The Titan and the Egg: Entering the Aquarian Constellation

Intro.: Work in Progress

2008-02-05T08:17:00.000-08:00

-for my wife

With love and enduring affection to our blithe spirit friend, a Magical Animal with one blue eye and one brown eye, who danced with us for a year and brought exquisite joy to the simple everyday pleasures of life during a difficult passage. Then, just as land was in sight, she disappeared into the night.

Author's Intro Personally, it is a simply a matter of knowledge & experience, sensing the world unfolding at the turn of the millennium, personally unfolding to physical aging as well, and finding the monk walking the same bank of the river as the physicist. Einstein first put it that both were cosmic explorations of similar dimension and that the religion of the future would be based on personal experience. We have nothing else, and as we age and pass through our lives, the world changes as our perception of the world changes. Like Schrödinger’s Cat, ("charming and bothersome," physicist Hisashi Nando, calls her) quiet and alone in her box, we are never sure if it will still be the same Cat when we visit it. And possibly it is with the Universe as it was with Nietzsche looking into the abyss: When we dream into the Universe the Universe is dreaming back at us.

Surely, Einstein is the Monkey God in this Universe as it opens to the new Creation. My view is that he was deity for five months in 1905, and thereafter, only an average commoner among the avante garde of Europe and America and with all its most predictable and dated opinions, social visions and prejudices. In later life, he even entered perhaps into what psychiatrists call Persona Madness – a delusion of omniscience and invincibility; a vision of himself as a kind of humanist deity among Sweeneys. As when he solicited Sigmund Freud in a letter to go with him to exploit their fame and form an international “intellectual elite” to influence the flow of human history, and to protect the world as he saw it from government and politics (Freud had the better sense). And again when he solicited Franklin D. Roosevelt to borrow from his cosmic observations and make with them an atom bomb. (“My biggest mistake,” he said later.)

But this is characteristic of Monkey Gods – worlds fall before them and new ones are born. They change the Creation, but have no control over the changes which will occur because of their speculation. Surely Einstein is our own Karma Dorjee, Rimpoche and itinerant ascetic enthroned in mid-air, under whose resting gaze mountains pitched and tossed, buildings shook and cracked, the sun fell like a thunderbolt and another sprang up in its place. Einstein considered himself to be such a disciple, like those from the heights of The Land of Snows.

Our age opened with a mushroom cloud – a phallic projection to the heavens as we’d not seen or
comprehended before, and from there we go forward. This image will mark the turning of our times, just as the waning age continued onward with a singular vision of a hole in the earth opening up – the vulva of the Earth Mother – and a sacred spirit drawing forth and ascending whole into the world, penetrating for two millennia & rising out into time the journey and the vision of the Christ. The journey of the Christ out of the Cave brought the West into the world. Einstein's vision brings it to the East and into the Universe.

Preface
I’m so happy ‘cause today I found my friends their in my head . . . and I’m not scared now my candle’s in a daze ‘cause I found God.
- Kurt Cobain

Patterns of history in and of themselves are neither objective nor subjective, they simply exist like streams and mountains exist, and like the ancient and archaic ancestral streams of an individual’s life, they meet the person in the present. The stream of history carries the individual into the river with it making the autobiography at one with the river. And the generation joins history and the individual as well, an entity in itself, bringing the flow to an occasional torrent.

Those of us who were born at the end of the Second World War have seen a great transition as we were born into a Western nation, and now we live in an American world civilization that is neither East nor West, but part of both. The Dalai Lama is as popular a figure today as television bishop Fulton J. Sheen was in my father’s day. But until recently, higher education taught an approximation of how we see ourselves as exclusively Western. In lesser schools and even the great universities, a world literature course would consider Shakespeare, Moliere, Goethe and Dante. The world consisted of the English, the French, the German and the Italian. And most of the professors were themselves unfamiliar with the Mahabharata, the Upanishads or the Tao Te Ching. Likewise, English and American history would be taught thus; U.S. history, English history, Greek and Roman history. And the driving force that formed our world evolved from Newton’s vision sometimes misunderstood and Calvin’s doctrine of a determined universe. But that has changed rapidly to a more organic view influenced by our journey to the East and the East’s journey to us, as historian Arnold Toynbee said it would. It is a view more confluent with the other discoverer of calculus, Gottfried Leibniz, who saw in his discovery of calculus as similarities to the I Ching.

A hundred years back and even at war’s end, scientists were soldiers of Reason at war with what they saw as the “illogical” world of Christendom and the East. Those soldiers are still in the trenches, but at the highest levels, theoretical physicists, astronomers and chaos theorists compare their work to Tibetan Buddhism and the earliest Christian theologians. Even to the layman, new revelations of black holes and multiple universes bring to mind the dream visions of St. Anthony and the Cosmos vision paintings of Hildegarde von Bingen. These relationships were noticed early on by the greatest of physicists, Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli in particular, but until recently, conventional education has proselytized in opposition to them.

The new influences have changed the very fabric of our society. Today only the most provincial would criticize the Harry Potter books as “contemptible” as the social critics greeted J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings when it first appeared in print in 1954. To that crowd, still at the helm at most major universities, the runaway success of the Taoist karate opera, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, in Chinese no less, with sub-titles, must have been more shocking than Sputnik.

In the 1950s there was little interest in myth, and in some quarters outright hostility, but since then Star Wars and Pokemon have introduced children to zen and the Tao. It was one thing to denounce these themes as “Orientalist” (a social condemnation) in the 1920s and 1930s and fascist in the 1950s, but something quite different nowadays. The road East can no longer be blocked. There will be a new understanding to a young generation. Perhaps Tolkien will also have a “butterfly effect” all his own and his time is yet waiting to meet him.

Now there is a broader outlook but today ideas are presented as diverse goods, benign and unconnected by theme or mythical relationships - the Tokugawa Period, kokopelli, Jane Austen, Islam - varied fish stalls in the marketplace of ideas. This journal is in opposition to way of learning. That view evolves from seeing (looking, watching) rather than being. It is like going to the mall and shopping for things to put in your head. It makes it impossible to find one’s place in the Creation. Nature does not live in boxes and life transcends academic discipline. Instead it is like a river changing course when least expected.

Six hundred years ago the Europeans sensed God as a Woman of the Earth and emphacized Her in devotion up until the 14th century. Rising to the Renaissance God was projected as a Man in the Sky, and as in this image of a robust Jesus by Michaelangelo's in the Sistene Chapel, the Earth Mother was intentionally cast aside (to better serve his "Warrior Pope" the artist noted in his journals). But history as it is generally taught to children and students fails in linking the present with the past properly and instead conjures an imagined past. We, the English-speaking people, did not emerge from the Romans. We adopted Romanism and adapted to it after conquest, just as the African slave adopted Christianity after two hundred years of submission in America. African-American scholars have become well aware that the history of the European Christian is not the history of the African who was taken to America in slavery, but the white still looks upon the Roman imperial overseer of northern Europe as if he were the natural ancestor. Robert Graves, who wrote a history of pagan England, is avoided and considered an anomaly.Perhaps historians don’t like to think that their ancestors were once pagans. Certainly the Power Principle finds its ancestor in Augustus Caesar and its adherents prefer the marble statue and bronze breast plate to the quiet hills and falling water of the Earth Mother, but it is a fanciful adaptation of the past to fortify the moment. Caesar and the Christian churches present half of the story of Europe. The Earth Mother is the other half. It is she that is responsible for the 6,000 years of world history that preceded Greek and Roman influence and it is she who gave the primary psychological impetus to the European into the 12^th century. And she has been discarded.

This journal considers archetypal trends and public events and phenomena that have a psychological effect on history and that manifest change and cultural transformation as we enter the new century. U.F.O.s are psychological events but so are Elvis and computer games. But so are Nelson’s sea victory over Napoleon and Hemingway’s suicide. Indeed, all human endeavors and history are psychology events. All of these ideas and came to my mind between millennia, practically all at once in the last three months of the past millennia, and they were finished in sketches at 4 am in the lobby of the City Suites Hotel in Chicago, while my wife and kids were upstairs asleep in the first hours of the new millennia, Jan. 1, 2001, technically, the waking hours of the first day of the Age of Aquarius. My thought was that Chicago was the right place to be as well, although it was just by accident that we were there – se just brought the kids to the city for a Christmas break. Just as I finished my notes the clerk came rushing into the lobby in a fluster, pointing to the ceiling. Something had happened on one of the floors above – a sink or toilet blocked or a pipe broke and water came rushing down the walls and ceiling. I thought it appropriate for the opening moments of Aquarius.

The change in a day and the change in millennia are periods which Tibetan Buddhism calls “betweens.” The between is said by Tibetan monks to be a place that resembles death in all but the passing of the body out of history. Robert Thurman, describes the between in his translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The chant “Oum” represents the full life cycle; three united sounds representing the three phases of the life; childhood, adulthood and old age, followed by an absence of sound representing death. Separating each sound is a ‘between,” a space/time gap. The fourth “note”, the absence of sound, representing death, is also a “between.” The life force is generational and betweens are generational as well. The War Babies – people my age - are now ending their second “between.” The Sixties, starting with the death of JFK and finishing with Woodstock, (roughly starting at age 16 and ending at 21 for my group) was the first between, the gap – individual and generational -- or overlapping time between childhood and adulthood.

The gap between millennia is a between as well. As said earlier (The Purpose of This Journal, October last). From this point of view Death is a space/time place – a place like this place but not like this, and the space between living events like Platonic months (they cycles of the zodiac) is a Death and a Birth as well. That date of the ideas, conditions, dreams and thoughts discussed in this journal sparked from a long sequence of dreams and coincidences in the mid-1990s. The Land of the Dead is the between we have just experienced between millenia and it ran in my approximation from roughly 1994 to 2005. In the dream and vision of some Native American shamans from the Lakota region, this Death and Birth was marked by a sign – the birth of a White Buffalo. Miracle, the White Buffalo, was born in the very last days of the Age of Pisces on August 20, 1994 and died in the Age of Aquarius, on September 19, 2004. Miracle was born to a white farmer and lived out his life in Janesville, Wisconsin. Native American shamans see an Awakening in the arrival of the White Buffalo and claim that the living spirit which guides such things sent the animal intentionally to a white farmer.

Returning

2008-02-05T08:16:00.000-08:00

" . . . in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength . . ."
- The Book of Common Prayer

"I have looked into the eye of this island and what I saw was beautiful." - John Locke on Lost

Recently, this past week, one of my smaller children was instructed to think up and create a painting in school and he brought home a lovely picture of a giant eye descending from the sky and falling into the sea. It reflects a change in the world. Dreamers today dream of returning to earth. 50 years ago they dreamed of Eyes flying and rising into the Universe, and that is the psychic core of UFO dreams, visions and apparitions. (Photo courtesy of Carlo Cuman, Giuliano and Michele Edoni and Giampaolo Salvato.)
Here in the age of cyber faith there are on-line astral temples for Elvis worshipers and the Keanic Circle, whose supplicants see Keanu Reeves (Whoa!), the Chosen One of the popular Zen hit The Matrix, basked in “most excellent light.” C.G. Jung made the observation that Eyes in the Sky are characteristic visions of our shift forward in time. This is the one singular difference in the culture of Aquarius, represented in the zodiac by an air sign, and that of the earlier age. It is the shift in the plane of consciousness from the earth and sea, to the air. In Aquarius, we are all sky walkers, not just Luke, Lieutenant Ripley, Captain Kirk and the remarkable hybrid from one of the last Star Trek spin offs, Seven-of-Nine.

This is apparent with the advent of flight, space exploration and TV and radio broadcast in the past century. The first intrepid footsteps into the Age of Aquarius occurred in the 1890s thereabouts. They brought a perception of ourselves as flying in the air and sent us producing devises to fly.
The epochal journey of Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin and Michael Collins (“three men in a boat” – see The Three Celestial Ones in this blog, January, 2006) to the moon in a mission named for the sun god Apollo would mark the great change in July, 1969, just as the Beatles were winding down and John Lennon had married Yoko Ono in his white suit at Gibraltar. Norman Mailer described the interior of the VAB [Vehicle Assembly Building] which built the space craft as “the antechamber of a new Creation.” He dubbed himself Aquarius for the telling of the tale of the flight to the moon in his book Of a Fire on the Moon. And in the spirit of the day, the LEM module, which was used as an escape devise and saved the lives of astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert on the troubled flight of Apollo 13, was named Aquarius.

But comfort level with air and space-based consciousness did not come easily and perhaps the heroic achievements of the Apollo astronauts were necessary for it to be realized. The astronauts were travelers not only to the moon but to a new condition of human consciousness. Psychologically it was, as Armstrong said, “. . . one giant step forward for mankind.” Earthrise, seeing the earth rise above the lunar horizon from the moon, would change how we saw ourselves in the universe, wrote mythologist Joseph Campbell, much like Columbus’ journey materially dispelled mediaeval notions that the world was flat. The change would manifest itself in the culture -- the world culture -- at one very precise moment, and history can look back and look forward from that moment.

It was in the mid-1970s, and film critic Stanley Kauffman called it an epiphany, “an event in the history of faith.” It was Stephen Spielberg’s movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

This movie could be considered a psychological companion piece to Star Wars, where one floats freely in space as if in the interior of the mind. It clears the deck of the tenacious Star Trek state of mind, viewing outsiders in outer space with hostility and suspicion like an imperial conqueror going to other planets.

Close Encounters is distinctly different from Sci-fi movies of the 1950s, movies like War of the Worlds, in particular, in which great “eyes” suddenly appear in the cities and blast the cities away. The Fifties response of course was to blast the aliens away before they blasted you, transferring a hostile enemy from Nazi Germany to the U.S.S.R. to an ambiguous alien invasion in ten short years.

C.G. Jung was fascinated by U.F.O. sightings in the 1950s and as early as 1946 he began to collect data on people who had “visitations.” He wrote the monograph Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies in 1958 and it was translated from the German the following year and included in volume 10 of his Collected Works, Civilization in Transition, in 1964. The learned establishments viewed it with as much trepidation as they did little green men from outer space (air-wise projections of the Green Man there, for the Age of Aquarius – Osiris had a green face as well), but as always, the hippies and the art students got into it right away.

Jung wrote in his monograph, to the chagrin of the mainstream of American psychologists and behaviorists of the day (and today):

“As we know from ancient Egyptian history they (UFOs) are manifestations of psychic changes which always appear at the end of one Platonic month and at the beginning of another. Apparently they are changes in the constellation of psychic dominants, of the archetypes, or “gods” as they used to be called which bring about, or accompany, long-lasting transformation of the collective psyche. This transformation started in the historical era and left its traces first in the passing of the aeon of Taurus into that of Aries, and then of Aries into Pieces, whose beginning coincides with the rise of Christianity. We are now nearing that great change which may be expected when the springpoint enters Aquarius.”

The circular space ships are eyes, said Jung. It is the eye of God, the eye of Horus, the sky god, projecting down from the heavens.

Characteristically, when one would see or dream of a UFO, Jung reported, he or she would report a light so bright that it burned the viewer’s face. This represents a confrontation with the unconscious with great impact on a people who have been away from the unconscious for a very long historical period. (First day awake. This is the music of Pink Floyd as well.)

Jung reversed the flow. We shouldn’t fear these things, he said. We should welcome them. And when we do we will begin to engage the new consciousness.

I don’t know if Stephen Spielberg was listening, but I expect he was, as his breathtaking movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, followed just that prescription. Spielberg’s screenplay is based on the book The UFO Experience (1972) by Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who portrays alien encounters as optimistic, benevolent and loving. The dreamers in the movie follow their visions and welcome the intruders fro Outer Space rather than blast them away.

This was followed by the Spielberg movie E.T., screenplay by Melissa Mathison - a well-known contributor to Tibetan Buddhist causes. E.T. is the story of the sweet-faced extra-terrestrial and it was accompanied by a famous poster featuring the Hand of God touching the little alien, like Michelangelo’s picture of God touching Adam’s hand in the Creation scene on the Sistine Chapel. (By the end of the century aliens are less than divine and we have become completely acclimated to critters from outer space. In the Spielberg blockbuster a few years back, Men in Black, they pass for ordinary citizens in New York City, although the guardians, the Men in Black, cast a wary eye upon them. The Men in Black in a folk tale of science fiction lore. Three Men in Black are said to accompany an Aquarian messiah, a space alien, much as the three Magi accompanied the Christ – see The Three Celestial Ones, January, 2006))

That would set the course. From then on out, Outer Space would be an element we would feel familiar in. Indeed, from then until the end of the century all epics would take place in the air or in space. The Star Wars sage presented a Taoist and Zen primer and would carry for 30 years. There are specific references throughout the series to Zen, Buddhism and Taoism. A “Quigon-ginn” for example, is a Taoist avatar. John Wayne, the 1950s man on horseback, would be the last of the earth-bound heroes.

No one understood the sci-fi alien encounter genre better than Chris Carter, creator of The X Files, whose agents, Scully and Mulder, are often between worlds, earth-bound and alien, and aliens are sometimes viewed as ourselves on another astral plane or ourselves evolved from DNA from an extra-terrestrial species. The X Files, which took some of its impetus from Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack’s book, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, progressively moves the genre away from us against them, to a situation where we somehow share something with the aliens: I am he. (Like Santa and the Beatles, The X Files has a shadow production; Chris Carter’s darker Millennium, broadcast during the same period.)

David Duchovny, educated at Yale and Princeton, brought some learned credentials to the show, and in one episode to which he contributed script, there is a retelling of Dostoyevski’s chapter in The Brother’s Karamatsov, “The Grand Inquisitor.” In the X Files version – as in the sci-fi folk lore of the three Men in Black accompanying a new avatar - Christ comes back as an alien and is imprisoned, effectively making the jump to hyper space from the Piscean Age and one of its last, great Christian thinkers and novelists, Dostoyevsky, to the Age of Aquarius.

For the record, in the final episode of The X Files on May 19, 2002, in which Scully and Mulder are reunited, the Cigarette-Smoking Man reveals that the world will end on December 22, 2012. That is, the “alien invasion” -- which suggests the new consciousness taking precedence over the old -- will be completed on that day. In the final scene, Scully and Mulder realize they are seeking the same thing - he as a UFO investigator and she as a Roman Catholic. Mulder takes Scully’s cross in his hand that she has been wearing on her neck throughout the series. It is interesting that it is exactly that worn by John Lennon in his last pictures with the New York City basketball shirt. It is interesting because in the week in which the Age of Aquarius actually began – Dec. 31/Jan. 1, 2001, the X Files featured an episode written by Mulder with a messiah figure who directly suggests John Lennon.

The ultimate Aquarian episode and one of the best is The Blessing Way, in which Mulder is left for dead by the Cigarette Smoking Man, then taken to the Land of the Dead where he meets his father, and is raised again from the dead or near-dead and “born again.” He is guided through the Land of the Dead and brought back by a Native American shaman during the birth of the White Buffalo on a Wisconsin farm, a Native American sign of new Awakening and a harbinger of Aquarius.

The X Files’ final regular series episode with Scully and Mulder together is a virtual Nativity scene with alien visitors, complete with guiding star and the Lone Gunmen presented as the three Magi bearing gifts. The child Scully bears is ultimately given up for adoption to a family that lives under the flag of the White Buffalo.

The child is the Chosen One, the Aquarian, and the White Buffalo is the symbol of Aquarius. (Both Close Encounters and The X-Files have tag lines that suggest religious faith. The movie poster for Close Encounters reads, “We are not alone.” In The X-Files, there is a poster of a flying saucer in Agent Mulder’s office that reads, “I want to believe.”)

By the turn of the millennium, but even the tenacious Star Trek crew has turned the corner. One of the very last chapters, Andromeda, staring the dreamy, New Age Kevin Sorbo as Dylan – no authoritarian Captain Kirk, just Dylan – the ship’s commander, casts its crew as “keepers of the way,” a page right out of Lao Tsu and the Tao te Ching, although the commander still has a tendency to break heads.

The desire to conquer the universe is a phantom. The Star Trek series began coming “back to earth” in the 1986 feature Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home, the self-paroding tale of the Enterprise crew coming back to earth in the 1980s to save the whales, one of the most engaging of the series, directed by Leonard Nimoy. After his retirement from the series William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk in the long-running series, wrote a book called Get a Life about Trekie cult followers. Trekies later became the subject of the hilarious spoof Galaxy Quest with Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver, who played Captain Kirk’s dark cosmic sister, Lieutenant Ripley, in the Alien series. Trekies aside, Captian Kirk and Lieutenant Ripley are both Master Aquarians working their way through the murky ambiguity unknown of an unknown future. “To boldly go where no man has gone before”; that would be to the new millennium.

A few years back a movie in the original genre of War of the Worlds was made called Independence Day. It was a classic right-of-passage movie in which the whole world united in a manly way to blast an alien ship out of the sky that looked a little like a giant flea about the size of the Empire State Building. Presidential hopeful and World War II era veteran Bob Dole attended the opening with Reagan-era culture czar William Bennett (where was Agent Smith?) to publicly declare it “a great movie.” Which it was. But not the kind of thing you see that much of nowadays.

This year Spielberg has made a remake of War of the Worlds and in my opinion it is his best effort and his best movie ever. The Spielberg remake virtually returns the genre to its beginning, folding time back to 1954. It is shot with some dense-looking color process that looks like the movies Jean-Luc Goddard and Francois Truffaut made in the early Fifties with only the barest-of-bones film making equipment. The Extraverted and heroic engagement of the characters reaching out to the aliens in E.T. and Close Encounters is over. The film has more the anxious tempo of Jaws – crowds milling around and tension and chaos building on the streets. It is a father-and-son movie of generations moving in different directions. The movie confirms my observation that somewhere in the interior of the psyche, everyone in the world is either a Yankee fan or a Red Sox fan (see “The Center of the Earth,” October, last). In this movie the father wears a Yankees cap and the son wears a Red Sox cap. And the movie is a journey movie going from an (Extraverted) New York state of mind, with its fast energy and power principle, to an (Introverted) Boston state of mind – staid, provincial, and conservative. When we leave the action and passion of New York behind, we return to ourselves and first principles and begin to cultivate again our own garden. When father abandons his singular adventures (in the sky, in fact - he drives a derrick high above New York City, much like the aliens’ Tripods), he returns home to family.

We are a land-based species and cannot live in outer space. It should be the most obvious fact of human nature. By the beginning of the new century we have returned to earth (and to its quality of the Unconscious, Middle Earth). Spielberg's A/I (2001) is a high-tech retelling of the Old World Pinochio story (the myth/dream of an old man at a spiritual loss and carving his Savior/Messiah out of a tree, like the Prague Golem story of the 16th century Rabbi Loeb). In Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and The Matrix, there is no longer the belief that the alien is really out there, in space, and that we should go after him, but that space fiction and its inhabitants are representative of an inner condition, as it has been right along in the Star Wars series. And in the magnificent animated feature film, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, (2002) we re-enter the natural world of earth, air, fire and water that we left behind when we said good bye to Abbess Hildegard in the 12^th century. Perhaps like Haku, we will remember our name.

As all things looked to the sky in the 1950s, today all paths return to earth. Tolkien’s Rings series enters a state preceding the maedeval period, State of Heaven brings us Christian on Islam war is the 12^th century, the best seller The DaVinci Code, contains riddles of a far earlier day and Harry Potter. The Deathless Child of Old England, returns us to where we came.

My experience with dreams and extraordinary dreams in the past few years tells the same story. One woman for example, dreamed of gold coins coming from the Pope while a contemporary suitor offered her only coins of chocolate covered with gold paper. Another had a similar dream with old gold marked by St. George’s Cross, again, in opposition to something new and trendy. And my astonishing dreamer friend – a woman from Australia - dreamed this on August 13, 2005:

I am outside the earth’s atmosphere, or in another realm.
I am sitting in a tree that is growing there.
It has leaves made of thin gold foil, and it looks
like a cherry tree. I don’t want to be there, the sun
shines all the time, there is never any night - it
feels surreal and I want to get home, or to earth,
I feel I should not be there. I try to climb down,
but every move I make takes me further up the tree,
not down. I decide that the only way to get down is
to jump - I think that this must be my destiny, and
if this is so, God will not let me die. Next to me
I find a piece of rope that is made of three ropes
twisted together. I pick it up and it is alive, and
purple and pulsating. I jump out of the tree, holding
this live, pulsating rope. I am falling into the
atmosphere and the wind is rushing past me, I am falling
like a skydiver without a parachute, freefalling. I look
up at the sky now and it is a beautiful combination of
pink, blue and purple, like a magnificent sunrise.
I also see that the rope that I am holding is attached
to the sky. I know eventually that it will pull me to
a stop if I keep hold of it. Every thing goes black
suddenly, but I am still aware, I am not dead, I rest
for a while. Then I see a light. It is as if I am
looking through a window into a light room from the
darkness. I see a dresser in the room, and I think
to myself 'this is my grandfathers dresser', I watch
the room for a while. Then suddenly my whole body
feels pressure, and there is pressure on the top
of my head. I am pushed past this pressure and
I suddenly see a baby being born, and I hear a
baby's cry and then I realise that the baby is me
and it is me that is crying and I am the baby -
I sense that I am a boy and my self awareness fades
and I become the baby and I am crying.

The dream here is a vision of Andromeda, Mother in the Sky, who holds the two fish dangling at the end of the rope. She visits us again. This is a cosmic dream of the new Creation – born female last time, this time a boy.

Our space journey did not begin with Flash Gorden or Captain Kirk. It began with Columbus. These are the sentiments of the most American of poets, Walt Whitman: “Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?/ The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,/ The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,/The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,/ The lands to be welded together.” The passage would be to the sun and the moon and all of the stars and to Siruis and Jupiter. Then: “After the seas are all cross’d (as they seem already cross’d)/ After the great captiains and engineers have accoomplish’d their work,/ After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the geologist, ethnologist,/ Finally shall come the poet worthy of that name;/ The true son of God shall come singing his songs.”

Note: The tv show Survivor and all of its knock offs are "returing to earth" stories as well. These are modern myths, like the UFO phenomena of the 1950s. Tv's epic drama Lost, in the same vein, presents new life on a new place. The place is Earth, but we are unfamiliar with it and its full nature. We are new residents on the Earth (see Quigley, my political blog). If, as C.G. Jung said in his essay, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, that the UFO phenomenon was a harbinger of times ahead, and in hindsight it appears to have been true, then the same is true of these new stories as they occur at the beginning of the millenium. They lead back to Earth. They are Creation Myths for the new millenium.

Particles and Waves: Cities and countries are binary and so is everything

2008-02-05T08:14:00.000-08:00

This is essentially, an edited out section of the last episode on the Six Grandfathers and American history.

Current research shows that on the day of birth a baby boy will look at a mobile hanging above his bead. A baby girl will look at a face. The one is a techomatrix orientation and inate fascination with technicality (head), the other empathy (heart). Head and heart are biological divisions and they are binary yang and yin orientations in the world. All societies divide between head and heart. Paris (above, Ile de la Cite and Left and Right Banks with Notre Dame's Rose Glass superimposed on the Ile de la Cite) gives a perfect example: the bankers and burgers live on the Right Bank of the river Seine (in red) and the artists, writers, hippies and mystics live on the Left Bank (in blue). The two halves are divided by a river connected by the Pont Neuf and held together by a perfect jewel: The Notre Dame Cathedral with its rose glass on the Ile de la Cite. Europe likewise divided between Roman (head) and Greek (heart) in Imperial, Christian and Cold War spheres, but unfortunately has no Ile de la Cite to unify and absorb its opposites today in a mandala.

A distinct binary relationship can be seen extending across Asia as well from India to Japan. Vedic (yin) Asia has its source in India but extends to areas that were once Vedic and are now Buddhist, like Thailand and its neighbors. The Vedic influence is palatable in Thailand and Laos. With Taoist (yang) Asia, China, Korea and Japan (Japanese zen owes itself to Taoism and is an extension to Taoism: See Suzuki’s Introduction to Zen), a binary relationship can be seen. The Vedic/yin regions feature yoga and graceful dancing, while the Taoist/yang regions express themselves in cerebral discussions (or non-discussion discussions as in Japanese Zen) marshal arts, stick fighting and in the farthest corner, Samurai swordsmanship, none of which are prominent in the Vedic areas. Tibet has influences of both; archetypal deities that resemble the Hindu pantheon, and the Taoism’s tai chi (yin/yang symbol) sits in the center of the Tibetan flag. Tibet, which calls the center of consciousness the Jewel Heart is in itself the Jewel Heart of the extended mandala of the East. The destruction of Tibet as a sacred center and its occupation by communist China will likely upset and destroy the ancient, balanced symmetries between China and India and those within the entire Asian continent.

The Asian regions developed these relationships over thousands of years, but the entire region will lose its internal yin/yang features as East and West adjoin in our times and a new global relationship develops a new Jewel Heart between East and West, founding a new benign mandala vortex around the Chicago/Toronto area thereabouts. This is a new world picture which has been moving to this one point since the beginning of civilization. It is the Aquarian mandala.

There is a well-known analysis in psychiatric lore about "Henry’s dreams" (picture here from Man and His Symbols, edited by C.G. Jung), which refers to a long series of archetypal dreams that brought a psychiatric patient of C.G. Jung associate Jolande Jacobi to face deep and irrational powers within himself. During analysis, Henry drew a picture with a blue field on the right with a Madonna-like woman standing in it and a red field on the left with a wolf-like black monster in it. The picture suggests that the forces within Henry are dangerously incompatible, but in the center of the picture is a mandala-like flower which links the opposite sides.

This personal dream of Henry's classically illustrates the situation described in the illustration above on the banks of the Seine in Paris, the left bank (artists and writers), the yin side, and the right side (bankers and business people), the yang side, united by the cathedral on the Ile de Cite. Further investigation reveals that this is the same pattern on the flag of France; a left field blue and a right field red, connected by a white field, meant to suggest the lilies of the field.

Many flags, particularly in mature countries, have this same balance; the blue sometimes green and the red sometimes orange, and with a flower or an icon of some type in the center holding them together. (The icon stashed up in the corner and with only one color suggests a transitional phase or a country out of balance.)

Many towns, cities and countries are thus divided, very often like New York into artsy (hippies, poets) “downtowns” and business-like “uptowns” (Madison Avenue). And the beautiful city of Washington, D.C. serves as a center-most mandala for North and South prior to the Civil War. And the Mississippi River divides the world today with Chicago at top and New Orleans at bottom uniting the U.S. east and west and all of the Eastern world and the Western world into one world. So far, like Europe, it has no mandala. But maybe it will one day. At center is the Lakes Region, which forms a water star - maybe a world mandala in the new center of the world will feature the Sea Serpent in the Great Lakes known to First People as the Manitou - the Primary Spirit of the Earth.)

Free as a Bird: John Lennon's Unfinished Journey

2008-02-05T08:13:00.000-08:00

"Is it not written in your law . . . you are gods?" John 10:34

"The crosses are all full," said the lay brother.
"Then we must make another cross. If we do not make an end of him another will, for who can eat and sleep in peace while men like him are going about the world?" - "The Crucifixion of the Outcast," Celtic tale retold by William Butler Yeats in Mythologies

"Zen demands intelligence and will-power, as do all the greater things which desire to become real." These are the words of C. G. Jung in the introduction to D.T. Suzuki’s An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. Jung’s words and observations would win him a place top row center, right next to Edgar Allen Poe, on the cover of Sgt. Peppers. In the 1950s Suzuki was always referred to as Dr. Suzuki – much as Richard Gere is referred to as only Richard today by Tibetan Buddhists. It is kind of an honorarium, a title. Dr. Suzuki was a solid forefather on the path East and one of the very first learned Masters to come from the East to the West.

In the 1950s he taught at Columbia University and was a celebrity in New York City, an exotic but common monk with a great smile and a pure vision of Zen. Personal experience is everything in Zen, said Dr. Suzuki. No ideas are intelligible to those who have no backing in experience. Mystification is far from being the object of Zen itself, but to those who have not touched the central fact of life Zen inevitable appears as mystifying. Penetrate through the conceptual superstructure and what is imagined to be a mystification will at once disappear, and at the same time there will be an enlightenment known as satori.

Dr. Suzuki talked straight: personal experience is everything in Zen. The purpose of life is love. I’m not sure if John Lennon read these words but perhaps his wife, Yoko Ono, did. She was a key figure in the avant garde art scene in New York City at the time and had been in New York for a long time, even as a student at Sarah Lawrence. She was well known as a conceptual artist before she met John Lennon, and lived and worked in the same realm as people like John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. These would be the first people in New York to listen to Dr. Suzuki.

The art students were always the first to catch on, and John Lennon and his friend Stu Sutcliffe were the art students who started The Beatles. They were like pilot fish for the rest of us who were born at the end of the war and it was quite a large school of fish. 40 million people. All our fathers had been warriors. We were all the same age and born within months of one another, conceived by men who had been a long time without women, directly on return from war in Asia and Europe.

For us it was a bristling, exciting respite between childhood and adulthood and we were interested in new things. There were no teachers around to deflect our learning, no priests to lead us astray. For the briefest period, all of the shields were down. Other voices would come shortly. Swami Yogananda, who wrote The Autobiography of a Yogi, would become very popular for awhile. John said he read about half of it, which I thought was pretty good, as I’d only managed about 80 pages. Later, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Tolstoy. But Suzuki’s message entered the river of our generation at the same time as John entered our river. At first much of the Zen around New York was dark, misunderstood in the West as nihilism, the shadow which withered the Western heart after 500 years of exploration and dominance. But John and Stu understood Dr. Suzuki’s Zen message that love is the purpose of life.

John is said to have started The Beatles to have something to do with Stu. When McCartney entered the group he drove them to become more serious and businesslike. But at first it was always John and Stu. Stu had the artist’s eye for style – naming the group The Beatles after seeing Lee Marvin and Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones. Lee Marvin’s motorcycle gang was called The Beetles. Stu always attracted the coolest people as well. And when they went to Berlin before the group was fully formed he attracted the beautiful photographer Astrid Kirchherr, who would become an anima figure – a muse – to the group and open them up in the mind in new ways and awaken new music and images.

An avante garde photographer in Germany, she and her friends, including Klaus Voorman, traveled in the seedy night scene in Berlin and met the group there, which was still going under the name of The Silver Beatles. She gave them the playful Beatles haircuts. Friendship would bind them. Stu married Astrid and Klaus later drew the cover picture for the Revolver album, and much later, after The Beatles had broken up, he played as a background musician on the Imagine album.

Personal experience would guide the fledgling poet as well, and like many ordinary men before him, Lennon became great when someone he loved died. He would remember them all. And he would remember Stu, who never returned to England with them.

I know I’ll always feel affection, for people and things that went before. I know I’ll always think about them.

But it was different with Stu.

In my life, I loved you more.

This requiem, this love song, is considered today to be one of the greatest songs ever written. It is the beginning of the artist’s journey for John Lennon.

The Sixties was a cacophony of a million sounds and smells and voices and music and colors and textures, but especially music. The electric guitar was like a key; an ancient iron ornamented key to a mediaeval dream door that would open to an age.

Every age, be it short or long, has a beginning, a middle and an end, like a person’s life, and this age was no exception. This age, someone pointed out, came with its own sound track. And it rose and fell rather quickly.

At the center was The Beatles and the Sixties rose and fell with the fate of the Beatles. And at dead center, the man in the center of the Beatles was John Lennon.

From beginning to end The Beatles was about John Lennon. He was not the most important innovator or instigator of the period, except perhaps in music, but the music would eventually become secondary to his life, as literature had become secondary to Tolstoy.

He was one of us, common and working class, but of course, more gifted. And the transformation he made, we made. Eventually he left The Beatles behind to complete the passage himself. He was the Man at the Center who made passage with us and for us and completed the journey on our behalf. And I don’t think we could have or would have completed passage without him.

The remaining Beatles say they were transformed by Bob Dylan like the rest of us were. John was as well. It shows in his pictures. It shows in his clothes and in music like Norwegian Wood, a folksy, spare song inspired by the folk scene, written when the Beatles would begin to rise to a higher artistic level. John, they say, wanted to conquer the world, which The Beatles did with ease. Then, when they heard Bob Dylan, they aspired to be artists.

Dylan opened the gate and performed the Rite of Entry to the age with his soulful cohort Joan Baez, and the age rose to the center when The Beatles reached their artistic apex. Then followed the rite of exit with Joni Mitchell and the howling animal cries of Neil Young, mourning the passing of the brief and sacred moment.

The Beatles, at the top of their creative arc -- that would be somewhere within the Sgt. Peppers area -- brought the defining moment to a generation. Some 30 years later, in January, 2001, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd contrasted the generation with George Bush, Jr., who last week threatened to cast the first veto of this presidency to overthrow Congress’s attempt to ban his policy of allowing the torture of military prisoners.

In his first month in office she wrote, “He said he never liked the Beatles after they got into that ‘kind of a weird psychedelic period.’” One either crossed the river or did not, and those who did not, struggled to create a counter-force. (Ten weeks into his presidency Dowd reported going hungry for a shred of modernity. “Bush II has reeled backward so fast, economically, environmentally, globally, culturally, it’s redolent of Dorothy clicking her way from the shimmering spires of Oz to a depressed black-and-white Kansas,” she lamented. “What’s next? Asbestos, DDT, bomb shelters, filterless cigarettes? Patti Page?”)

Not unlike George Bush, John Lennon was preoccupied with Jesus. You could see it early on with the trouble he got into when the Beatles were first big. Fans would crowd them and overwhelm them and once John said to a crowd of reporters, “We’re more popular than Jesus.” There was no arrogance to it, but subtle awareness. The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Yet Bush and Lennon couldn’t be more far apart in their quests.

In The Tao of Jung, psychiatrist and Jung scholar David H. Rosen discusses C.G. Jung’s decent into the shadowy world of the collective unconscious, the world beyond the conscious ego. On the way into the “cave” of the unconscious stood a dwarf with a leathery skin, as if he were mummified, which Jung squeezed past. Rosen explains this in terms of Indian mythology: “Shiva steps on a dwarf that represents the ego when this deity does its creative dance of death and rebirth.”

Likewise with the Beatles. When they began their real creative work, they left behind the casings of their early ego identity, pictured as four mop-top wax dummies in early Beatles suits at what appears to be a burial on the cover of the Sgt. Peppers album, while the “new” Beatles appeared above like butterflies just left the cocoon in brightly colored satins and playful epaulets.

At the building vortex of their work, John went through a classic shaman’s arc, the same as the one described by Dante in The Divine Comedy; the same ascribed to Jesus by his followers thus, “. . .he descended into hell the third day . . . . he ascended into heaven.” (As E.C. Krupp writes that Santa Claus, an archaic remnant of a Norse shaman, enters the subtle realms of the archetypal shamanic journey by descending the chimney to the Underworld and flying through the Cosmic Heavens with magical reindeer.)

This is the classic pattern of the journey of the shaman described by anthropologists and it occurred with John as the Beatles rose to the top of their creative arc. IN this kind of psychological transformation, the man or woman who is about to enter into Unconscious falls, out of nowhere and against his or her will, into a funk. He falls into a torpor, a sickness of the mind and heart and feels a worthlessness to his life. He goes through a period of spiritual death and descends deep into the earth. Afterwards, he ascends and rises into heaven. Finally he emerges transfigured and enlightened god king, leaves the celestial place and comes out, usually down from a mountain, with a simple transforming idea for the tribe, a gift from the Land of the Dead.

Lennon went through such a transformation, falling into a psychological funk and getting fat and afraid at the peak of the Beatles initial popularity (“Help,” he sang. “I’m a loser, and I’m not what I appear to be.”) Then at the Revolver album, something new began to happen. Suddenly there is a sense of entering the river, an image which occurs in dreams at times of birth or death (“turn off your mind, relax and float downstream,”) and at times of psychological transformation. In Buddhism and Taoism, it is the sign of a new awakening.

He sang a second song on the same album about floating downstream in a transcendent, blissful sleep, while everyone thinks he is just lazy, (but “I don’t mind,” he sings, “I think they’re crazy”). Some say I’m Only Sleeping is aesthetically the best song he ever composed.

In terms of anthropology, this is the first orientation of an earth shaman finding his feet in the Underworld – the creative unconscious – the world under the earth, where he will take you down with him into the density of the earth, but this is the Subtle Realm of the earth, the Underworld, where “nothing is real” in Strawberry Fields.

And there he finds clarity and confidence, but in a new world, the world of the Unconscious where there is understanding of all you see with eyes closed, and the old world becomes a shell, a mere caricature of psychic life.

The shaman then ascends out of the earth and into the sky, like Jesus rising out of the tomb and entering heaven. John and the Beatles rise then to the very height of their work in Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. And here at their best work is the shaman’s archetypal journey to the heavens in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Like the Underworld of Strawberry Fields, the Astral Heavens also have otherworldly features, like newspaper taxies and magical rivers with tangerine trees and marmalade skies (like the tree “showered with reddish blossoms” blazed in light, a cosmic vision Jung had – a “vision of unearthly beauty” which oddly enough, took place in Liverpool, home of the Fab Four. Lennon’s dream vision in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds also echo’s Dante’s, looking upon the stars from above, in Paradise: “I saw light in the shape of a river/Flashing golden between two banks/Tinted in colors of marvelous spring./Out of the stream came living sparks/Which settled on the flowers on every side/Like rubies ringed with gold . . .”).

At the peak, John wrote a song called I am the Walrus in which he invoked the Upanishads, which along with The Autobiography of a Yogi was very popular back in those days. John wrote, “I am he,” about the swimming together of all of us at the peak of the Sixties, and “we are all together.” “I am the Eggman,” he sang, with his characteristic Liverpool humor, “. . . they are the Eggmen. I am the Walrus.”

Lennon’s favorite book was Alice in Wonderland and the Abbey Road album contained a snippet of Lewis Carroll's prose. He may have drawn on Lewis Carroll’s wise Walrus, who would fit right in on Sgt. Peppers, holding forth on cabbages and kings to a horde of oysters.

It is all comic and hidden, but it reflects an awareness he had about being a man at the center of a world in transformation. The words, “I am he,” are from the core of Eastern spirituality and are well known to its practitioners. Shimon Malin’s recent book Nature Loves to Hide: Quantum Physics and Reality, a Western Perspective offers an explanation from science: He writes, “Erwin Schrödinger had the experience of finding the soul of the universe within himself, as his own ultimate identity. He expressed his finding as follows: Inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you – and all other conscious beings as such – are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is, in a certain sense, the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in the sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat twam asi, this is you [or I am he or this is that]. Or, again, in such words as ‘I am in the east and in the west, I am above and below, I am this whole world’.”

Malin writes that Wolfgang Pauli, when asked if he believed in a personal God, responded with an answer that suggests a mandala: “May I rephrase your question? I myself should prefer the following formulation: Can you, or anyone else, reach the central order of things or events, whose existence seems beyond doubt, as directly as you can reach the soul of another human being? I am using the term “soul” quite deliberately so as not to be misunderstood. If you put your question like that, I would say yes.”

This expression reflects the sentiment of the Upanishads in which the Atman (the Eggman) or the individual soul, finds itself at one with another individual soul, then another, then the whole soul, the world soul, the God consciousness, the Brahmin (the Walrus). It is what Jesus had become after he had gone through the Transfiguration, referring to himself as at one with the God force, at One with the Father. This is the Brahma consciousness.

The Beatles were at their peak with Sergeant Peppers. There John would find fulfillment, anthropologically speaking. Then he would journey to the East, although Paul and Ringo were bored, and find the mystic Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a father figure to him, but a Great Father, a spiritual father, not an earthly father.

The shaman’s work is essentially over by then, except to bring the gift idea to the community. The shaman has brought the tribe with him through the transformation of the Unconscious. It is up to us after that.

Yet some of the Beatles greatest work would come as they traveled down the back side of the mountain. The White Album is still a favorite to fans. One song, I’m So Tired, wonderfully reflects the rite of exit of the exhausted artist that comes at the end of the transformational passage, balancing the liberating I’m Only Sleeping, at the rite of entry.

It is characteristic of the dark side of the passage that the archetypes reverse themselves and show themselves not as they are in the holistic form of the inner life, but just the opposite, shattered in the outside world, reflecting that the center has been passed through and we have once again entered the flat consciousness of the everyday world. And in this instance, it was a hostile world at war in Vietnam and on the streets and campuses of the United States (“Happiness is a warm gun,” sang John)

“Can one live with a shattered glass?” the guru classically asks a Tibetan monk who has just found Enlightenment.

And here – classically - the Beatles reject their psychological god-king, the Maharishi, and even publicly denounce him. Here John sings, “My mother is of the sky.” Lucy is of the sky, his anima, his female counterpart whom he found in transcendent journey. Mother is of the earth. And the tricksters continue their playful treachery, fooling their audience and keeping them off guard with pranks like this one: “ . . . here’s another clue for you all. The Walrus was Paul.”

The Walrus, of course, was John.

Coming off the backside of the mountain – and on return form India - John sometimes believed he was carrying – channeling, we say – Jesus and said so to the Beatles. And he made occasional references, even paraphrasing the Gospel of Thomas “. . . the inside is out/the outside is in. . .” on the White Album.

The full text is, “Jesus said to them:/When you make the two one,/and make the inside like the outside,/and the outside like the inside,/and the upper side like the under side,/and (in such a way) that you make the man/(with) the woman a single one,/in order that the man is not man and the/woman is not woman; when you make eyes in place of an eye,/and a hand in place of a hand,/and a foot in place of a foot,/an image in place of an image;/then you will go into [the kingdom].” – from The Gospel of Thomas.

This preoccupation with Jesus appears again and again. “Christ, you know it ain’t easy,” he sang in one of his last songs, suggesting in The Ballad of John and Yoko that he, like Jesus, would be crucified.

Certainly Lennon made himself look like Jesus at the end of the Beatles. On their last album cover, Abbey Road, he is dressed all in white, like Jesus after the Transfiguration, with the Beatles trailing him across the road, like the Three Celestial Ones (see this blog in January, 2006 for the Three Celestial Ones), following in his wake. (And cultism would abound in the Beatle myth. The old Catholic myth about the three secrets revealed to the children at Fatima by the Blessed Mother took a pernicious turn into hippie lore in the late 1990s when the Pope revealed the third secret to be about a “man in white” who would be gunned down when he returned from the mountain top. The Pope, who had been wounded in an attack at the same time that Lennon was murdered, revealed the contents of the letter to the public because he said the prophecy had been fulfilled. John Paul II, who wore white garments at public ceremonies, claimed to be the man identified in the prophecy.)

Even later, at the very end of his life Jesus is suggested. All through the most creative period, the shaman’s journey from Sgt. Peppers to the end of Abbey Road, John wore a special flowered talisman around his neck. Afterwards, he stopped wearing it. But in New York, in one of the later pictures ever taken of him, a well-known photograph where he is wearing a t-shirt that says New York City across the front, there is a tiny cross hanging from his neck.

At the end of the Beatles period John continued in a prophet’s journey. Like Moses and the Bodhisattva, he returns from a celestial vision on top of the mountain with a simple transforming idea, as Moses did with the tablets.

It is the same idea that has occurred throughout the century but is new to our century here in the West. It is Emerson’s message and here it is again expressed ten years before the Beatles by C.G. Jung: “Our world has shrunk, and it is dawning on us that humanity is one, with one psyche. Humanity is a not inconsiderable virtue which should prompt Christians, for the sake of charity – the greatest of all virtues – to set a good example and acknowledge that though there is only one truth it speaks in many tongues, and that if we still cannot see this it is simply due to lack of understanding. No one is so godlike that he alone knows the true word.” As Woodstock guru Satchidananda put it, “One truth, many paths.”

It is the same idea that Leo Tolstoy, a Great Father figure to the non-violence movement of the Sixties, had brought to the world after his night of the dark soul when he went through a religious transformation.

Lennon, with his wife Yoko Ono, entered the peace movement when he left the Beatles, and like Tolstoy later in life, attempted to apply his natural gifts didactically to public purpose. He is said to have been reading Tolstoy’s late non-fiction work on religion and non-violence as many were in the late 1960s, and his final word, the simple transforming idea he brought down from the mountain is precisely the same thought as Tolstoy’s: Imagine there’s no country, it isn’t hard to do. . . Imagine all the people living life in peace.

Tolstoy claimed that there was one singular thought in Christ’s work and that was do not return violence with violence. On this he built the doctrine that would inspire Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the anti-war activists of the 1960s. Furthermore, in Patriotism and Government, Tolstoy wrote that patriotism was a practicable solution for nations early in their development, but it was time now to abandon national prejudices. Even Ghandi, who he corresponded with and who admired Tolstoy enormously, had failed in this, he said. The non-violent approach was the right approach, but, said Tolstoy, declaring the nation to be Hindu, “ruins everything.”

It was time for the removal of all barriers. No country, and no religion, too. This would be Lennon’s final impression on the people: Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you can, no hell below us, a brotherhood of man.

This is precisely Tolstoy’s religious conviction at the end of his life. He advocated abandoning identity with a particular prophet as one would abandon nationalism.

In one of his last writings on the subject Tolstoy clearly states his opinion: “Attributing a prophetic mission peculiar to certain beings such as Moses, Christ, Krishna, Buddha, Muhammad, Baha’u’llah as well as several others is one of the major causes of division and hatred between men.”

John’s swan song, Imagine, reflects timeless Buddhist sentiment like that presented in What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula, which had gained popularity in the Sixties. And is likely an intentional reconstruction of Tolstoyan philosophy which was deeply influenced by Buddhism and Taoism. Intended or not, it completes the shaman’s journey and begins the transformation of the group.

Imagine also bears a relationship to The Gospel of Thomas. Elaine Pagel's book Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, states that in Thomas’s account, Jesus challenges those who mistake the kingdom of God for an otherworldly place or a future event: Jesus said, “If those who lead you say to you, Look, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will get there before you . . .” In a word, Imagine there’s no heaven.

William Butler Yeats writes: “What portion in the world can the artist have/Who has awakened from the common dream/But dissipation and despair?” Such was the lot of John Lennon.

Late in life, broken and in pain, he wrote, “I was the Walrus, but now I’m John.”

One of his biographers writes that he was never happy again after the Sgt. Peppers period. The pictures show it. He never smiled again for the camera after he returned from

India

ORANGE MONK

2008-02-05T08:09:00.000-08:00

The artist's journey into the Unconsicous; parallel to the monk's. They share the same cosmic place, even in death.

Orange Monk: the white piano

2008-02-05T08:07:00.000-08:00

Prelude to The White Grand Piano

With this dilemma in mind I approached Thomas Kuhn, author of the 1962 classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which analyzes how scientific change, to get his advise about my investigations . . . What I found most helpful was Kuhn’s observation that the Western scientific paradigm had come to assume the rigidity of a theology, and that this belief system was held in place by the structures, categories and polarities of language, such as real/unreal, exists/does not exist, objective/subjective, intrapsychic/external world, and happened/did not happen. He suggested that in pursuing my investigations I suspend to the degree that I was able all of these language forms and simply collect raw information, putting aside whether or not what I was learning fit any particular worldview.

- from Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens
by John E. Mack, M.D.

To consider this in a vein closer to Dali’s vision you must first detach from the conventional religion. Specifically, the idea of individualism has to be abandoned and the idea of lineal time. Both are social conventions begun by Europeans only in the last 500 years which have come to be understood as truth and to each there is a flickering of truth but each is also an illusion. Taken together, they proceed in a masquerade of illusions. Putting aside individualism, consider instead that you are part of your siblings and husband, wife and children and her sisters and family and at key moments you will share spirit and even share the same dreams. Almost everyone has had this experience in their lives. Arthur Koestler called this “an arrow in the blue” – a flash of awakening which comes only several times in a lifetime and for the briefest of moments, but reveals the long stretches of time lived dutifully in everyday work and pleasures to be an illusion of logic and language. Consider instead that you are an inextricable part of your friends and blood relatives and cannot be separated from your ancestors no matter what you do or what you call yourself. Consider instead that you are part of the Universe.

The artist of the caliper and vision of Dali sees closer to Einstein/Blavatsky. Einstein startled the world in 1905 when he presented time as part of a package. His view then was seen parallel to that of the Russian spiritualist, Madame Blavatsky, who thought likewise, claiming the Creation runs back and then forth. Indeed, the old spiritualists who have been abandoned by the conventional religionists were prelude to abstractions which young avante garde Swiss, German and Jewish students would entertain themselves with before they became world renown physicists (much as NASA scientists today tell us that they got their original ideas from Analog Science Fiction Magazine when they were kids.) And this play of the mind and spirit enkindled creativity. Newton wrote a million words on the nature and condition of the Vegetation spirit of the Earth before he approached hard issues of science (and as in religion, the science industry moves to create its own institutional cultism and remained in denial of this until the 1990s). Einstein, his niece reported, even kept a copy of Madame Blavatsky’s classic work of the occult, The Secret Doctrine, on his desk at The Institute of Advanced Science.

Tibetan Buddhism has it that individual consciousness is an illusion and a general collective state is a more coherent package. This idea was highly influential at the time of the Surrealists but it has been entirely abandoned by contemporary post-war academia. C.G. Jung borrowed from the East and called this the Collective Unconscious. The idea of the Collective Unconscious was pioneered by Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli who wrote the book together called The Interpretation and Nature of the Psyche. Jung taught with Einstein at the University of Basil and only proceeded with his work with Pauli after consultation with Einstein. Arnold Toynbee read Spengler and Jung half way through his writing of A Story of History and it became the key to his life’s work. Shortly before his death Toynbee made a statement that the Collective Unconscious was the greatest discovery of the 20^th century. At the time he was considered the world’s greatest historian, but from that moment on he was forgotten. Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack extended this same idea to new cosmic potentials. He was considered the most important and influential psychiatrist in the world as the head of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard, then when he applied these theories to patients and clients who dreamed of UFOs, as Jung did, Harvard’s entire Plumed Procession marched out in Medieval Splendor to revoke his tenure. He missed expulsion from the University by only one or two votes. Notice that all in the suburbs think and act alike? Notice all Democrats think alike and all Republicans? This is the Collective Unconscious. Consciousness is largely generational. In old China, the sage Taoist influence understood this, and children were given a generational name as well as a family name.

Creative groups emerge in society like boiling points in a lava flow. New ideas and images occur as if from nowhere. I once listened to a brilliant and world-renown theoretical physicist describe in an interview the awakening of the idea of calculus separately and independently by Newton, Leibniz and the Japanese mathematician Kowa Seki (1683), by reaching up like he was taking an apple off a tree. It just came from nowhere. “It was like they just pulled it out of the air,” he said, reaching upward. The creative groups which form spontaneously around these ideas share a unique collective identity. The Paychoalylical Movement early in the century was one such group, the Surrealists another. These two groups could be considered sister groups as they fed off one another.

It is difficult to understand the work of the Surrealists today because the thought that they related to has been abandoned by the general culture, particularly with the American ascent since World World II. Surrealism has come to mean anything kooky, strange or something which really freaks out the squares like putting pointy green things in your hair. But anything which freaks out the squares participates in the power of the squares and has no lasting heft (it is two men sword fighting). One fashionable writer on the arts wrote that photographs become “surreal” when they become old. That is not surreal. That is odd. Others see surrealism in a cloudy sky. That is not surrealism. That is foggy. Some see surrealism as anything they can’t understand. That is not surreal. That is confusing. Surrealism is a dream, archetype, painting, poem or expression which has a meaning and a meaning which delves into the occult and the Unconscious. It is a dream which can be understood but not by conventional or rational strategies. The Surrealists were deeply influence by Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, the founding fathers of depth psychology. Freud despised them. Jung encouraged them. Andre Breton might be considered in this vein a third founder. As the leader of the Surrealist Movement, he advocated seeking the things of the Unconscious through art and poetry. But seeking was not enough. The object was to find. As Picasso – patron saint to the Surrealists - said, “I don’t seek. I find.” To look at the group from the perspective of its own world is instrumental in understanding what was going on in their times. It is part of our times. As Breton understood, artists have a greater gift for entering the Psyche – indeed, in true art, it is the Psyche which calls the artist forward. As Jung pointed out, the Psyche is feminine, and She calls forth all true art.

The Surrealist Movement was a unit of which the individuals related to one another. Dali and Magritte especially both did similar paintings and used similar themes in their painting. All of the Surrealist men were in love with the same woman, Gala Eluard (Gala Dali). This is similar to the story of The Mahabharata in which the brothers were all married to the same woman Draupadi. It suggests the life force of the group rather than the specific individuals in the group, in the telling of the story. The group shares the same Psyche. The group, in the Mahabharata myth, formed and created the country of India. Individualism would destroy the group. The group all shared the same muse or anima – Draupadi and Gala – and the woman in each embodies the feminine spirit of the Universe, called Kundalini in Hinduism (likewise as a generation shares consciousness, an entire generation will be in love with Hermione Granger and she will manifest the feminine spirit of that generation). So the condition is the same with Dali and his friends. In this environment, a zeitgeist or group united by a single yin spirit, the group is one unit, and each individual only a different aspect of the group as a whole.

All of the world actually believed this until around the 1500s. Even the king or queen was not considered an individual as is referred to in legal records even in the England’s Glorious Revolution in 1688 as “the Body of the Queen.” The Queen’s nature and role was as a spiritual component of the group and she had no rights or identity as an individual person.

Literal time has to be abandoned as well – in draping and bending the clocks, Dali shows this abandonment. We take for granted time on the clock and see it as truth, but the clock is an invention of the 14^th century, when the Western world left its yin consciousness or its Earth Mother orientation. In dreams, it is supposed that the individual has the dream and he does, but often people have the same dreams and sometimes friends, lovers and relatives share the same dream at the same moment. The conventional religion as it is passed on in the Academy generation to generation is that the bent watches in Dali’s pictures comes from Einstein’s ideas which trickled into the art culture and the general culture. Light is bent. Time is a package. It does, however these ideas developed in the early part of our century much differently than the same ideas developed today. In Dali’s day Madame Blavatsky was still fresh. Today the general science trickling in to the mass culture grows to a Newtonian view, misunderstood as a mechanistic view, and one which precedes Einstein. Einstein wrote that Buddhism is the only religion which fills the need of science and is a cosmic religion as science is a cosmic study. In the future, one would be led to religion by individual experience, he said. Every individual is cosmic. Every individual has a difference sense of space/time. These ideas have been generally abandoned by democratic culture and the Blue Plate special presented at university and forum has it that everything can be measured. There are things on one side of the river which can be measured (Power). There are things on the other side of the river which can’t be measured (Love). The MIT physicist Kerson Huang has some interesting thoughts on this. The Blue Plate special has it that there is no other side of the river. (Alors, I digress again to gratuitously mock the Academy, the Museum, the Guru and the Priest.)

In this consideration, the Tibetan Buddhist sees literal time as an illusion and so does Einstein/Blavatsky. In this view, someone can have a dream and someone else in another place and in another time can finish the dream. People who are in love sometimes experience this. Mothers and children separated by continents sometimes experience this. There is a time/space package and it shows itself with specific symbols. It is likely that individuals share dream symbols of their specific group of ancestors (I do, others do). Irish people like my self dream of Flaming Swords. Jewish physicist Wolfgang Pauli dreamed of the Seal of Solomon. This space/time condition is the Tibetan Buddhist’s outlook. It is entirely similar to C.G. Jung’s idea of the Collective Unconscious. These ideas have never been of interest in

America

since the end of the war although they are of interest to Chinese and to Europeans. My thought is that Americans experience New Soul and are disinclined to see consciousness as anything beyond the ego space of one person in one moment (and perhaps Revolutionary cultures break with their ancestors – my expert dreamer friends are not Americans). The Surrealists however were deeply immersed in Jung. It is clear throughout the work of Dali. Jung’s Collective Unconscious implies a general state of conscious much like the Tibetan experiences and understand it and much of it was drawn from the East. In a word: the images in these pictures by Dali precede him in history and follow him in time. For 30 years Salvador Dali was obsessed by the image of a white grand piano, as a spectre coming from the Unconscious and taking hold in the world. People are still dreaming of white grand pianos and in certain cases, they may relate directly to the vision of Dali and share the same place in space/time.

Since I read C. G. Jung’s essay, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies years ago I became interested in the change in millennia, particularly after my mother died in the mid 1990s and I had a series of extraordinary dreams for a period of about two years. We were, of course, at the same time approaching the end of the millennium and there was a good deal of hysteria (Y2K) and hubris/denial (the Dow Jones averages will go up to 35,000 and Jesus is coming!) – classic symptoms of Fin de Siècle. Jung wrote in the introduction to his essay that although few people would hear him, it was his duty to prepare those few who would hear for coming events which are in accord with the end of an era. “As we know from ancient Egyptian history,” he wrote, “they are manifestations of psychic changes which always appear at the end of one Platonic month and at the beginning of another. Apparently they are changes in the constellation of psychic dominants. . . . (etc., etc.) This transformation started in the historical era and left its traces first in the passing of the aeon of Taurus into that of Aries, and then of Aries into Pisces, whose beginning coincides with the rise of Christianity. We are now nearing that great change which may be expected when the springpoint enters Aquarius.”

The Platonic months are two-thousand year periods which run in sequence through twelve signs to a complete Sun cycle of approximately 24,000 years. The Age of Pisces, mentioned by Jung above, was marked by the Star over Bethlehem and its Avatar was the Christ. This is the 11th era, the Age of Aquarius. My own speculation is that Platonic months present a conundrum, but it is possible to see and understand these eras by viewing the key figures at the turning points. In each there should be both a representative Introverted Figure and a representative Extraverted Figure. One will ascend and the other will recede depending on the character of the era approaching. sign, the first in a new sequence, starting a new 24,000-year cycle. We just recently entered the Aquarian age at the turn of the millenium.

The Platonic months as I understand it themselves alternate between introvert and extravert, or yin and yang if you prefer, giving the passing eras a sense of alternating chirality (“right-handedness” and “left-handedness”) you might say, and forming a kind of cosmic turbine. Pisces, the receding age, was a yin or introverted age (marked by a water sign and the ascent of the Earth Mother in Europe to Rose Moon in full flower by the 12^th century (See Robert Graves, The White Goddess). The definitive mark of Pisces could well be the Rose Glass, like that at Riems and in The Cathedral of Notre Dame on the Ile de La Cite and it could mark the era as the pyramids mark the Egyptian age.

The Ascending Age of Aquarius is a yang or extraverted age, (marked by air and in Jung’s essay, visions of UFOs). At the turning of Pisces, Christ represented the Introverted Force while Caesar represented the Extraverted Force. The Christ/Caesar paradigm will flip in Aquarius and the Caesar figure should ascend (the age is marked by the rise of the Titan – a governor - did somebody say Arnold?), while the Christ/Introverted Avatar will fall into remission and disrepair.

This is in opposition to popular notions of the Age of Aquarius, which come largely from the pop culture of the 1960s in which hippies were compared to the early Christians. Canadian writer Robertson Davies, who cited Jung in much of his writing, pointed out that the Aquarian Age would be an Authoritarian Age (and if the hippie movement resembled the early Christians it was as a waning force – See Davies’ essay “What Will the Age of Aquarius Bring?” in his book, One-Half of Robertson Davies). Technically, in the Greek configuration ofAquarius, the traditional role of water pourer - curing, healing and creative awakening - the feminine experience has been usurped by a male, Ganymede.

I’ve looked at a lot of music, literature and paintings from over the last millennia and most all significant European painting represents a quality of consciousness which rises from the earth to the sky, yin to yang. But the very most significantThe Magic Flute. Ingmar Bergman’s movie version (1973) illustrates the European journey from the Earth Mother in her dark phase – Kali, the Death Mother – to the cosmic masculine principle, and thus went the Western world with Mozart in 1791. I see the nature of the age ahead as one in which East meets West (“One world, many paths,” in the phrase of the Woodstock guru Swami Satchidananda) in the immediate future and the Introvert/Extravert figures emerging as both likely Europeans but both emerging in the New World – the North American continent - and both beginning to reveal themselves perhaps in the near future.

I recently posted some thoughts on a UK art forum about the sad case of the Piano Man in the British mental institution and his penchant for drawing grand pianos. Last Spring a man emerged soaking wet with no identification in England and refused to speak. When he was placed in a British mental hospital he drew only pictures of a grand piano and, according to a local parson, played snippets of John Lennon and some classical music. At the same time I’d been talking to an Australian friend about her dreams and sending her pictures and paintings of Salvador Dali to help explain some of the images and archetypes in her dream. Although I began my adult life as an art critic, I hadn’t noticed before that Salvador Dali’s pictures easily yield to archetypal analysis of dreams devised particularly by C.G. Jung, but abstracted from all or the world’s cultures. I noticed as well that Dali was obsessed by one particular image for 30 years: a white grand piano.

From the horse ascending to the sky from its own corpse in 1930 (“William Tell”) to a Buddhist monk in orange robes descending from a horse in the sky 40 years later (“The Second Coming of Christ”), the pictures easily yield to archetypal dream analysis and tell one story. The horse is important. It is Pegasus, the harbinger of Aquarius. Pegasus takes to the sky and kicks the mountain, freeing the curing and creative waters of a new age. Dali was certainly aware of this symbolism, as there were no social conventions opposing the occult and the zodiac as there are today in the West, and artists and even more conventional architects were knowledgeable about the Inner Life and often incorporated zodiac symbolism in their work. Dali was heavily influenced by Jung and his style of painting, which he called Paranoid Critical Method is clearly an application of Active Imagination, a strategy of dream analysis pioneered by Jung.

Thinking of the Piano Man, I began looking back at some old Dali and Magritte paintings from the 1930s, and saw that the white grand piano was the key to metamorphic transformation in Dali’s work. In a nutshell, this is what I discovered. There were three alchemical periods (in which artists delved into the occult and searched the Unconscious for inner truths) in the last century and they are all interrelated: the first, consisted of William Butler Yeats, Khrishnamurti, Madame Blavatski and the Theosophists as core influences in the late 1800s.

The second, the Surrealists in the 1930s, consisting of artists Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and Max Ernst as core members. There was a third fleeting but vastly more influential group; the small grouping of John Lennon and his friend Stu Sutcliffe, the English art students who started The Beatles, and the German avant garde photographer and artist friends, especially the photographer Astrid Kirchherr (who gave them the Beatle hair cuts) and the photographer Klaus Voorman, whom they befriended in Germany before The Beatles became fully formed.

All three of these groups are connected by C.G. Jung. Jung wrote about the Blavatsky/Khrishnamurti grouping as a new “fledgling religion” in the West and Jung and the Irish poet Yeats are linked through alchemy studies – (see Yeats Mythologies for intimate writings on the Alchemical Rose and his doings with the occult). In the middle group Magritte and Dali are symbiotes – the same symbols occur in both their work at the same period.

Dali’s work seems directly influenced by Jung and Wolfgang Pauli, particularly in their study on nuclear explosion and the shattering of mind-matter, as a turning point in world history. Dali’s work in the 1950s and later often pictured things in exploding molecular parts. The nuclear explosion is a turning point in Dali’s work, but what follows is not his best work, and much of it seems to be applied from the Jung/Pauli theory that the first splitting of the atom was a critical juncture in the transformation of human consciousness. Dali’s later work, much of it illustrated with the Alchemical Rose and alchemical animals, seems derived as well from Jung and Yeats’ thinking with some startling exceptions.

With The Beatles, only Sutcliffe and Lennon (and to some extent George Harrison) appeared deeply interested in the artist’s Unconscious and the occult. On the cover of the famed Sgt. Peppers album are Sutcliffe, Aldous Huxley, Aleister Crowley, Sri Yuktewar Gigi, Sri Mahavatara Babajii and a few other gurus. Top row center is C.G. Jung. The final words of The Beatles as a group was, “Here comes the Sun King,” which should at least evoke some curiosity about the shift between passing age and ascending age at what was conceivably the century’s strangest moment.

The Beatles and the portion of the Sixties zeitgeist which relates to these issues is very important as the group’s rise reflects a change in world culture due to what Jung called the ascent of “the American tempo.” It was populism at its peak and perhaps at its possible best. In earlier art and culture movements in the early 1900s and even just before the war, well-bred and educated people like Yeats and Aldous Huxley could influence a gentry which held sway in politics. And in earlier times a folk ditty would float among the peasants for 200 years before it got to Johan Sebastian Bach.

No longer. The post-war period brought primal American folk influences – Little Richard, Hank Williams, Elvis – direct, unadorned and without interpretation to a vast world youth consumer mass-market, creating a global youth culture. Likewise in the Sixties. The influence of this on world culture has been enormous. The context is largely forgotten now if not to say repressed by a countervailing political culture, but at one moment in 1968 as public opinion turned to rage against the war in Vietnam and turmoil and riots racked cities and campuses around the world, John Lennon, in white suit and lengthy beard, penning a peace anthem for demonstrations in Toronto, was perhaps the most important man in the world. The change it brought has been enormous. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi may have been freaky and startling to suburban America in 1967, but today, the Dalai Lama is as popular and uncontroversial a figure as Mother Teresa.

As far as I can see, these three periods belong together, but to date as far as I know, no one has put them together. Interested parties might read William Strauss & Neil Howe’s great book on history and generational identity, The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendevouz with Destiny, to see how historical periods alternate in Introverted and extroverted manner. These three periods fit in the Strauss/Howe pattern of alternating historical cycles in the Introverted arcs.

What I find most interesting is that the Theosophists and the Surrealists in hindsight can be seen as prelude to the atomic bomb, first exploded in July, 1945. The rise of The Beatles (only to the point of Sgt. Peppers and the journey to India) as a post-script to that event. Looking back, the Surrealist paintings are an archaeological gold mine of the psyche of the times, if the pictures and paintings are viewed as images from the Collective Unconscious.

For example:

This picture by Salvador Dali is similar to William Butler Yeats’ Aquarian messiah in the short story “The Gift of the Magi” in the book Mythologies – it tells of the Aquarian as a Unicorn born to a prostitute in a brothel in Paris – a vision of the Cosmic Self. (It is interesting that Yeats’ most famous poet about a negative Aquarian god-king, “The Second Coming,” which features a Rough Beast Slouching Toward Bethlehem, is well known and was universally quoted at the turn of the millennium, but this positive the three Aquarian figure is virtually unknown.) In Yeats’ story the “Magi” are three old Irish fishermen who lead the protagonist to the Unicorn. The three male avatars – Jesus and Magi, Abraham and the three Visitors – are marked here by three trees (Magritte has the three trees as well). The three trees as well suggest Yggdrasil, The World Tree, and its Three Realms which contain the Nine Worlds of Northern European folklore. Jung showed interest in Yeats and his group (including the prescient actress Maude Gunn, I would think). Yeats was deeply influenced by alchemy and wrote of the Alchemical Rose throughout “Mythologies.”

Dali’s “Meditative Rose” (1958). This image, symbolizing the “rosy cross” was key to Yeats. It appears in much of Dali’s work in the 1950s and later as the symbol of Christ and the Baby Jesus. This clearly seems derived from Yeats.

(photo of Dali’s Temptation of St. Anthony)

Jung and others speak of Pegasus as the harbinger of the ascending Age of Aquarius. The flying horse begins to rise out of Dali’s work in 1930 and it rises out of a grand piano. This is “The Temptation of St. Anthony” (1946). I would think that this is derived as well although it is an interesting painting. This “Temptation” is an Aquarian vision with Pegasus leading Rome (the spirit center of Europe in the waning Age of Pisces) on elephants to the sky and to a new place in a desert which, in the context of his other paintings and interests in this period appears to be Texas (he painted this in the United States). Dali would know from Jung and others that Aquarius is an air age in the zodiac configuration.

But what is most interesting psychologically in Dali and Magritte is their work in the 1930s. It is dense, broody, almost oppressive. The pictures come purely from the unconscious and are full of foreboding. Most interesting, key elements are the grand piano (particularly in Dali) and the alchemical lion.

Here is an old catalog picture of the alchemical lion from earlier centuries – the vegetation spirit of the earth which devours the sun. Look below how this figure enters into the dense work of Dali and Magritte in the 1930s.

This painting by Dali, “The Feeling of Becoming” in 1930 illustrates something rising from the unconscious “beyond the veil” as the shadow of the alchemical lion is approaching.

This one by Dali in the same period (1931) is called “Diurnal Illusion: the Shadow of a Grand Piano Approaching.” It shows the same foreboding – fear of something ahead rising from the Unconscious.

This is an extraordinary picture titled William Tell (1930). The Adam and Eve figures on the bottom suggest Primal Yin and Yang – they appear in a later picture sending the two out of the Garden. The tomb stone thing to the right with water flowing from it suggests new life coming from the unconscious (The Land of the Dead begins to feature prominently in Dali’s work hereafter). The vision rising from the primal Adam and Eve is of a man sitting at a grand piano with dual nature (he has two heads attached to each other, like a Siamese twin); the one a contemporary piano player, the other the alchemical lion. Pegasus rises from a dead horse carcass on top of the grand piano. This is the archetype of Krishna stomping on a dwarf, his old ego, and lifting out a new god to begin “the creative dance or life and death.” (The Beatles likewise, rise out of their old skins for more creative work on Sgt. Peppers and leaving behind wax figures of their former selves.) Here Pegasus, symbol of transformation of the millennial Age of Aquarius, takes first flight.

Life behind the curtain – the unconscious – presents Primal Yin and Yang – and newly manifested Adam and Eve sent to the world under the shadow of Alchemical Lion in a continuation of the last picture, this one named, “The Old Age of William Tell.” (1931).

Another grand piano in 1931 with a door open to the Unconscious and a woman (Anima) figure outside. I understand the six “Lenin” heads to be the equivalence of the “six grandfathers” in Black Elk – the six male figures being the six male signs of the zodiac or the half of the Universe which is Yang. The waning age of Pisces is yin, Aquarius is yang. (See miss3's dream at the beginning of this journal - visionalry dreamers and artists sense approximations: Desquarts/DeCoursy. Lenin/Lennon, perhaps. Consider also that Dali opposed the Marxist influence of Data and may have considered Lenin as a representative of the Dark Side.)

Dali’s “Invisible Man” (1932) (from the Unconscious) – the interior forms in the room (suggests inner life) as the shapes of table and chairs form a grand piano.

Dali’s “The Enigma of William Tell” (1933). What remains of the piano is now white – a white grand piano. The elongated figures in all of Dali’s work can suggest a being in space/time – someone who has dual nature, human/cosmic. Is William Tell a reflection of Jung influence? Is it the same Cosmic Self which Jung experienced as “another Swiss” in his great dream of a fountain in Liverpool?

Critics who take the artist at face value often miss the point. Artists love to freak out the squares and critics are seen as Buffy’s Mother (that would be Joyce) – suburban and mediocre. Critics over time generally denounce Dali for this picture “Necrophilic Fountain Flowing from a Grand Piano” (1933). This is a masterpiece. It brings the grand piano to perfect balance – the Tree of Life grows from it and the curing waters of Aquarius flow from it. The grand piano here has dual nature; one on the earth and a second piano image below made of water (the unconscious).

Dali’s “The Invisible Harp,” (1934) - here is the grand piano clearly in the land of the Unconscious with its dark “Traveler” – he who lives on the dark side of human experience and brings us gifts from the Unconscious – the Cosmic Self. There are other grand piano pictures but they begin to lose their dense unconscious quality in 1934.

Pegasus arrives in the sky in 1944 (Untitled - Dali).

And in the same year (1944) the grand piano makes its way through the curtain in Dali’s “The Red Orchestra,” finding its way out of the unconscious and into every day life.

Here is “Red Orchestra” again in 1957, the same year he painted “Rock and Roll” and actually tried to market a perfume with the name Dali’s Rock and Roll. The piano here is white (and timeless, like ancient ruins) and has emerged from the curtain (the Unconscious) and the curing waters of psyche flow from it as from the tomb in “William Tell” and live in it. The color red suggest the passage from the Unconscious to the world is complete.

The Shadow/Self figure above in “The Invisible Harp” appears with Magritte as well and many of these images appear in both Magritte and Dali, but Magritte’s picture seem to simply state the archetype, while Dali’s dance the Unconscious dance, like Krishna’s dance of “life and death.” Here is Magritte’s alchemic lion on a bridge between millennia with its magnificent Dark Aspect.

This is Rene Magritte’s “Homesickness” – 1941. Magritte makes the journey with Dali, but longs for home all the way. It is the same with Lennon and McCartney – Lennon continually presses the journey Across the Universe, while McCartney well complements his voice and vision and goes along, but throughout, he desires to find the Long and Winding Road that leads back homeward. (C.S. Lewis and C.G. Jung also had visions of the lion which suggest a transmutation of the Christ in this same period. See "The Lion of God . . . December, 2005, above.)

For Dali, the bridge to Aquarius is crossed and here is the Aquarian. This painting is called “The Second Coming of Christ,” painted in 1971. The alchemical feature of the double dragon seems applied (from Jung’s studies), but in the sky Pegasus, the Aquarian harbinger, is pierced and is passed through. He disappears into the clouds. The avatar is a Buddhist monk with hermaphrodite features, suggesting transition from yin age to yang age.

And here is Magritte’s grand piano:

Magritte’s The Happy Hand (1953). Magritte’s piano is ringed in a perfect circle, the sign of psychic wholeness. Yet it has a Shadow, a reflection on the glossy top of the piano suggesting that the circle can be broken.

The white grand piano that became the icon for John Lennon’s last moment in public life and the very last end of The Beatles and Lennon’s public life journey. The white grand piano has become a talisman for the song “Imagine,” Lennon’s swan song. At an impromptu TV memorial for the victims of 9/11 featuring popular artists and musicians such as Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Bono and U2 and Robert DeNiro, the centerpiece event was Neil Young singing Imagine on a grand piano. The song Imagine takes its theme from Tolstoy’s late work on pacifism and religion. Lennon’s final impression was: Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you can, no hell below us, a brotherhood of man. This is precisely Tolstoy’s religious conviction at the end of his life. He advocated abandoning identity with a particular prophet as one would abandon nationalism. In one of his last writings on the subject Tolstoy clearly states his opinion: “Attributing a prophetic mission peculiar to certain beings such as Moses, Christ, Krishna, Buddha, Muhammad, Haha’u’llah as well as several others is one of the major causes of division and hatred between men.” Imagine also owes to The Gospel of Thomas (as do other of Lennon’s bits from late Beatles – The White Album). Elaine Pagel’s book Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas states that in Thomas’s account, Jesus challenges those who mistake the kingdom of God for an otherworldly place or a future event: Jesus said, “If those who lead you say to you, Look, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will get there before you . . .” In other words, Imagine there’s no heaven. (It is interesting that this makes the Christ’s view confluent with the Torah of Moses, Eastern Orthodox (Chronos) and zen.)

This is the so-called Piano Man in the British mental hospital who appeared to the world out of nowhere in April, this year. He spoke not but drew pictures of a grand piano and played snippets of John Lennon and classical music. His drawing (at the top of this essay), like Magritte’s, has a shadow and it is contained in a completed circle. Has anyone studied the content of this man’s images? Perhaps he like Lennon, Dali and Magritte has had visions of the Unconscious and they proved to be too much for him. William Butler Yeats said, “What portion in the world can the artist have/Who has awakened from the common dream/But dissipation and despair?”

After Piano Man had been silent in the mental hospital for several months, a nurse came in and said, “Well, are you going to speak this morning.”

“I think I will,” he answered. He said he was from Switzerland and was sent back to his home. They asked him why he drew the grand pianos.

“It was the first thing to pop into my head,” he said.

Into the Occult – In 1964, not long after a religious conversion, Dali painted a vision of a Cosmic John (Untitled [St. John], 1964). He drew it again, this time from the rear, in 1965, a few years before his painting of the Christ as an Orange Monk. It is worth noting that both Dali’s work then and the clouds on the famous Imagine album (photo by Yoko Ono). Magritte’s well-known painting Son of Man ( 1964) – an Englishman with an apple for a face – certainly suggests the Savior, as the text from the Book of Daniel is a direct reference to the Chosen One*. But in this case, the Chosen One is identified by a green apple – which became the emblem of The Beatles in their middle period (Apple Records). This appears within the realm of the possible in Dali as well. In Living Still Life, 1956, the major elements of the central composition can be seen (as in the slightly modified illustration at the bottom) as the table, the grail and instead of a Host, which represents the Christ at the Sacrifice of the Mass, a green apple. In this picture, like many of Dali's, I get the feeling that he is sincerely following the dream or vision, then throwing in extra elements to obscure the essential theme. It is like the Magritte’s suggested something perhaps of the occult related to The Beatles, who came into their arc of creativity from 1963 to 1968. Commentators have noticed that Dali’s Man with His Head Full of Clouds (1936) looks like a “negative image painting” (something from the Unconscious, not yet manifest) and it has reminded them of John Lennon with his head in I Spy children's books, and not far from The Beatles with the Sgt. Peppers cover. They said they put in pictures of people they really admired, then a lot of people they didn't like at all. (This grail item works through Dali's work as a "dual nature" devise - suggesting two natures; the one earth-bound, the other cosmic.) Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono knew Dali and met with him in Paris six days after their wedding at Gibraltar. An assistant to Lennon reports that Dali thereafter tried to work with Lennon on different project, but Lennon demurred.

*from the Catholic Encyclopedia: In the great vision of Daniel after the appearance of the four beasts, we read:

"I beheld therefore in the vision of the night, and lo, one like a son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and he came even to the Ancient of days: and they presented him before him. And he gave him power, and glory, and a kingdom: and all peoples, tribes, and tongues shall serve him: his power is an everlasting power that shall not be taken away: and his kingdom shall not be destroyed.”

The Lion of God . . . I’ve never particularly cared for the C.S. Lewis stories. Was the prose in which I could not become entangled – felt it was an analytical approach to the alchemy of the human soul with a guided exit (Alchemy for Optimists). You always knew the conclusion ahead of time, like with Christian rock bands. Also I considered that it was his Oxford colleague, Lewis, who Tolkien suggested when he wrote in the preface to his Rings book that he never cared for allegory. And as in Lewis’s disturning attacks on Gandhi, his oppositional side always seemed to overshadow his original points. (In Jung's dream below and in this picture, the snake and the lion, like the snake and the tree in Genesis, represent the primal Mother and the Father of Nature and the Universe or the yin and the yang. And if this was a dream of a still youngish man I heard related about a lion and a witch who lived in a closet and the witch dominated the lion, it would immediately come to mind that this man lived in cronic masculine weakness and was unable to fully find his [King/lion] masculine force and fully manifest it as it was dominated instead by the desicated feminine element [witch] which lived there with it - perhaps this is the story of Shadowlands and of England ground down into the ground and out of Empire at the end of two world wars. Perhaps this movie is so popular today as this archetype calls forth a crippled generalized pattern or manifestation. It brings to the fore older men who love war and the idea of war but found not the courage to serve when they were called as younger men when they were needed in war, but spent their time istead in college, in alchoholism and in drug use. The alchoholic, the mother-dominated boy, the negative masculine spirit is Surprised by Joy and finds it fleetingly. The positive masculine spirit naturally unfolding onto the biological path of manhood is Surprised by Sin [Fish]). But as a movie version of his influential work, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe opens this week, I believe it will have a large effect and will draw light and illustration to turnings in the 1950s, some of vast importance, which have been overlooked by the big splash of later years. I think it will have a major impact at the beginning of the new millenium. It is worth noting that Lewis is one of at least four artists, thinkers and writers who had the dream/vision of a Cosmic Lion: Magritte in 1941, Dali in 1930-31, Lewis in 1950, and C.G. Jung much earlier in the century. Two of these, Lewis and Jung, saw this image of the Lion as a transmutation of the Christ to the new millennium. Jung, in a dream vision in 1913, saw the alchemical figure as Aion, the mythological god-king with a lion’s head submerged in the depths of the Unconscious for millennia and now reemerging. I bring it up because my wife, who enjoyed the Lewis books as a child said she was surprised when she first heard of the controversy about Lewis presenting the Lion as a metaphor for the Christ, as she was always taught to see the Christ as a lamb (Lamb of God). That, I think, is precisely the point. With the view of Lewis and Jung, this is entering Aquarius, and the second vision or incarnation of the god-head.

To note: in Hinduism, the Buddha is an incarnation of Mahavishnu, one of the gods of the Hindu Trinity, identified as a lion man. Worth recalling the words and vision of Padmasambhava, the founder of the oldest of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism, written twelve hundred years ago: When the iron bird flies and the iron horse rolls on wheels, the Tibetan people will be scattered like ants across the face of the earth, and the teachings of the Buddha will come to the land of the red-faced people.

Orange Monk: Salvador Dali's dream of the Second Christ

2008-02-05T08:04:00.000-08:00

Since I read C. G. Jung’s essay, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies years ago I became interested in the change in millennia, particularly after my mother died in the mid 1990s and I had a series of extraordinary dreams for a period of about two years. We were, of course, at the same time approaching the end of the millennium and there was a good deal of hysteria (Y2K) and hubris/denial (the Dow Jones averages will go up to 35,000 and Jesus is coming!) – classic symptoms of Fin de Siècle. Jung wrote in the introduction to his essay that although few people would hear him, it was his duty to prepare those few who would hear for coming events which are in accord with the end of an era. “As we know from ancient Egyptian history,” he wrote, “they are manifestations of psychic changes which always appear at the end of one Platonic month and at the beginning of another. Apparently they are changes in the constellation of psychic dominants. . . . (etc., etc.) This transformation started in the historical era and left its traces first in the passing of the aeon of Taurus into that of Aries, and then of Aries into Pisces, whose beginning coincides with the rise of Christianity. We are now nearing that great change which may be expected when the springpoint enters Aquarius.”

For example:

(photo of Dali’s Temptation of St. Anthony)

This painting by Dali, “The Feeling of Becoming” in 1930 illustrates something rising from the unconscious “beyond the veil” as the shadow of the alchemical lion is approaching.

Dali’s “Invisible Man” (1932) (from the Unconscious) – the interior forms in the room (suggests inner life) as the shapes of table and chairs form a grand piano.

Pegasus arrives in the sky in 1944 (Untitled - Dali).

And in the same year (1944) the grand piano makes its way through the curtain in Dali’s “The Red Orchestra,” finding its way out of the unconscious and into every day life.

And here is Magritte’s grand piano:

The white grand piano that became the icon for John Lennon’s last moment in public life and the very last end of The Beatles and Lennon’s public life journey. The white grand piano has become a talisman for the song “Imagine,” Lennon’s swan song. At an impromptu TV memorial for the victims of 9/11 featuring popular artists and musicians such as Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Bono and U2 and Robert DeNiro, the centerpiece event was Neil Young singing Imagine on a white grand piano. The song Imagine takes its theme from Tolstoy’s late work on pacifism and religion. Lennon’s final impression was: Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you can, no hell below us, a brotherhood of man. This is precisely Tolstoy’s religious conviction at the end of his life. He advocated abandoning identity with a particular prophet as one would abandon nationalism. In one of his last writings on the subject Tolstoy clearly states his opinion: “Attributing a prophetic mission peculiar to certain beings such as Moses, Christ, Krishna, Buddha, Muhammad, Haha’u’llah as well as several others is one of the major causes of division and hatred between men.” Imagine also owes to The Gospel of Thomas (as do other of Lennon’s bits from late Beatles – The White Album). Elaine Pagel’s book Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas states that in Thomas’s account, Jesus challenges those who mistake the kingdom of God for an otherworldly place or a future event: Jesus said, “If those who lead you say to you, Look, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will get there before you . . .” In other words, Imagine there’s no heaven. (It is interesting that this makes the Christ’s view confluent with the Torah of Moses, Eastern Orthodox (Chronos) and zen.)

After Piano Man had been silent in the mental hospital for several months, a nurse came in and said, “Well, are you going to speak this morning.”

“I think I will,” he answered. He said he was from Switzerland and was sent back to his home. They asked him why he drew the grand pianos.

“It was the first thing to pop into my head,” he said.

*from the Catholic Encyclopedia: In the great vision of Daniel after the appearance of the four beasts, we read:

"I beheld therefore in the vision of the night, and lo, one like a son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and he came even to the Ancient of days: and they presented him before him. And he gave him power, and glory, and a kingdom: and all peoples, tribes, and tongues shall serve him: his power is an everlasting power that shall not be taken away: and his kingdom shall not be destroyed.”

The Lion of God . . . I’ve never particularly cared for the C.S. Lewis stories. Was the prose in which I could not become entangled – felt it was an analytical approach to the alchemy of the human soul with a guided exit (Alchemy for Optimists). You always knew the conclusion ahead of time, like with Christian rock bands. Also I considered that it was his Oxford colleague, Lewis, who Tolkien suggested when he wrote in the preface to his Rings book that he never cared for allegory. And as in Lewis’s disturning attacks on Gandhi, his oppositional side always seemed to overshadow his original points. (In Jung's dream below and in this picture, the snake and the lion, like the snake and the tree in Genesis, represent the primal Mother and the Father of Nature and the Universe or the yin and the yang. And if this was a dream of a still youngish man I heard related about a lion and a witch who lived in a closet and the witch dominated the lion, it would immediately come to mind that this man lived in cronic masculine weakness and was unable to fully find his [King/lion] masculine force and fully manifest it as it was dominated instead by the desicated feminine element [witch] which lived there with it - perhaps this is the story of Shadowlands and of England ground down into the ground and out of Empire at the end of two world wars. Perhaps this movie is so popular today as this archetype calls forth a crippled generalized pattern or manifestation. It brings to the fore older men who love war and the idea of war but found not the courage to serve when they were called as younger men when they were needed in war, but spent their time istead in college, in alchoholism and in drug use. The alchoholic, the mother-dominated boy, the negative masculine spirit is Surprised by Joy and finds it fleetingly. The positive masculine spirit naturally unfolding onto the biological path of manhood is Surprised by Sin [Fish]). But as a movie version of his influential work, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe opens this week, I believe it will have a large effect and will draw light and illustration to turnings in the 1950s, some of vast importance, which have been overlooked by the big splash of later years. I think it will have a major impact at the beginning of the new millenium. It is worth noting that Lewis is one of at least four artists, thinkers and writers who had the dream/vision of a Cosmic Lion: Magritte in 1941, Dali in 1930-31, Lewis in 1950, and C.G. Jung much earlier in the century. Two of these, Lewis and Jung, saw this image of the Lion as a transmutation of the Christ to the new millennium. Jung, in a dream vision in 1913, saw the alchemical figure as Aion, the mythological god-king with a lion’s head submerged in the depths of the Unconscious for millennia and now reemerging. I bring it up because my wife, who enjoyed the Lewis books as a child said she was surprised when she first heard of the controversy about Lewis presenting the Lion as a metaphor for the Christ, as she was always taught to see the Christ as a lamb (Lamb of God). That, I think, is precisely the point. With the view of Lewis and Jung, this is entering Aquarius, and the second vision or incarnation of the god-head.

To note: in Hinduism, the Buddha is an incarnation of Mahavishnu, one of the gods of the Hindu Trinity, identified as a lion man. Worth recalling the words and vision of Padmasambhava, the founder of the oldest of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism, written twelve hundred years ago: When the iron bird flies and the iron horse rolls on wheels, the Tibetan people will be scattered like ants across the f.ace of the earth, and the teachings of the Buddha will come to the land of the red-faced people.

SAlvador Dali's Visionary Texas - Who was that Masked Man?

2008-02-05T08:02:00.000-08:00

Salvador Dali's work yields to archetypal dream analysis. Through much of it an older European age is yielding and a new age ascends. Taken as a whole it becomes clear that life begins again as a new Creation on a new continent in Texas.

Note: The painting of the Buddhist monk by dali at the bottom is called "The SEcond Coming of Christ."

A few introductory notes on dreams: To understand your dreams, there is no other way. You must start from where you are. Now is as good a time as any, and it is perhaps a much better time than 50 or 100 years ago. There are a lot more resources available now. You can learn knowledge of dreams today from Native American sources, from the Kabala, from Tibetan Buddhism and Theravada Buddhism – which travels smoothly from Vedic to Buddhist without breakage in places all over Southeast Asia and into Indonesia – or from C.G. Jung and William Butler Yeats. Best introduction for Westerners in my opinion would be Faust, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and for English and Celtic people the Tolkien stories, as they restore an approximation of the Original Creation Myths of Ireland and Britannia, left behind in the 13th Century thereabouts when the North African Creation Myths of Genesis and the Pentateuch were brought north and superimposed by the priests. In dreams where Faust and Frodo went, you will go as well if you have the courage and the will to go there. Perhaps today there are too many sources. Studying pictures can teach the path of the Unconscious to the quiet mind. Above, top left, is a figure from the dead. He comes from the Unconscious and first begins his entrance as draped figure. A draped figure or a figure behind a veil often opens a dream guide - a guide from "beyond the curtain." This figure directly to the left, Enigmatic Landscape, (1934) will open to the figure top left and all the pictures below. Like many true dream journeys, this one begins with a Child leading the way. The Child in center of picture moving toward the veilded Spectre is Dali.

On-line now are a variety of dream forums which offer the Blue Plate Special. It is like going to the mall to find your true love. It is possible you will find him there, but not likely. Then again, remember that the gods always hide in the lowest places – malls, beat-up Detroit neighborhoods, crystal-gazing web sites (there is one shaman-woman I like out of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, at the foot of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, in the neighborhood where the movie Goodfellas was filmed).

Avoid two things: the Mister Potato Head treatment – the notion that in a single dream you are finding all the different components; your female side, or anima, masculine side, or animus, dark side, Self, Psyche and the Monkey God to boot. This will be a lifetimes’ journey and then it will be only a very small and partial journey. Dreams of Cosmic consequence tell a story and the story usually has a beginning, a middle and an end and sometimes goes on for several years or longer. Then other times it is all in one night or one moment, as in Black Elk’s great vision. I would avoid psychologists, and never pay to have someone tell you what your dream means. It is one of the things in life you don’t pay for. The culture is plagued with neurosis, and neurosis is generally dispersed generationally (or in a multi-generational pattern), not individualized. In my opinion, the greatest affliction today is Infantilism – the inner child theme. Like alcoholism or drug use, it reverts people back to childhood and MOTHER and prevents them from pushing on to the long and changing arc of adulthood and an honest death. This magnificent portrait above of Madonna and Child (1320) by Pietro Lorenzetti, expresses the cosmic life - the yin and yang - of the Western trajectory up until the 14^th century – all the Extraverted Karma is in the yin, the Earth Mother or the Cosmic Mother, while the Introverted Karma is in the yang, the Cosmic Child (in Lorenzetti's picture he is even darkened, in shadow, as the yang force was submissive to the yin force until the 1500s) – and notice how Lorenzetti's picture resembles our own Cosmic Child on the last day of his life – notice as well that his wife chose to wear black on the morning it was taken. But in this historic photo, Yoko's Cosmic Child is full of light, and Earth Mother has returned to shadow. Annie Leibovitz had taken a similar picture years before, but Yoko Ono was naked. The Cosmic Child is the Hindu archetype of the Deathless Child – the Taoist avatar, like the Christ Child and the Star Child, born every year to the Earth Mother on Winter Solstice. To see with the vision of this Avatar is to see "as a Child." To see "like a child” is the neurosis of Infantilism.

In the current mischief, the “inner child” becomes the neurosis and perhaps an entire generation suffers from it. C.G. Jung warned against the “inner child” as someone weak in spirit – and one is weakened in the spirit when he goes to a shrink – will not see “as a child sees” as Jesus came to after Cosmic Trasfiguation and as a Buddha does after Enlightenment, but “like a child” – reverting further to adolescence and irresponsibility. It is like recommending drug use or heavy drinking to make your pain go away. And like Heavy Drinking and Drug Use, it does work in making the pain go away, but it takes you off your path. The Pain you feel is the future ahead of you and your Unfolding into It – you’re finding your Way in the Creation. Avoid the Blue Plate Special.

There are two kinds of dreams – the first is a dream of being on the second floor of a building and wanting to be on the eighth floor. These are nervous dreams about everyday life – of wanting to get a promotion at work; the waiter's dream of forgetting to give a customer his cup of coffee the day before, the young professor intimidated by an upcoming lecture she or he must give and dreaming he is naked before a class; a dream of nails in your hands and feet when you have been “crucified” – treated arbitrarily and unfairly by a pedantic teacher, parole officer or wicked nun. These are dreams about the stresses of everyday life.

The other kind of dream is a calling from God to lead you to the path of wholeness – with yourself and with your community – at best, with God, and with the Universe. This is the Zen path, the Taoist path - in translation from the text The Tao te Ching, it is The Path of Integrity. You can learn to understand your dreams in a variety of ways, but most important you must see that dreams are not a separate part of your life. They are a most important part of your live, like love and the responsibility which associates itself with love. It is a life-long path and if you drop the ball one time you’re screwed.

Throughout his life Dali was inspiried by the South Lipez Desert in Potasi, Bolivia, and som eof his best known paintings take their background from that region. One of his most well known pictures, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), 1936, clearly takes an inspiration from this rock formation photographed by Maurice van Niekerk.

He also had a lifelong fascination with the New World and the North and South American continents. Dali spent years in the United States and painted many psychological impressions. Various elements live inthe desert and they can be seen connected by elements they share. The picture at top, for example, has a Knight on Horseback - a Skeleton; a KNight from The Land of the Dead. I have dreamed of such a character in my own dreams. Very often it is a messenger - a connector between the Everyday life and the Cosmic life. In Star Wars, a Jedi, who has powers both mortal and cosmic. In the terms of early Christianity, a Knight Templar - illustrated by two on a horse, as he has dual nature, human and Cosmic. This archetype is best described by Lao Tsu in the Tao te Ching as a "Knight Scholar of Dark and Mysterious Consequence." He rides in the Unconscious and he rides in real life. Lao Tsu mourns his passing in the Tao de te Ching, and laments that now his presence is gone from the earth - now we will have to draw up rules to live by. (We have lost our Intuition to the Inner Life.)

Clearly Dali's Knight here comes from The Land of the Dead and the landscape suggests a world that is dying. But behind the screen of nature - and such a screen like this is a common element in dreams - there is new life and a rainbow. The Horseman from the Unconscious faces and points left of screen, which always in organic life, be it Dali or Mother Whistler, points to the Inner World and to the Inner Life. Surely this Horseman is a Spectre of Death, but Death in a dream, is often a birth. And what appears frightening is auspicious (as novelist Gretel Erlick points out, " . . . the smae ship that brings out the Dead bring in the Birth.") This is the way of Dreams.

This figure will appear again in Dali's work, and in a more healthy state. Here is is in 1932, The Knight at the Tower. But in The Horseman of Death (above), in 1935, he brings the shadow of war falling across Europe. Giorgio De Chrico, forerunner of the Surrealists, painted Towers as well, in red and white and in the same time period. But I don't feel that De Chirico fully solved his riddle. Dali did.

Here is a third picture with the same elements, and filled with other stuff as well. In 1943, in this painting called Poetry of America, the Knight has completed his journey.

This is an unfinished painting, but as is it speaks volumes. First of all, the Knight, whom we ahve seen in at least two paintings has become real in the world. Waht was in the Unconscious trying to become real has arrived. The Knight is no longer on garde in armor or on horseback, be is sitting passively. The Creation has arrived. The Avatar like Kao Ste's Daark and Mysterious Knight, no longer has a role. We know he is the Knight because he still holds the staff and the tower is still present. And as the Knight has lost his individuated Cosmic nature and is now naked, the Tower is fully developed. But there is a new Avatar in this picture. The man on the right. And he is the Christ. The Christ in a new land in a new age. And we know from his wound that he is in Texas.

I find the tower to be interesting. It looks very like the clock tower at The University of Mighigan at Ann Arbor, one of my favorite places - partly because of the architecture of the campus. The style of Albert Kahn pervades the U. Michigan campus as it does Dearborn and Detroit. It represetns he new age of America as Ford did to Aldous Huxley, both with its light and dark side. It is the Power Principle fully incarnate - a man dancing with a another man - like Hegelian thesis and counterthesis, there is no yin present in the new age. There is only yang plus and yang minur - two male characters dancing. (Interesting, as Albert Kahn advanced the modernist perspective in Detroit, his brother did in Moscow - Hegel's force and counter-force; Two Men Dancing - Communist and Capitalists.).

There are elements in this picutre which work much as dreams work - a person will dream of a figure one night, and later it will develop or discinteegrate, but its nature will change one way or another. We know it is the Christ from another picture - and we learn form this picture that it is the Christ in the other picture, because of the nature of the wound in this picture. The would in the figure on the right is where Christ was wounded with the spear on Calvary. We know also by the candle in his head that he is the Enlightened One. and in this popular and remarkable work, Geopolitical Child Watching the Birth of the New Man, painted in 1943, same year as Poetry of America, we see that the oil is blood. Between the two pictures we know that the New Man - the Aquarian - is the Christ.

This is an important painting. Geopoliticus Child in America will be a basketball player. The Christ will fall into shadow, as in the Lorenzetti painting of 1320. The cleansing blood of Christ upon the earth is a oil slick carrying a coke bottle and a telephone. But this picture tells us something else. It tells us that we have entered time. And the hole in the egg/globe - the hatching in the new world is presented at the top of the tower as a clock. - the age has begun and is upon us.

I have seen the form hanging from the clock refered to as Africa by museum curators and writers, but I don't know why. It would seem that it was similar to taking the picutre out of context of the others. There are a good number of Dali's paintings of the North and South American continents with the North illustrated as a hole or an egg cracking - a birth image, and th eSouth dangling form it. Geopoliticus Child is the most prominent one. In 1949, in Baby Map of the World, he is ready for first steps. All these pictures appear to have the Andes and Patagonia trailing on the left.

All these pictures suggest the United States is a world being born again in a new age.

The oil flow in Poetry in America divides the U.S. as the Mississippi does, and pools in what ws considered the great source of oil in the 1940s, Texas. This would be the dance of the millenia ahead, that between the one on the one Coast, and that on the other. High on top would be the Tower, and below, the Desert.

What is more: as in the piano paintings, Dali brings Pegasus, the harbninger of Aquarius into the picture. IN 1941 he was invited to participate in a contest to make a picture of hte classic vision of the Western spirit rising out of the earth, the womb of the Earth Mother, and finding its new consciousness. The Temptation of St. Anthony marks the transition from Maedeval age and the Earth Mother consciousness, to the Renaissance and the rising vision of the Enlightenment. Sassetta has him leaving a cave in the earth in trepidation in the early 1400s and Matthias Grunewald his him torn apart by beasts in the early 1500s.

Dali brings in Pegasus, carrying Rome with him to the Desert.

From beginning to end, the Surrealists were on a spiritual quest, but an unconventional kind. Andre Breton wrote poems indedication to the 13th Dalai Lama. These is continuity today with artist, asa all organic and true artists are related. In recent years Yoko Ono and her son Sean participated in a concert for the benefit of The Campaign in Tibet. As mentioned before, Dali was fascinated with pop music and found it in the Unconscious where the Knight on Horseback lives, identified by a white grand piano. In 1957, it came from behind the curtain ( which seperates the quick from the Land of the Dead - and here in this picture critters are from the Dead/the Unconscious and In Between). Same year he sent it to the American desert - that would be the Texas Desert, still with a trace of the hills in the background of Poetry in America, but now in full daylight - where the oil was thought to be in this painting titled Rock 'n Roll.

Of course the Orange Monk, Dali's Aquarian avatar, landed in the desert as well - a desert on the edge of pasture and hinterland. Notice the common compositional elements with above paintings Geopolitical Child and Poetry in America; water flows from Pegasus dividing the painting, as oil and blood flow from the Christ figures above in Geopolitical Child and Poetry in America. The Horse dripping fluid centers the compostion as the Egg/Dancer with Candle dripping fluid does in the others. The connected secondary figures in Geopolitical Child and Poetry in America evolve to a dual dragon here, connected in all three paintings. This picture advances all themes in those paintings and forms a sequence with the earlier Tower painting. The new avatar, the Orange Monk, emerges from the Christ wound in the flying horse, Pegasus - the Christ in the above painting. The appearance of the dual dragons signifies a new creation (Khrishna holding the two eggs - Arthur and the two dragons). (Note: Pegasus, the flying horse, is in mythic terms the harbinger of the Age of Aquarius; see Jung, here. Orange Monk was painted in 1971. In 1930, Pegasus shed his skin, the sign of "new creation" - see reader's dream here for discussion - and took to the sky from a grand piano, played by a piano player who had two heads; dual nature - man and lion god - in Dali's great work, William Tell. See White Grand Piano for discussion.)

Texas and its desert is a place at once primal and sacred and it is stuck in between the Western world and the Eastern world. It is a desert in the center of the world. In the 1950s the story was told of a Texas Ranger who died/was killed and was brought back to life ("born again") by an Indian. The common parlance has it that this Indian, Tonto, the Ranger's side kick, was a submissive underling, shoeing his horses and polishing his Silver Bullets. This is the work of Revenge Demons (Where is Buffy when you need her?). In actuality, an Indian in a secondary role like this - be it in Cooper's Leatherstocking tales or in the episode of The X Files where Fox Mulder is guided through the Land of the Dead - is an avatar or spirit guide to the white man who has lost his Euro ways but not yet found full psychic footing in the new land. This is the primary myth of the North American condition.

The white man wears a mask. His identity is not revealed. Weekly we were asked on American TV when Dali was making these paintings, "Who is that Masked Man?"

We are the Masked Man. Our identity is not yet revealed. Even to ourselves.

THE THREE CELESTIAL ONES

2008-02-05T08:00:00.000-08:00

The Three Males archetype; the Three Maji, the Three Pure Ones, Abraham's Three Visitors; they always accompany an agent of change.

This essay and the last (Turning East) are parts four and five at the end of the Three Celestial Ones, a chapter in Notes from the Land of the Dead (to come next week) about the archetype of three males which appear in times of motivation and change in a culture. In the United States, the North/South contention has extended 400 years. The pivotal moment of change was the Jay Treaty of 1795 when the Virginian, George Washington, permanently cast his lot with New Yorker Alexander Hamilton and John Adams of Massachusetts. Thomas Jefferson bonded solidly in opposition with James Madison and Monroe. From then until now the Hamiltonian point of view has been the domonant perspective, running in opposition to the Jeffersonian perspective. More later. (See my political blog, Quigley: Culture, Politics, Sheep for some discussion.) To perceive this there has to be a greater reach than the Hegelian 3 x 5 card: thesis vs. antithesis = synthesis. Which usually comes out two men swordfighting and leaves Andromeda lost in the ozone. Most in the academy today see themself as the "antithesis" and thus will contribute, but they are as time-bound as the Pentagon. He is never selected, but Shopenhouer is still on the menu and so is Oswald Spenglar, and they offer a cosmology analogous to that one in which we live and anyone who can understand biology should be able to understand it.