Pansies of Numinosity

Some time ago, one of my blog buddies wrote to me, and mentioned his current enthusiasm for 'numinosity'. Numinosity, the numinous: great words, evoking primal magic, imagination, mystery, the Other. Best viewed mythically rather than tied down, chained, and reduced by logical definition. Such is not their purpose, their way.

Mention of the numinous immediately conjures, in my mind at least, the figure of Jung. It was a word that he used, and which I presume he was fond of. As time passes, my admiration for Jung only grows, his stature increases. Not that I am pretending he was a saint, a guru, an exemplar to be blindly followed. Not at all. But he put out so much amazing stuff, lots based on his own experience, and during a period of history when to speak about some of the things he spoke about required a good deal more courage and chops than it does nowadays.

Many modern Jungian analysts and therapists are, I suspect, extremely selective about the Jung that they deliver. Personality types, shadow work, dipping into the archetypes: OK. Creative imagination: writing, drawing, dancing. No problem. But some of Jung's stuff is seriously 'out there'. Alchemy, astrology, UFOs, throwing the I Ching before a consultation. No thank you very much.

Jung has been one of the greatest influences of all upon my own life. He has pointed me to pastures new as well as describing and clarifying a number of experiences that I was at a loss to understand otherwise. Deep within that great cauldron of investigation and exploration that is Jung, however, I spy two subjects on which, to be so bold, I suggest he was wrong.

First up, Christianity. Actually, he said many fine, insightful, and to some people shocking, things about Christianity. He saw with crystal clarity how the Christian ideal, embodied in the figure of Jesus Christ, was lopsided, accepting of one side only of humanity and the universe in general. It is the Light, and has no room for the Dark. Thus, darkness is denied rather than incorporated, and projected out into ultimate bad and evil, onto other beliefs and peoples, and comes to be embodied in the Devil. A religion that is so stuck in duality, identifying exclusively with one side of the divine equation without seeing beyond, cannot help but be a blight on this world.

Jung's deep understanding of this dualism, which remains unresolved, and which is therefore left to run amok throughout western culture in its widest sense, flowed out into his perception of topics way beyond Christianity as such. At the end of the section discussing alchemy in the cartoonish yet pretty spot-on 'Introducing Jung' by Maggie Hyde and Michael McGuinness, there is a picture of the alchemical 'Rebis', the reborn. This is the end of the line in alchemical studies. It is not a figure of obvious beauty, of supernal light, as one might expect, however. It is instead a weird-looking hermaphrodite grasping snakes, standing atop a crescent moon, and with a raven looking on. "Why is the desired goal of alchemy portrayed in this monstrous form?" is the question reasonably posed by a cartoon character in the book.. "Because," the cartoon Jung explains, "alchemy is the 'maternal darkness' that compensates for Christianity's 'paternal light'." I find this insight to be brilliant: it is a statement not purely about the religion in its literal sense, but concerns the entire project of western civilisation over the past 2000 years.

Note: there are variations in the depictions of the Rebis. Sometimes the hermaphrodite stands upon a winged dragon rather than a moon, for example. The overall nature of the illustration will be similar.

Jung had other ideas about the Christian God that would be perplexing, if not shocking and considered blasphemous, by any orthodox believer. He speculated that God remains imperfect and continues in a state of transformation: he is a still-evolving God. These statements would raise the blood-pressure of any self-respecting theologian, for sure.

Yes, despite seeing all the nonsense that is Christianity, Jung couldn't let go. He continued to place hope for the future in changes in the Christian religion. I suppose that this strange course of events was based on his premise that spiritual answers for the west need to be based in our roots, our history, our own traditions rather than importing them from the orient or elsewhere. Fair enough, I would say. But Christianity is not really an indigenous tradition to western Europe. It was, in its time, a foreign import, first introduced through the late Roman Empire in search of a unifying factor for its own crumbling edifice. And, what's more, orthodox Christianity is a system at the service of a false god. I nowadays insist upon this. It is based on the great impostor, the demiurge as perceived by Gnostics, the one who pretends to be the creator of all. He and his cohorts, the archons, whether we take them literally or metaphorically. The Gnostics were right on this. So there can be no healing in the west that is based upon a falsehood, a distortion, an untruth.

So I find it slightly laughable, raher quaint even, when Jung gets excited about the Catholic Church proclaiming the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1950. "The most important religious event since the reformation" he apparently called it, since he considered it as giving a place to the feminine in the spiritual realm, expanding the trinity (God the father etc) into a more complete quaternity. Had he lived a little longer, Jung might have seen how irrelevant Christianity, or any dogma-based monotheism, was for any spiritual hope in the modern world. It is with a touch of irony that we note how much of Jung's work has been instrumental in laying the foundations for much of the mystical/spiritual work of today, which moves far away from anything conventional Christianity is ever going to serve up. 'Spiritual life after Christianity' owes more to Jung than probably any other single figure.

So this is the first thing that I suggest Jung was mistaken about. There is a second: but, in the tradition of the pansy, I shall keep this short and leave it for another time.
                        

Tree of Souls

Part One

Always one to keep up with the latest trends and happenings, I recently revisited the movie 'Avatar'. Well, it was only released in 2009. I enjoyed it so much this time round that I watched it again.

OK, it's mainstream blockbuster. Parts of it are a bit naff, others cheesey. Even some of the deep ecology stuff is presented a bit clumsily, tending towards cliche and being hackneyed. All the same, all the same......

On release, 'Avatar' broke all box office records. Then slipped away into oblivion. I find this interesting: no mass Avatar fan clubs, no Neytiri party costumes. As pointed out ad nauseam on Pale Green Vortex, things don't just happen. So this is no coincidence, either. Despite the surface cheesiness, the underlying world-view of the Na'vi, the Blue People inhabiting Pandora in the film, is not easily disneyfied (though apparently they are trying). Taken seriously, it is downright dangerous. The deep shamanism of the Na'vi is shown as what deep shamanism properly is: not just an idea about ecology or the environment; not just scientific analysis of life, the world, and similar bullshit; not jumping onto pseudo-ecological political bandwagons. No. Real, direct, visceral experience. Becoming a different kind of being, with different kind of experience, really. And you can't have a whole generation of kids going around spouting about the interconnectedness of everything, and how the trees in this part of the forest know what the trees in the other part are up to, and how Eywa (Gaia-Sophia in the film) raises up in support if only you know how to call her. It's not going to help the cause of Empire one little bit. Best leave it alone to slip away quietly.

A fascinating spin-off from Avatar was the incidence of 'Avatar depression' -  thoughts of 'Avatar suicide' even - that was reported. People who had watched the film and absorbed the luminous beauty of Pandora, the world of the Na'vi, found leaving the cinema and returning to grey, boring, often nasty everyday world extremely difficult. These are people, I submit, who sadly rather missed the point. They cannot have not done their deep shamanic work and practice, otherwise they would realise differently....

Another fascinating snippet is the deleted scene 'the Dreamhunt'. Search this out and the whole film hangs together far better. Watch this, too, and you'll see why it wasn't included in the final 'product'. It involves our hero Jake Sully's initiation: when he becomes a man and truly one of 'the People'. It is explicitly psychedelic/entheogenic. In the context of ritual, he swallows a worm and is bitten by a scorpion, and goes off onto a lone journey, during which he sees various elements that will appear in his future. That funny 'little bits missing' feeling while watching the film disappears once you have found Dreamhunt. And, again, it's something else which is not going to be blasted across big screens the world over.  

Part Two

I haven't written for a while about windfarms. That doesn't mean they've gone away. Far from it, in fact. While in England, that green and pleasant land apparently, onshore windfarm construction has been terminated by government, here in Scotland it proceeds apace. Incredibly. Some parts of Scotland have been changed beyond recognition over no more than a decade. It's awful. I recently took the train from Carlisle, through the Southern Uplands and across some of the Central Belt, to Edinburgh. What much of this trip now entails beggars belief. It consists largely of a journey through a newly industrialised landscape, an almost continuous parade of windfarms plastered across hills, moors, farmland. A land compromised, degraded, devastated.

Just down the road from where I live, a monster windfarm is now under construction in the Monadhliath Mountains. It is called Stronelairg. We are not talking a few little windmills fluttering in the breeze: it is an enormous project, laying to waste vast areas of moor and peatland. All, of course, given approval by the Scottish authorities, despite challenge, protest, and the rest. Viva democracy.

Part Three

A while ago I was on a walk with a friend. I was extemporising on the subject of windfarms, and how the nature spirits would not be happy with the destruction of their habitat for these giant concrete-and-metal flapping structures. At that moment we were passing the edge of a new-build of bungalows on the fringe of town. "Don't you think these are worse?" my friend asked me. "They cover up everything; destroy the entire ground." I found this an extremely interesting question; I had no answer, except for "I don't know." The question went into my shamanic bag and we walked on. And thus things remained, until I took my recent gander at Avatar.

At one hour twenty minutes into the film, the bulldozers go in. Enormous, surreal, metal machine monsters march forwards, scrunching and trampling everything in their wake. Forest trees snap like twigs; animals flee screaming in all directions; Blue People run for their life. Pandora is under seige. It is truly awesome.

As I watched the bulldozers and their entourage laying waste to all and sundry, my mind flashed back to my friend and her question. "This is it!" an inner voice shrieked out loud and clear. "This is it, precisely." This is the image to capture the windfarm tragedy, more completely, more perfectly, than words can ever hope to do. I have written plenty on windfarms, but sometimes words just fall short. It is in their nature. And no word could compare to this.

On the Scottish hillsides, the bulldozers also continue to go in. The machinery is slightly less grandiose, but only just; and the archetypal configuration, as we may call it, is identical. Mile upon mile of access roads, gouged out of the heather, peat and rock; tons of concrete poured deep into holes sunk into the mountain. Then they arrive, the metal monsters themselves. carried on the backs of enormous lorries, so heavy that the earth quivers to announce their arrival. The spirits, the gods, the goddesses, are angry. I insist this is so.

No prayers of apology, atonement, redemption, are offered up. No conversation with the mountain, its spirits, the birds, the plants, the animals. No asking for a sign, an omen. 'Windfarm plan shelved due to omen': I have yet to read the headline. "We received a message from sister wind," project chief explained. "We're going home." No. As they say in the film, 'It's science.'

Most of the humans in 'Avatar' aren't on that alien world Pandora for the science. They are there for the richest mineral known to them: unobtanium. And the best deposits of all just happen to be found directly beneath a place most sacred to the Na'vi, their dwelling place, known as Hometree. The humans go for the jugular: cue further destruction of the forest and protracted battle scenes between humans and Blue People.

To the Na'vi, all the forest is sacred: their own energies are inextricably linked with those of everything that exists there. At the same time, some places are more sacred than others. Certain locations act as focal points, magnets, for connection, for energy, for healing even. Places such as the Tree of Voices, trashed by the bulldozers; Hometree; and the Tree of Souls, where uplink to the greater community, the community of ancestors, the field of magical healing, and to Eywa herself, takes place.

As it is on Pandora, so is it on Earth today. There is something special about the hill places, the mountain places, the upland places; and of these some are more special, more sacred, than others. This is not personal projection, to be unravelled on a Freudian therapy couch. It is more than that. Our distant ancestors knew this knowledge for sure. As, in my own vague, half-baked, and vaporous civilised way, do I.

The British Isles are tiny. For the most part they are crowded by humans, their spaces intensively utilised by humanity. So be it. But, as a result, its few remaining pockets of relatively untouched land possess value beyond scientific measure. Here - just, and with a struggle - can be accessed that vital connection with the rest of the natural world; the Power of the Land, if you will. It is this which is being sundered by the march of the windfarms.

The Power of the Land: in Britain, it is nearly gone. Its best chance is probably in the Highland areas of Scotland. Or at least it was until very recently. Remove this link and we are as good as dead. It is possible to get conspiratorial about the whole thing. It is not far-fetched to surmise that the severance of this connection by the devastation wrought by the upland windfarms is not an accident, but is deliberate, designed as a matter of disempowerment. While a person maintains a contact with the Power of the Land, they cannot be completely contained, corralled. One part of their soul remains free - which, more esoterically, is the one thing most threatening to the System that would control us all.

In this article, I have written from the heart; blood runs through the words in this piece. Yes, there are windfarms on Pandora.

Appendix      

Down here at Pale Green Vortex, we're not always over the moon over happenings at infowars. Alex Jones jumping up and down on his chair, ranting and raving about something or other, sending our blood pressure through the roof, can sometimes be a bit much. Having said that.......

Below is a link to a very recent programme that infowars produced on windfarms. It is set in the USA, where people tend to be a bit more proactive about things than is often the case in tired, worn-down, resigned-to-our-fate, Europe. It's well worth watching; and everything in Scotland is the same, except that it's worse, since Scotland is such a small place so the effects are that more dramatic.

Infowars, thanks for that. And remember, folks: you heard about it first on Pale Green Vortex.

https://www.infowars.com/exclusive-wind-energy-war-on-the-high-plains/


Images:

Top: At the Tree of Voices
Middle: The Tree of Voices, after the bulldozers
Below: Stronelairg construction. Amazingly, SSE put up this photo as a sign of progress, as a good thing! It is at this point that, should further proof be needed, I recognise that 'humanity' is not a unified species, but a collection of varying offshoots, with actually very little in common.




  

Nettles in the White House

Part One

As well as Pansies, as referred to in my previous post, D.H. Lawrence entitled another collection of his poems after plants: 'Nettles'. Even if, like me, you are pretty rubbish at knowing the names of plants, the difference between a pansy and a nettle is so obvious that I need elaborate no further on the general nature of the nettle poems.

So, yes. It makes you laugh, really. I was in the process of completing my pansy, all about cutting the discursive thought etc, when I found myself in the middle of a whole bed of nettles. Ouch.

Neil Kramer provides an excellent window on the mess out there. From the perspective of Self, he declares, the current state of affairs (cultural, social, political) is a disaster. To Soul it presents a challenge. To the Divine it's all a game. Certain events over recent days have really come forth to test the depth of our immersion in Soul or the Divine; or whether we're solely scrambling around in the ever-changing mire of Self.

I speak of Trump, and of Syria. I was one of the many who felt the Trump was a good thing: not necessarily due to many of his policies, which suck like anybody else's policies - but because his election suggested a sea-change: enough Americans had seen at least a little through and beyond the Elite who had been running the roost over recent decades. Trump was at least different, not one of them. It denoted a change of consciousness on the collective level. A bit, anyhow.

Overnight, with his action over chemical weapons in Syria, Trump has transformed. He has turned into Hilary Clinton. He has become one of them.

As I write, I'd say that this use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government is a suspect proposal. Even many mainstream media reports include words such as 'alleged' and 'suspected' in their reports. It is worth considering why on earth Assad would use such weapons in the first place. By all accounts, he has been doing quite well recently in the conflict in his own back yard. He knows what's coming his way if he resorts to such nasty tricks as chemical warfare. Unless he's on his own suicide mission, which is unlikely, he's gonna steer well clear.

I suggest that it behoves any responsible citizen of Planet Earth to look elsewhere than the crap that spews out of their television screens and oozes off the pages of the mainstream papers if they want to know what is going on. Afterwards you still might not know what's going on - knowing what's going on is a critically-endangered species nowadays, and its pursuit may no longer be an appropriate strategy. But at least BBC's 6 o'clock propaganda show will be put into some kind of perspective.

Part Two

During my years of English language teaching in London - we're talking late '90s here - I developed decent relations with quite a few members of staff. There was one, a female teacher in her late 20s, with whom I was always joking, swapping good stories, etc. Let's call her Rachel. One day, however, I did something, or said something about her, that she didn't much like. I have no idea what it was. Not serious in my book. Anyhow, life continued as normal.

Months later, all the teaching staff was enduring one of our occasional post-teaching-hours staff meetings. These were invariably interminable affairs, the school principal engaging in a series of lengthy monologues on matters with zero interest to anybody apart from him. Anyway, at one point he brought up the subject of the photocopying machine. Once more, it had broken down due to careless handling by teaching staff, creating inconvenience for all concerned. It was unnecessary, and inexcusable that a lone irresponsible teacher should create so much trouble for everybody else. At this moment, Rachel perked up. She looked straight at me, accusation glaring from her eyes, and firmly declared in front of the entire gathering: "Ian, I told you not to do that with the photocopying machine anymore."

All eyes were instantly fixed on me. Was I the guilty party, the bringer of mayhem to class preparations, the prophet of last-minute panic? And we all thought Ian was such a responsible kind of guy. Meanwhile, Rachel found this hilarious.

Creating suspicion, making false allegations - creating fake news, as is the trendy way of putting things - is dead easy. One of the easiest things on the planet. At least Rachel had no machinery at her disposal to rub the accusation into the school's collective mentality. Imagine if the receptionists were telling students every time they went to the desk about my photocopier crimes. If the teachers were informing all the pupils every lesson to watch out for me. The principal's henchmen included a bit about my photocopier misdeeds every time they went round the classrooms publicising trips to Bath and Cambridge. This is what the anti-Assad machine has at its disposal, in the form of the mainstream media. Everywhere you look, there it is: the chemical criminal.

What's going on with Trump I do not know. It would seem that he's been well and truly got. The transformation borders on the surreal. It is like if Pale Green Vortex suddenly gets full of articles entitled 'Nicola Sturgeon's funniest jokes'; 'Why Angela Merkel is my screensaver'; 'More windfarms, please'. Ironically, it was Trump who really brought into the public domain the term 'the deep state'. Now, I propose, that very same deep state has him by the short and curlies.

Part Three

Why I am an anarchist.

Should anybody still be needing further proof that the current system of politics is unworkable as far as accomplishing change for the better, the Trump story is it. Vast numbers of people in the USA voted in the Trump, out of a sense that the Old Order served them not; they wished for something different, maybe something that took them a little more seriously, even. The turnaround, the volte-face, by Trump which led to the attack in Syria, all undertaken with no explanation of policy reversal, was so quick, so total, that it leaves us in no doubt. The System, the Elite, Empire, call it what you will, has simply and effortlessly reset. Nothing has changed. The same old influences - whoever and whatever they may be precisely - are back in charge.

The current mainstream world - financially, economically, socially, culturally, politically -  exists to perpetuate itself and to further its reach. That is all it is there for, nothing else. This is so obvious nowadays that I am tempted to say that anyone doubting or questioning this is just stupid. It is as if the Gods have decided the time is right to give it to us straight: more and more situations in your face, smack bang, the Trump and Syria being the most recent and blatant of all. It requires a considerable effort of purposeful unawareness, a kind of self-disavowal, to maintain the deception. Wilfully turning a blind eye becomes an increasingly schizophrenic act. The Gods are trying to help us: Look, look! Great gifts! We bestow events with our blessings. They are your teachers, if only you will see. All we cannot provide is the awareness to see and to learn. That alone must emanate from you, the individual.

Thus is the configuration within which we live. Only a restructuring along anarchist lines will more properly reflect the individual and their deeper purpose, their self-determination. I do  not subscribe to the classic political view of the 19th century anarchists, however. Their notion was that all we need is to remove the bosses, the chiefs, the big nasties, and people will become free and good. In this they were naive and metaphysically limited. As I've discussed elsewhere, we are all here because it's where we are suited. It reflects our own being, the maturity (or lack thereof) of ourselves on the levels of Self and Soul. The System is not something we just smash to pieces, to enter into Utopia. No. We need to do our unique spadework; to grow, to use that language. Only then will the powers that strangle have no choice but to slink away into oblivion. Precisely how, I cannot pretend to understand. But this much is clear: it cannot work any other way.

P.S. When I was a child, I once fell out of a tree into the middle of a large bed of stinging nettles. I was wearing short trousers, and it was not a good experience.

P.P.S. I did not damage the photocopier.

Images: A bed of stinging nettles
              Bakunin, 19th century political anarchist
            

A Pansy for Spring

The idea of 'Pansies' is not my own. It comes from D.H.Lawrence. It didn't originate with him, either. He took it from 'Pensees', thoughts in prose as written by Pascal or La Bruyere. Though in his case it was a collection of short poems to which he conferred the name. And in typical Lawrence style, he amplified on what he was talking about: "Each little piece is a thought; not a bare idea or an opinion or a didactic statement, but a true thought, which comes as much from the heart and the genitals as from the head" ('Introduction to Pansies' in 'The Complete Poems of D.H.Lawrence'). Elsewhere,
Lawrence describes 'real thought' thus: "Thought is a man in his wholeness wholly attending."

'Pansies' is my mood - at this moment at least. Over the past eight months or so I have done a fair wack of writing, exercised my faculty of discursive thought, following a number of threads which I have felt it necessary to follow.

This has all been good, and I have reaped benefit. But I sense a change. Conceptualising, that certain way of thinking, has its place, but should be allotted no more than its due. This was presaged in the Tarot (at this moment, half my readers raise their eyebrows skyward, shrug their shoulders, and go and make lunch. So be it....). A Full Moon reading in the middle of March spoke strongly and insistently of 'banishing a skill', letting go. And work, a project, broken, along with its attendant ambition. Then, New Moon at the end of the month: new cards, a reading bathed in feeling, and the power of the dream. No swords, the image of the mental plane.

Related to this is a feeling that I have been doing many different things - writing, reading, communicating, walking, planning, discussing, cleaning, and goodness knows what else. All of these things are good things: I have succeeded in concentrating my life and its purpose so that little extraneous matter remains. Yet still it all can seem a bit of a jumble. I strive to experience the overarching intent - or presence.

Self - Soul - Sun (the Divine) is one way that Neil Kramer describes the journey along the mystic path. I'll buy that. 'Self' in this instance is what I sometimes call ' the petty self'. It is concerned with the matters of the everyday. Many people never see beyond its incessant, inexhaustible demands. It has its place. 'Soul' is 'big picture you'. The concerns of Self are as dust to Soul: mortgages, pensions, jobs, money; security, happy marriages, health even. Or if Soul does address these issues, it is from a perspective that is competely different from that which everyday life approaches them with.

Soul simultaneously seems to look after you -  it can be the guardian angel - yet is ruthlessly indifferent to our cares, fears, anxieties. It is, I suppose, intermediate twixt everyday me and the divine. And in -isms like Christianism this miraculous inner gift gets projected onto the priesthood, the cardinals, archbishops and popes; a disavowal of our own inner wealth.

I concede that things have been a bit different since the severe illness I succumbed to just over two
years ago. During those weeks of enforced doing-nothing, my everyday mind had no choice but to simply shut down as well. Many facets of the petty self ceased to function, and in the ensuing silence (aside from the incessant din of coughing) something else came through. This 'something else' had made its presence known before, in fits, starts, and trickles for years if not decades. But now it decided to move centre stage. Soul, daimon, anima, guardian angel, call it what you will: its voice came through loud and clear. It was ready to communicate, to converse. And it became my little secret, our communication. Part of me was done with 'this world', the 'deep concerns of everyday life' as Castaneda ironically calls them in 'The Active Side of Infinity'. Channels were opened up which have steadfastly refused to shut down again - not completely at any rate.

There doesn't seem to be much of a place for the Self - Soul- Divine thing in Buddhism, at least not in its more exoteric forms, and in the ways that I learnt and practised it. In Buddhism there's samsara, which is a bit crap; and there's nirvana, which is all freedom, release, liberation. Except in its more developed forms of thinking, where it is pointed out that nirvana and samsara are two sides of the same coin. You can't have one without the other, so you might as well just relax and go eat breakfast.

In case any Buddhists should feel indignant at my portrayal of its teachings, yes I know, I've simplified and caricatured. And if you're feeling indignantt, that's part of your samsara, so get over it.....

Self - Soul - Divine is better sourced in the fragments, the bits and pieces, that have come down
through the various mystical traditions of the west. Somewhere in the middle of that series of programmes 'The Great Work' (readily viewable on Youtube), Georgia Lambert delineates the different levels of meditation. The practice of meditation, she says, culminates in the ability to 'Shut up and listen'. And learning to shut up and listen is one way to look at the theme of this pansy. Too much mental activity, too much discursive thought, and you're dead. Forget it. Too much internal noise and chatter, even about apparently 'important things', has to be treated as an indulgence to be chucked out. Lots of reading and writing goes out the window, too. We're doing something a bit different. We're tuning in to 'Soul Intuition', outside and beyond the ruminating mind. And 'Shut up and listen' has a different feeling to it than the Buddho-Hindu mantra 'Be Here Now'. Shut up and listen implies a fine-tuning, a marvellous opening to intuition, an active and intentional receptivity. Whereas in comparison, being here and now sounds a bit passive and stupid to me.

I am grateful to the compilers, translators, and interpreters of the western tradition fragments. Some of this material has spoken eloquently to me. In particular, in the context of this pansy, in valuing and validating emotional and intuitive experience in ways which nothing that my decades in Buddhism did. I have been able to breathe a deep sigh of relief at having aspects of my experience properly acknowledged by anyone other than myself, it seems for the first time.