A SPIRITUALITY THAT TRANSFORMS

Lead me from dreaming to waking.
Lead me from opacity to clarity.
Lead me from the complicated to the simple.
Lead me from the obscure to the obvious.
Lead me from intention to attention.
Lead me from what I'm told I am to what I see I am.
Lead me from confrontation to wide openness.
Lead me to the place I never left,
Where there is peace, and peace
- The Upanishads

*note* acid article from Ken Wilber ..interesting
-added by danny-
...........................................

A SPIRITUALITY THAT TRANSFORMS

~ There is only Ati

by

Ken Wilber

Translation Versus Transformation

In a series of books (e.g., A Sociable God, Up from Eden, and The Eye of Spirit), I have tried to show that religion itself has always performed two very important, but very different, functions. One, it acts as a way of creating meaning for the separate self: it offers myths and stories and tales and narratives and rituals and revivals that, taken together, help the separate self make sense of, and endure, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. This function of religion does not usually or necessarily change the level of consciousness in a person; it does not deliver radical transformation. Nor does it deliver a shattering liberation from the separate self altogether. Rather, it consoles the self, fortifies the self, defends the self, promotes the self. As long as the separate self believes the myths, performs the rituals, mouths the prayers, or embraces the dogma, then the self, it is fervently believed, will be "saved"--either now in the glory of being God-saved or Goddess-favored, or in an after-life that insures eternal wonderment.

But two, religion has also served--in a usually very, very small minority--the function of radical transformation and liberation. This function of religion does not fortify the separate self, but utterly shatters it--not consolation but devastation, not entrenchment but emptiness, not complacency but explosion, not comfort but revolution--in short, not a conventional bolstering of consciousness but a radical transmutation and transformation at the deepest seat of consciousness itself.

There are several different ways that we can state these two important functions of religion. The first function--that of creating meaning for the self--is a type of horizontal movement; the second function--that of transcending the self--is a type of vertical movement (higher or deeper, depending on your metaphor). The first I have named translation; the second, transformation. With translation, the self is simply given a new way to think or feel about reality. The self is given a new belief--perhaps holistic instead of atomistic, perhaps forgiveness instead of blame, perhaps relational instead of analytic. The self then learns to translate its world and its being in the terms of this new belief or new language or new paradigm, and this new and enchanting translation acts, at least temporarily, to alleviate or diminish the terror inherent in the heart of the separate self.

But with transformation, the very process of translation itself is challenged, witnessed, undermined, and eventually dismantled. With typical translation, the self (or subject) is given a new way to think about the world (or objects); but with radical transformation, the self itself is inquired into, looked into, grabbed by its throat and literally throttled to death.

Put it one last way: with horizontal translation--which is by far the most prevalent, wide-spread, and widely-shared function of religion--the self is, at least temporarily, made happy in its grasping, made content in its enslavement, made complacent in the face of the screaming terror that is in fact its innermost condition. With translation, the self goes sleepy into the world, stumbles numbed and near-sighted into the nightmare of samsara, is given a map laced with morphine with which to face the world. And this, indeed, is the common condition of a religious humanity, precisely the condition that the radical or transformative spiritual realizers have come to challenge and to finally undo.

For authentic transformation is not a matter of belief but of the death of the believer; not a matter of translating the world but of transforming the world; not a matter of finding solace but of finding infinity on the other side of death. The self is not made content; the self is made toast.

Now, although I have obviously been favoring transformation and belittling translation, the fact is that, on the whole, both of these functions are incredibly important and altogether indispensable. Individuals are not, for the most part, born enlightened. They are born in a world of sin and suffering, hope and fear, desire and despair. They are born as a self ready and eager to contract; a self rife with hunger, thirst, tears and terror. And they begin, quite early on, to learn various ways to translate their world, to make sense of it, to give meaning to it, and to defend themselves against the terror and the torture never lurking far beneath the happy surface of the separate self.

And as much as we, as you and I, might wish to transcend mere translation and find an authentic transformation, nonetheless translation itself is an absolutely necessary and crucial function for the greater part of our lives. Those who cannot translate adequately, with a fair amount of integrity and accuracy, fall quickly into severe neurosis or even psychosis: the world ceases to make sense--the boundaries between the self and the world are not transcended but instead begin to crumble. This is not breakthrough but breakdown; not transcendence but disaster. But at some point in our maturation process, translation itself, no matter how adequate or confident, simply ceases to console. No new beliefs, no new paradigm, no new myths, no new ideas, will staunch the encroaching anguish. Not a new belief for the self, but the transcendence of the self altogether, is the only path that avails.

Still, the number of individuals who are ready for such a path is, always has been, and likely always will be, a very small minority. For most people, any sort of religious belief will fall instead into the category of consolation: it will be a new horizontal translation that fashions some sort of meaning in the midst of the monstrous world. And religion has always served, for the most part, this first function, and served it well. I therefore also use the word legitimacy to describe this first function (the horizontal translation and creation of meaning for the separate self). And much of religion's important service is to provide legitimacy to the self--legitimacy to its beliefs, its paradigms, its worldviews, and its way in the world. This function of religion to provide a legitimacy for the self and its beliefs--no matter how temporary, relative, nontransformative, or illusory--has nonetheless been the single greatest and most important function of the world's religious traditions. The capacity of a religion to provide horizontal meaning, legitimacy, and sanction for the self and its beliefs--that function of religion has historically been the single greatest "social glue" that any culture has.

And one does not tamper easily, or lightly, with the basic glue that holds societies together. Because more often than not, when that glue dissolves--when that translation dissolves--the result, as we were saying, is not breakthrough but breakdown, not liberation but social chaos. (We will return to this crucial point in a moment.) Where translative religion offers legitimacy, transformative religion offers authenticity. For those few individuals who are ready--that is, sick with the suffering of the separate self, and no longer able to embrace the legitimate worldview--then a transformative opening to true authenticity, true enlightenment, true liberation, calls more and more insistently. And, depending upon your capacity for suffering, you will sooner or later answer the call of authenticity, of transformation, of liberation on the lost horizon of infinity.

Transformative spirituality does not seek to bolster or legitimate any present worldview at all, but rather to provide true authenticity by shattering what the world takes as legitimate. Legitimate consciousness is sanctioned by the consensus, adopted by the herd mentality, embraced by the culture and the counter-culture both, promoted by the separate self as the way to make sense of this world. But authentic consciousness quickly shakes all of that off of its back, and settles instead into a glance that sees only a radiant infinity in the heart of all souls, and breathes into its lungs only the atmosphere of an eternity too simple to believe. Transformative spirituality, authentic spirituality, is therefore revolutionary. It does not legitimate the world, it breaks the world; it does not console the world, it shatters it. And it does not render the self content, it renders it undone. And those facts lead to several conclusions.

Who Actually Wants to Transform?

It is a fairly common belief that the East is simply awash in transformative and authentic spirituality, but that the West--both historically and in today's "new age"--has nothing much more than various types of horizontal, translative, merely legitimate and therefore tepid spirituality. And while there is some truth to that, the actual situation is much gloomier, for both the East and the West alike.

First, although it is generally true that the East has produced a greater number of authentic realizers, nonetheless, the actual percentage of the Eastern population that is engaged in authentic transformative spirituality is, and always has been, pitifully small. I once asked Katigiri Roshi, with whom I had my first breakthrough (hopefully, not a breakdown), how many truly great Ch'an and Zen masters there have historically been. Without hesitating, he said "Maybe one thousand altogether." I asked another Zen master how many truly enlightened--deeply enlightened--Japanese Zen masters there were alive today, and he said "Not more than a dozen."

Let us simply assume, for the sake of argument, that those are vaguely accurate answers. Run the numbers. Even if we say there were only one billion Chinese over the course of its history (an extremely low estimate), that still means that only one thousand out of one billion had graduated into an authentic, transformative spirituality. For those of you without a calculator, that's 0.0000001 of the total population. And that means, unmistakably, that the rest of the population were (and are) involved in, at best, various types of horizontal, translative, merely legitimate religion: they were involved in magical practices, mythical beliefs, egoic petitionary prayer, magical rituals, and so on--in other words, translative ways to give meaning to the separate self, a translative function that was, as we were saying, the major social glue of the Chinese (and all other) cultures to date. Thus, without in any way belittling the truly stunning contributions of the glorious Eastern traditions, the point is fairly straightforward: radical transformative spirituality is extremely rare, anywhere in history, and anywhere in the world. (The numbers for the West are even more depressing. I rest my case.) So, although we can very rightly lament the very few number of individuals in the West who are today involved in a truly authentic and radically transformative spiritual realization, let us not make the false argument of claiming that it has otherwise been dramatically different in earlier times or in different cultures. It has on occasion been a little better than we see here, now, in the West, but the fact remains: authentic spirituality is an incredibly rare bird, anywhere, at any time, at any place. So let us start from the unarguable fact that vertical, transformative, authentic spirituality is one of the most precious jewels in the entire human tradition--precisely because, like all precious jewels, it is incredibly rare.

Second, even though you and I might deeply believe that the most important function we can perform is to offer authentic transformative spirituality, the fact is, much of what we have to do, in our capacity to bring decent spirituality into the world, is actually to offer more benign and helpful modes of translation. In other words, even if we ourselves are practicing, or offering, authentic transformative spirituality, nonetheless much of what we must first do is provide most people with a more adequate way to translate their condition. We must start with helpful translations, before we can effectively offer authentic transformations. The reason is that if translation is too quickly, or too abruptly, or too ineptly taken away from an individual (or a culture), the result, once again, is not breakthrough but breakdown, not release but collapse. Let me give two quick examples here. When Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a great (though controversial) Tibetan master, first came to this country, he was renown for always saying, when asked the meaning of Vajrayana, "There is only Ati."

In other words, there is only the enlightened mind wherever you look. The ego, samsara, maya and illusion--all of them do not have to be gotten rid of, because none of them actually exist: There is only Ati, there is only Spirit, there is only God, there is only nondual Consciousness anywhere in existence. Virtually nobody got it--nobody was ready for this radical and authentic realization of always-already truth--and so Trungpa eventually introduced a whole series of "lesser" practices leading up to this radical and ultimate "no practice." He introduced the Nine Yanas as the foundation of practice--in other words, he introduced nine stages or levels of practice, culminating in the ultimate "no practice" of always-already Ati. Many of these practices were simply translative, and some were what we might call "lesser transformative" practices: miniature transformations that made the bodymind more susceptible to radical, already-accomplished enlightenment. These translative and lesser practices issued forth in the "perfect practice" of no-practice--or the radical, instantaneous, authentic realization that, from the very beginning, there is only Ati. So even though ultimate transformation was the prior goal and ever-present ground, Trungpa had to introduce translative and lesser practices in order to prepare people for the obviousness of what is.

Exactly the same thing happened with Adi Da, another influential (and equally controversial) adept (although this time, American-born). He originally taught nothing but "the path of understanding": not a way to attain enlightenment, but an inquiry into why you want to attain enlightenment in the first place. The very desire to seek enlightenment is in fact nothing but the grasping tendency of the ego itself, and thus the very search for enlightenment prevents it. The "perfect practice" is therefore not to search for enlightenment, but to inquire into the motive for seeking itself. You obviously seek in order to avoid the present, and yet the present alone holds the answer: to seek forever is to miss the point forever. You always already ARE enlightened Spirit, and therefore to seek Spirit is simply to deny Spirit. You can no more attain Spirit than you can attain your feet or acquire your lungs.

Nobody got it. And so Adi Da, exactly like Trungpa, introduced a whole series of translative and lesser transformative practices--seven stages of practice, in fact--leading up to the point that you could dispense with seeking altogether, there to stand open to the always-already truth of your own eternal and timeless condition, which was completely and totally present from the start, but which was brutally ignored in the frenzied desire to seek.

Now, whatever you might think of those two Adepts, the fact remains: they performed perhaps the first two great experiments in this country on how to introduce the notion that "There is only Ati"--there is only Spirit--and thus seeking Spirit is exactly that which prevents realization. And they both found that, however much we might be alive to Ati, alive to the radical transformative truth of this moment, nonetheless translative and lesser transformative practices are almost always a prerequisite for that final and ultimate transformation.

My second point, then, is that in addition to offering authentic and radical transformation, we must still be sensitive to, and caring of, the numerous beneficial modes of lesser and translative practices. This more generous stance therefore calls for an "integral approach" to overall transformation, an approach that honors and incorporates many lesser transformative and translative practices--covering the physical, emotional, mental, cultural, and communal aspects of the human being--in preparation for, and as an expression of, the ultimate transformation into the always already present state.

And so, even as we rightly criticize merely translative religion (and all the lesser forms of transformation), let us also realize that an integral approach to spirituality combines the best of horizontal and vertical, translative and transformative, legitimate and authentic--and thus let us focus our efforts on a balanced and sane overview of the human situation.

Wisdom and Compassion

But isn't this view of mine terribly elitist? Good heavens, I hope so. When you go to a basketball game, do you want to see me or Michael Jordan play basketball? When you listen to pop music, who are you willing to pay money in order to hear? Me or Bruce Springsteen? When you read great literature, who would you rather spend an evening reading, me or Tolstoy? When you pay sixty-four million dollars for a painting, will that be a painting by me or by Van Gogh?

All excellence is elitist. And that includes spiritual excellence as well. But spiritual excellence is an elitism to which all are invited. We go first to the great masters--to Padmasambhava, to St. Teresa of Avila, to Gautama Buddha, to Lady Tsogyal, to Emerson, Eckhart, Maimonides, Shankara, Sri Ramana Maharshi, Bodhidharma, Garab Dorje. But their message is always the same: let this consciousness be in you which is in me. You start elitist, always; you end up egalitarian, always. But in between, there is the angry wisdom that shouts from the heart: we must, all of us, keep our eye on the radical and ultimate transformative goal. And so any sort of integral or authentic spirituality will also, always, involve a critical, intense, and occasionally polemical shout from the transformative camp to the merely translative camp.

If we use the percentages of Chinese Ch'an as a simple blanket example, this means that if 0.0000001 of the population is actually involved in genuine or authentic spirituality, then .99999999 of the population is involved in nontransformative, nonauthentic, merely translative or horizontal belief systems. And that means, yes, that the vast, vast majority of "spiritual seekers" in this country (as elsewhere) are involved in much less than authentic occasions. It has always been so; it is still so now. This country is no exception.

But in today's America, this is much more disturbing, because this vast majority of horizontal spiritual adherents often claim to be representing the leading edge of spiritual transformation, the "new paradigm" that will change the world, the "great transformation" of which they are the vanguard. But more often than not, they are not deeply transformative at all; they are merely but aggressively translative--they do not offer effective means to utterly dismantle the self, but merely ways for the self to think differently. Not ways to transform, but merely new ways to translate. In fact, what most of them offer is not a practice or a series of practices; not sadhana or satsang or shikan-taza or yoga. What most of them offer is simply the suggestion: read my book on the new paradigm. This is deeply disturbed, and deeply disturbing.

Thus, the authentic spiritual camps have the heart and soul of the great transformative traditions, and yet they will always do two things at once: appreciate and engage the lesser and translative practices (upon which their own successes usually depend), but also issue a thundering shout from the heart that translation alone is not enough.

And therefore, all of those for whom authentic transformation has deeply unseated their souls must, I believe, wrestle with the profound moral obligation to shout from the heart--perhaps quietly and gently, with tears of reluctance; perhaps with fierce fire and angry wisdom; perhaps with slow and careful analysis; perhaps by unshakeable public example--but authenticity always and absolutely carries a demand and duty: you must speak out, to the best of your ability, and shake the spiritual tree, and shine your headlights into the eyes of the complacent. You must let that radical realization rumble through your veins and rattle those around you. Alas, if you fail to do so, you are betraying your own authenticity. You are hiding your true estate. You don't want to upset others because you don't want to upset your self. You are acting in bad faith, the taste of a bad infinity.

Because, you see, the alarming fact is that any realization of depth carries a terrible burden: Those who are allowed to see are simultaneously saddled with the obligation to communicate that vision in no uncertain terms: that is the bargain. You were allowed to see the truth under the agreement that you would communicate it to others (that is the ultimate meaning of the bodhisattva vow). And therefore, if you have seen, you simply must speak out. Speak out with compassion, or speak out with angry wisdom, or speak out with skillful means, but speak out you must.

And this is truly a terrible burden, a horrible burden, because in any case there is no room for timidity. The fact that you might be wrong is simply no excuse: You might be right in your communication, and you might be wrong, but that doesn't matter. What does matter, as Kierkegaard so rudely reminded us, is that only by investing and speaking your vision with passion, can the truth, one way or another, finally penetrate the reluctance of the world. If you are right, or if you are wrong, it is only your passion that will force either to be discovered. It is your duty to promote that discovery--either way--and therefore it is your duty to speak your truth with whatever passion and courage you can find in your heart. You must shout, in whatever way you can.

The vulgar world is already shouting, and with such a raucous rancor that truer voices can scarcely be heard at all. The materialistic world is already full of advertisements and allure, screams of enticement and cries of commerce, wails of welcome and whoops of come hither. I don't mean to be harsh here, and we must honor all lesser engagements. Nonetheless, you must have noticed that the word "soul" is now the hottest item in the title of book sales--but all "soul" really means, in most of these books, is simply the ego in drag. "Soul" has come to denote, in this feeding frenzy of translative grasping, not that which is timeless in you but that which most loudly thrashes around in time, and thus "care of the soul" incomprehensibly means nothing much more than focusing intensely on your ardently separate self. Likewise, "Spiritual" is on everybody's lips, but usually all it really means is any intense egoic feeling, just as "Heart" has come to mean any sincere sentiment of the self-contraction.

All of this, truly, is just the same old translative game, dressed up and gone to town. And even that would be more than acceptable were it not for the alarming fact that all of that translative jockeying is aggressively called "transformation," when all it is, of course, is a new series of frisky translations. In other words, there seems to be, alas, a deep hypocrisy hidden in the game of taking any new translation and calling it the great transformation. And the world at large--East or West, North or South--is, and always has been, for the most part, perfectly deaf to this calamity. And so: given the measure of your own authentic realization, you were actually thinking about gently whispering into the ear of that near-deaf world? No, my friend, you must shout. Shout from the heart of what you have seen, shout however you can.

But not indiscriminately. Let us proceed carefully with this transformative shout. Let small pockets of radically transformative spirituality, authentic spirituality, focus their efforts, and transform their students. And let these pockets slowly, carefully, responsibly, humbly, begin to spread their influence, embracing an absolute tolerance for all views, but attempting nonetheless to advocate a true and authentic and integral spirituality--by example, by radiance, by obvious release, by unmistakable liberation. Let those pockets of transformation gently persuade the world and its reluctant selves, and challenge their legitimacy, and challenge their limiting translations, and offer an awakening in the face of the numbness that haunts the world at large.

Let it start right here, right now, with us--with you and with me--and with our commitment to breathe into infinity until infinity alone is the only statement that the world will recognize. Let a radical realization shine from our faces, and roar from our hearts, and thunder from our brains--this simple fact, this obvious fact: that you, in the very immediateness of your present awareness, are in fact the entire world, in all its frost and fever, in all its glories and its grace, in all its triumphs and its tears. You do not see the sun, you are the sun; you do not hear the rain, you are the rain; you do not feel the earth, you are the earth. And in that simple, clear, unmistakable regard, translation has ceased in all domains, and you have transformed into the very Heart of the Kosmos itself--and there, right there, very simply, very quietly, it is all undone. Wonder and remorse will then be alien to you, and self and others will be alien to you, and outside and inside will have no meaning at all. And in an obvious shock of recognition--where my Master is my Self, and that Self is the Kosmos at large, and the Kosmos is my Soul--you will walk very gently into the fog of this world, and transform it entirely by doing nothing at all.

And then, and then, and only then--you will finally, clearly, carefully and with compassion, write on the tombstone of a self that never even existed: There is only Ati.

Copyright 1996, 1997, Shambhala Publications. All rights reserved.

VISIT KEN WILBER's website: http://wilber.shambhala.com/

(This article appears on http://www.newciv.org/ISSS_Primer/asem29kw.html)

Sugar...

Lead me from dreaming to waking.
Lead me from opacity to clarity.
Lead me from the complicated to the simple.
Lead me from the obscure to the obvious.
Lead me from intention to attention.
Lead me from what I'm told I am to what I see I am.
Lead me from confrontation to wide openness.
Lead me to the place I never left,
Where there is peace, and peace
- The Upanishads




*note* nice song:) ...but the true sugar is not out there...you can give only as much sugar as you have.Sugar is like money...if you don't have it..you can't give it..lol

Meditation Sickness and the Path to Enlightenment

Lead me from dreaming to waking.
Lead me from opacity to clarity.
Lead me from the complicated to the simple.
Lead me from the obscure to the obvious.
Lead me from intention to attention.
Lead me from what I'm told I am to what I see I am.
Lead me from confrontation to wide openness.
Lead me to the place I never left,
Where there is peace, and peace
- The Upanishads

*note* interesting comments from the ,,the Wanderling,,..
-added by danny-
............................................
PRESENTED BY:
the Wanderling
FROM A PAPER BY:
James Tan
(original no longer calls up)

Shakamuni the Buddha used 45 years (some say 49) dispensing and elaborating on the Four Noble Truths. From his infinite compassion he shows us many paths to Enlightenment. The most direct is the wisdom path through meditation, although we are also warned that it is not the easiest.

Meditation is by no means an easy activity as it activates a lot of hidden obstacles and hindrances. They appear in mundane forms like physical illness and on rare occasion distractions from other entities.

So, logically, who wants to get ill and distracted from a seemingly stable routine of sitting, walking, standing and lying down? But, let us take a moment before making a rash decision. These accepted routine activities, are they permanent and as rewarding as they appear to be?

Did the Buddha say something to this effect,"… the grasping of the presence is the building of future suffering!"

The ancients have always advised us to use this 'meditative inconveniences' as a trigger for more effort. They are not wrong! The pain of the present may in fact moderate future obstacles at other stations in Samsara. The common advice is: "Let us be diligent and complete our homework before we need to hand them up to be marked."

A bit of icing on the cake is: one can reduce or even eliminate much distractions by building some form of knowledge. This includes reading on the theoretical aspects and discussions with seasoned mediators. The are lamps that help to illuminate the journey through the 'tunnel of uncertainty'.

The purpose of this paper:

This essay is the work of a novice, just like an apprentice to the seniors of a soccer team. The writer has simply followed the advice of the Buddha, "Confirm one's understanding by speaking, writing and debating."

Putting one's thought in words is perhaps the easiest of the three activities. The future reader is invited to find in their compassion to moderate the wording if not the essay's content. One can only improve through advises.

The centre of focus is: the hindrances faced by a practitioner during meditation. What are their causes, their symptoms and cures.

On the first reading, the reader may even think this short note is too generalised or basic.

The writer hopes you will find the information listed as a critique and a guideline.

What meditation is not:

Going back to basic: the general English word 'Meditation' has a different implication and elaboration in Buddhism. In general usage, it only implies an activity that aims to achieve a calm or soothing perception. Millions of dollars have changed hands due to this general mis-understanding and millions more were handed out to promises of Iddhis (magical powers) and its counterpart Siddhis (super-normal perceptual states), health-improvement, etc.

Two ancient words are shown here for your consideration.

The first is Bhavana, it is Sanskrit and Pali in origin and is roughly translated as 'to develop or to change something'. That is for us to transmute our impure states to that of a higher level of purity and understanding. It is found to be more in use at early discourses given in the earlier phrases of the Buddha's dispensation.sutra collection of the Buddha's teaching.

The other word is a Tibetan word, sGompa, which implies one to get familiar with a situation. That phenomena is our natural state, the original wakefulness with the concept of duality. Many names were used and this include, sugata-garbha, Buddha Mind, etc. sGompa implies at each level of realization, one may realise the previous the obstacles and activities on the paths could have been avoided. They then become lesson for the future generation.

What is the goal:

The Buddha said: "The path is in effortless."

That is: we can leave all phenomena in their natural state (of emptiness) as they arise.

Another facet is ancient's description, "All phenomena is beyond, dwelling, beyond arising and beyond ceasing and all prevailing."

We live in the mundane world and are surrounded by a dualistic environment. Each of us is compelled to do something. Perhaps, a need to get up, to shout some slogans or to be noticed. That response is normal as we need to adapt this change in attitude. This is through a modified behaviour routine.

In short, the goal of a meditation is to regain our original nature before idea of " I " existed.

Basic Knowledge:

To go into proper sitting, some fundamental points have to be cleared:

• Body (posture): The traditional cross-legged position is strongly recommended. The most important point lies in the straightening of the back. By placing the body in its original state, meditation natural occurs.
• Eye (gaze): do not close your eyes, blink or glare sideways. Look directly and unwaveringly ahead. Since the eyesight and the consciousness share a single nature, meditation occurs naturally.
• Mind (the way of resting): do not let the natural state of your ordinary mind purse past habitual patterns, or look into future activities of disturbing emotions and do not fabricate the present state by conceptualising. By resting the consciousness in this natural mode, meditation occurs naturally.

Calm Abiding Is Not Meditation;

We are told of the nine stages of progression in this initial practice, but one must be fore-warned, the main obstacles of Shamatha are feeling of exhilaration, dullness and agitation. They must be overcome before one can even contemplate advancing into clear Insight Meditation (vipashyana). See also LAYA: A Definition.

These stages and its hindrances are not universal to all, some meditators may just 'jump' to the next phrase. An indivisible mode called "shamatha inseparable from vipashyana."

A crucial point to note is: other faiths have their own form of classification and methods. However, this is where the similarity ends. The goal of vipashyana and the knowledge sought differs.

Experience and Obstacles of Samadhi

Samadhi is a general word that would be ideal to describe the next level: The level of absorption, insight and realization.

At this stage, we are told three experiences may arise: Bliss, Clarity and Non-Thought.

Non-thought happens when the consciousness is free from conceptual thinking and has three types:

• No Good Thought" - free from clinging to mediator and meditation object;
• No Evil Thought" - is the interruption of the flow of gross and subtle conceptual thinking;
• No neutral Thought" - recognition of the natural face of awareness as being locationless.

During his state of non-thought, there is clarity.

Clarity is the unobstructed, naked radiance of awareness (three types)

"Spontaneous Clarity", the state being free from an object;

"Original Clarity" does not appear for a temporary duration;

"Natural Clarity" is not made by anyone (unfabricated).

Bliss is different from the usual dictionary definition and there are four types:

"Blissful Feeling" - is to be free from adverse conditions of disharmony "Conceptual Bliss" - is to be free from the pain of concepts;

"Nondual Bliss" - is to be free from the clinging of dualistic fixation;

"Unconditioned Bliss" is to be free from the causes and conditions.

When these three experiences appear, their attachment (another hindrance) is known as the "Defects of Meditation". If one does not detach, one strays into three states of existences (Realm of Desire, Form, Formless).

Despite, having the notion of one has detached from the above experience, there is still some subtle attachment. We are asked to contemplate these attachment by ways if three analogies:

Detach from Bliss like a madman (or stray into the Realm of Desire) ;

Detach from Clarity like the dream of a small child (or stray into the Realm of Form);

Detach from Non-Thought like a yogi who has perfected his yogic discipline (or stray into the Formless Realm)

To cut through this pitfall, one uses "Nine Serene States Of Successive Abiding."

The Real Cause behind the Obstacles

Our deluded mind is the singular cause for all the obstacles in our samsaric existence. It gave birth to The Three Poisons of Ignorance, Hatred and Desire. Through recognizing their true essence, we understood the true meaning of the Tripitaka and applied them as paths.

The five emotions are in effect, creation and manifestations of the mind's three poisons. By being mindful when they arise, one reflects on their cause. They arose from an external factors which is empty in essence. By understand their cause and naturally resting in their turbulent state one perfect the five innate wisdoms and convert them as paths.

Using Samadhi as a Path

All good Samadhis produce experiences. These 'taste' or prana may be seen as an advancement in practices but one needs to be careful. It is tempting to cling onto them as an ego. This attachment will only create more karmic deed.

One must be understand all experiences are transitional or temporary. They are displays of our dualistic mind. The practitioner must look into its essence without fixating and without attachment. This set the ground for the dawning and understanding into the empty essence of nondual wakefulness.

Using Bodily Sickness and Pain as a Path

Hindrance of bodily sickness and pain

Padmasambhava, the precious guru, advised us to use hindrances experiences like sickness, pain, headaches, or intense fatigue as helpers for Samadhi.

One starts by understanding its transitional nature.... a temporary experience. Without naming it as a faults or virtue, one simply allows it to naturally occur and be liberated. Without clinging it does not a dwelling ground.

Knowing his future listeners to be entangled by mundane concepts, the guru advises on how to clear these bodily sickness and pain. In brief, the lesson explains:

"Sickness abides laterally in the all-ground, in the manner of the constitution of the channels and as habitual tendencies. Its causes are due to unwholesome karma accumulated through ignorance and ego clinging. It is activated by disturbing emotions, conceptual thinking, prana-winds, or gods and demons. The matured results is the 404 types of disease, heated by heat and cold, phlegm, aches, and swelling. In short, the disease of coemergent ignorance is the chief cause and the disease of conceptual ignorance is the chief circumstance."

In summary, all sickness (including those not related to meditation) posses five factors:

Unwholesome Karma as the cause;

Disturbing emotions as the circumstances;

Conceptual thinking as the connecting link,

Prana-wind as the concluding assembler,

Gods and demons as the supportive factor.

Using Ignorance as an example, the process is:

Since the cause is Ignorance, recognize co-emergent wisdom as the cure.

Since the condition is disturbing emotions, settle your attention to evenness.

Since the connector is conceptual thinking, cut through the ties of thought.

Since the gatherer of the conclusion is wind, focus on the key point of wind.

The back-support is the gods and demons: must abandon the notion of a demon.

By doing this you will be freed from all kinds of disease.

However, the cure for the essence of illness as instructed by the Enlightened master may be beyond our conceptual mind. He went on to explain the alternatives:

Best to leave it to be self-liberated.

That is to say, in the preliminaries, don't pursue the sickness.

During the main part, don't cultivate the sickness.

During the conclusion, don't dwell on feeling sick.

Through that, you will untie old sickness and remain unharmed by new ones.

(Living followers of this advice are those that understood)

Transmuting Adversity:

Regard the sickness with gratitude and letting your mind be jubilant, eat food that harms the illness and act in adverse ways towards it

Cutting directly:

This process of illness vacating is the medicine of cutting through.

Equalizing:

At least you will not have to suffer with the thought of feeling sick

Last is to cure by meditation.

In general, resting in equanimity should be completely become the essence of Non-Thought. You must cause all concerns far away and be free from doubt and hesitation about what is exorcised or visualised. The visualisation and your mind should be unified. It is important to rely and concentrate upon these three points.

The Fear and Dread of Gods and Demons:

The occurrence of this hindrances is universal. They exist in the mind of the practitioner who has yet to be contact with a glimpse of reality. See Mara.

But where do they come from?

The presence of demonic force and doubt arises from the indivisibility of prana and the dualistic mind (It is nurtured by conceptual thinking).

The guru recommended the following method:

"When hindrances such as thoughts of Fear and Dread arises, we must identify them quickly and bring them onto the path. If you let them run wild or fall under their power and will later matured as an obstacle for your practice,

"The ground of evil forces and magical displays are within your own mistaken mind. There are definitely no 'gods' or 'demons' outside of yourself. The very moment you experienced evil forces and magical displays, apply the vital point of understanding that they do not possess any true existence as they are devoid of arising, dwelling and ceasing

"One start by assuming a yogic posture. Keeping one gaze, we look into its identity. As soon as our thinking turns into empty cognisance, we will possess the confident courage that thoroughly cut through fear and dread."

We are also warned that a self-assuring thought, like, "I cannot be harmed by obstacles!" and "I wonder if I will meet with some obstacles!" may in fact creates a welcome for demons.

In summary, one is advised to cut the stream of conceptual thinking! This includes offering your aggregates as a feast offering or as food. This is the sure way to cast away ego-clinging. One simply applies the vital point and practice!

One may like to try practices like meditation on "Loving kindness" or Chod. The latter is a method developed in Tibet by Lady Machig Ladron. An expedient means that combines the sutra and esoteric teaching.

Integrating Meditative experience into the Five Noble Paths

Padmasambhava said the Five Paths are included within Three Experiences (Bliss, Clarity and Non-Thought) of Samadhi.

The instructions are:

• 1. Having cut these pitfalls (from the 4 Formless States of serenity - 4 Dhyanas), one practices a flawless meditation by remaining serenely and vividly in this clarity and non-thought during the meditation state. In the post meditation state; appearances arise unobstructedly and are as in substantial as a dream or magical illusion. You understand the nature of cause and effects, fill the measure of merit to the brim, attain the 'heat of samadhi'; and thus perfect the Path of Accumulation.
• 2. By practising this for a long time, you see in actuality, locationless and self-cognisant, the nature presence in yourself. Recognising your natural face in the Path of Seeing.
• 3. Experiencing appearance, awareness and emptiness to be locationless and self-cognisant, you see directly the unconditioned innate nature. The obscuration of disturbing emotions is destroyed at its root. Realising that cause and effect are empty, samsara has no solid existence. The meditation state is indivisible from Buddhahood and everything in the post meditation arises as magical illusion. - Path of Joining.
• 4. Growing familiar with this state and sustaining it steadily, all phenomena become nondual. Recognising them as self-display, appearance and mind mingle as one. When emptiness arises as cause and effect, you realise dependent origination. During the meditation state all phenomena are locationless and present as the essence of awareness. The slight presence of objective appearance during the post-meditation state is the Path of Cultivation.
• 5. Maintaining this for a long time, you realise that all samsara and nirvana is nondual, beyond arising and ceasing, unmixed and utterly perfect, locationless and self-cognisant. The cognitive obscuration totally vanishes, and the very moment everything dawns as original wakefulness is the Consummation of Incomparable Enlightenment, the State of Buddhahood, Anuttara-Samyak-Sambodhi.

Fundamentally, our experience as experienced is not different from the Zen master's. Where

we differ is that we place a fog, a particular kind of conceptual overlay onto that experience
and then make an emotional investment in that overlay, taking it to be "real" in and of itself.

The only journey is the journey within

Lead me from dreaming to waking.
Lead me from opacity to clarity.
Lead me from the complicated to the simple.
Lead me from the obscure to the obvious.
Lead me from intention to attention.
Lead me from what I'm told I am to what I see I am.
Lead me from confrontation to wide openness.
Lead me to the place I never left,
Where there is peace, and peace
- The Upanishads

*note* nice quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926)
-added by danny-
...........................................

~ The only journey is the journey within. ~

Be patient with all that is in your heart
And try to love the questions themselves.
Do not seek for the answers that cannot be given
For you would not be able to live them
And the point is to live everything.
Live the questions now and perhaps,
without knowing it,
You will live along some day into answers.

~ The only journey is the journey within. ~(Rainer Maria Rilke)

Why not dance the hamsper dance?

Lead me from dreaming to waking.
Lead me from opacity to clarity.
Lead me from the complicated to the simple.
Lead me from the obscure to the obvious.
Lead me from intention to attention.
Lead me from what I'm told I am to what I see I am.
Lead me from confrontation to wide openness.
Lead me to the place I never left,
Where there is peace, and peace
- The Upanishads

*note* dance a bit..
-added by danny-
.

JUNG ON THE RELATIVITY OF the Gods

Lead me from dreaming to waking.
Lead me from opacity to clarity.
Lead me from the complicated to the simple.
Lead me from the obscure to the obvious.
Lead me from intention to attention.
Lead me from what I'm told I am to what I see I am.
Lead me from confrontation to wide openness.
Lead me to the place I never left,
Where there is peace, and peace
- The Upanishads

*note* interesting comments about Jung perspective of GOD(from John P. Dourley)
-added by danny-
....................................
Jung's theoretical understanding of religion makes of the analytic process a religious event. It recalls the Gods to their psychic origin and encourages unmediated conversation with them within the containment of the psyche. The analytic process thus understood is currently to be valued for a number of reasons. The internalization of divinity curtails enmity between religious communities bonded by external Gods. More than this Jung's total myth contends that divinity can become conscious only in humanity. The education and redemption of God in history is an ongoing project. Currently it takes the form of an emerging myth of an extended compassion whose embrace supplants still reigning myths of lesser compass. The analytic process though confined, in the first instance, to individuals is a significant contributor to the now emerging societal myth

JUNG AND THE RECALL OF THE GODS.
By John Dourley
Jung on Religion: Theory and Therapy.
The intimacy Jungian psychology establishes between theory and therapy is particularly prominent in matters religious. Jung's greatly extended sense of religion rests on the unmediated experience of the numinous working ever more intense patterns of personal integration and universal relatedness. The experience of the numinous also lies at the heart of Jungian therapeutic practice. Without it no transformation takes place. Writes Jung on this point, "But the fact is that the approach to the numinous
1 This is an expanded version of a paper read at the 2nd International Academic
Conference of Analytical Psychology and Jungian Studies, Texas A and M University,
College Station, Texas, July 7-10, 2005.
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is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology" (Jung, 1973, p. 377). When the experience of the numinous becomes the basis of both religion and "...real therapy...", the distinction between Jung's theory of religious experience and the practice of his therapy collapses. The doing of classical Jungian therapy becomes itself a religious event. The religious nature of this event stands in constant need of clarification so that, at least, the analyst is made fully aware of what is at stake in the analytic process. The analytic process is one in which the analyst and analysand foster the birth of the self in the analysand's consciousness through the dream dialogue with the self. In effect the analysis becomes a personal revelation of the individual's unique myth originating, in Jung's view, from the same source that gives rise to all religions, namely, the archetypal dimension of the psyche.
The discovering of one's personal revelation enables the individual to distinguish one's personal myth and so oneself from the myths into which one is inevitably born. These are the layers of collective mythology such as ethnicity, religion, nationality, social status, etc., which can serve, in varying degrees, as impediments or resources in the emergence of the self. But it is only the emergence of the self in the consciousness of the individual that frees the individual to relate one's inherited mythologies to one's own deepest personal truth. As this truth emerges into consciousness the individual is progressively released from a compulsive and unconscious adhesion to received mythologies toward a more discerning response to them out of the power of the inimitable and sustaining truth of the personal self. This response can range from outright rejection to a heightened appreciation of the symbolic, ritual and more meaningful dimensions of the mythologies one inherits at birth. The point is that wherever the response lies
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along the scale from rejection to integration of inherited truths, it is a response in living touch with the power of the individual's personal myth. In the end such power is, for Jung, the only power that enables the individual to respond to the collective as an individual. "Resistance to the mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself (Jung, 1958, p. 278). (Italics Jung's).
The individual's growing into one's personal myth in the analytic process is never a solipsistic event. Such growth is a significant social resource because it provides society with individuals endowed with the critical perspective that only living out of their personal myth affords. This side of the religious role of the analytic process is peculiarly pressing in a time of epochal change. Jung thought his time and ours was a time of such epochal change. He refers to "...the end of the Christian aeon...", to "...the invalidation of Christ...", and describes himself as a modern Joachim di Fiore ushering in a new age of the Spirit (Jung, 1953b, p. 138). In this context the analytic endeavour can be revisioned not only on a personal level as an occasion for the surfacing of individual mythologies. The analytic endeavour becomes, through the individuals it touches, a major contributor to the emergence of a more encompassing collective myth or now dawning revelation which Jung anticipated but understandably could not describe in more than general terms.
The turbulence surrounding the birth of a new societal myth is presently vividly evident at the collective level. The educated and spiritually sensitive turn away in great numbers from ecclesial institutions that continue to take their founding poets, the writers of their Holy Scriptures, literally and then rely on legalism and authority to enforce belief in the unbelievable. Theology thus remains where it was in Jung's day. "It proclaims doctrines
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which nobody understands, and demands a faith which nobody can manufacture" (Jung, 1948, p. 192). With the departure of those with a native religious sensitivity and/or developed mind, collective religion is largely abandoned to various forms and degrees of fundamentalism in both West and East. The numerical surge of institutional fundamentalism bears stark witness to the baser lusts of humanity collective religion so often serves, namely, the need for instant certitude collectively reinforced in the face of the anxiety and fear of living with doubt. In my own tradition the spirit of renewal promised by Vatican II in the sixties has been broken through more than a quarter century reign of an imperial papacy with roots in the thirteenth century. The head of the Inquisition during much of this period has now succeeded his predecessor. Nor has Romanism been the only religious tradition to have circled the wagons in an instinctive defense against the emergence of a secularity of higher moral instinct informed by a still fragile but growing religious sense of a broader compassion and more inclusive embrace.
For many contemporaries caught in this current situation the religious import of the analytic process could serve as the "tertium", the third, not given or not entertained as a possibility by those whose dismay with traditional religion holds out but two bleak options. Many feel they can either grind their teeth and stay in their tradition or simply walk away, often to the sterility of a life without the depth that functional religion can provide. Jung's third possibility would hold out the option of accessing the source of all religions as the basis of one's own through accessing the depths of the personal psyche. This accessing could restore the vitalities of religious experience to those who would explore it, its arduous demands, and its quiet rewards, with an immediacy devoid of institutional need or intervention.
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Such access might bring to some a transformed and heightened appreciation of their former traditions, symbols and rites now freed of their literal misinterpretation and authoritarian imposition. As an example, such experience would be of help to a now sociologically discernible group known as "recovering Catholics". Whether or not such recovery was to take place within or beyond ecclesial confines, it would restore a vitality that only the experience of the native religious depths of the human can provide. Or, on the other hand, and in a more gnostic vein, many may have to go it alone and simply "...stand before the Nothing out of which All may grow (Jung, 1933, p. 75). In this passage Jung suggests that this alternative may indeed be the face of future religion for the truly modern though few might currently be able to bear its demands. Deeper than either of these options and the many variations that lie between them is Jung's contention that the abiding in one's personal revelation is the greatest contribution one can make to the surpassing myth, the new revelation, now struggling for birth, at least, in the contemporary West. This alone makes the exploration of the religious implications of the analytic process, the melding of the theory and practice of religion in a Jungian sense, worthwhile.
Capping the Volcano.
Jung's understanding of the psyche rests on a conception of containment which tolerates no invasion of the psyche by agencies beyond the psyche. Such containment eliminates all commerce between an allegedly self-sufficient supernatural world of divine beings and the natural world of psyche. Theologically such containment means that the psyche creates all the divinities as well as all personal and collective faiths in them. For Jung this now dawning consciousness marks the culmination of a millennial
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evolution of religious maturation (Jung, 1954, p. 402), one which carries with it a moral imperative. This imperative demands that responsible religion recall the Gods to their psychic origin where dialogue with them would continue on an individual basis (Jung, 1940, p. 85). This dialogue would be at once socially safer and personally more harrowing. It would be socially safer because it would undermine the conflict between religious communities who claim a universal truth for one or other of their competing, still transcendent Gods. The dialogue would be more harrowing because it would face the individual with an inner critique more personal, rigorous and defiant of evasion than any religion can muster. Internalizing the conversation with deity would also, in Jung's words, terminate "...the systematic blindness... that God is outside man" (Jung, 1940, p. 58). (Italics Jung's). It would force humanity to confront its Gods and its faiths in them within the confines of the psyche from which they first are born.
Recent Jungian reflection on the internalization of the relation to the divine has illuminated the Jungian options to the inevitable question Jung's work poses, "Is there a God beyond the psyche?" Lionel Corbett points out in strict continuity with Jung that the experience of the numinous is the basis in humanity for the experience of God. This leads to only two options in relating the numinous to the possibility of a God beyond the psyche. Corbett puts it this way, "To reiterate: numinous experience arises from an autonomous level of the psyche that is either the source of, or the medium for, the transmission of religious experience: empirically we cannot say which (Corbett, p. 8). If the unconscious is the source of the numinous experience there would be no need to posit a God beyond the psyche. If the unconscious is the medium of the numinous experience then one could posit the reality of God beyond the unconscious who would address the human
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through the unconscious. This would lead to the question of why such a God in his creative role would use such an ambivalent medium as the unconscious to make his presence and project known to humanity. This option, when closely examined, envisages a God or divine power along theistic lines who would create the unconscious as a mediator between himself and the human ego. Occam's razor would surely slice away such a superfluous entity as the unconscious as mediator in favour of the more abstemious option that the unconscious is, in fact, the source of the numinous and requires no reality beyond it for the generation of the numinous as the basis of humanity's experience of the divine. The option for the unconscious as the source of the numinous would lead to the sparse yet organic conception of a wholly intrapsychic transcendence, one that would affirm that the unconscious infinitely transcends ego consciousness but that nothing transcends the total psyche. Jung's own waffling on this issue might well be traced to the progressive development of his thought and to his being less than candid in his dialogue with theologians. He was, however, quite frank in his debates with Victor White and Martin Buber that the real or implied supernaturalism of both thinkers was incompatible with his understanding of the psyche in its religious function (Dourley, 1991).
Corbett is also accurate in his perception that Jung's psychology rests on an eastern Vedantic notion of a point of residual identity between the divine and the human within the human. He goes on to comment that though this position is consistent with certain Western mystics like Eckhart it is in serious conflict with orthodox Jewish and Christian insistence on an objective transcendent God. He notes, "So far Jungian depth psychologists have largely been dualistic in this regard, presumably reflecting the unconscious bias of their Judaeo-Christian heritage" (Corbett, p. 42). This is
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a rather strong indictment of Jungian analysts who cling to a theistic and supernatural conception of the divinity as an objective entity beyond the psyche and usually as its creator. Corbett's critique that such dualism is hostile to Jung's understanding of the psyche has much to validate it. It is difficult to reconcile such a divinity with Jung's statement, "The naive assumption that the creator of the world is a conscious being must be regarded as a disastrous prejudice which later gave rise to the most incredible dislocations of logic (Jung, 1954, p. 383, fn 13). Rather Jung would have the ego in a much more immediate relation with a divinity as beastly as it was good looking for the reconciliation of its opposites in human consciousness.
Such psychic containment rests, in Jung's word's, on a point of "identity" between the divine and human native to all of nature including human nature (Jung, 1940, p. 58, 60, 61). Such a sweeping sacramental sense enables Jung to extend to every human the prerogative of the homoousia, the unity of two natures, divine and human, in one person (Jung, 1940, p. 61). He does not do this in the fixed essentialist categories of the Trinitarian and Christological councils with their limitation of this status to one outstanding "historical" individual. Rather Jung affirms that everyone is gifted with a conscious and an unconscious nature and that bringing them together in one person is both the work of a lifetime and the only serious meaning of redemption available to empirical humanity. In this integrative view human maturation and deification coincide.
The unification of each individual's two natures into a total person is also the only meaning that Jung gives to incarnation (Jung, 195, p. 406). Incarnation describes the process of the unconscious becoming embodied in the consciousness of " a more compendious" or "supraordinate" personality
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(Jung, 1954b, p. 258, 259). The Spirit or the self works this emerging personality through the conscious unification of the individual's divine and human natures. In doing so the Spirit brings itself to conscious birth in those who respond to its approach (Jung, 1954b, p. 263). In this sense incarnation does not refer to a past event but becomes the ever present and ongoing process of God becoming conscious in the individual to the extent the individual allows the urgencies of the unconscious to become conscious in the unique form that incarnation seeks in every life. In this precise sense the analyst has every right to view participation in the analytic process as cooperation with the Spirit in working its incarnation in the consciousness of the analysand. By mediating the analysand's latent divinity to consciousness every analyst plays the role of the priest.
Incarnation thus understood becomes an alternate description of what Jung means by "the relativity of God" (Jung, 1921, p. 242-244; 1954, p. 381). Put succinctly, Jung is contending that only in human consciousness can God become self-conscious and so relativized, at least, in relation to a God conceived as an absolute and transcendent self-sufficient divinity "wholly other" than the human (Jung, 1953, p. 11, fn. 6). The "relativity of God", thus understood, also provides the deepest meaning of human suffering. Relativization implies that divinity must divest itself of its transcendent remove and suffer in historical humanity the resolution of its unresolved eternally conflicted life. It is no wonder that Jung would write that "...God wants to become man but not quite" (Jung, 1954, p. 456). Even for deity things were less painful in eternal but unconscious bliss. With the realization that the pain of becoming conscious is the same pain in the human and the divine, humanity has to face the fact that its deepest historical meaning and suffering is the redemption of God at the insistence of a God
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who creates human consciousness as the only locus in which the divine self-contradiction can be perceived and resolved. The redemption of God in and through the suffering involved in the conscious integration of divinity's living antinomy in historical humanity is also the basis of Jung's eschatology and of his philosophy of history (Jung, 1954, p. 408, 455, 459, 461). Christ's dying in despair between divinely grounded opposites as a prelude to their union in resurrected life becomes for Jung the substance of the answer to Job. This moment is "...as divine as it is human, as 'eschatological' as it is 'psychological'" (Jung, 1954, p. 408). Psychologically humanity's suffering toward the redemption of God in itself coincides with the movement of history and strikes the deepest cord in the psyche as the meaning and movement of the entire human enterprise (Jung, 1948, p. 179).
Humanity's current participation in the ongoing divine/human drama calls up the image of the volcano that now needs to be capped in the wake of Jung's recall of the Gods to their psychic origin. Jung confronts contemporary humanity with the question of whether it is up to suffering divinely based conflict in the immediate precinct of human interiority, the matrix of all the Gods, without breaking containment and destroying itself in destroying the evil other. Failure to meet Jung's challenge would only continue the sad current situation of externalizing the conflict and blowing up, in the name of the demonic, whatever contradicts one's own truncated personal or collective compact or testament with the divine. Thus the recall of the Gods and the internal resolution of their mutual enmity as the precedent of external peace is currently at the heart of the hope of the species that it can survive its God and religion creating proclivity (Dourley, 2003). It is the fire of this wider hope the analytic process fans through addressing whatever conflict it faces in the individual circumstances of the
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analysand. Each individual gain in consciousness contributes to the contemporary emergence of a myth informed by a more universal sensitivity and wider inclusion now sponsored by the unconscious in its role as the maker of history.
Humanity and Divinity as Functions of Each Other.
The intimacy which Jung establishes between divine and human life, suffering and consciousness is most evident in his appropriation of Meister Eckhart's mystical experience. Here Jung reads Eckhart to mean that God and humanity are "functions" of each other caught up in a single cosmic and organic process of mutual completion (Jung, 1921, p. 243). In these passages Jung is obviously equating the relationship of the ego to the unconscious with the relationship of the human to the divine and containing both within the psyche. Elaborating on this intrapsychic dialectic Jung makes the telling point that those who do not understand that, "...God's action springs from one's own inner being..." do not understand the nature of religious experience and so do not understand religion itself (Jung, 1921, p. 243).
Jung goes on to describe the dynamic of humanity and divinity as functions of each other in some detail. Basically this dynamic takes on the form of a never to be completed psychic cycle. In the first moment the soul regresses to an immersion in and identity with the energies of the divine. In the second moment the soul then mediates these energies to consciousness (Jung, 1921, p. 255, 256). When the cycle is taken in its totality Jung is found to be saying that the moment of the soul's identity with God is the necessary prelude to the birthing of the divine in human consciousness. His Answer to Job describes the same process in terms of a baptism, the baptism
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of consciousness into and from the pleroma, the creative and formless source of all form and consciousness (Jung, 1954, p. 425). In every analysis reliant on dreams this process is at work as the dreams take the soul into the depths of the psyche and then speak directly to consciousness through the soul from her immersion in these depths. This process makes of the analyst both the observer and catalyst in the baptism of the individual into the life of the individual's evolving myth as that individual's greatest contribution to the emerging societal myth.
The psychic rhythm Jung describes in his treatment of Eckhart and Job establishes a mutual dependence of the soul on God and God on the soul working the endless redemption of divinity in a humanity itself redeemed in its function as the sole birthplace of divine consciousness (Jung, 1921, 251). The divine/human mutuality Jung here describes strongly suggests that the depth of one's penetration into the unconscious is the ultimate determinant of the breadth of one's compassion in the conscious world. It further implies that there is no where humanity, individual or collective, can hide from its role in the redemption of the divine since nothing exists beyond the psyche which could absolve humanity from the suffering involved in the divine insistence of becoming progressively conscious in the creature. To the extent any analysis births the self in consciousness it also births God in humanity and in the process redeems both. The effect of such redemption always has wider societal import.
Toward A Surpassing Myth and a More Encompassing Spirit.
The above considerations make it obvious that Jung's psychology is itself a myth which appreciates even as it corrodes so many reigning religious myths and especially the monotheisms. In Jung's view the
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monotheisms had already been seen through by the religious consciousness evident in the Book of Job (Jung, 1954, 385). Once Job's consciousness had surfaced little could be done to save the monotheistic myth in any of its variants. Jung's myth continues in this critical stance but adds significant substance to the myth the unconscious currently sponsors in the West, a myth appreciatively surpassing the monotheisms.
A foundational element of Jung's myth is humanity's unmediated experience of its divinity and the dynamic this experience presently unleashes. If humanity and divinity naturally share a common point or ground, the thrust of this ground is to manifest its total potential in ever greater approximations of human totality. As it drives toward the fullest manifestation of itself in the human, the divine and psychic ground of humanity exercises both an expansive and balancing influence on the humanity in whom it seeks to become conscious. In effect this side of Jung's mythology is addressing the compensatory nature of revelation. Put simply Jung equates revelation with the compensation the unconscious offers to the culture in which the revelation occurs. In effect we get the Gods, saviours, and religions we deserve and need.
Bringing these positions to bear on the contemporary situation, Jung introduces a complex historical argument concluding that the transcendent Gods of the monotheisms provided a then much needed religious compensation to their constituencies (Jung, 1956, p. 66-71). This compensation currently cries out for its own compensation, that is, for a new revelation at whose service Jung places his psychology. This is particularly the case with Christianity, and by extension the other monotheisms, whose initial compensatory imbalance toward the spiritual would inevitably fall prey to the laws of the psyche and evoke their own
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compensation in the course of time (Jung, 1959, p. 43). On the precise dates and mode of the revelation compensating Christianity, Jung waffles from the Book of Revelation (Jung, 1959, p. 43; 1954, p. 439, 458), itself within the Christian canon, to the gnostic/alchemical tradition, to the mediaeval Spirit movements, mystics, and devotees of the grail, to Renaissance neo-Platonism, and finally to the Enlightenment (Jung, 1959, p. 43, 44) and its enthronement of reason as the anti-Christ (Dourley, 1999, p. 58-65). Take your pick. Such imprecision is hardly the stuff that a more rigorous historical methodology would to-day tolerate.
In spite of this historical ambiguity, when Jung gives content to what the new revelation demands and offers he does address social phenomena undeniably visible in contemporary society. For Jung's myth moves from a trinitarian paradigm of a self-sufficient divinity only contingently involved in the human historical drama to a quaternitarian paradigm (Jung, 1948, p. 175). In this paradigm divinity and humanity are co-dependents in processes of reciprocal fulfillment in time. Within this context Jung can be very precise on what is lacking in the Spirit of a trinitarian divinity and needs to be recovered and sacralized by the more inclusive Spirit of the quaternity. The Spirit of the new myth would confer divinity on the feminine as well as the masculine in the movement toward a richer androgynous consciousness. It is this Spirit that informs much of the feminist movement especially as it now matures beyond democratizing patriarchal values. In his work on Job Jung is prescient in his reference to "...the signs of the times which point to the equality of women." (Jung, 1954, p. 465)
The Spirit of the new myth was also operative at an unconscious level in restoring one side of the Goddess to her place at least in the Catholic pantheon through the declaration of the Assumption, for Jung, "...the most
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important religious event since the Reformation" (Jung, 1954, p. 464). But if Jung is read closely he is found to be saying that the son and virgin of Bethlehem are divine, and so "...not real human beings at all, but gods" (Jung, 1954, p. 399). As such they serve as a necessary but somewhat pallid prelude to a fuller incarnation of the divine in "...- an ordinary woman, not a goddess and not an eternal virgin immaculately conceived" (Jung, 1954, p. 439). Jung's full analysis of the meaning of the Catholic doctrine culminates in his claim that the conjunction of sun and moon in the woman and child of the Joannine Apocalypse already compensates the less or more than fully human Virgin and Son of the synoptic gospels (Jung, 1954, p. 439, 443, 448, 454). The former do not contain the totality of opposites that the sun woman and her child, who unite sun and moon, light and dark, do. What the author of the Book of Revelation took be a reprise of the first incarnation was actually its corrective. Already within the Christian canon a unity of opposites occurs which compensated the one sided and not fully human spirituality of a divine son born of an immaculate virgin. With this view Jung can then readily connect the full restoration of the feminine in the woman and child of the apocalypse with the divinization of matter and the body in a manner reminiscent of Blake's marriage of heaven and hell. This side of the Spirit of the quaternity is, no doubt, at work in the contemporary interest in the body, the healing arts, and in the resacralization of nature in environmental and ecological endeavours.
However, the symbol for the final inclusion of what the Spirit of the Trinity excludes from divinity and yet is so evident in humanity is much more elusive. Such a symbol would entail the Spirit worked synthesis of good and evil, lodging both good and evil in God and demanding that humanity work their resolution in history (Jung, 1948, p. 174, 175; 1954, p.
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434). On how this is to be done and what it might look like Jung remains vague. He will say that both good and evil are to be relativized in a perspective beyond good and evil but not at the cost of abandoning the traditional religious virtues which will be needed as this relativization takes place in empirical humanity (Jung, 1953b, p. 136). Jung would concede that at some point we all get stuck (Jung, 1953c, p. 297). It would appear he was stuck on providing greater detail on the emergence of a sense of the sacred in which good and evil, the light and dark sons of the same God, could embrace in history.
One might address this problem and go beyond Jung by identifying where the problem is most evident in the contemporary world. The problem of good and evil is blatantly evident in the mutual projection of evil onto each other by communities possessed by archetypally based suasion dignified by such noble names as "faith", or "patriotism", or "commitment". These euphemisms effectively disguise the loss of personal responsibility to archetypally induced collective unconsciousness. Going beyond good and evil in this context would mean the gracious moderation in individual and collectivity of claims to exhaustive possession of the absolute in any of its forms, religious or secular. The murderous grip of competing absolutes on their victims' minds can only be tempered through reflection on their common archetypal origin and on the narrowing influence they too often exert on the communities they bond. Humanizing by relativizing all claims to the unconditional possession of a saving truth would remain compatible with Jung's frank acknowledgement that the sense of the absolute, and so of religion, can never be fully removed from human consciousness (Jung, 1940, p. 6).
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Nevertheless, Jung's insight that the unconscious, as infinitely fecund, could never bring itself to exhaustive and so final expression in any finite form, religious or secular (Jung, 1954b, p. 258), would greatly undermine both individual and collective proclivities to project evil onto the other out of a sense of one's own identity with the absolute good or God. Spelling out the broader religious and political implications of Jung's thought in this manner is not to take them out of the analytic container or out of the specifics of a given analysis. Every analysis as it leads to greater conscious approximations of the self not only reveals the individual's myth but contributes to the sense of the individual's continuity with the totality and so breeds a universal sentiment hostile to premature and now dangerous communal or personal claims to an exhaustive possession of a saving truth. The experiential appropriation of one's individual myth corrodes the tyranny of mythologies claiming privileged access to a definitive salvation as all religious and many political mythologies do.
As this consciousness would spread, the claim of any ultimate, and especially a religious ultimate, to complete expression of the unconscious would be viewed as psychologically immature and socially unethical. Exclusive monotheisms, political or religious, would be deemed immoral. Humanity could finally come to see the connection between claims to the final revelation and the final solution. The dawning consciousness that all absolutes, and especially the religious, are products of a common generative ground would lead devotees of each to recognize the common ground of all. Archetypally bonded communities could then appreciate each other as variant expression of a shared human profundity. In short the need to convert or kill would be undermined in principle.
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Conclusion: Recovering Our Health From Our Heresy.
Jung's psychology honors the priority of the Goddess or Great Mother in deference to the maternal nature of the deepest unconscious (Jung, 1956). If his psychology were to be given creedal or theological formulation it might read like this. In the beginning the Goddess created consciousness to become self-conscious in her child. Though from the outset she already dwelt in her child, she had to recall her child to a moment of immersion in herself to become more fully incarnate in the child then reborn from her womb. For the child reborn was now aware of the turbulent, conflicted life of the Goddess and, so, painfully conscious that her self-contradictions could only be perceived and redeemed in suffering toward their resolution in the life of humanity (Jung, 1954, p. 459). This process is redemptive both of the Goddess and of humanity who have from the outset been parts of each other. The Spirit of the Goddess thus always works toward the fullest manifestation of her infinite but conflicted energies in a humanity enriched by their syntheses. The incarnation of the Goddess and her redemption in humanity is the base meaning of individual and collective life and suffering as well as the direction in which all of history moves (Jung, 1948, p. 179). As such it grounds a new eschatology based on the resolution of divine conflict in humanity, a divinely grounded mandate humanity can neither evade nor hope to complete in time. The mandate cannot be evaded because it is felt immediately in every individual's experience of the self. It can never be completed because the fullness of the unconscious will always outstrip its historical concretions. There will be no situation in history in which God will be all in all just as there can be no human life wholly divested of the drive toward such a consciousness.
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The question that arises from the religious formulation of Jung's psychology is this. Can it be accepted by the religious mind currently prevailing in the West or has that mind, in the process of its self-making, excluded as heresy each of the abovementioned foundational elements of Jung's myth? Western theological reflection and attendant spirituality has become what Jung calls "...a universal religious nightmare...", (Jung, 1954, p. 453) a one-sided truncation of the human spirit now in desperate need to recover its heresy if it is to heal its pathology. It remains to be seen whether the great religions, at least in the West, can affirm humanity's natural inhesion in a divinity that asks of humanity its cooperation in enabling the divine to become increasingly conscious through the manifestation of its fullness in the only theatre available for that purpose, human consciousness (Jung, 1954, p. 461).
Beyond the religious sphere Jung's myth would seem to be enacted wherever a more extensive embrace of the totally human and the human totality is endorsed in the extension of a full humanity to those members of the species whose full divinity had been denied or qualified by the still reigning religious and societal collectives. Within the religious sphere the mystical impulse would seem to be the most vital carrier of Jung's myth because of the mystics' unmediated experience of the divine and the mutual need of divine and human this immediacy implies. This is especially true of Jung's favourite mystics, the mystics of the apophatic tradition, who for a moment lost themselves in the maternal nothingness from which all form is born (Dourley, 2004). One of them, Marguerite Porete, was to write of her soul, "...without such nothingness she cannot be the all" (Marguerite Porete, 1993, p.193). A Jungian translation might read, "My embrace of the world will never be more inclusive than the depth of my entrance into the mother
of the all." In a period when a terrorized humanity looks for salvation from its saviours to avoid its extinction, Jung's myth points to a moment of dissolution in the mother of the all as the ultimate resource to the lethal squabbles between her children fatally possessed by mere fragments of her always surpassing and redeeming wisdom. This is the wisdom which seeks to become conscious in every analysis moving through the individual into society.
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