its face appeared to be gazing at the heavens above. The Star-gazer prompted me to complete the song by making it a koan, which is a word puzzle given to throw open the cages of the mind. What is the sound of one hand clapping?, for example. So, a bit grandiose, but it goes like this:

Satori

See how slowly summer turns
To her own completion?
Bring your piercing Reason and seek this hidden Love.
It’s quick as light!
It’s quick as Light!
Singing river, peaceful song
Mocking your confusion,
Feel your true Emotion and speak this hidden Love.
It’s quick as Light!
It’s quick as light!

Reach and

Touch your own hand.

Over the years since, I read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 with Font-de-Gaume in mind. There are a few ways to understand marriage of true minds. One of them for me is the marriage of my mind of this life with its immortal portion. I read this as a singer-teacher and affirm that no true singer-teacher should offer any songs, stories or teachings or in any way get in the way of the marriage of the true minds of all persons around them. This marriage of minds is the Way of Nature with its morphogenetic fields.

Sonnet 116 (Shakespeare)

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me prov'd,

I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

I also have felt affirmed by Wittgenstein’s propositions:

Proposition 6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

Proposition 6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

Proposition 6.4311 If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

William Blake’s Marriage Heaven and Hell, as well, with care for the olde man-language:

The cherub and his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite, and holy, whereas now it appears finite and corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment. But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged. If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern.

Here, too, is Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ account of her knowing in On Life After Death:

My physical pain disappeared at the moment I uttered the word “yes” not in words but in thoughts. And instead of a thousand deaths, I lived through a rebirth beyond human description.

It started with a very fast vibration, or pulsation, of my abdominal area which spread through my entire body and then to anything my eyes could see — the ceiling, the wall, the floors, the furniture, the bed, the window, the horizons outside my window, the trees and eventually the whole planet earth. It was as if the whole planet was in a very high speed vibration. Every molecule vibrated. At the same time, something that looked like a lotus flower bud appeared and opened into an incredible, beautiful colorful flower. Behind the lotus flower appeared the light that my patients talk about. And as I approached this light through the open lotus flower, with a whirl in a deep vibration, I gradually and slowly emerged into this incredible unconditional love, into this light. I became one with it.

At the moment of merging into this source of light, all vibrations stopped. A deep silence came over me, and I fell into a deep, trance-like sleep from which I awoke knowing that I had to wear a robe, put my sandals on, and walk down the hill. This would occur at the moment the sun was rising from below the horizon.

Approximately an hour and a half later I woke up, put on my robe and sandals and walked down the hill. I experienced probably the greatest ecstasy of existence that human beings can ever experience on this physical plane. I was in total love and awe with all life around me. I was in love with every leaf, every cloud, every piece of grass, every living creature. (p.70)

The description she gives aligns very much with descriptions of Indigenous rituals where upon completion, everyone walks again into a beautiful world. This would be my own experience some 25 years later when I began attending a Sun Dance during the moon of the ripening choke cherries.

In his Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research, Stan Grof has language for my Font-de-Gaume moment — a holotropic state of consciousness:

The Beyond Within

In systematic spiritual practice involving holotropic states of consciosness, we can repeatedly transcend the ordinary boundaries of the body-ego. In this process, we discover that any boundaries in the material universe and in other realities are ultimately arbitrary and negotiable. By shedding the limitations of the rational mind and the straightjacket of common sense and everyday logic, we can break through many separating barriers, expand our consciousness to unimaginable proportions, and eventually experience unity and idenity with the transcendental source of all being, known from the spiritual literature by many different names.

When we reach experiential identification with the Absolute, we realize that our own being is ultimately commensurate with the entire cosmic network, with all of existence. The recognition of our own divine nature, our identity with the cosmic source, is the most important discovery we can make during the process of deep self-exploration. This is the essence of the famous statement found in the ancient Indian scriptures, the Upanishads: Tat tvam asi. The literal translation of this sentence is, “Thou art That” meaning “you are of divine nature,” or “you are Godhead.” …This revelation concerning the identity of the individual with the divine is the ultimate secret that lies at the core of all great spiritual traditions, although it might be expressed in somewhat different ways. (p. 276)

After satori, then practice can begin.

— Zen saying

Immanent And Transcendent Functions

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In my definition of Immanent Function, I mention C. G. Jung’s, Transcendent Function. His Transcendent Function was how he described the complementary union of consciousness with the unconscious. Here is the opening lines of his longer text on the Transcendent Function found in Jeffrey C. Miller’s book, The Transcendent Function: Jung’s Model of Psychological Growth Through Dialogue With The Unconscious:

There is nothing mysterious or metaphysical about the term, “transcendent function.” It means a psychological function comparable in a way to a mathematical function of the same name, which is a function of real and imaginary numbers. The psychological “transcendent function'“ arises from the union of conscious and unconscious contents.

Experience in analytical psychology has amply shown that the conscious and unconscious seldom agree as to their contents and tendencies. This lack of parallelism is not just accidental and purposeless, but is due to the fact that the unconscious behaves in a compensatory or complementary manner towards the conscious. We can put it the other way round and say that the conscious behaves in a complementary manner to the unconscious. The reasons for this relationship are:

1. Consciousness possesses a threshold intensity which its contents must have attained, so that all elements that are too weak remain in the unconscious.

2. Consciousness because of its directed function, exercises an inhibition (which Freud calls, censorship) on all incompatible material with the result that it sinks into the unconscious.

3. Consciousness constitutes the momentary process of adaptation whereas the unconscious contains not only all the forgotten material of the individual’s own past, but all the inherited behavior traces constituting the structure of the mind.

4. The unconscious contains all the fantasy combinations which have not yet attained threshold intensity, but which in the course of time and under suitable conditions will enter the light of consciousness.

   This reality explains the complementary attitude of the unconscious towards the conscious. (p. 146)

I can offer an example of transcendent function by sharing the dream that encouraged me to go with Paula to France that summer of 1986 with the Loceys. This is the story behind the story.

Earlier in the year, the Loceys had invited us to join them for the program, but I was wavering. Paula and I talked about it, but there was no clear sense of direction. A few weeks after the invitation, I dreamed a dream in which Paula was asking me about the trip. It was one of those dreams where you speak of things that seem normal in the dream, but on waking, they seem quite mysterious. The dream conversation entered into subjects that included architecture, painting, money. At the end of it in the dream, she kissed my temple and said, “Well, we should go then.” I woke up and told her that I think we need to go based on the dream. This is how the Transcendent Function works. The conscious and unconscious team up together for the greater dynamic wholeness. For Transcendent Function, that dynamic force urges you onward to becoming more of who you really are. It is personally prophetic.

Transcendent function is not imagined as a collective experience, nor do any ecosystems, stars, nor seasons of the year appear. In the Jungian literature, the union of day and night minds is limited to the individual. In a Jungian therapeutic relationship, the analysand learns interior soul guidance — individuation. This is why Miller’s book on the transcendent function includes, Jung’s Model of Psychological Growth Through Dialogue With The Unconscious. He and Jung both limit their subject to individual agency.

Transcendent function, as unique as it can first appear when you learn about it, is actually an updated name for one of the mainstays of indigenous wisdom. We are guided by dreams. In The King and The Corpse, Heinrich Zimmer highlights this idea as regards wisdom found in ancient stories, in this case, in Irish tales:

The moral of the story, at this point, is one generally voiced by Irish myths and fairy tales: follow your unconscious intuitive forces blindly and with confident faith; they will carry you through your perilous trials. Cherish them; Believe in them; do not frustrate them with intellectual distrust and criticism; but permit them to move and sustain you. They will bear you through the barriers, across thresholds and beyond dangers that could not be met by any other guide, surpassed on any other mount. And until they ask you of themselves to consummate what will be felt as a painful parting, do not kill them. When the time comes, they will mark the moment and indicate the way; for, better than the rider, these mute forces understand that death, the dolorous sundering, is a prelude to rebirth, transmutation and reunion, and they know the possibility for the miracle is present. They know what our ego, conscious and rational, never will comprehend, must not even try to comprehend before the instant of the event itself: they know, namely, that there is no death. (p. 45)

I can attest that Zimmer’s counsel as regards being blindly guided by your unconscious intuitive forces, garbed in Celtic aura, leads to moments of remarkable genius - except for when it leads to madness. The most valuable turning points of my life have come when I was delivered by uncanny guidance, yet, the same guidance, when I was fearful about over-riding it, landed me in the psych ward. Ultimately, my days in the ward were some of the most healing in what seemed like a thousand years of effort. So, as of this writing, in the depths of his message, Zimmer is trustworthy, however, I’ve learned what amounts to a coyote lesson, or a Sacred Clown teaching. Sometimes, we need protection from God’s guidance because sometimes the Highest Power of our understanding learns in us, with us, by us, beyond us, through us.

Immanent Function is a collective becoming together. As a form of interdependent group individuation, the transcendent Functions of all participants merge in ways that include the environment. Michael and Lenita Locey were and still are professors who deeply love each other. They loved and still love their shared vocation. When the students around them rose to the occasion to become a unified whole, magic resulted. So, I was not alone. Juanita was also opened. I am not sure who else was, but to this day, the guides who work at Font-de-Gaume call this kind of initiatory opening, La Revelation. Immanent Function’s unified becoming together seamlessly woven into all life is an ecopsychological step because of the participation of Earth.

I am only a beginner in the work being done in African nations using the concept of Ubuntu which translates as, I am because we are. What I think I am writing about is a Western entryway into meeting the same universal love from our cultural locations.

Vulnerable Potency Potent Vulnerability

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But I have not been allowed to know the identity and nature of the communities that belong to the specific organs of generation. They are actually too inward for anyone in a lower sphere to understand. They relate to uses of those organs that are deeply hidden and far removed from knowledge.

[p. 177, in The Universal Human and the Soul-Body Connection, by Emmanuel Swedenborg]

Font-de-Gaume left me with a task that I am completing with this essay. In Ohio, in 1986 the only books that came close to describing my experience were Carlos Castenada’s. His were all drug-induced which were of little use because I come from a family in the 12 Step movement. Finally, in 1989, I found some light at the end of my tunnel. I had started a Jungian analysis in 1988 with Dr Vocata George, the founder of the C. G. Jung Educational Center of Cleveland. Vocata and the Jung Educational Center’s book collection opened the way to Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine, by Eugene Monick, published in 1987. Phallos soon became vital to my task. Dr. Monick also had La Revelation at Font-de-Gaume. I didn’t know this when I finally met him in Cleveland in 1991. I learned about it in 1992 when I asked him about the paleolithic drawing at the opening of his book.

Dr. Eugene Monick was a Jungian Episcopal priest. His efforts were to empower humanity, especially men, to separate masculinity from patriarchy. He encouraged a renewal of embodied sacred manhood via the recovery of a forgotten image of God in its male form, the erect male organ of sex, that he named, Phallos. In Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine, he made the case that axis mundi and shamanic awareness are most needed by men now to draw away from the patriarchal melt-down and embrace ecomasculinity, my term for developing his use of the Jungian term, psychoid and his term, Phallos.

Axis mundi and shamanic awareness were revealed by his own Font-de-Gaume initiation into the 20,000 years old primal ways. He, too, was a reborn accidental Cro-Magnon/Neanderthal Heretic whose Western mind had been decisively dissolved. Axis mundi and shamanic awareness were also revealed by dreaming. It was one dream in particular that helped Gene to recollect the lost archetypal image he, himself, needed to separate masculinity from patriarchy. He was at a major crossroads of his professional life as vicar at St. Clement’s in New York City. He was also in Jungian analysis with the first Jungian in America, Esther Harding. In his dream, he was on his back with an erection. His feet were up against an immense phallus rising up from the ground. There were other men with him in that same position:

At that time, I was working analytically with Esther Harding, the first Jungian analyst in the United States. She was an elderly and rather delicate-appearing maiden lady, the daughter of an English vicar. I brought her my dream of a great phallos appearing in a circle of naked men who were lying on the ground. Each man had his feet placed upon the base of the phallos, and each man had his hand upon his neighbor’s erect member. Dr. Harding asked about the central image: “Was it a man’s phallos?” “Certainly not,” I replied, “it was much too big for that.” “Was it a giant’s phallos?” she asked, “No, it was much too big even for that.” Well, then, Mr. Monick, whose do you think it was?

The implication was that it was for me a god-image, even a symbol of the Self. I remember that she was amused by her line of questioning and by my surprise. I remember that I was bemused by the possibility of a phallos being as strong a presence as divinity. As a Christian priest, I was not at ease with a phallic god-image, St. Clement’s or no St. Clement’s. I had nowhere to put such a suggestion, no way to incorporate it into my life. (p. 33, in Phallos)

He felt a team-unity as the men held each other, aligned. In the dream there was such a surge of joy, power, worthiness and confidence that he woke up a changed man. He could feel a new inner strength that carried him forward. As vicar at St. Clements after the dream, he leaned into the job with new vigor and assurance from within – with vulnerable potency. He was unable to find any description of this kind of experience in any Freudian nor Jungian texts nor in any text of depth psychology, no description of the underpinnings of maleness save for in one of Jung’s more gnostic books, Seven Sermons to the Dead. Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine came out in 1987. However, he did not fully disclose his choice of the term, phallos, until 1993 in his Evil, Sexuality, and Disease in Grunewald’s Body of Christ.

Dark Christ: Gnosis—Secret Knowledge

…Jung claimed to be scientific and empirical in his investigation of the psyche, but he was not in the modern sense of demonstration by laboratory replication. He meant by his claim that he took with utmost seriousness the phenomenology of psychological experience, including the oddity of images as they appear in apparently self-determined ways. It is important to note that in physics, the most radical and abstract of the modern scientific disciplines, post-Einsteinian development is remarkably compatible with Jung’s intuitive notions of the psychoid natures of the archetypes and of the material world: that matter is essentially psyche-like and the psyche is essentially material…

Early on, Jung wrote an odd monograph called, “The Seven Sermons to the Dead,” in which he spoke in the fictitious voice of a second-century gnostic teacher Basilides, expounding truths revealed by a god named Abraxas. The work later became an embarrassment to Jung himself, to say nothing of his more conventional followers. To me, it is Jung at his secret best. In the fifth sermon, he wrote:

“Man shall know that which is smaller, Woman, that which is greater…Man shall call spirituality Mother, enthrone her between heaven and earth; He shall name sexuality Phallos and shall place it between himself and the earth.” (pp. 48-49)

It is within the gnostic and secret Jung of the Seven Sermons that Eugene Monick’s Phallos carries forward Carl Gustave’s unanswered questions.

Using amplification of the dream theme, he was also able to find the psyche’s archaic language reflected in a pre-historic Japanese sacred site, Nonakado Stone Circle, that spoke of the numinosity of his dream.

He was also able to find accounts in folklore, anthropology and ethnography of the vertical shaft of axis mundi that was the shaman’s method of penetrating the other worlds and returning. He emphasizes this in the lines below. Informing the lines is the deeper, Nonakado-like mythic dream experience that changed his life from within. What led him to encourage men to embrace axis mundi and shamanic ways was that he had done it himself first.

I had the same dilemma with my Font-de-Gaume experience that Gene had with his archetypal masculine dream. Institutional support in the United States for a male’s embodied union with Eternity is yet to be seen. Heterosexual erotic spirituality has seldom existed in patriarchy with the troubadors’ cult of Amor of the 12th century the one exception to this. You can imagine what a breath of fresh air it was to read at the opening of Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine. Recall he was saying this more than 30 years ago now:

Men need to understand the psychological underpinnings of their gender and their sexuality better than they do. One might think that in a patriarchal society males would grasp the basis of masculine identity naturally and spontaneously. They usually do not…There is a lack of contemporary Jungian writing about masculine issues in general, and almost nothing, since Erich Neumann’s Origins and History of Consciousness, on the archetypal basis of masculinity…Unless masculinity is differentiated from patriarchy, both will go down the drain together…

To write of archetypal masculinity means to concentrate upon phallos, the erect penis, the emblem and standard of maleness. All images through which masculinity is defined have phallos as their point of reference. Sinew, determination, effectuality, penetration, straightforwardness, hardness, strength — all have phallos giving them effect. Phallos is the fundamental mark of maleness, its stamp, its impression. Erection points to a powerful inner reality at work in a man, not altogether in his control. The inner reality may be different from a man’s conscious desires at a given time. Phallos is subjective authority for a male, and objective for those who come into contact with him. That’s what makes phallos archetypal. No male has to learn phallos. It presents itself to him, as a god does. (p.6)

Five foundational ideas pertaining to phallos as defined by Eugene Monick are:

Patriarchy is not the same as masculinity and must not be equated with it. It is not necessary to diminish or subordinate masculinity as one draws away from patriarchy, quite the opposite.

Phallos is sacred to men as the manifestation of the inner self. “Hierophany,” Mircea Eliade’s term for “a manifestation of the sacred” describes the holiness of phallos to men. It is a key to understanding the experience.

Phallos is co-equal with the feminine in origination and is god in its masculine form.

Both solar (sun, light, spiritual) and chthonic (underworld, instinctual, lunar) are sacred and essential to masculinity…to judge one as superior and the other as inferior is, at the least, misleading.

The shadow of phallos, its negative and destructive element, is present in both solar and chthonic phallos.

For the mindfield of collective consciousness to merge with the planet, it requires more than having the meeting place be outside where the participants can forest bathe. There are flashes of planetary merging hinted at in the examples above from Bill Russell, Chris Bache, Jorge Ferrer, Delio, Jaworski, Bohm, Maciuszko, Sheldrake, and me. I created a mash-up out of the examples with some helping conjunctions, conjugations and punctuation:

You are aroused and even the sensate world unveils herself delighting to be seen and truly appreciated. The heart flutters in erotic communion as the mind becomes unusually spacious and clear. One not only knows all of the others by heart, but also all those who oppose, and they all know you. You forget where you are, forget everything and are transported somewhere else. to be conscious of the larger dimension of our efforts, laboring in the midst of the world, so that our activities become part of the unfolding of the earth process itself. Your participation is to benefit all of life, human and non-human, seeing in nonhuman creation the inherent dignity of all creatures and our mutual relatedness to all created things. You are in the world and expressing it as a psychological field, where persons are given with events, so that events are experiences that touch us, move us, appeal to us. A strong bonding takes you out of yourself and you are part of something bigger than yourself.

The full experience came out of Font-de-Gaume:

Re-emerging into the upper world of the 20th century, I enjoyed a simultaneous seeing and feeling into all the life around me. I could sensually feel the historical and geological ages beneath my feet. Those layers themselves rested upon, as if rooted into a timeless symbolic ground. I understood the shapes, colors, motions and intentions of each tree, bird, plant, breeze. I knew how the underlying pattern of summer within and around us in-formed all events. In the Depths of it all, hummed a constant and faithful Silence.

For the next 4 days, my wholeness continued. Paula and I were also trying to conceive our first child. The love-making of those days was of the same Depths where we were husband and wife participating in life, human, divine, animal.

Collective Ecological Unconscious and Conscious

Theodore Roszak uses the term, ecological unconscious, in his 1992 mentor text for ecopsychology, Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology. For Roszak, the ecological unconscious is the core of the mind. It includes the living record of cosmic evolution, tracing back to distant initial conditions in the history of time. Life and mind emerge from this evolutionary tale as culminating natural systems within the unfolding sequence of physical, biological, mental and cultural systems we know as ‘the universe.’ Ecotherapy, then, works to awaken the inherent sense of environmental reciprocity that lies within the ecological unconscious.

The collective ecological unconscious is our cultural split from its ecological core of the mind. The way Western culture has lived the past 500 years is called Normative Dissociation. As your inherent sense of environmental reciprocity awakens, the bioregion in which you find yourself begins a conversation with you. You learn to read the sacred text of each season and learn to live wisely in right timing with that season. The ecologically conscious person who lives in constant communication with the planet has achieved what Roszak calls, the ecological ego. I call the world of the ecological ego, the ecological conscious. A culture of ecological egos living relationship with the planet participate in the collective ecological conscious. A name for returning to participate in the collective ecological conscious is re-indigenization and also, decolonizing.

When we were kids in Norwalk, Ohio, my brother, Rob, a neighbor, Pat, and I, were playing near our home by a cornfield one summer. Out of the corn came a red fox. We watched it quietly for a moment. It turned and darted back into the field. We looked at each other with surprise when suddenly, it came out of the corn again. It looked at us. I think it wants us to play with it, said Rob. For the next 2 hours, we chased the fox into the corn and along the rows of the cornfield. Sometimes, it would let one of us hold it. We got some dog food for it which it ate. The game went on until we were satisfied. When the fox saw we were losing energy, it turned and disappeared back into the corn.

Years later, as I emerged from my ecological unconsciousness, the day we were visited by the fox came back to me. When I examined the visitation with the idea of synchronicity, as if the event were a waking dream, the meaning deepened. Our last name, Reynolds, has connections to the French word for fox, renard. The Reynolds family crest features 4 foxes. At turning points of my life, red fox has been a visitor. Over the years, many people I meet have had similar experiences of one-of-a-kind visitations by fellow citizens of the bioregion. For that reason, I have coined the name for those visitations, The Enchanted Land or The Mind of the Land. I encourage developing relationships with beings of one’s home ecosystem with the challenge to, Harmonize the Mind of Place.

Reclaim Ecomasculine Nature

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I heard Gene tell the following story a number of times when he presented. His recollection was about when he kept an office for Jungian practice in Philadelphia. At one point, he was invited to volunteer his skills to help in an urban neighborhood. One day, a man came in seeking Gene’s guidance. When Dr. Monick asked him, he replied, I’m having trouble with my Nature. Gene had never heard that expression before so he asked the man to please repeat what he had said? My Nature! I’m having trouble with my Nature! Still no good. Gene replied, I don’t understand what you mean. What do you mean by your nature? To that, the man pointed at his genitals. Oh! Your Nature! I get it!

I share this story now to make the case that if our collective consciousness is ever going to get right with nature, it will have to include our Nature. What follows now is an archetypal ecology by way of the Monickian opus on Phallos. This includes bringing the work forward, but also taking it to a next stage of development.

Underpinning even this more expansive approach is our inherited tradition of amor, the Noble Heart, which Campbell roots in the Celtic Christianity of Pelagius:

…whereas according to the Gnostic-Manichean view, nature is corrupt and the lure of the senses to be repudiated, in the poetry of the troubadors, in the Tristan story, and in Gottfried’s work above all, nature in its noblest moment — the realization of love — is an end and glory in itself; and the senses, enobled and refined by courtesy and art, temperance, loyalty and courage, are the guides to this realization. Like a flower potential in its seed, the blossom of the realization of love is potential in every heart (or, at least, every noble heart) and requires only proper cultivation to be fostered to maturity. Hence, if the courtly cult of amor is to be catalogued according to its heresy, it should be indexed rather as Pelagian than as Gnostic or Manichean, for as note in Occidental Mythology, Pelagius and his followers absolutely rejected the doctrine of our inheritance of the sin of Adam and Eve, and taught that we have finally no need of a miraculous redemption, but only of awakening and maturation; and that, though the Christian is advantaged by the model of Christ, every man is finally (and must be) the author and means of his own fulfillment. In the lyrics of the troubadors, we hear little or nothing of the fall and corruption either of the senses or the world…in Gottfried’s world…the self-surpassing power of life, which is experienced in love when it wakes in the noble heart, brings pain to the entire system of fixed concepts, judgements, virtues, and ideals of the mortal being assaulted.

In the same spirit that Campbell defines as “each man to be the author and means of his own fulfillment,” Abraham Maslow’s Peak Experience/Experience of Unitive Consciousness is described by Stan Grof:

Episodes of Unitive Consciousness ("Peak Experiences")

The American psychologist Abraham Maslow studied many hundreds of people who had unitive mystical experiences and coined for them the term peak experiences (Maslow I964). He expressed sharp criticism of Western psychiatry's tendency to confuse such mystical states with mental disease.

According to him, they should be considered supernormal, rather than abnormal, phenomena. If they are not interfered with and are allowed to run their natural course, these states typically lead to better functioning in the world and to "self-actualization" or "self-realization' - the capacity to express more fully one's creative potential and to live a more rewarding and satisfying life.

Psychiatrist and consciousness researcher Walter Pahnke developed a list of basic characteristics of a typical peak experience, based on the work of Abraham Maslow and W. T. Stace. He used the following criteria to describe this state of mind (Pahnke and Richards I966):

Unity (inner and outer)

Strong positive emotion

Transcendence of time and space

Sense of sacredness (numinosity)

Paradoxical nature

Objectivity and reality of the insights

Ineffability

Positive aftereffects

As this list indicates, when we have a peak experience, we have a sense of overcoming the usual fragmentation of the mind and body and feel that we have reached a state of unity and wholeness. We also transcend the ordinary distinction between subject and object and experience an ecstatic union with humanity, nature, the cosmos, and God. This is associated with intense feelings of joy, bliss, serenity, and inner peace In a mystical experience of this type, we have a sense of leaving ordinary reality, where space has three dimensions and time is linear. [In, Psychology of the Future, p. 157]

There is a mental prejudice that I find people bring to Grof's writing that we leave ordinary reality and find that space no longer has 3 dimensions. time is non-linear. The actual experience is one of tremendous Now/Here and of depth that embraces and infuses ordinary reality with sacredness. It's not flying up and out and it's not self-annihilation, but a completion, a fullness into wholeness that makes being alive on our planet take on new meaning.

I think it's safe to place Maslow’s Peak Experience/Episodes of Unitive Consciousness to the Troubadors' Pelagian Heresy of True Love of Beloveds as a psychological underpinning for Phallos. Both experiences open the heart to the awe of being alive. Amor/Episodes of Unitive Consciousness/Peak Experiences invite each man to be the author and means of his own fulfillment.

Claiming the Pelagian/Maslowian underpinnings of our Nature moves deeper still through Chris Bache, through the Cloud of Unknowing. Bache shares:

I found myself moving beyond the images, stories, and beliefs that human history has imprinted on the collective psyche. The cultural forms we have worshiped and used to interpret life fell away like wardrobe falling off the shoulders of actors, and Nature stood naked before me once again, inviting me to see it afresh. All forms, even the glistening splendor of archetypal forms, are intermediaries to that which lies beyond form. As the author of the fourteenth-century Christian mystical treatise, The Cloud of Unknowing, reminds us, if we ever hope to glimpse the true nature of the Divine, we must unlearn everything that we have been taught about God. (p. 153, in LSD and the Mind of the Universe)

The Pelagian awakening and maturation of the sacred in human beings cannot be done alone. Amor is experienced in relationship and through relationship of True Love with the capitals “T” and “L.” While the storyline of The Davinci Code does not develop the theme of amor, the awakened and mature experience of God is with us - Emmanuel - is the Grail - a loving chalice that is made together by two:

Find below my experience of love that opened up the noble heart of me. The song title, Belikane, is name of the Muslim woman who loves a Christian knight, yet chooses to remain Muslim. It is a reference to the pelican that was once thought to nurse its young on its own blood.

In the Grail stories, there is a message that the Grail cannot come home until the followers of all the forms of patriarchal monotheism sit down together and remember that all human beings are of our same solar system and galaxy. Chretien de Troyes used Islam and Christianity, but it could be Hindu and Sikh, Jewish and Lakota, or any way of life of the planet:

Towards New Consciousness

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Eugene Monick called patriarchal culture, Present Consciousness. He named his goal, New Consciousness. In 1987, he wrote:

Axis mundi is the ancient image needed by men today as they experience the disintegration of patriarchal Present Consciousness. Surrender to reemerging matriarchy is not the solution, either cultural or personal. It is regressive and will produce, eventually, a stringent reemergent patriarchal attitude in vain defense of masculine identity. There is no need for males to fear females and act out such fear as tyrant or slave once a primary-process inner connection with phallos is engaged and dependably functional. Axis mundi, suggesting the rigorous, precarious heroism of the shaman, is just the ticket. (p76 in Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine)

Gene got the ancient image right. However, he was unable to unbind Axis mundi from the image of a flat-Earth found in the Ptolemaic geocentric cosmology, the idea of the horizon of a collective kingdom, empire, nation in the heliocentric cosmology of our ancestors. Neither their flatlands nor realms are ours. Their mundus was a wide disk supported by pillars or Globe ruled by a single power . For each culture, the axis was the central mound, mountain, tree, city, sacred ritual center — The Hill. In the Bible, for example, one headed ‘up’ to Jerusalem and ‘down’ on the way home. Our orbis is a turning, orbiting sphere. Our axis mundi is not only a bi-polar centerline of balance. It also gives a sense of direction like that of a gyroscope that can hold its attitude due to its gravity and spin. His New Consciousness is planetary. It is of balanced cultures living with a galactic cosmology of the emerging participatory world view. (We have to come down off the Hill.)

There was a main sticking point for Gene as a Jungian to make the full transition out of the pure heaven above-fallen Earth below, geocentric mental habits, the one single power supported by geocentrism or heliocentrism. Certainly, one brand of stuckness was due to his years of priestly ritual based on the Bible’s flat Earth mythology and all Christian rituals. However, there was a second sticking point that tends to be a mental habit of those who follow C. G. Jung’s use of what Jung called, the supraordinate personality, God-image, Anthropos, and/or two-dimensional mandala for their image of the Self. (Mandala is Sanskrit for circle.) The Jungian Self, for Jung, is the supposedly central archetype or “self,” which seems to be the point of reference for the unconscious psyche just as the ego is the point of reference for consciousness, both the psychologically organizing center and whole of the human psyche. When you look at the geometry of a planetary sphere versus a flat-world circle , the advantages of using a 4-dimensional hyperspherical Self image turning on its W-axis of consciousness are unexpected and surprising. When you allow the Self-image to also be a World-image, the confusions caused by the mandala and God-image ease. An axis, radius, surface area, volume of a four-dimensional hypersphere of Self and World, both empower and bring into relationship our individuality.

Geometers May Enter Here

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This is the front cover of Dane Rudhyar’s book, Rhythm of Wholeness. The picture on the cover over-lays the two dimensional circle of the yinyang above the three dimensional sphere of our planet. This picturing that presents three dimensional planetary reality as a two dimensional flat circle is misleading. This two dimensional yinyang over the Earth is only 1/4 the actual size of Earth’s surface.

The yinyang, according to the I-Ching, was originally inspired by observing the moon’s 8 phases from the darkness of the new moon to the illumination of the full moon and back again into darkness. It describes the rhythm and the relationship of complementary opposites that symbolize the living pulse of the Tao. The Earth, too, has this kind of rhythm; the changes of day and night and the four seasons of the year. Rudhyar’s invitation in the book is for the reader to learn how to be in balanced relationship with the embodied wholeness of the planet. He is referring to a bi-polar, seasonally affected humanity that is seamlessly woven with the depths of the cosmos.

However, a two-dimensional circle (mandala):

does not equal a voluminous, three dimensional rotating and revolving planetary sphere with its own turning, “revolutionary” moon:

In Indigenous wisdom, the mandala for Earth is the Medicine Wheel:

Though it appears flat to us, there is an above and below implied due to how the sun in the northern hemisphere is always in the south. To older cultures, the Wheel has an above the south and a beneath in the north. Plato shares this same way of seeing the world. It is an automatic assumption of what geometry calls, a Z axis of depth that accompanies the vertical Y axis and the horizontal X axis of three dimensional reality.) Plato’s Timaeus explains what is called the celestial equator and the ecliptic. The ecliptic is the sky path that the sun, moon and planets appear to follow. The ecliptic passes above (south) and below (north) the surface. In Timaeus, where the celestial equator and ecliptic join together in the form of the Greek letter, Chi. (x):

So, reading the yinyang from the Indigenous perspective makes for a 3D image with X, Y, and Z axes, like so:

The assumption of the Western mind when looking at the Indigenous mandala of Earth through the lens of the yinyang generally looks like a 2D circle with only X and Y axes, like this:

A circle with an X axis and a Y axis is not the same as a sphere with an X axis, Y axis and Z axis. They are different because a sphere has an added degree of freedom that a circle lacks. Find below short geometry lessons on the relationship between the two dimensional surface of a mandala and the three dimensional surface of a sphere when both share the same diameter. This is followed by a short description of early 20th century art that expressed 4 dimensions. Four dimensional space has another degree of freedom called the W axis, the axis of consciousness.

With 2, 3, and 4 dimensions in mind, there is one more step of the pre-teaching. There are 2 clips about the 4th and 5th dimension.

If it is helpful to consider, then I invite you in. If your usual sense of expansiveness feels nailed down or confined by these short pre-teachings, then, it’s ok to skip over it to the section, Opening Up Entering In.

For You Who Are Curious

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In Jungian parlance, shadow means all elements of our wholeness that are unconscious to waking consciousness. Shadow first comes upon us during adolescence when it sets us apart and makes us all strangers to an alien world. Living with the rising waters of the unconscious feels overwhelmingly personal even though the same human journey has occurred and will always occur so long as there are human beings. Shadow is personal, yet at the same time, our awareness opens into the vast dynamic and infinite depths of the unconscious. In Winterreise, by Schubert and Muller, it’s possible to catch a view of shadow as noted by the word, Fremd.

Gute Nacht

Fremd bin ich eingezogen,
Fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus.
Der Mai war mir gewogen
Mit manchem Blumenstrauß.
Das Mädchen sprach von Liebe,
Die Mutter gar von Eh’, –
Nun ist die Welt so trübe,
Der Weg gehüllt in Schnee.

Good Night

A stranger I arrived here,
a stranger I go hence.
Maytime was good to me
with many a bunch of flowers.
The girl spoke of love,
her mother even of marriage.
Now the world is dismal,
the path veiled in snow.

Ian Bostridge’s book on Winterreise, Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession, gives an excellent list of a web of translations for Fremd that can be used to approach our own psychological shadow: stranger, someone else’s, different, foreign, alien, strange, other, outside, unfriendly, not related, of another house, not one’s own, hostile. To his terms, I add from my own work on the theme of the orphan soul: orphaned, abandoned, not good enough to keep, profoundly unworthy, worthless, ruined nature lost.

There are remarkable gifts when someone shows you how to apprehend all that is of you that seems like someone else’s. An astounding mass of unlived, undeveloped raw potential awaits those who would seek it out and bring it up into awareness. A sphere helps us imagine those buried treasures. Already, at the start, an idea such as, the surface of a sphere is four times its shadow, opens up three more mandalas where there used to be only one. Your wholeness is three times more expansive than the absurd alien you can feel yourself to be — especially the three directions of past, present and future.

This awareness is important because shadow here means shallow. Unconsciousness implies awareness stuck, tied, frozen to, a shallow, dim outline or covering. Shadow as shallow is a caricature that hides as it hints at, that masks, blocks you from the deeper truths it simultaneously reveals. It is due to shallowness that we condemn and cut off regions of our psychological totality and refuse relationships with them. Fullness begins by considering four times the meaning in what your current shallow, “flat,” mind and “deep fake” feeling has treated as the whole of you and all those around you too.

A 2-dimensional shadow seen from the side is a narrow, one dimensional line. Thomas Berry described this kind of narrow shadow as: Since the industrial revolution, the human mind has been placed within the narrowest confines it has experienced since consciousness emerged in the Stone Age.

The experience of shadow in adolescence is one of numinosity, thus, of living myth.

This is an update of Plato’s Cave.

The surface of a sphere is 4 times its shadow.

A person’s journey to claim soul and learn from psyche’s wisdom through dreams includes coming to Earth in new, unforseen, seminal ways. Our own dreams are of the Dream of Earth. Thomas Berry wrote of this in his book of the same title:

Beyond our genetic coding, we need to look to the earth, as the source whence we came, and ask for its guidance, for the earth carries the psychic structure as well as the physical form of every living being upon the planet.

Psychologically, this means to remember the Earth dreams us. To become psychological is to become aware of what depth psychologists at first named our own unconscious complexes. Mary Louise von Franz writes in her book, Matter and Psyche:

As is well known, Jung developed and changed the so-called association test experiment of Wilhelm Wundt. In this test, a list of a hundred words is put together, one part of which is composed of words to which the test persons are expected to be relatively indifferent (like, table, chair, water, glass, and so on.); the rest of the list are words that might well hit some kind of emotionalized content. The test person must associate something to each word as rapidly as possible, as for example: table--chair, glass--water, light--dark. As soon as a complex is touched, the response time slows down extraordinarily. When an important complex is touched, even the answers to the following words slow down, which is called a "perseverance phenomenon." Later this test was combined with the psychogalvanic experiment. The breathing curve or the electrical permeability of the skin can then be measured, and here a similar phenomenon is encountered: at the moment when a perseverance -- a delayed answer -- shows up, curve deviations will occur. These are measures not of the psychic phenomenon, but rather of the physiological phenomena resulting from emotional excitement.

She explains that the test was originally intended to show evidence of brain lesions, but Jung took it in an unexpected direction:

He concentrated instead on illuminating the purely psychic context of delayed responses. In this way, he discovered that in the psyche there exist "complexes" -- a word well known by now -- that is, emotionally intensified content clusters that form associations around a nuclear element and tend to draw ever more associative material to themselves. They behave like unconscious fragmentary personalities. Whenever these complexes are touched off, as I have indicated, physical changes also take place...

...The third element in the makeup of the psyche is what Jung called the psychoid system. By this he meant that which in psyche that is completely unknown, or, we might also say, unconscious material that never comes in contact with the threshold of consciousness, the really absolutely unconscious, that which by its nature is unknown. But Jung uses the expression in a specific sense. In his view, the psychoid system is the part of the psychic realm where the psychic element appears to mix with inorganic matter.

Although the complexes, as contents of the unconscious, are unconscious, they can nevertheless behave in us like additional "consciousnesses" or "personalities." This fact was first discovered by Pierre Janet, through whose efforts a very fragmented hysteria patient of his was able to recount her conscious processes orally to her doctor, while simultaneously writing down with her left hand what her unconscious was saying. She could also to some extent enable a second unconscious person, a complex, to express itself. And here it became clear that the manifestations of this second person (in this case it was simply a complex that was very strongly repressed) also possessed a certain consciousness, a certain ability to reason and to calculate and had affects, etc., as well. Jung referred to the "consciousness" of the unconscious personality as a "luminosity." Complexes possess something resembling a very diffuse, unclear consciousness. This is clearest in cases in which an unconscious complex makes an "arrangement," which is something that can be observed in strongly fragmented personalities...

Now, Jung's second great discovery lay in not seeing the complexes as something purely pathological, as the psychiatry of his time was inclined to do, and as Freudian psychology did as well. Rather, he assumed the existence of normal complexes. In other words, our psychic system is composed of various complexes, of which the ego complex is only one among various others, and this is normal. Every human being has complexes, and these are not in themselves the cause of psychological illness -- only under certain circumstances. They are part of the normal psychic makeup. These normal complexes that everyone has are what Jung called archetypes. (p. 5)

Since the initial awareness of psychological complexes and archetypes our map of consciousness has expanded to what are called COEX systems or COEX constellations. Waking and embodied life is seamlessly merged with infinite depths/Eternity, The Great Song that the Gaels called, Oran Mor.

According to Stan Grof in his Psychology of the Future, a COEX system or COEX constellation:

…consists of emotionally charged memories from different periods of our life that resemble each other in the quality of emotion or physical sensation that they share. Each COEX has a basic theme that permeates all its layers and represents their common denominator. The individual layers, then contain variations on this basic theme that occurred at different periods of a person’s life. The unconscious of a particular individual can contain several COEX constellations. Their number and the nature of the central themes varies considerably from one person to another…in addition to negative constellations, there are also those that comprise memories of very pleasant or ecstatic moments and situations.

In my present understanding, each of the COEX constellations seems to be superimposed over and anchored in a particular aspect of the trauma of birth. The experience of biological birth is so complex and rich in emotions and physical sensations that it contains in a prototypical form the elementary themes of most conceivable COEX systems. However, a typical COEX system reaches even further and its deepest roots consist of various forms of transpersonal phenomena, such as past-life experiences. Jungian archetypes, conscious identification with various animals and others. (p.23, in Psychology of the Future)

Here again is Jeffrey C. Miller’s (depth psychology’s) invitation to learn the value of those myths as ways of seeing into and gaining insight into shadow experience of unconscious contents:

Unconscious materials, such as contents of numinous experiences, have no conscious language adequate for clarifying their meaning. This lack of an appropriate language occurs because unconscious materials are psychic phenomenon alien to the conscious mind through which they are communicated. Jung has observed that unconscious contents, because their nature is unknown, have a tendency to self-amplification, that is to say, they form the nuclei for an aggregation of synonyms. He states: “When something is little-known or ambiguous, it can be envisaged from different angles, and then, a multiplicity of names is needed to express its peculiar nature.” These synonyms are unmistakably mythological in their character, and Jung regards them as the inborn language of the psyche and its structure or “the language of the unconscious which lacks intended clarity of conscious language.”

This archaic, non-rational language of the psyche is universally found in such unconscious materials as dreams, fantasies, psychotic episodes, fairy tales, myths and religious literature, such as various accounts of the Buddha’s experience of the numinous…the images, thus amplified, which are otherwise obscure and confusing, can become clearer and more intelligible by being permitted, in a sense, to speak for themselves. The method of amplification cannot attempt to establish or designate the specific content of a numinous experience; it can, however, approximately reveal the essential nature of the experience. [p. 128, Transcendent Function]

Becoming Together And Synchronicity

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Joseph Campbell’s 1968 Masks of God: Primitive Mythology has an excellent description of becoming. Becoming is one of the gifts of the power of myth. It comes as a result of being willing to enter into the play of ritual space. He tells a story of a child who bothers her hard-working father in his study. He gives her 3 burnt match sticks to play with. Over time, she imagines the matchsticks into persons, one of them is a witch. As time passes further, suddenly she screams and runs to her father. She begs him to take the witch away because it is bad. The burnt matchstick was transformed from make-believe witch into a psychological reality. A matchstick became a witch.

There are many sections on becoming in Belden C. Lane’s 2019 book, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul. Here’s one:

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that human perception is deeply invested in a full-bodied exchange with the rest of the world. Sitting near his home on the seacoast near Bordeaux, he writes: “As I contemplate the blue of the sky…I abandon myself to it and plunge into the mystery, it ‘thinks itself within me.’ I am the sky itself as it is drawn together and unified…my consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue.” The lines blur between his perceiving and the stunning character of what he perceives. The sky ‘thinks itself within him. (p. 26)

A friend who is a Civil War re-enactor in the Ohio 8th Infantry of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) told me that one of the most powerful experiences in a re-enactment is when time shifts and it all becomes real. He said they call it, Seeing the Elephant. A man enters into the performance of an event and over time, it becomes real as he turns back to see his friend get shot crossing the creek.

I was in a sweat lodge with the intention to finding a new way forward in my life. At the end of the 3rd round dedicated to the direction of the East, during the time of the Sacred Clowns, I was stretched onto the ground feeling my heart beat against it. Suddenly, I became a stone. Alex, my mentor at that time, recognized the value and encouraged me to stay with it and learn by being. I am still being nourished by knowing how it feels to be a living stone. Other names for becoming are shape-shifting, somatic transfiguration, identifying with, and knowledge by identity. The various names indicate the profoundest form of knowing. Thou art That, is a description of how this experience feels when you become the Mystery.

Erich Maria Remarque in his 1931 follow-up to All Quiet On The Western Front, The Road Back, describes a remarkable sequence of becoming:

White Mary’s threads, cobwebs, shimmering gossamers, float in the air. They hang from the stalks and leaves, the wind bears them along, they catch on my hands, on my clothes; they spread themselves over my face, my eyes, they cover me up. My body, now even my body is passing into the meadow. Its boundaries are becoming uncertain; it is no longer apart, the light breaks down its contours and at the edges it is beginning to be unsure.

Above the leather of my shoes rises the breath of the grasses; into the woolen pores of my clothing presses the odor of the earth; through my hair blows the moving sky, which is wind; and the blood knocks again against the skin, it rises to meet the incoming thing, the nerve ends are erect and quivering. Already I feel the butterfly’s feet on my breast and the tread of the ant echoes in the concave chambers of my veins — then the wave gathers strength, grows stronger; the last resistance has carried away and now I am a hill without a name, grass and earth ——-

The noiseless streams of the earth ebb and flow and my blood flows with them; it is borne along with them and has part in them all. Through the warm dark of the earth it is flowing with the meaning of crystals and quartzes; it is in the secret sound of the weight with which drops sink down among the roots and assemble to thin runnels in search of the springs. With them it breaks out again from under the ground; it is in brooks and in rivers, in the glistening banks, in the breadth of the sea and in the moist siver bapour the sun draws up again to the clouds. It circles and circles; it takes ever more and more of me with it and empties it into the earth and subterranean streams; the chest sinks and collapses, the arms fall away; slowly and without pain the body disappears; it is gone; now only the fabric, only the husks remain. The body has become the trickling of subterranean springs, the talk of the grasses, moving wind, rustling leaf, and silent, resounding sky. The meadow comes nearer, flowers grow through it, blossoms sway over it. I have sunk down, forgotten, poured away under poppies and yellow marsh marigolds, over which butterflies and dragonflies hover. (p.308)

Synchronicity is C. G. Jung’s term for the ways the union of the conscious and unconscious coincide with outer events in life. Meaningful coincidence is a thumbnail definition. In my story, there is a synchronistic significance to know that I am a living stone and the end of the 3rd round. In the Lakota tradition, that moment after the 3rd round and before the 4th is the turning point when the tears of sorrow become the tears of laughter. It is the time of the Sacred Clowns. I know from experience how at times a major life change, I can expect to be visited by the beings the Lakota call, Heyoka, the Thunders, and water-healers. Synchronistic becomings are deep well springs that have carried me forward for decades. They are not bound by spacetime.

Becoming is the reality of myth. Our mental capacity is used in service to a reality with more degrees of freedom than 3 dimensional reality. The same expanded intuitive capacity is used in quantum physics. The full experience of mind is usually reduced to 3 dimensions when we need to focus. Paying bills on time, showering, shaving, driving a car, getting groceries, picking up the kids, mowing the lawn, painting the house, going to work, coming home, doing dishes, all need the clear focus of a mind held to 3 dimensions. If 3D focus is a choice, it is a gift. If your mind cannot imagine any deeper potential than going to work, coming home, doing the dishes, etc., Indigenous wisdom calls this kind of mind, the suicide level. The gifts of becoming are that the expanded mind keeps you alive, especially when the routine you have falls apart.

James Hillman describes becoming and its meanings in Re-Visioning Psychology:

The fact that psyche can never be identified with any of its locations or incorporations and that it must always be distinct from body is not a tragic disaster, the result of man’s two natures. We are engaged here neither in a theology of many placing him between ape and angel, nor a philosophy or science of man dividing him between mind and matter. Soul is distinct from body because soul may not be identified with any literal presentation or perspective. As the perspective that sees through, the psyche cannot itself be another visibility. As connecting link, or traditionally third position between all opposites (mind and matter, spirit and nature, intellect and emotion), the soul differs from the terms which it connects. Its distinction from body is only in terms of literalism, the literal notion of body, encased in skin, out there. This notion also distorts soul into some sort of pious ghostly vapor, running the physiological machine as a little invisible subject in a control tower.

But the moment we realize body also as a subtle body — a fantasy system of complexes, symptoms, tastes, influences and relations, zones of delight, pathologized images, trapped insights — then body and soul lose their borders, neither more literal or metaphorical than the other. Remember, the enemy is the literal, and the literal is not the concrete flesh but negligence of the vision that concrete flesh is a magnificent citadel of metaphors. (p. 174)

In a becoming together, also known as an as-if experience, the literalism of the 3 dimensional reality does not go completely away. You are fully aware that the event is happening in a sacred space, in a time out of time, a time between, liminal.

An example of becoming together was when Alex felt what was happening and encouraged me to stay with my experience. We were there in the sweat for the happiness of all beings, not just for ourselves. Had he been filming it with a Go-pro, it would look like me laying on the ground not a big rock with a heart-beat. He saw Chris Reynolds stretched out in the lodge with his 3D awareness. Because he understood sacred space, he entered into the mythology of the ritual . When I told him I am a stone, he did not correct me and tell me the fact of the matter is that a person cannot be a stone because that is impossible and that real science proves it.

Being able to live well with both ways with your mind is embodied by the firekeeper in an Indigenous ritual. That person holds the line between the spaces for the good of both. My friend, Neil, was at this sweat lodge too as firekeeper. In fact, he was hunkered down in the rain and darkness near the fire. If someone would have stumbled into the ceremony, Neil would have put himself between that intruder and the sacred space. Anything that attempts to enter sacred space has to come through the fire-keeper first.

Conversely, had I suddenly jumped up in living stone possession wanting to proclaim some new revelation to the neighborhood, Neil would know I am speaking in myth but planning to go where 3 dimensional humility and respect for others are the rule of law. In that case, Neil would tell me I am not a stone and that it is rude to head out a-preachin’ to people who didn’t ask for it.

Sadly, I think the Cane Ridge revivals included becoming together but with no water-pourer elder, no fire-keeper, no Earth-based integration. Barton Stone named Christian becomings – exercises. Here’s more from Mansfield’s Lincoln’s Battle with God:

“…years later in his autobiography, Stone catalogued the unusual manifestations that were common at Cane Ridge. There was the “falling exercise” in which a person would, with a piercing scream, fall like a log on the floor, earth or mud and appear to be dead. Then, there was the phenomenon called, “the jerks.” Stone insisted that in this manifestation, a man’s head would be jerked backward and forward or from side to side so quickly that the features of the face could not be distinguished. “I have seen the person stand in one place and jerk backward and forward in quick succession, their head nearly touching the floor behind and before.” There was also the “dancing exercise,” the “barking exercise,” in which “a person affected with the jerks, especially in his head, would often make a grunt or a bark, if you please, from the suddenness of the jerk.” There was the “laughing exercise.” Understandably there was the “running exercise” in which persons feeling something of these bodily agitations, through fear, attempted to run away. More pleasant was the “singing exercise” which came from a person in a very happy state of mind, singing entirely from the breast.

Based on what I have learned, I think my sweat lodge experience is a lot like what Barton Stone called the “falling exercise” without the screaming. The difference for me was having a ritual space to enact Immanent Function through Earth-honoring ways.

An equally important difference between my lodge experience and a Cane Ridge experience is due to the difference between the Indigenous world view and the Christian world view as regards human beings. In my experience of becoming a stone, though I was nourished by a healing power far more ancient and larger than me, it simultaneously felt like I was learning a fact about myself that had always been true. At Cane Ridge, when the Spirit fell upon the people, they were told they being saved by a power higher than them to which they had to submit. A human soul did not include such a virtue.

The difference here has to do with participation. When I told Alex, “I am a stone,” he did not respond in Cane Ridge-style: “Submit to the Almighty Power of the Great Stone of Heaven because you are nothing!” He encouraged me to be in and of the stone, that is, to participate.

Note how Barton Stone’s description of the exercises above lacks any information at all from the participants. Each and every person who fell like a log in the mud or jerked or sang or ran or barked was realizing an inner fact already present but unrealized, already embedded in a larger family, clan, already in a sacred ecosystem. Though it was a simultaneously more ancient and larger reality, they were also of that reality.

Whether there is virtue by nature always present in a human being or if virtue has to be introduced from an outside source is an old struggle in Western culture. It was Socrates’ argument with the Sophists. For Socrates, a teacher brings out or ‘leads out’ (educare) inner virtue. For the Sophists, a person has to submit to the instruction to obtain virtue human souls lack. Indigenous wisdom sides with Socrates.

There is a lovely section in Jenny Wade’s Transcendent Sex: When Lovemaking Opens The Veil that closes out the themes of becoming together and synchronicity nicely:

The Face of God

What is the core of the unio mystica? If all the saints and spiritual masters — and the lovers from this study — are correct, it is finally achieving the soul’s desire to see God. But when people are taken into God, they find that Spirit has no face at all — or no face other than all of What Is, no other face than their own, Our Own.

The mystical experience of God transcends the symbolic gradations of the canonical Bible and rabbinical literature. Mystical Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all describe something very different from any personified being — and very different from anything that can easily be conceived. For instance, Sufi mystic, Abu Yazid Bistami, who began by courting God as a lover tells of his gradual abandonment of any notions of an anthropomorphic God as his contemplation deepened:

“I gazed upon [God] with the eye of truth and said to Him, “Who is this?” He said, “That it is neither I nor other than I. There is no God but I.” Then he changed me out of my identity into His Selfhood…Then I communicated with him…saying, “How fares it with me with Thee?” He said, “I am through Thee; there is no god but Thou.”

Sufi mystic al-Hallaj was martyred when he proclaimed his own experience of God in the words, “Ana’l Haqq,” which can be translated as “I am the Truth” or “I am the Absolute.” Or as the Christian saint Catherine of Genoa said, “My Me is God, nor do I recognize any other Me except my god Himself.” In the King James New Testament, St. Paul’s words are similar: “I live, yet not I, but Christ in me,” which can be more contemporaneously translated as, “but I am living, not as I, but for it is Christ who lives me.”

The same staggering realization reverberates throughout the reports of lovers during transcendent sex. According to one man, the moment of recognition is the purest ecstasy and awakening:

“It’s real! I can embody all my spirit and it is divine. At the same time I felt it coming from the outside, it was also coming from the inside. It was evident that it was also in me. I participate in divinity in a direct, inclusive way. There’s no separation at all…

It wasn’t a call, it wasn’t a sign. All the things I had interpreted as it weren’t true. Was there a face to God? No. Or a presence? The presence was us. We were just there. It just was…”

We really are All That Is. We are. We are All That Is. All That Is.

What Is The Image?

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In Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Jung gives his understanding of how the psyche will express itself in dreams using circles and synchronicity:

In such cases it is easy to see how the severe pattern imposed by a circular image of this kind compensates the disorder of the psychic state — namely through the construction of a central point to which everything is related, or by a concentric arrangement of the disordered multiplicity and of contradictory and irreconcilable elements. This is evidently an attempt at self-healing on the part of Nature, which does not spring from conscious reflection but from an instinctive impulse. , (p. 388)

When Jung’s Self-image appears in dreams, it is not bound by time. This would make any Jungian mandala of the Self a four dimensional psychological idea. When Jung creates a mandala, even when he apparently draws a two dimensional circle, his psychological ideas belong more closely to descriptions of a hypersphere or a four dimensional sphere.

This is important to know. It can be helpful to recall that Jung lived at a time when artists worked hard to conceive of showing four dimensions using the flat two dimensional surface of a painting. Jung’s mandalas belong to this constellation of creators.

I am aware of Jung’s own dismissal of his art as Art. There is a famous inner-dialogue he had. He recounted:

When I was writing down these fantasies, I once asked myself, ‘What am I really doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with science. But then what is it?” Whereupon a voice within me said, “It is art.” I was astonished. It had never entered my head that what I was writing had any connection with art. Then I thought, “Perhaps my unconscious is forming a personality that is not me, but which is insisting on coming through to expression.” I knew for a certainty that the voice had come from a woman. I recognized it as the voice of a patient, a talented psychopath who had a strong transference to me. She had become a living figure within my mind. Obviously what I was doing wasn’t science. What then could it be but art? It was as though these were the only alternatives in the world. That is the way a woman’s mind works. I said very emphatically to this voice that my fantasies had nothing to do with art, and I felt a great inner resistance. No voice came through, however, and I kept on writing. Then came the next assault, and again the same assertion: “That is art.” This time I caught her and said, “No, it is not art!

Current quantum string theory posits ten+ dimensional reality. At the start of the 20th century, the concept of a 4th dimension of consciousness was just becoming conscious. I think we do well to give Jung’s inner woman’s prophetic voice her due. Though he is chauvinist and harsh calling her a talented psychopath with a strong transference, she was, in fact, prescient as regards what has unfolded historically. When Jung spoke of this, he admits a temptation to leave psychology and go live in some garret in Paris. Both points of view have proven their worth. They can both be heard now, for many consider Jung’s mandalas and creative writing in The Red Book to be art as well as depth psychology.

Jung affirms his four dimensional awareness of humans in his 1959 BBC Face to Face interview two years before his death:

…we know that there are these peculiar faculties of the psyche - that it isn't entirely confined to space and time. You can have dreams or visions of the future. You can see around corners and such things. Only ignorance denies these facts, you know; it’s quite evident that they do exist and have existed always. Now these facts show that the psyche is not under obligation to live in time and space alone, and obviously, it doesn’t. Then, to the extent that psyche is not subjected to those laws, that means a practical continuation of life, of a sort of psychical existence beyond space and time.

Stars Behind The Blue

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In Paris, at the 1907 Cezanne Retrospective, a new way of art making came forth that implied a 4th dimension of consciousness and multiple depth perspectives present in the moment we experience as now. The painting above, The Pigeon Tower at Bellevue, expresses a reality that is only possible by simultaneous seeing from multiple points of view. One of the points of view is airborn, looking down at the tower from above it.

I apologize ahead of time about introducing the 4th dimension and its W-axis of consciousness in what comes next. I ask that you relax into it. The W-axis is what you already have been doing your entire life. The W axis is your own axis mundi that unites your daytime waking “I” and your nighttime “I” of dreaming. The “I” of the daytime, the person you are as your read this is the direction called upward that generally lives in a flow of time with a present that has a past and a future. It is the direction of one who is infinitely One. You say in the morning, “I had a dream.” Last night’s dream is in the past for you. But, at night, the dream has you. Not only that, but in the dream, all the persons, animals, etc. are your own wider psychological wholeness. Your “I” is just one of the players in the play. Your dreaming I where one who is infinitely Many lives is in the downward direction of the W axis.

When you learn to make sense of your dreams and begin making choices based on them, you gain degrees of freedom that are the gifts of the W axis. The common name for this access to time is intuition. You say of this freedom that you have a hunch, you feel it in your gut, or in your bones. In depth psychology, this is Transcendent Function.

Look again at the union of the 2 points of view in Pigeon Tower. They are simultaneous and separated depth perceptions in curved spacetime. This is the beginning of how to include the W axis to 3 dimensions. If you would have to literally move to see from both points, this is to add the downward direction of the W axis.

The liberation from the depth perspective of single time-locked point of view, a move from 3 dimensional seeing to 4 dimensional seeing – 2 points in different spacetimes as a now, is the new degree of freedom of expression. The freedom he gained in the four dimensional uses of color to express volume and form both prompted Picasso to describe Cezanne as, father of us all. You can track those lines of development through what followed.

This is Pablo Picasso’s 1921 Cubist painting, The Three Musicians. In Cubism, first developed by Picasso with Georges Braque, the method of expressing the fourth dimension of consciousness occurs because the painter imagines that he is set free from spacetime and is able to be in all locations at once. You, the observer, are spread through the curves of spacetime to different points of view while looking at the players and their dog under the table. In this 4D image, you are standing and aware simultaneously in locations in front, behind, on all sides, seeing from multiple points of view a moment that unites past, present and future — reality apprehended all at once.

Notice the sheet music on the music stand. A three-dimensional “you,” locked into a sequence of moments in spacetime, would not be able to see both sides of the music stand at once. However, a 4D “you” sees not only front and back of the music stand, but also from points of view all around, all at once. This is how you can imagine the W axis joining vertical, horizontal, and depth in its conscious unity. You can count it yourself, but I am able to make out 14 points of view in Three Musicians. 1/14 = Fourteen in the downward direction.

The numbers I just used above; 1/14 = Fourteen in the downward direction, belong to our numerical roots before the introduction of zero. The more ancient numbers are qualities and also describe music. They are imagined as emerging out of the One that precedes the one. You can see this in the Fibonacci sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13….. There is a One before the one.

When you work with the older numbers that describe consciousness, it looks like this:

….1/8, 1/7, 1/6, 1/5, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 1, 2/1, 3/1, 4/1, 5/1, 6/1, 7/1, 8/1…..

In the lives of my student, Dave McGary, and my nephew, Jack, there are dreams that featured the infinitely vast and the infinitely small. For them, the experience was troubling. I was not able to offer the above as quickly as I wished I had. I just didn’t have the knowledge when the theme first came up. It works well, however, to approach what are a lot like Alice in Wonderland dreams of becoming tiny or gigantic. Artists of the early 20th century who worked with the 4th dimension and the W-axis are also a way to strengthen this wholeness of human consciousness.

Here is another example from Picasso. His Head of a Boy is from the Rose Period, (1904-1906). He painted Head (Tete) in 1926 using the same Cubist 4D style in Three Musicians. In the first, you see one point of view (W = 1/1). In the second, you see three points of view, both sides and the frontal view (W = 1/3)

In his Nude Descending a Staircase, Marcel Duchamp approaches the question of spacetime by having the point of view of the painter be a stationary axis around whom spacetime unfolds all at once. This is like time-lapse photography, but time does not occur in a series, it happens all at once. Once again, points in past, present and future are apprehended as a whole and immediate four dimensional now. Once again, the W axis. W = 17/1, Upward to seventeen.

I want to acknowledge that if Cezanne’s freedom from a single time-locked cell of perception made him, father of us all, then, Duchamp’s freedom of the cells of perception in a single human body, makes him mother of us all.

There is a Russian fairy tale in which the hero gets help from a wise old woman who turns him into a pin and sticks him to the wall. She does this to teach him to listen in what is a vertical vision quest. This, too, is Duchamp’s view. Feel/know/perceive all times in the interior of all spaces of yourself.

To review, the W axis has two directions just as the X, Y, and Z axes in geometry. There is an infinity towards One — upward (ana in Greek) and an infinity towards Many– downward. (kata in Greek) Those two directions are in the paintings above. Downward is moving in the direction of the many points of view. Cezanne’s Pigeon Tower has its simultaneous 2 points of view. They are, however, a single point in the downward direction of the W axis — I am two. The Three Musicians, with its multiple points of view in the space around the subjects is a further downward — I am Fourteen. 

The upward is moving in the direction of infinite One. The single viewpoint that sees the motion of the nude walking down the stairs, 17 steps, is a point along the upward direction of the W axis — Seventeen am I.

At first, wrapping your head around a W axis mundi upward or downward makes for a WTF moment. Remember that human beings have an inborn species wisdom. Though unusual at first, things simplify when you recall that the W axis is our natural capacity. W axis is a way to think about it dreaming and consciously take them up. You can gain an extra degree of freedom.

The “I” of daytime mind is an experience of All with One.  — It includes a point on the upward direction of the W axis with X, Y, and Z. The nighttime mind is an experience of One with All. In dreams, we are among our own complexes, ancestors, archetypes, etc. The dreaming ‘I’ is a role you play in the theater below – downward.

Our minds are focused in the day. They unbind from spacetime during the night. Learning how to unite the two halves of a mind is a major life task. I repeated above that Jung named the ability to unify two minds. Transcendent Function. My two minds unified when I dreamed Paula kissed my temple, woke up and Remembered and then used Memory to assist my Will. Unifying Memory and Will opened life to France. The most pivotal journey of my life was guided by an intuition about the future. Along the W axis, I moved downward where dreaming has us.

Our Western tradition describes the psychologically experienceable Infinite One upward as The Father. This is a way to describe the Will and Imagination. The Infinite Many downward is The Mother. This is a way to describe Memory and Recollection.

As a bridge to mandala as hypersphere, Salvador Dali’s Sacrament of the Last Supper uses the structure of a four-dimensional dodecahedron. Earlier in his 4D paintings, Dali had worked with a four-dimensional cube — a hypercube or tesseract. Here again is the idea of experiencing past, present and future all at once using geometry. Inside four dimensions of a hyper-dodecahedron, Dali is inviting us to imagine that when the Eucharist is celebrated, it simultaneously merges Western culture’s platonic solid that symbolized the fifth element, aether, the atmosphere of the heavenly realms, with that moment of the Last Supper in Jerusalem, with the entire life of Christ, and the the future. Dali used hyper-forms repeatedly, during a time in his later years when he revisited his childhood faith and hoped to re-animate Catholic imagery like the Madonna and Child, the Crucifixion, and others. This is a one seeing many from its axial single viewpoint, so W axis upward, W = 12/1. I think there are 12 times aligned here. Twelve am I.

To complete Gene’s work with Phallos, it’s helpful to know how to imagine four dimensions expressed as two and then imagine phallos as a four+ dimensional reality. It can also be useful to know the geometry that can lead your mind from a circle of two dimensions to a sphere of three. Phallos is X, Y, Z, and W axes embodied. The sovereignty of soul that comes with Phallos understood in this way is that it places the decision to participate or not in a larger collective/community/mission/culture with the individual in question. The central mountain is the individual among many other central mountains.

To understand this shift, there are two ancient tales written about ana and kata worth noting more carefully. Anabasis (expedition up from/the ascent) by Xenon describes an army’s move from the coast upward to the interior as a way to claim authority. Such an idea of power held at the high place of a central mountain or mound is an aspect of the flat earth cosmology of 370 BCE. Katabasis, is Greek for a downward journey/descent, however, it also means the journey from the center of a country to it’s outer edge. Katabasis originally also was held bound within the flat earth and central power.

A person who has ana and kata in his/her/their own will is not bound to the collective rule.

Ears Ringing Heads Humming

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It is from the three dimensional sphere that the planetary hypersphere of New Consciousness might synchronistically drop like an apple of awakeneing into the hand. The next clip is a moving image that invites us into a view of the 4th dimension from the 5th. In my own experience over the years, 5 dimensional awareness comes as ringing in my ears. Usually, one ear, but sometimes both. The soundless Sound tends to highlight very precise moments and acts as an existential highlighter. My intuition is that this way of perceiving is not visual as we understand it, but we can use images to offer the likeness. Synaesthesia which is a blending of the senses, seeing sounds, tasting colors, feeling goosebumps when someone speaks the truth, then, lives comfortably as 5 dimensional perceiving. As odd as it seems, hear/see, taste/watch, smell/observe, feel/think, the clip below – watching is ok too!

Human interaction with 5 dimensional consciousness is described in the film, Interstellar, as communicating with they, or Bulk Beings. Five dimensional expanded awareness also represents the future human – They is us. They are us. We is them. We are us.

There are other authors who took on the task of developing human intellectual flexibility, fluency, and comprehension of 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, dimensions. Edwin Abbott Abbott’s 1884, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, is an excellent example. I’ve put a great deal of time in considering the 6th dimension. My hunch is that it is a direction associated with water – in particular, the water that frees us from all stuckness and dryness. The tears of awe, of love, of grief, of breakdown and breakthrough. The best depiction I know of this is in the film, Contact. This is a 6D+ experience of the Living Water of Life.  

I think the Tarot card, Temperance, carries this same Message as regards the embodied Beauty, Truth, Goodness that moves you to tears.

My Uncle died and returned in a Near-death Experience. He reported red and blue light, but predominantly white light in the other world. I think this light is of the 7D+ dimension. It’s degree of freedom is, would you like to participate in the magnifying of Beauty? I am aware that there are getting to be a lot of dimensions. Einstein’s gift is that we are already herethen, therenow. You don’t have to do anything to earn them. You can work for discernment in experience and in recognition.

This is a kind of map of the territory we now enter. As a map, it is not the experience, however, when you are in the experience, it helps. In my video below, I affirm that there is a ringing in my ears, and in my ear that seems to belong to a longer timeline of my life. The ringing is a highlighter - pay attention! There is a sacred experience in the Hebrew mystical tradition called the Bat Kol. There is a good description of Bat Kol by Leonard Cohen’s rabbi, Mordecai Finely, in the film, Hallelujah. Here is a good article and some words from that article on the film:

I asked him once where he draws the creativity from, and he defined it as a ‘bat kol,’” says Cohen’s rabbi, Mordecai Finley, in the film, using the Hebrew term for the voice of divine revelation. He says that Cohen told him: “I open myself to the bat kol, which recognizes my willingness to accept it; she comes, talks and goes away, leaving me to polish the things she said.

My songwriting method is similar to Cohen’s, though it also includes learning about the song during a live performance of it. Something talks back to me across the experience of singing. It’s a receptive giving mode that works this way.

Opening Up Entering In

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In Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine, Dr. Monick described his quest for some kind of psychological affirmation of his stone circle dream. He went seeking using its vertical axis and was then able to pull together a spread out array of images. His list included trees, mountains, poles whirlwinds, standing stones, even the famous 180 foot Cerne Abbas Giant with its 36 foot erection. Unfortunately, the felt-support of his phallos dream that he described as the psychological underpinnings of masculinity was almost absent in the psychoanalytic movement. There was not much. After a lot of reading all his published works, Monick found that Jung used the feminine term, anima mundi quite often when describing archetypal masculinity. Axis mundi, holy spirit or spiritus mundi, though you find it as a key co-author in psychological events, Jung attributes both roles to anima mundi acting alone. Gene observed:

Axis mundi is not an easy image to work with, since Jung, at least in his published work, did not mention the term. Not so anima mundi, to which Jung gave great attention and importance. Jung wrote, “It is clear from a number of texts that the alchemists related their concept of the anima mundi on the one hand to the world soul in Plato’s Timaeus and on the other to the Holy Spirit, who was present at the Creation and played a role of procreator, impregnating the waters with the seed of life, just as later, he played a similar role in the obumbratio (overshadowing) of Mary.”

This passage is taken from Jung’s long treatise on Mercurius, who was called, by one of Jung’s alchemical sources, the anima mundi itself. There can be no doubt that the process that Jung describes here, in its Holy Spirit aspect, is masculine. The choice of such words as procreator, impregnating, seed and ‘the overshadowing of Mary’ so indicate. Later in the paragraph, Jung comments that “here again matter and spirit are identical,” a reflection of the psychoid quality of the Mercurical presence in the unconscious. The active words used in the quotation point to the involvement of phallos.

Jung used the term, anima mundi, to describe masculine participation in creation, a situation which leads to the confusion in psychoanalytic thinking I have addressed in this work. (Phallos, p. 72)

The Dreaming Shaft Of Radius Mundi

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Gene claimed axis mundi as the masculine archetypal ground necessary to underpin men’s inner and outer relationships with the feminine. He imagined that the feminine had anima mundi as its own archetypal ground. By doing this, he went too far. His solution works for a flat-Earth understanding of patriarchal Present Consciousness. On a flat Earth, the masculine is vertical and the feminine is horizontal. As you saw above, Dr. Monick’s argument with Jung was that Jung seemed to speak out of both sides of his psychological mouth when it came to having any archetypal support for men and their bodies. He recalls to us how in Jung’s published works, the term, axis mundi, as a description of the divine masculine, never occurs.

When Jung did describe archetypes of the divine masculine, his habit was to refer to them mixed together with the archetype of the feminine, anima mundi. Gene drew apart the masculine archetypes; whirlwind, giant, eagle, mountain, tree, pole, etc, and to point out that the image behind them was a vertical axis mundi. With full embracing of axis mundi, he urged men that the passage forward was necessarily shamanic.

This was a Promethean task. Personally, he shared how fearful he was as he wrote. Sometimes, he admitted, he had to drink himself into a kind of Dutch Courage, as the old soldiers used to say. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the harm caused by drinking to gain courage to do a difficult task and the punishment upon Prometheus for stealing from the Gods to help humanity both afflict the same blood-cleansing organ. Mythologically, you pay the price of going against the current world view in order to steal a greater dignity for humanity with your own liver.

Dr. Monick’s phallos trilogy: Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine, Castration and Male Rage, and Potency: Masculine Aggression as a Path to the Soul, all elaborate on his original statement of axis mundi and shamanic knowing as the proper partners to anima mundi and the rising sacred feminine.

Even more heroic was the risk he took to lift 2500 years of Western demonization from sacred sexuality, both masculine sexuality and feminine sexuality. For there is not a single character in any monotheistic storyline where a male human (using phallos) can meet and make love with his Beloved as a way to know and share together in the numinous rapture of the Divine.

The foundational assumption of Present Consciousness that the vertical masculine is the complement of the horizontal feminine breaks down when what is essentially a two dimensional patriarchal model expands to three dimensions. On the sphere of a planet of New Consciousness, the flat horizontal feminine expands to three dimensional feminine interiority and the thin vertical superior masculine to three dimensional masculine exteriority. On a planet, interiority implies movement inward from the surface towards its axis. Exteriority, then, in order to complement direction from surface to within, goes from inner to outer — from axis mundi to surface.

Both interiority and exteriority, towards or away from the axis of a sphere are descriptions of a radius. To complete Gene Monick’s pathway from Present Consciousness to New Consciousness requires masculine and feminine union and the image to know the difference. Gene’s axis mundi is of the W-axis of consciousness:

Axis mundi and radius mundi are the ancient, yet future images needed by men, women, all LGBTQ+ today as they experience the disintegration of patriarchal masculine and patriarchal feminine Present Consciousness. Surrender to reemerging matriarchal femininity and matriarchal masculinity is not the solution, either cultural or personal. It is regressive and will produce, eventually, a stringent reemergent patriarchal attitude in vain defense of patriarchal masculine or patriarchal feminine identities. There is no need for males and females and all genders of the LGBTQ+ spectrum to fear each other or act out such fear as tyrant or slave once a primary-process inner connection with one’s own spinal axis mundi and the shaft of radius mundi are engaged and dependably functional. Axis mundi and Radius mundi, suggesting the rigorous, precarious heroism of the shaman, the daily, lunar and seasonal ritual generosity for the happiness of all beings also the passionate and now planetary tantric ritual generosity of sacred sexuality, are just the ticket.

Let us perform, then, what amounts to an alchemical process of separatio, a separation and drawing apart of a prima materia. The first substance in this case is phallos as it was first defined in Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine, in 1987.

Phallos As Two

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An important detail absent from Monick’s work with phallos is that phallos, in embodied experience, is not an archetype who limits visitations to our waking hours. During REM sleep when we dream most vividly, not only do our eyes move rapidly, but we men become erect. In fact, a way that psychological impotence can be discerned from biological impotence is by observing a man while he is dreaming. Erection = dreaming. If a man shows REM and no erection, then his potency issues are of a biological nature only. I, too, have been through Jung’s Collected Works and Red Book. I have been through Gene Monick’s publications and have spent time with him. I have studied dreaming since the age of 17. In depth psychology, as of this writing, there is plenty of affirmation of REM. There is no mention of nocturnal penile tumescence. It is defined as:

Nocturnal penile tumescence is a spontaneous erection of the penis during sleep or when waking up. Along with nocturnal clitoral tumescence, it is also known as sleep-related erection, morning glory or morning wood. Men without physiological erectile or severe depression experience nocturnal penile tumescence, usually three to five times during a period of sleep, typically during rapid eye movement sleep. Nocturnal penile tumescence is believed to contribute to penile health.

Ron Reminick notes in his work on the complementary mirroring of male and female bodies that women display a private thickening that includes an equal amount of erectile flesh, blood and nerve endings. (His work affirmed for me an intuition I had about the double meaning for the English word, shaft.) A woman inwardly mirrors male erection when she experiences a visitation of the Goddess called, clitoral tumescence. Like men, as the citation above indicates, periods of REM sleep for women can be identified by feminine swelling. The implications are — in the same way that phallos is the archetypal waking and dreaming ground for a man’s participation in the masculine image of God, a woman’s participation in the feminine image of Goddess, clitoral tumescence in eros and in nocturnal clitoral tumescence in dreaming, has her own sacred image of the feminine, an ithyyonic Goddess who joins the ithyphallic God.

It is certainly men who labeled the inner members of women’s erection the legs — crura. In publications where clitoral tumescence is defined as including clitoris and crura, authors describe the crura as wings. Wing, in Latin, is cornu. It may be a surprise or maybe not that cornu is also the Latin word for horn. A winged Goddess is a horned Goddess. Horned Goddess returns nicely to the Moon, Hathor. It may come as an even more shocking surprise, but in Our Lady of Guadelupe, her lunar horns are her foundation:

Rabbi Jill Hammer does not name a feminine image of the Goddess who inversely mirrors/receives/completes Phallos. Beautiful Faces of the Priestess and 13 archetypes that embody Her are in Hammer’s and Shere’s 2015, The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership. Hammer and Shere come close to considering clitoral tumescence as a sacred image of the Goddess:

I am a rabbi ordained by a seminary that values both tradition and contemporary scholarship. I live, and teach, Jewish texts, beliefs and practices. I have the conviction born of years of Torah study, that if a truth is not lived in the present, it dies. So too, I have the conviction I have the conviction that the study of ancient priestesses is not sufficient to make them real to us. If we believe in them, it is not enough to research them. We must become them. (p. 2)

Images of clitoral tumescence do not appear in the substantial catalogs of images of the Goddess of Marija Gimbutas. In David Gordon White’s thorough Yoga in Practice, 5000 years or more in the Yoga tradition is full of phallos. When the sacred feminine appears, there is plenty of the general term, yoni, but not a single clitoris on the horizon. Our mental habit is yoni = vagina. That is the same as saying phallos = penis. There needs to be swelling, thickening, eros, dreaming, psyche for penis to become phallos. It is the same for yoni. Even the poems of Sappho, the Tenth Muse, her ithyyonia is invisble. If clitoral tumescence is present, it appears in hints.

I’m going to use the terms, Our Lady or Notre Dame, to honor the experiences of clitoral tumescence across the 14 archetypes of the Priestess that Hammer and Shere describe:

Weaver-Priestess

Prophetess-Priestess

Shrinekeeper-Priestess

Witch-Priestess

Maiden-Priestess

Mother-Priestess

Queen-Priestess

Midwife-Priestess

Wise-Woman Priestess

Mourning-Woman Priestess

Seeker-Priestess

Lover-Priestess

Fool-Priestess

Future-Priestess

Update of Hail Mary, The Our Lady

Our Lady, you are Grace and Grace-full.

Your waters nourish all timespace in your Embrace.

Wisdom of Beloveds, Mothers, Daughters, Aunties, Sisters, Cousines, Grandmothers, Great-grandmothers, Friends and Enemies, guide the Dream of Life through Your Delight.

Now and ever-loving, Our Heart’s Horizon’s knowing and co-evolving.

Amen

Gornick and Mornan in their 1971, Woman in Sexist Society:

Almost from the very beginning of our lives, we are all taught that the primary male sex organ is the penis and the primary female sex organ is the vagina. These organs are supposed to define the sexes, to be the difference between boys and girls…This is a lie…Woman’s sexual pleasure is often left out of these definitions. If people considered that the purpose of female sex organs is to bring pleasure to women, then female sex would be defined by, and focused on, a different organ. Everyone would be taught from infancy, that, as the primary male sex organ is the penis, so the primary female sex organ is the clitoris. (292-293)

Even in the above, the wings are only hinted at. Phallos and penis are confounded.

For many years as an Irish Roman Catholic, I witnessed how the patriarchal feminine was a hierarchy that made for a pecking order. At the top were religious women who were put onto a pedestal. Next came married women with children, especially male children. Beneath them were married women who chose to not have children. Next came divorced women with children, then single, unmarried women. Indigenous women, women of other traditions, and many others seemed below the radar. In the 80’s and 90’s I was at a few retreats where single women without children bemoaned their treatment at the hands of other women. LGBTQ+ was deeply buried, yet often assumed as an element of religious life.

My friend, Darmaris Chrystal, shared a dream with me where she was told to find Saint Teresa of Avila’s lost shard. I shared with her that having grown up in a Catholic family and community, I know that a major lost shard for Teresa is that she had no way of knowing that spiritual ecstasy and sexual ecstasy were colors of the same rainbow. When I learned about Bernini’s sculpture, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, I learned that he asked his model to orgasm for him so he could capture a woman’s face in ecstasy. I think we could make a good step forward by recovering this lost shard, healing our split-apart rainbow by seeing in the face of Teresa, the Face of the Beloved, the Goddess, the Face of the Divine.

Teresa wrote of this day:

I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.

I think that now, centuries later, we can allow her experience be both bodily and spiritual — psychoid.

The joyful, Messenger and trickster of Western tradition is Hermes. What often gets forgotten is how the Herm of Hermes is the soul union of spiritual and erotic life. The sexually aroused are also participating in Messages of what is to come. The Herm of Hermes is the swelled psychoid body of SpiritEarth and the wind of the sky-mind of life-giving atmosphere.

Someone Over The Rainbow

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Understanding that this image below is of the feminine, it is possible to flesh out a guess of the Beloved of Phallos.

We can take a clue from one of Jung’s childhood dreams. In the dream, fully written out later in this essay, Phallos, is the main character. Jung dreamed of a giant male member on a throne underground. Young Carl found himself descending into an underground chamber awe-struck. He heard his mother’s voice beyond him above the ground exclaim, “Yes, look at him. That is the man-eater.”

Who Is The Man-Eater?

Before going further, it’s helpful here to employ what Jung called, amplification, Hillman called, psychologizing, and I call, magnification. Magnifying differs from amplifying and psychologizing in that our own growing, thickening bodies are deeply implicated. In fact, REM sleep seems to always synchronize with sexual tumescence. For me, the mutual appearance is to be understood with an eye for synchronicity as opposed to one of cause and effect. Both rise into reality together. Here is Miller’s text again:

Unconscious materials, such as contents of numinous experiences, have no conscious language adequate for clarifying their meaning. This lack of an appropriate language occurs because unconscious materials are psychic phenomenon alien to the conscious mind through which they are communicated. Jung has observed that unconscious contents, because their nature is unknown, have a tendency to self-amplification, that is to say, they form the nuclei for an aggregation of synonyms. He states: “When something is little-known or ambiguous, it can be envisaged from different angles, and then, a multiplicity of names is needed to express its peculiar nature.” These synonyms are unmistakably mythological in their character, and Jung regards them as the inborn language of the psyche and its structure or “the language of the unconscious which lacks intended clarity of conscious language.”

This archaic, non-rational language of the psyche is universally found in such unconscious materials as dreams, fantasies, psychotic episodes, fairy tales, myths and religious literature, such as various accounts of the Buddha’s experience of the numinous…the images, thus amplified, which are otherwise obscure and confusing, can become clearer and more intelligible by being permitted, in a sense, to speak for themselves. The method of amplification cannot attempt to establish or designate the specific content of a numinous experience; it can, however, approximately reveal the essential nature of the experience. [p. 128, Transcendent Function]

If we use amplification/psychologizing/magnifying then, there would be fairy tales, myths, and religious literature that give insight to the dream’s archaic and non-rational language. There is a fairy tale, then, that uses the term, man-eater, that a young Carl Gustave Jung may have known. It’s found in the Grimm’s tale, “The Drummer”. The man-eater is a giant. In The Drummer, the hero is warned by the woman he wants to save before he sets forth on his path:

“The road goes through the great forest, in which the man-eaters live,” she answered, “and more than that, I dare not tell you.” And he heard her wings quiver as she flew away.

In my life, the archetypal giants are the shadow of the sacred masculine’s power, yet also the Grandfather’s Dreaming. In rites of passage, young men meet and have it out with the giant in ways that require all they are, plus some Grace. The Cerne Giant is a famous image:

In our family, my nephew dreamed this very theme as he moved into the deepest embodiment of his life as a man. It may seem simple, but to a child, an adult is gigantic. It may have wisdom in it that the giant is the shadow of the future adult body and life for the ecomasculine/ecofluid.

Who is the Eater-woman?

The shadow of the sacred feminine is the witch, then, in the old stories. If Jung’s Lord is underground, then Our Lady would be oversky. Her images, then, are the tornado, whirlwind, twister, cyclone, vortex, that belong to the above, Someone that you find Over the Rainbow. The twister of The Wizard of Oz, then, would be a complement to Jung’s enthroned underground phallus. The twister that destroys all that Dorothy knew and took her into her oversky initiation is a giant yoni/giant female sex:

I heard my father speak from the Earth beneath my feet. From under the ground his voice proclaimed:

“Yes, she sees you! That is the eater-woman!.

If the man-eater hints at the archetype of the giant, then I offer that the eater-woman is hints at the archetype of the witch. With this archetypal image, quite a lot falls into place. In the Jungian writings, there is an account he gives of a childhood active imagining that scared him. In his vision he saw a great cathedral-crushing turd crapped from the sky. He assumed it was from the Father on High. It actually resonates better and is funnier if his sky-log came from the Goddess who was returning the favor after centuries of feeling crapped upon by the Church.

Going to the American narratives, it works quite well if Wizard of Oz is a woman’s story of initiation by the body of the witch, the Goddess who hides over the rainbow. In Goddess mythology, for many beings of the sacred feminine, like the Greek Demeter or Celtic Maeve, their sacred animal is the pig and boar respectively. Among the threshold scenes in the film, Dorothy falls from the hog-pen fence she was walking. She participates in a fate the sends her downward among the pigs.

Earlier, the themes of her loving heart and her devotion to her dog, Toto, establish that she will risk all to protect him. Toto – The All – is the through-line of her tale. Toto got in trouble and she ran away to save him. Once over the rainbow, Toto finds the new friends, even saves Dorothy. At the end, Toto causes the accident that separates She of the Ruby Slippers, from the less authentic Wizard. With myth, to fall down among the pigs is a marker of the threshold into sacred space. She had entered the Queendom of the Goddess.

I think it’s safe to see the threshold mythologically as a test of the trueness of her heart. A lesser-hearted woman would have not been permitted to proceed further. In that case, in her fall Dorothy would have suffered from bites and attack. However, Dorothy’s heart was true and while it is not filmed, the pigs would have protected her.

Through her adventures, through the witches of the East, West, and North, Dorothy Gale, who inherits the broomstick and the power to move ruby-slippered through spacetime at will, is the Witch of the South. The Twister who comes for her is her own Goddess Vortex Calling. In the traditional Medicine Wheel, East is childhood and South is adulthood. Though her outer life had yet to catch up with her transformation, the inner labors of passing into womanhood were successfully completed.

L. Frank Baum, the author in whose books the orphan, Dorothy Gale, appeared, was not able to allow for an embodied Witch of the South. His tellings of her adult life in no way carry forward her mojo. I think he did get her name right. Dorothy = Gift of God and Gale = Jovial, Rowdy, Merry. In the story, when Dorothy was an infant burst into laughter so loudly that Auntie Em was shaken. I’m confident that if Dorothy had written her own way forward. She would have found a new depth of herself. She would have returned and followed a very Jovial, Rowdy, Merry path.

Finally, if the habit is to claim both parts as masculine, then this logic implies that the biblical Pillar of Cloud is the same jovial, rowdy and merry Goddess who came a hunting for Dorothy Gale to initiate her into her true name, Jovial, Rowdy, Merry, Gift of Goddess.

Anomalous Experiences

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For anomalous experiences, the most solid study to enter into the subject, though it plods along at times due to its great care to proceed on solid research-based grounds, is Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence. The American Psychological Association published the first edition in 2000 and the second edition in 2014. Cardena, Krippner and Linn are the editors. The definition they use is: an anomalous experience is any experience that is unusual but not necessarily psychopathological phenomena that may hold great significance for those who have them. The book examines near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, hallucinations, lucid dreams, mysticism, psi events, and reincarnation.

The title is a tip of the hat to William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1905. Anomalous experience is a way to say religious experience when you are afraid to say it. While our culture is rich in material items and powerful in weapons, there have been few cultures the past 20,000 years who have been so spiritually impoverished. In my 30 years as a French teacher in a public school system, some of my most meaningful work was listening to the anomalous experiences in the community, letting the person who shared know he, she, they were not crazy, affirming that such experiences are the most powerful in life, and getting them to the right books to learn more. The book I gave away the most was Patricia Garfield’s, The Dream Messenger: How Dreams of the Departed Bring Healing Gifts.

In high school, my first Teacher with the capital “T” was Mike Hay. Before he came to our school, he died in a car crash, spent time in the spirit world, wanted to stay there, but was told that his work was not done. It makes a huge difference when someone who has been dead talks about what happens when you die! In Tibetan culture, such a person is held in high regard and called a Delok.

Carol is a priest. One day, she was preparing for a service with two male friends. As she lifted a heavy candelabra, her clothing shifted into a monk's robe and her friends were dressed in the same way. They were all monks preparing for a mass in a monastery in the Middle Ages.

When he was in high school, Dan, was with friends in the metroparks near Berea, Ohio. That particular afternoon, a storm unexpectedly approached. Dan decided to run ahead to unchain their bikes. As he ran, he found the situation funny. He turned back to shout a joke to his friends. Just as he turned, a thunderclap split the sky. In that moment, everything was transformed. In his hands was a gun. He and his friends were German soldiers in uniform. It was World War One and they were being shelled.

Alex walked into Fay Canyon, Arizona, and was overwhelmed by the certainty that he had returned to a place he once knew. He said he felt memories of a thousand years. Later, he was separated from the main group and ran to join up. Suddenly, as he ran, wolves and then men appeared running alongside him. He could feel and perceive them, though they seemed to belong to another dimension that is near to ours.

Marilyn went through an awakening in her home in Bedford, Ohio. It was so powerful, she could no longer live the life for which she had settled. Her anomalous experience, like Alex's, featured shifts in time, inspired seeing, yet included guidance from a being of light that asked her to restore the sacred feminine and bring balance back into our world.

When I was 6 years old, some older boys in the neighborhood joined us when we were playing cowboys and indians. My friends and I usually played the roles of cowboys in this game. So, we thought it was a kind gesture when the older boys said they didn't mind being the indians. However, instead of the usual sequence of events, they tied us up and took us to my family's garage where they said they would now torture us. Up to that point, the indians torturing the cowboys was never how things went. We were scared to death. Suddenly, in the midst of the fear, my awareness shifted back in time to the 19th century prairie and I was being tortured for hours.

Finally, of all anomalous experiences, whether near-death, out-of-body, lucid dreams, reincarnation, or divine Visitation experiences, the most noble because it opens our hearts the most, is falling in love. True Love's piercing opens us to the secret anomaly within all anomalies. I have described in this section the first function of a living mythology - its mystical function.

State Of The Union

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The we all must make is into an ecologically wise, embodied, enspirited, and ecopsychological human being, aka. psychoid. Psychoid means like the soul. When all life and our bodies are ensouled, matter, energy and spirit are all merged with the planet. This is Roszak’s ecological ego fully de-colonzied and re-indigenized. As my Font-de-Gaume education taught me, we can live quite delightfully as beings of a planet deep with 5+ dimensional experience.

Monick’s phallos is a gateway for re-entering sacred ways on a sacred planet in three experiences of Communion: Communion of both spiritual, erotic solitude in self-knowing-delight, Communion of sacred sexuality, and Communion of felt intermingling with nature. Phallos, sacred image of the masculine is takes up Jung’s unanswered questions. In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Jung reflected:

It is a widespread error to imagine that I do not see the value of sexuality. On the contrary, it plays a large part in my psychology as an essential–though not the sole–expression of psychic wholeness. But my main concern has been to investigate over and above its personal significance and biological function, its spiritual aspect and its numinous meaning, and thus to explain what Freud was so fascinated by but was unable to grasp. My thoughts on this subject are contained in “The Psychology of the Transference” and Mysterium Coniunctionis. Sexuality is of the greatest importance as the expression of the chthonic spirit. that spirit is the “other face of God,” the dark side of the God-image.

If Phallos is the sacred image of the masculine, the shaft by which a man displays his embodied participation in the masculine presence — Jung’s “dark side of the God-image,” then the shaft by which a woman displays her embodied participation in the sacred feminine presence is Our Lady, Notre Dame, the other face of Goddess, the light side of the Goddess-image.

For this shaft to be ensouled, it must be 4 dimensional. What we are being asked to imagine is that when we expand, we are connected to all times and places. We know things about the future of life and its direction. Use the swelling of these 4 dimensional balls as a guide to the fullness we are meant to experience when in the midst of what is an archetypal visitation:

Sacred Clowns And Archetypal Wisdom

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Here again, the sphere comes to our assistance. On a flat world, beyond and beneath, above and below can never meet. On a sphere, it is only a matter of time before going down starts leading up, when rising up begins to descend. left becomes right, East is West, North is South, and so on.

There is an end to the tears of grief, healing laughter calls us from a place beyond what we thought were the depths of sadness. This is the same healing power as theater’s catharsis through both the tragic and comic. In dreams, ritual, and visionary experience, where these powers are involved, like cures like. A healing dream from feeling emotionally castrated features an even more audacious castration. Since the 4D balls are here on the page, I will share my own Sacred Clown experience.

I cannot emphasize enough that just because a numinous and 4th dimensional experience is going on, it does not guarantee moral authority. It is on the contrary, at that moment of body alert, you are called to a deeper attention to life and your part in discerning the life-affirming from the parasitic. You are on call to participate in an increase in wisdom, a grain of salt. A lifetime of practice goes into learning and honoring your own tumescence. Erotic arousal does not imply moral autopilot. A hard-on is not automatic Jesus or Buddha suddenly appearing as an ethical guide-lamp-post of your body! Clitoral tumescence is not necessarily the unpolluted moral Wellspring of Kwan Yin, Goddess of Compassion.

What is true is that thickening seems to appear in relationship with the participation in the Dream of Life, thus the Dream of the Earth. You are being awakened. The Dream of Life is here. Which then brings up its contrary, impotence.  In moments that expose your weaknesses and vulnerability, the message seems to be the same. The Dream of Life is here. In this case, in a Sacred Clown code — excruciatingly timed epic failure. The Clowns bring humor, a chance to drop solemnity and choose to move in ways never before imagined. Tumescence, then, can be at its most healing power when it flips and speaks backwards. Hillman affirms this sense of the flow of things:

…dreams and fantasy, and symptoms too, are making soul in the midst of nature.

In traditional cultures where the Sacred Clowns remain alive, there are names for the power in us that chooses. The Clowns come to teach us wisdom lessons about our free will, inner spirit. A heterosexual married Jesuit, John Bryde, who served the Oglala at Pine Ridge shares a form of this learning, choosing, inner guidance axis known as the innermost:

Different tribes might call the value by a different name, but the meaning of the value is the same. The Lengua, for instance, call adjustment to nature “respecting the innermost.”

The innermost to them is not the soul of a person, but rather, it is the source or place inside of our behavior. It is something similar to a conscience. The innermost in a person must be kept in balance by that person and it must be kept in balance with other persons…A good person will have a stable or balanced innermost and will exercise great respect for the innermosts of other persons. The good person will not get even when the innermost is wavy or upset or if there is excitement or anger.

This same kind of honoring a person’s learning about living with awareness of eternity in time is in Jenny Wade’s 2004, Transcendent Sex: When Lovemaking Opens the Veil:

Transcendent sex is not all sweetness and light. It has a shadow side that can be frightening, seductive, and dysfunctional. Altered states per se are not indicative of any higher or more evolved way of being — spiritual or otherwise — so being in an altered state during sex does not necessarily mean something hallowed is going on, no matter how it feels. “Altered states” refers to any state different from normal adult waking consciousness, not merely the sublimity of meditation but also schizophrenia, drunkenness, vertigo, hallucinations, and the like. There is nothing particularly sacred about the plasticity of time, place, or self; these characteristics of altered states have been associated with both spirituality and madness depending on the context and on their effects — whether states lead to life-enhancing or life-diminishing transformations. (p. 204)

Here is one of my most cherished Clown stories:

In July 1992, I went through a shamanic illness/psychosis. The trigger was singing a song I wrote called, Broken God, during Gene Monick’s talk at the Festival of Archetypal Psychology in Honor of James Hillman.

At one point during the Festival after the trigger, I decided to go golfing. The Festival was at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana where they have a nice golf course. The game was going well and it was a beautiful July afternoon. That is, until I reached the 4th hole.

I teed up my ball and when I drove it, it went straight up into the sun. I lost sight of it. Figuring it had to come down out on the fairway somewhere in front of me, I looked out. Nothing. To my surprise, the ball did not come down. “That’s weird,” I thought. I teed up another and the same thing happened. I sky-ed my ball straight into the sun. Taking it in stride, I put my driver away and walked out and dropped a ball where I figured my balls would have landed had they not been stolen by the thieves overhead.

I finished hole 4 with no futher drama. That is, except for what felt like a circle of pressure pushing down on the top of my head. It felt like a crown of light and heat. This was not a good thing. At the 5th, the same thing happened – two balls sky-ed into the sun. With my halo increasing in intensity, I started walking in the shade and stayed close to the trees.

For the 6th, I resolved to solve this sun issue or go home with no more balls. I shot my last three all up into the sky – no more balls. The light-crown, however was present and increasing. I put my clubs over my shoulder and sulked on back to my room, a defeated golfer with no more balls in his bag.

This is an example of a healing moment under the auspices of the Sacred Clowns. Wisdom comes by reading it sideways, upside down and backwards–most importantly, with a grain of salt and some smiles, if I wrote well. In this cautionary tale about the limits of forcing it, the reason I lost my balls is because I stubbornly chose to continue in the game I had been playing. It’s funny to call the sun, maybe the sky too, a pair of ball-thieves. A more humbling look reveals how I participated in my own symbolic castration. It would have been possible at any point to stop and choose a new direction. There is also the gentle humor of the situation. There are 2 aspects to notice. First, a lesson that I learn by doing and it takes as long as it takes until I get the message. Second, the bawdy sexual humor encoded in the poetry of the events. These are both in the energy field of the Sacred Clowns. In fact, our entire bodies work this same way with poetic symptoms. However, there is a very essential and comic form present when it comes to Phallos. It’s best Gifts are funny.

A great Gift of this ball-losing cautionary tale, reading it backwards, is that it was from this story that I have gotten my balls back. Here, I mean my own testicles and scrotum. Gene did not include them in his original definition of phallos. Privately, one time, he bemoaned how it seemed that every time he spoke of phallos, the question of balls was usually raised by women. At that time, I was still in the process of healing, so I was only able to ask him if there was something about the balls that he had missed? After all, castration for men is not the cutting off of the penis. It is the cutting off from the balls.

Now, I can answer that what he missed is the meaning of a seminal work, meaning, truly original brought forth via a man’s individuality. What makes a work seminal, according to Webster’s is that it strongly influences later developments. I know that losing my balls at Notre Dame carried a message for me to not lose the value of my own insights in service to another person’s notoriety. To belong to yourself, at first, seems less prestigious compared to appearing on-stage with the famous or belonging to a valorous company. From lost time and lost work I learned that the famous and valorous will never invest much energy in caring for your own seminal gifts. Voltaire called this kind of lesson, travailler pour le roi de Prusse. (working for the king of Prussia)

Next, the most specific guidance I gently receive when I’m in the presence of anyone, any gender, who shares from their true originality, I feel it. After a performance or reading, I will be sure to let the person know that I was honored to be in their presence as they shared from their genuine art. ( I don’t say, “Hey, when you were singing, I felt it down in my plums.”) So, phallos is certainly the experience of standing manhood in waking and dreaming, and it is also present when it goes absent. With confidence I place the asterisk that phallos is present in the testicles and scrotum to one who is aware of seminal bona fides. I find this to be a reversed masculine mirror, my joyful outward parts that are in an Innuit woman’s poem. She concludes, Earth and the great weather move me, have carried me away, and move my inward parts with joy. I have often wondered if this woman’s joy explains why mostly women asked Gene about the absence of outward parts that move in his understanding of phallos.

When a speaker is speaking with spiritual energy in whatever language of her/his/their art form, private thickening often stirs beneath the belt. There was a reason why the old Catholic prayers were named, ejaculations. Due to Western religions of the Axial Age promotion of the transcendent and condemnation of the immanent, my hunch is the name was meant to belittle and subjugate the sacredness of individual testicles and ejaculations.

This kind of patriarchal bridle upon the soul of a people first appeared in Sumer, 3500-3000 BCE with what Campbell called, the disciplined social order imposed from above by force and campaigns of systematic conquest and subjugation. The way you harness a people is to bind up their erotic/spiritual expression by condemning the erotic, all the while silent about the full story. Gene Monick would teach about this in sacred clown style when he would say, I’ve kept my cassock unbuttoned and open due to the subject of this talk.

In Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, the wounded Fisher King is described this way:

The King fared forth alone that day (which was to prove a great sorrow to his people), riding in quest of adventure, steered along by his joy in love: for love’s zeal so compelled him. And he was pierced, wounded in a joust, by a poisoned spear through his testicles, so severely he could not be healed.

In his Creative Mythology, the symbolism of the Fisher King with his unhealed testicles is called by Campbell, an essential problem of the Christianized Western world— mythic dissociation. Here is a helpful insight into why we do well to become aware of any inherited life-desolating habits of mind that separate us from nature. Ours is a generation when it is now possible to get right with our Nature in order to be right with nature:

…since it is at root a consequence of the basic biblical doctrine of an ontological distinction between God and his universe, creator and creature, spirit and matter, it is a problem that has hardly altered since it first became intolerably evident at the climax of the Middle Ages. In briefest restatement: The Christian is taught that divinity is transcendent: not within himself and his world, but “out there.” I call this mythic dissociation. Turning inward, he would not find divinity within, but only his created soul…Consequently, just as in the Old Testament view a relationship with God could be achieved only through physical birth as a member of the Holy Race, so in the New, only through baptism (spiritual birth) into membership in Christ’s Church; i.e., participation, in either case, in a specific social group…

Unhappily, however, in light of what is now known, not only of the history of the Bible and the Church, but also of the universe and evolution of species, a suspicion that was already dawning in the Middle Ages; namely that the biblical myth of Creation, Fall, and Redemption is historically untrue. Hence, now spread throughout the Christian world a desolating sense not only of no divinity within (mythic dissociation) but also of no participation in divinity without (social identification dissolved): and that, in short, is the mythological base of the Waste Land of the modern soul, or, as it is being called these days, our ‘alienation.”

In current scholarship, there is an important focus on Perceval learning by hard experience that he is meant to ask the Fisher King, Brother, what ails thee? However, there is not much on the Fisher King’s own voice. I suspect, the Wounded King would reply, “A f####g poisoned spear stabbed my junk and I’ve been in this condition for a thousand years ever since.” To this you might respond, “Wow! That looks like it REALLY hurts. Can I get you to a 21st century hospital?” Anfortas (whose name means, affliction) would respond, “Well, that would be nice, but I’m tired from 1000 years of being the wounded posterboy for an essential problem of the Christianized Western world. Can you solve this problem now?”

As was his habit, in Gene’s report of his phallos dream of the circle of men, he mentioned the hand upon each neighbor’s male-member. He did not mention anyone’s testicles. Using my tale of lost and recovered balls, the symbolism of what it means to belong to yourself, I think Gene’s dream also shows how men can honor each other’s seminal Reasons for life in ways that offer mutual support. His dream is a naked version of the Round Table. It offers an image for those who would lead in the Spirit of the Grail, not by imposition of will, but by mutually interdependent inspiration from the core of being, dreaming, sensing the Dream of Life, the Dream of Earth.

There have been now eight generations of the Reynolds (originally from Kent, England) family in America. Since 1740, there has never been an initiation of youth into adulthood. My mother's family, the Donovans, stretches back into Ireland beyond memory. Due to their Catholicism, there was never a true rite of passage. The same lack of authentic spiritual experience appears in the Fisher King. The Christianized West's mythic dissociation appears in Ohio history in the writings of John Heckwelder, a Moravian missionary to the Lenape (Delaware). He wrote in 1813:

Initiation of Boys: I do not know how to give a better name to a superstitious practice which is very common among the Indians, and, indeed, is universal among those nations that I have become acquainted with. By certain methods...they put the mind of a boy in a state of perturbation, so as to excite dreams and visions; by means of which they pretend that the boy receives instructions from certain spirits or unknown agents as to his conduct in life, that he is informed of his future destination and of the wonders he is to perform in his future career through the world...He will fancy himself flying through the air, walking under the ground, stepping from one ridge or hill to the other across the valley beneath, fighting and conquering giants and monsters, and defeating whole hosts by his single arm. Then he has interviews with the Manitto or with spirits who inform him of what he was before he was born and what he will be after his death. His fate in this life is laid entirely open before him...(p. 245)

Heckwelder's prejudice towards the spiritual foundations of the first nations reveals how he is someone who has been split from his own innate capacity to know his fate in life. He is a man whose mind is discontinuous with what he was before he was born and what he will be after his death. His culture has done this to him and he, himself has participated in his own self-maiming. Whether of religion or of materialist science, the deepest seminal knowing of a person's life is misunderstood and de-valued, even mocked, from an inexperienced point of view.

Without individual initiation with the elders, our first experience of amor, the life-transforming intimacy of a loving couple is how most of us are initiated into adulthood. Two initiations are bound up into one in such a way that leaves us un-rooted. Unrooted, here, means without knowledge of the root chakra, the base of our spines. Forgetting initiation makes for competition in our relationships that does not have to be there.

An initiation or vision quest, definitively separates you from the energy field of the family and extended family. The root relationship becomes the Earth, dreaming, visions, and those helping spirits described in Heckwelder's account. This was my experience, which I am embarrassed to say, did not happen until I was 55 years old. .

At the close of my second day of prayer, a quick sequence of events nudged me to speak out loud and very clearly what I had come there to seek. A storm was approaching from the West at this point. I spoke my heart's desire out loud and just at that moment, thunder sounded from the darkening sky and the wind increased. Tears streamed down my face as the West Wind seemed to focus directly on my solar plexus. A mist began to fall and it felt like some illness was being lifted from me. I have a relationship with the powers of the West, the Thunders, Sacred Clowns, the Celtic Taranis, chariot, wheel, and the West Wind that I cannot explain to you. I can only share this now and say I have an understanding that goes beyond words into being.

I can share that because he sat for so long helpless, I can tell that Anfortas never knew his guiding spirits, never learned who he was before his life, never saw his life laid out before him, nor had experience of what his life would be like after he died. This is the second binding of the patriarchal bridal upon the soul of a people. It is to bind the soul to the ways of the colonizer by insisting that the way to peace is through its doctrines, economy, medications, brands. The Earth is always a place of peace and balance. There is no need for any political solution, nation-state, corporation, guru, creed, nor prayer, drug, nor ritual to make the Earth a place of peace. This second binding holds souls away from the Peace beyond understanding of the Earth by teaching that the planet’s Peace does not exist, that the Tao does not exist. Conversely, when the Peace of the Earth does enter experience and you find peace, it is appropriated as being of a different sky-based source or a delusion.

Gene’s Circle, the Table Round, now, resonate with the beginning of this essay. Here are the words again, this time, coming back as refrain:

At that special level, all sorts of odd things happened. The game would be in a white heat of competition, and yet somehow, I wouldn’t feel competitive — which is a miracle in itself. I’d be putting out the maximum effort, straining and coughing up parts of my lungs as we ran, and yet, I never felt the pain….It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion. During those spells, I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken….My premonitions were always consistently correct and I always felt then that I not only knew all of the Celtics by heart, but also all the opposing players, and that they all knew me. There have been so many times in my career when I felt moved or joyful, but these were the moments when I had chills pulsing up and down my spine.

There are always invisible visitations that enter the manifold space. Something divine can come to the table. These emerge as as-if presences, are felt as shifts in time, are perceived when turns of phrase come forth thick like sandwiches, trailing scintillae, are recognizable where the cramped and restricted ease with re-newed life. In Urreality, the full body begins to awaken to the conversation, golden chills wash over the shoulders, warm the heart, draw attention to depth. There is a sense of clarity about the face, a clarity of sensing. One is aroused and even the sensate world unveils herself delighting to be seen and truly appreciated. The heart flutters.

Human participation in transpersonal and spiritual phenomenon is a creative multidimensional event that can involve every aspect of human nature, from somatic transfiguration to the awakening of the heart, from erotic communion to visionary co-creation and from contemplative knowing to moral insight.

It’s as if the floor suddenly falls away. The atmosphere in the room becomes supercharged, and everyone seems to congeal into a unified state. My mind becomes unusually spacious and clear, and my students’ eyes tell me that they have moved into a particularly receptive state. Our hearts seem to merge, and from that open field of compassion comes a slow stream of thoughts that I, as spokesperson of the group, unfold and work with. In these transient moments of heightened awareness, I sometimes have the acute sensation that there is only one mind present in the room.

When these barriers have dissolved, there arises one mind, where they are all one unit, but each person also retains his or her own individual awareness. That one mind will still exist when they are separate, and when they come together, it will be as if they hadn’t separated…It’s actually a single intelligence that works with people who are moving in relationship with one another…If you had a number of people who really pulled together and worked together in this way, it would be remarkable.

During the rehearsal of the second symphony, the whole orchestra, including the conductor, went into a kind of trance. We played and the conductor went on conducting without stopping. We were out of tune and went on. Someone’s string broke. He put his instrument on his knees and we went on. We played the whole symphony uninterrupted until the very end. When the finale finally came, we all felt we had gone through some kind of transcendental experience.

The image above comes from Campbell’s Creative Mythology. Yes, it remains a tour-de-force in its scope. However, what has been lacking for some time in the West is the importance of clans in the Indigenous sense. By clan, I mean, a multigenerational collective that shares the same thematic responsibilities, talents, and roles, through which human individuals contribute to the life and happiness of the whole of the world. For clan membership crosses the borders of nations.

As regards a loving couple, there is an endurance and wisdom possible when each Beloved is rooted in his/her/their appropriate clan. Additionally, the clan Ancestor is of the mythological ecosystem/bioregion. So, I feel very vulnerable writing that my relatives are the Thunders. And it is a relationship that I am unable to sustain if I have to do it myself. In my life, I have always needed at least one other person who would be willing to allow me my own clan in our relationship. Likewise, this is not an experience that my friend tolerates my odd quirks, but understands the experience from the inside - I am sustained in community by others who dare the same mythic courage.

Not only did Gene not have room for an idea that God had a sacred image of the masculine, but his analyst, Esther Harding, had no Indigenous education, so, had no way of imagining that Gene was being shown that he has always been supported in his manhood by his clan. Knowing him over the years, I suspected at first that Gene belonged to the Bear Clan. However, due to my ongoing connection with him, I think his clan appeared in a dream he shared with me that he said was the night before his acceptance as a Jungian. At the heart of the dream was a heavenly throne with what seemed like a gorilla. He said he shared his dream during the acceptance ceremony and the leading person responded by: Monick, your god is an Ape. The night of the Jungian ceremony, his diploma from the Episcopal Church that was hanging in his office fell from the wall. In the morning, when he arrived, he found it face down surrounded by shattered glass.

James Hillman, in Puer and Senex, can be a bridge between the Indigenous notion of a Clan and its continuity. There is here a language to imagine healing the masculine and separating it from patriarchal ways by a union of sames.

We find it too (splitting apart of sames) in the insoluble difficulties of the master-pupil transference, the senex-teacher who must have a disciple and the puer-pupil who must have his image of the old wise man carried for him. [50] This is the traditional way the spirit is transferred. Yet just this outer constellation reflects the inner division within each. Owing to the split archetype, a negative polarity is inevitably constellated.  This leads to the curse between generations, the betrayals, to kings and powers not sages and wisdom, and the inability of the master to recognize his pupil and give him blessing. The pupil then “slays the Old King” in order to come into his own kingdom, only to become an Old King himself in the course of time.

What might this union of sames feel like? How would it be were the polarity healed? We have only hints: some in concepts, some in images. A primary image of the union of sames is given in that “most widely cherished Renaissance maxim” festina lente (make haste slowly). Holding the opposites together in a balanced tension was represented in countless emblematic variations summarized by Wind. The puer-senex or paedogeron was one major example of festina lente. Maturity in this ideal was not a negation of the puer aspect since the puer was an essential face of “two-fold truth.”  Festina lente, in other words, presents an ego-ideal based on the two-faced archetype. It is an ideal that may be achieved, however, only by remaining consequently true to the puer aspect. To be true to one’s puer nature means to admit one’s puer past – all its gambols and gestures and sun-struck aspirations. From this history we draw consequences. By standing for these consequences, we let history catch up with us and thus is our haste slowed. History is the senex shadow of the puer, giving him substance. Through our individual histories, puer merges with senex, the eternal comes back into time, the falcon returns to the falconer’s arm. The dynamus of one combines with the order of the other. The bipolar spirit becomes ambivalent, logically incoherent but symbolically cohesive, as we see in the paradoxes of mysticism. There will be a curious intermingling of time and eternity, as in nature. Temporal continuity, that causal chain of history, the basis of order and the basis of ego, is broken up or broken through by the eternal. The world of Saturn is pierced through with Mercurius; the silver-quick flow coagulated into solid moments: quantum jumps, spontaneous events, forgetting and foolishness, uselessness in the world of power yet full knowledge, unpredictable – “discontinuity,” as Erich Neumann called it. 

Yet this is not chaos nor random destruction. Rather these ordered happenings within limits are vividly meaningful, happenings having their own meaning, a sense or non-sense that is not dependent upon before or after from which it may be discrete, discontinuous, or only in the same “topological space.” So the sense is given wholly by the experience itself as a gift of soul. (Hillman in Senex and Puer, 1989)

Dennis Pottenger, in his essay, Why the Men Went into the Woods, affirms in me what it means for a healing of the sacred masculine that emerges when the full stature of semen is restored to a man’s life:

He writes:

Eugene Monick spoke to this male experience of distress (castration) when he wrote that male rage “is in living and excruciating contat with profound injury, even nonbeing.” Monick also wrote of what he called the "castration complex,” which he said:

“…forms in a man’s unconscious when an event or event take place causing a boy inwardly to perceive that something essential to his being a male actually has been taken from him. Ever after, he has a hole, a weak spot in his masculine grid, an emptiness.”

This speaks to the effect, to the manifest emotion, in the male experience of wounding. But what of healing? With shame, and the castration of a man’s connection to the archetypal qualities of the Wild Man, an idea first attributed to Paraclesus, the Renaissance physician and alchemist, becomes meaningful. To the alchemical imagination, semen, as both substance and a metaphoric possibility of the imagination, was a particularly potent substance.

In an essay he titled “Fear of Semen,” Jungian analyst Joseph Cambray quoted Paraclesus speaking about the attraction of the sexes:

“The tendencies of man cause him to think and speculate; his speculation create desire, his desire grows into passion, his passion acts upon his imagination, and his imagination creates semen.”

According to Cambray, identifying semen with the imagination is a radical notion. For

“In this theory, Paraclesus makes it clear that for him, semen is a basic, archetypal, substance, involved in the creation of the universe….Semen is, here, at the archetypal foundation of the world. Psychologically, it is equivalent to the psychic reality upon which the self takes shape and manifests.”

What makes semen so important, psychologically speaking? In one passage, Cambray pinpointed the apocalyptic impact semen can play in the work of individuation:

What…is being sought psychologically in the retention [of semen]? Is it not the sense of a potent, powerful self that can be lost when arousal leads to discharge? Tantric exercises seem aimed at introverting the aroused masculine libido, sacrificing it in a return to the self…In the language of psychological objects this might be called, “retentive identification.” By this, I mean the possibility of an experience of the self has been projected onto an aspect of the body image, in this case, the semen, which it then becomes crucial to hold onto for the sake of the wholeness carried by it.”

Angel Lust, Death Erection, Terminal Erection

There is a sizable literature on the erections and aroused womyn-hoods of the dead. Recorded over the centuries are many stories of those who suffered tragic deaths, hangings, accidents, suicides. Many become visually aroused after dying. Steinberg’s The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion is a wonderful text on this. He notes how Renaissance artists portrayed the crucified savior with a death erection, but the Catholic Church suppressed those paintings for several centuries. The version of Heemskerck’s Man of Sorrows pictured above is an example.

In this, intuitively, I think there is a hint of an element of dreaming, seminal dreaming, after death. The best known examples of this are Near-death Experiences. In Western tradition, even Hades has his ithyphallic nature, so, it falls easily into the theme at hand and also deepens current imagination of sex and death. In the same way that we are not dropped into this world from on high, but come into life surrounded by life, it would make sense that as we leave this world, our sacred marriage is of the death partner.

In fact, the theme of going to a celebration of marriage bed at death is an archetype. Jung and his friends famously drove past 3 weddings the day he died. There are other stories like this I heard when I was in Oman. I’m writing here that I think it’s reasonable to allow for phallos and she-who-is-yet-to-be-named to offer their parting gifts, even if it might not be a Hollywood Finish. It also feels intuitively correct that if the French slang for an orgasm is, petite mort (small death), then death itself would be an orgasmic fulfillment of greatest release — Moksha, in the Hindu tradition.

There is an unusual example of the death erection in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. This is the tomb of Victor Noir. He was famously gunned down in a dual by a family member of Napoleon III. Jules Dalou, the artist who forged this image used photos of the man taken just after he was shot. Un-noticed for many decades was the small raised area that you can see is well-rubbed at this time. It turns out that Victor is sporting his own angel lust. The tradition now is for a woman to rub is groin and kiss his lips as a way to improve her sexual delight as well as her fertility.

Brilliant And Mysterious Ways Of The Chub

Forging its own healing path for men is the enduring mystery of the chub. The River Chub and Creek Chub are fish native to where I live in Ohio. Their return to the Cuyahoga river 50 years after it burned is a sign of health returning. However the chub I of which I write now is also absent from Monick’s work. He did not how phallos happens to a man and is not under his control. However, he was referring to the full-on standing man-hood.

Much more difficult to learn are the ways of the chub. During puberty, a chub can appear suddenly. It surely comes with sexual longing when you see someone you who attracts you. But, quite often, the cause seems to be a chub has a mind of its own that leaves you trying your best to divert all attention from all genital regions, yours and those of others.

In dreams, the first time I was welcomed by another mentor, Robert Bly, with a hug and a blessing, I felt waves of energy flow through me. They were both infused into from him but also was flowing vitality from my own being. Suddenly, during the hug, I got the chub and became worried about how to respond. I adjusted my body and allowed for the full experience of life vitality and vulnerable man-hood. Now at age 61, after checking in with numerous other men, I think the chub is a sign of happy masculine embodiment — for whatever the reason. It’s not one of power over others - but a Delight to be alive.

There are no Greek, nor Roman, nor Indigenous myths of the chub. However, there is this fish of the Cuyahoga’s health. I would like to root the chubs of all who delight in manhood and masculine embodiment in our ecosystems where the Chub plays its part and brings its Medicine.

Synesthetic Experience

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The general understanding of synaethesia, also spelled, synesthesia, is a blending of the senses. It is when you see colors or shapes as you listen to music, hear colors, works of art, beauty in nature, and so on. The experience tends to be a delight and to also be a highlighter of Beauty with the capital “B.” I have enjoyed feeling warm chills and other body responses to someone speaking Truth. Another experience I have come across is a ringing in the ears as regards a situation or person who is important to my life, an idea as I think it, a line in a book I read or write. There is an atmospheric shift as well. There are fragrances of roses, lilacs, cedar, sage, sweetgrass, osha, tobacco, gin, whisky.

When a conversation is going well, I have experienced and witnessed what Emerson called becoming a transparent eyeball. Transparent eyeball feels like your head and face are gone and there is a clear, wide field of perceiving. Relationship is key to opening to transparent eyeball reality. My hunch is that Emerson in his eyeball story was walking with another person whose companionship he kept off the page. I am aware that I am pushing the boundaries of the classic see/hear, hear/see, feel/smell, dichotomy, but want to offer these other perceptual shifts that I know from being inside the spacetime of Immanent Function.

My friend , Chris, the recording engineer and music producer with whom I work, was mastering The Magnification. He kept changing the sound on a guitar in the mix. When I asked him how he knew the right sound, he said he goes by taste. He can taste when the guitar is mixed correctly. Based on that, I think our expression of having good taste is code for a life guided by the wisdom of synesthesia.

The Shaft of Phallos and the Shaft of Our Lady

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Radius mundi, as a shared shaft, completes the process that Monick began. For New Consciousness, his encouragement to recover the rigorous, precarious heroism of the shaman, is just the ticket. The axis mundi of consciousness is of the W-axis. He knew it to be true by living it. Look again at the stone circle. With his back against the Earth, Gene had aligned his backbone to the axis mundi of the planet. This phallos is the direct experience of Radius Mundi as a shaft of offering fullness. The immense male member was not a man’s, nor a giant’s, nor God’s, but the male member that is the radius mundi of the planet. This is an image of brotherhood of Father Earth, Grandfather Earth, Beloved and Lover Earth.

Why is Earth erect?

Is Earth dreaming?

Is Earth Spirit Dreaming?

Why is Sky whirling?

Is Sky dreaming?

Is Sky Body Dreaming?

However, to update this ultimately phallic-centered heroism for planetary life, we require ideas about shamanic heroism that are generous enough to embrace a rigorous, precarious heroism embodied as feminine, masculine, and all LGBTQ+ gender potentials between.

Axis mundi, then, is to be imagined as the innermost, the backbone, the turning point of our world, W-axis. That backbone/axis mundi/turning point is a both immanent and transcendent archetype – by definition, beyond complementary categories like male and female, left and right, etc… Human beings with this kind of 4-D spine can merge and participate with eternity in all seasons of Earthly life.

I offer here, as a possibility to be considered, the fact that our planet is a magnet with a magnetosphere. A magnet, in French, is called, un aimant – a loving. A magnet/loving has a north-seeking “top” pole and a south-seeking “bottom” pole. Gene Monick and Marion Woodman both arrived at the masculine term, patrix, as the mate of matrix. My proposal is that the axis mundi of a person has polarity, a north-seekingness/south-seekingness, that makes for a pattern of attraction, a magnetic/erotic field of feeling that informs the shaft of radius mundi. In my lifetime, contrary to popular opinion, phallos cannot be faked. In this I have found that men cannot make love with just anyone. Men are not sex-machines. Where phallos has gone absent, only with performance-enhancing drugs or injections might a man force his will against the gentler loving nature of his own body.

With a magnet/loving W-axis mundi taking up its role as a turning center of balance, a more complete working hypothesis of axis and radius is:

Phallos: Sacred image of the masculine, other face of God = Radius mundi + Axis Mundi/W axis= Patrix

Matrix = Radius mundi + Axis Mundi/W axis = Our Lady, Notre Dame: other face of Goddess, Sacred image of the feminine. 

Remember how human being could be reflected in the volume of a planetary sphere turning and orbiting upon an axis mundi. Imagine that we live with backbone literally, even as our entire volume and surface cycle in rhythm and pulse merged with the invisible depths of consciousness that surround us on all sides and are also within. It is from our own north-seeking/south-seeking Tree and Serpent Spine within that we variously embody, literally, metaphorically, and invisibly, all the worlds we are. Expanding this now, we are — each one of us —conscious ecosystems who require the more than 100 trillion microbial cells of our personal microbiomes to thrive.

We can move beyond ourselves to know physically, psychologically, spiritually all the understanding in the symbolism of the beloved couple, phallos and priestess, as shared radius mundi: the ithyyonic shaft that of receptive emptiness and the ithyphallic shaft of offering fullness.

Earth Prayer

Make me the radius mundi of thy peace

Where there is despair in life, let me co-create hope

Where there is injury, let me co-heal

Where there is doubt, true gnosis

Beloved Grandparents of this Earth

May I ever seek to grow in giving and receiving consolation

To learn to give and receive love wisely

For the good of all beings in past, present and future

May this world be warmer, more loving, surprising, and more humorous

Amen

With axis mundi and radius mundi imagined this way, as embedded into the geometry of the volume, the body of a planet, Monick’s rigorous, precarious heroism of the shaman can become a way of full participation whether as the masculine or feminine planetary form and any combination, any They between, within, beyond the two. Dorothy Gale’s journey was definitely shamanic, rigorous, precarious and heroic. New Consciousness is living a life where we are meant to taste the direct knowing of Depths and psychic wholeness, including all the spiritual and erotic faces of God and Goddess illuminating their Dawn.

Wonderful examples of shamanic heroism are James J. Lafferty’s 2020 book, Memories and Meditations of a Persistent Pilgrim on the Camino de Santiago de Compostella and Beyond, Elizabeth Meacham’s 2020 book, Earth Spirit Dreaming: Shamanic Ecotherapy Practices, and Bill Pfeiffer’s 2013, Wild Earth, Wild Soul: A Manual for an Ecstatic Culture, John M. Schluep’s 2019, Soul’s Cry, James B. Beard’s, White Mocs on the Red Road: Walking Spirit in a Native Way, and Chris M. Bache’s, Dark Night, Early Dawn: Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind, of 2008.

James writes of a visit to Glendalough, Ireland:

I sat on a rock there between the two loughs to drink in the idyllic beauty. Suddenly, I had an incredible feeling of peace penetrating my whole being. It seemed to me of the kind that “passeth all understanding,” so profound and all-encompassing it was. I had no idea of its origin. I grasped for possibilities: Had something happened to FX since I had left him? Was it his spirit passing over me? Was it this hallowed place where I sat, associated as it was with the renowned saint? I had no immediate answer to the queries rising from this marvelous, dare I say, mystical occurrence. (p.21)

Here is James Beard, aka. Noodin (Wind) as he journeys beyond what he had known in order to further develop his recovery through the 12 Steps:

A few minutes after starting to drive again, we rain into another snow storm. The whiteouts were worse than before and we had to slow down and watch the path on the road in order to be able to continue.

After traveling about forty miles in whiteout conditions, at a speed of maybe fifteen miles per hour, the weather finally cleared and stars were showing.

Just before the weather began to clear, a White Wolf ran across the road in front of our car. It was a beautiful animal and gave us the sense that this road would be clear now. We had seen a sign!

To the Indian, animals do not just appear by coincidence but are often there to signify something that is happening or will happen. The Wolf is a protector of his family, a scout watching for dangers and hunting for food, a messenger of wisdom. (p.103)

Here’s Liz as she vulnerably shares her courage to reclaim shamanic experience:

These magical moments that happen as we re-indigenize Western minds are unexplainable to Western people because the nomenclature and necessary categories of understanding needed for these kinds of knowing are profoundly atrophied. Access to magic is a gift in our DNA from our ancestors, and they cheer us on as we find ways to dance with time out of time. Yet, there is a struggle, and a bit of staggering through as we find our way to a shared language for the emergence of the shamanic experience in Western culture in this time and place. Words that don’t quite fit, or are overused, are the best we can do sometimes.

I have struggled in the past with using the word, ‘shamanic’ to define the experiences that are now regular occurrences for me after years of meditating and making art and music in nature. I did not consciously seek out shamanic experiences and was very resistant to the idea when I realized that my experiences fit best into what this world generally means — and what it now fails to mean because of being so overused outside of indigenized experience community. I did not train with a shaman or seek to become a shaman. I do not consider myself a shaman or think that this book will train others to become shamans. Rather, I think that what we think of as altered states and ‘shamanic experience’ are everyday states in many indigenous cultures that we need to relearn. (pp.186-187)

John Schluep reminds us that what makes shamanic experiences shamanic is that they are side-products of a deep love for the people. His Soul’s Cry is a call to the people loved so deeply by veterans have a responsibility to learn from their war experiences, especially moral injury. Moral injury is a wound to the soul that a person experiences when committing and/or witnessing acts of violence that they know to be wrong. In his mentor text regarding how to heal moral injury, John writes directly that the spirit worlds, nature, and community are crucial to homecoming:

Warriors can become those members of society who inform and teach us about the truth of war. When we do not honor our veterans or honor those who have served in generations past, we do so at our own demise. When we do not honor the veteran and the ancestors, we forget who we are and what sacrifices have been made to insure our present day. For these reasons, ceremony and ritual are of vital importance in the journey home with honor. In ceremony, we ask the ancestors, spiritually, to find the healing for their wounds that they may still carry. We honor them, their wisdom and their spiritual connection to all warriors.

The nature of ritual is to “break open” time for God to enter our awareness. Every ceremony, every worship service is about inviting God to break open our defenses. This “breaking open” is what we feel is unexplainable and indefinable. (p. 69)

Bill writes of remembering, imagining and dreaming who we are:

What if culture embedded in nature was not a relic of the past but a living reality? What if you did not have to travel thousands of miles to experience indigenous wisdom but felt it in your heart? What if you knew in your bones the “rightness” of learning sustainability from the inside out? …

Part of our remembering our true nature is remembering our inherent powers. One such power is the power to dream, and not just when we are sleeping. Dreaming is the fuel for manifestation in this world. We simply do not have to settle for the attitude, “This is the way it has been, so it is always going to be this way.” Instead, we can draw on the vital power of dreaming to create a conscious, directed process toward the world we want. The Australian Aborigines call the place from which that vital power emanates, the Dreamtime. (p 33)

Chris Bache’s 2000 book, Dark Night, Early Dawn: Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind, offers a foreshadowing of planetary tantric ritual generosity of sacred sexuality.

Chris offers the deeper pattern in which a planetary tantra participates:

Our religious vision of the last thousand years has emphasized the forging of the individual in the karmic fires of history and has attended less to the collective karmic sinews that weave individuals into larger wholes that are simultaneously evolving. How different the history of karma might have looked if women had an equal share in writing it…

…In Vajrayana Buddhism, for example, one is said to make progress toward spiritual realization by the practicing of the “two accumulations,” first the accumulation of karmic merit and then the accumulation of wisdom. Somewhat paradoxically, however, at the end of every spiritual practice in this tradition one gives away the karmic merit one has just generated in doing the practice, distributing it to all beings who live in the various realms of the samsaric universe. One constantly empties one’s karmic cup, so to speak, to drive home the lesson that there is no separate self here seeking enlightenment in the first place. One practices not to lift a private self out of ignorance, but to lift all existence. To grasp this fact is to grasp the true condition. (p. 157)

Radius Mundi, whether understood as phallos —a shaft of fullness toward opening or as the archetype of clitoral tumescence — a shaft of opening toward fullness, offers human beings a shared image through which they can participate in knowing God and Goddess. It invites a way to become the other face of God, to become the other face of Goddess. Taken all together, I am describing divine-human participation in this life — to know and be known from the most intimately shared ‘biblical’ sense of knowing to the most expansive. Radius mundi opens a way to a reclaimed, yet updated wholeness.

With this updated theoretical framework (geometry) to describe wholeness, there is a planetary Communion, experienced as an inner marriage with self. Jung called this, Coniunctio. There is a planetary Communion as a couple physically shared to enter more deeply into marriage. In that merging, Radius mundi, as the hidden faces of God and Goddess can create new life in the journey together in the flesh of immanent presence and transcendent beyond. There is planetary Communion that is spiritual and erotic knowing or gnosis, with the Earth. So, singing the refrain above again:

You are aroused and even the sensate world unveils and reveals, delighting to be seen and truly appreciated. The heart flutters in erotic communion as the mind becomes unusually spacious and clear. One not only knows all of the others by heart, but also all those who oppose, and they all know you. You forget where you are, forget everything and are transported somewhere else.

Re-emerge into the upper world. Enjoyed a simultaneous seeing and feeling into all the life around you. Sensually feel the historical and geological ages beneath your feet. Those layers themselves rest upon, as if rooted into a timeless symbolic ground. Understand the shapes, colors, motions and intentions of each tree, bird, plant, breeze. Know how the underlying pattern within and around us in-forms all events. In the Depths of it all, hums a constant and faithful Silence.

May your wholeness continue. May your love-making be of the same Depths. May you fully participate in life, human, divine, animal.

You can imagine that the Immanent Function uses Radius mundi to speak of the cells of Communion’s experience all at once, as one body: monk’s cell, chamber of the lovers, cells of a body, cells of Earth. Here it is again:

Synchronistic, embodied becoming together when two or more choose to gather for the happiness of all beings. The immanent function is the partner to C. G. Jung’s transcendent function. Individual consciousness participates in communion with the collective ecological conscious and unconscious. When in partnership, the immanent and transcendent functions make manifest the awe that opens the human heart to the Mystery of life. Their intermingling is recognized by an ensouled, living atmosphere of warmth, love, surprise and humor that makes life-cycles worth living in enduring planetary and interplanetary relationships. Anomalous, synesthetic, paranormal, psychokinetic, miraculous, prophetic, numinous, aesthetic arrest experiences that are immanent to the transcendent occur in the midst of their union.

I am not the first to declare this. Here is Whitman sounding very aware of swelling, dreaming, remembering, imagining:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

I invite you to consider Whitman’s poetry as more than personal. His poetry has layers of both interpersonal and transpersonal planetary tantric ritual generosity. Deeper still, is how his words are an invitation to a Vision Quest. When you lift away his personalized eroticism, you can hear the Indigenous wisdom of Earth-based elders reminding the youth who they are and the soul wealth that is rightfully theirs.

Only by a God can a Goddess be known.

Only by a Goddess can a God be known.

Only by a God can a God be known.

Only by a Goddess can a Goddess be known.

Paranormal and Psychokinetic Experiences

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A paranormal experience is an experience that is impossible and cannot happen according to our current science. It includes a lot of manifestations. At a time when some friends were teaching in Lawrence, Kansas, they had just put their infant daughter to bed in her room upstairs. Not more than an hour passed when suddenly, they heard a sound that was like the howling of a cat or a deeply sobbing woman. It was upsetting and uncanny. They were not able to find the source of the sound, even going outside. Once outside, they knew the sound was coming from inside the house upstairs. Once inside again, walking up the stairs, they realized the sound was coming from just outside their baby’s room. When they got to the doorway, the sound stopped. They checked on the child and she had spiked a high fever. The fever was so high, they took her to the hospital to make sure she would be well.

In Indigenous rituals, I have seen flashes of lights in the air, like flashbulbs going off. That same kind of flash happened one time when a group of us were praying in a house in Mansfield, Ohio. It was not during the prayers, but later, in the kitchen having a snack after the session, a bright flash lit up the entire room in front of all of us.

William James, author of Varieties of Religious Experience, spent a portion of his career carefully studying the paranormal. He was president of the American Society for Psychic Research and put in a lot of hours in seances. A good book from the growing edge is Kripal’s and Strieber’s book, Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained.

Generally, psychokinesis is moving objects and/or affecting the world with the intention of the mind. I have mixed feelings about the practice, yet it shares some attributes with an apport, when objects move with no apparent mover. Since a ritual for the good of all beings is a form of group intention of the mind, I think mental intention is important. However, in a ritual or prayer space, there is no command as to what occurs. The openness to the experience as opposed to control makes for a sense of surprise, awe, and grace. For example, one afternoon, we were about to sit down for a ceremony when the shaman’s drum on the floor was struck loudly one time by an unseen hand. It is numinous when it happens right in front of you, yet also brings a sense of playful seriousness. The Indigenous have many ceremonies where the movement of objects by the spirits and spirit lights are part of the sacredness. There is a wonderful book on the spiritualism of the 1850’s in Athens, Ohio, by Sharon Hatfield entitled, Enchanted Ground: The Spirit Room of Jonathan Koons.

Review Of The Literature

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Four of my mentors have published dreams, life events, and creative works that are key to my embodied ecomasculine understanding. To those four, I am going to add my own because it would feel cowardly to me to share the vulnerability of men I respect and hide behind them! Carl Jung, W. B. Yeats, Eugene Monick, and Walt Whitman have all been quite courageous about their authentic manhood.

To begin, however, Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine, have been anti-mentors for men since Jerome’s 383-404 CE translation of the Bible into Latin and Augustine’s Confessions, written between 397-400 CE.

Jerome condemned REM sleep and Phallos as nocturnal penile tumescence in his Latin translation of the Bible when he purposely mistranslated the Hebrew word, anan. Morton Kelsey in his 1991 book, God, Dreams, and Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, notes that Jerome mistranslated Deuteronomy 18:10 and Leviticus 19:26. He changed the original law from, You shall not practice augury or witchcraft, to, You shall not practice augury or observe dreams. His condemnation of Phallos continued for 1500 years in Christianity because most translations of the Bible were taken from the Church Father’s vulgate. Only in 1991 was this phallic wound consciously lifted by Kelsey. In 1604, when Samuel de Champlain first spoke to the Montagnais elders in Montagnais lands soon to become Nouvelle France, Jerome’s theft can be seen when de Champlain warned his Indigenous hosts that dreams were sent by the Devil to trick us. The Saint came by his fear of dreaming honestly. He famously dreamed he was being lashed before the throne of a divine judge for being interested in the Greek and Roman classics. It was the dream of the lashing that inspired him to focus on his work as a biblical translator.

Augustinian teachings on Original Sin, I would argue, were derived from his own unexpected erection in a Roman bath one day with his father. While it delighted his yet to be converted pagan father, the news terrified his fundamentalist Catholic Christian mother. It is my intention to lift some of the karmic debt off of Augustine’s visitation of Phallos at age 16. I think it’s ok for us of European ancestry to re-negotiate our relationship with 16 centuries of the inherited effects of Augustine’s self-loathing that has fallen onto men. I think it’s ok to reclaim the buried and forgotten full delight of his own father’s joy for his son and family future as a grandfather. I think it’s ok to lift away some of his mother’s mind that feared eternal hellfire for her previously pure son whose embodied manhood had publicly stood up to announce he was ready for an initiation into the mysteries of the sacred masculine. Augustine confessed:

I will now call to mind my past foulness, and the carnal corruptions of my soul; not because I love them, but that I may love Thee, O my God. For love of Thy love I do it; reviewing my most wicked ways in the very bitterness of my remembrance, that Thou mayest grow sweet unto me (Thou sweetness never failing, Thou blissful and assured sweetness); and gathering me again out of that my dissipation, wherein I was torn piecemeal, while turned from Thee, the One Good, I lost myself among a multiplicity of things. For I even burnt in my youth heretofore, to be satiated in things below; and I dared to grow wild again, with these various and shadowy loves: my beauty consumed away, and I stank in Thine eyes; pleasing myself, and desirous to please in the eyes of men…But while in that my sixteenth year I lived with my parents, leaving all school for a while (a season of idleness being interposed through the narrowness of my parents' fortunes), the briers of unclean desires grew rank over my head, and there was no hand to root them out. When that my father saw me at the baths, now growing towards manhood, and endued with a restless youthfulness, he, as already hence anticipating his descendants, gladly told it to my mother; rejoicing in that tumult of the senses wherein the world forgetteth Thee its Creator, and becometh enamoured of Thy creature, instead of Thyself, through the fumes of that invisible wine of its self-will, turning aside and bowing down to the very basest things. But in my mother's breast Thou hadst already begun Thy temple, and the foundation of Thy holy habitation, whereas my father was as yet but a Catechumen, and that but recently. She then was startled with a holy fear and trembling; and though I was not as yet baptised, feared for me those crooked ways in which they walk who turn their back to Thee, and not their face.

This is the same Augustine who will later develop the doctrine of Original Sin. You can make out the hidden contours of Phallos, an unexpected Roman erection, in his condemnation of human instincts, erotic, loving and love-making, the sacred union celebrated as Amor:

As soon as our first parents had transgressed the commandment, divine grace forsook them, and they were confounded at their own wickedness; and therefore, they took fig-leaves and covered their shame; for though their members remained the same, they had shame now where they had none before. They experienced a new motion of their flesh, which had become disobedient to them, in struct retribution of their own disobedience to God. For the soul, reveling in its own liberty, and scorning to serve God, was itself deprived of the command it had formerly maintained over the body. And because it had willingly deserted its superior Lord, it no longer held its own inferior servant; neither could it hold the flesh subject, as it would always have been able to do had it remained itself subject to God. Then began the flesh to lust against the Spirit, in which strife we are born, deriving from the first transgression a seed of death, and bearing in our members, and in our vitiated nature, the contest or even victory of the flesh. [Augustine in The City of God, Book XIV, Chapter 13]

The journey from childhood through the passage of adolescence and into manhood has been bridled as a power source by all the forms of monotheism that I know. It has been exploited by tribes, nations, kingdoms, empires to encourage men to become soldiers. The following men, Whitman, Jung, Yeats, Monick, have written of their own paths. Their published works describe various rites of passage they have taken on their own and/or have kept their initiations and initiators hidden. At the end, I include my own.

The path to the sacred Earth moves through our bodies, in this case, I’m offering an ecomasculine/ecofluid passage. A first model to take the path untaken by Augustine is Whitman in Leaves of Grass. I think he affirms sensuality and the Beauty of life. Here’s the full section and I’ll pick it up again further on:

28

Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new
identity,

Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,

Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help
them,

My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike
what is hardly different from myself;

On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,

Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,

Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial,

Depriving me of my best, as for a purpose,

Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare
waist,

Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight
and pasture-fields,

Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away,

They bribed to swap off with touch, and go and graze
at the edges of me;

No consideration, no regard for my draining strength
or my anger;

Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a
while,

Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry
me.

The sentries desert every other part of me;

They have left me helpless to a red marauder;

They all come to the headland, to witness and assist
against me.

I am given up by traitors;

I talk wildly—I have lost my wits—I and nobody else
am the greatest traitor;

I went myself first to the headland—my own hands
carried me there.

You villain touch! what are you doing? My breath
is tight in its throat;

Unclench your floodgates! you are too much for me.

29

Blind, loving, wrestling touch! sheath'd, hooded,
sharp-tooth'd touch!

Did it make you ache so, leaving me?

Parting, track't by arriving—perpetual payment of
perpetual loan;

Rich, showering rain, and recompense richer after-
ward.

Sprouts take and accumulate—stand by the curb
prolific and vital;

Landscapes, projected, masculine, full-sized, and
golden.

30

All truths wait in all things;

They neither hasten their own delivery, nor resist it;

They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon;

The insignificant is as big to me as any;

(What is less or more than a touch?)

Logic and sermons never convince;

The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

Only what proves itself to every man and woman
is so;

Only what nobody denies is so.

A minute and a drop of me settle my brain;

I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and
lamps,

And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or
woman,

And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have
for each other,

And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson,
until it becomes omnific,

And until every one shall delight us, and we them.

31

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-
work of the stars,

And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of
sand, and the egg of the wren,

And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,

And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors
of heaven,

And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all
machinery,

And the cow crunching with depres't head surpasses
any statue,

And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions
of infidels,

And I could come every afternoon of my life to look
at the farmer's girl boiling her iron ten-kettle
and baking short-cake.

I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss,
fruits, grains, esculent roots,

And am stuccoed with quadrupeds and birds all over,

And have distanced what is behind me for good
reasons,

And call anything close again, when I desire it.

In vain the speeding or shyness;

In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against
my approach;

In vain the mastadon retreats beneath its own pow-
der bones;

In vain objects stand leagues off, and assume manifold
shapes;

In vain the ocean settling in hollows, and the great
monsters lying low;

In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky;

In vain the snake slides through the creepers and
logs;

In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods;

In vain the razor-bill'd auk sails far north to Labrador;

I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of
the cliff.

32

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are
so placid and self-contain'd;

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition;

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their
sins;

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to
God;

Not one is dissatisfied—not one is demented with the
mania of owning things;

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived
thousands of years ago;

Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole
earth.

So they show their relations to me, and I accept
them;

They bring me tokens of myself—they evince them
plainly in their possession.

I wonder where they get those tokens:

Did I pass that way huge times ago, and negligently
drop them?

Myself moving forward then and now and forever,

Gathering and showing more always and with velocity,

Infinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among
them;

Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remem-
brancers;

Picking out here one that I love, and now go with him
on brotherly terms.

A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive
to my caresses,

Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears,

Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,

Eyes well apart, full of sparkling wickedness—ears
finely cut, flexibly moving.

His nostrils dilate, as my heels embrace him;

His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure, as we speed
around and return.

I but use you a moment, then I resign you, stallion;

Why do I need your paces, when I myself out-gallop
them?

Even, as I stand or sit, passing faster than you.

33

O swift wind! O space and time! now I see it is
true, what I guess'd at;

What I guess'd when I loaf'd on the grass;

What I guess'd while I lay alone in my bed,

And again as I walk'd the beach under the paling
stars of the morning.

Jung’s dream of phallos is in Memories, Dreams and Reflections. He was between 3-4 years old and dreamed he went underground through a stone-lined hole. He recollects:

At the bottom was a doorway with a round arch, closed off by a green curtain. It was a big, heavy curtain of worked stuff, like brocade, and it looked very sumptuous. Curious to see what might be hidden behind, I pushed it aside. I saw before me in the dim light a rectangular chamber about 30 feet long. The ceiling was arched and of hewn stone. The floor was laid with flagstones, and in the center a red carpet ran to a low platform. On this platform stood a wonderfully rich golden throne…a real king’s throne in a fairy tale. Something was standing on it which I thought at first was a tree trunk twelve to fifteen feet high and about one and a half or two feet thick. It was a huge thing, reaching almost to the ceiling. But it was of a curious composition: it was made of skin and naked flesh, and on top of the head was a single eye, gazing motionlessly upwards.

It was fairly light in the room, although there were no windows and no apparent source of light. Above my head, however, was an aura of brightness. The thing did not move, yet I had the feeling that it might at any moment crawl off the throne like a worm and creep towards me. I was paralyzed with terror. At that moment, I heard from outside and above my mothers voice! She called out, “Yes, look at him. That is the man-eater!”…I awoke sweating and scared to death.

W. B. Yeats in his 1916 Reveries over Childhood and Youth, shared his own phallos story many years before Jung shared his own. In 1926, as he confided to a friend in response to a reader’s reaction to Yeats’ book, A Vision, that mystic vision and sexual experience were essentially the same and that the way through the first lay through the second. (p. 242 in Yeats’ Ghosts by Brenda Maddox)

In Reveries, he shared:

I was tortured by sexual desire and had been for many years. I have often said to myself that some day I would put it all down in a book that some young man of talent might not thin as I did that my shame was mine and mine alone. It began when I was fifteen years old. I had been bathing, and lay down in the sun on the sand on the Third Rosses and covered my body with sand.

Presently, the weight of the sand began to affect the organ of sex, though at first I did not know what the strange, growing sensation was. It was only at the orgasm that I knew, remembering some boy’s description or my grandfather’s encyclopedia. It was many days before I discovered how to renew that wonderful sensation. From that on it was a continual struggle against an experience that almost invariably left me with exhausted nerves…It filled me with loathing for myself.

In Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine, Gene offered both his own lived experience and the dream that were both seminal to his Opus:

Phallos as God-Image

As a child of about seven, in the early days of the psychosexual period which Freud called latency, I crawled into my parents’ bed one summer morning. We had moved to our summer cottage on White Bear Lake, now a suburb of St. Paul but then two hours’ journey by backroads from the city. Mother had left the bed to prepare breakfast. Father lay there asleep, naked. I went under the covers to explore. I may have had a flashlight with me, which would indicate an intention to investigate. Or, sensing there was a discovery to be made. I left the darkness of the blankets to find one. In any case, crouched in the darkness next to my father’s body, I came upon his genitalia. I focused the light and gazed upon a mystery. How long I remained there I have no idea; the particulars of the experience have faded. There were no words, then or afterward. As fare as I know, my father was not aware that I was there.

What I do remember is the powerful effect the incident had upon me. I think now that I looked upon my father’s maleness as a revelation. Certainly at the time I could not articulate what it was unequivocably present before me. There, in those organs, was a picture I had not known before. The picture intimated another world. It was a world I somehow knew existed but until that exposure I had not tangible image to embody my fledgling inner sense. Suddenly, in those naked parts, it faced me.

The other world surely was the potential within me for a sexual life of my own in the future, then only dimly perceived. I also think it was much more. It was the beginning of transpersonal awareness, presented to me as connected with masculine sexual organs. The organs were my father’s, and through them, I came into being. They were also archetypal in essence - something more, even, than my father. He and I were united within a masculine identity having its roots beyond us both. (p.13)

Gene’s dream contribution follows. He had become the vicar at St. Clements in New York City. It was a heavy responsibility that included incessant reporting in the news media about parish events. This dream published in Phallos occurred when Gene was nervous and unsure of himself. He was working on his dreams at that time, 1968, with Esther Harding. He writes:

At that time, I was working analytically with Esther Harding, the first Jungian analyst in the United States. She was an elderly and rather delicate-appearing maiden lady, the daughter of an English vicar. I brought her my dream of a great phallos appearing in a circle of naked men who were lying on the ground. Each man had his feet placed upon the base of the phallos, and each man had his hand upon his neighbor’s erect member. Dr. Harding asked about the central image: “Was it a man’s phallos?” “Certainly not,” I replied, “it was much too big for that.” “Was it a giant’s phallos?” she asked, “No, it was much too big even for that.” Well, then, Mr. Monick, whose do you think it was?

The implication was that it was for me a god-image, even a symbol of the Self. I remember that she was amused by her line of questioning and by my surprise. I remember that I was bemused by the possibility of a phallos being as strong a presence as divinity. As a Christian priest, I was not at ease with a phallic god-image, St. Clement’s or no St. Clement’s. I had nowhere to put such a suggestion, no way to incorporate it into my life. (p. 33, in Phallos)

Something I have learned over the years is that during the moments of embodying phallos, either in a wet dream or in play, there are crucial symbolic, metaphoric, and mythological (archetypal) understandings woven into the biological somatic revelation.

All of the images seem to share a delightful, purposeful friction. Behind them all seems to be all the metaphors for fire, fire-making, fire-finding, fire-accidents, fire of the day and night, cooking and weapons, internal combustion, ancestors, stars, planets, suns and moons. This is before orgasm is possible. After, when fantasizing, visions, dreams, originality, and relationship appear, an inner, shared fire and an outer, shared atmosphere, signal an adult capable of helpful, self-sustaining participation in collective community life.

Puberty runs much deeper than a physical transformation into an adult male body that can reproduce life via sperm production and successful delivery into a fertile human female. So, I write:

As a young man from an Irish Roman and German Catholic family, the self-loathing and dilemma shared by Yeats was also my experience. Mine was in 1973 between 12-13 years old. At the dawning of my own initiation, I remember that it was sudden. I had no memories of the actual size of my erection before this time. However, one day, as I took a bath, there it was. I found myself looking for ways to enjoy myself. What I discovered was that the flow of the water coming out of the faucet brought a full-body enjoyment that was amazing. I enjoyed delightful friction this way until all the hot water was gone from our house and my mom knocked on the door to tell me to stop using up all the water. From that day on, phallos water-loving was my practice.

Coming out of the bathroom, the self-loathing would be so heavy on me that I always felt like some alien life-form, a kind of hairy, slouching insect with slurred speech. It felt so obvious to me, it was hard for me to understand why no one else seemed to notice my mutation.

It would be forty-five years later, when I was 58 years old, I had the dream below that seemed to confirm the healing of manhood away from patriarchy. It was a dream of sacred masculine/ecomasculine dancing.

In the dream, I felt joyful through the whole of my body. My breathing, especially, was deep, easy, even as if a wind was blowing through me with each inhale and exhale. I looked down to see my man-self shimmying from side to side. My joyful awareness of how this felt in my dream body matched my vision. I thought to myself in the dream, “My God, I’m dancing.” This thought, with the words spoken into my mind, “Most Delicate Guidance Instrument.” The energy of this seeing, feeling and awareness carried me laughing, rising upward out of sleep and into being awake in the morning light.

Just here, I would like to offer that, personally, I think Gene’s dream of Phallos was the beginning of an honest Christian effort to dissolve the shame of Augustine about his own manhood. It would not be until the second half of the 20th century that any Christian theologian would confront Augustine’s distortion and shaming:

We are ashamed of that very thing which made those primitive human beings ashamed, when they covered their loins. That is the penalty of sin, that is the plague and the mark of sin; that is the temptation and the very fuel of sin, that is the law in our members warring against the war in our mind; that is the rebellion against our own selves, proceeding from our very selves, which by a most righteous retribution is rendered us by our disobedient members. It is this which makes us ashamed, and justly ashamed. [in, On Marriage and Concupiscence, written in 420]

I do think that Michelangelo attempted to heal the fullness of masculinity with his Risen Christ where his manhood has been redeemed of shame by the Death and Resurrection.

With Walt Whitman, in Section 28 of Leaves of Grass, I share the noun, headland. Whitman wrote:

I am given up by traitors,
I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the
greatest traitor,
I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat,
Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.

I think he is sharing in poetry the same story told by Yeats’ and my own prose. In poetry, the refrain of my song, Headland, speaks of this same mutant experience. Here I name the simultaneous shame and exhilaration, the isolation and communion, of a secret gnosis. In dreams and in awakening spiritual/erotic life.

Dear Fremd,

I understand.

Tonight be with us and all the stars of Heaven.

Headland, Headland,

To talk of Heaven and sing in ruins,

To sing through the heavens.

An Infinite Hypersphere, Axis, and Curved Surface: The Turning Point

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The planetary Turning Point of a W-axis mundi is a reminder that in our current cosmology, there is no such thing as a single stillpoint, like the dot in the center of a flat circle. To carry forward the symbolic and psychological language of our Ancestors, terms like divine spark, scintilla, monad, stillpoint, sacred center, mandala, core, etc…that appear in religious texts and in the works of thinkers like Joseph Campbell, C. G. Jung, W. B. Yeats, and, of course, Monick, require an update.

In our galactic cosmology, all particles show spin. In order to show spin, there needs to be an axis around which the spinning occurs. There can be a still point in a one or two dimensional reality, but life in spacetime is far and wide and within with spinning, entangled spirals of evolutions and involutions. This update has become a necessity to our wholeness since the 1905 publication of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity where the spacetime and mass of our cosmos are in a constant dance together. Wheeler famously said:

Spacetime grips mass and tells it how to move.

Mass grips spacetime and tells it how to curve.

My cultural shift in this, with due respect to Wheeler, is that time need not belong to the spaceside of the equation. There is masstime too, a major gift of Einstein’s General Relativity. There is no place outside time, beyond time, without time. The Reynolds Tweak is:

Spacetime grips mass and tells it how to move.

Masstime enters space and tells it how to curve.

The conceptual shift that merges time with all space and all mass has already occurred in Eastern culture in the foundation of Aikido based on the spin of our cosmos.

Rick Fields in his 1991 book, The Code of the Warrior, brings attention to this:

Where jujitsu taught, “When pushed, pull back; when pulled, push forward,'“ aiki-jutsu taught, “When pushed pivot and go around; when pulled, enter while circling.” Becoming one with the opponent by entering fearlessly and directly into his attack, Ueshiba took a defensive initiative—called go-no-sen—in which he blended with and joined the attacker’s energy, moving always in the spiraling circular, swirling movements of the universe itself. (p. 200)

“DEVS EST SPHAERA INFINITA CVIVS CENTRVM EST VBIQUE, CIRCVMFERENTIA NVSQVAM,” a quote used over the centuries from a book called, Liber XXIV Philosophorum, “The Book of the 24 Philosophers,” offers a good stepping off point for what I am describing. The Latin quote in English reads: God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. The quote works fine as long as you live on a motionless, flat Earth upon which the refuse of the entire universe has fallen that is beneath a solid celestial vault overhead. The quote does not work if Earth is itself a celestial sphere turning on its axis mundi in a solar system where the sun, moon, all other planets and their moons too are turning.

Another way to conceptualize this is to imagine how for a two dimensional person, three dimensions seem infinite the same way that to our three dimensional personhood, four dimensions seem infinite. For a four dimensional being, five dimensions seem infinite, and so on. In the definition of God that we need to update, notice how God is a 3 dimensional sphere described by a two dimensional circle – a circumference and a center. So, for our times, God needs to move to a 4 dimensional hypersphere that we describe using a sphere. God does best when the definition is in the direction of new degrees of freedom taken up by the human species-mind.

This quote, updated, is of a beloved pair who have said yes to life, have risked all to love, to bring forth the never-been, the never-will-be-again. Our cosmos is a union of They who We are.

Goddess is an infinite hypersphere whose curved surface is everywhenwhere and whose axis is nowherewhen.

God is an infinite hypersphere whose axis is everywherewhen and whose curved surface is nowhenwhere.

Decolonize God and Goddess

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God and Goddess now resting upon their own foundations in delight and purpose in life open the way for us to re-instate and honor our own families, clans, and nations. When a colonizer goes conquering, a method of control is to demonize a people’s relationship with the loving dead. Colonizers destroy a family’s home altar to the Ancestors using scientific materialism and/or monotheism. Phallos and the archetype of clitoral tumescence are surely archetypes. They are not Ancestors. This is a hard lesson of Monick’s Phallos trilogy. The books hold you captive inside the colonizing ways of our Hellenistic/Judeo-Christian-Islamic roots.

Colonial Goddesses and Gods must now give way to the restoration of Grandmothers and Grandfathers. I mean this both archetypally as well as genetically. Puberty as well as passage into elderhood and their visitations invite us into membership and participation in our genetic family’s manhood and womanhood and all LGBTQ+ gender variations. Planetary Goddess and God can be deepened:

Grandmother is an infinite hypersphere whose curved surface is everywhenwhere and whose axis is nowherewhen.

Grandfather is an infinite hypersphere whose axis is everywherewhen and whose curved surface is nowhenwhere.

An Ancestor is a person with whom you have a personal relationship. The boots on the ground awareness of the infinite 4th dimension is that the dead do not die. Life continues in psyche and in relationship with us. They are not ghosts. Ghosts tend to be isolated, parasitic, hungry for attention. Ancestors care for us, bring us peace, helpful guidance, warmth, love, humor, play, surprise.

The 4th dimension of enduring consciousness is also the in-between lives, the whenwhere of sustaining mind out of which we are born. Over the planet, personal relationships with the 4th dimension is the key to human survival. It is good to be reminded that what is known in Indigenous wisdom as the spirit-worlds we call the 4th dimension. In enduring cultures, life without the spirit-worlds/4th dimension is the suicide level for a person and a nation.

Anywhere we find the terms that refer to a two-dimensional circle with a centerpoint, a 4D+ hypersphere turning on an axis needs to replace it. Human souls in the past were imagined as reincarnating monads.  The one-dimensional monad is of the old cosmology because, by definition, it has no spin/no axis. Now, and going forward, in a cosmos full of spinning, we are each a reincarnating axis mundi. In one of his last works, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Joseph Campbell described our time as the time of the birthing of the monad of mankind. If we describe axis mundi as a turning point, new horizons open. May we all heroically engage now when our time is the time of birthing the turning point, axis mundi, curved surface and radius mundi of human kind.

Finally, God and Goddess, Grandfather and Grandmother can join with Patrix and Matrix. Matrix has been around for awhile, but Patrix was recently coined around the same time but in the different minds of Marion Woodman and Gene Monick.

We are here to be the turning points.

An axis mundi that is a re-incarnational turning point restores a long-missing cosmic teaching of the Western tradition’s Spindle of Necessity. In our own tradition, Plato taught in Timaeus that the cosmos is turning due to the Goddess Necessity, the Sirens, and the Fates who keep the rim of the Spindle rotating.

In the Myth of Er, chapter 10 in The Republic, time in between lives is represented to the minds of our Ancestors. Each soul chooses a personal spindle of a life. We have a choice in the life we are born into. It can be made out of unreflecting habit, unawareness, haste, slow discernment.

In our own tradition, virtue is free. This means that no matter the life, transformation is possible. The recent series, Russian Doll, expresses this brilliantly. We are all called to be the Turning Point is the update for this traditional teaching since evolution, spacetime and the reality of the unconscious.

 Mediation Is Wisdom

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Here’s a quote from John Wier-Perry on spiritual emergency:

“Whenever a profound experience of change is about to take place, its harbinger is the motif of death. This is not particularly mysterious, since its the limited view and appraisal of oneself that must be outgrown or transformed, and to accomplish transformation the self-image must dissolve. In severe visionary states, one may feel one has crossed over into the realm of death and is living among the spirits of the deceased. One is forced to let go of old expectations of oneself and to let oneself be tossed about by winds of change.

Far less familiar is the companion piece to this death motif–the image of world destruction. Like the self-image, the world image is a compacted form of the very complex pattern of how one sees the world and how one lives in it. We learn most about this from cultural anthropologists, who find that, in times of acute and rapid culture change, visionaries undergo the shattering experience of seeing the world dissolve into chaos and time whirl back to its beginnings. This dissolution of the world image clearly represents the death of the old culture to pave the way for renovation. Thus, in an individual’s life, when a transformation of one’s inner culture is under way, dissolution of the world image is the harbinger of change. Expressions of cultural reform are explicit.

These and other archetypal images have the function of implementing the process of spirit, of liberating and transforming its energies, which will then slip out of the old structures and into new ones geared to the future. All this happens in he interest of development, of cultivating a more capacious consciousness, open to new dimensions of experience.

Not only are these two motifs, self-image and world image, companion pieces in the process, but they also share the same representative image: the mandala. The entire process of renewal is evidently the work of this powerful image symbolizing the psyche’s governing center.

The energy that had been bound up in the structures of the old self-image and world image, the issues of who one is and what sort of world one lives in, is immense. In dreams or visions, nuclear explosion is a frequent expression of this enormous change of psychic energy that is loose during the renewal process and raises havoc for a period of time. Though one’s own nature is struggling to break through, one may feel that who one is and what one values is up for grabs. Indeed, values and the emotional issues of life seem to be clashing opposites.

This energy does not remain long in suspense, but quickly seeks its reincarnation into new structures, expressed in the form of images and experiences of rebirth and world regeneration. A new sense of oneself appears along with fresh interests and motivations. The new birth activates one’s memory of the actual events of one’s first birth, thus linking these phenomena with those studied by Stanislav Grof. In addition, there is an inner reenctment of emotional experiences of early years.

The cataclysm of this kind of crisis in spiritual processes reminds me of the Biblical warning, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” For during the period of time between the initial visions of death and world destruction and their resolution in renewal, one is apt to be in the grip of fear, and dismayed to find oneself isolated since communication of one’s experiences is not often empathetically received. At the very moment when one needs loving acceptance one finds oneself either alone or surrounded by professionals who want to suppress the process and make one conform to the ways of the former self and the former world.

This fear and (and an accompanying rage) produce biochemical effects in the brain and the rest of the body that medical doctors prefer to see as the primary cause of psychological disorder. This biased and mechanistic diagnosis does not hold up, however, since it is now well known that if a person undergoing this turmoil is given love, understanding, and encouragement, the spiritual crisis soon resolves itself without the need for interruption by suppressive medication. The most fragmented “thought disorder” can become quite coherent and orderly within a short time if someone is present to respond to it with compassion. Such a relationship is far better than a tranquilizer in most instances. A haven where there is attentiveness to inner experiences and where, removed from the context of daily life, one can examine one’s whole existence is also adventageous.

I have described the more extreme form of visionary states because the psychic process is so clearly shown that one can understand it. The more unusual experience, however, while showing the same psychic contents and processes, may be far less disruptive. Severity ranges from the horrendous to the mild, depending perhaps on how vigorous the resources of a person’s consciousness are and how rich in its repertory one’s unconscious psyche might be. But the process of renewal needs a partner.

What is the ultimate goal of spiritual emergence and the renewal process? It has the same goal as that of the mystic way or of meditation: in Buddhist practice, it is called wisdom and compassion or love.” (pp. 68-69, in Spiritual Emergency, Christina and Stan Grof, eds.)

Wier-Perry invites us into the fuller awareness of a sphere when he notes that self-image and world image are companion pieces. However, more than a two-dimensional mandala-self is required to reflect experience in our spherical world. Axis mundi, radius mundi, volume and surface of the hypersphere of the world now mirror psyche’s governing center. We are within it and it is within us. By this magnified spherical for the world and self are renewed. We are each a world with its turning point, unique and, as he notes, potentially capable of world-evolution if we are compassionate in how we participate in our own power and self-image.

Here is a the first part of an updated version of Wier-Perry’s mandalic reasoning:

Two motifs – self-image and world image- are companion pieces in the process of renewal. They share the same representative image: a mandala that is now to be imagined as a 4D+ hypersphere resonant with the 5th dimension and turning like a gyroscope on its axis mundi. We are inside the world image and the self-image is within us, except when they are not. 

There is another nuance that resembles Dr. Monick’s claiming of axis mundi for the masculine, thus unconsciously perpetuating the mental structure of Present Consciousness. Wier-Perry unconsciously passes on the patriarchal habit of having the source of the control of life outside the agency of the conscious personality. What I mean is here:

The entire process of renewal is evidently the work of this powerful image symbolizing the psyche’s governing center.

For the update to New Consciousness, the entire process of renewal is in reality a collaboration. This powerful image symbolizing the psyche’s governing center now is a partner. We are at a time of divine-human ecological partnership. The idea of divine human partnership is at the heart of alchemy and the Western tradition of Hermeticism. It also occurs among the Cayuga of the Six Nations people of the Great Lakes as part of the reforms of Handsome Lake.

The Upper Pantheon, including the Creator and the Four Angels, has undergone modification from the original because of the teachings of the revealer, Handsome Lake, at the close of the eighteenth century. The original Cayuga designation for the Supreme Being was “Haweni-yu, Controller,” but Handsome Lake was told by the angels to instruct the people to substitute the title, “Sqgweadr-sq, Creator of all, ” when calling upon the Deity in prayer or thanksgiving. The reason was given, as a myth relates, that the Evil Spirit laid claim to being the “Controller” of the earth and its people and accordingly responded when the original term was used. (p, 39 in Midwinter Rites of the Cayuga Longhouse, Speck)

So, in what is an old-fashioned gnostic move, we too, are called to set aside the idea of Haweni-yu, the form of power that has been usurped by a less compassionate Controller of the Earth and its people. Western culture’s Fibonacci Series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21… is the same teaching to not make an image of the One, to understand that humanity can approximate the One with all and sundry paradoxical symbols of Source. Yet, the Great Mystery that is Creator of all life, who ever has a Home that includes us.

Our version of “Sqgweadr-sq, Creator of all, “ would appear in the other half of Wier-Perry’s world-image/self image as:

The entire process of renewal is evidently human co-participation in the work of the powerful planetary image that symbolizes the psyche’s governing source simultaneously within (self-image) and all around (world image) us, except when they are not.

And here now, is what Wier-Perry called, self-image/world image, defined as a participatory planetary Self-image:

Not only are these two motifs – self-image and world image- companion pieces in the process of renewal. They share the same representative image: a mandala that is now to be imagined as a 4D+ hypersphere resonant with the 5th dimension and turning like a gyroscope on its axis mundi. We are inside the world image and the self-image is within us, except when we are not. The entire process of renewal is evidently human co-participation in the work of the powerful planetary image that symbolizes the psyche’s governing source simultaneously within (self-image) and all around (world image) us, except when it’s not.

Urperson and Urth: Self-Image and World Image, The Messiah Complex

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In Gene’s 1991 Castration and Male Rage: The Phallic Wound, he worked with Alice Peterson to lay to rest the patriarchal Greek word for mankind, anthropos, with the more spacious word, Urperson. (oor-person) They searched for a base-word that included all genders and chose, person because of its mutability. Ur, a Germanic prefix means, primal, original, source. Urperson, then, is a primal-original-source being.

Over the years, I developed Urrealism using Ur, as well as found Lee Irwin’s term, Ur-space, which is an update of our cosmos that unites matter, energy, spacetime, and psych. Urrealism is what Urpersons do in Ur-space. It is original wholeness in communion with original wholeness. Urreality is the expanded reality of Immanent Function. It was not long before I found I needed to update Earth to Urth, pronouncing both the same. Urth is our primal, original, source.

I introduce Urperson and Urth now in order to collapse the cumbersome updated mandala definition. So, from now on going forward, I am going to set aside:

a mandala that is now to be imagined as a 4D+ hypersphere resonant with the 5th dimension and turning like a gyroscope on its axis mundi. We are inside the world image and the self-image is within us, except when we are not. The entire process of renewal is evidently human co-participation in the work of the powerful planetary image that symbolizes the psyche’s governing source simultaneously within (self-image) and all around (world image) us, except when it’s not.

The new definition is:

Not only are these two motifs – self-image and world image- companion pieces in the process of renewal. They share the same representative image: Urperson and Urth: Self-image and World-image, The Messiah Complex.

In 1995, in the book, Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, shared the same psychological underpinnings. Here is Gestalt thinker, William Cahalan:

Being grounded is enhanced and renewed by periods of extended, empathic engagement with the world, balanced by restorative moments of inward reflectiveness. This rhythm involves an intuitive cycling between the individual’s more contracted sense of self, on the one hand, and a more expanded, relational, or extended sense of self on the other, including the ability to lose oneself at times in union with the world. When we experience this self-extended state, the Earth tends to be sensed as the all-embracing, enduring Self of which the individual is one unique but temporary expression.

Decolonize Self/World Image Now

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Absent from Wier-Perry’s description is the fact that Indigenous ways offer collective rituals of the months, the seasons, and the year, of birth, childhood, adulthood, elderhood, death, and rebirth. In those collective ways, the self-image/world image is cared for because you care for the self and world of each other.

He’s right about the atomic blast that can appear in dreams in persons during a major life change. I observed this during my 30 years as a French teacher in my students. I dreamed of the nuclear blast as well during my own changes. We can live more gently in transition. It can be a creative life change when done with a wise community. This is the message in my essay, Answering James Joyce: If You Meet Zoe Christ on the Road.

A next step we are being asked to mature care of our own self-image/world-image. If there are any lessons to be learned from the 20th century, it’s that each of us are no longer safe when we surrender our self-image/world-image to any institution — religious, psychological, ecological, educational, economic, political. To move forward together through the Earth-rise photo of 1968. The time we are in now calls us to stand on our own two feet and look for ourselves, from the moon’s perspective - simultaneous physical celestial ground and psychological Celestial Ground.

Planetary and Interplanetary Relationships

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Since 1958, the planet has had a Galactic Coordinate System that is imagined as a large sphere over our quadrant of the galaxy. The star map that the GCS integrated is the star map human beings have used since our ancestors learned that the nighttime sky moves in predictable patterns. The first discovery of an Earth-like planet was in 2015. Our movies help us imagine interstellar travel, but our actual capacity is that we have managed to get two human-created objects, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, beyond the gravitational hillsphere of the sun. Voyager 1 crossed the boundary of our solar system, the heliopause, in 2012 and Voyager 2 crossed the heliopause in 2018.

Not only do our movies help us imagine hope for a future for the human species, there are important gifts they include as regards what kind of humanity we want to be and become? What is encouraging is that ideas like the Force in Star Wars, the 5 dimensional love that is the gravitational glue of life in Interstellar, the universal language of a galactic community for humans to better negotiate the future in Arrival, the gifts and challenges of mutations of X-Men as well as in the so-called Power of the Dark Side, once again, in Star Wars, all offer ways to us to reflect on how we treat each other on Earth. Any of our inherited sacred ways that are unable to be transformed by the questions raised in our films are to be thanked for their help over the centeries and put to rest. Inherited sacred ways that can go forward in new unexpected ways can be joined into a more global human atmosphere of peace as the priority.

The Force is easily accepted if you follow the Indigenous Red Road where balance and deep reverence for all life, the Medicine Wheel travels quite well. If you follow the Grail, the Grail Questions, What ails thee? and Whom does the Grail serve?, also jouney well. Star Trek’s Prime Directive of non-interference can easily last for trillions of years of learning and growing in the cosmos. Epic failure to learn from our past appears in Avatar.

Passport to the Cosmos, by John E. Mack is the best place to start. Next, inspired by Strieber’s book, Communion, the book, Communion Letters, opens up examples from the more than 200,000 letters the Striebers received. Communion Letters gives you numerous access points to what is a living mythology of the planet.

In my life, I was helping with ceremonies and caring for the sacred fire through the night at a gathering in 2016. Around 2 am, I stepped out of the ceremony hut to look at the stars. Just then, three black ships arced across the sky, northeast to southwest. When I worked at Angel House in Strongsville, Ohio, a man who had a shared experience with the Visitors took me to the Abbey Road location in North Royalton, Ohio, where it happened.

The same theme of directionality was there. I am in agreement with persons like John E. Mack, the Striebers, Jeff Kripal, Carl Jung, and others that what we are experiencing is the birth of the new mythology that can sustain us as we mature. The entryway to this living mythology is the same as what I described in the section on becoming. However, what is added is a pathologizing where what you first experience afllicts you. In that case, the advice from depth psychology that, In your symptom is your soul, works well to begin to unpack what may at first seem life-threatening!

In Passport to the Cosmos, John E. Mack’s summary of his many hours interviewing experiencers of different ages and of numerous cultures is worth the time:

For this awakening, the heightened awareness that grows out of the ego-shattering impact of the encounters, carries with it quite consistently certain inter-related psychological changes, especially if experiencers are enabled to work through the traumatic dimension of what they feel certain has happened to them.

First, they have access to what in Western societies is called nonordinary states of consciousness, similar to the symbolic worlds of the shamans of indigenous cultures. They become aware of the great archetypes of the collective unconscious, of birth, death, and rebirth, which helps them to experience their connectedness to other beings and to the Creator or Source.

Second, as a result of this deepening and expanding of their psychological and spiritual powers (abductees will often also speak of and manifest particular psychic abilities), together with the experienced shift of their bodlily vibrations, they may undergo a profound connection or reconnection with the Divine, God, Source or whatever they may call the ultimate creative principle of the cosmos…

Third, they experience a heart-opening, a sense of loving connection with all living beings and creation itself, which can at times take on mystical proportions…This is consistent with the findings of Norman Don and Gilda Moura, who observed that Brazilian abduction experiencers could enter voluntarily into states of hyperarousal revealed by their brain waves to be comparable only to the states of ecstasy or samadhi of advanced meditators or yogis.

Fourth, abductees experience a renewed sense of the sacred and a reverence for nature. Some, like Carlos Diaz, see divine light, like an aura, surrounding each living thing…they may become aware of the interconnected web of life and be viscerally, sometimes unbearably, pained by the destruction of the Earth’s living forms, committing themselves to their preservation…

…Each of the principle elements of the phenomenon — the traumatic intrusions, the reality-shattering encounters, the reconnection with Source; and the forging of new relationships across dimensional divide—contributes to the daishigyo, the great ego-death, that is marking the end of the materialist business -as-usual paradigm that has lost its compatibility with life in the world as we know it. (pp. 277-278)

Merged Spheres of Urperson and Urth: The Energy Fields of the Two Become One

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Jenny Wade, in her 2004, Transcendent Sex: When Lovemaking Opens the Veil:

Nothing in my life really prepared me for ecstatic sex. I’m not a spiritual adept, and I’m certainly not a love goddess. I was brought up in a conservative Methodist and Southern Baptist home. I became Episcopalian with contemplative leanings. As a baby boomer coming of age in the early 1970s, my attitude about sex is relatively liberal, and I’ve had a number of partners over the years. I don’t consider myself a particularly gifted or sophisticated lover.

On this occasion, I went to be, as I had countless times before, with man with whom I was deeply in love and with whom sex was always terrific but not in any way unusual. To my surprise, the room we were in began to change. Its right-angled white walls dissolved into a round pink chamber with a silver Greek-key border around the ceiling. The next thing I knew, I was no longer in that room but looking out over sparkling ultramarine ocean waves from a sunny shore. Then, I found myself surrounded by sea creatures. I thought at first I had been drawn from the beach into the ocean’s depths, but then I realized the sea creatures weren’t real. Instead, they were fantastic pictures of all sorts of fish and octopi on the pale greenish-blue walls of yet another and very different room. The pictures were painted in the distinctive style of ancient Crete, a culture about which I knew almost nothing. The greatest peace, wonder, delight, and bliss pervaded me. (p. 8)

In his 2007 book, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, Jeffrey J. Kripal shares an excellent account of what is the American soul’s dreaming edge. He affirms here what Joseph Campbell had intuited in Creative Mythology, that we are wise to root ourselves in the tradition of amor:

But there is another, more obvious and natural way of achieving the Shiva-Shakti union, and that is by way of the sexual act itself: and here one need not think of the analogy of god and goddess since the man and woman themselves supply both the image and the experience. Indeed, throughout the culminating period of Indian art and civilization, this way of sexual or Tantric yoga was held by many to be not only the most natural and easy path but also the most effective. Since hunger and sex, it was claimed, are the fundamental urges of the whole of nature, suppressing them is unnatural and continually suppressing them leads only to a state that is more morbid than sublime. Unnatural strains should not be imposed for the realization of truth, but on the contrary, the path should be followed along which nature itself is pointing. The natural powers should not be annihilated by amplified, whereupon they will become of themselves, transformed and yield the revelation of the Other Shore.

[p. 36, in Myths of Light, Joseph Campbell]



His chapter 16, The Tao of Esalen, contains insights from encounter group leader, John Heider. Kripal writes:

Among this collection of essays is Heider’s “Electric Sex and Magnetic Sex,” probably the clearest statement we have from a major Esalen figure on the psychology and mechanics of a contemplative sexual practice. The essay begins with the obvious: More people experience energy sensations during sexual intercourse than during any other experience.” Heider then proceeds to explain how these energy fields can be expanded, deepened, and developed through a contemplative approach to sexual foreplay and intercourse. Crucial here is Heider’s distinction between electric sex and magnetic sex:

“Electric sex is male sex, yang sex. Electric sex works when a body specifically stimulates sexual trigger points such as the head of the man’s penis or the woman’s clitoris. This in effect, “zaps” the body into arousal and eventually sparks an electric circuit through which the sexual energies can arc and discharge, leaving the body in a state of relaxation (or exhaustion).

Magnetic sex is different. Historically rare in the West but known throughout Tantric Asia, “magnetic sex is female sex, yin sex, Magnetic sex works when the fields of two people awaken and make contact. Magnetic sexual arousal is diffuse and felt more or less equally all over the body and in the space surrounding the body. It need not lead to a traditional orgasm and the pleasurable discharge of the energies. Energies can build and build here and be sublimated into deeper and deeper states of bodily bliss and contemplative consciousness — an electro-magnetic sex life, if you will….”

What Heider hopes for, then, is not a return to the sexual revolution of the 1960’s, but a “new covenant,” “a new Law” derived not from Paul and Christianity, which has always more or less ‘regretted that we [have] bodies with carnal impulses,’ but from the Asian tantric traditions and their use of sex ‘to help people become increasingly married to one another and to the cosmic whole.” Heider points out that this Tantric turn was anticipated in the West by Reich, who “specifically said that when sexual union is free from blocks, the energy fields of two partners become one unified energy field.” (pp. 362-363)

Heider’s new covenant has been a very long dream deferred for Western culture. The last time such an effort was made was attempted in our own mythology of the Grail and the sacred worth of amor as an 8th sacrament to be integrated into the other seven sacraments of Roman Catholicism. In Tristan and Yseult, the banished lovers arrive at a sacred chapel in the forest:

They come to a cave fashioned by the giants of pre-Christian times. We are back to the old Celtic-Germanic world. And over the entrance there is an inscription, “Chapel for Lovers.” Every detail of this chapel has symbolic meaning: chastity, loyalty, purity, and so forth. All the terms have new meanings, of course, in this context. And where the altar would have been is a bed of crystal. The sacrament of the altar is the sacrament of sex. Gottfried meant this. Medieval people meant this. The sacrament of love is sexual intercourse. And it IS a sacrament. [Joseph Campbell in The Romance of the Grail, 2015, p. 104]

In his book, Aikido and the Harmony of Nature, Saotome, the student of Eushiba, founder of Aikido, wrote:

I asked O Sensei, “How can you see God?”

He pointed at himself and then at me.

“My God perceives your God.”

This is the very same knowledge that calls Beloveds to the altar bed in the Cave-Chapel of Lovers. However, your hearts are pierced by a burning love that empties out all you were before meeting. With Beloveds, as gender-sensitive as I can be, the story says:

I asked my Beloved, “How can you see God?”

She pointed to her own heart and then to mine.

“My Goddess receives your God.

Your God perceives my Goddess.

When we make love, I know and I see.

We become all that is, all that was, all that is to come”

Ken Wilbur echoes this this in his forward to Dr. Jenny Wade’s 2004 book, Transcendent Sex: When Lovemaking Opens the Veil:

That is why sex can kill you. As the simplest, most accessible, most here-and-now transcendent experience that anybody can have, it is the most common doorway to the Divine, the most ordinary (in the best sense of the word) altered state that accelerates the stages of spiritual realization. The more one is plunged into the ocean of Spirit, into the ocean of infinite ease, the more one dies to one’s smaller self, dies to one’s ego, that finite and contracted mortal coil, and finds instead one’s own Original Face, one’s own Godhead, one’s own True Nature, prior to, but not other to the manifest world.

And discovering That, we laugh — and laugh and laugh and laugh. It is truly the ultimate inside joke: You are That. In the deepest, highest, wildest part of yourself, you intersect Infinity, you are one with the radiant Divine, you are the luminescent Essence of everything that exists, the blazing realization of which brings such a shattering relief that henceforth you might never stop laughing. Or crying — at that point, they mean pretty much the same thing. But the ultimate cosmic joke is simply that You’re It. (p.xi)

Here’s Jenny Wade herself defining transcendent sex:

1. Transcendent sex involves altered states that seem to come out of nowhere and overcome one or both of the lovers. The term, “transcendent sex” comes from the sense of transcending (going beyond or breaking through) the usual constraints of space, time, or self that constitute normal, waking consciousness.

2. In transcendent sex, there is a pervasive sense that these events participate in, or come from, a supernormal force, which people usually associate with Spirit, however understood. Whether it’s stepping into another reality, seeing visions, being possessed by an animal power or imploding into the utter emptiness of the Void, most people attribute a numinous quality to the events, even if they consider themselves athiests or agnostics.

3. Transcendent sex involves relationship. It is rooted in the ground created by the lovers, even when one person is taken so far beyond reality that the partner and the lovemaking recede into infinity. Or, in some cases, even when the partner is not human. (pp. 11-12)

True love is not ended by death. It changes shape and evolves — bridges the chasm — between the living and the dead. In Myer’s Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, he intended to share the exchange with his Beloved who tragically died by suicide before him from a broken heart. His Beloved, Annie Marshall, through the mediums Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Piper, addressed Myers in sufficient depth to heal his loss. The texts that affirmed ongoing love were removed from the book and destroyed by his wife. In the late 19th century, Myers used Plato’s Eros as his model.

Due to our E=MC2 cosmos, my years dreaming, participating in Indigenous Earth-based rituals, and most importantly, knowing the heart-piercing depths of loving and being loved, I know and would again willingly choose the pain to the entire system of fixed concepts, judgments, virtues, and ideals of the mortal being assaulted. To miss this kind of love is to miss your own life.

I know from experience that Myer’s love that bridges the chasm is the same love throughout nature, the body of Earth is a body of Beloveds. It is for this reason that, over time, the loving dead merge into the mountains, rivers, streams, ecosystems. You and your Beloved’s bodies and the landscape become the same body. You walk together through yourselves. I know it is for this reason that before he died, Myers wrote and placed into a sealed envelope: If I can revisit any earthly scene, I should choose the “Valley” in the grounds of Hallsteads, Cumberland. (where he and Annie walked, lived, loved.)

When you know the realization of love, your deepest wish is for all human beings and all life, in all times, all who pass by your ever-remembered locations to know this love and depths of life — to join into add their Gifts, Songs, Stories, Rituals, to the symphony of Earth.

With this kind of love, we at last return to loving as it has been carefully respected in Indigenous wisdom. In the song, Nature Boy, first made famous by Nat King Cole, later celebrated again in the film, Moulin Rouge, the phrase at the heart of the song is:

The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is to love and be loved in return.

In the ancient Ojibway love story of Geezhig (Cedar) and the Wabun-anung (Morning Star), Basil Johnston in his book, Ojibway Heritage, offers the same message from aged human wisdom. Geezhig and Wabun-anung were about to be married when Wabun-anung died. Heartbroken Geezig resolves to find her in the Land of the Souls and bring her back to life. During his journey, he asks and learns, many people try to convince him to let her go. However:

Good words and wise which neither diminished Geezhig’s pain nor lessened his resolve. Geezhig continued his search.

“My boy, out of your loss you will know gain,” wheezed an old grandmother, her back bent by the burdens of sorrow in life, whose heart had known many sufferings that cut as deeply as Geezhig’s loss, but whose eyes remained bright with the joy of life. “It is better to have known and received love, however short, than never have known it at all. Through your tragedy, you will come to know life and be better able to give and receive love hereafter.” (p. 105)

In his 2009 book, Evil, Sexuality, and Disease in Grunewald’s Body of Christ, Gene Monick reported a gnostic tale about Jesus and Mary Magdelene that he learned from reading Jung. In the story, Jesus takes Mary Magdalene to a private place. Next, as he stands in front of her, he produces a woman out of his own body and makes love with her. This scene is so overwhelming to Mary, she loses consciousness and passes out. When Jesus revives her, the text describes a form of prayer that Jesus seems to make with his own seed.

Monick’s main target was to dismantle the patriarchal name for the original human being, anthropos, which is Greek for, man. In its place, he proposed, Urperson, as a way to speak of a post-patriarchal original human being. While his efforts with Urperson were to restore shadow, evil, and sexuality to the wholeness of the primal human image, I’d like to take it in a more personal direction that he also had hinted at 12 years earlier in Phallos.

My point here is that in the same way that phallos is two, so are what Heider calls, magnetic sex, and Campbell calls, the sacrament of sexual intercourse, Saotome and Eushiba’s My God perceives your God, and my own Magnificat, in the lines above. Yin can be learned and cultivated through enjoyment of phallos alone, like Jesus demonstrated. Monick refers to this as communion in Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine. First, he shares a Catholic analysand’s dream and then he reflects on it:

Dream two - There is an estatelike church. A Mass is going to be siad on the grounds outside. Gene is going to be the priest. There is an altar on the lawn and a lot of benches. I take a bench in the back. The whole tone of the Mass is liberal and I think this is because it is an Anglican Mass.

“We start a long hymn. It is difficult for me to sing, so I mouth the words. Gene leaves the altar and walks around the benches and goes off. Soon he returns as the hymn ends. Some people come by and I have to make room. I realize that I am wearing a hat. I think people will think I am Jewish. I take it off as it seems inappropriate to wear a hat at Mass.

The scene changes. I am inside the house. I see inside a room with four or five people. They seem older. I feel the need to masturbate as I am under great sexual tension. I try to get away but it seems too risky. I end up looking through drawers to choose clothing.”

Gene comments:

What about the dreamer’s “need to masturbate?” Men often feel guilt about masturbating because of the stigma of self-indulgence attached to it. Yet masturbation is normal and ubiquitous—and accordin to the testimony of many women, sexual intercourse is a permitted masturbation for men more often than men realize. Masturbation can be understood as a man’s acknowledgement and enjoyment of phallos, for its and his sake.

In the above dream, the urge to masturbate comes upon the dreamer in the context of a liberal Mass. In the Mass, one worships God sacramentally incarnate in the mystery of the consecrated bread and wine. In masturbation, unseen phallos become palpable phallos and is likewise owned and confessed. The god is enjoyed, even as the Presbytarian Shorter Catechism instructs one to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” In the Mass, ritual actions accompany transformation. The same is true in masturbation. The act is secret, however, not collective, as is the Mass. Psychoanalysts are more aware than other of the rich ritual environment men construct for masturbation, both concretely and in fantasy. Phallic worship today, as a man’s personal and tangible homage to his inner life force, takes the form of masturbation. It is therefore appropriate that the dreamer’s “need to masturbate” occurs within the context of the Mass…Masturbation and the Mass are related inversely. What takes place in both masturbation and Mass is recollection and promise, a remembrance of things past, or anamnesis, and an intimation of possibility or hope. Since instinct and archetype are inextricably related, it should come as no surprise that both suggest their presence in religion and sexuality, as in this dream. Creation and re-creation are the motifs that link each with the other. (pp. 112-114)

I’m suggesting here an additional form of magnetic yin sexuality that fully takes in hand the sacred image of the masculine.

I expanded the 2 dimensional Taoist yin-yang using the 3 dimensional structure a sweat lodge. A lodge is imagined as a 3D sphere above and below the ground with human beings sitting where the inner/outer, above and below merge. It’s true that the American soul has been uniting the wisdom of the East of Tantra and Taoism with the Western body. However, a re-indigenization of Western bodies has also been unfolding.

A sweat lodge, during ritual times, is united with all that is. Three dimensions are transformed into seven+ dimensional interactive space. In this way, Indigenous Wisdom invites human beings to experience mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually, the four+ dimensions – the Good Taste, that Western minds, as a rule, can only think about. The merging of the Tao with the Lodge expresses this union of West-East-Re-indigenous.

The Immanent Function manifests atmospherically what Heider describes as gifts of a contemplative yin sexuality — delight that is felt more or less equally all over the body and in the space (atmosphere) surrounding the body, a bodily bliss — belongs to all of life, not just the sacred sexuality of tantra and Reich. An experience of embodied delight felt more or less equally all over the body and in the space surrounding the body is native to our planet. I describe here a feeling-knowing of flow and joy to be alive. This flow and joy move through and with “I” and “me” with “them and they” and “you” and “you” — as an “us” and “we and all of Who?” You can recognize it in all the world around you as you become mutually caring for any “them” and “they” — like cells of the spiritual-erotic bodies of the cosmos.

When you participate in traditional collective rituals like a sweat lodge, vision quest, Sun Dance, any traditional ritual meant for the good of all beings, you enact the immanent function. The energy of delight all over and surrounding your body becomes a shared atmosphere of more expansive, supportive, relationship breathing with all beings. In this comprehensive wholeness, you feel the planet’s web of life supporting you personally, collectively and/or supporting you and your Beloved’s becoming one unified field. When you feel the support and relationship with the wider web of life, you feel unified with all that is — an “I” who is simultaneously “All My Relatives.”

This same embodied delight to be alive also comes forth in a space of shared creativity, in my Urreality, in Bache’s living classroom, in a Bill Russell Celtics game, all sports, in travel, languages, cultures, in exploration of painted caves, in symphonic music with Maciuszko, with Jaworksi, Bohm, Ferrer, in all group intentions — to live fully embodied and in relation to living in relationship, whether as a loving couple hoping to conceive a child or with the greater planetary life.

A human lifetime can be lived at a newly birthed capacity to participate, with creative or destructive effects, in the Mystery of Earth’s evolution.

Magnificat, by F. Christopher Reynolds, c. 2016

Blessed be your Presence, Beautiful Body of the Cosmos

Blessed all life that you bring forth

From whence is this to me that I would create with you

This New Day’s worth?

You are the sensual, immanent and beautiful Presence

You are Faithfully With.

As soon as I heard your Call,

The sacred Life in me awakened

In and through your Beauty shall

Flow the Courage of the Generations

You are the embodied life who labors to birth the Never-been

The Beloved, ever-conceiving, the Never-will-be-again.

From whence is this to me, I would receive with you

This Midnight’s Worth

I am the sensual, intimate, Invisible Voice

I am Faithfully With You

I am the One Who Loves

I am in love with the Never-Been

The Beloved ever-perceiving

The Never-will-be-again.

COEX Constellations Are The Gates Of The W Axis

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When I was 6 years old, our group of friends decided to play cowboys and Indians with some of the older kids. We were the cowboys. The pre-teens were the natives. Things were going along fine until the older group caught up us cowboys with a rope and took us to my family’s garage. They then announced that we would all be tortured to death. (!) None of my 6-year old friends ever heard of this way of playing cowboys and Indians!

That’s when time shifted for me. I lost track of when and where our game was going on. It was no longer 1967. We were being burned alive in the past somewhere on the Great Plains for what went on for an unbearable amount of time. None of us made it out alive. This experience was my first time with a COEX constellation. In a COEX constellation, time slips and merges with other times. In my early COEX, I did not see the landscape of my family garage in centuries past. I was in another location. I think I experienced the downward direction of the W-axis. Over the years, I’ve met enough persons who know this downward experience that I can affirm its reality. It’s disorienting because your sense of when and where, space-time, though emotionally familiar, becomes anachronistic to your senses. Conversely, I think my opening at Font-de-Gaume yields more gifts when considered as my experience of a COEX constellation. I moved on the W axis upward. I felt like I was in the same place, yet suddenly in an expanded “now” of all times, an Always Now.

Another example from my family happened to my nephew, Luke, his senior year of high school when he was in the play Les Miserables. It happened as his character was dying on the barricades in the June Rebellion in Paris, 1832. He wrote it out this way:

Upon dying on the barricade during Les Miserables, I laid flat on my back and looked into the darkened rafters of the theater. The darkness expanded into an abyss and my consciousness was opened to a new range of mystic emotions of intense connection to other young men dying in battlefields throughout history and powers greater than my own consciousness, connection to the passage of time beyond my normal apprehension.

Next, all my emotions were turned to Love and a sort of vision of the female spirit came into my view. I felt as if I was truly dying and felt the presence of the abyss along with a hole in my side. I felt all my care for causes melt and the only emotion left was a deep want of being with a True Lover.

In the early 90's, I was a member of group called, Hermetica. Among other pursuits, we shared anomalous experiences. A woman in the group was with her brother as he died. He would rock back and forth, and seem out of his mind. Every once in awhile, he would pause and look at the clock on the wall. She said, with her spiritual sight, when she looked at him, he looked like infinite heads stretching behind him, as if he was between 2 mirrors.

At one point, he paused and looked at the clock. He asked her, 'There are so many worlds. Is this the real world?' She was quick on her mental feet. "All the worlds are real. This is the material world." He thought on this and asked, "So, if I get the time right in this world, all the worlds line up?" She responded, "Yes, I think so." He smiled and relaxed into himself more. He would still pause to look at the clock on the wall. He died peacefully. I did not get to talk to him, so I could not tell if he was moving upward or downward. The lesson that has come to this page from the family, from Hermetica, is one worth considering more deeply.

So, in Western culture, we do have the necessary psychological ideas that enable us to imagine as well as understand when three dimensional space-time merges into four dimensions. COEX stands for Condensed Emotional Experience. COEX systems/COEX constellations now hold the upward and downward experiences of consciousness now open to all persons, a burden and a gift. No one can grant you the conscious awareness of your COEX constellations. No one can achieve this conscious awareness alone. We are at a new level of interdependence that asks us for its own Declaration.

Here’s Stan Grof once more in his Psychology of the Future, a COEX system or COEX constellation:

…consists of emotionally charged memories from different periods of our life that resemble each other in the quality of emotion or physical sensation that they share. Each COEX has a basic theme that permeates all its layers and represents their common denominator. The individual layers, then contain variations on this basic theme that occurred at different periods of a person’s life. The unconscious of a particular individual can contain several COEX constellations. Their number and the nature of the central themes varies considerably from one person to another…in addition to negative constellations, there are also those that comprise memories of very pleasant or ecstatic moments and situations.

In my present understanding, each of the COEX constellations seems to be superimposed over and anchored in a particular aspect of the trauma of birth. The experience of biological birth is so complex and rich in emotions and physical sensations that it contains in a prototypical form the elementary themes of most conceivable COEX systems. However, a typical COEX system reaches even further and its deepest roots consist of various forms of transpersonal phenomena, such as past-life experiences. Jungian archetypes, conscious identification with various animals and others. 

The COEX systems play an important role in our psychological life. They can influence the way we perceive ourselves, other people, and the world and how we feel and act. They are the dynamic forces behind our emotional and psychosomatic symptoms, difficulties in relationships, and irrational behaviors. (pp.23-24, in Psychology of the Future)

Using the transpersonal psychology of a COEX allows for the simultaneous unifications through spacetime, the W axis, that have begun to appear in our movies. A short list is Cloud Atlas in 2012, Interstellar in 2014, and Arrival in 2016.

To take the most recent, one COEX constellation that runs through Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival is the relationship, the love, the love-making, and the birth of future life of the main characters Louise Banks and Ian Donnelly. Together, they conceive a daughter named, Hanah. In the story, 7-limbed intergalactic beings that are called, heptapods, offer humanity a universal form of language that unlocks time. The visual narrative invites you to imagine how you could simultaneously experience past, present and future from our “now.” Particularly moving is the portrayal of the future, present and past life moments with Hanah — whose name can be read both forward and backward. As Louise mind opens to time, her points of view merge and she is in two places at the same time. This is downward 2 are One (W = -2) yet stretched into the future.

In Interstellar, a central COEX constellation is the love between the father, Joseph Cooper and daughter, Murphy Cooper. Time especially folds in on itself and merges in many scenes in Interstellar, but especially in Murphy’s bedroom filmed using the same 4D structure that Salvador Dali used, the hypercube, also known as a tesseract. To date, this is the boldest expression of the W axis in Western art. Cooper is infinite, in all times and places and it is only through an act of choosing to feel, receive, and give love that he is able to come to the proper now he desires most. All are one.

In Cloud Atlas, there is a central COEX constellation that holds centuries together using the image of a birthmark in the shape of a shooting star. In one scene especially, all the lives that share the birthmark merge into one and awaken in the character Zachry (Tom Hanks) in the year 2321 and connect him to lives occurring in 2144, 2012, 1973, 1936, and 1849. One is six. (W = 6)

Re-Awakened Flesh: Re-learning to shed our skins

When you realize that the statue above shows St. Bartholomew draped in his own skin, it can be gut-churning. This was a last clue that Gene Monick sent me in one of his post cards. I am fairly certain that he was deeply struck by it, but not aware of any interpretations when he sent it. The martyr, St. Bartholomew, was skinned alive and beheaded according to legends. He is said to have been one of the 12 apostles of Jesus and that he is the person who brought Christianity to Armenia.

So, Gene, I think your hidden clue to me all those years ago was to not leave out the skin. If you look at Grof’s definition of COEX, there is no skin. He was only passing forward a habit that started with Jung, but considering this statue, it seems to be a habit of the Western mind. In fact, skin and its special relation with soul are foundational to the discovery of the unconscious at the beginning of the 20th century. To touch skin is to touch soul. This implies that to touch skin is to touch eternity. A clear-feeling skin, however, takes a lifetime of practice, though some persons are born with the gift fairly developed. Mary Louise von Franz writes in her book, Matter and Psyche:

As is well known, Jung developed and changed the so-called association test experiment of Wilhelm Wundt. In this test, a list of a hundred words is put together, one part of which is composed of words to which the test persons are expected to be relatively indifferent (like, table, chair, water, glass, and so on.); the rest of the list are words that might well hit some kind of emotionalized content. The test person must associate something to each word as rapidly as possible, as for example: table--chair, glass--water, light--dark. As soon as a complex is touched, the response time slows down extraordinarily. When an important complex is touched, even the answers to the following words slow down, which is called a "perseverance phenomenon." Later this test was combined with the psychogalvanic experiment. The breathing curve or the electrical permeability of the skin can then be measured, and here a similar phenomenon is encountered: at the moment when a perseverance -- a delayed answer -- shows up, curve deviations will occur. These are measures not of the psychic phenomenon, but rather of the physiological phenomena resulting from emotional excitement.

She explains that the test was originally intended to show evidence of brain lesions, but Jung took it in an unexpected direction:

He concentrated instead on illuminating the purely psychic context of delayed responses. In this way, he discovered that in the psyche there exist "complexes" -- a word well known by now -- that is, emotionally intensified content clusters that form associations around a nuclear element and tend to draw ever more associative material to themselves. They behave like unconscious fragmentary personalities. Whenever these complexes are touched off, as I have indicated, physical changes also take place... Although the complexes, as contents of the unconscious, are unconscious, they can nevertheless behave in us like additional "consciousnesses" or "personalities."

This fact was first discovered by Pierre Janet, through whose efforts a very fragmented hysteria patient of his was able to recount her conscious processes orally to her doctor, while simultaneously writing down with her left hand what her unconscious was saying. She could also to some extent enable a second unconscious person, a complex, to express itself. And here it became clear that the manifestations of this second person (in this case it was simply a complex that was very strongly repressed) also possessed a certain consciousness, a certain ability to reason and to calculate and had affects, etc., as well. Jung referred to the "consciousness" of the unconscious personality as a "luminosity." Complexes possess something resembling a very diffuse, unclear consciousness. This is clearest in cases in which an unconscious complex makes an "arrangement," which is something that can be observed in strongly fragmented personalities...

Now, Jung's second great discovery lay in not seeing the complexes as something purely pathological, as the psychiatry of his time was inclined to do, and as Freudian psychology did as well. Rather, he assumed the existence of normal complexes. In other words, our psychic system is composed of various complexes, of which the ego complex is only one among various others, and this is normal. Every human being has complexes, and these are not in themselves the cause of psychological illness -- only under certain circumstances. They are part of the normal psychic makeup. These normal complexes that everyone has are what Jung called archetypes.

...The third element in the makeup of the psyche is what Jung called the psychoid system. By this he meant that which in psyche that is completely unknown, or, we might also say, unconscious material that never comes in contact with the threshold of consciousness, the really absolutely unconscious, that which by its nature is unknown. But Jung uses the expression in a specific sense. In his view, the psychoid system is the part of the psychic realm where the psychic element appears to mix with inorganic matter.

There is a picturing, an imaginal felt experience of shapes over your skin that are part of loving erotic soul-practice. It’s as if until we are lovingly touched, our skin is flat and armored, tattooed with old dead constellations. As the feeling-knowing of the skin increases with love, the same deepening, from the constellations of the many complexes that move our skin and breathing, into the archetypal collective human depths, occurs. Your skin can begin to feel the space around you, the soul-states of others, the seasons, the changes of the seasons of the year, the moon.

This same kind of deepening of the knowing of the skin occurs in sweat lodge, vision quest and Sun Dance, in fact, in all Indigenous rituals. The goal of those rituals, as the goal of being with your Beloved, is Delight in Being Alive.

So, for now, my reading of Gene’s last clue is that there is no Phallos nor soul without skin. Spiritual practice does well to consider its goal to be Delight in Being that is merged with the Delight of the planet. Von Franz and Chris Bache both argue the same, Here’s Chris Bache in LSD and the Mind of the Universe:

The collective psyche appears to organize its memories in ways that parallel how the personal unconscious organizes its memories. Grof has demonstrated that our personal unconscious organizes its memories into clusters of experience that come from different periods of our life but share a common emotional theme…the collective unconscious organizes its vast store of memories in a similar fashion. It appears to gather the memories of humanity into giant memory clusters that come from different people and different historical periods but share a common emotional theme. I call these collective memory clusters META-COEX systems. The structure of a META-COEX system parallels the structure of a personal COEX system, but it operates on a much larger scale and a different level of consciousness—the subtle level. (p. 75)

And later, he grounds his finding with von Franz:

For years I kept trying to fit my psychedelic experiences into the model of individual transformation. Opening to a narrative of collective transformation felt monstrously arrogant. How can a single person impact something as large as the collective unconscious of our species? It felt like I was inflating my ego even to suggest the possibility, and yet this shift was demanded by the experiences themselves. Not only did the quantity of suffering shatter the myth of individual therapy, but the quality of suffering was demonstrating that this was an inherently collective dynamic.

Years later, after I had concluded my journey, I learned that Marie-Louise von Franz, a life-long collaborator with Carl Jung, had come to a similar conclusion about the collective import of deep transformative work. She wrote:

“Whenever an individual works on his own unconscious, he invisibly affects first the group and, if he goes even deeper, he affects the large national units or sometimes even all of humanity. Not only does he change and transform himself but he has an imperceptible impact on the unconscious psyche of many people.”” (p. 137)

So, though it may not feel like our own skin means much in this crazy world, but our better teachers and lovers all beg to differ. There are good reasons to devote our lives to the idea that the gentle shall inherit the Earth.

The Magnitude Of Our Hair, Skin, Bones

The book above is Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncias, Starry Messenger, in English. Pictured for the first time are stars that were unknown, collectively unconscious to human perception. He shows here Orion’s Belt and the Pleiades. However, Galileo has drawn 7th magnitude and 8th magnitude stars that were visible through his telescope along with the inherited naked-eye stars. The un-aided human eye has a limit at the dimness of 6th magnitude stars. The known stars are outlined and the 7th and 8th magnitude stars are drawn as asterisks.

Galileo wrote that he had to limit the number of stars of 7th and 8th magnitude he drew because the stars were innumerable. Here is a living metaphor for the expanded human consciousness we have inherited and are in the process of integrating. When Jung referred to the "consciousness" of the unconscious personality as a "luminosity," he was speaking from a human awareness of a magnitude of consciousness unknown to the Ancients. When speaking of complexes of the unconscious, the term, constellated, is rooted in this same sensual experience of seeing through the old sky. In Western myth, the starry heavens are known as a moving image of Eternity. A responsible care of cultural integrates the living aspects of a psychologized cosmology of the past and sheds the rest. We are a species that evolves by collectively shedding the old skins as we expand into the new.

Geruvigus’ sky shows the constellations of his day, but there are no stars. As human astronomical knowledge expands in the 10 centuries after this drawing, the star-less constellation images will give way to innumerable imageless stars. Our term, psychic projection, where we pin our own psychological qualities outside ourselves onto the world and others. Those qualities that we perceive as separate from ourselves are also our own. Projection is only part of the process of human evolution We are always invited to enjoy and expand the magnitude of life and soul. Projection, once it is understood psychologically - what we perceive is simultaneously within us — is a foreshadowing of next human becoming. We become by absorbing former understandings of the universe into our own hair, skin, and bones. Withdrawing projections shakes loose the spell one has been under. Transformational expansion, metamorphosis, is the evolutionary becoming of how much of Thou Art That we are able to receive into ourselves. This is a message of shedding our skins that have always been a symbol in close proximity to rites of passage.

In Bayer’s Uranometria, some 50 years after Sidereus Nuncias, you can see a blend of the old constellation images as well as the stars. See in the next maps, the slow dissolving of the inherited constellations. The process of breaking the spell of a world view due to an understanding of the constellations is a two-step process. What we call shadow-work or having it out with the unconscious is called meeting the ally in Indigenous wisdom. An ally first relates to you as a threat. Your ally comes at you as if it wants to kill you. Its hidden hope is that a sleeping potential within you will be brought forth to meet it. Once you have it out with your ally, if you don’t die or go mad, the ally becomes your protector, albeit one you do well to keep an eye on.

Reverse-mirror

In constellation work, there is a step called reverse-mirror, where the constellations are seen from above and beyond them, backwards. The first example of this was in the tradition of Mithras, where Mithras is shown sacrificing the bull, Taurus, with Taurus flipped reverse-mirror style. Mithras, the power imagined as the one responsible for slowly turning the zodiac over the centuries, was considered above the old stars. See below Elijah Burritt’s Geography of the Heavens atlas of 1835. This is the same area of the sky as Bayer, but it is reverse-mirror in format.

Integration, Shedding, Birth into Deeper Magnitude

There is a step of dissolving into or dispersion that appears in the next atlas. The next two maps are of Argelander. In the first, notice how the constellations remain faint, yet still present. These constellation images along with the star map represent an art form that was a bridge between the remnants of the Ptolemaic cosmos and the modern. Look for the outline of Taurus from Argelander’s Uranometria Nova of 1843. The last star map is from Argelander’s Bonner Durchmusterung, and it was published 20 years later, in 1863.

In the final image, though cleared of all graphics, has stars to the 9th magnitude — one degree of magnitude deeper than Galileo. Hubble telescope sees stars of the 30th magnitude.

Where did all the constellations go?

They are us now.

The word association experiment has shown since the beginning of the 20th century, our souls are fields of COEX constellations and they are of our own skin, breath, heart-beat, and they affect our awareness. Here is von Franz again speaking constellation metaphors:

…the archetypes are contaminated with one another. They merge one into the other; they are not like separate particles, as electrons were formerly viewed as little particles, but are more like an “electron smear,” in the language of the physicists. They are like a blurred cloud; at their edges they run over into parallel phenomena. For example, it often cannot be said of an archetypal image exactly to which archetypal image it belongs. Let us take the following image as an example. In the tomb of King Sethos 1, there is a representation of a tamarisk tree with a breast and the king is sucking on it. Now, is this an image of the archetype of the Great Mother or the archetype of the Tree of Life? Both. We cannot separate archetypes from each other….The archetypes do not swim around in the collective unconscious like pieces of bread in a soup, but rather they are the whole soup at every point and therefore always appear in specific mixtures. (p. 9)

Skin: In Our Symptom Is Our Soul

If all humans can be given a word association test and all humans show their own constellated complexes, and if all complexes are part of deeper archetypal layers and as Bache noted about the collective shared archetypal ground when he noted:

…the collective unconscious organizes its vast store of memories in a similar fashion. It appears to gather the memories of humanity into giant memory clusters that come from different people and different historical periods but share a common emotional theme. I call these collective memory clusters META-COEX systems. The structure of a META-COEX system parallels the structure of a personal COEX system, but it operates on a much larger scale and a different level of consciousness—the subtle level. (p. 75)

Then, my point is made. When we touch the skin of another, we are touching all persons, we are touching into the Eternal and our touch has stars, living constellations, COEXs that open into endless depths.

Our offense, since 1863, has been against the skin.

It will be by seeing through the old notions into this new depth of skin that racial tensions might find a way forward as too narrow, too mean, too homicidal and ecocidal to go forward into the future where life is going.

It is through the skin that we shall find healing.

There is language from within the tradition of depth psychology through Sandra Lee Dennis’ 2001 and now 2013 second edition of Embrace of the Daimon: Healing Through the Subtle Energy Body/Jungian Psychology and the Dark Feminine. She coined the marvelous term, Unio Corporalis. A paraphrased definition is:

The incarnation of the soul…deep acceptance of the validity of the daimonic promptings toward the feelings and the body…during this phase, insights are brought into the body, into action, into the world.

I had arrived at the same conclusions as Dennis, coming at it through music, ritual, dreams, and my own skin. The artwork by Diane Pinchot offers a picture of how I have experienced embodied life since a moment of aesthetic arrest in the Cro-magnon cave, Font-de-Gaume, France, in 1986. This image offers a way to describe the way life feels in indigenous traditions as well as when one is de-colonized and re-indigenized. This depth of feeling and knowing life requires a daily, monthly, and seasonal sacred earth practice with a community who shares the same heart for the good of all beings from the birth of our sun till its end.

Miraculous And Transcendent Sexual Experiences

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The miraculous is an embattled reality in American history. Thomas Jefferson famously cut out all miracles by his own hand the create his version of the Bible. All Indigenous traditions that have endured after 500 years follow their ways because miracles are real. Without miracles, the people would not have survived. Lewis Mehl-Madrona is a Western educated doctor who was transformed by witnessing healings that Western medicine considers impossible. His book, Coyote Healing, is a good place to start.

Where two or more gather for the happiness of all beings, like in any of the rooms of 12 Step meetings, as in rituals, as in sports, music, art, really any activity the people are all there for the greater good, miracles happen all the time, even miracles that you didn’t know what they were until you realized it 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 900 years later.

Our extended family was driven apart by the war of 1861-1865. Three of the Reynolds brothers fought for the North and three fought for the South. Two of the sons who fought for the South disappeared at Shiloh in 1862. Another who fought for the North never came home and no one ever learned his fate. In December, 1866, Isaac Reynolds, the father of those sons passed away. I know his heart was broken. There were maybe 400,000 other parents whose hearts were broken by the war too. To fully heal, it required 4 generations before I sat down across from my Reynolds cousin, James Richards, and we played music together. The best miracles take a long time and a lot of deep psychological work. As regards the Reynolds in the war, my hunch is that the same Bible-driven claims for truth that split congregations as regards slavery, also drove our family apart. Brothers participated in a war against brothers.

We have paid in blood to learn that there is no Truth that is worth your own brother. Finally, the First Commandment has a curse in it as regards any father who would not adhere to the Way of the Father. There is punishment to 3-4 generations of those whose fathers ‘hate Jehovah.’ It played out in our generations in versions of Protestant against Catholic against Freemason against scientific atheist.

In the United States, transcendent sexual experience has been even more persecuted than miraculous experience. I am open to thinking differently on this, but every place I have lived the past 60 years has featured the same silence as regards the transformative power of the merging of souls.

The most sober and even-handed book on transcendent sex is pictured below. What makes this book a mentor text is that the experience of love-making opening the veil does not belong to any privileged group throughout the millennia of human history. Jenny Wade, herself, shares her experience, which caught her off-guard. She defines transcendent sexual experience as:

The ability of sex to trigger altered or non-ordinary states in ordinary people…at that particular time, something magical happens. They get swept out of the here and now or they seem to have visions of a world that other people can’t see while they’re having sex. Most of the time, not always, these are ecstatic and blissful experiences. In fact, they are so blissful and ecstatic, that people say it’s many many magnitudes beyond the pleasure of ordinary sex.

I have felt since 1981 that Western culture’s unconsciousness as regards the mythology of the Second Coming has been a continual hidden driver for our wars without end. After the death of a best friend, Dale “Butch” Fisher, in the face of the worst grief of my life, I was praying with a group of persons on a Catholic retreat and realized that we are in the End Times. I began to live that way, storing my treasures up in Heaven for that Day Not Far Off. My experience of the living into and out of The Second Coming is the reason I wrote, Answering James Joyce: Full Moon & New Earth, which is also on this website.

My first experience of transcendent sex came with Paula, whom I would later marry. That transformation of my being was the final step for me out of the End Times. The first step had come in a dream that taught me about the distortion I had been living as I waited for the Lord and Savior. The second step had been learning about gnosticism. The third step was updating my cosmology. It was on one of our early dates, Paula took off my shirt and kissed the center of my chest. In that moment, I felt my consciousness drop deeply into my body. I was 20 years old. As I looked out through my own adult eyes, as I felt and breathed in a more fully human way, it was clear to me that the lessons I had been taught about life before that afternoon had my awareness up in the air to the right behind me. I was not in my body, but near it, almost as an observer of someone else’s life.

There are many persons I know and Wade’s book is full of stories of what turns out to be the most common form of human spiritual experience, transcendent sex. I have placed it with miraculous experience, because anyone who knows what I am describing understands the miracle of it.

Wade is honest and direct in underlining that just because you experience transcendent sex, does not make you Buddha or a morally superior person. The experience, like the sun and moon and planet is open to all, available to all. I do think, as if this writing, that my experiences of transcendent sex have made me a gentler human being and planetary citizen because I am more aware of the tremendous value of life on Earth.

META-COEX Of Day And Night, The Seasons, And The Moon

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I think Radius Mundi best describes the gender-toned/fluid relationships that unite the wholeness of interiority and exteriority shared. Radius Mundi is Gene Monick’s Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine, which is a COEX constellation — a multi-dimensional experience for multi-dimensional worlds known only through the flesh, skin, bones, body.

There are important collective human experiences that do not appear in Grof’s definitions, nor in his work overall. The immanent of Immanent Function is incomplete without the collective participation in the flesh-felt ecosystems of Nature. Read again Bache as he defined the term, META-COEX in order to be able to describe why the vast majority of his LSD initiatory experiences were of collective human suffering:

The collective psyche appears to organize its memories in ways that parallel how the personal unconscious organizes its memories. Grof has demonstrated that our personal unconscious organizes its memories into clusters of experience that come from different periods of our life but share a common emotional theme…the collective unconscious organizes its vast store of memories in a similar fashion. It appears to gather the memories of humanity into giant memory clusters that come from different people and different historical periods but share a common emotional theme. I call these collective memory clusters META-COEX systems. The structure of a META-COEX system parallels the structure of a personal COEX system, but it operates on a much larger scale and a different level of consciousness—the subtle level. (p. 75)

In the same way that Bache was forced by lived experience to expand Grof’s original COEX, with Grof’s blessing, I have had too many ritual experiences with the intention of easing collective suffering followed by enjoying a seamless clarity and communion with the life, the moon the season around me to let COEX stand. There is a META-COEX of Earth that includes our shared atmosphere, phases of the moon and the Earth’s gravitational field, its hillsphere. The much larger scale and a different level of consciousness is the subtle level natural to Earthly living.

To understand the planetary META-COEX, consider that the Indigenous Medicine Wheel is another mandala to express the Tao. Here again is the two dimensions brought to three. Notice that the height and depth of the architecture of the lodge is aligned to the 4 Directions, which also describe the 4 seasons of the year:

Night and day, the seasons of the year, the phases of the moon, all feature themes of particular ecological, therefore, physical. In our place on Earth, there are sensations, emotions and memories, that permeate all the layers of our being due to lives lived as beings of our bioregion. We are called to expand Grof’s COEX and Bache’s META-COEX to the planetary Communion by noting how the particular qualities of each day and night, each season and phase of the moon, are themselves woven with deepest roots that consist of various forms of transpersonal phenomena, such as past-life experiences. Jungian archetypes, conscious identification with various animals and others.

When Chris Bache was able to tease out a foundation for his META-COEX as a further development of the West’s returning awareness of the collective unconscious in the not only in Grof’s work, but also as Jung’s student, Marie-Louise Von Franz. In this way, he honored his elders in a way that carries them forward all. I wish to do the same for Chris. First, here again is his account:

For years I kept trying to fit my psychedelic experiences into the model of individual transformation. Opening to a narrative of collective transformation felt monstrously arrogant. How can a single person impact something as large as the collective unconscious of our species? It felt like I was inflating my ego even to suggest the possibility, and yet this shift was demanded by the experiences themselves. Not only did the quantity of suffering shatter the myth of individual therapy, but the quality of suffering was demonstrating that this was an inherently collective dynamic.

Years later, after I had concluded my journey, I learned that Marie-Louise von Franz, a life-long collaborator with Carl Jung, had come to a similar conclusion about the collective import of deep transformative work. She wrote:

“Whenever an individual works on his own unconscious, he invisibly affects first the group and, if he goes even deeper, he affects the large national units or sometimes even all of humanity. Not only does he change and transform himself but he has an imperceptible impact on the unconscious psyche of many people.”” (p. 137)

Immanent Function fully embodied impacts the human collective psyche as well as the planetary psyche. When we offer our cultural creative passion for the good of all, day, night, the seasons, the moon, our standing up — all gifts of gravity’s rhythms, we are joined with Earth, and moon, our protective magnetosphere and atmosphere inside the hillsphere of a breathing Earth, celestial bodies of our solar system — all carried within the loving whole of our heliosphere, our life as Star-lings continues now, wide awake at the wheel as we make another Round on the Good Starry Road.

To come home now, to breathe with Earth, look again at Marie-Louis von Franz’s foreshadowing of Bache’s META-COEX. Notice how nicely our own breathing, our own relationship to breath and the Breath of Life, aka. Spirit, merge. This would suggest that working on our own relationship to b(B)reath has a potentially atmospheric impact on others. Each one of us is a steward of B(b)reath. In the same way that a group harms others when it pollutes the shared atmosphere, so do nations harm the planet by neglect of their own care of personal b(B)reath.

This stewardship, as Jaworski in his Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership remembers, calls us each to the Mystery of Commitment.

So, with all your love and courage:

Choose to gather for the happiness of all beings. Participate in communion with the collective ecological conscious and unconscious. Know the awe that opens your human heart to the Mystery of life. May your intermingling be recognized by an ensouled, living atmosphere of warmth, love, surprise and humor that makes your life-cycles worth living in enduring planetary and interplanetary relationships. May synchronistic anomalous, synesthetic, paranormal, psychokinetic, miraculous, prophetic, numinous, aesthetic arrest experiences that are immanent to the transcendent occur in your midst.

New Consciousness is human lifetimes shared as consciously as possible. It is a participatory awareness that keeps in mind the creative or destructive effects of our individual and collective choices on the planet. The consciousness of humanity merges with the living atmosphere to wisely co-pilot the Mystery of Earth’s evolution.

Prophetic Experience

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The best book to start with for our times is Jon Klimo’s book, Channeling: Investigation on Receiving Information from Paranormal Sources. One reason why is that the spirit in which he writes is for all persons who would come to read his book. Receiving information through participation in merging with the wider conscious of life through our own conscious and unconscious belongs to all human beings. The prophetic experience is claimed by all enduring traditions in ways that sadly seem to suggest that everyone else’s way of prophesying is not as pure as their own. Klimo avoids this and opens the invitation.

This was actually the intention of Surrealism’s pure psychic automatism. In his older years, Andre Breton, the Surrealist Pope/not-Pope, bemoaned that their goal was always to deepen the foundations of the real. This was his way of saying Transcendent Function and Immanent Function. Surrealism was meant to be a prophetic art to empower the people. In my 2001 Urrealist Manifesto, I attempt to bring deepening the foundations of the real up to date for our times. I took Ur from Monick’s Urperson – Original Being, Lee Irwin’s Ur-space – multidimensional matrix of all becoming, the an atonement to transmute the karmic habit of the crime of the royal houses of Ur the city where the practice of the priesthood was to bury the people of the court alive with the dead king, their animals too.

Urrealism is a conversation done with your deepest original being’s receptivity and creativity. Art answering Art. Urrealism offers a way of co-creation and co-extrication. It is a path of the Immanent Function based on sacred space as creative space – Urreality, also known as, Urth.

Urrealism is a way of waking up together when it’s just you and another orphan soul who meet and wish to awaken. The Urrealist Four of receiving and answering creation with creation are responses that you can use when originality is happening right in front of you. They are: This reminds me of…., __ occurs to me, create art that answers art, silence. The Four are published in my chapter, Let the Beauty We Love Be What We Do, in Jane Piirto’s edited book, Organic Creativity.

By a remarkable coincidence, I was able to enjoy prophetic cross-training with Dr. Michael Olin Hitt’s Oracle, who is the Messenger of the Holy and learning Lakota-style sweat lodge with Alex Farkas. For 3 1/2 years, each month, I would prepare questions for what Kabbala names, a Maggid, and the Earth. The preparation that was my part was to truly get clarity of what my questions were. I can share from experience that there are immense amounts of love, support, guidance, healing, wholeness, good taste, that are beyond the edges of our consciousness. That abundance can reach us best if we get clear about what we want and why we want it. I found the 2 Grail Questions to be useful:

What ails thee?

Whom does the Grail serve?

The heart of service encouraged by the Grail stories mirrors the heart of service of our Earth. Whom does the Earth serve? All beings and you too, except for when that’s not true.

Each month, then, I found there were 2 sacred languages/dialects. Michael’s Oracle would speak pages of words. The Lodge would offer one image repeatedly. I mean here, for example, at one sweat, a single coal kept popping out of the fire and I kept putting it back. It was not the same coal, of course. But the whole fire was about bringing back to the fire the spark that had fallen out. A sentence then, A single coal has fallen from the fire, was the Indigenous Sacred Text. The same feeling and inspiration would be in the pages from the Messenger. Going back the other direction. After my experience of becoming a stone, the Messenger said: You are no longer a reed in the wind searching for the breeze to blow. No, you have become a rock, a weight. It is a foundation.

In the early months of this system, I feasted on the banquets set before me. However, after a time, it began to feel like being in a band with Jimi Hendrix and Black Elk who took all the jams themselves. I realized that I needed to step up my own game to the level of passion and commitment shown by Michael and Alex. I needed to create art and write from my own being, to take up my own prophetic voice. My level of music, art, cosmology, writing all increased and gained focus. Prophecy when it’s good, calls you to be prophetic too, in your way, in your one-of-a-kind way. You have to learn it by doing it.

There is a category of prophetic experience that sets Jung’s Transcendent Function apart from Immanent Function. There are times when the prophetic experience is merged with the future becoming together of a people. Lincoln’s dreams during his presidency at times were prophetic in this way. He knew ahead of time of the victories at Antietam and at Gettysburg, for example. He knew he would see the passage of the 13th amendment, as well. Personally and collectively in a single night, shortly before his assassination, he dreamed of seeing himself in a coffin at the White House.

The past ten years, I have taken up a practice I learned from the Seneca. The idea is that in the depths of winter, we are all dreaming with and for each other. Those collective dreams of winter require sharing with others who are willing to take them as seriously as their own. To not share the dreams of winter, then, has a negative mental health impact. The dreams meant to be gifts for the coming year are a cause for individual mental suffering due to soul-blockages. Immanent Function seeks to remedy the colonial idea that prophets lived in the past or that only chosen individuals are prophets. In this older collective sense of prophecy in dreams, even in psychological symptoms, we all are healthier if we take each others’ dreams as a necessary attitude towards overall health.

So, to close this part, we are living in prophetic times and it is time do dream dreams and see visions. I am placing tobacco on the Earth today, dear Reader:

I am asking on behalf of the Peoples of Earth. Reader, you were born for these times and have within you capacities that when fully switched on will be a one-of-a-kind Grace in the world. Would you please let your trauma and your awe be your curriculum? Would you please make all the journeys you need to find the healing and the way your gifts can be shared? Would you do this for the future generations so the children and grandchildren can live in a world that has more Grace in it because you live?

All The Love We Make

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Axis mundi and radius mundi are the ancient, yet future images needed by men, women, all LGBTQ+ today as they experience the disintegration of patriarchal Present Consciousness. Surrender to reemerging matriarchal feminine or matriarchal masuline is not the solution, either cultural or personal. It is regressive and will produce, eventually, a stringent reemergent patriarchal attitude in vain defense of patriarchal masculine or patriarchal feminine identities. There is no need for males, females, all LGBTQ+ to fear each other or act out such fear as tyrant, colonizer or slave once a primary-process inner connection with one’s own spinal axis mundi and the shaft of radius mundi are engaged and dependably functional. Axis and Radius mundi, suggesting not only the rigorous, precarious heroism of the shaman, but also the passionate and now planetary tantric ritual generosity of sacred sexuality, ecomasculine, ecofluid, ecofeminine, are just the ticket.

Gaia Is Two

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We are only now learning a ways of mutual tantric ritual of ecomasculine, ecofluid, and ecofeminine, for the good of all beings, for the future of Earth. Joseph Campbell was correct in his intuition that the myth of the West is a Creative Mythology that arises out of the Grail. Hopefully, this essay opens up even as it penetrates into a new frontier of exploration and learning about embodied loving for the good of the Anima Mundi/Matrix/Bottom-seekers and Axis Mundi/Patrix/Top-seekers. There is a last and necessary separatio required now as well on the original notion of Gaia as Sacred Feminine. Gaia is Two.

Liz Meacham has begun using the pronoun, they, for Gaia. This is advantageous because there is here a way to speak of a loving couple and as two who are one person. Such a move also aligns with teachings of the Sacred Pipe where all human beings and life are a balanced pair. This also aligns with the term, Urperson that I mentioned above. They also works well for Urth. Gaia and Ouranos = Urth and Urperson.

The necessary balancing of the Mother as Urperson and Urth is at the heart of Gene Monick’s Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine. He has done the heavy lifting to allow the sacred masculine its own sensual participation in the origin of consciousness and life and in the unconscious. He deftly shows how both Freud and Jung’s psychological perspectives leave little room for masculine participation in psychological life. He does this in chapter 3, Phallos in Psychoanalysis, in Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine. After making his case that both Freud and Jung took a mental path that James Hillman calls, the naturalistic fallacy, Monick writes:

Whether or not Freud was leery of mystery and Jung was leery of physicality, the fact remains that neither did significant direct research work on phallos, and little has been done by their followers. This has resulted in a fundamental disservice to the importance of the archetypal masculine, a theoretical imbalance that cries out to be redressed. (p. 56)

You will find here no advice on how to proceed, just the encouragement to do so. It is possible to enter ever more deeply into being married and into the Mystery of commitment. It is a transformation that includes all of the Beauty and Courage of Romantic Love, however, it now calls us into engaging our Love for the Beauty that sustains the World.

May you ever feel aroused as the sensate world unveils and reveals, delighting to be seen and truly appreciated. May your heart flutters in erotic communion as your mind becomes unusually spacious and clear. May you not only knows all others by heart, but also all those who oppose you, and may all know you. May you step beyond mass-mindedness and arrive singing here, again and again until you are satisfied.

When We Get the Time Right

My brother Rob and my sister-in-law, Teresa own a ranch in Mississippi, the Reynolds Ranch. They have horses, dogs, cats, cows, and a lot of beauty. They wanted to try raising chickens for eggs and meals. After buying an incubator, they found eggs on sale that were a mix of chicken and duck eggs. When the eggs hatched, it was all chickens and 2 ducks.

On a ranch, if you are a chicken, your life is picking seeds out of horse apples and cow pies, scratching the dirt, making more chickens, and trying not to die. If you are a duck, no part of you is made for that kind of life. As the birds got older, it was sad how the ducks came to believe they were failed chickens. Not only that, but the head chicken would come over and peck the ducks in the head to make sure they kept their heads down. They had become ducks who learned to duck.

Time went by and there came warnings that there was a bobcat in the neighborhood. One morning, when they came outside, they found chickens, one duck and scattered duck feathers. What was striking to Rob and Teresa was that the duck who got eaten could have flown away at any time. Ducks can fly hundreds of miles, they can swim, dive, float. The dead duck had grown so used to keeping his head down, to ducking, that he forgot to duck, meaning, to fully become himself.

Later that week, the second duck was gone, but there were no scattered feathers. They hoped that duck numero dos moved out of chicken life. They hoped that duck had found companionship with fellow flyers, swimmers, divers, and travelers. Join with others and choose duck life. Lean away from being chicken and those who gain by keeping you less-than.

Immanent Function is an invitation to remember to step forth into the full stewardship of our own W-axis. It’s past time to heck our cultural clock and return to the wisdom of the Earth and the seasons. It is an invitation to step beyond the mass-minded chicken-life battlegrounds of our Age Of Pisces and make a conscious step into a shared atmosphere, solar system, stars and galaxy. NGC (New General Catalog) 488 is a spiral galaxy we can see because it 'faces us.'

Anima Mundi = Soul of the World = whole of a sphere
Spiritus Mundi = Spirit of the World = axis and motion a of sphere
Radius Mundi = Radius of the World = union of Anima and Axis Mundi

We are all these.

Immanent Function is synchronistic becoming together. May we face and share together the full realization of a galactic face of our clock on the wall.

We arrive then, back at the beginning:

The Immanent Function is synchronistic, embodied becoming together when two or more choose to gather for the happiness of all beings. The immanent function is the partner to C. G. Jung’s transcendent function. Individual consciousness participates in trans-immanent communion merged with the collective ecological conscious and unconscious. When in partnership, the immanent and transcendent functions make manifest the awe that opens the human heart to the Mystery of life. Their intermingling is recognized by an ensouled, living atmosphere of warmth, love, surprise and humor that makes life-cycles worth living in enduring planetary and interplanetary relationships. This is a mythology of Einstein’s theory of gravity.

Anomalous, synesthetic, paranormal, psychokinetic, miraculous, prophetic, ritual, numinous, transcendent sexual, aesthetic arrest experiences that are immanent to the transcendent occur in the midst of their union — trans-immanence. This is a declaration of the reality of the new Earth. The moon and Earth are a gravitational pair whose orbit together around the sun brings complementary phases of new/full, waxing crescent/waning gibbous, waxing half/waning half, waxing gibbous/waning crescent, full/new, waning gibbous/waxing crescent, waning half/waxing half, waning crescent/waxing gibbous, new/full, complete each other. Like Beloveds, Earth and moon complete each other as we journey within the solar system within the protective heliosphere of our yellow dwarf star. as we journey within the protective heliosphere of our yellow dwarf star. We cycle above, within, below, the galactic plane, about the galactic center. May our life-giving, life-sustaining, protective star be known as, The Heart of the Heavens. May we create together a life-giving mythology of the atmosphere in which mysteries are known to join us with our galactic neighbors.

Marilyn of the Whirlwind (Answering Vocata George)

This tale began some time ago of Ancient Powers calling,

A Callin’ on young Marilyn and found her Spirit willing

The Whirlwind rushed and rattled the house.

Her man asked, “Who’s that knockin’?”

She said, “I don’t know, but it’s time to go.

I’m wide awake and I’m walkin’.”

Into the Rushing of the Whirlwind, the opening of the Door,

The sounding of the hour. No preparing for what’s in store.

Bring forth Living Water, Keepers of the Spring.

A winding Thirst that brought you here asks you now to drink.

Day passed day and the time when on,

In the evenings came the resting.

The healing wound and the Wounded Healing,

She worked without resisting.

Loose in time and loose in mind, her man prayed for hopin’

While the TV and the radio joined the sound of souls thrown open

By the rushing of the whirlwind. This is the Opening of the door.

This is the Sounding of the Hour. No preparing for what’s in store.

Bring forth Living Water, Keepers of the Spring.

The winding thirst that brought you here asks you now to drink.

The Winding Thirst thirst that brought you here,

Asks you know to Drink.

Maybe it was three days. Maybe it was forever.

On the morning of the Golden Dawn, there was a new Creation.

Now a Vessel under-the-world, an Anchor to the Heavens.

Now, a woman in the sunrise sings, “This is the New Life, my Beloved.

The rushing of the Whirlwind. This is the opening of the Door.

The Sounding of the hour, no preparing for What’s in Store.

Bring forth living water, Keepers of the spring.

A winding thirst that brought you here asks you now to drink.

Your winding thirst that brought you here asks you now to drink.

The Rushing of the Whirlwind, The Sounding of the Hour

Bring forth Living Water. A winding Thirst that brought you here,

Asks you now to drink. A winding thirst that brought you here,

Asks you now.