Supreme Creative Energy

Evolution is love in action.
Love is evolution in practice.

Thou

To whom I cry I know not:
yet into that echoing dark
I raise my voice, asking
only for shelter against the
storm, and workman’s wages.

To whom I sing I know not:
yet my dancing heart
is fuller than a nest
of nightingangels
all the day long.

To whom I weep I know not:
yet my soul is sore
to see such cruelty,
such greed, such ignorance
of nature’s sacred laws.

To whom I plead I know not –
for justice, for respect
for all planetary life,
for compassionate restraint between nations
and for love between neibours.

O thou, thou listening space,
thou answer in the wind,
thou song in silence heard,
thou all-enclosing otherness,
honour my heart’s wishes.

Building

It wasnt until last week that I realised what a responsibility it is to build a completely new space. On the R is a picture of my old studio. It was a fairly ramshackle affair, built on the site of a greenhouse, whose refurbishment had been kindly borne by a delightful elderly pupil about 10 years ago.

For a couple of years it has been clear that rebuilding would need to take place, as the poor insulation had already had already taken its toll on my piano. Here is a picture of the interior in 2002 with my sister and late mother.

Hitherto all Ive ever done in terms of building might best be called intelligent conversion. Recently I dawned on me that what I am doing here will stand as an objective statement of who I was in the same way as my music – more conspicuous, perhaps, for who knows what fate that will enjoy?

I relish the responsibility, while realising that here, as in so much else, what we put on display is not our conscious intention, but our subconscious value system. At this stage I am greatly concerned about cost, but the whole process has been a great opportunity to engage (with) the energy of my guide Sai Baba.

Amor & Psyche

The Golden Ass of Apuleius is one of Marie-Louise von Franz's most insightful books. And in it her chapter explaining the tale of Amor & Psyche contains some of its finest passages.
p82
Love with its passion and pain becomes the urge toward individuation, which is why there is no real process of individuation without the experience of love, for love tortures and purifies the soul. Expressed differently, Eros presses the butterfly painfully against his chest, representing the soul being developed and tortured by the love god.
On one beautiful gem the goddess Psyche, with her hands behind her back, is being tied by the god to a column which ends in a sphere. One could say that this image expresses in a beautiful way the process of individuation. Eros tying Psyche to the column surmounted by a sphere, the symbol of totality which is realized by suffering. Sometimes one would like to run away from the person to whom one is tied, in order to run away from the dependence, but Eros forces us to become conscious through this tie. Love makes us dare everything and leads us thus to ourselves. Therefore one of Eros's main epithets, which he had in antiquity, was "purifier of the soul."
p90
What happens to the gods if this process of [incarnation] takes place? A relationship is never only a one-way thing, so the gods get pulled into the human realm and, in the counter-movement, the ego expands its conscious awareness. That is the process of the incarnation of a god. Actually … in the impulse towards individuation and integration [within a human individual] it is the god who wants to incarnate.
p107
[Eros] wakes up and gives her the greatest punishment this god can give: he leaves her. To be left by the god of love is really worse than anything else he could have done to her. Psyche now is completely in the dark, and now her real deeds begin with the long and agonizing search to find Eros again.
p113
… stages of unconscious harmony, like that in the story of Paradise, result in the stagnation of life, and naturally certain disharmonious or evil impulses are excluded.
Some people by a great mental and psychological effort will sacrifice the one pole of an essential conflict in the hope of establishing peace in their souls with the remainder. For instance, in the monastic life money and sex are cut out, and with them the source of innumerable conflicts, and by retiring from these difficulties the establishment of peace in the soul is sought. The whole Christian idea of inner peace is in this direction; that is, one first cuts out a certain aspect of evil which seems impossible to integrate, and then one tries artificially to establish harmony with the remainder. All over the world mankind has a tendency to go in this direction. It is probably inevitable, for one needs from time to time to be able to set aside an insoluble problem.
It is as though there were rest places where one has a moment of peace, though one has the dim feeling that the conflict is not solved and will reappear after a time. One can observe this in people who draw mandalas and in doing so leave a part outside. They put the dark things outside the border of the mandala and imagine that they have now reached a state of relative wholeness and totality. But in this way they exclude certain aspects, and they can be sure that this state will not last. Some of these left-out elements will break in and a new process of integration must begin.
At this point we have the essence of the whole novel, for all through it (though sometimes the author seems to be gripped by feeling) a mocking, skeptical tone creeps in, a devaluating judgment which works like the knife in Psyche's hand. When things go well, a devil whispers in our ears that it is "[only …]" a rational devaluation which destroys everything. In a woman it is generally the animus [inner masculine] who is the artist in this field, and in a man it is a certain aspect of the anima [inner feminine]. The more sensitive and delicate and untouchable a man's feeling is on one side, the more he tends to mock himself. The Swiss recognize this type of man in their poet Gottfried Keller, whose feeling, on the one side, was extremely delicate, while on the other he showed the typical mockery of an old bachelor. That was his defense against his own hypersensitivity.
p115
Venus then orders Psyche to sort out a quanity of different kinds of seeds during the night.
… this could have to do with the Eleusinian mysteries, for corn is the mystical substance which represents the mother goddess as the goddess of corn.
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A chaotic host of seeds is, in a way, an image of the collective unconscious, which seems to be, at the same time, a single essence and a multiplicity of images and creative impulses. One could say that as long as the archetypes of the collective unconscious are not [activated] by a human being, they are not real. They only become a psychological reality if they are experienced by a human psyche. It is for this reason that the archetypes of the collective unconscious resemble a host of chaotically dormant 'seeds' inborn in every human being, which, if not activated throu contact with human consciousness, could … be regarded as nonexistent.
p116
In the tale Psyche cannot cope alone with the corn. But there is still something which can rescue her, for ants turn up and sort out the grain. The chaos of the unconscious always contains a relation to order as well. In talking about the unconscious one must always talk in paradoxes, and when we emphasize its chaotic aspect we know at the same time that the unconscious is not only chaos but it is also order. In the last analysis, only unconscious order can overcome unconscious disorder. Man cannot do anything but be attentive and make the utmost and, so to speak, hopeless effort, until order is established again by itself.
This is something which Christian theologians would call faith.
p118
So one can say that in the right way faith is a great achievement, or rather pistis; loyalty to the inner law. When this loyalty or feeling constellates, it calls forth the secret order which is the chaos of the unconscious.
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Jung always said that truth does not speak with a loud voice. Its low but unsuppressible voice announces itself as a malaise, or a bad conscience, or whatever one may want to call it. Great quiet is needed in order to feel these small hints. When the unconscious begins to talk loudly and to manifest itself with car accidents and such happenings, then the situation is already very bad. But in the normal state it has been whispering softly for years, before the thunderclap comes …

Ray Wyre

In terms of someone willing to engage with his own darkness and use it as a medium to help others negotiate with their demons, Ray Wyre deserves a permanent memorial. Which in a way he has - in hundreds of changed lives.

The article contains an interesting example of how the unenlightened unconscious operates. Despite Wyre's manifest success rate in non-reoffending, both his residential clinics closed due to local paedophobia. As a society we project all our hatred onto paedophiles - they are the scapegoat for everyonelse's issues with sexual boundaries - & yet when someone demonstrates an effective way of dealing with the 'evil' he receives little or no collective support.

The same thing happened with (Quaker) prison shrink Bob Johnson 10 years ago. Michael Howard & others simply buried him because his successful therapeutic regime at Parkhurst did not fit their political agenda.

We all have our own issues with 'what we can get our heads around' within ourselves. And hence the level of integration to which we are willing /feel safe to go. I heard Ray Wyre interviewed In The Psychiatrist's Chair, & what really imprest me was his talk of how he prepared spiritually before & after sessions, so that in it he could be completely open & nonjudgmental yet also detox himself afterwards so as neither to become corrupted nor lose his vulernability.

That I thought was one truly wise man. I honour his passing.

Direct pointing to reality

Essentially the Jungian idea of wholeness /wellness /health /wholth expresses in psychological language what is also the philosophical substructure of all polytheistic traditions, namely that we become one by digesting & assimilating what is diverse – ie, that as we can accept antitheses (perceive the underlying unity of cognitive dissonances) we come to see the nature of existence.

On the inner path the reward for resolving one (existential) paradox is a bigger one(!)

One of our biggest hindrances to self-realisation /achievement of power-full integration is that we project those very hindrances onto an external reality – which /whom we suppose is itself the hindrance. Jung has a useful phrase 'the [personal] unconscious always first manifests in a hostile form.' IE, while our consciousness is a stranger to our unconscious it perceives the latter as something other: the more alienated we are from our true self, the more hostile we perceieve this otherness. Which explains Horror movies.

Part of the great game of a successful life is to engage with this inner otherness (which is sometimes called the shadow) so that by assimilating rather than rejecting what is unattractive about ourselves we actually release its inhibited power to integrate within the natural diversity of our personality.

Often when we achieve what we think of peace /stasis in life it is by blanking elements which disfigure our concept of it. IE by a philosophical trick we place them outside our charmed circle where all is light. Monotheists for instance think that by focusing exclusively on the 'saviour' they can consign all their unintegrated elements to a 'devil' for which /whom they do not have to take responsibility.

To achieve full personhood we have to acknowledge & accommodate within ourselves all that we dislike – so that we no longer have any illusions. To use an eco metaphor, we become our own compost. That way the flowers grower stronger and more vivid. In Von Franz's books she speaks of a recurrent experience as a therapist of finding that within every client there seems to be an inner otherness (manifesting particularly in dream) with whom the therapist can create the conditions for a self-healing dialog to take place, and that when this does it invariably produces a holistic self-realisation which Jungians call the [true] Self – but which in traditional language might be called the soul. Jungians call this journey individuation.

This is contemporary language for the nature of the perennial search for wisdom ['direct pointing to reality' as the Buddhists call it] which is embodied in every religious /philosophical tradition worth the name. Some people personalise this as G/god, others don't. Yet we can never achieve full inner awareness without the integration of the otherness-within-us. In other words the I (ego) has to explore, discover & befriend the not-I (id) so that we achieve a consciousness balanced between egoic awareness & intuitive 'alter-egoic' perception – & in the position we become equipt to unleash the magical powers entrusted to us. But, this is the fascinating double-lock on esoteric reality, they are only fully open to the human mind when the possessor of that mind has consciously & profoundly renounced the personal advantage that such power offers.

E Pluribus Unum

'From many, unity.'

Nobody could have lived a more scattered, scatty life than I. Yet as I wandered /wondered throu the different rooms of my personality I had a single purpose. To uncover the Christ in my life. It was as if by visiting each person within me I was excavating an aspect of the whole, what the Vedas call purusha or fully-achieved human. I sought unity within the diversity of my experiences.

If we are not seeking a unified awareness then all the diversity we experience has no context. It's like sitting on a train & seeing an unfamiliar countryside flash past the windows. It may be pretty but we have no identification with it and it is ultimately meaning-less for us, the memory is quickly erased.

I had the experience of working with a group of voice hearers. Two things struck me: 1) was that many young poets & authors would have traded a limb to 'hear voices': 2) the patients were tormented by experiences which had neither meaning nor context for them. Why was that? Sadly because, as far as I could discover, not one of them had this essential impulse to seek unity or intunity (a word I have coined to indicate a state of inner harmony). Buffeted about as they were by the vagaries & diversity of life they could only see it as random and appeared to lack any sense of an underlying unity, let alone the impulse to rendezvous with it.

The challenge is to distil the essence of life's many flavours until one's sense of them becomes visible as a quintessence.