A deeper/longer philosophical conversation from the Nightlight classroom today...one of my students raised some interesting points....enjoy if you like longer reading, otherwise, sorry in advance for the novel length. :-) Student: I very much enjoyed reading your horoscope for today. And it just reveals another layer of your mysterious (to me) stance on constantly turning the question back on the questioner, always putting a mirror to reality to face itself. That all is constantly relating to everything else, nothing ever stands alone (if I am understanding you correctly). It’s inherently dualistic, I think it might be correct to say that. Do you choose to align with that term or do you stay away from considering your worldview in that way? Youve mentioned it before. Anyway, very interesting, it takes some mental limbering up for me to grasp your perspective honestly, but it’s so intriguing. I love that this philosophy of yours, athat I perceive you have, is like a puzzle, like the rubik’s cube, that needs constant readjustment to figure out, and hardly ever lines up… Very nice. Good brain exercises happening there. But I do truly want to understand! Maybe in a linear way I am seeking understanding. -------------------- My response: Im not sure about the words stance as well as inherently dualistic. Im receptive to the perceptions youre having...that I have a stance or something like that...but isnt it just so tempting to want to reduce or define these things we see into definitions...rather than examining our response..our showing to anothers showing. For example...your descriptions rubiks cube, puzzle, constant readjustment...youre describing my stripes...or the stripes of the gods that show themselves in me. This was my favorite part of your letter because your descriptions were so great...I could see you, or I could see the gods, in them. Grasping perspectives is exactly what these stripes Ive put out tend to ruffle...we dont grasp perspectives...they grasp us...they show themselves to us...otherwise who is doing the perceiving of them? And we have to ask ourselves, what do we think we are grasping...something lifeless? The spirit is always wanting to grasp...but what it wishes to grasp isnt just some thing, some further validation of itself....it is soul..a particular...an aliveness...a stripe not just a concept...a showing or phenomenon, not just a mechanical explanation. And it turns out that it is the soul that does the grasping and the holding...thats why I say these things have US. Its our spirit, our ego, our sense of undifferentiated and ultimately free selfness, that desires soulfulness...a particularity that gives embodiment and stripes. Soul desires the illumination and quickening that spirit gives to soul...and the whiteness of soul thus becomes silvered (spiky, lustrous, condensed, hard, milky, cool, radiant). (This came from Hillmans talk that we looked at!) When we say something is spiritual, what we usually mean is better, or superior, or more than, or transcendent. In this rising above, we forget that love is blind. I dont mean this in a heroic way...more literally. This kind of blind, spirited love, is more like literally blind. Whatever we mean by spiritual, is often a blind statement of ignorance...divorced from or suppressive of soul...the actual phenomenon to which it is already and always being grasped BY. So, for example...someone comes in for a reading...they are very materialistic, hard headed rationalist...scientific...etc. A spiritual person thinks they have a more elevated position...a perspective that is higher or more evolved somehow...even if they try to love or hold compassion, etc, etc....all the christianizing of our judgments needs to be thrown out.....because a soulful person merely SEES the archetype...like an animal perceives your grumpy mood and responds with a little cowering because its not thinking about placating your grumpiness with christian kindness, etc. The response is aesthetic, sensate, and immediate, so to speak. In the reading I end up explaining how his loaded earthiness speaks to his rationality. Ive described his spots in archetypal terms. He then, upon seeing me seeing them, has the perceptual freedom to shift into a slightly different or completely different archetypal dynamic. He can shape shift because Ive relativized his spots (in fact eternalized them!). This awareness of the archetype that has us, doesnt mean we have to or need to be rid of it....however many people find a surprising liberty..even healing (so often a pompous word!)..when they receive this kind of perceptual freedom...this poetry of soul description. When he steps into another position, and I describe that position...artfully if possible...again, his sense of who he is, and what soul is...deepens. We become deepened into the mystery of our multivalences....and our questions and strivings about self, and spiritual goals or ultimate meanings, can find rest (if theyd like to rest or need rest) because they too are showings of stripes and the particulars of an aliveness (and they seem to be exhausted or exhausting us all the time). Nothing isnt alive. Nothing isnt ensouled. But then...taking even this too literally, we get a kind of pantheism that BEGS for the blank canvas...can we please have something that is not so sacred, precious, soulful, etc. So you see its not a stance, as much as it is an awareness of the darks of our own eyes (as Hillman also liked to say)...the negativa that is always simultaneously blocking how much we can claim to see or know in awareness. Spiritual people are always shouting for us to raise consciousness or integrate or become more aware. They are white without the silvering, blank eyed rather than deep eyed...(really Ive listened to that Silver and the White earth lecture by Hillman a bunch and it keeps giving and giving each new listen!) Dualistic? It depends on what you mean by dualism...dualism is part of what is...its another set of stripes or spots, so to speak. Its part of the conversation...the word inherently reflects that frustration of spirit...the desire to reduce, define, literalize, unify, singularize, etc. Spirit cant do it...or if they can, at the very least..its not the only trip available. What were talking about is psychology and soulfulness...polytheism..rather than monotheism. Someone could criticize me and say that Im spiritualizing soul...thats fair...because thats what I think is always happening. For example, when I see someone devoting all their time and energy to Amma, or yoga, or Christianity, or Islam, with an ultimate metaphysical goal in mind...I dont think to myself, how stupid, I think to myself how yogic or how christian. To me its a particular set of stripes..as were Hillmans or my own or anyone elses. Its perhaps a choice of how someone wishes to participate in eternity (our birth charts seem to reflect the idea of a choice!). To me, its at the very least annoying and at worst psychic terrorism when these kinds of spiritual people suggest that all stripes are the same, or that all paths are valences of the same stripes, or that theyre all leading to the same place. Who says were going anywhere, is my response? And if we are going somewhere, does it ever have any end? Why does it have to be toward a final end or telos? Maybe soul is forever...and life is already forever....why should we let time push us around? When I was a little boy...like 7th grade, I won this special national young author of the year award..along with a small group of other children from around the country....it was for an essay I wrote..and in one part of the essay I talked about time like a black jaguar...hunting us down...and how through a friends death I realized that time, the black jaguar, is actually an ally, moving with us rather than stalking us. I think the fear of death scares people into metaphysics...I like metaphysics the best when it feels like the poetry that a soul cant help but sing...because those people arent so manic and paranoid about ultimate, unifying explanations...Thomas Merton comes to mind... Also...who knows how far death goes...we think of death as a transition..a doorway...but maybe death is endless...as Roger Ebert once wrote, I dont remember what it was like before I was here, and so Im not worried about what it will be like when Im gone. Even highfalutin Buddhists speak of death like this...and yet our light and love based ideas of reincarnation, perpetual grooves to Nirvana, enlightenment, evolution, etc, are incessantly degrading of the love of death...or at least the soulful respect for its vastness. Were so quick to make the 8th house about rebirth, for example...but what makes the 8th house wealthy is its depth...depth and wealth are synonyms in Greek thought...not rebirth and wealth. Sometimes people make the criticism that Greek polytheism (archetypal mutlivalence) makes acting impossible....because we will always be in the grips of some relative archetype...and so its impossible to escape...yes...great criticism...if you are Hamlet and standing on the edge of a knife...to be or not to be. But who needs to take the paradox so seriously? Its the one who needs an answer...not the one content to play a part. Hamlet plays his part, even though he knows its tragic. Shakespeare was always getting at this in his plays...Julius Caesar, where the characters are all aware of omens and divinations about the bad things happening and yet they cant avoid their fate anyway....the point being that psyche and eros, soul and spirit, love ALL the participations (and hence to be or not to be ironically IS ONLY a question). So long as love (spirit) makes a division between things in overly literal ways, we will miss out on the real gifts that any form of spirituality or metaphysics or science has to offer us....that it is always also at its best when it dies...that when it fails us we are also deepened, etc. This isnt to say that everything is ultimately redemptive...because if we knew this, certainly, we would forfeit the beauty of that same scene in Hamlet To be or not to be. We dont want to give that up either, even if it is somewhat naive and dramatic. Its also essential. Its also soulful. Many things are in retrospect...thats also why both Cancer, and the Moon, rule soul and memory. The Moon weaves all things into a lustrous silver...makes it real, ..so my rubiks cube stripes...are they more silvered now?! Hopefully Im showing them well. The Moon is in Leo today, after all. :-) Its peacock pride day! I think thats all Ive got. Im going to share this with a few groups. Thanks for the great response...glad youre interacting with this stuff. I heard someone say that astrology was like a nerdy group of people that like to speak klingon...lol..fair enough!
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 20:05:47 +0000