PSYCHE’S
YEARNING
Radical Perspectives on SelfTransformation
COVER IMAGE
GILLIAN ROSS
PSYCHE’S YEARNING
Other books by Gillian Ross:
The Search for the Pearl: A Personal Exploration of Science and
Mysticism.
Is There Life before Death: Reflections on our Spiritual Awakening.
CD Titles:
Relaxation 1
Relaxation 2
Relaxation for Children
Relaxation Made Easy
Relaxation for Healing
Relaxation for Sleep
Meditation
Third Eye Meditation
Armchair Yoga and Meditation
Be Calm, Be Still
The Art of Letting Go
Yoga for Pregnancy
DVD Titles:
Stretch Away Stress
PSYCHE’S YEARNING
Radical Perspectives on SelfTransformation
Gillian Ross Ph D
To Isabella
An extraordinary latent potential for unbridled
creative engagement and egoless compassion lies deep
within us, waiting to be released into this world. But
most of us don’t see this, or if we do, we don’t realize
that it is not going to happen by itself. At this juncture
in human history, the evolution of our species requires
one thing and one thing only-our conscious,
wholehearted participation. We bear a profound
responsibility to be evolutionary pioneers.
Andrew Cohen
A significant portion of the earth’s population will
soon recognize, if they haven’t already done so, that
humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or
die. A still relatively small but rapidly growing
percentage of humanity is already experiencing within
themselves the break up of the old egoic mind patterns
and the emergence of a new dimension of
consciousness.
Eckhart Tolle
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost my thanks must go to my meditation
teacher Samuel Sagan whose wisdom, love and teachings over the
last twenty years have been a constant source of inspiration. I
would also like to thank all those students of the Clairvision
School who helped Samuel create the brilliant Knowledge Track
CDs (KTs) They are such a rich source of spiritual transformation
practices and have enabled me to connect with the energy of the
school on a daily basis.
My thanks also to Michael Leunig for the use of his fabulous
cartoons and to my website manager and technological advisor
Paul Joseph.
Last but not least, my special thanks to my husband Peter and my
dear friends Fiona Luckhurst, Ditta Bartels and Jonathan Bowden
who so willingly and meticulously proof read the manuscript and
encouraged the enterprise from the beginning.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Emotions and Feelings Chart by Samuel Sagan, reproduced by
permission of Clairvision Press
Hafiz poems ( trans Ladinsky) reproduced by permission of?
Leunig cartoons, reproduced by permission of The Age
Cupids Kiss( cover image) shutterstock free download?
CONTENTS
Introduction
CONSCIOUSNESS VERSUS CATASTROPHE
The Spectrum of Consciousness
Embodying the Transcendent
The Beloved of the Soul
The Cosmic Dance
The Power of Story
Awakened Consciousness
Prologue
PSYCHE AND EROS: A Spiritual Parable
Psyche’s Betrayal
Psyche’s Tasks
Chapter One
MY STORY: The Loss of Lucy
Childhood
Adulthood
Motherhood
Tools of Transformation
Acknowledging the Divine Beloved
The Inner Quest
Flowing with the Tao
Chapter Two
PSYCHE’S DESPAIR: Yearning Becomes Addiction
Denial of the Inner Realms
The Underground River of Addiction
Instant Gratification
The Authentic Self
Alternative Approaches
The Return of the Goddess
Follow Your Bliss
Chapter Three
PSYCHE’S NEW BODY: Our Subtle Anatomy
Life Force
Subtle Bodies
The Chakras
Awakening the Third Eye
The Heart Centre and Third Eye
Psyche’s Tasks and the Chakras
Chapter Four
PSYCHE NURTURED: The Power of Purification
Junk Food
Junk Thoughts
Yogic Purifications
Samskaras (energy blockages)
Chapter Five
PSYCHE’S ILLUMINATION: The Touch 0f Grace
Stillness, Silence and Solitude
Meditation
Kundalini Awakening
Transformed Astral Body
Psychic Powers
Mystical Illumination or Madness?
Kriya Yoga
Connection
Chapter Six
PSYCHE REDEEMED: The Call to Service
Love
The Grail Myth
APPENDICES
Appendix I
Appendix II
Appendix III
yoga nidra or Psychic Sleep.
Scientific Explanations of Subtle Energy.
Practices for Awakening the Third Eye.
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GLOSSARY
WEBSITE RESOURCES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Introduction
CONSCIOUSNESS v CATASTROPHE
It has been said that at this time in human history,
consciousness finds itself in a race against catastrophe. In the
stirring words of the poet Christopher Fry:
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul men ever took.
Affairs are now soul sized.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake,
But will you wake for pity's sake.
A Sleep of Prisoners
Affairs indeed are now “soul sized”. They call for a giant
evolutionary step for humanity into a new way of seeing and
feeling and being. We are deluding ourselves if we believe that the
problems besetting us can be solved by the same worldview or
model of reality that created them. The enterprise demanded of us
is an inner exploration that will lead to a transformation of
consciousness for each one of us as individuals, and ultimately,
for humanity as a whole. We are being called “to change the world
from the inside out.” (Andrew Cohen)1 Western civilization has
over externalised us with the result that the unprecedented power
which we now wield over the world we inhabit is being exercised
with catastrophically inadequate levels of emotional and spiritual
maturity.
The good news is that the changes needed for our “longest
stride of soul” are trans-genetic. In other words they are on the
level of consciousness rather than biological evolution. We do not
need to modify our DNA. We simply need to realize more of our
existing potential. In this way we are different from other species.
It can be said that a dog is perfect in its dogness, a cat is perfect in
its catness but we are incomplete in our human beingness. We see
this in the discrepancy between our behaviour and our hopes.
One only has to look around at the abject human folly
manifesting in the world and contrast it with our aspirations for
love and peace.
Sleeping within us and waiting to be awakened on a massive
scale is a consciousness that transcends the fear driven agendas of
the ego; a consciousness that honours our intellectual and
scientific skills while at the same time experiencing other ways of
knowing that lie beyond the limitations of words and thoughts. It
is a consciousness that brings joy and peace. Above all it is a
consciousness that will move us to serve the earth community
with wisdom, compassion and humility. This awakened state of
being is no longer the prerogative of the saint and the shaman. It
is the birthright of every one of us and the time to claim it is now
“When wrong comes up to face us everywhere”. We are all
capable of awakening to experiences of energies that lie beyond
ordinary mental consciousness which bring a sense of connection
with some higher inspirational aspect of ourselves. Moreover they
need not be fleeting mystical moments but can take on a feeling
of permanent “connection” that feels like a homecoming.
For the awakening soul, this consciousness is like a breath of
fresh air in a stuffy room, but we have to be receptive to it. We
have to open the windows. We also have to clean the room and
discard some of the garbage that we have collected over the years.
For most of us, purification practices are an essential pre-requisite
for spiritual awakening. They have certainly been a necessary
process in my journey and I share my experiences of them in
chapter four.
THE SPECTRUM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Our humanity is the conscious meeting-place of the finite
and the Infinite and to grow more and more towards that
Infinite even in this physical birth is our privilege.
Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950)
In his early masterpiece Up From Eden the highly acclaimed
contemporary writer on consciousness Ken Wilber commented
that there are only two stations in life at which men and women
are perfectly content; one is slumbering in sub consciousness and
the other is awakened into superconsciousness. Everything in
between he describes as “various degrees of pandemonium”
In what has become a contemporary mapping of
consciousness, the pandemonium stage is known as “personal
consciousness”. The subconscious state is referred to as “prepersonal consciousness” and the superconscious state is known as
“transpersonal consciousness”.2
As a species we can call our pre-personal contentment, the
bliss of Eden. It was the time when human consciousness was not
aware of itself. We were still in the womb of the Earth Mother,
absorbed in Nature, living by our instincts much as animals do. As
individuals it is the dreamlike state of babyhood and early
childhood. Transpersonal consciousness is the state of being in
which consciousness is awake, aware and in tune with its Divine
Source. Human will and Divine will become one. In between
these two stations of bliss are the trials of personal consciousness-
a journey through “pandemonium” during which we birth the
ego, or sense of a self, separate from nature and from the Divine.
The awakening of transpersonal consciousness is the next
stage in the drama of human evolution. It is the
consciousness that we must embrace as a species if we are to
win the race against catastrophe. This book is all about the
challenges of our critical transition from personal to
transpersonal consciousness.
One of the great challenges in our journey of incarnation is the
separation anxiety that plagues the personal/pandemonium stage.
A sense of separation from our Divine Source is the primordial
wound. Evolution for both the individual and the species can be
described as an ascent into separateness- firstly an awareness of
the separateness of our bodies and then an awareness of the
separateness of our minds. Our evolutionary destiny is to
transcend that sense of separateness, and the neuroses arising
from it, by re-embracing our Divinity. In that experience of
reunion, the ego loses its destructive strategies of selfpreservation and places itself in the service of its Transcendent
Source.
In its current stage of evolution, humanity is in chronic
“pandemonium” territory where the ego reigns supreme. There is
no shortage of self-transformation programs these days but more
often than not they are stuck in the personal domain. They inflate
ego driven agendas of personal happiness and success. The
individualism that characterizes our post-industrial Western
consciousness, and which we quite rightly see as being the
hallmark of an enlightened civilization, has its shadow side. In
denial of any deep seated separation anxiety and severed from
transpersonal aspirations, personal consciousness can easily
degenerate into dysfunctional self-obsession. We return to what
has been called our current epidemic of narcissism in the context
of addiction in chapter two.
As a species we are poised between the pre-personal and the
transpersonal. We could fall backwards into oblivion or awaken to
less ego centred and more connected levels of consciousness. We
certainly cannot stay where we are much longer. The rung of the
evolutionary ladder on which we find ourselves can no longer
support our weight.
EMBODYING THE TRANSCENDENT
It is the individuation of your Unique Self that is the main task
of your life. You are the only perfect expression of what and
who you are. So you might as well be yourself. In any event,
everyone else is taken.
Marc Gafni
The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Sogyal Rinpoche has said that: “the
aim of life is to embody the Transcendent”. That is a profound
statement about human destiny. Embodying the Transcendent is
the essence of our longest stride of soul into transpersonal
consciousness.
I realize that for many, Rinpoche’s remark and my reflections
upon it, will beg the question ‘What do you mean by the
Transcendent?’ Given that Its essence is unknowability, this is a
very difficult question to answer. Asking for a description of the
Transcendent is like asking an ant to describe the solar system. It
is a word which denotes something well beyond the
comprehension of our intellect. The Transcendent is the “I AM”
consciousness of Exodus and St John’s Gospel. It is the Presence
Divine, the Light, the Absolute, the Tao, the Divine Ground of
Being. Throughout the book the word “God” is avoided. I feel
that “God” has become a very limiting concept for the mystery at
the heart of creation. My aim is to inspire and “God” is a term
which, for many, carries far too much fear laden patriarchal
baggage and is too externalized.
Contemporary mystic Brother Wayne Teasdale3 defined the
Divine or Transcendent as:
…the everlasting light of awareness that is in all,
behind all, beyond all, and intimate to all. As the
totality, it encompasses everything; nothing is
beyond it and all are within it. (1999:76)
Spiritual work is all about awakening the “everlasting light of
awareness” within us. When we allow it to shine through the
consciousness of our daily lives we begin to “embody the
Transcendent”. In deep meditation, a connection with that
everlasting light can be as tangible as switching on a light bulb. I
return to the theme of mystical connection in some depth in
chapter five.
Teasdale’s “everlasting light of awareness” echo’s popular
spiritual guru Eckhart Tolle’s experience of “Presence”:
Awareness is the power that is concealed within the
present moment. That is why we may call it
Presence. The ultimate purpose of human existence,
which is to say your purpose, is to bring that power
into this world. (2005: 78) 4
When that power is brought into this world we are manifesting
a personalized aspect of the Transcendent and become in each
moment a unique expression of the Divine- a Unique Self. We
embody the Transcendent.
The profundity of Sogyal Rinpoche’s injunction has been
captured with scholarly elegance and heartfelt passion by best
selling author, Hebrew scholar and cutting edge evolutionary Dr
Marc Gafni. He speaks of the Unique Self as “the fullest flowering
of your humanity and the blooming of your divinity….. ….It is
also your gift to the world”. He sees teachings on the Unique Self
as an “ evolutionary emergent” in our time meaning that they are
being called forth at this particular moment in history and, what is
more, are profoundly needed at this time in history. The idea of a
Unique Self has been foreshadowed in spiritual traditions of the
past but never before fully articulated or revealed.
In his forthcoming book entitled Your Unique Self: The
Future of Enlightenment he addresses the deepseated
contradiction at the heart of contemporary spirituality between
traditional Eastern perceptions of enlightenment as a state of
impersonal no-self and our Western intuitive understanding of the
preciousness of our hard earned individuality. Reconciliation is to
be found in our realization of a “Unique Self”. Pointing out that
“the greatest mistake in the evolution of human spirituality was
the failure to properly distinguish between separateness and
uniqueness” Gafni writes:
For the West, the Unique Self is the source of
human dignity, love, obligation and destiny. At
the deepest level, you know that your Unique
Self is not your separate self. It is not your ego.
Your separate self is an illusion, though you
remain a unique strand in the seamless coat of
the universe. Spiritual practice moves you to
realize your essential enmeshment with the
larger reality, even as you retain the dignity of
your distinction. Uniquness is the source of this
dignity; as well as your sense of joy and
responsibility.
For the East, the realization of Unique Self is
equally critical. It is precisely the recognition of
the Unique Self, that allows for the
transcendence of the illusion of separate self
without the wholesale rejection of individual
specialness and uniqueness. You are able to fully
embrace the call to evolve beyond separate self
and ego, even as you affirm and embrace your
Unique Self that emerges from your Buddha
nature
.(Your Unique Self: The Future of
Enlightenment: 37)
I return to the Unique Self in the context of addiction and the
Jungian process of individuation in chapter two.
From the evolutionary perspective of spirituality, so essential
to our new story, our unique embodiment of the Transcendent is
evolving along with the universe in which it is embedded.
Embodying the Transcendent is, in other words, a gradual
process, an emerging phenomenon.5 It does not descend upon us
as an act of Grace overnight.
The personal dimension of Divinity that we are learning to
embody has been given different names in different traditions. It
is the Christ Consciousness within; it is our Buddha nature, our
Higher Self (New Age). In the Western esoteric tradition of
Rudolph Steiner it is referred to as our Ego (ego with a capital
“E”). Carl Jung spoke of it as a Numinous intelligence in the heart
of the psyche and called it the Self archetype. In the mystical
tradition of Islam (Sufism) they call it, very delightfully, the Friend
or the Beloved of the soul.
.
THE BELOVED OF THE SOUL
Consider the divine spirit in the human soul.
This spirit is not easily satisfied.
It storms the firmament
And scales the heavens
Trying to reach the Spirit that drives the heavens.
Because of this energy
Everything in the world grows green,
Flourishes
And bursts into leaf.
Meister Eckhart (Led
to the Desert)
It is of some comfort in our race against catastrophe to
understand that spiritual awakening seems to be coded in our
being. We carry within us a sense of incompleteness and at a deep
level yearns for union with an intuitively felt transcendent aspect
of ourselves. In mystical language this is the soul’s yearning for
the Divine Beloved. It is a fundamental attribute of human nature,
as powerful as any of the basic drives of thirst and hunger and
sex.
On a grander scale the yearning is nothing less than the driving
force of evolution-“the lure of human becoming” (Jean Houston),
“the love that moves the sun and other stars” (Dante), “the force
that through the green fuse drives the flower, drives my
blood”(Dylan Thomas), “the gravitational impulse of creation”
(Teilhard de Chardin), “the drive that takes you beyond yourself”
(Ken Wilber).
The Beloved of the soul does not have to be imaged or
visualized in any particular form. It can be experienced in many
ways, but being touched by the transcendent Beloved always
evokes a sense of the sacred and a promise of completeness.
I regularly walk my dog at that special time between day and
night when a certain stillness and softness descends on the valley
where I live. Relaxing into the beauty all around me, feeling totally
at home and deeply nourished by the energies of the land, I am
often moved by a fullness of heart to exclaim “I love you”. I’m
not actually sure at the time to whom I am saying that. It doesn’t
seem to matter. It certainly isn’t to any omnipotent entity in the
sky. The Beloved of the soul becomes in that moment the essence
of all that is. I am in love with the mystery that is the heart of the
cosmos. The feeling is one of belonging and being deeply loved-a
coming home. I share more of my personal experience of the
Divine Beloved when I tell my story in chapter one.
Literature and music and poetry are replete with expressions of
our innate yearning for the Beloved of the soul. The myth of
Psyche and Eros, the legend of Tristan and Isolde, Shakespeare’s Romeo
and Juliet and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights are all classic
examples of the timeless appeal of stories of lovers separated for
one reason or another and their passionate, compulsive longing
for reunion. In the spiritual desert of Western culture, that longing
is manifesting ever more pervasively in the romantic escapism of
popular culture. Hollywood movies, TV soapies and pop songs all
ooze sentimental substitutes for the soul’s Divine Beloved.
Our innate yearning for wholeness is particularly lively during
adolescence. Is it any wonder that increasing numbers of young
people are depressed and resort to drugs and suicide? They have
so few skills for honouring that yearning. In my view their
problems relate to fundamental distortions in our perception of
reality. More often than not they are manifesting the neuroses of
thwarted spirituality. Jungian analyst and author Robert Johnson
has gone so far as to describe all neuroses as “low grade religious
experiences”. By this he means that they are a dysfunctional
expression of a consciousness which is yearning for the Beloved
of the soul.6 I return to this avenue of thought when we look at
problems of addiction in chapter two.
A yearning for something does not necessarily mean of course
that it exists. An evolutionary biologist would simply assert that
spiritual yearning must somehow have favoured our survival. It
can all be explained in terms of natural selection. Scientists are
equally dismissive of mystical experiences. Indeed, there is now a
science known as neurotheology which explains them in terms of
the electro-magnetic stimulation of the temporal lobes of the
brain. Such findings, far from undermining religious experiences,
surely suggest that we are programmed to embody the
Transcendent. Our brains are wired for Its reception.
We live in a culture which denies the existence of the
“everlasting light”. This state of affairs is not one that is
conducive to the much needed wide scale graduation to a
transpersonal perspective on life. And the amazing thing is just
how successful this unprecedented impoverishment of the world
has been. Materialism- the belief that matter is all there is–is so
much at odds with our experience. The ‘matter myth’, as it has
been called, is I believe the most absurd hypothesis ever to be
taken seriously by humanity. I well remember trying to explain the
philosophy of materialism to my son Dominic when he expressed
interest in such things at around the age of eleven. He just could
not get a handle on the notion that people actually think that
matter is the only reality. It brought home to me rather
delightfully that many young children find it difficult NOT to
believe in angels and fairies and auras and things that go bump in
the night. In many instances I do not doubt that they actually see
non-physical energies. I know Dominic did. Sadly and predictably
his high school education and a heavy dose of teenage hedonism
closed down all of that and his mother’s ideas remain in the weird
basket.
Equally of course it must be said that it is extremely difficult to
embody the Transcendent, if we have been indoctrinated with the
conventional Christian understanding of matter as being
irrevocably tainted and unworthy as a receptacle of the Divine.
These extremes-matter without Spirit and Spirit without
matter-plague our perception of reality and are calling forth the
new story of our embeddedness in the living evolving mystery that
is the cosmos.
THE COSMIC DANCE
What we find within ourselves moulds the universe. We birth the
universe and the universe births us. Outside and inside engage in a
dance of mutual awakening. This is not New Age nonsense. It is
one of the discoveries of quantum physics. And I believe that
Christ was alluding to it in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas:
When you make two into one
And what is within like what is without,
And what is without like what is within
Then you shall enter the Kingdom. (Iyer trans. 1983)
The prevailing scientific worldview tells us that we are isolated
specks of accidental consciousness that have evolved out of an
inanimate purposeless universe of matter. It is a story that
tragically diminishes both ourselves and the cosmic mystery in
which we live and move and have our being. Could we not
equally, in the light of current scientific knowledge, honor the
infinite creativity and essential unknowability of the universe and
understand that each one of us is a unique expression of its
sublime intelligence? Indeed through the evolution of
consciousness it may well be that our human mind is destined to
become a universal cosmic mind.
And the wondrous thing is that we do indeed embody all the
powers of this living, evolving universe. 7 The energies that
brought forth the stars and galaxies and the exquisite beauty and
wondrous creatures of our planet-ants and elephants, whales and
butterflies-are present in us and can be consciously activated in us.
When this new story is truly felt, it is an awesome insight but not
a frightening one. On the contrary, it brings a lightness of heart
because it awakens a sense of belonging. The pain of separation is
transcended, not in a fleeting mystical moment but permanently.
Meantime however, we find ourselves in a culture where
“interiors are out and exteriors are in”. (Wilber 2001:286) The
West has very few steps to offer in the cosmic dance. We lack the
skills needed to explore consciousness having applied ourselves to
external rather than internal technologies. Western religion has
discouraged direct encounters with the Infinite. We have no yoga,
no tradition of meditation, no maps of the inner realm. The
spiritual energy housed there is closely allied to sexual energy and
is immensely powerful. Our race against catastrophe requires
those energies to be awakened and harnessed wisely. This is why it
is so important to have enlightened guidance on our inner journey
and why our current crisis of meaning calls for a science of
spirituality 8. Without some sort of road map for our inner quest,
we are in danger of ending up psychotic rather than spiritually
awakened. It is with good reason that so many spiritual seekers,
myself included, have turned to the East for guidance.
For over 2500 years, Eastern yogis, masters of mind and body,
have mapped the non-physical realms of the inner landscape and
offered practices for exploring them. The Dalai Lama says: “Tibet
has no petrol for engines but it does have petrol for the mind,
which should justify other countries coming to its rescue”.
Included in this petrol for the mind are various well-established
structures of consciousness that are like a map for the inner
journey. I call these structures our “subtle anatomy” and explore
them in some detail in chapter three.
I will be arguing that if we are to move beyond the current
insanity of the human condition, an essential ingredient of our
new story has to be the recognition of ourselves as conduits of
subtle energy. We have to begin to experience ourselves viscerally
as being a great deal more than mere flesh and blood and bone. In
other words we have to awaken our subtle anatomy. Subtle energy
experiences are the gateway to transformed consciousness.
What we are beginning to see in this 21st century is the
emergence of a global spirituality. It is our new story and I
passionately believe that it is the story that humanity must
embrace if we are to win the race against catastrophe. It integrates
the spiritual wisdom of ancient traditions with the
psychotherapeutic skills of the West and, most importantly, gives
them contemporary meaning against the backdrop of quantum
physics and our newfound understanding of consciousness in an
evolving universe. This integral spirituality and the interplay
between psyche and cosmos underpin the efficacy of all the
practices and ideas around self-transformation that I am exploring
in this book.
I make no apologies for lacing the book with quotations.
There is so much inspirational writing on the new global
spirituality and my aim is to help in any way I can to raise
awareness of our new story. Many readers not familiar with the
authors quoted may feel moved to look more deeply into their
work.
THE POWER OF STORY
The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that
are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in.
Harold
Goddard
Over the last twenty years or so our new story has been gaining
momentum with a revival of what is known as sacred psychology
and the birth of transpersonal psychology. Sacred psychology
acknowledges the existence of a spiritual dimension to our inner
world of experience and understands that dreams, myths, rituals
and sacred symbols, all help us to connect with that dimension in
a way that defies rational explanation. It owes much to the
insights of Carl Jung. Sacred psychology teaches us to
“mythologise rather than pathologies our unconscious processes”
(Jean Houston). 9
The transforming power of this way of thinking was brought
home to me through mythologist and storyteller Joseph Campbell.
I first became enamoured of him when I watched his popular
television series The Power of Myth, recorded shortly before he died
in 1987. Campbell describes myth as “the secret opening through
which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human
cultural manifestation”. That’s a pretty good reference for them as
a valuable source of assistance in the challenges that beset our
longest stride of soul. The universe is not a place. It is a story.
Ancient myths are empowering because they have a special
resonance with that story.
In the early nineties I wrote a book called The Search for the
Pearl. The title was inspired by an ancient poem called The Song of
the Pearl. It tells a classic story of a hero’s journey. Its symbolism
fitted so beautifully with my theme that I was able to weave its
timeless imagery into my text. This time I am drawing on the
power of story with a heroine’s journey-the ancient Greek myth
of Psyche and Eros. It is much more than a love story. Psyche is the
archetype of the soul and her journey of transformation is the
journey of consciousness out of pre-personal oblivion into the
trials and tribulations of personal/egoic awareness. The four tasks
that Aphrodite gives Psyche symbolize the soul’s growth process
in our “pandemonium” stage of evolution culminating in a reawakening of her divinity. Psyche’s yearning for re-union with
Eros is the driving force behind her success with these
outrageously challenging tasks. It can be seen as the yearning of
the human condition for perfection in the embrace of the Divine
Beloved. More profoundly, it is the yearning of matter for spirit in
the drama that is cosmic evolution.
The Greek god Eros is popularly portrayed as a young winged
archer whose golden arrows awaken sexual passion, but at a
deeper mystical level that sexual energy is nothing less than the
primordial power of creation-the evolutionary impulse. For Plato,
for example, Eros was:
… a complex and multidimensional archetype which
at the physical level expresses itself in the sexual
instinct, but at the higher levels impels the
philosopher’s passion for intellectual beauty and
wisdom and culminates in the mystical vision of the
eternal, the ultimate source of all beauty. (Tarnas
quoted in EnlightenNext magazine 2009, Issue 45).
Psyche’s story is told in the prologue. Its rich imagery serves as
a meaningful sub text. The chapter titles keep the story alive and I
draw on its symbolic wisdom throughout the book.
In the first chapter I tell my own story because I believe that,
in outline anyway, it blueprints the story of many 20th century
Westerners. It is a story about a journey out of the pre-personal
mysticism of childhood into the pandemonium of a spiritually
alienated adulthood. It speaks of the pain of separation and the
joys of transpersonal reunion with the Divine.
AWAKENED CONSCIOUSNESS
What is this precious love and laughter
Budding in our hearts?
It is the glorious sound
Of a soul waking up!
Hafiz (1315-1390)
Contrary to much New Age thinking, there are no quick fixes in
spiritual transformation. Our longest stride in soul is not going to
be easy. It requires us to participate passionately in a process of
awakening. Sagely wisdom down the ages tells us however that the
rewards far outweigh the perils of the journey. Before we begin to
explore the challenges, I would like to lighten the burden by
touching upon possible rewards with the help of the visionary
insights of cosmologist and mathematician Brian Swimme. 10 I
regard him as being among the most profound thinkers of our
time. He has the ability to move into the heart of the cosmos and
read our destiny there. His eloquent reflections on the awakened
sensitivities that will blossom in the human, once we transcend
the limitations of personal consciousness and embrace our kinship
with a sublime, living universe, are in themselves transformative.
The Perception of Beauty
Swimme has said that he sees “the development of a capacity to
be stunned by beauty as the central move into the wisdom phase
of our evolution”. What a delightful impracticality in our world of
compulsive doing. Perhaps we can use it as a measure of our
spiritual awakening or certainly of our capacity to be a human
being. The transforming power of beauty is one of brother Wayne
Teasdale’s themes. He writes:
Everyone of us is irresistibly drawn to the beautiful.
We thrive on our encounters with beauty, and these
times of encounter are precious beyond all
calculation…. Beauty inspires us, lifting us out of
our inertia and calls us in numerous ways. (1999:
242)
The Navaho Indians have an image of pollen as the Source of
life and talk of the spiritual path as the pollen path. Beauty is its
signature. “Oh, beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty
above me, beauty below me. I’m on the pollen path.” (Campbell
1988: 230).
An appreciation of beauty is so much more than a mere
sensory enjoyment of form. In his best selling book on selftransformation, The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle writes:
Beyond the beauty of external forms there is more
here: something that cannot be named, something
ineffable, some deep, inner, holy essence. Whenever
and wherever there is beauty, this inner essence
shines through somehow. (2004:97)
To be moved by beauty, is to be touched by the Presence
Divine. It is a connecting experience, a balm for the primordial
wound of separation. I realized this very powerfully years ago
while on spiritual retreat in the bush. In my diary at the time I
wrote:
“I am sitting by my camp fire beside a fast flowing
river flanked on either side by magnificent
eucalyptus. The setting sun is moving behind a hill
beyond the river. Two stars shine out in the clear
pale blue sky above the glow left behind by the sun
and I marvel at the rightness and beauty of it all.
And then it occurs to me that the beauty which I
perceive is not inherent in the scene but arises out
of my connection with it. I find it pleasing because
what is its essence is also my essence. Beauty is not
just in the eye of the beholder; it is in the eye of the
beholder identifying in some profound way with the
beheld. Perhaps this is what Keats meant when he
wrote:
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty
That is all ye know in life
And all ye need to know.’
Was he making a statement about the importance of
feeling our connectedness with everything as an
expression of the Divine? Since first reading ‘Ode
on a Grecian Urn’ as a child Keats’s words sent a
tingle up my spine but I have never understood
them until now. And when I close my eyes in
meditation by my fire, I hear the flow of the river
and I feel it in my veins.”
Creativity
Swimme also talks about ‘creativity as a spiritual discipline’ as
being a critical aspect of our awakening. The very essence of the
living universe is creativity. This is a new understanding. The
word creativity was not used in the context of the universe until
the 1920s. As we begin to connect inside and outside in the dance
of consciousness, we will begin to experience ourselves as a mode
of this endlessly inventive universe. We will find ourselves
becoming an expression of its pulse of creativity in ways currently
unimaginable.
This will not be so very difficult for us. It is often said that the
hallmark of our humanity rests on our ability to reason but no less
important is our power to imagine. The human species has
imagination built into its DNA. The word “imagination” is not
being used here in any pejorative sense as a mode of thinking that
is delusional. On the contrary, it is being seen as an expression of
our deeply felt allurements. It choreographs the steps of our
cosmic dance.
Comprehensive Compassion
In our deepening of soul there will be an awakening of what
Swimme refers to as ‘comprehensive compassion.’ I believe this
to be the most critically needed ingredient of transformation, the
essence of our spiritual awakening. Our journey out of personal
pandemonium into transpersonal sanity can never be near
completion without the call to service that I elaborate upon in the
final chapter of the book.
As we learn to transcend the limitations of ego bound
consciousness, we will begin to experience empathy for all life
forms and really care for what might happen to them in the
future. The awakening of comprehensive compassion will shift us
from a fixation on the human project to a fascination with the
Earth project. We will begin to take delight in seeing the Earth
community flourish. This will involve putting into place
synergistic strategies: strategies that are mutually enhancing. We
already have the skills to be able to draw energy from the Earth
but at the same time leave it richer-permaculture, ecological
farming and so on. It is just a question of finding the will to
implement them on a planetary scale.
Swimme surmises that compassion could become the
evolutionary force which shapes life. This is awesome in its
implications-one giant step for mankind. And so far removed
from the economic imperatives and power struggles which
dominate our life strategies at the moment. Again however, he
points out that it is not unrealistic. Compassion has been at work
in evolution all along. It is merely a question of activating it as the
basic organizing principle of life on the planet. In his book The
Sacred Balance David Suzuki devotes a whole chapter to the Law of
Love.
The Law of love is as fundamental, and as universal,
as any other physical law. It is written everywhere
we look, and it maps our intimate connection with
the rest of the living world. (1997:1760)
Psychic Energy
There are beautiful wild forces within us.
Let them turn the mills inside
And fill,
Sacks that feed even heaven
St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226)
Another key element in our transformation is what Swimme refers
to as an awakening of our capacity to tap into a great ocean of
psychic energy or “psychic bliss”. With infectious enthusiasm he
conveys the message that this trans-material or non-physical
energy is limitless and what is more, once you begin to taste its
delights the less interested you become in the acquisition of
material commodities and the pursuit of pseudo mysticism.
I believe that if our medical profession were blessed with some
inkling of the healing possibilities of this untapped reservoir of
subtle energy, it would revolutionize our approach to our current
epidemic of mental illness, especially depression. Drug therapy
th
would begin to look like a 20 century anachronism.
Swimme avoids theological language but acknowledges that
ancient wisdom has always known of these latent energies within
us. It is just that our new story puts them into an evolutionary
perspective.
The psychic energy that Swimme speaks of is reminiscent of
the kundalini or shakti energy of the yogic tradition. When
awakened in the human body it flows through subtle channels and
energy centres (chakras) and lights up the brain. In the Christian
tradition I would link it with the power of the Holy Spirit. We
return to our understanding of this spiritually empowering well of
energy in chapter five.
These awakening sensitivities will, over the course of many
generations, transform what it means to be human in ways that
are currently unimaginable. In its infinite creativity the universe is
full of surprises:
It is impossible for us to conceive of what we might
become once we truly realize ourselves as a mode of
the whole universe and draw freely from the ocean
of energy which is its sublime consciousness.
(Canticles to the Cosmos: 1990)
At the moment the world is so beset with life or death
challenges that we can be forgiven for feeling that this vision of
transformed consciousness is nothing more than wishful thinking
and that in any event, as individuals, we can do very little that will
impinge on the bigger picture. Nothing could be further from the
truth. Quantum physics has highlighted for us the profound
nature of our interdependence. Always, in every moment, our
actions have a ripple effect on the world. In so far as our
thoughts affect our actions, they too are critical. This is an
awesome insight. Moreover, physicists are also telling us that
when a system teeters on the brink of chaos the ripple is
magnified. It is what has become known in chaos theory as the
“butterfly effect” .11 Australian biologist and poet Darryl Reanney
articulated the implications of this for each and everyone of us:
It means that what we do as individuals matters.
Really matters. Balanced as we are on an
evolutionary knife-edge, the actions of each one of
us can have repercussions beyond our capacity to
imagine. So each time we make a choice that puts
self ahead of others, each time we withhold a
compassionate word from a troubled friend we shift
the balance albeit perhaps slightly towards our
collective extinction. By contrast, each time we smile
at someone in the street, each time we extend a
caring hand to a fellow creature in distress we move,
all of us towards the light that illumines the near
death experience with love. (1994: 171)
Human consciousness is a blossoming, a flowering of the
living universe. Science now tells us that the growth of the
universe from its origins in the primordial fireball was, from the
start, just right for the emergence of that exotic bloom. At this
stage in our evolution, consciousness is like a bud poised to either
burst into flower or wither on the vine. If we nurture it with our
inner work, our children may yet be able to say that:
Our splendid 20th century was still at the Stone Age
of psychology, and that with all our sciences we had
not yet entered into the true science of living or of
the mastery of the world and ourselves and that
before us are opening horizons of perfection and
beauty and harmony beside which our superb
inventions are like the rough sketches of a novice.
(Satprem 1970: Preface) 12
PROLOGUE
PSYCHE AND EROS: A Spiritual Parable
The images of myth are the reflections of the spiritual
potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating these
images we evoke their power in our lives.
Joseph Campbell (1973:3)
The ancient Greek myth of Psyche and Eros is much more than a
love story. Like all enduring myths it is rich in symbolism and has
many layers of meaning. In essence it is about the mystery of
incarnation. It tells the story of the journey of consciousness out
of its Divine Ground of Being into expression in human form.
The soul (psyche) falls into duality, into separateness and forgets
its Divine origins. A deep sense of loss and a yearning for
wholeness takes the soul into its long dark night of
transformation. The matter/spirit, human/Divine hybrid emerges
into full consciousness of its own beauty and blossoms as joy.
Psyche was once an exceptionally beautiful Goddess living on
Mt Olympus. Her vanity however led to her being banished to
earth to live as a mortal and to forget her Divine origins. As a
mortal she was said “to have been born of heaven’s dew”-a gift
from the gods- falling form the sky like a divine dewdrop. Her
exquisite beauty and purity enchants everyone. Citizens of Greece
come from afar to gaze upon her. This adulation brings her little
joy however. She is too good to be true, too awesome in her
perfection. Ordinary mortals shy away from any friendship with
her and no one wanted to marry her. She comes “to hate the
loveliness that charmed so many nations”.1 Furthermore, the
attention she is receiving arouses the jealousy of Aphrodite,
goddess of beauty and love. Aphrodite orders her beloved son
Eros to shoot Psyche with one of his arrows so that she will be
“consumed with passion for the vilest of men’”. Meantime, back
on earth, Psyche’s parents, the king and queen, asked the oracle of
Apollo to find a husband for her. Apollo decrees that she must
be the bride of Death. Appalled and grief stricken her family
prepare her for her fate, dressing her in funeral robes and
abandoning her on a mountaintop. Eros however, having pricked
himself with one of his arrows and fallen madly in love with her,
rescues her from her marriage with Death. He sends the West
wind to waft her down to an idyllic valley. She finds her way to a
magical palace with invisible servants and every delight she could
imagine, including a nightly visitation from Eros. She becomes
not the bride of Death but the bride of Love. The downside of all
of this unexpected pleasure is that her lover tells her that their
love must forever be in darkness. She must never look upon him
or she will undoubtedly lose him. Psyche of course agrees. But it
is a big ask. Temptation comes in the form of her two jealous
older sisters.
PSYCHE’S BETRAYAL
Her sisters hear of her remarkable good fortune and are
determined to claim their slice of it. They seek her out, and
Psyche, in her naive innocence, welcomes them to her palace.
Eros had at first warned Psyche against entertaining her sisters but
she had pleaded with him and in the end he relented, on the
understanding that she must not speak with them about him.
They persist in their questioning however and eventually succeed
in drawing out of Psyche the truth of her situation. She confesses
that she has a husband but he only came to her at night because
she is not to look upon him. Determined to make mischief, the
wicked sisters remind her of the predictions of the oracle and
proceed to sow serious seeds of doubt in Psyche as to the true
nature of her mysterious lover whose child she now carries. The
sisters tell her that he must be a hideous monster to conceal
himself in that way and that in all probability he is planning to kill
and eat both Psyche and her baby. They urge her to light a lamp
and slay him with a knife while he is sleeping. The childlike
Psyche, used to obeying her big sisters, takes a knife and holds an
oil lamp over Eros while he sleeps. To her amazement she sees,
not a monster but a beautiful young man. In her shocked delight
she accidentally pricks her finger on one of her lover’s arrows and
falls deeply in love with him. On moving closer in admiration,
some of the oil falls on his shoulder and he awakens. The sacred
taboo is transgressed. Betrayed by his beloved, Eros has no choice
but to return to Olympus. Psyche attempts to cling to him but
falls back to earth. The spell is broken; the magical palace of
delights disappears.
In this first part of our story we see consciousness in its dream
state. It is not yet aware of itself. Psyche is enjoying the bliss of
Eden. Indeed the theme is reminiscent of Genesis in this regard.
The jealous sisters play the serpent role. In holding the oil lamp
over Eros, Psyche, like Eve is disobeying Divine decree and the
consequences are very similar-the loss of paradise. Their
transgression signifies the birth of self-reflective awareness and
ego. In terms of the spectrum of consciousness discussed in the
introduction, Psyche is leaving her pre-personal paradise and
entering the personal realm–pandemonium territory. Interestingly,
one of the first beings that she encounters after the disappearance
of her palace of dreams is the god Pan from whom the word
pandemonium is derived.
Contrary to the conventional Christian interpretation, we can
see this ‘fall’ from paradise as a positive event. In Psyche’s case
the imagery is one of bringing light into darkness, of making the
unconscious conscious. We are not left forever tainted with
‘original sin’ 2 but rather fulfilling our destiny in bringing
consciousness into its next phase of evolution. Psyche’s sisters,
like Eve in the Garden of Eden were blessings in disguise. They
lured Psyche into the journey of self-aware consciousness. Painful
though it is, our journey into separateness is necessary if the soul
is to grow and express its unique Divinity in human form. That
process of growth is the theme of the second half of the story.
PSYCHE’S TASKS
Sorting the seeds
Pregnant, abandoned and desolate, Psyche tries to drown herself
in a river but the gods will not let her die. The river brings her to
rest on its opposite shore. There she meets the engaging god Pan.
Pan advises Psyche to have faith in her adoration of Eros and not
abandon all hope of ever finding him. Psyche searches for her
beloved everywhere but to no avail. In deference to Aphrodite the
gods at this stage refuse to help her.
In desperation, Psyche summons up the courage to appeal
directly to Aphrodite. She pleads for mercy and forgiveness and
begs her to use her power as goddess and mother to reunite her
with her husband. Infuriated by her audacity and still madly
jealous of her, Aphrodite challenges her to prove herself worthy
of a relationship with a god. On pain of death, she sets her the
seemingly impossible task of sorting a huge pile of seeds before
sundown. Psyche is totally overwhelmed by the enormity of the
task. She is, at the best of times, the least practical of beings. As
she stares helplessly at the pile of seeds, an army of ants comes to
her rescue and the task is accomplished within the allotted time.
Collecting the golden fleece
Aphrodite is not too pleased with this unexpected success and
sets before Psyche a second “labor”. Desirous of a splendid new
shawl she orders Psyche to gather some of the golden fleece from
“the rams of the sun” who graze by the river. The rams are
particularly vicious-a symbol of the most aggressive of masculine
power. Again, our gentle Psyche sees the task as hopeless. She is
on the point of throwing herself off the cliff that overhangs the
river when she hears the sweet voice of a river reed. It whispers to
her to take heart. The rams derive their strength from the sun. If
she waits patiently until the sun sets the animals will be subdued
and she will be able to creep in and collect their fleece from the
bushes they have rubbed against.
Collecting the Water of Life
Psyche delivers the golden wool to the enraged Aphrodite who
nevertheless begins to see that there may be more to this beautiful
mortal than she had realized. Accusing her of having cheated in
her task, she sets her an even more dangerous one. She orders
Psyche to collect a crystal goblet full of “the Water of Life” from
the underworld river Styx where it cascades into a gorge high up a
mountainside. The mountain is steep and slippery and virtually
impossible to climb and fearful dragons guard the river’s entrance.
Psyche stands before it frozen with fear and again suicidal:
“though she was present in the body, her senses had flown away
from her. And quite overwhelmed by such a vast inevitable peril,
she lacked even the last solace of tear”. Understandably, Psyche is
at this stage attracting a great deal of attention on Olympus. After
all she is carrying Eros’s child. This time her ally is no less than
Zeus, the king of the gods. He sends his majestic eagle to assist
her. The powerful bird swoops down and takes the goblet from
Psyche’s hands. He then soars up the mountainside dodging the
dragons and with great precision, finds just the right place to fill
the cup.
Journeying to the underworld
Psyche is now ready for the ultimate challenge of her fourth and
final task. Aphrodite tells her that she must journey to the
Underworld to meet with Persephone, the queen of the
Underworld. She is to obtain for Aphrodite a jar of Persephone’s
beauty ointment. Psyche’s task again seems an impossible one.
The notorious Cerberus, a three-headed canine monster, guards
the Underworld. A descent into the Underworld is a descent into
certain death. Psyche saw the oracle’s prediction coming true at
last. Instead of taking the perilous downward journey, she climbs
to the top of a tower with the intention of throwing herself off.
This time the tower becomes her ally. It gives her a series of very
precise instructions to follow in order for her to successfully
complete her final mission. She must take two pieces of barley
bread to placate Cerebus on the way in and on the way out. (She
can sneak past him while the three heads fight over the morsel of
bread.) She must take two coins for Charon the ferryman on the
river Styx. She must not be distracted in her task by the wretched
creatures who will plead for her help on her journey. She must not
be wined and dined by Persephone, and above all she must not on
any account open the jar of ointment. With great presence of
mind, Psyche successfully navigates the journey and receives from
the Queen of the Underworld the precious ointment of eternal
beauty. On the way home however, Psyche is overcome with a
desire to try out the ointment. After all she wants so much to look
her best again for her beloved Eros. On opening the jar she falls
into a deep sleep.
Failure at the last minute is a common mythic theme .It is
rather like landing on the ninth square in the game of snakes and
ladders- that long snake that sends you back to the beginning. In
Psyche’s case however, all is not lost. Her story ends “happily ever
after”. Honoring Psyche’s unfailing devotion to Eros, and
recognizing the deepening of soul that Psyche has undergone, the
gods, including Aphrodite, deem her to be a worthy relative. Eros,
who himself has grown in strength and wisdom through his love
of Psyche, is permitted to lift the pre-conscious sleep from her
eyes and embrace her again as his bride. Their child is named
Voluptia meaning “plunging into life”, sometimes interpreted
simply as “joy”.
In her four tasks, Psyche is learning to navigate the
pandemonium of personal consciousness. In her first task she
engages her instincts (the ants), in her second task, she listens to
her intuitive wisdom (the reed) and learns to integrate her
masculine and feminine energies. In her third task she is learning
discernment. These skills prepare her for her journey of initiation
into the depths of the transpersonal realm.
With the help of many non-physical allies, and sustained by her
unerring love for Eros, Psyche is developing the skills to safely
and wisely embody all her spiritual qualities of sweetness, beauty
and purity. She is integrating the below and the above, the human
and the Divine, matter and Spirit .She is learning to embody the
Transcendent. The central message of the story is that the
evolution of the human is an ever-deepening incarnation of soul.
At this stage I leave the reader to reflect upon the details of the
richly symbolic meaning of the four tasks.