Table of Contents

Return to the Whole

Book One - Part I - In the Garden

Book One - Part II - Eden's Doorway into Archetypal Reality

Book Two - Part I - Call to Boundlessness

Book Two - Part II - The Meandering Journey

Book Two - Part III - The Wilderness Wanders

© 1996, 1997, 1999, 2001 by Ann K Elliott

RETURN TO THE WHOLE

JOURNEY TOWARDS WHOLENESS
as informed by
ART & RELIGION,
PSYCHOLOGY & SYMBOLOGY
and envisioned as

The Eternal Spiral Return
--master motif of the soul's journey--
the path of life--of heart, mind and soul.

From birth to mid-life the spiral moves out, expanding and extending until reaching the mid-point. There the direction reverses and the journey outward turns back inward--the soul back to its Source.

Return to the Whole explores the landscape symbolism of the Bible, from the perspective of Christic spirituality and Jungian psychology, informed mainly by four disciplines:

The role of ART in expressing the
emotional dimension of the spiritual journey;

The function of RELIGION in preserving
the essence of the teachings of those
who have known God intimately;

The provision, in the PSYCHOLOGY
of C G Jung, of a map of the known and
unknown territories of human consciousness;

And from the synchronization of the SYMBOLOGY
of East and West, an indication of an archetypal level
--a unifying field--where "the many are one."

A Personal Forward:

Through the convergence of the above four areas of interest in my life, the earlier perspective of my Christian upbringing has broadened considerably. Nevertheless, the memory of my childhood is blessed in having known a Jesus on whose lap there was always room. But then, a lap so universally available will, in time, require re-examination.

In re-evaluating the Jesus of my personal history, it occurred to me that in order to have been so everywhere available he would have had to have broken through some barrier--like the speed of sound or of light. And that he may or may not have been the first to fully succeed in making a fully conscious return to the Source of all being so as to be everywhere present. In any event, or so it seems to me now, it is to the higher, Christic perspective that all are being drawn-- individuals and, humanity collectively. This is also the substance of the vision of Teilhard de Chardin whose evolutionary expectations permeate these pages, as similarly do those of Sri Aurobindo.

I now even dare to imagine that none in the great sea of humanity can ultimately escape a net so broadly and deeply cast, and this because in a universe whose glue is an all inclusive love there is no place to escape to. Thus freed from the impositions and distortions of millenniums, the sacred words, themes and symbols of the past are now free to be re-clothed in new meaning. But for this to happen in a consciousness-transforming way, each of us is now called to discover the meaning they hold for our own lives, and answer for ourselves alone the questions they newly evoke.

Envisioned as a journey of self-discovery and ever-expanding consciousness, the life of the spirit requires not only an alertness to the questions life is asking but a clarification of the choices the questions set before us. By a repetition of this discernment process, the spiritual journey is propelled. Beginning in the garden of unconscious relationship to the Whole, the journey moves out into the wilderness of separation and alienation, up the mountain of enlightenment, across the river and into the promised land. Until finally, in the words of the old refrain, "our feet are planted on higher ground," with this higher ground understood as a consciousness that knows itself inseparable from the Whole, and from where--because its spiral path is eternal--the journey is never ending.

May we journey together in peace and all good,
Ann K Elliott, TSSF
December 15, 2001
elliott@murraycreek.net

BOOK ONE

Part I

IN THE GARDEN

Each of our lives began
in an edenic womb
of unconscious wholeness.

The Womb of Eden

Eden was a protected enclosure. Within the verdant garden's boundaries God's first children lived without fear of bodily harm or the pressures of necessity. They lived in a paradise of contentment and comfort. For companionship Adam and Eve had one another and God. For amusement they had the friendly animals. For nourishment they had but to pluck the sweet fruit of their choice. The idyllic innocence of their beginning was the kind we would wish for every child.

In truth, life began for each of us within an enclosure comparable to Eden. The maternal womb provided for our every need. There we knew contentment and comfort, until the time came when we had outgrown our protective walls. Then the necessity for expansion pressed in upon us. Instead of a place of comfort the womb became a constraining vise. A principle of life was at work. An inherent wisdom had taken over to apply increasingly greater pressure against the uterine limitations that now had become barriers to further growth and therefore to life itself. As with Adam and Eve, so for each of us the time came when we had outgrown our primal maternal paradise. We, too, had to suffer the trauma of expulsion into a larger and ultimately more needful and demanding world.

The story of physical birth, of psychological birth, and of spiritual birth all follow a similar pattern. Psychologically, we are born again and again. In fact, as someone has observed: "We cannot be born enough." Spiritually, too, the need is to die, again and again, in order to be born anew in spirit."

O Felix Culpa

The story of Eden is about alienation from an original Whole of which we were an unconscious part. That Whole was God. What follows, from Genesis to Revelations, concerns humanity's long trek back into relationship with God, but with the difference that the longed-for return is to a fully conscious union. The longing impels the journey. As pilgrims we move from one stage to the next. The journey progresses according to the intensity of our desire. Saints are those who, having gone before us, desired God the most. In their union with God they increased the attraction of the Whole towards which humanity, as an evolutionary necessity, is being drawn. Or so has Teilhard de Chardin envisioned in his The Phenomenon of Man, and also St Paul in his Epistles.

What happened in Eden--the unfortunate event that caused the estrangement--turned out to be the "necessary sin" by which humanity would become aware of its need to be found, redeemed, and reunited with God.

O truly necessary sin of Adam,
which the death of Christ has blotted out!
O happy fault
that merited such and so great a redeemer!(1)

How often it happens that some painful event or realization turns out to be the very means by which our desire for a closer union with God is rekindled. Often, too, in human relationships it takes a crisis to deepen the roots of love. Our souls grow also through the pain of crises. In the life of the soul times come when we begin to sense, in some area of life, the acute pain of unfulfillment. Some neglected or unknown part of oneself presses to be born. If the inner voice is ignored, something in us is in danger of dying. In this way we sin against our innermost Self. But if we "go with the pain," this may jeopardize another aspect of our life. In becoming conscious of our own needs we are in danger of going unconscious where the needs of others are concerned. Preoccupied with self we loose touch with the deep ties by which we are bound one to another. In this way we sin against others. In truth, times come when we are compelled to grow. Grow or die. The paradox of life is death. But in a relationship, when we exert self-will we drive a wedge between ourselves and the other. In seeking to fulfill our own needs we bring upon ourselves the pain of alienation, thus exchanging one pain for another. Of necessity we sin, alternately against ourselves and others. Again and again, in our struggles with self-will and the "necessary sins" by which we grow, we come face to face with our own need for redemption. In seeking forgiveness we find release. In acknowledging our need we are renewed. In newness of life we can once again give to both ourselves and to others. In doing so we offer a part of ourselves as a sacrifice. Like obedience, sacrifice is not sacrifice unless it goes against self-will. But when it does it brings the power of atonement down into human lives in order for human life to be lifted to a higher level.

The Image of the Whole

The biblical story of redemption begins in a garden. The design of this garden is an image of wholeness. The dynamics of the design express what it is to be a truly whole human being.

"Yahweh God," the account begins, "planted a garden in Eden which is in the East." Symbolically East points to an inner, non-physical level of reality. With this one word we are alerted to the symbolic meaning of the story. It is where the journey towards wholeness begins.

In the center of the garden was a fountain. Beside the fountain God planted two trees. And from the fountain four rivers flowed, fanning out so as to water the entire surrounding land. First the one, then the two, then the four. This numeric pattern coincides with the way a mandala is drawn. John Sanford points out that

A mandala is a concentric design that represents or symbolizes wholeness. In a mandala everything is grouped around a center. The shape of the mandala is circular, or, sometimes, square. In a circle, every point on the circumference is equidistant from the center, so the shape of the circle suggests balance and completeness.

. . . Because of the mandala shape of the garden, we are met immediately with the suggestion that the story is about wholeness--how man was originally contained within it, but then fell away from it.(2)

A garden itself symbolizes the kind of environment in which reconciliation can take place and therefore consciousness evolve. This is because

The garden is the place where nature is subdued, ordered, selected and enclosed. Hence, it is a symbol of consciousness as opposed to the forest, which is the unconscious . . . .(3)

By design a mandala is enclosed, selected and ordered. In a mandala everything is subject to its center and all the parts are in a balanced and complementary relationship to each other. Additionally, all are encircled and included within the circumference of the design as a whole. The progressions of a mandalic design are illustrated in Figure 1: first the point of origin (a) around which the circle is defined (b); then its division into two (c), and then into four (d). The familiar yin/yang symbol (e) is another way a circle can be divided equally in two, and when this again is divided in two (f) the final progression illustrates the dynamic, outwardly expanding movement of the "four rivers" by which the whole of the territory of Eden was made "fertile."

A mandala emulates what it is to be fully alive with energy flowing between all of the parts that make up the whole of who we are. When energy is blocked in any given area, then that part of the whole is not, for all purposes, alive. Though physically alive there are those who appear to be spiritually dead: though mentally active some persons appear to have been rendered emotionally dead. Yet God, if the mystics are right, is alive in all of creation and the mystical journey is towards this realization. Self realization is a waking up to the flow of spirit in every part of our lives, and to ourselves as integral parts of the all that God is. The lives of the mystics suggest that desire for God, and to live unceasingly in God's presence, is what empowers the spiritual life. A continuous "circumambulation" of spiritual energy is said, in the East, to be the "secret of the golden flower," and to result in the creation of the "spiritual" or "diamond" body. Biblical symbolism, when taken as a whole, is about the process that reawakens the soul to its oneness with God. Mandalas are symbolic of the process. The more complex or compound the mandala the more progressed the process symbolized.

The Balanced Wheel

The one word that describes a mandala is balance. In the final verses of the Paradiso, Dante tells of his vision of the Whole as a golden-centered white rose whose unfolding petals represent the souls of those who have "returned" to "conscious innocence." In essence Dante's vision is the same as the "golden flower" of China, and the "thousand-petaled lotus" of India. Entranced, Dante experiences himself

. . . being turned
instinct and intellect balanced equally
as in a wheel whose motion nothing jars.(4)

Walter Russell was a Twentieth Century mystic and scientist. As recorded in his Message of the Divine Iliad, he was told that if God could only give humankind one word that word would be balance. If it would take two words those two would be rhythmic balance. And if three words were required they would be rhythmically balanced interchange.(5)

When we have come to know ourselves as part of that rhythmically-balanced "wheel whose motion nothing jars," then we will be home. We will have returned to the Whole. We will have attained union with God and know ourselves as inseparable from the All that God is. The question is, how do we get there? "There is but one possible way," wrote English mystic William Law, "and that way is the desire of the soul turned toward God."(6)

The Fountain in the Center

Just as balance is implicit to wholeness, so is movement within the whole. Just as Dante's mandala moved, so does the one described as the garden. Just as the garden is circular, so, according to tradition, is the form of the human soul. And just as the garden has a center so, in the New Testament, Christ is the center from which living waters flow.

Jung suggested that the center of the human psyche corresponds to the image of God in which we are created. He called this center the Self and thought of it as a fountain of living water from which four rivers flow. The symbolism of Eden corresponds to what Jung discovered to be the quaternal structure of the human psyche with its center as the source from which every area of life is meant to be energized and made fruitful. Referring to the centered-in-Christ Self, Jesus said to the woman at the well:

Whoever drinks this water will get thirsty again; but anyone who drinks the water that I shall give will never be thirsty again: the water that I shall give will turn into a spring inside him, welling up to eternal life.(7)

Eden's Four Rivers

Jung made the observation that "In the history of symbols, quaternity is the unfolding of unity."(8)When we stand still in the center of a circle we are in relationship to four points on the circumference: one that is before us, one behind us, one to our left and one to our right. We are most visually aware of the one directly before us, and only peripherally so of what is to our left and right. But in order to know what is behind us we have to rely on other means of perception, such as the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. According to Jung, when an "unconscious content enters the sphere of consciousness" it already has split into four "by virtue of the four basic functions of consciousness." The content presenting itself

is perceived as something that exists (sensation); it is recognized as this and distinguished from that (thinking); it is evaluated as pleasant or unpleasant, etc. (feeling); and finally, intuition tells us where it came from and where it is going.(9)

Jung was in no way limiting to four the ways humans function, but rather comparing consciousness to the cardinal points of a compass, and freedom of function to an agility of consciousness that allows a person to be moved by the spirit in any direction appropriate. When this is so, then a person's entire life--mind, body, soul and spirit--are in the kind of balanced, harmonious relationship that the four centrifugally-spiraling rivers out from Eden's central fountain symbolize. Figure 2, from a medieval Celtic manuscript, reflects this truth.

Figure 2

A river to be a river has to flow. Flow suggests a dynamic, empowering force that causes things to move, such as the force of gravity by which the four rivers of Eden are moved out over the entire fields of Eden, making them fertile and productive. It would seem then that Eden, according to the dynamic symmetry of its four rivers, was never intended to be a static state of bliss, but rather a living, moving, revolving, evolving reality empowered by a dynamism that flows out from a central point and from which life itself, the Tree of Life, springs forth. Jung made reference to Eden's rivers when he wrote:

For the Church Fathers Christ is the source, and Paradise means the ground of the soul from which the fourfold river of the Logos bubbles forth.(10)

The Heaven-Earth Axis

If four rivers, depicted as two crossing axes, divide Eden's horizontal plane, its vertical dimension, the Heaven/Earth connection, is defined by a third axis. In drawing a circle the circumference is scribed around its center, but symbolically considered a circle is a flat representation of a sphere, and in order to represent a sphere the central axis around which it rotates must somehow be inferred. The graphic motif that most simply expresses three axes is shown in Figure 3: The "X" represents earth divided by two horizontal axes; the "I" stands for the vertical axis by which heaven and earth are spanned. These same three axes encompassed by a circle form the ancient "sun wheel," a motif adopted by gnosticism to mean Jesu (I) Christo (X) the sun (O) of God."

To early philosophers the Tree (or axis) of Life was the lifeline of the spherical soul. One very early source in elaborating on this theme compared the soul "to the sphere of the moon, but . . . furnished on all sides with eyes."(11)

Similarly, the Garden in Eden is an image of the soul at its point of origin when it was in an undifferentiated relationship to the whole, and therefore "furnished on all sides with eyes." Taken altogether the symbolism of Eden describes the original inner landscape of the soul at the beginning of its journey into consciousness. As with every child in his or her outward-bound journey through life, the soul foregoes (forgets) its original state of unity. But in doing so begins a journey back that is a knowing return to the Whole.

The Eternal Return

Another place the message of eternal return is found is in the two-way interchanging spiral motifs of peoples all over the world. The spirals in Figure 4 are from Petrie's source book.(12)

As a general interpretation Cirlot defines the spiral as a "schematic image of the evolution of the universe." He adds:

In the Egyptian system of hieroglyphs the spiral . . . denotes cosmic forms in motion, or the relationship between unity and multiplicity.(13)

Also concerning the double spiral, Cirlot suggests these are the "flattened projection of the two halves of the egg of the world,"(14)Today we tend to look upon these designs which date back to Megalithic times as "primitive art." But it is more likely that to those who chiseled them in stone their art was also their religion. And as religious symbols they evoked in peoples of the past a feeling of being in relationship with the cosmos.

As an experiment, using your finger tip, trace the outline of Figure 5, moving back and forth from the center of one spiral to the center of the other, and from the other back to the one, repeating the movement until you sense its centering, balancing, calming effect. Next, with eyes still on the motif and using both hands and arms, trace its outline in the air.

Seeing Ambidextrously

In the evolution of consciousness perception into the nature of reality changes. This can be a problem for those who regard themselves as called to maintain the status quo. In Jesus' day the Pharisees were the keepers of the Mosaic Law. Today we would call them "Bible thumpers." But their fundamentalism blinded them to the law of the Spirit and thus they became breakers of the higher law. Jesus, on the other hand, understood the effectual operation of the higher law. "I have come not to abolish [the law and the prophets] but to fulfill them."(15)In his obedience to the higher law he fulfilled the lesser law. From his consciousness of unity with the Father he could say that to see the action of the one--the Son--was to see the action of the other--the Father. This, however, so offended the Pharisees that they felt compelled to undermine what they considered a threat to the Mosaic Law. Today human nature is not that much different but we do have language and more general insight into the workings of the human psyche. Therefore we can recognize that it was not the Law but their egocentricity that was threatened. Self-honesty tells us that we react similarly when the "masks" we wear, in order to pretend to be what we are not, are threatened.

To unmask ourselves so as to stand naked-faced before ourselves is shadow work. This means facing up to the evil proportioned us as our share of the dark aspect of human nature. To shine the light of consciousness into our own dark inner recesses is to do our share of transforming the collective. This seeing through the false image was what the Pharisees couldn't bring themselves to do. They couldn't "own" their own shadow. So they opposed it "out there." Here, in the area of shadow work, is where it becomes necessary to think paradoxically, to see as Jesus did, even as to how intentionally-directed evil can serve God's ultimate purpose. Referring to "The Miracle of Paradox" Robert Johnson notes that:

To transfer our energy from opposition to paradox is a very large leap in evolution. To engage in opposition is to be ground to bits by the insolubility of life's problems and events.(16)

To see paradoxically is to see the opposing sides as the parts of a whole: now this, now that; holding one view in the left-hand and the other in the right-hand; then bringing the two together as the left and the right of the whole.

To be able to take hold, however lightly, of two seemingly opposing points of view opens us to what Nahum Stiskin, in his book The Looking-Glass God, describes as a way of seeing the two faces--the front and the back--of the one ultimate reality.(17)Stiskin refers his readers to another book, The Ambidextrous Universe,(18)which concept is illustrated in Figure 6.

Using the four rivers of Eden as an image, imagine a sphere divided at its equator and as having an exact center that is shared by both left and right hemispheres. Then imagine the four rivers flowing out from this shared center into both hemispheres so as to appear in mirror-opposite relationship. The rivers to the left flow clockwise; and those to the right flow counterclockwise--the two in seemingly opposite directions. But if the two hemispheres are next imagined to fold back into the one sphere from which they were originally divided, then their oppositeness--their ambidexterity--disappears. Multiplicity is swallowed up in unity. The divided is reunited.

All Is Well

When, due to something we have done or left undone, we are left with a sense of separation either from God or others, we experience a sense of loss. But when we turn from moving away to moving back into relationship, then joy returns: "the rivers clap their hands, and . . . the hills ring out."(19)Moreover, there is something about an act of reconciliation that enables us to move beyond where we previously were. Through an act of self-will we fell away, maybe even necessarily so, but in returning we find that our consciousness has leaped over former obstacles.

For a number of years I was estranged from the Church. Then, after my mother's death, I began longing for "Mother Church" into whose arms I had been born and whose memories for me were happy. One day I heard an inner voice speak resolutely. "I'm going back," it said. And when I did I experienced a sense of well-being, a welling up of joy. Before leaving the Church I had come to see it as full of faults and imperfections. In the intervening years I had done some "shadow work" of my own so that on returning I found myself more at peace with imperfection, both in myself and others.

The most essential meaning of the familiar four-armed whirling cross, the same motif as Eden's rivers, is "All is well" . According to Pennick this ancient and universal design symbolizes "the rotation of the heavens about the central axis of the world," an orderedness that communicates "God is in his heavens, all is well in the world."(20)So it is with ourselves when we feel contained within the all-embracing arms of God and know ourselves to be part of his all-encompassing universe.

For some the symbols and rituals of the Church have lost their meaning, but for others the Church still can be a nurturing connection to the maternal heart of God. In offering unconditional love the Church fulfills her feminine role. For others the Church is a connection to a loving father and offers the stability of tradition and an opportunity to grow through serving others. For the soul to have a sense of well-being both kinds of love--that of a mother's and that of a father's--are necessary.

The "all is well" whirling crosses in Figure 7 are from church graffiti of English medieval origin. They are similar to the Hopi "Kachina" symbolism in which the arms sometimes are shown moving clockwise and sometimes counterclockwise, the former "showing affinity" with the sun, the masculine, and the latter with the earth, the feminine.

The Fulcrum of All Things

There is a further symbolic relevance to Eden's four horizontally-flowing rivers when we consider the center from which they flow as the earth-to-heaven axis of the garden. As already shown in Figure 3, the three crossing axes form the oldest known symbolic monogram for Christ, the one most widely used by the early church. The "I" is the Greek equivalent of our "J"for Jesus and the "X" the Greek equivalent of our "Ch"for Christ.

These same letters also form a geometric pattern--the six-spoked hexagon--that is pregnant with meaning. In nature, the hexagon is the structural basis of the snow crystal. From the countless microscopic photos studied to date, no two have been found to be alike. This fact is attributed to the variables of temperature, moisture, and air currents. Yet every snowflake is based on an unvariable hexagonal theme. Moreover, this same geometric pattern is the basis for the Star of David which is to the Hebraic religion what the Cross is to the Christian religion.(21)

As Fideler notes:

For the earliest Christians, the cross symbolized the center of the universe, prefigured by the tree of Paradise which was surrounded by four rivers before the beginning of time. As Hippolytus, the third century Bishop of Rome remarks in an Easter sermon, "This tree, wise as the heavens itself, has grown up into heaven from the earth. It is the fulcrum of all things and the place where they are at rest. It is the foundation of the round world, the center of the cosmos. In it all the diversities in our human nature are formed into a unity. It is held together by the invisible nails of the Spirit so that it may not break loose from the divine. It touches the highest summits of heaven and makes the earth firm beneath its foot, and it grasps the middle regions between them with immeasurable arms."(22)

Jacob's Ladder

The etymologies of axis, axle, and tree are closely akin. The tree that reaches for the heavens while sending its roots into the earth is like the human being who, as a soul/body unity, lives in both upper and lower dimensions of reality.

The heaven and earth of a tree, of a body, or of a soul are connected by an axis. In a tree its trunk is the way by which the moisture and dark nutrients of earth interchange with the light and warmth of the heavens, causing the tree to grow. In the human body the spinal column serves as a similar, vital axis. The soul also has a means by which its heaven and earth are connected. Jacob dreamt of this axis as a ladder reaching from earth to heaven on which angels were ascending and descending. He saw Yahweh standing there over him and heard him renewing the covenant he had made with Abraham. Thus Jacob was assured, at this crucial point of his life, of Yahweh's ever-abiding presence and help. Jacob, in turn, made a vow of faith to Yahweh, thus renewing Abraham's part of the covenant.

Jacob's Ladder symbolizes the two-way, divine-human axis of communication. Edinger describes the ladder as symbolic of the ego-Self axis by which "the personal ego-world and the archetypal psyche" interpenetrate. He quotes Blake on the bridging of these "lower" and "upper" realities:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.(23)

Ezekiel's Wheel

But an axis not only unites, it also opposes. By definition it has two opposing, tension-creating poles. These poles are vital in the life-sustaining processes by which the balance of life is maintained. In the body old cells are constantly dying and new ones being created. Physical, mental, emotional and spiritual life and health are created and maintained by an interchange between polar opposites. Physically we breathe in and we breathe out. Mentally we take in new ideas, inwardly digest them, and then eliminate what for us is irrelevant. Emotionally we are moved like ocean waters, alternating between high and low tides. Spiritually, we ascend the mountain top only to descend back down again into the valley.

An axle holds apart the two opposites it unites. The axle is the spindle by which two wheels are joined so as to revolve and move. In automotive language, a "live" axle is one in which driving power is transferred to the wheels. Something similar to this is suggested in Ezekiel's vision of the four living creatures and the four moving wheels. In his vision Ezekiel observed that the creatures were able to move in any direction and "without turning." Moreover, "Wherever the spirit would go" the creatures also went, the wheels rising along with them. "For the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels."(24)

Edinger refers to Ezekiel's vision as "a numinous mandala-image of the Self."(25)He also calls attention to Jung's observation that in Ezekiel's vision Yahweh, for the first time, addressees one of his prophets as "Son of Man," thus prefiguring "the idea of the higher man" that is to be fully revealed in Christ. According to Edinger, Jung viewed Ezekiel's vision as "two well-ordered compound quaternities," and used it "as a model for his most differentiated formula of the Self."

But back in Genesis the mandala described is still a simple, single quaternity. The evolution of humanity into more fully differentiated consciousness is just beginning. With Ezekiel's vision its complexity is doubled. In St John's Revelations the progression becomes the "four-squared" New Jerusalem.

Humanity's Evolutionary Axis

Excitement grows as we contemplate with St Paul the axis along which humanity is evolving:

Just as all men die in Adam, so all men will be brought to life in Christ; . . . And when everything is subjected to him, then the Son himself will be subject in his turn to the One who subjected all things to him, so that God may be all in all.(26)

Teilhard echoes St Paul in describing Christ as the Omega Point towards which all of humanity is converging. According to Teilhard, and as illustrated in Figure 9, Christianity is the "principal" but not the only axis along which humanity is converging, "principal" because it is "where faith and hope reach their fulfillment in love."(27)

Teilhard envisioned Christ as the center of the cosmos towards which all things were being drawn. His conviction was that when the mystical Body of Christ would be complete then the Risen Cosmic Christ would unite Christed humanity under God. So that, in the grand and glorious culmination of creation God truly would be all in all.

Eden's Four-Fold Polarity

Eden then, in symbolizing the human psyche, has two pairs of polar opposites: one at each end of its vertical axis; and one at each end of its horizontal axis. Its vertical pole relates to heaven and earth, or the divine and the animal extremes of human nature, and the horizontal pole to "Adam" and "Eve" as symbolic of the masculine and feminine polarity inherent to human nature. The well-being of the human psyche depends upon a balanced interchange between these four poles. The Cross in Figure 10 beautifully illustrates this interchange. It is of Celtic origin of an unknown date.(28)Note how dynamically alive its design is, suggesting it could have been someone's "healing image," perhaps the means by which the one who made it became reconciled to the loss of a loved one.

Our lives, our cultures, our religions--all are out of balance when either the masculine or the feminine prevail. Robert Faricy writes of this in his comparison of the psychology of Jung and the theology of Teilhard. He calls for the universal church to re-examine its traditional, masculine interpretation of the creation story for ways this point of view devalues the feminine. He contends that in their devaluation of the feminine those who have perpetuated this theological stand have also fostered an exploitive attitude towards nature. The two--nature and the feminine--according to Faricy, go hand in hand.(29)

In unfolding the symbolism of Eden the importance of both the masculine an the feminine becomes apparent. Consider also how fundamental these God-created opposites are, how essential their polarity is to the ongoing process by which not only life recreates itself but also as the way consciousness evolves.

The Seed of Unfolding Consciousness

The Tree of Life symbolizes the unity from which all life springs. It also depicts how consciousness, born from a seed, unfolds from its point of conception in the mind of God, a point Jesus was making in comparing the kingdom of heaven to the smallest of seeds which becomes the greatest of shrubs.(30)

A seed is so small as to be nearly invisible, yet encoded within it is the pattern of its full potential. Correspondingly, imprinted in the human soul is its "seed" potential for attaining to "the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. (31)

Teilhard speaks of both biological and spiritual evolution as "life-rooted-in-matter and life-branching-out-in-consciousness," the two evolutionary tracks following simultaneous pathways. Teilhard uses the word "complexification" to describe "the branching out of consciousness. In The Phenomenon of Man he describes creation as an expansion from "the infinitesimal to the immense," and "from the extremely simple to the extremely complex." For Teilhard consciousness is "the specific effect of organized complexity" transcending by far the "narrow limits within which our eyes can directly perceive it."(32)

Two Trees or One?

In Genesis we are told about two trees. The name of the one relates to life and the other to death. It is with the eating of the fruit of the latter that the journey towards conscious differentiation begins, a journey that culminates in Revelations with the promise of total reconciliation between human beings and God and all of creation. Joseph Campbell interprets the symbolism of the two trees as:

The tree of knowledge of good and evil is the tree of going from unity into multiplicity, and the tree of eternal life is that of going from multiplicity to unity. It's the same tree in two directions.(33)

In the same garden the two trees grew: the branches of both reaching heavenward; the roots of both seeking out the hidden depths of matter; the branches and roots of the one bearing the imprint of life; the other containing within it the seeds of death. Yet Yahweh warned only against the Tree of Knowledge. Not until the fruit of the forbidden tree had been tasted did he become apprehensive about the Tree of Life. As long as good and evil were unknown the Tree of Life was of no consequential danger.

As long as human beings were primordially "innocent" they, like the animals, lived in harmony with nature and God, and, like the animals, as Alfred Ribi notes, fulfilled "nearly completely the purpose built into them by the Creator." But

as soon as the miracle of consciousness arises, the harmony of the first day of creation is impaired.(34)

Here we are faced with a fact of life. When it is time to ascend higher in consciousness, the status quo of life is disrupted. Life is de-structured on one level in order to be restructured on another. We become disorientated in order to be reoriented.

The Cosmic Egg

Drawing from the old nursery rhyme, William Irwin Thompson sees Humpty Dumpty as "the cosmic egg," an image of "the immortal soul before its Fall into time." But after this "neither God's animals nor His angels can put him back into the world beyond time." In The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, he continues:

. . . the universe is an egg that shatters as it expands to begin its career of unfoldment in time. As an archetypal image of primordial unity, the cosmic egg suggests that there is unity and fragmentation, eternity and time. The Fall into time is not so much an event itself as the conditioning of time-space out of which all events arise. . . . the Fall of the One into the many, the emergence of the physical universe out of the transcendent God, the Fall of the soul into time . . . . The Fall is not only once and long ago; it is recapitulated in each instant of consciousness. The unfallen world beyond time remains as a background to the figured beats of the heart in our world of serial progression.(35)

The Double Helix

Having fallen into lateral, sequentially perceived time we make our way back to eternity spirally. In ascending the spiral stairway of life each new level is at right angles to the one below. Each shift in consciousness demands an alternation of perspective and a reorientation towards life. Just as the seed determines the unfolding of the tree, so within each human life a similar blueprint is contained in the double spiraling DNA molecule. (Figure 11)

About the double helix Doczi observes that

it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are looking at one of nature's most basic pattern-forming processes . . . [and seeing] the hidden and harmonious order built into body and mind, as it is built into every flower and leaf, mirrored by the crafts, and echoed by music . . . .(36)

Calling symbols "the stuff both of feeling and of knowledge," Lawrence Blair characterizes spirals as more than the timeless symbols of eternity

which we find scrawled or woven throughout our earliest mythology; . . . . Spirals are the actual "shape" of fluid energy evolving order from chaos, and are found even in the anatomy of our own biological inheritance--the spiraling nucleic acids in the DNA molecule.(37)

The spiral journey which begins in Eden moves out from an original state of unity. Its beginning is in the direction of division and separation. But at the crucial point--the crux, the Cross--the direction changes back towards unity and culminates in the New Jerusalem. In spiraling round we will come back to where we began but from a higher vantage point and from which we will know that we know that we are inseparable from the heart of God.

The Forbidden Fruit

But in Genesis the journey was just beginning and the creation of pairs of opposites was where God began, doing so with the creation of "the heavens" and "the earth," and differentiating into further pairs of opposites: the waters above and below; night and day; land and sea; the sky above, the earth below; sun and moon; male and female. And in each case God saw that it was good. It would seem that in God's scheme of things the division of original unity into pairs of opposites was essentially "good."

But then came the creation of the garden and its two trees, the one whose fruit was forbidden. The name of this tree was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, inferring a division into opposites that opposed rather than complemented one another. The result was a duality that split apart and created the breech that became known as the Fall.

The unity that was lost does not seem to be the kind that ordinarily happens when children grow up and leave home in order to become their own persons and live their own lives. Rather, in eating the "forbidden" fruit, Adam and Eve's relationship with their Creator-Parent was ruptured. They became alienated in the same tragic way that sometimes happens within families today, and that causes parents who are subjected to this kind of sorrow to wrestle with self-blame and wonder where they went wrong. But estrangement is sometimes the result of a child's falling victim to the kind of temptation that leads to actual involvement with evil, and that is harmful not only physically and mentally but that endangers them spiritually as well. Against these "powers of darkness" our children need our fervent and constant prayers.

For humanity in its evolutionary childhood the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil surely must have been "forbidden" for some good reason. Otherwise, as John Sanford points out, God's punishment "for one act of disobedience . . . looks like a case of overkill," particularly when we consider that the whole situation was a "set up."

For God to create curious beings like the first man and woman, place them in a garden with the gift of free will, point out to them this miraculous fruit, goad their curiosity by placing a tempting serpent with them, go off and leave them alone, and then be surprised at what they did and make a big deal about it, is an interpretation that surely does not do justice to this subtle tale.(38)

The Gift of Discrimination

Food itself is a metaphor for the different kinds of knowledge that can be "eaten" and "inwardly digested." In the animal kingdom different species have different digestive systems. What is food for one is poison for another. Some animals, in fact, have an exceptionally finely-tuned instinct for discriminating between what is fit for consumption and what is not. Digestion itself is a transmutation process, one that calls for discrimination. Biologically or spiritually, what cannot serve the continuation of life is separated out and those elements returned to the earth. In ancient Egypt the jackal was honored for his "precise timing" in allowing his prey to putrefy (and therefore predigest), but only to the point of providing the maximum nourishment from his meal. Thus in Egyptian mythology the jackal was the "judge" who accompanied souls to the gates of the underworld where their lives were weighed "in the balance of a feather."

Discrimination is a gift of maturity that comes with "the seasoning of existence." In the garden time of humanity's early childhood, the fruit of the forbidden tree, if nothing else, was immature.

The story suggests that, as with food for the body, in the realm of knowledge there is a distinct risk of contamination. As parents there are certain experiences, certain ways of knowing, from which we would hope to protect our children. Something similar could have been behind Yahweh's prohibition.

But perhaps, as John Sanford has pointed out, the text is not even talking about knowing the difference between what is good and evil, but rather is using knowing in the biblical sense of being intimate not only with good but also with evil, thus experiencing not only good but also evil. As parents, while we want our children to know the difference between good and evil, we certainly don't want them to get involved in experimenting with practices that are evil. And we try the best we know how to protect them, hoping they can grow up without becoming the victims of evil. But we are not always successful, nor can we or should we be so overly protective as to render our children unprepared for the realities of life. To protect or not protect is one of the paradoxes of parenthood.

But there is a natural learning process the Eden story also could be speaking of: how in the process of growing up we experience "shame" and become aware of our "nakedness." Most little children learn "hot" from getting too close to the fire. And very early the child learns "me" and "you," and soon after, "mine" and "yours," as well as "good and bad." "No," even when intended to keep a child from harm, can be interpreted by the child as condemnation. This leads to guilt and guilt to shame. Shame, in turn, leads to a sense of being separated and cut off from approval. Psychologically the child feels unprotected and exposed--naked. Most little children, before they have been "shamed," delight in running around naked. Self-consciousness around nakedness results as a child is conditioned to sense separation according to differences. What begins as gender differences carries over to cultural and social differences, to the differences that cause some children to feel inferior and others to feel "special." Thus step by step each of us leaves the garden of unconscious unity for the wilderness of separation, egocentricity, guilt, and remorse.

Referring to the Tree of Knowledge, Jung said: "The tree stands for the development and phases of the transformation process." The process in its "going out" phase is one of separations and differentiations. But in its "coming back" phase it is a process of realizing our sameness as human beings and of discovering our unity through the bond of human frailties we share.

From Eden to Gethsemane

Not only does the principle of opposites apply to the physical world of the five senses but also to emotional and spiritual realities: sorrow and joy; love and hate; fear and trust; hope and despair; generosity and greed; kindness and cruelty; arrogance and humility; and the list goes on and on. In a mandala, pairs of opposites are united by the axes they share. Through a similar process of reconciliation between the opposites of the human psyche its potential for wholeness is realized. The Cross, as the foundation upon which Christianity is built, was from early times on called The Tree, with its vertical axis symbolic of reconciliation between God and ourselves, and its horizontal arms of reconciliation between ourselves and others, thus on the Cross the breech on both individual and collective levels is repaired. Christ on the Cross is, for Christians, the model of what it means to be totally surrendered to God's will. In this way the Cross becomes the antidote for the "fruit of disobedience." It is the way back into unity. In St John of the Cross' words this union takes place when the two wills, the will of God and the will of the soul, are conformed "with neither desiring aught repugnant to the other."(39)

The first garden leads through the wilderness to a second garden--to Gethsemane--where the tree of death becomes the Tree of Life.

From "the simple to the complex" and from "the infinitesimal to the infinite," the eternal moment of Calvary is symbolized by the four-armed Cross. From Calvary the story moves on. Through the animated imagery of Revelations St John takes us on a journey that transcends time and space. Sequentially he expands on all that is involved in the process of being individually transformed into the image of Christ. But there is more. Humanity collectively is to be Christed. This is symbolized by the twelve-gated New Jerusalem with the Tree of Life now growing in its center, its branches bearing the "twelve fruits," its leaves for "the healing of the nations."(40)

ENDNOTES

1. From the Roman Missal.

2. Sanford, John A, The Man Who Wrestled With God, (Updated), Paulist Press, 1987, pp107-108

3. Cirlot ,J E, A Dictionary of Symbols, Philosophical Library, NY 1962, p115

4. Ciardi, John, Dante's Paradiso, NY: The New American Library, 1961, p365

5. Russell, Walter, Message of the Divine Iliad, University of Science and Philosophy, Swannanoa, Waynesboro, VA, 1949

6. Way, Robert, The Wisdom of the English Mystics, New Directions, NY, 1978, p 45

7. John 4:14, Jerusalem Bible

8. Jung, C G, Civilization in Transition, Vol 10, CW, p407, Pantheon NY, 1964

9. Ibid, p408

10. Jung, C G, Aion, Vol 9,11, CW, Pantheon 1959, NY, p235

11. Jung, C G, Mandala Symbolism, p10, Princeton/Bollingen Paperback Edition, 1972

12. Petrie, Flinders, Decorative Patterns of the Ancient World for Craftsmen, Dover, NY, 1974, plate L xxxi

13. Cirlot, J E, A Dictionary of Symbols, op cit, p305

14. Ibid, p306

15. Matthew 5:17 RSV

16. Johnson, Robert A, Owning Your Own Shadow, Harper-San Francisco, 1991, p85

17. Stiskin, Nahum, The Looking-Glass God, Weatherhill, NY, 1972, p27

18. Gardner, Martin, The Ambidextrous Universe, Penguin, Middlesex, and Basic Books, NY 1964

19. Psalm 98:9

20. Pennick, Nigel, The Swastika, Fenris-Wolf, Cambridge, 1980

21. Elliott, Ann, Christian Folk Art, Morehouse-Barlow, 1979, p 32

22. Fideler, David R, Jesus Christ, Sun of God: Ancient Cosmology and Early Christian Symbolism, Quest Books, Wheaton, 1993, p 280

23. Edinger, Edward F, Ego and Archetype, Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1973, p 269

24. Ezekiel 1:20 RSV

25. Edinger, Edward F, The Bible and the Psyche, Inner City Books, Toronto, 1986, p125

26. 1 Corinthians 15:22&28, Jerusalem Bible

27. Survival, A study guide for Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man, published by POM Project, Canoga Park CA, 1967, p 133

28. Petrie, op cit, Plate X-LXXVII-T9

29. Faircy, Robert, SJ, The Lord's Dealing, The Primacy of the Feminine in Christian Spirituality, Paulist Press, NY, 1988

30. Matthew 13: 31-32

31. Ephesians 4:13

32. Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, Harper, NY, 1959, p300-301

33. Campbell, Joseph Transformations of Myth Through Time, Harper & Row, MY, 1990, p207

34. Ribi, Alfred, Demons of the Inner World: Understanding our Hidden Complexes, Shambhala Publications, Boston 1989, p41

35. Thompson, William Irwin, The Time it Takes Falling Bodies to Light, St Martin's Press, NY, 1981, p9

36. Doczi, Gyorgy, The Power of Limits, Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art and Architecture, Shambhala, Boulder & London, 1981, p28

37. Blair, Lawrence, Rhythms of Vision, The Changing Patterns of Belief, Schocken Books, NY, 1976

38. Sanford, John, The Man Who Wrestled With God, op cit, p114

39. St John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, translated by David Lewis, Book I Chapter 1, Benziger Brothers, NY, 1906

40. Revelations 22:2

BOOK ONE

Part II

EDEN'S DOORWAY INTO ARCHETYPAL REALITY

.

Metaphor, myth and symbolic image--
for human beings these are the age-old doorways
from ordinary to non-ordinary reality,
from the personal to the transpersonal,
from the temporal to the eternal

~~

Encountering the Archetypes

In Part I the Garden was seen as a mandalic whole. Its main components were a central fountain, two trees and four rivers--the rivers fanning out so as to water the whole of the Garden. In design Eden was seen to reflect the structure of the human psyche.

Now, in Part II, Eden becomes the symbolic doorway from the ordinary reality we think of as "the real world" into an infinitely larger, multi-dimensional sphere of being where, behind the scenes of conscious awareness, archetypal dynamics are at work exerting transpersonal influences on human lives.

In his later years Jung explored this deeper, edenic dimension of the psyche, describing it as

that mysterious shadow realm, the collective unconscious, to which we shall never have direct access, and of whose existence and operation we can have only indirect knowledge, precisely through our encounter with the archetypes . . . .(1)

[There] archaic man still lives in us . . . without fixed boundaries, and still wholly interwoven with the world and nature.(2)

Progoff similarly defined the archetypes as " expressions in individual form of the processes and rhythms . . . of nature."(3)

In the development of consciousness we become separated from nature. We leave the Garden. But in our archetypal depths where consciousness is "without fixed boundaries," there, in our inner collective depths, psyche and nature remain "wholly interwoven."

From Jung we understand that archetypal levels are not accessed directly or through "ordinary" consciousness, but indirectly through encounters with the archetypes as they are activated in our lives. Their activation, Jung tells us, is detected "from the effects they produce."(4) Learning to detect these effects is part of how we gain greater conscious interaction with archetypal reality.

~~

Land of the Shadow

Just as in Part I the mandalic Garden was divided into four by its four rivers, so now in the dynamics of the drama that takes place in Eden there are the four players who represent the four primary archetypes of the psyche. And corresponding to the central fountain is the Self--the wholeness-ordering wisdom of the psyche. The Self is the hidden treasure, the pearl of great price buried in the field of the human psyche.

Back in Genesis, after Adam's and Eve's expulsion from the Garden, the Tree of Life was placed under guard on all sides by a flaming sword.(5) In similar mythic truth, the Self is guarded all around by a fire-breathing dragon. This means that in the search for wholeness the realm of the dragon--the unconscious--will have to be entered and our own inner dragons encountered.

Encountering dragons involves facing up to having those inner selves we try so hard to conceal, both from ourselves and others: our angry, prideful, deceitful selves, as well as the envy, greed, lust or laziness we disown but project onto others. It means removing the "log" from our own eye rather than the "specks" we think we detect in the eyes of others.(6) Put together, those selves we disown form the archetypal shadow about whom Jung warns:

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real.(7)

Condemned to the unconscious, the shadow is capable of wrecking havoc in lives, particularly in relationships where we condemn in others what we have yet to accept as part of our own human nature. But in recognizing and accepting the shadow we are put in touch with our own vulnerable human sameness. As a result we become less judgmental and more kindly inclined towards ourselves and others.

The dragon (as shadow) is caught off guard, and therefore disarmed, when accepted. Similarly the ego, when taking a stance in opposition to the Self, is disarmed by our acceptance of human nature as a co-mingling of light and dark. Moreover, this is the way we assume responsibility for the darkness apportioned each of us, and until we do we will continue to project our own capacity for evil onto others, thus increasing rather than decreasing humanity's collective shadow.

~~

Doorways into Archetypal Reality

Owning one's shadow takes considerable moral effort because the only way to become conscious of the shadow, as well as other archetypal aspects of the psyche, is through self-knowledge. And there is only one way to gain self-knowledge, and that is through self-observation. For this a shift of perception is needed so as to discern our own unconscious processes at work. Following Jung, we will here approach archetypal reality indirectly, as through a backdoor into the psyche.

Metaphor, myth and symbolic image are all doorways into archetypal reality. For just as the shaman uses the drum as "canoe" or "horse," so the repetitive rhythms of metaphor, myth and image are primary modes for being transported into the land of the archetypes. Try entering by so-called rational means and you will not get there. Knock, however, on the doors of symbolic perception and the way will be opened.

Non-ordinary reality can be recognized in several ways. There will be about the landscape a subtle sense of other-worldliness, something qualitatively different--a numinosity. And about its lighting there will be a peculiar luminosity. The atmosphere also will feel "charged," "heightened," "enlivened." Finally there may be a feeling or a sense of familiarity--of having been there before.

~~

Places Where the Past is Still Palpably Present

There are also places in "ordinary" reality so impregnated by the past as to leave an imprint still palpably present. Rupert Sheldrake's theory of "morphic resonance"(8) includes the idea that "fields of resonance" build up as "cumulative collective memories." This could explain why certain geographic locations evoke the same kind of resonance and effects that archetypes do. They have become impregnated with archetypal energies.

Inner or outer, there seem to be "fields" of energy that evoke images and feelings capable of impacting us emotionally and sometimes physically. These then become examples of "the effects" Jung refers to which have "a kind of autonomy" and "possessive"(9) quality capable of bringing forth both positive and negative effects.

Dreams are also doors into non-ordinary reality, as are spontaneous fantasies, or the process of active imagination which when initiated may take on a life of its own.(10) In any case, finding ourselves in a different from ordinary state of consciousness we are alerted to the opportunity to observe and to ask what is happening in an area of the psyche not ordinarily available for our observation. What am I doing here? What am I feeling? Why here? Why now? What might I fantasize as my connection to this place?

Who is Visiting?
Figure 1

The Realms of Ancestral Roots

At times we may become conscious of an interpenetration of ordinary and archetypal levels of reality. Some years back my husband Bob went to Scotland seeking his paternal roots. He described his week there as "enjoyable" and "interesting." But then on a brief jaunt down to southern England, coming to Glastonbury and sitting midst the ruins of the old abbey, there in the geographic proximity of his mother's people, he experienced an intense feeling of having "come home."

A year or so later, the resonant effect of Southern England called Bob back to look more deeply into his maternal roots. Shortly thereafter we learned of the work of Dr Kenneth McAll (described in his book Healing of the Family Tree.)(11) Dr McAll, a psychiatrist and also an Anglican layman, explains how insight into the family tree and the healing power of the Eucharist can work in conjunction to free persons who may be suffering from cross-generational influences. Relating his findings to biblical references to "the iniquity of the fathers" being "visited" on future generations,(12) Dr McAll suggests that in some cases the unresolved problems of those who have died may be effecting, or "being visited upon," the living. He then suggests a family tree be drawn for the purpose of asking: "Who is visiting?" Figure 1 is a sketch by Dr McAll of a person whose mind is under the siege of unconscious voices.

Both Bob and I had personal reasons for being interested in Dr McAll's findings. When Bob had been thirteen his parents, first his mother and three months later his father, had taken their lives. And on both sides of my family tree there was a history of serious, life-immobilizing alcoholism. If such was possible we wanted to learn how to pray for the deceased of our families whose souls might benefit from our prayers. Our concern was also for our children and grandchildren, that their lives be free from the influence of destructive family patterns.

How family patterns are transmitted can only be speculated. It may be genetically, or perhaps through some form of psychic resonance. In some cases it simply may be a matter of the attitudes and assumptions of parents being caught by the children. In any event, whatever way generational influences are passed along, if we believe God to be a loving God, then we can't believe that God "punishes" children for their ancestors' sins. Perhaps, though, there is some other aspect of truth behind these troublesome scriptures, some trans-dimensional, time-transcending overall reality in which forgiveness flows freely both backward and forward in time so as to allow for the past to be healed in the future. Jesus' words in the eighth chapter of John suggest his availability throughout all time: "before Abraham was I am."

In Dr McAll's work the Eucharist--the Blood of Christ--is the healing agent applied to the family bloodline. But when the Eucharist is not available, what then? Perhaps it is then that, in touch with the sacrificial meaning of the Cross, human empathy and compassion become the "Blood of Christ" universally and eternally available for all and all times.

One of the truths Eden mythologically presents is the unity in origin of all of humanity.

~~

The Transformation of Perception

Just as geographical places can be "fields" charged with particular energies, so there are areas in the psyche similarly charged by archetypal energies. Jung called these highly charged areas complexes. The images we bear within us of our personal parents are undergirded by archetypal parents. In this sense we are all in the grips of father and mother complexes by which we feel accepted and supported or rejected and abandoned. Sometimes we project our parent complexes onto others in our present life situations. And sometimes, in so doing, we set ourselves up to experience all over again the pain of rejection we had felt as children.

An approach to the healing of our inner parent images is one in which the judgments we have placed on our parents are transformed into empathy for them as we gain insight into the hopes and expectations they had held for their lives. In this way our focus is on their aspirations rather than their failures. We thus broaden our perceptions of who they were and also gain insight into how their hopes may have played a role in forming our own aspirations. Even where they failed, their hopes nevertheless live on in us.

In active imagination we can sense a parent blessing us at whatever period(s) in our lives we most needed them to be free to express their love for us. Nor does our doing so depend on whether a parent is still living or not, this because it is our perceptions concerning them that need be transformed. And when our perceptions are changed the result is a new emotional reality which heals the personal parent image by enjoining it to the undergirding divinely-infused archetypal parent.

I can personally attest to a transformational healing of this nature that occurred around my feelings of having been abandoned by my father. This happened when I was in my late thirties. I had shared a dream with a friend.(13) He responded by suggesting I visualize my father holding me in his arms when I was an infant. Evidently the meaning of my dream (which I no longer recall) was so obvious to my friend that he led me straightway into the heartland of archetypal reality where he knew my father would be waiting. Once there, he suggested I sense how much my father had wanted to love and care for me. He instructed that in my imagination I see written on my father's face and shining from his eyes the love God as Father implants in every human father's heart. As I imagined the infant I was, my friend suggested I open my heart to allow this co-mingling of human and divine father-love to pass through my father's heart into mine. Ever after I have perceived myself as loved by both an earthly and a heavenly father, the personal having been assumed into the archetypal.

The negative perception or "field" of psychic energy around the inner image of the personal parent is transformed into a positive one when the archetypal parent (the divine Mother or Father) enters in and becomes part of the equation. And often, as in my case, it is a dream that opens the door.

~~

How Archetypal Encounters Guide Creative Work

Another example of the way ordinary and archetypal levels of reality can interpenetrate involved my mother on a trip she made to Spain. Moreover, her encounter there directed the creative movement of her life for the next ten years. Visiting an old cathedral she felt something so oppressive in its atmosphere as to bring on an attack of nausea. Accompanying this physical reaction was an intuitive sense of something to do with the Spanish Inquisition.

Having gone to Spain to research the early life of Fr Junipero Serra, her bizarre "flashback" so captivated her interest in inquisitional Spain that, after finishing the Serra story,(14) she returned to Spain to pursue the life of another Franciscan, a Poor Clare abbess whose life, a hundred years before Serra, had been subjected to hierarchical scrutiny. In my mother's research she had come across a reference in which Serra credited Mary of Agreda with his coming to North American. Serra believed that Agreda, a century before, had laid the ground work for his founding of the California Missions. How? That question led my mother further and further afield in searching to know how a Seventeenth Century nun who never left Spain could "visit" Indian tribes throughout the American Southwest.(15) If a satisfactory explanation for Agreda's and others' "bi-location" travels ever is found I venture it will lead into the deep ground of the Self where, "without fixed boundaries," nature, the universe, and the human psyche co-exist in a state of oneness, and where, according to Jung, synchronistic occurrences have their origin.(16) As for Agreda, when she was questioned about how she could have been in two places at once, she simply quoted St Paul: "Whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows,"(17) and thus she personally escaped the tyranny of the Inquisition.

~~

Spiritual Lineage

Jung noted that archetypal influences are characterized by their capacity to fascinate. Serra had been captivated by the New World "journeys" of Mary Agreda. My mother, in turn, "caught" his fascination. Shortly after my mother's death, and probably more than a little related to it, I discovered there was an Anglican branch of Third Order (secular) Franciscans. I recognized at once that I was by nature and inclination Franciscan. Eastern religions speak of "spiritual lineages," a concept that may have validity in the West as well. My mother, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, had no apparent connections to the Franciscans. Nevertheless the lives of two Franciscans fascinated and captivated her creative energies so as to lead her deeper and deeper into the mysteries of the human psyche, and now my life was being directed onto the Franciscan path. Of Agreda my mother had asked: What was the motivating force behind the extraordinary accomplishments of her life? And of Serra, what was the common spiritual bond that attracted him (a scholarly university professor) and the California Indians (living in a Stone Age world) to one another, causing each to recognize the other as brother or sister "in Christ"? And now I too wonder of Francis, Agreda and Serra: What is it that binds us one to the other and not only in visible but invisible realms?

While there may be alternate explanations for why we feel emotionally impacted by one place and not another, or attracted to certain spiritual practices or disciplines and not others, when we look back over our lives certain destiny-determining archetypal influences emerge as the connecting threads of our lives.

~~

Healing the Residue of Unresolved Grief

In the 1970's we moved to a narrow creek valley in the California Mother Lode where the Miwok Indians had lived before their land and lives had been taken from them out of greed for gold. Shortly after settling in, I began to sense a sadness beneath the sylvan beauty and tranquillity of this place. It felt to me like the "unresolved grief" of those who had been here before. I sensed their anguish and also their bewilderment over the abruptness with which their way of life had been crushed. Walking along the creek and coming to the rocks where they had ground acorns, and to the deeper holes where they had bathed, it was as if I could hear their mournful cries. It was as if their existence continued on, but in a reality of unresolved, bewildering, and meaningless grief. As one whose roots trace back to the Europeans at whose hands the Indians so grievously had suffered, I asked for forgiveness.

Following my prayers I began to perceive ways greed and acquisitiveness have played out in my own life; how prone I have been to compensate for my inner greedy self with outward showings of generosity--one being the shadow of the other. Following my indignation at the greed of others I became acquainted with the face of greed in my own psyche.

Through self-observation we gain self-knowledge. And wounding as it may be to the false self's sense of pride, self-knowledge is the kind of truth by which the true Self is set free.

Gradually my perception of the presence of the past here has changed, until now the resonance of those tragic days feels superseded by the happier, tranquil lives the Miwoks had lived in harmony with nature. It feels now to be an environment where the soul can be nourished by the tranquillity and harmony that is here.

But this is also a good place to do grief work, perhaps because of the human suffering witnessed here: grief over what was or what never was. Grief work for ourselves, our ancestors, and our planet is something we each can do to lighten the load we collectively bear. In this way we help free future generations from the burden of the past. Grief experienced through to resolution serves this purpose. To grieve loss is part of what it means to be human.

On this earthly plane, joy and sorrow, and life and death co-exist--life that is not separate from death but as one life/death pulse beat eternally repeated. There is about any place whose roots reach into archetypal reality a sense of paradoxical simultaneity. Our souls are layered with opposite and alternate experiences. We have experienced this and that. We have felt this and that. Self-knowledge is gained through experiences that put us in touch with the opposites that make us human. Our capacity to experience the heaviness of sorrow and the lightness of joy simultaneously is part of what makes us human. We are both shadow and light; both conscious and unconscious. One of the miracles of being human is this capacity to embrace, contain, and experience the opposites of human nature.

~~

Self-Knowledge As a Pressing Necessity

In assessing the collective psychic condition of the mid Twentieth Century, Dr Jung wrote that "self-knowledge in particular has become one of the most pressing contemporary problems."(18) He goes on to explain that this is what affords the individual protection from the "isms" of mass-mindedness and its "irresistible urge to catastrophe."(19)

Self-knowledge is what inoculates the individual from the contagion of fear constantly loosed in the collective. Jung cites two areas in particular where self-knowledge is needed. The first is for recognition of the shadow component of human nature which unrecognized is projected onto other people, races, religions, organizations, institutions and governments. The blind-to-self shadow tries to make itself right by making what is wrong "out there," thus avoiding personal responsibility for the resolution of collective problems. Concerning the shadow and self-knowledge, John Sanford advises:

The kingdom requires a morality which is not founded on rules and regulations imposed from outside, but on self-knowledge. This self-knowledge can be achieved through inner confrontation. The inner confrontation occurs when we confront the person within us for whom the Law is necessary. It would not be necessary to have a Law forbidding murder, adultery, stealing, coveting, and slander if there was not a part of our personality which might do exactly these things. The scribes and Pharisees seek to avert the danger of this inner "shadow" by following rules which prohibit these things. But the higher morality requires confronting the shadowy one within us who has made the rules necessary in the first place. In this way we achieve a truly differentiated moral attitude toward ourselves and life and are fit for the creative life of the kingdom.(20)

The second necessity Jung called for was recognition of "the existence and the importance of the archetypes." Shadow and other archetypes inform us concerning our human commonality, knowledge of which perhaps really is, at this point in history, our most pressing need if we are to survive this present evolutionary passage.

~~

Archetypal Reality and the Bible

The Bible, from Genesis to Revelations, abounds with archetypes and archetypal personifications and situations. When, in the course of our everyday lives, we are put in touch with persons or situations that "set us off" we can be sure there are biblical correlations to what we are experiencing. This is because the Bible, as well as the myths and wisdom of every culture, address a limited number of typical (archetypal) situations. The Chinese book of wisdom, The I Ching, speaks to 64 possible human situations that occur and reoccur in our lives as "patterns of change."

When we seek out biblical correspondences to our occurring life situations we open ourselves to insight. This pursuit of insight into the meaning of life's challenges is how an activation or "disturbance" of the contents of the unconscious is resolved and assimilated into consciousness. It is also the way we learn to recognize, communicate with, and reclaim the archetypes as part and parcel of our human nature. Jung (in pre-inclusive language) wrote: "Man's capacity for consciousness alone makes him man."(21)

In particular, the Bible of our Judaic-Christian heritage furthers self-discovery by presenting myths, metaphors and symbolic images that resonate from the past up through the present. Resonance alerts us to the activation of an archetype. Then, if we seize the opportunity and follow where this leads, it will be in accordance with the innate wisdom of the Self. This approach to following where the archetype leads is the one followed below in attempting to derive personal meaning from the drama taking place in Eden.

~~

Finding Ourselves in Eden

If, in a dream, meditation or some other inscape, we find ourselves in an edenic-like place, very likely we will be awestruck before its verdant, primeval beauty. Looking about we may surmise ourselves to be alone. Surprisingly, however, we will not feel lonely. Rather we will sense the place to be alive with a sentient presence.

In the Judaic-Christian tradition Eden is a metaphor for an archetypal level of consciousness that exists in each of us. Here Adam and Eve, representing humanity's first parents, "walked and talked" with an all-knowing, all-pervading presence sometimes called "Yahweh" and sometimes "the Lord God." But the experience of the presence that they knew there could also be describing an experience of the Self, the God-Self, in whose image our most essential, eternal being is made. The drama in the Garden speaks metaphorically of how and why our original connection to God through the Self was broken. With the expulsion of human consciousness from the Garden, the journey back into God's presence--now knowingly--began.

~~

Encountering Eden's Archetypes

Eden, then, is not a place that no longer exists (or that never was) but a common ground of archetypal reality where a drama concerning the evolution of human consciousness is being enacted. And since the evolution of consciousness is something that is happening simultaneously, both collectively and individually, we too are part of the drama.

In that the archetypes of Eden are transpersonal, we are not connected to them through personal memory or history. Nor do they belong to any one culture or religion but rather to all who share a common identity as human beings. Just as at the bottom of all oceans all land is one, so it is with archetypal reality. The archetypes, although emerging from common ground, are nevertheless as varied in form as the individuals whose lives they both energize and transform.

Stages of life have a way of running out of energy. When this happens the archetypes, as the transformers of psychic energy, have an important role to play. At such times it is the Self--the archetype of wholeness--who calls forth some new potential waiting in the wings of the unconscious for its turn on the center stage of our life, bringing with it a whole new reserve of energy and enthusiasm for life. Thus our individual lives are moved from one stage to the next by the power inherent in the archetypes.

~~

Human Nature as Part Animal and Part Divine

As human beings we are creatures of both earth and heaven. We are part instinctual (part Serpent) and part divine (part Yahweh). We are also part dark and part light--partially conscious and partially unconscious. This is the primary, vertical duality of human nature. Secondarily, and on either end of a horizontal axis, we are also both Adam and Eve, both masculine and feminine. We have both active and passive poles as well as the capacity both to think and to feel, to sense and to intuit.

The human psyche is the crucible within which the opposites of human nature are held in suspension in order to be reconciled. Eden is the stage upon which the drama of awakening consciousness takes place. The players are the four primary archetypes. As Adam and Eve and Yahweh and the Serpent, they represent the masculine and the feminine and the divine and the instinctual. They are the four corners upon which consciousness is founded. As they become reconciled in us we become whole.

Figure 2 reflects Eden's four rivers and shows Eden's four players in their polar-opposite arrangement. As two opposing pairs they exert the tensions that keep our lives from complacency. They keep us moving towards wholeness. The psychic energies flowing between the opposing poles also work to bring the light of consciousness into the dark recesses of the unconscious, causing some of what lies latent there to rise to consciousness. Increment by increment we become more conscious by a process that is both humbling and ennobling as we come to accept both the heights and depths that make us human.

Eden's Archetypal Cast of Four
Figure 2

Even should we give these four different names, or even leave them unnamed, still they would exist as representatives of the four parts of human totality. Similar to how astronomers plot out the heavens, working from what they do know of the orderedness of the heavens, so psychologically the existence and unique characteristics of these archetypes can be deduced from what is known of the essential order of the psyche. This, in any event, is the "scientific" premise from which Jung approached his study of archetypes.

Moreover, just as our perspective of heavenly bodies changes over seasons and more greatly so over eons, so the collective perception of the archetypes changes as cultural persuasions change. Thus succeeding generations bestow upon the archetypes new meanings or shades of meaning. Also, because the language they speak is common to all peoples, archetypes are the bridges between different cultures and religions. In this capacity they reinforce human sameness and our underlying unity.

~~

The Transformation of Consciousness

Even though the archetypes are universal they can only be understood particularly. And when it comes to deriving personal meaning from them they shift similarly to the sands of changing tides. Illusive, in fact, is the very nature of an archetype. More an energy than an image, an archetype sidesteps letting its meaning be pinpointed. Rather it points in a general direction of relevance to a particular time or situation. Realizing this we can assume as our responsibility the need to work with and get to know a particular archetypal image from as many facets as possible, a task that requires both patience and perseverance.

An archetype, in order to fulfill its role in the transformation of consciousness, must, first of all, connect with and even become attached to something in the individual psyche that is ready to be moved from the darkness of the unconscious into the light of consciousness. In this way it is like a catalyst that triggers a chain reaction resulting in a change from one state to another: as when a liquid becomes a solid; or an aspect of self that has been unconscious becomes conscious. A biblical example is the story of the angel who from time to time would stir the waters in the pool of Bethsaida.(22) Then it would be that the person first into the disturbed waters would be healed. The inner meaning of this story is that until our unconscious blocks and fears are disturbed, exposed and challenged we will continue to find ways to avoid the responsibility of living our lives to the fullest.

As the container of a latent potential an archetype is "programmed" towards a goal. This goal is to bring the part of the whole that it represents into a conscious relationship with the totality of who we are, and then this totality into conscious relationship with the greater Whole, the All-in-All, that God is. The dynamic symmetry of Eden, as presented in Part 1, is our potential for wholeness, and its four players are the North, South, East and West of the human psyche. With this as a foundation upon which to build understanding, we can next ask: "Who in us are the archetypes of Eden?"

The Caduceus
Figure 3

Two-Headed Serpent
Figure 4

The Serpent of Eden

"Well, certainly," we may say, "not the Serpent, not the cause of suffering for the whole human race." But yes, this creature who is as complex as its comparable part of human nature, is also us, and a part without which we could not have made it into this life or our lives thus far.

Although the Serpent has been interpreted in opposite ways by various peoples and historic times, its most essential symbolic meaning is unconsciousness and instinctuality. But also, even in the Bible, its other connotations are wisdom and healing, and to this day this meaning survives in the caduceus emblem of the medical profession. (Figure 3)

According to Jung the ambiguity of the Serpent corresponds

. . . to what is totally unconscious and incapable of becoming conscious, but which, as the collective unconscious and as instinct, seems to possess a peculiar wisdom of its own and a knowledge that is often felt to be supernatural.(23)

Larger-than-life and multi-faceted, East and West understand the Serpent from different points of view. This two-headed aspect of the Serpent is shown in Figure 4. Not only do East and West view the Serpent ambivalently but past and present, influenced by changing cultural and religious values and mores, also fluctuate concerning the value judgments they place on the Serpent.

~~

The Instinctual Serpent

In the process of being "civilized" our instincts are for the most part repressed. And because by nature they are unconscious, it is only under rare circumstances that we are afforded the increment of distance necessary to observe and identify our instincts in action. Such a moment of truth is always awakening.

One of the problems we commonly face is that in our alienated-from-nature society we have been made uncomfortable with the idea of our instincts and therefore prejudiced against the Serpent. Like a snake in the grass our instincts hide in waiting. And for the very reason that they have been culturally repressed we have been rendered "unconscious and incapable of becoming conscious" of the ways instinctuality rules and overrules the outer veneer of our out-of-balance intellectual and technological civilization. But, if we dare, we can receive insight through the archetypal Serpent as to how instincts disguise themselves in our personal lives and in our culture.

Serpent, snake and dragon carry interchangeable meanings with somewhat different emphasis. In mythology it is the dragon who guards the "treasure," the treasure being the Self in its totality, and which includes the "peculiar" or instinctual wisdom referred to above, while the more common garden variety snake is symbolic of the "dark, chthonic world of instinct." But as Jung further points out, "the snake is not just a nefarious, chthonic being; it is also . . . a symbol of wisdom, and hence of light, goodness and healing."

. . . The inner polarity of the snake-symbol far exceeds that of man. It is overt, whereas man's is partly latent or potential. The Serpent surpasses Adam in cleverness and knowledge and can outwit him.(24)

Implied here is a warning: Never underestimate the power of the instincts. "She," Jung goes on, "is older than he, and is evidently equipped by God with a superhuman intelligence, like that son of God [of Hebrew mythology] who took over the role of Satan." It is this double significance of the Serpent that places her (according to Jung) at the lower end of the primary axis of the human psyche--its vertical axis--by which the heaven and earth of human nature are united.(25)

~~

The Egocentric Serpent

A duality similar to the Serpent's applies to the ego. Through our egocentric arrogance we, along with the fallen angels, are brought low, but only because we (our egocentricity) also aspire to ascend to a position higher than God. This is how egocentricity functions. It usurps the place of God. It places itself higher than God and so takes the place of God in our lives.

But egocentricity is only the unredeemed aspect of the ego. The redeemed ego is our link to the Self, to knowing God and the realization of the Kingdom as an inner reality. For this reason Jungians, rather than seeing the ego as something to eliminate, advise instead that the ego-Self axis be strengthened in order to establish an open line of communication with God.

In recent times the person who seems to have had the greatest insight into egocentricity was John Sanford's mentor Fritz Kunkel.

Kunkel believed that our egocentricity is the equivalent of the biblical idea of original sin. It is this that corrupts us; it is the spiritual disease from which we must be cured. Kunkel once made the statement that the closely guarded secret of evil is that the ego is the devil, by which he meant that the ego in its egocentric condition is the door through which archetypal evil enters the soul and eventually comes to possess it. When this happens, Kunkel noted, "the [egocentric] ego, without knowing it is always fighting on the side of evil and darkness though it pretends to be a servant of light."(26)

~~

Separations and Differentiations

We have been told that in Eden it was an act of disobedience that caused the fall and brought about the ultimate tension of the human soul--self will in opposition to God's will. As unconscious beings Adam and Eve were "obedient children." In common with what anthropologists tell us about the earliest humans, their sense of immediacy was with nature and their environment. But with the dawning of self-consciousness came the establishment of boundaries between the individual and the natural environment. Perhaps it was at this point that Adam was given the task of "naming" the animal kingdom, thus differentiating and ordering them into species.(27) If so, this would mark a time in evolution when a separation from undifferentiated unconsciousness was taking place--the time of emergence into self-consciousness.

The growth of human consciousness proceeds through repeated separations and differentiations. This is how autonomy and consciousness-of-choice are established. But the gain is also a loss. The ability to make choices leads to the painful consequences of choices made for the wrong reasons and under the influence of a voice that urges towards self-will and "hardens" the heart towards God.

~~

To Obey or Not Obey

In the evolution of consciousness one of the most vulnerable points of temptation is early adolescence with its glandular changes, erupting emotions, and power struggles. Let us assume that in the Garden Adam and Eve had come to the adolescent stage of development and, as typical adolescents, they were vulnerable to suggestion. To obey or not obey? To resist or not resist temptation? To believe the voice of parental and cultural guidance or the voice of the intinctually-rooted Serpent?

Discontentment is another aspect of adolescent consciousness. And although Adam's and Eve's fall from grace is blamed on disobedience, it could be that just as much at fault was the same discontent with constricting circumstances that causes young people today to become disruptively restless. Up to this time Adam's and Eve's obedience had been without questioning. Yet, without the ability to question there would be no basis upon which to learn to make choices and therefore become self-determining adults. To obey or to question authority, this is one of Eden's paradoxes to which each of us can relate.

Having been an adolescent as well as having seen six offspring through their teen years, my sympathy is with both Yahweh and Adam and Eve. My experience has been that when the time comes and children are restless to move on into a larger, less constricting world, the tensions that mount cause a mutual readiness to let go. Someone (I don't know who or even if I recall it correctly) expressed the dilemma of parenthood: "Love, if held too tightly, will die; if held too lightly will fly away; lightly, tightly, how do I know if I'm letting you die or letting you go?" This may have been Yahweh's dilemma.

Could it, then, have been adolescent discontent, together with the capacity to make choices, that caused Eve and then Adam to listen to the voice of temptation, and therefore set themselves up to be driven from the Garden?

As with ourselves and our children, sometimes our choices too have led to painful consequences. As part-smart adolescents we were unaware of our own latent powers. This together with surfacing instinctual tensions--the very elements the Serpent symbolizes--made us particularly vulnerable to temptation.

~~

Proneness to Suggestion

In reference to the Serpent, Jung wrote the following:

Most people do not have sufficient range of consciousness to become aware of the opposites inherent in human nature. The tensions they generate remain for the most part unconscious . . . . . Traditionally, the snake stands for the vulnerable spot in man: it personifies his shadow, i.e., his weakness and unconsciousness. The greatest danger about unconsciousness is proneness to suggestion.

And early to mid into the Twentieth Century he began to fear that because our society had become so overly rational we were headed for a time of extreme vulnerability and susceptibility to irrational violence. He feared that "rationality without tradition and without a basis in instinct" would leave us vulnerable, unprotected, and unable to discern "absurdity" when we would be faced with it. He felt that

the ever-widening split between conscious and unconscious increases the danger of psychic infection and mass psychosis. With the loss of symbolic ideas the bridge to the unconscious has broken down. Instinct no longer affords protection against unsound ideas and empty slogans.(28)

Kunkle also expressed concern for the dark side-effects of a collective time of "puberty" as "human character comes of age."

Our time, like the first century, is characterized by the decay of national structure on an international scale. The individual must stick to old conventional values which are obsolete, or he must set out on his own account to find the entrance into the realm of the future. The new outer structure is developing within the character of the average individual. We are witnessing a psychological mutation; the old species, homo feudalis (feudalistic man), is changing into the new species, homo communis (common man). But every mutation has to be paid for with much loss of life. There will be many criminals and madmen for each single "reformer" who finds the entrance into the kingdom.(29)

But we are not without a ray of hope. Along with the collapse of our spiritual and psychological "bridges" there is a simultaneous collapse of racial and political barriers. With the collapse of the latter, the common people of earth are moving closer towards one another. In our connectedness we move beyond individualism towards realization of our human sameness. In our personal egocentric strivings we move away from unity and into separateness, but in becoming mindful of the whole we reconnect with a personal sense of being part of the Whole. Our sense of individuality merges with our sense of universality. Echoing Teilhard, Barbara Marx Hubbard describes the next level of human transformation as from Homo sapiens to Homo universalis with Christ as the "evolutionary template."(30)

~~

The Psyche as Crucible

The human psyche is the crucible within which the opposites of human nature are held in suspension: hate and love; doubt and fear; despair and hope; dark and light; sadness and joy. Similarly the duality of the Serpent is a part of human totality, not only as Satan (the rebellious ego) but also as the elemental level of consciousness which when elevated empowers creativity. It seems important, then, that we free the Serpent from its negative connotations and cultural judgments and see that most essentially the Serpent is symbolic of the life force hidden in the very heart of creation--even matter itself. But we need also do so without losing sight of how being unconscious of elementary instinctuality makes us vulnerable in the extreme to temptation. And temptation, if followed, ends in alienation from God, from the source of our creativity and therefore our sense of meaning and purpose.

~~

The Patriarchal Slant of Genesis

As far as cultural history goes, whether the Serpent has been interpreted positively or negatively has depended on the particular culture's point of view. Certainly in Genesis we are given the patriarchal slant, and naturally so, since this was the point of view from which the writers and translators purposely told the story.(31)

Crawling close to the ground the Serpent symbolizes the pre-conscious or instinctive side of human nature whose primary concern is for the survival of life and the species. If we are to read the Genesis story as consistent with the instinct to survive then we will have to allow that it is the patriarchal slant that causes the story to color the Serpent, and therefore the feminine, at fault. And yet where would any of us be without the survival concerns of the nurturing feminine who, of necessity and in the ordering of creation, is instinctually rooted?

Because the drama of Eden contains mythological elements and archetypal symbols, as we delve into the story new levels of meaning naturally emerge for us, the significance dependent on where in our individual journeys we happen to be. Moreover, what the story means for one generation or one culture will be different for succeeding generations and under culturally changing views.

To find the correction to the patriarchal slant we have but to look to pre-patriarchal and eastern cultures. These cultures more readily recognize and honor the feminine principle, and understand the Serpent as symbolic of the kind of wisdom that looks to earth and to nature for insight. It would seem also that eastern cultures make allowances for the darker aspects of their gods and, more generally, recognize that dark as well as light is a part of total reality. This is particularly true of the artworks of eastern religions where the goddess is sometimes shown as having a ferocious aspect, as does nature herself.

~~

Masculine and Feminine Ways of Knowing

Referring back again to the wheel of archetypes in Figure 2, if egocentricity were to replace the Serpent, and the Self take the place of Yahweh, in Jung's sense of the Self as our God connection, then for Adam we could substitute the masculine way of knowing which is direct and mental, and for Eve the feminine way which is indirect and intuitive. In this manner and as shown in Figure 5, the wheel of the psyche would be stepped down from the archetypal or collective to a personal and individual level.

The Essential Polarities of the Human Psyche
Figure 5

As happens, in the process of the psyche coming into greater balance, the pendulum swings back-and-forth between the two sets of polar opposites. Similarly the poles of cultures also shift. In a dominantly masculine culture, feminine ways of knowing are feared and suppressed. Although feminine values are making a come back, it was not so long ago that "witches" were being burned at the stake. (Moreover, this was being done by Christians and in America, a land supposedly founded on the principals of freedom and equality.)

If, however, feminine ways of knowing are understood to apply to men as well as women, then we can observe how the feminine pole functions in both negative and positive ways in men as well as in women. Receptivity is to the feminine pole what the capacity to take action is to the masculine pole. In the feminine, be we men or women, we receive. In the masculine, be we women or men, we take action.

As a spiritual capacity, receptivity is the ability to hear God's inner directing voice, to receive it in our hearts, to hold it there, to ponder it, and, if further directed, to take appropriate action. Because Mary was receptive to a messenger from God and acquiesced, Jesus was born. Because Joseph received guidance through his dreams the child Jesus was protected from those who sought to harm him. Thus the Child was able to survive to adulthood in order to fulfill the purpose for which he had come. Mary received and acquiesced: Joseph received and took action. Together they exemplify the necessity for being free in the feminine pole.

~~

The Sin of Manipulation

But there is another, a negative side to the feminine way of knowing. And how can we judge when a way of knowing is "of God" or not? What makes one person a prophet or prophetess and another a "witch"? And how might we, in a present cultural context, define a witch?

The definition I once heard, and tend to agree with, is someone who manipulates another person's will for their own purposes. This definition has helped me identify a few "witches" who have crossed my path. But it also has caused me to think of the more subtle ways I, too, have been guilty of manipulation. In doing inner work, and particularly where the shadow is concerned, we are forced to redirect our accusing finger to ourselves.

Accordingly, if witchcraft is understood as manipulation, then it would have to include all the ways persons intuitively or instinctively "psych" others out to get their own needs met. And since "needs" are instinctually rooted, whether for survival, gratification, or power, it then would be our own neediness that sets us up to be "psyched out." Moreover, it would be our same neediness that tempts us to manipulate others for our own purposes. In either case, it is unconsciousness of where we are needy that makes us vulnerable both to being manipulated and to being manipulators. Here again the evolution of consciousness is dependent on self-knowledge.

~~

Insight into Self Images

If our need is to fulfill a self image of how we want others to see us, this makes it even more difficult for us to catch sight of our shadow. If, for example, someone looks to me for help because they have me pegged as a good Christian or even just plain motherly--the earth-mother type that I am--I may fulfill their expectation simply because it matches my own self-image. If I do so unconsciously I may soon find myself in the position of being this person's source--their god--and therefore their co-dependent in the dark art of manipulation. The Serpent, as a perpetrator of manipulation is truly wise beyond all creatures and "more subtle."(32)

But I would dare say that as children we were all, to some degree or another, masters in the art of manipulation. Speaking for myself, I remember a time when I was in third or fourth grade and knowingly and with remarkable subtlety manipulated my teacher so as to get out of having to stay after school. Can I claim innocence of age? I don't think so since I still recall the scene and the way I "colored the facts" in order to win her sympathy.

~~

Original Sin as Generationally Perpetuated

When, even as children, we knowingly and consciously practiced deceit we were diminishing the light of our souls. Nor is the capacity to deceive something every child reinvents. Rather it is an aspect of the "original sin" into which we are born, and even may be a part of the DNA patterning passed on to successive generations. In any case, we also have the capacity to choose not to practice deceit. Some of our ancestors did and some did not, some more and some less. Thus, we are all both cursed and blessed by those who came before us. If we make an effort to become more conscious and more self-honest concerning the motives behind what we say and do and how we go about getting our needs met, then, instead of being the perpetrators we become transformers of generational sin. Rather than blaming "sin" on Adam and Eve, we can assume responsibility for our share in transforming consciousness collectively.

In observing and honestly assessing the ways we use our own lower intuitive powers we initiate the process by which the shadow aspect of human nature is redeemed. Kunkel speaks of this shadow aspect of inner work as "a painful and exclusively personal task:"

It implies the acceptance and assimilation of our unconscious fears and faults, the removal of our inhibitions and prejudices, the reformation and integration of our passions and compulsions.(33)

The Uroboric Serpent
Figure 6

~~

Suffering, Endurance and Consciousness

The drama in the Garden tells of the beginning and cause of suffering. But, as we have already surmised, the beginning of suffering was also for the sake of the evolution of consciousness, and for humanity's conscious reunion with God. The New Testament, as well as the writings of mystics both past and contemporary, speak of a "suffering endured for the sake of Christ" and that is transforming. Although judged "foolishness" by the rational mind, it is nevertheless the "wisdom of God" to which Paul and many have attested.(34) James, in his New Testament letter, speaks of an endurance that is rewarded by "the crown of life."(35) And Sweitzer, in discussing the "being in Christ" mysticism of St Paul, refers to a suffering that is atoning when endured for the sake of Christ and borne in conscious union with Him.(36) There is also Jesus' directive to his disciples to pick up their crosses and follow him.(37) In context, Jesus seems to be referring to self-denial--to yielding self-will to the higher will of the one he calls Father. Symbolically understood this amounts to the death of self-will--its crucifixion.

From personal experience I know that suffering can be physical, emotional or mental. I know also that there is a kind of suffering that takes the form of a moral dilemma and that places one in the fire of painful or conflicting emotions or desires so as to evoke images of being "tried" by fire. It is James again who observes how often it is the tongue that sets in motion the "wheel" of fire--of hell.(38) But even self-ignited suffering can be transforming when it leads to self-examination, and self-examination to insight as to how self-will exerts itself in our lives. In this way we "eat our sin," that is to say we assimilate into consciousness a portion of our previously unconscious shadow self. The uroboric Serpent who swallows its tail is symbolic of this self-assimilation process. (Figure 6) ~~

Entering Myth as a Participant

Characteristically an archetypal myth invites the reader to become a participant, to put him- or herself into the story as one (or more) of the players. This is possible because a story that is mythologically true is able to reach beyond our conscious blinders and directly into the unconscious where its meaning is symbolically understood.

Just as there are levels upon levels to human consciousness, so there are levels and levels of meaning in an archetypal myth. But for as long as the patriarchal finger of Genesis has kept us focused on "the woman's" eating from the forbidden tree of knowledge of good and evil we have missed some of the more subtle messages of the story and its paradoxical nuances.

As already noted, the Serpent not only has a dark side but also a light side. In both the Old and New Testaments there are hints of both: the Serpent as Satan, and as bearer of wisdom and physical healing. Moreover, even though the meaning of a myth may be culturally conditioned, the symbolic language through which it communicates allows its truth (not to be confused with the facts) to be transmitted from age to age and place to place. The reason we can personally relate to an age-old myth is because we have within us counterparts to what is being portrayed in the story.

In addition to the masculine point of view presented in Genesis, a feminine voice also can be heard speaking from a purely earth mother point of view. This causes me to wonder, "If I were Eve, deceived or not, what would be going through my mind as the sequence of events unfolds?"

~~

An Earth Mother View of the Fall

True, as we listen to the Serpent as tempter, the tale is one of unabashed guile: How to practice guile and how to be beguiling.(39) These, however, are the very characteristics of consciousness that develop along side of egocentricity. Therefore, if it was through egocentricity that the Serpent intended to "psych out" Yahweh's children, perhaps Adam would have been a better victim. But what if there was something else that made Eve susceptible to this particular temptation? From what other angle could Eve have been beguiled?

An important point of the story is the Serpent's contradiction of Yahweh by telling "the woman" that what Yahweh really fears is that if she and Adam eat the fruit of this tree they will become "like gods.". I think "being like gods" would mean something different to a man than to a woman. Speaking for myself, I don't see the Serpent as appealing to Eve's egocentricity so much as to her instincts as an earth mother. And if so, how exactly did the Serpent go about setting Eve up for "the fall"? In other words, what could have been going on in Eve's mind? What beneath the surface of the story might be at issue here?

For one thing, as Eve it would seem to me that the most important thing about becoming "like gods" would be "to live forever." Moreover, the first argument the Serpent presents to Eve is to contradict Yahweh by telling her, "You will not die." To the part of me that is Eve this would certainly be more appealing than gaining "knowledge of good and evil," except perhaps as idle curiosity. But I know from Eve's name that her primary nature is in being an earth mother. And I know how primarily concerned an earth mother is for the safety, well-being and the preservation of the physical life of her offspring. And if Eve is destined to become the "mother of all," as her name indicates, then this desire is basic to who she is. I know that on this level I am unconsciously and sometimes outrageously instinctual. At times I even have been just conscious enough to observe how even mild apprehension can evolve into full-fledged anxiety where my children are concerned. For these reasons I feel that for Eve, the original earth mother, this priority of physical survival would have been essential to her nature.

As I read the story, Yahweh's focus, too, seems more concerned with the Tree of Life than the Tree of Knowledge. Only after the fact of the temptation is Yahweh overheard to say, "See, the man has become like one of us, with his knowledge of good and evil. He must not be allowed to stretch his hand out next and pick from the Tree of Life also, and eat some and live for ever." It is for this reason that Yahweh bans Adam from the Garden and places the Tree of Life under the guard of the flaming sword.(40)

~~

The Tension of Opposites

At this point in the story as it has come down to us in Genesis, it is almost as if Eve, being a mere woman, has become so unimportant as to be invisible. I also can relate to this, to times in the midst of highly charged, "important" masculine situations when I, too, have felt invisible. But in all fairness, I'm sure the same could be said for men when in the vicinity of women totally involved in their own gender happenings.

Just as the Serpent and Yahweh create a tension of opposites--the instinctual and the spiritual--so Adam and Eve--the masculine and the feminine--have their own characteristic and opposing energies that from time to time build up to a collective fervor capable of obscuring all else.

If the Serpent is instinctual--is of the earth and matter--then Yahweh is of heaven and spirit. If Yahweh represents consciousness, then the Serpent represents unconsciousness. If Yahweh is "good," then the Serpent is "evil." If the goal is to return to conscious union with God then the "evil" that the Serpent represents is that which is done out of unconsciousness.

~~

Yahweh-Elohim

The Bible nowhere defines for us an ultimate, absolute, transcendent God, perhaps because this, as Judaism holds, is beyond human understanding. Instead we have different names for God, names defining different divine characteristics. These different names clue us into the different facets of the One who is beyond our comprehension. When Moses asked of the Voice from the burning bush, "Who shall I say sent me?" "I am who I am" (also translated "I exist",) was what he was told. Thereafter it was this "I am" who, through Moses, directed the Israelites and who became known as Yahweh.

But Yahweh is not the only name by which God is known in the Bible. In Genesis 1:1 it is Yahweh-Elohim who creates "heaven and earth." Nor is Yahweh, as he is characterized in the Old Testament, the same in character as the Heavenly Father whom Jesus calls "Abba," (or as we would say, "Daddy.") At least by name--by nature--Yahweh is not even the name of the one who spoke to Abraham saying:

I am El Shaddai. Be fruitful and multiply. A nation, indeed a group of nations shall descend from you. Even kings shall be numbered among your descendants.(41)

El Shaddai, according to David Ebaugh's research based on Strong's Concordance, is a feminine Hebrew word related in meaning to"large or multi-breasted provider." Yahweh, on the other hand, is a masculine word whose root meaning includes the idea "to produce with the hand," and the Elohim of Genesis 1:1 is a plural androgynous word etymologically related to "strong oak tree."(42) These different names for God suggest different facets of the Hebrew Godhead, only one of which was Yahweh.

It was "Yahweh-Elohim," who walked and talked with Adam and actually spoke of himself in the plural. Let us just suppose that this Yahweh-Elohim of the Hebrew Godhead had some reason other than a demand for blind obedience for not wanting his children, in their present stage of development, to eat of the Tree of Life. From the perspective of wholeness, what motive might we assign Yahweh that would be more in keeping with how a loving father could be expected to deal with disobedience in children? To gain insight here we need turn now to Adam and the role in the Garden drama assigned him as representative of the masculine pole of the human psyche.

~~

The Archetypal Adam

As the first man and the first woman, Adam and Eve represent the masculine and feminine principles of the human psyche. Eve's role as earth mother--as the primal maternal--has already been noted. Adam, as her opposite, carries the potential for masculine or paternal responsibility. One of the positive functions of the masculine principle is to assume responsibility for the protection of offspring until they become old enough to shoulder responsibility for themselves, at which time they will be better equipped to make responsible choices and be responsible for their choices. Along with the freedom of choice comes exposure to unknown dangers.

If there was something about the nature of the Serpent that resonated with Eve's basic role, then it follows there was something about the nature of Yahweh that related to Adam. If in the development of human consciousness Yahweh exemplified, among other things, the protective masculine then his justification for expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden may have been that human nature was not yet ready to assume the responsibility for making mature choices.

But why, having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil and already having tasted something of what it is like to be gods, would Adam ("the woman" is not mentioned) have needed to be protected at all costs from eating of the Tree of Life?

~~

From Unity to Multiplicity

Back in Genesis the "innocence" that was lost was an original state of undifferentiated unity of consciousness. Eating of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil was symbolic of the beginning of the process of differentiation. Before that, we may surmise, the individual human being was not yet aware of existence apart from the whole. Reflective thought, except in undifferentiated reference to the whole, had not yet been experienced. Only after the fruit of duality was consumed and digested, only from that point on did the ability to think in terms of opposites become apparent: good and evil, light and dark, male and female, heaven and earth, the divine and the human, life and death. And, as human consciousness continued its evolutionary path of increasing complexity, the list of opposites multiplied proportionately.

Yahweh's immediate concern had been with "the man" who had become like god in his knowledge of good and evil. But what if Yahweh's ultimate concern was the near certainty that these humans next would eat of the Tree of Life and consequentially obtain immortality. Apparently in Yahweh's mind to have done so would have been disastrous.

~~

Yahweh's Worst Fear

Eve, "the mother of all those who live,"(43) is the earth principle with its inherent instinct for physical survival. If Eve could have secured physical immortality for herself and her children her innermost desire as an earth mother would seem to have been fulfilled and, as far as she was concerned, creation would have fulfilled its purpose. But, at the same time, Yahweh's worst fear would have been realized. It has been said that high on the list of human fears is the fear of dying before one has really lived. When life becomes complacent and settles in at the level of mere existence there is no motivation to make of one's life something more than it already is. For this reason Jesus said, "Whoever would preserve [as in pickle] his life will lose it."(44)

Perhaps this is what Yahweh was bent on preventing from happening: humankind's eating of the Tree of Life and thereby attaining immortality too soon--before having lived long enough to become conscious enough to appreciate that without purpose and meaning life is not really being lived. A tragedy of our times is that so many young people are "falling through the cracks" of our society, the potential of their lives being lost before they have had an opportunity to live.

~~

The Tree of Life--Its Heart and Side Shoots

A Jewish "cabalistic" explanation of the Tree of Life sees it as having lateral branches representing the sub-human species. These side-shoots come to a halt at one level or another, ending on the same level where each began. Humankind, however, is understood as being the heart or trunk of the tree. (Figure 7)

The Heart and Side Shoots of the Tree of Life
Figure 7

Consequently, each species is compelled to exist in a milieu which varies only to a slight extent. If the milieu alters beyond the species' capacity of adaptation, then the species dies. . . . . For the genus Homo, however, the situation is completely different. . . . The life to which Adam is called is a series of destructions and new beginnings. Allegorically, life is "saying" all the time that this "germ" of humanity must always be prevented from achieving perfect protection and shelter. If ever it should find a fixed refuge, a comfortable stability, it would settle down lazily into a subhuman species; it would become one of these side-shoots on the tree of life.(45)

A similar point of view is given in The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian, by Joseph Epes Brown, who explains the complexity of the spiritual endowment of the Plains Indian, and why their beliefs cannot be put off simplistically as pantheism.

. . . although man was created last of all the creatures, he is also the "axis," and thus in a sense is the first. For if each animal reflects particular aspects of the Great Spirit, man, on the contrary, may include within himself all aspects. He is thus a totality, bearing the Universe within himself, and through his Intellect having the potential capacity to live in continual awareness of this reality. . . .

[Peace] comes within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the Universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.(46)

~~

The Ordering of Priorities

In Eden, while Yahweh's concern had been with Adam, the Serpent's conversation had been with Eve. In apprising the Tree of Knowledge Eve saw, first of all, that it was "good to eat," secondly that it was "pleasing to the eye," and last of all she conceded it to be "desirable for the knowledge it could give". If the archetypal Eve is a part of each of us, it can be self-revealing to note Eve's priorities, and then honestly assess them against our own. What are our survival concerns? Our emotional needs? The value we place on knowledge?

The transformational process asks that we become observers but not judges of our own unconscious attitudes and assumptions. In becoming observers we gain the distance and detachment necessary to see how some of our most basic attitudes and cherished assumptions are the cause of our resistance to change, and therefore to having alternate choices. Judgment, on the other hand, (whether directed towards ourselves or others) causes a defensive response which blinds us to alternate possibilities. Biblical personalities, however, offer another avenue to self-knowledge, one that is indirect and therefore able to bypass the resistance we all have to seeing into the inner depths of our own souls. When we read about them we are drawn to reflect upon our own human similarities. In this way we become more psychologically honest. John Sanford, speaking of what made Jacob a candidate for transformation, notes:

To be psychologically honest means that a person is capable of seeing the truth about himself and what he is doing. . . . He calls a spade a spade, and this quality of psychological honesty is of fundamental importance to spiritual and psychological development. Without it nothing can take place; with it there is always the possibility that God (Who, psychologically speaking, is the urge toward wholeness) can break through our egocentricity and make something of us.(47)

~~

How Opposites Interchange

As noted in Part I, the components of the Garden form a mandala that reflects the structure and dynamics of the human psyche. Another way of seeing the same dynamics at work is in the Star of David, which symbol is to Israel what the Cross is to Christianity. Both Cross and Star are symbolic of the reconciliation of opposites and have common components. Previously we have seen Adam and Eve and Yahweh and the Serpent as pairs of opposites. Now, in Figure 8, Yahweh and Adam are shown occupying the upper, downward pointing triangle and Eve and the Serpent as occupying the lower but upward pointing triangle.

Figure 8

As shown in Figure 8, the upper but downward pointing triangle is the territory of Yahweh and Adam, with Yahweh representing the higher and Adam the lower archetypal levels of the masculine principle. Inversely, Eve's territory is the upper portion of the lower triangle, the one pointing upward, which for our purposes represents the feminine principle. Its lower-most archetypal level is the habitation of the Serpent

Note the small diamond in Figure 8 where the tips of the two triangles (marked with a plus sign) meet. Then, in Figure 9, note how in the integration process opposites interchange. For Eve and her daughters the journey towards wholeness leads upward from the lower world of the unconscious--a place or state of mind where no one questions Eve's ability to carry on a conversation with a Serpent. But for Adam and his sons the journey leads downward from the upper world. Whereas it was Eve who conversed with the Serpent, it was Adam whose task it was to name and categorize the animals. Adam's challenge, or the challenge of the dominantly masculine, is to become more intimately familiar with the lower regions of consciousness referred to as the unconscious.

Figure 9

The Process of Symbolic Inversion

In Figures 8 and 9, as Eve's and the Serpent's triangle ascends and Adam's and Yahweh's descends, what is a small diamond (a seed potential) in the center of Figure 8 has expanded so as to include all four of Eden's archetypal personages. Moreover, Yahweh and the Serpent, instead of being relegated to the upper and the lower outermost territories, (representing the archetypal extremities) have now become co-joined and included within the very center of the diagram.

This process by which opposites interchange is called symbolic inversion. As a principle of nature it is constantly happening in our daily lives as day turns into night and summer becomes winter. Something similar is also constantly taking place in the human psyche with its rhythmic movement from times of withdrawing inwardly to times of moving back out into greater activity and involvement. This ebb and flow of psychic energy is as regular as the rise and fall of the ocean and follows laws of nature as dependable as those upon which the tides are regulated.

In Genesis, Yahweh and the Serpent are the archetypal representatives of the principles symbolized as heaven and earth: Adam and Eve are the representatives of these same principles in human nature. The creative task of becoming individually whole is the progressive work by which the opposites on both personal and collective levels of consciousness are united. The diamond, as it is double outlined in Figure 9, is symbolic of the many-faceted, whole psyche--the diamond Self.

~~

The Creative Process at Work in Our Lives

Our survival into adulthood gives us firsthand knowledge of life's passages. From infant to child to adolescent to young adult, we pass through "initiations" that symbolically relate to our emergence from unconsciousness. In the embryonic state we were contained within an encircling environment that provided all our needs. After being so rudely pushed from the womb we gradually experienced separateness. Incrementally our independence and self-identity increased and strengthened. Gradually it dawned upon us that someday we would be expected to assume responsibility for our own lives. As teenagers we began to resist what we experienced as barriers to our freedom and to rebel against those who imposed limitations on us. We were betwixt and between the womb and the world. We were about to be banished from Eden's gates.

On the transformational journey we become conscious of who we are both individually and in our relationship to the whole. Our need is to know where we have come from so as to appraise where we now are and be receptive to direction from within as to where we are to go from here. In this movement the creative process is at work in and through our lives.

The story of Eden is about the initial phase of the repetitive pattern by which consciousness evolves. In grasping this we come to see that the real life situations that cause us the psychic pain of alienation are not working against us but for our wholeness. If only we could more readily embrace rather than resist our pain, then our suffering would be less and we would understand it as something not to escape but to wrestle with. "To prevail" in this sense is to not let go of what we are wrestling or struggling against until we are able to discern its message, meaning, or guidance for our lives. When we do this the experience then becomes transforming and prepares us to ascend higher up the evolutionary spiral where our lives can be seen in terms of their intentional course.

To know there is intent behind our lives is to know that we are connected to and part of a larger life and a greater reality than the limited one we know through our five senses.

~~

From the First to the Second Adam

Paradoxically, for the individual as well as for humanity, emergence from that original edenic state of collective containment causes an erasing of memory. We are born into this life with only "intimations" of our immortality. In the original, undifferentiated, unconscious state we are so identified with the whole we don't know who we are apart from all else. The biblical journey from Genesis to Revelations points our way of return to the eternal All-in-All that God is, not as an unconscious union but in a fully conscious reunion.

The real choice to be made is between accepting the responsibilities of becoming more fully conscious over the consequences of remaining unconscious, a choice most acutely brought into focus at each of life's crossroads. For pre-conscious humanity the Garden of Eden was just such a crossroads.

If Yahweh is the archetypal representative of the divine masculine principle, one of his primary functions is to keep humanity on its evolutionary course in order for it to reach its goal. The way an archetype functions is to set in motion a particular kind of energy by which the human psyche--individually and collectively--is moved from one phase of its journey to the next. In this light, even the violence of the Old Testament and of Revelations can be read as symbolic of how the human soul's resistance to transformation is overcome--is itself done violence to--as when a tornado uproots everything in its path that is not sufficiently lashed in place, or an earthquake shakes the very foundation upon which a person is standing, causing whatever is not firmly anchored to come tumbling down.

The Garden of Eden was a pivotal crossroads for collective humanity. Jesus, in the agony he experienced in Gethsemane, made a symbolic return to Eden. About this the Apostle Paul wrote:

The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.(48)

In accepting the "bitter cup" of crucifixion Jesus was opening himself to all the cumulative darkness and pain of the human race. Rather than making any effort to preserve his own life, he accepted "obedience unto death," thereby blotting out that first and all subsequent acts of disobedience--past, present and future.

If in Eden disobedience caused humanity to veer from some originally intended course, in Gethsemane humanity as a whole was put back on course.

O happy fault

That merited such and so great a redeemer!(49)

~~

Illustration Credits

Marianne Elliott: Frontispiece and Figures 3, 4, & 7.
Kenneth McAll, M.D.: Figure 1 (permission requested)
Ann K Elliott: Figures 2, 5, 6, 8, & 9

_________________________

Endnotes:
1. Jung, C G, quoted by Jolande Jacobi in Complex, Archetype, Symbol, Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press, 1950, p 31 and following in which Jacobi gives a clear and concise treatment of the archetypes. Italics in text mine. 2. Ibid, p 32
3. Progoff, Ira, Jung, Synchronicity, and Human Destiny, Dell, NY, 1973, p78
4. Complex, Archetype, Symbol op cit, p 31
5. Genesis 3:24
6. Matthew 7:3
7. Jung, Collected Works, Aion, Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, Vol 9,11, para 14, p 8, Bollingen Series XX, Pantheon Books, 1959
8. Sheldrake, Rupert, The Presence of the Past (Park Street Press). Also see Dan Menkin's interview with Sheldrake in Quest Magazine, Autumn 1995.
9. Ibid, p 8
10. For an in-depth treatment of active imagination as developed by Jung see Barbara Hannah's Active Imagination, Sigo Press, 1981
11. McAll, Kenneth, M D, Healing the Family Tree, Sheldon Press, SPCK, Marylebone Road, London NW1 4DU, England, 1982.
12. Exodus 20:5
13. The friend to whom I refer is Cliff Custer. See his book Love is an Inside Job. Address inquiries to his attention, 421 Avenue De Terresa, Grants Pass OR 97526
14 . Karney, Beulah, Old Father's Long Journey, ..\..\..\serra\californiamissionstudies.htm
15. The Agreda Story, by Beulah Karney ..\..\..\agreda\maryofagreda.htm
16. Jung, Synchronicity, and Human Destiny, op cit, pp 112-3
17. 2 Corinthians 12:2
18. The Basic Writings of C G Jung, edited by Violet Staub de Laszio, Modern Library, Random House, 1959, N Y, p 115
19. Ibid
20. Sanford, Kingdom Within, p 51
21. op cit, Basic Writings, p 102
22. John 5:2-9
23. Jung, C G, Aion, Pantheon Books, New York, 1959, p 234
24. Ibid, p 245
25. Ibid, p 247
Westminister/John Knox Press, KY, 1992. Kunkel quote from Fritz Kunkel: Selected Writings, p 387, Edited by Sanford and published by Paulist Press, NJ 1984
27. Genesis 2:19
28. Aion, op cit p 248
29. Kunkle, Fritz, Creation Continues, pp 64-65, Word Books, Waco, TX, 1973
30. This is thematic in The Revelation, Our Crisis is a Birth, by Barbara Marx Hubbard, Foundation for Conscious Evolution, Greenbrae, CA, 1993
31. Sanford, John, The Man Who Wrestled With God, (Revised and Updated), Paulist Press, (1987) NY See Chapter 12, particularly the last few pages in discussion of the Wisdom interpretation of the Serpent of Eden which suggests that at the time of the writing of the story there was actual concern for the kind of evil that is morally defiling and capable of causing a person to darken or lose their soul by corruption from within.
32. Genesis 3:1
33. Kunkle, op cit, p 70
34. With reference to 1 Corinthians 1:25
35. James 1:12
36. Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, Macmillan, MY 1956, See pages 141-7
37. Matthew 10:38
38. James 3:6
39. Genesis 3:3
40. Genesis 3:22
41. Genesis 35:11-13
42. Research on The Names of God provided by David Ebaugh in his newsletter Monarch, October 1990, 102 Park Terrace, Harrisburg PA 17111-1667
43. Genesis 3:20.
44. Matthew 16:25
45. Suares, Carlos Cipher of Genesis, Bantam Books Edition, NY, 1973, p 98-99
46. Brown, Joseph Epes, The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian, Pendle Hill Pamphlet 135, 1964, Pendle Hill PA, pp 18-19
47. Sanford, John, The Man Who Wrestled With God, Religious Publishing Co, PA, 1974, p 24.
48. 1 Corinthians 15:45
49. From the Roman Missal ~~

BOOK TWO

THE WILDERNESS

Part I

CALL TO BOUNDLESSNESS

The decisive question is:
Is [a person] related to something infinite or not?
C G Jung

Saul Raskin's ABRAHAM

~

Abraham's Call

The Judaic-Christian heritage goes back nearly 4,000 years to when Abraham heard the voice of God directing him to

Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.(1)

Thus Abraham set out for the land of Canaan--the Promised Land. He was called out of one life into another. He experienced a separation from all he had known and all to which he had thought of himself as belonging. He was enjoined to the solitariness of an unfamiliar Wilderness, called to a place where he would experience his true nature as a child of the universe, as one who was boundless.

~

The Call to Individuation

Edward Edinger has described Abraham's divinely originated urge as "the archetypal image of the 'call' that initiates individuation."(2) Abraham was called to wake up to who he was individually and eternally, to become aware of a center of personality other than the ego, a transpersonal center Jung has identified as the true, creative, authentic, whole Self, the Self by which the individual is linked to the infinite.

~

Early Intimations

Similarly Wordsworth, in the language of poetry, speaks of the Soul as "our life's Star." In his "Intimations of Immortality" he recollects early memories not entirely forgotten:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
and not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:(3)

. . . a little child playing alone in her sandbox, sensing herself surrounded and enfolded by the love of a heavenly Father whose omnipresence she senses in the flowers, in the melody of a bird, in the gentle breeze and the warmth of the sun, in the iridescence of the sky--a Presence she senses as everywhere and in everything as far as she can see.

Such early "intimations" reflect the Self's innate sense of being. Later they are the holy ground from which a readiness for vocation arises. The call may come as a voice (inner or outer), or as a vision or dream. It may happen in the midst of a literal or figurative Wilderness, or through an ordeal, or in answer to a soul-searching question sincerely asked. It comes in whatever way it can, through whatever opening into consciousness it can find. As with Abraham, the call comes to tell us who we are and why we are here. Above all, it comes to summon us back into relationship with an infinite Being who is called by many names.

~

Boundless as the Stars

So it happened that Abraham found himself cut off from his family, his native land, and all that had been familiar. Standing all alone beneath the desert night sky, a voice spoke out of the silence: "Abraham,"

Lift up your eyes and look: As far as you can see in every direction, all this belongs to you and your descendants for ever.(4)

Thus Abraham was brought into relationship with all that he could see as far as he could see. And without knowing how it could or would happen, he accepted God's word that he would father a great nation, one so great that his descendants would outnumber the stars. In him all the families of the earth would be blessed.(5)

The ancient Hebrew sages, according to Rabbi Dobin,(6) had a belief that every twenty years, when Jupiter and Saturn were in conjunction, the will of God was made known. The idea was that Saturn, the farthest planet they could see, was the Divine Messenger who communicated God's will at the time of the conjunction. The message was then passed on to the rest of the planets over the following year as each came into conjunction with Jupiter. Thus every twenty years knowledge of God's will made the rounds of the heavens. Possibly it was such a conjunction that brought Abraham out beneath the stars that night. Perhaps he was standing there in readiness, his mind and heart attentive to the voice of God.

In any event, it is the Self who comes with the divine message that we, too, are as boundless as the stars and who calls us into a relationship with God that is based on an intimacy such as exists between close friends, a Self with whom God covenants to be mutually bound.

. . . you, Israel, my servant,
Jacob, whom I have chosen,
the offspring of Abraham, my friend.(7)

Before their fall into consciousness Adam and Eve had "walked and talked" with God in the Garden of their pre-conscious existence. (Book One, Part I) Then had come the separation from the One, the sense of self as severed from God. But now, in the person of Abraham, the relationship was being restored, only higher up the spiral as a conscious relationship.

Star Stuff

Edinger identifies the Covenant relationship between God and Abraham and his descendants as "the core content of the old Testament"

Abraham is told that the fruits of his life will be countless and of the nature of stars. . . . He is to be the father of "star stuff."(8)

An ancient Chinese Book of [burial] Rites, also points metaphorically to the stars as the home to which the eternal Self returns:

Earth covers the bones . . . the spirit rises to the stars.(9)

Abraham's call was to father individuals destined to take their places among the stars. Symbolically speaking, each soul has its own individual place in the whole of creation in the same way that each star has a place of its own in the heavens. The stars speak of an individuality that is an integral part of a greater Whole. Porphyry describes this unity as a particular that is distinct without being separate. Raynor Johnson comments:

Perhaps the individual human consciousness, the sense of "I"-ness, is an irreducible and fundamental thing, and the increasing sense of unity as we penetrate towards reality is a unity of relationship. I think we can find useful analogies for this on many levels--being careful not to press them too far. There is on the material level the relationship of atoms in a molecule. The atomic nuclei remain intact, but the external structures are interlocked to form a new and larger whole. Take the human body. The billions of cells are united into functioning organs and the various organs into a still greater whole through which runs a principle of co-operation and unity. The unity is one not of structure and function, but of relationship. On the level of mind we have the unity of relationship of many varied memories held without confusion within a single mind. In art we have the unity of relationship of pigments forming a painting or of notes forming a piece of music.(10)

The Christ Event

Jung held that the lives of certain individuals so far exceed their personal influence as to impact the psyche of collective humanity. Through their attainments humanity as a whole is furthered along the evolutionary spiral. From the seed of Abraham one in particular would come whose relationship with God would be so close that to see the one would be to see the other. Out of this at-one-ment an Event of cosmic proportions would be generated so as to reverberate throughout all ages.

From an evolutionary perspective, the task for which the Israelites, as the descendants of Abraham, had been chosen was to be the boost that would launch human consciousness from one stage to another--like millions of rockets fired irretractably into the heavens.

A brilliant conjunction of heavenly bodies had announced the advent of the long foretold Event. The new light that had entered human consciousness continued to increase during the centuries immediately following its earth entry. Early on there had been expectations of a Second Coming. But when the parousia did not take place, at least as expected, the fervency surrounding the Event began to diminish. Eventually it was politicized and institutionalized. Then, with the dark ages, its light disappeared from view. By this time, however, the seeds of the Event had been sown far and wide and lay waiting to burst back into Life.

Certainly, in the art and architecture of the Renaissance, the Event was reborn as aesthetics. This awakening, however, gave way to the dehumanizing influences of industrialization and the over-rationality of the age of science. Metaphor, myth and symbol were becoming lost languages. The vision of Christ, risen and returning to complete the work of atonement, was perishing for lack of visionary language.

~

The Silent Awakening

Then, moving into the Twentieth Century, a new stirring of spirit began. In Civilization in Transition Jung speaks of a "secret spirituality" among the "silent ones of the land." He quotes Keyserling as one who "speaks with the voice of many and so gives expression to a great time of change."

The man of this age undoubtedly speaks through him when he rates understanding above faith and experience above a credo. The individual, "master of himself and freed from the shackles of tradition, is beginning to understand the old truths, in so far as they are truths which in earlier times were simply accepted on authority, in a new and personal way. At the very time when the old forms are disintegrating, advanced minorities are beginning to experience their essential meaning, their living and immortal substance, more profoundly than at any time since the golden age of Christianity, when Greek thinkers were giving shape to the Christian view of the world. This means nothing less that that the age of the Holy Ghost is now at hand."(11)

"Who would have thought that?" Jung muses:

Who are these "advanced minorities"? Where are they? I will tell you: your next-door neighbours, the Meiers and the Mullers, of whom you would never have expected it, . . . . (12)

What is "it" we don't expect of our neighbors? Is it their deep but secret spirituality? That they have dreamt big dreams, heard voices, and even seen visions? That they have had spiritual experiences they wished they understood but are reluctant to talk about? Could it be that this generation really is witness to a collective, planetary spiritual awakening? To a New Coming? Barbara Marx Hubbard would agree when she speaks of this generation as "members of the evolving world" who are living "at the time of its Quantum Transformation."

We are the seed of a fully human species. Our desire to grow is the pulse and power of evolution itself, motivating us to realize and fulfill our life purpose. Deep personal stories often reveal the pattern of the future human.

Each of us is an expression of the overall evolutionary journey. By tracing our individual stories, we discover our unique participatory role in the great transformation of our time.(13)

~

The Twentieth Century Synthesis of Psychology and Spirituality

As early as mid Twentieth Century the fresh new wind of the Holy Spirit was clearly discernible throughout the land. Charismatic "renewal" communities were springing up across all denominational lines. In place of statements of belief they offered an experience of the Holy Spirit. Faith was coming alive in a new and living way.

For some the experience of the Holy Spirit was also a call to individuation, a call that recognized the need for going deeper into the psyche where soul healing was needed in order to free one to discover and follow her or his own individual path. In this manner spiritual renewal and depth psychology found themselves joined together. And out of this synthesis the Christian implications of Jung's work gained credibility, particularly in the work of authors such as Morton Kelsey and John Sanford who were able to relate Jungian concepts to New Testament teachings. Both recognized Jung's map of the unconscious as familiar New Testament territory and concurred with Fritz Kunkel's assessment of the New Testament as "the great text-book of depth-psychology."(14)

The winds of change were stirring on still another front, around the thought of Jesuit priest/scientist Teilhard de Chardin. Silenced by the hierarchical authority to whom he had vowed obedience, his writings were not published until after his death in 1955. Writing in terms that were at once scientific and mystical, Teilhard's legacy to the Twentieth Century church was a contemporary language in which to recast the ongoing redemptive work of the Risen Christ. For a decade or so interest in Teilhard spread like wild fire. Then, perhaps because much of his writing was not easy reading, popular interest waned, but not before his thought and his vision of the Cosmic Christ had made their imprint on the collective mind of the times.

With the ideas of Jung and Teilhard as leaven to the psychology and theology of the latter Twentieth Century, science was about to make another leap that would again challenge the prevailing assessment of reality: If the universe was an expanding macrocosm it was also a contracting microcosm of infinitesimally small sub-particles--universes within universes moving in both directions. And as for chaos, look again, underneath the appearance of disorder there was a whole other level of order. Beyond all this, some physicists--serious physicists--were now entertaining the possibility of simultaneous, alternate or "parallel" universes. Star Trek was becoming believable. And wouldn't the insatiably curious Jung have enjoyed dialoging with these new leading-edge scientists, and they with him?

Moreover, in light of where science appears headed such issues as evolution-versus-creation-according-to-Genesis has lost all relevance. In their place a door into unlimited possibilities has been thrown wide open. And it may be that this is the doorway--"the eye of the needle"--through which the Judaic-Christian journey must pass into the Twenty-First Century if it is to regain the universality of its beginning; if it is to leave the vestiges of Judaic exclusivity behind in favor of the universality of Hellenistic thinking.

~

Return to the Whole

Nor could Abraham have foreseen the twisting, turning path his spiritual lineage would take so as to make him the ancestral father of the cosmic Christ, and towards whom Teilhard's vision sees all of creation converging.

When a vision is formed of "living and immortal substance," then its eternal truth stands ever ready to be understood in a new and relevant way. As in Jesus' day there were those who wondered if the Baptist might not be Elijah returned, so in our day there is something about Teilhard strikingly Pauline--the Paul who was able to create a bridge from ancient Judaism to a hellenized Christianity and so provide the means by which the seeds of Abraham could be universally sown. Now, nearly two thousand years later, Teilhard is as much a product of his age as Paul of his. Teilhard--scientist, priest; prophet, poet, mystic; visionary; paleontologist; evolutionist--whose vision of the Cosmic Christ Robert Faricy has summarized, in part as follows:

The whole universe, the cosmos, is the body of Christ.

The church, as Christ's body, identified with him in unity, and yet distinct from its Head, does not yet appear as what it really is in the overall structure of God's plan: the central axial line of the world's development toward the final reconciliation of all things in Christ.

The church's main field of action is this world and all that is in it: that everything be more and more brought to Christ and reconciled in him toward the time, the end of time, when God will be all in all and Christ will hand over the one kingdom to the Father.(15)

But will this be the end, or just an end that is at once a new beginning? Will creation's return to the Whole initiate a new divine-scale creative process?

~

The Birth of a New World

To Abraham the vision appeared as the countless star/souls in whom the seed of God consciousness would be sown. For Paul the vision was of a collective birth of the sons and daughters of God. For Teilhard the vision came as a progressive evolutionary ascent towards Christogenesis(16)--the Christing of human consciousness. And to Barbara Marx Hubbard, twentieth century visionary, the vision is of the birth of a new species--Homo Universalis. She sees

The planet itself . . . evolving toward a quantum leap, wherein all of its members will experience themselves as part of one body.(17)

Abraham, in being directed to "look up" to the star-filled heavens, was being asked to make a shift in consciousness from reason to imagination and to see through the eyes of faith.

Jesus similarly challenged his followers to "Look up," adding, for "your redemption is drawing near."(18) In context he referrd to upcoming upheavals both in nature and society. Normally, catastrophic predictions would be cause for trepidation, but Jesus, in saying to "look up," was pointing beyond this finite, temporal world to an infinitely greater, eternal reality.

Also contrary to expectation was Jesus' statement he brought not peace but the sword. Now a sword is used to sever, and likewise the work of individuation begins with a call which, in effect, is a separation--is a severance--from one's former life circumstances. It is a call to a time of change when disruption and upheaval are precursors of a reordering of the psyche with the Self as the new center. Accordingly, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses were all called out from where they had settled into living familiar, comfortable, unconscious lives.

One must be dumped out of the psychic containers that keep one unconsciously identified with family, tribe, party, church and country.(19)

Continuing, Edinger proposes:

One who succeeds in dissolving this participation mystique becomes, like Abraham, "a great nation." To achieve the state of conscious individual being is like the birth of a new world.(20)

And from The Visions Seminars he quotes Jung as dropping a "mysterious hint" that

It is quite possible that we contain whole peoples in our souls, worlds where we can be as infinitely great as we are infinitely small externally--so great that the history of the redemption of a whole nation or a whole universe might take place within us.(21)

Even from Jung this is a mind-stretching idea, but one comparable to Abraham's challenge to believe his offspring would be more numerous than the stars. Abraham at first (and as we also are prone to do) took the imagery literally and applied it narrowly: "How could that be? Were not Sarah and he childless and past the childbearing age?"

To shift from the limitations of logic to the realm of unlimited possibilities goes against human reason. Even where our dreams are concerned, the tendency is to reach first for a literal meaning, and only later explore the possibility that the dream just might be delivering a symbolic message concerning some other level of meaning.

Taken literally the Promise to Abraham referred to a quantity of sons and daughters with a common ancestry. But taken symbolically, Abraham's progeny would be those who would "take after him" in their capacity for intimacy with God. Moreover, they could be expected to hear voices and see visions, even be visited by angels. And the particular hyperbole, "as many as the stars in the heavens or the grains of sand beneath your feet,"(22) could be taken as pointing to a time when humanity in its entirety will have attained conscious unity with God, will have evolved to Homo Universalis.

~

Passing Down the Blessing

In the patriarchal days of Abraham, a Blessing would have been one passed down from father to eldest son. Isaac, accordingly, would have been the next recipient. Sanford, however, points out that missing from the records of Isaac's life are indications of his having had dreams or seen visions. Sanford wonders if Isaac, as the boy who was almost sacrificed to God, "may have been so badly frightened by God that for the rest of is life he kept him at a distance."(23)

The Sacrifice of Isaac

~

When Isaac and Rebekah had their twins, Esau, the first born, was "hairy" and grew up as Isaac's favorite. Jacob, the second, was "smooth" and favored by Rebekah. Rebekah connived with Jacob to deceive blind Isaac into thinking Jacob was Esau. Thus Jacob received the patriarchal Blessing that rightfully belonged to Esau. When Esau heard about the deception he let it be know he was going to kill his brother. In fear Jacob fled for his life. Thus Jacob was dumped from his "psychic container" into the aloneness and uncertainty of the Wilderness, but where he dreamt his big dream.(24)

Jacob's Dream

Of Jacob's twelve sons it was Joseph, neither the first nor last born, upon whom the Blessing of spiritual consciousness next fell. Provoked to jealousy by the partiality shown Joseph, his brothers sold him into slavery.(25) And so with Joseph the Blessing traveled down into Egypt where it disappeared from sight for the next four hundred years. There it remained as a seed hidden in the depths of the descendants of Abraham until, with a sudden burst of revitalization, the seed sprang forth once again in the person of Moses. It was this seed-potential for spiritual consciousness that brought Moses face to face with the Burning Bush where he received his call to be the new evolutionary dynamo around whom the twelve-tribe nation of Israel would come into being.

Holbein's Moses and the Burning Bush

~

From Abraham to Christ

From Abraham to Christ, one generation after another the Blessing passed, each a progression in the evolution of consciousness. Abraham's call was to father a people of faith who would have the capacity for individual relationship with a personally-known God. Jacob's call was to a Selfhood based on the capacity for self-honest reflection. Without this, the work of becoming conscious would have been stymied. Jacob had twelve sons who, in their differing personalities, characterized the major facets of human personality--the symbolic Tree of Life with its twelve fruits, one for each month, symbolic of the whole, individuated Self.

Joseph's call was to a still greater depth of consciousness, one that enabled him to see all things as working together according to God's purpose. It was this insight that enabled him to forgive his brothers. Jealousy had been their motivation, but God's intention had been to bring good from it.(26)

Joseph's whole life was a demonstration of his connection to a Self that was directing his life for a purpose that transcended his own personal well-being. He was in touch with a depth of the psyche where all things exist in simultaneous, interconnected relationship: the realm of nature; of the Tao; of the laws of universal harmony; and of synchronicity--the ordering principle that governs even unrelated, non-causal events. Through his Self connection he was able to interpret dreams, to discern the signs of the times, to read the cycles and patterns that determine lives and events as well as nature. Not until the coming of Jesus was anyone else portrayed in the Bible as functioning so purely from Self as Joseph.

~

Evolution and Individuation

From the death of Joseph until the birth of Moses, no more is heard of Abraham's seed. Hidden in Egypt their strength and number increased until Moses was called to the most challenging task of the entire Old Testament. To him was assigned the task of facilitating the evolutionary transformation of an entire people, a call of exponential magnitude, and not equaled until, with the Crucifixion, the Christ seed of divine sonship was implanted into the collective human psyche in its entirety.

The individuation process follows a pattern that is similar to the evolution of consciousness as this is given in the Bible: Like Abraham we initially are awakened to our potential for spiritual awareness. As Jacob we must experience separations and "wrestle" with the shadow aspects of our human personality. Similar to Joseph we must come into contact with the deeper, transpersonal levels of being where we dream dreams, hear an inner guiding voice, and come to see our lives as having transpersonal meaning. Then like Moses and the Israelites, we must have the heroic impulse to endure our Wilderness ordeals and temptations as we progress towards wholeness--towards the Promised Land. But once there, we still must take possession of a land that is only potentially ours.

~

Becoming Boundless

In the Wilderness the Israelites accepted their "election" as the People of God. In doing so they unknowingly initiated the process that would bring into their experience (and therefore into their self-awareness) all those regressive tendencies that stood between them and the freedom from bondage they sought, a bondage that in reality was to their own unconsciousness.

In the Wilderness the Israelites, as Abraham before them, would be asked to contemplate the countless stars, and so be put in touch with the boundlessness of creation and the ultimate power by which the course of each star and each life is guided and sustained.

Jung saw the anxiety of our age as the need to know that our individual lives are eternally relevant. About this he wrote:

The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. [When we do so] we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted. In our relationships to other men, too, the crucial question is whether an element of boundlessness is expressed in that relationship.(27)

~ Illustration Credits

Abraham -Etching by Russian-born (1878)
artist Saul Raskin
The Sacrifice of Isaac - From 15th Century German Bible
Jacob's Dream - From 15th Century German Bible
Moses and the Burning Bush -Woodcut by German artist Holbein

End Notes

1. Genesis 12:1
2. Edward F Edinger, The Bible and the Psyche, Inner City Books, Toronto, 1986, p 25
3. William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
4. Genesis 13:14 (paraphrase)
5. Genesis 12:3
6. Rabbi Joel C Dobin, The Astrological Secrets of the Hebrew Sages, Inn Traditions International, LTD, NY, 1983, p 33
7. Isaiah 41:8
8. Op cit, Edinger, p 28
9. Zimmer, Heinrich, "The Significance of the Tantric Yoga," in Spiritual Disciplines, Edited by Joseph Campbell, Bollingen Series XXX,-4, Princeton, 1960, p 26
10. Raynor C Johnson, The Imprisoned Splendor, Harper & Row, NY, 1953, p 336
11. C G Jung, Civilization in Transition, Bollingen Series XX, 1964 p 494 and where Jung, referring to the "silent ones" and the age of the Holy Ghost is quoting Keyserling
12. Ibid
13. Barbara Marx Hubbard, The Revelation, Our Crisis is a Birth, Foundation for Conscious Evolution, Greenbrai CA, 1993, p 19
14. Fritz Kunkel, Creation Continues, Word, TX 1973, p284
15. Robert Faricy, The Lord's Dealing, Paulist Press, NY, 1988, p98-99
16. Survival, A study guide for Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man, published by POM Project, Canoga Park CA, 1967, p 3
17. Op cit, Hubbard, p 31
18. Luke 21:28
19. Op cit, Edinger, p25
20. Ibid
21. Ibid, p 26
22. Genesis 13: 16 and 15:5
23. John A Sanford, The Man Who Wrestled With God, Paulist Press, NY 1974, p 11
24. Genesis 27, 28 & 29
25. Genesis 37
26. Genesis 45: 5-7
27. C G Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Pantheon Books, NY, 1961, p325

BOOK TWO

THE WILDERNESS

Part II

THE MEANDERING JOURNEY

Celestial Rose--mandalic image of the Whole
--goal of the soul's labyrinthine journey back to God
Figure 1 - Engraving by Gustave Dore

~

From Mandala to Meander

In Book One, Part One, the Garden was seen as a place of containment and order, as a safe mandalic enclosure. In the Wilderness the symbolism makes a right-angle turn into an untamed landscape of shifting sands, and for what will prove to be a very long meandering journey.

If the Garden was a watered place of comfort and consolation, the Wilderness is where the soul experiences alienation and barrenness. If the Garden was where the soul walked and talked with God along bordered paths, the Wilderness is where it finds itself alone and uncertain of the way.

As the journey had its beginning in the edenic womb of unconscious wholeness, so in the Wilderness the soul becomes conscious of being lost. "When a man believes himself to be utterly lost," Luther posits, then it is that "light breaks."(1)

Having sensed its separation, the soul now seeks its return. Having set its sights towards the light, the soul now progresses towards those radiant beings who, having completed their own journeys, serve now as the attracting force--as the enlightened beings composing Dante's spiraling Celestial Rose. (Figure 1)

The Path of a Meandering River
Figure 2

Fretting towards Wholeness

Corresponding to Dante's imagery of Purgatory is the slow, repetitive rhythm by which the Israelites make their way back to the Promised Land. Both Purgatory and Wilderness speak of how consciousness is gained progressively--in stages. The Israelites, in slow, recursive twistings and backward turnings transverse a meandering course. Time and again, when they are nearly there, the labyrinthian path takes them back out and away from their goal. For forty years they are led round and round over increasingly familiar-feeling territory.

Does their meandering course begin to sound familiar? In like manner do we not also travel time and again over the same emotional territory? The familiar jab of an old jealousy here? The fear of failing again there? Or the recurring nag of old anxieties, guilts, angers? In these and numerous other ways the soul frets its way towards wholeness. It meanders according to a pattern so named after the winding Miandros River. (Figure 2)

~

The Labyrinth as a Pattern of Movement

A labyrinth is a stylized meander. As a pattern of movement it is symbolic of the soul's journey back to God by way of the Wilderness. Dr Max Oppenheimer, a professor of foreign languages, notes that in Arabic the word for labyrinth is matahah which means "wilderness, desolate barrenness, wasteland."(2)

From within its pathways the overall design of a labyrinth is obscured. Only when viewed from above is its path seen as purposefully ordered and deliberately leading to the center. A prime example is the Labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral which dates back to the Thirteenth Century when it was popularly called Chem de Jerusalem--a "Journey to Jerusalem" for stay-at-home pilgrims. (Figure 3).

An 18th Century Engraving of the Chartres Labyrinth
Figure 3

The Fret, Key, or Meander Motif
Figure 4

Remnants of another design, known as the "Classical," "Cretan," or "Seven-Circuited" labyrinth, have been found all over the world. For the Hopi the design symbolized Mother Earth; while on the coins of ancient Crete, sometimes the motif was centered by a rose, sometimes by a crescent moon, indicating devotion to the Goddess as both Mother and Virgin.

In a remarkable way, the Hopi/Cretan Labyrinth evolves out of a familiar pattern. (Figure 4)

English geomancers, Jeff Saward and Nigel Pennick,(3) have demonstrated how when two units of the above pattern are rotated a full 360 degrees (one axis moving, one remaining fixed), the result is a Seven-Circuited Labyrinth. (Figure 5)

The Conversion of Meander into Labyrinth
Figure 5

Still another type of meander (Figure 6) suggests a path of movement similar to the one the Israelites followed from their point of departure in Egypt to their place of entrance into the Promised Land. In design, meander and maze differ from the Classical Labyrinth in which the same path that leads to the center also leads back out again. The Wilderness is the maze--the chaos--that must be gone through on the way from one state of consciousness to another.

A Stone-etched Native American Meander(4)
Figure 6

~

Moving Towards Resolution

In 1988, inspired by the labyrinth research of Saward and Pennick, and with the help and enthusiasm of friends and neighbors, we created a Seven-Circuited Labyrinth in a meadow on our Sierra foothills ranch. Using a knotted rope for a compass, and after marking out the design with cornmeal, we placed stones from the creek--one right next to the other--so as to create the alternating--clockwise/counter-clockwise--path to the center. Over the years the many who walk it repeatedly describe their experiences as "centering," "quieting," "balancing," "healing." (The Murray Creek Labyrinth)

Walking a Labyrinth is a symbolic way of moving from an outer to an inner place--from the periphery of outer activity to a still center of peace within. Correspondingly, the Wilderness is a symbolic movement between two states of mind: an edenic or unconscious state of awareness; through an unsettling transition of feeling lost; but continuing on until a new state or level of consciousness--the Promised Land--is attained.

Following a meandering path also can be a way of moving towards a resolution, particularly when one's peace of mind has been upset, perhaps by a disturbing dream, or an attack of anxiety, or an outburst of emotion. In these circumstances movement that is circular and repetitive has a way of bringing the source of the disturbance into focus--into the center--there to be seen from other points of view--reviewed from all angles--thus broadening and balancing one's perception of the situation. In this manner, we are restored to that state of mind the Bible calls Jerusalem--City of Peace--and which the Psalmist describes as a city that is "at unity with itself."(5)

~

Nature's Pattern of Movement

In walking a maze, a labyrinth, or some other meandering path, the course that is followed winds first one way and then the other, thus imitating one of nature's favorite ways of slowing things down. Moreover, the quieting rhythm has the effect of calming the spirit. I recall my mother telling me that when something would be troubling my grandmother she would get down on her hands and knees and scrub the floor--whether it needed it or not. And that when she would get up and stand back to admire her "clean-enough-to-eat-off-of-floor," whatever the trouble had been would appear to have been resolved. Of course, that was before the age of psychotherapy. And it is also true that much in our ancestors' lives went unresolved and has been left to subsequent generations to work out. Nevertheless, our lives are the better when they include movements that have the power to restore our sense of harmony and inner peace.

Weaving, knitting, even doodling, are kinesthetic ways of experiencing what it is to move more slowly and circularly, going for a while in one direction and then another, one way giving way to another, in a manner similar to a river winding its way to the sea--or the soul back to its Source.

In Patterns in Nature, Peter Stevens explains how and why the river winds and turns so as to slow down its movement.

At first we might suppose that the river follows the terrain, that it twists and bends in direct response to peaks and dips in the landscape. . . . [However, even] on a smooth and gentle slope, we find that water does not flow straight downhill; it wanders back and forth like a skier running a slalom.(6)

According to Stevens, the bends of a river are predictable. "The windings turn out to be surprisingly regular, quite independent of subtle changes in topography." The curves of rivers are "elliptic integrals" (Figure 7) which have

the exceptional characteristic of being the smoothest of curves, of having the least change in the direction of their curvation.(7)

How Rivers Curve Elliptically
Figure 7

Contrary to what we may have thought, the slow meandering way by which the Israelites moved through the Wilderness just may have been the best possible way for attaining their goal, at least when considering that consciousness, like the river, is gained slowly and in accord with a wisdom inherent to the nature of the soul.
~

The Dry and Thirsty Land

In the Wilderness the soul learns what it is to hunger and thirst not for what satisfies the physical, mortal body but for what satisfies the deeper longing of the eternal Self. It is this dry and thirsty inner landscape about which the Psalmist wrote:

Eagerly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you,
my flesh faints for you,
as in a barren and dry land
where there is no water.
Psalm 63:1

In the symbolism of the Wilderness, the mystic, the depth psychologist and the alchemist share a common language and a common goal. Their point of convergence is their concern with the soul's formation into a vessel of Spirit. The Wilderness is both where and how this takes place. It is therefore the "extremity" that is God's "opportunity."

~

The Alchemist's Calcinatio

Stark and empty, the limestone Wilderness of the Bible is a place of dry bones made white by the sun's relentless rays. For the mystic it is the first of a three-fold progression from purgation to illumination to union. For the alchemist it is the stage of the opus known as the calcinatio. Edinger points out that most alchemical images derive in part from chemical procedures. Calcinatio relates to a drying-out process that involves intense heat. The result is quicklime--a whitened, powdery substance. Alchemically, this whitened "fire" acts on the nigredo--the soul's darkness--so as to purge and purify.

When quicklime is mixed with water a catalytic reaction creates an intense, internal heat, a heat that is inherent to the quicklime but inert until quickened by being moistened. If the mixture in its fluid state is poured into a mold it will "cure" into the shape of the mold. For the medieval alchemist and mystic, Christ was the mold into which their souls were being poured.

Most of us, when we were children, experimented with a process in which we mixed plaster of paris with water and poured it into a mold. What would have made our experiments "alchemical" would have been our intent and awareness that what we were doing outwardly had an inner correlation. Something ordinary was in the process of being transformed into something extraordinary--something as base as lead into something as beautiful and valuable as gold. For the alchemist, the "chemical" procedure "rang true" or "bore witness" to a corresponding spiritual truth.

As Edward Edinger observes in his book on the symbolism of alchemy, when Jung discovered the writings of the alchemists, they struck in him a resounding chord:

I had very soon seen that analytical psychology coincided in a most curious way with alchemy. The experiences of the alchemists, were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world. This was, of course, a momentous discovery: I had stumbled upon the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious.(8)

~

Igniting the Inner Fire

For the alchemist each of the four elements was relevant to a particular stage of the opus. For the calcinatio it was fire, a fire inherent to this stage of the transmutation process but inert until activated. Corresponding to the symbolism of the calcinatio is the mystic's impassioned desire for union with God--to be divinely enflamed. Similarly, in order for individuation to be initiated there must be a quickening within the psyche. Moreover, once ignited the inner fire must be kept burning; otherwise better it had been left unlighted, for fear of falling under the scathing indictment of the church of Laodicea:

Would that you were cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.(9)

In both the alchemists' calcinatio and the Israelites' Wilderness ordeal, the soul's purgation is a process by which the hidden or unconscious "dross" is exposed to the light of consciousness, and in that light--that fire--is consumed. For those aspects of a person's life that are being lived out of egocentricity this stage of the process amounts to a "trial by fire"--to subjection to an internal heat, but from which ashes, as with the mythical Phoenix, the soul emerges reborn. Figure 8

The Phoenix rising from its self-inflicted
exposure to the full force of the sun's rays (10)
Figure 8

~

The Scriptural Basis for Purgatory

The symbolism of Dante's Purgatorio, in addition to paralleling the symbolism of the Wilderness, corresponds as well to the depth psychology of the alchemist. Edinger, in fact, sees the "doctrine" of purgatory as "the theological version of calcinatio projected onto the afterlife."(11) He cites Paul as the scriptural origin of the purgatorial imagery in which the theme of "salvation in Christ" is presented as a trial by fire.

. . . if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble--each man's work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If any man's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.(12)

The Wilderness is the refining furnace in which the wood, hay and stubble are consumed. But it is also where the gold, silver, and precious stones are revealed.

In the legend of the Phoenix, as its lifespan nears an end, it gathers twigs and resin into a nest on which it then sits until the intense heat of the desert sun sets both nest and bird on fire, but out of which ashes it arises reborn.

In a Wilderness experience, at the same time the unconscious underpinnings of a person's life are being exposed to the light of consciousness, the soul's desire for God is intensifying, and so consuming all lesser desires. In this way the soul experiences what the legend of the Phoenix, as well as the alchemist's calcinatio, symbolize.

~

Letting Go of self-Will

In the Garden, the central motif was a fountain from which four rivers flowed out and around in a balanced rhythmic symmetry so as to form a pattern of movement around a center. As long as the center held the image was one of wholeness and connectedness. But in the Wilderness the old center has let go and the new one has yet to be established. For now the image of wholeness is lost. Movement is disordered and diffused. The symmetry and balance of the Garden are lost.

Jeremiah provides a pertinent illustration: One day Yahweh, wishing to instruct Jeremiah concerning his relationship with Israel, tells the prophet to go down to the shop of the potter and watch him at work at his wheel. When Jeremiah arrives he observes the hands the potter shaping and forming a vessel of clay as the wheel turns round and round. But as Jeremiah looks on he sees the clay begin to wobble and the vessel to teeter off balance. From side to side it flops about until finally it collapses in on itself. The vessel is spoiled. But the potter, all in a day's work, simply picks up the clay and reworks it "into another vessel, as it seemed good to the Potter to do."(13)

Jeremiah understood that Yahweh was the Potter and Israel the clay. Relevant to our contemporary lives, God is still the Potter but the individual soul is Israel--is the clay. And as with Israel, the Wilderness is the phase of the spiritual journey where the soul is formed and reformed, until, like the clay under the Potter's hands, it learns to let go of self-will.

~

Reordering Priorities

Human nature is multi-leveled, each level with a will of its own: the instincts willing one thing; the ego another; and the Self still another. Each also has a hierarchy of conflicting priorities. The Wilderness necessitates a reordering of these priorities. What previously were considered "necessities," in the Wilderness are reduced to "amenities." But here also, while days are directed towards what is essential to survival, nights afford time for soul considerations: for measuring the hardships of the moment against the hope of eternity. In this natural balance between day and night and body and soul, the ego's sense of importance is all but left out. For the ego, with all its complex needs, the Wilderness is a time of being emptied and diminished. But it also affords the ego an opportunity to gain a new perspective from which to re-evaluate its own dim light against the brilliance of the starry sky, and to measure its self-importance against the immensity of the heavens. For the soul the Wilderness is an opportunity to gain true humility.

~

The Nekyte

Because the Wilderness symbolizes the vast unclaimed, untamed territory of the unconscious, the account given in Exodus is descriptive of a prolonged encounter with the unconscious. Its overall symbolism is suggested in its beginning crossing of the Red or Reed Sea. Not surprisingly, the mythological roots of this crossing are found in the Egyptian symbolism of the Nekyte, or Night Sea Journey. Here night is the realm of the unconscious and sea is the collective or archetypal psyche.

In crossing the sea the Israelites were embarking on a journey that corresponds to the one the sun makes nightly in its descent from the western sky and as it travels under the sea and through the realm of darkness, moving eastward and unseen until it re-emerges with the light of a new day. The symbolism is that of life/death/rebirth--the rhythmic heartbeat of ongoing creation.

In its rising and falling, the sun corresponds to the experience of alienation which occurs with a similar regularity as the ego alternately and cyclically experiences inflation followed by deflation. Its deflation feels like death, but in its rising up it feels once more in control. This, however, sets another cycle in motion that takes it back down again into unconsciousness. The cycle of alienation is, according to Edinger, the way consciousness increases incrementally until a point is reached where the ego/Self axis of communication is sufficiently strengthened so that the inflation/deflation extremes can be modified through an ongoing inner dialogue between ego, instinct and Self.

Edinger has observed that Eden was paradisal because consciousness had not yet appeared and there was therefore no conflict pressing for resolution.(14) Here again, the Wilderness is opposite to Eden in that it is where what is hidden and unresolved is brought to light. With each descent and awakening of consciousness our eternal lives are being saved from the oblivion of unconsciousness.

In Jungian terms, the path through the Wilderness is the path of individuation, a commitment to which, Edinger notes, there is no turning back:

the prolonged dealing with the unconscious--the chaos or prima materia--that is required following an irrevocable [emphasis mine] commitment to individuation . . . [is a] transition between personal, temporal existence (ego) and eternal, archetypal life (Self). Thus the forty years of wandering in the wilderness signify a nekyia or night journey from the ego-bound existence of Egypt to the transpersonal life of the Promised Land.(15)

~

Dark Night of the Soul

The biblical account of the Wilderness journey contains symbols, images and metaphors that are relevant to those times when unconscious contents press upwards into the foreground of our lives, inundating and thus confounding and overpowering the conscious mind. Such an experience is comparable to the phase of the mystic's journey called the Dark Night of the Soul. In this Night the ego is defeated in its efforts to remain master of the soul. Its loss of power is a death that both alienates and purges. St John of the Cross describes not just one dark night but one that is followed by a still darker night:

The first purgation or night is bitter and terrible to sense, . . . . the second bears no comparison with it, for it is horrible and awful to the spirit.

For this Divine purgation is removing all the evil and vicious humours which the soul has never perceived because they have been so deeply rooted and grounded in it; it has never realized, in fact, that it has had so much evil within itself. But now that they are to be driven forth and annihilated, these humours reveal themselves, and become visible to the soul because it is so brightly illumined by this dark light of Divine contemplation . . . .(16)

~

Alienation

In seeing the Wilderness as the classic symbol for alienation, Edinger describes it as the "necessary prelude to awareness of the Self." He quotes Kierkegaard:

. . . so much is said about wasted lives--but only that man's life is wasted who lived on, so deceived by the joys of life or by its sorrow that he never became eternally and decisively conscious of himself as spirit . . . which gain of infinity is never attained except through despair.(17)

Wilderness is, in fact, synonymous with alienation. It is the long drawn-out process by which the ego is emptied of self will. As a rule a person is driven into the Wilderness by some inner or outer compelling circumstance: as when Adam was "driven" from the garden;(18) or Cain "banished" to the Wilderness as a fugitive.(19) Jacob, also, having aroused his brother's fury, was forced to "flee" for his life.(20) And Joseph, having provoked his brothers' jealousy, was first "thrown into a pit" and then sold into slavery.(21) Moses' fate was similar when, having killed the Egyptian, he "escaped" into the Wilderness.(22) Even Abraham experienced estrangement when he was sent by God from his kindred and his native land in order to receive The Promise that from his descendants a great nation would arise.(23)

~

Barrenness

What alienation was to the forefathers of Israel, barrenness was to the women. If the Wilderness was where the soul was made ready for the seeds of God consciousness to take root, barrenness was the pattern for the wives of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Having known barrenness they could conceive "the first fruits" of the new potential for consciousness.

First there was Sarah who, at age ninety, laughed when told she would conceive. Then there was Rebecca for whom Isaac "prayed to the Lord . . . because she was barren."(24) And even though Jacob fathered the twelve sons who became the twelve tribes, Rachael, the only true love of his life, was also barren. Finally, however, she did give birth first to Joseph and later to Benjamin. And although Jacob dearly loved Benjamin, it was a love saddened by the death of Rachael at his birth. Again of Hannah it was said that "the Lord had closed her womb," but opened it when she fervently prayed for a son, and Samuel was born.

In the New Testament, Elizabeth was past childbearing years when John the Baptist was born. In each of these biblical cases barrenness preceded the conception of a child who became a noteworthy servant of God.

Symbolically understood, barrenness is the soul empty of self and surrendered and receptive to God's will. It is therefore a soul within which the seeds of spiritual awareness can come to fruition.

~

Wounding and Healing

In alienation the thing that is lost is the old order of one's life. It is the loss of what formerly had seemed fulfilling, a loss of one's hard-won adaptation to life. In alienation the ego falls from its place as king pin. Due to a combination of circumstances, one's life is propelled into a crisis, one that even may be life-threatening. Fears, doubts, deep anxieties surface. Old issues and whatever other demons are waiting in subconscious recesses appear or reappear. The outcome, even in victory, is both wounding and healing; as when Jacob wrestled with the angel until he "prevailed" and received from the angel a blessing, but ever after walked with a limp."(25)

Jacob Wrestling with the Angel
Figure 9

Most Jungians, I assume, see Jacob's angel as his shadow, and his victory two-fold: the overcoming of his fear of Esau's revenge; and his release from guilt over having "stolen" Esau's Blessing. Even though he "prevailed" during that long dark night, he endured a fear so terrible that it left its mark. He was able to endure because something in him wouldn't let go until he "owned" rather than justified his wrong doing, and saw his deceit for what it was. Empathy was born in Jacob that night as he imagined himself in Esau's shoes and how painfully hurt his brother had been by what he had done. It was this that enabled Jacob, the very next morning, to humble himself before Esau and, as a result, receive his brother's forgiveness.

~

The Fate of Icarus

Jung speaks of the "defeat of the ego" as when we come to the realization that the ego--the "I" that we thought we were--is no longer the master of our life. The "I" has become divested of its self-importance. The result can be devastating, as with Adam when he was driven out of Eden into a strange land, estranged also from God whose spirit had breathed life into him. Thus separated from his origins, his sense of acceptance and his self-esteem were also stripped away. He no longer knew who he was or the purpose for which he had come into being. Adam's expulsion from the Garden, in addition to being individually relevant, also speaks portentously of a collective time of alienation which marks each evolutionary transition away from unconsciousness towards a new and greater level of consciousness.

In Ego and Archetype Edinger spells out the "cycle of alienation": how and why the breach between ego and Self occurs and how the connection is restored. Alienation, he explains, is the hubris brought upon through the ego's identification with the Self. This is the sin of pride, of presumption. When the ego identifies with the Self, presuming to be God, it becomes inflated and brings upon itself "the fate of Icarus."

Like Icarus the ego insists on following its own course; becomes exhilarated by its ability "to fly;" flies too close to the sun; its wax wings melt; and Icarus falls into the sea. The flight is its inflation; the sun its self-exaltation; the wax wings its vulnerability; and the sea its deflationary fall back into unconsciousness.

Through repetitions of the cycle of alienation, and particularly as we experience the consequences, we come to recognize the ego's self-defeating patterns and the telltale signs of its inflationary attitudes. Here again it is Edinger who helps us identify our inflationary tendencies by which we also fly too close to the sun:

Power motivation of all kinds . . . . Whenever one operates out of a power motive omnipotence is implied. . . . Intellectual rigidity which attempts to equate its own private truth or opinion with universal truth . . . [This] is the assumption of omniscience. Lust and all operations of the pure pleasure principle . . . . Any desire that considers its own fulfillment the central value transcends the reality limits of the ego and hence is assuming attributes of the transpersonal powers.(26)

The illusion of our own physical immortality is another aspect of inflation. Edinger explains why a close call with death is so often a humbling and a soul-awakening experience:

There suddenly comes a realization of how precious time is just because it is limited. Such an experience not uncommonly gives a whole new orientation to life, making one more productive and more humanly related. It can initiate a new leap forward in one's development, because an area of ego-Self identity has been dissolved, releasing a new quantity of psychic energy for consciousness.(27)

~

Dante's Wilderness

In the Divine Comedy Dante's "wilderness" was a "forest" which he entered through the gateway of a mid-life crisis. His entrance was signaled by a "darkening" or "confounding" of his conscious mind--the dark night of his soul.

In our own journeys, the onset of a time of transition is typically felt as a time when the meaning and purpose of life seems to have run out. Without being able to pinpoint why, something is not working. The direction of life feels wrong. The flow of life feels blocked. Doubts, fears, and confusion plague the mind. There is a sense of being entangled or trapped. But at the same time one feels urged and compelled on, towards some unknown but more satisfying goal in life. Thus Dante found himself at the entrance into a "dark wood."

The wildness of that rough and savage place,
The very thought of which brings back my fear!
So bitter was it, death is little more so.(28)

Helen Luke sees, in Dante's words, the image of a man stumbling about in darkness without any sense of direction. In other words one who is "lost" in the psychological sense of the word.

but the poet is surely also telling us in those few words that it is precisely through the terrifying experience of the dark wood that we find the way of return to innocence; that indeed it is because of his lost state that a man is able consciously to refind himself.(29)

Dante had awakened to the fact that the light, the meaning and purpose of his life, had gone out. He had lost the sense that his life was going somewhere. The forward movement had come to a halt. He was stuck. Moreover, he seemed helpless to get his life back on track. Something like this happens to each of us wherever or whenever it is in life that we wake up to the realization

that we are stumbling around in the dark, and that our complacent goals of power, success, respectability, rebellion, uplift, or a thousand others are empty and meaningless.(30)

~

The Narrow Gate

Entering into a "dark wood" is similar to the "narrow gate" described by Jesus as leading to life. Kunkel enumerates what must be left behind

All security, all guarantees, . . . not only health, mammon, the old-age pension, and life-insurance, but also reputation, social standing, and religious merit. Moreover, the gate is so narrow that only single individuals can pass through it. The group, the tribe, the community, even the new brotherhood, have to be left behind.

The gate can be found at the end of our physical career, or between two periods of our life; or there may be many gates of different degrees of narrowness. The narrow gate symbolizes rebirth.(31)

In light of Jungian thought, to enter through the narrow gate is to be put in conflict with our most basic and for the most part unconscious attachments to life. The wide gate is the way of unconsciousness; the narrow gate the way of consciousness. The wide gate is unchallenging: The narrow gate is wrought with conflict, is, in fact "bought" with conflict. No wonder so few choose the one, and so many, by not choosing, opt for the other.

The Life That Is Lost / The Life That Is Found

Fritz Kunkel identifies "the core of Christianity" in Jesus' statement concerning the necessity of "losing" one's life in order to "find" it and which seems to ask that we let go of all we hold dear in the areas of physical comfort, temporal security, and social standing. Another way of understanding what it is to "lose" one's life is offered by Elizabeth Boynton Howes(32). She suggests we examine the self-protective walls by which we "hedge in" "the vital spark of being." We spend our whole lives, she says, building these walls through our "defenses, evasions and excuses." In hiding behind our walls we hide not only from others but also from God and even from our own true selves. These self-imposed barriers cut us off from life itself. The result is a loss of savor for life. In our attempt to "save" ourselves from the emotional hurts and pain of life we lose the opportunity life affords us for enlarging our souls in preparation for eternal life.

~

The Wilderness of Sin

For the Israelites the Sinai Wilderness was their place of despair, a despair repeatedly attributed to sin. In fact, throughout the Bible there is so much talk of sin that it is impossible to seriously study the scriptures without coming to terms with this word. Edinger points out that St John of the Cross' "dark night of the soul," Kierkegaard's "despair," and Jung's "defeat of the ego" all refer to the same experience, to an awareness of lostness, of separation, of sin. Sin in this sense is not an act but a state. And if so, it is also the way we are found and therefore "saved." In Luther's words:

God works by contraries so that a man feels himself to be lost in the very moment when he is on the point of being saved. When God is about to justify a man, he damns him. Whom he would make alive he must first kill. God's favor is so communicated in the form of wrath that it seems furthest when it is at hand. Man must first cry out that there is no health in him. He must be consumed with horror. This is the pain of purgatory . . . In this disturbance salvation begins. When a man believes himself to be utterly lost, light breaks.(33)

~

The Hero's Journey

In as much as the path through the Wilderness is the path of individuation, it is the archetypal hero's journey of becoming. It is the stage upon which egocentricity is transformed into ego strength, which in turn is the distinctive mark of the hero or heroine whose influence extends beyond his or her own personality. Erich Neumann notes that the hero is one "who is destined to bring [the] new order into being and destroy the old."(34)

[He,] the hero, like the ego, stands between two worlds: the inner world that threatens to overwhelm him, and the outer world that wants to liquidate him for breaking the old laws. Only the hero can stand his ground against these collective forces, because he is the exemplar of individuality and possesses the light of consciousness.(35)

John Sanford, referring to Moses' birth as following the pattern of a hero, adds "but this did not guarantee he would become a hero."

Before the seed of a potential hero in him could develop, the young Moses had to undergo a process of psychological development and transformation. As with Jacob and Joseph before him, his egocentricity had to be destroyed, so that his life could be molded by the Greater Will within him."(36)

As clay upon the Potter's wheel each of our lives is being raised up, sometimes into a fit vessel, but other times collapsing in on itself. Thus we are shaped and reshaped, formed and reformed, "as it seems good to the Potter to do." all the while learning how to let go, how to yield self-will, what it is to will one thing--to will the will of the Higher Will--and so submit to the process by which the soul is formed into a vessel of Spirit.

~

Illustration Credits

1. Gustave Dore, from Illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy, Dover,
2, 4, 7, the author
3. 13th Century engraving, reproduced in Labyrinths, their Geomancy and Symbolism, by Nigel Pennick, Runestaff--Old English, 1986
5. Nigel Pennick after Jeff Saward, Labyrinths
6. After illustration in Mazes & Labyrinths, by W H Matthews, Dover, NY 1922, Pictograph from Mesa Verde
8.
9. Pen & ink drawing by Marianne Elliott

Endnotes

1. Roland Bainton, Here I Stand, Abingdon-Cokesbury NY, 1950, pp 82
2. Max Oppenheimer, "On Labyrinths and Mazes--Meandering & Musings," in Labyrinth Letter, Vol 1, No.2, July 1995, 10550, E San Salvador, Scottsdale AZ 85258-5744
3. Nigel Pennick, Labyrinths: their Geomancy and Symbolism, Runestaff, England, 1986, p 5
4. W H Matthews, Mazes and Labyrinths, Dover, NY, Original, London, 1922
5. Psalm 122:3
6. Peter S Stevens, Patterns of Nature, Little/Brown, Boston, 1974 pp 92-3
7. Ibid
8. Edward F Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche, Open Court, La Salle IL, 1985, p1
9. Revelations 3: 15-16
10. J E Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, Philosophical Library, NY, 1962 p 253
11. Op cit, Edinger, p26
12. 1 Corinthians 3:11-15
13, Jeremiah 18:4
14. Edward F Edinger. Ego and Archetype, Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1973, p 17
15. Edward F Edinger, The Bible and the Psyche, Inner City Books, 1986, Toronto, pp 51-2
16. St John of the Cross quoted in The Soul Afire, p 256-259H A Renhold, Editor, Meridian Books NY 1960
17. Op cit Edinger, Ego and Archetype, p 48-50 and Fear and Trembling, the Sickness Unto Death, by S Kierkegaard, Garden City, NY, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954, p 159.
18. Genesis 3:24
19. Genesis 4:12
20. Genesis 28:43
21. Genesis 37:28
22. Exodus 3:15
23. Genesis 12:1-2
24. Genesis 25:21
25. Genesis 32:31
26. Op cit, Edinger, Ego & Archetype, p 15
27. Ibid
28. Dante, Divine Comedy, I i, Lawrence Grant White translation, NY Pantheon
29. Helen Luke, Dark Wood to White Rose, Dove, Pecos NM, 1975, p 9
30. Ibid
31. Fritz Kunkel, Creation Continues, Word Books, Waco TX 1973, p 109
32. Elizabeth Boynton Howes, Jesus' Answer to God, Guild for Psychological Studies, San Francisco, 1984, p128-130
33. Roland Bainton, Here I Stand, Abingdon-Cokesbury NY 1950, pp 82f
34. Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Bollingen, Princeton 1970, p175
35. Ibid, p380
36. John A Sanford, The Man Who Wrestled with God, Paulist Press, NY, Revised Edition, 1987, p83

BOOK TWO

THE WILDERNESS

Part III

THE WILDERNESS WANDERERS

The account of the wilderness wandering
provides us with a whole series
of profound symbolic images
pertaining to the individuation process.
Edward F Edinger(1)

The Re-kindling of Hope

When we are young our hopes and expectations are charged with an enthusiasm and faith in the future. But if too often those expectations are disappointed, hope begins to dim and even may turn to despair. Similarly, without a vision to guide, the life of a people can die. After four hundred years of Egyptian enslavement the light of the people of the Promise was about to go out.

In Canaan they had lived a good life until the cycle of nature had turned against them. It was then that Jacob had sent his sons down into Egypt where, it was rumored, grain could be bought. Arriving there, the brothers of Joseph hadn't known it was the brother they had sold into slavery from whom they would have to purchase the grain. Joseph, however, had long ago forgiven his brothers their evil deed. He was, in fact, so overcome at seeing them that he sent everyone else out of the room. Alone with his brothers, he burst out weeping so loudly that it was said all of the household of Pharaoh heard him. "I am Joseph," he said, "whom you sold into Egypt." But quickly he added, wanting to alleviate any guilt or fear of reprisal they might have:

Do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you . . . to preserve for you a remnant on earth . . . So it was not you who sent me here, but God.(2)

Joseph provided his brothers with grain for the trip back to Canaan, making them promise to bring their father Jacob and the entire family back to Egypt. And it was a good thing because the drought, the severest in anyone's memory, lasted five more years, during which there was "neither plowing nor harvest."(3) While many in the land of Canaan died, the lives of the Israelites were sustained in Egypt. For the remainder of Joseph's life and for some time afterwards, the Israelites prospered and multiplied. Eventually a Pharaoh came into power who saw the Israelites as a threat and placed "taskmasters" over them "to afflict them with heavy burdens."(4)

We hear no more of the Israelites until the birth of Moses and the decree that "Every son that is born to the Hebrews [be] cast into the Nile."(5) Moses is one of the doomed infants, but is miraculously saved--a pattern to be re-enacted in the life of the Christ Child.

Dore's Finding of Moses

Next we know, Moses is grown and residing in the royal household as the adopted son of Pharaoh's daughter. He is now around forty years old and, inquisitive about his origins, goes out among the Israelites. This is how he happens to observe an Egyptian slavemaster beating one of the Israelites. At the sight Moses flies into a rage and kills the Egyptian. When Pharaoh hears of the incident he orders Moses killed.(6) Thus Moses, like Jacob before him, flees for his life into the Wilderness.

~

Moses' Call

In the next scene, Moses has been in the Wilderness for forty years. During this time he has married the daughter of the priest of Midian and become shepherd to his father-in-law's flocks. In addition he has received from his father-in-law initiation into the sacred mysteries of the Midian priesthood. So it was that one day, as Moses was tending sheep on "the mountain of God",

. . . the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed.(7)

At this Moses said to himself,

I will turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.

At this point he heard a voice calling to him out of the bush,

Moses, Moses! . . . Do not come near; put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.(8)

Thus Moses was called to the task of leading the Israelites out of their Egyptian bondage.

It had been six hundred years since the time of Abraham, and four hundred since the Israelites had come to Egypt. By now they had lost hope of ever returning to Canaan. To get their lives back on track Moses would have to re-awaken their sense of being the people of the Promise. He would have to re-kindle their hope of returning to the Promised Land. He would do so by recalling for them the Promise given Abraham concerning their exile in Egypt:

Know this for certain, that your descendants will be exiles in a land not their own, where they will be slaves and oppressed for four hundred years. But I will pass judgment also on the nation that enslaves them and after that they will leave, with many possessions.(9)

How a People are Enslaved

One of the ways a people become enslaved is through the disruption of their sense of community and continuity. In America, the slaves brought from Africa were separated to the extent of disallowing those from the same village, or who spoke the same dialect, to live or work together. Separated, isolated, unable to communicate, and deprived of participation in the rituals of communal life, their spirits as well as their bodies became shackled. If they resisted, mindful of the dignity due them as human beings, then they were beaten into subjection or to death.

In Egypt the Israelites' sense of self-worth and dignity had been similarly breached. Its healing would take time. Not only would Moses be leading his people through the Wilderness, he also would be coalescing them back into a people, remolding them collectively into the people of God. Moreover, the Wilderness was where they would be forged into a twelve-tribe nation with laws by which to live; a societal structure within which to build their sense of community; and a moveable Tabernacle, minutely detailed for enacting the proscribed sacramental rites by which the whole of their lives would become consecrated to God. To further order and instill their lives with a sense of harmony, a yearly round of feasts and festivals would be established.

The Pattern of Resistance

Moses' whole life had been preparation for the task to which now he was being called. Nevertheless he resisted. Nor can we fault him his reluctance. Beyond being self-consciousness around his "slowness of speech," he was reluctant to have his life, for a second time, totally disrupted. When he had been forced to leave Egypt forty years before, he had been torn from the only home and family he ever had known. He had managed to make the adjustment and had rebuilt his life as a desert herdsman. But now? At eighty? To return to Egypt and demand of Pharaoh that he let the Israelites go? "No way," we can hear Moses arguing with himself. Yahweh, however, kept insisting. And in the end, a destiny such as Moses' could not be escaped

Kluger reminds us that resistance to the call of individuation only serves to confirm its authenticity. In the case of Moses, once he had said yes to Yahweh the battle then became one of wills between Yahweh and Pharaoh, a battle that ended ten plagues later when, finally, the Israelites made it safely and miraculously out of Egypt. In so doing they crossed what would turn out to be the great divide of their sacred history. They were on their way back home.

In escaping from the Egyptians the Israelites had entered into a cloud that had hidden and thus protected them; not only from the Egyptians, but from the unfamiliarity of the place into which they were being led. Similarly, there are times on the spiritual journey when what is taking place in inner depths needs to be obscured from the conscious mind in order to bypass its resistance to change. It is then that the work of transformation is said to proceed as in "a cloud of unknowing."

Once into the Wilderness, however, the Israelites' resistance to the demands of the journey broke out into the open. Eventually their unrelenting resistance earned for them the reputation for being Yahweh's "stubborn and stiff-necked people." They became, in fact, a case in point of what it means to be dragged kicking and screaming into consciousness. Kluger explains how even though they had left Egypt physically, they were still there psychically:

The people are still in Egypt, still contaminated with the unconscious, still slave to the great mother [i.e. the regressive pull of the unconscious]. In the course of events they reveal themselves as a resisting, stiff-necked people who do not want to become conscious, who demonstrate the resistance of the natural man against the opus contra naturam, and who again and again make life go sour for Moses with his higher consciousness.(10)

Nor is anyone immune to the resistance that accompanies a major transition in consciousness, one such as is symbolized by the "Night Sea Journey"--the descent into unconsciousness that marks the beginning phase of a passage or "birth" into a new level of awareness.

It may be that we have been drifting calmly on the sea of life when suddenly the winds of change begin to blow. The clouds thicken and darken. Our boat begins to rock. We take hold of whatever we can. With all our might we resist being dumped overboard. But finally, dumped we are--out of our apathy and into the fathomless waters of the unconscious. From this point on, although it may appear that we are functioning as usual, something all-consuming--something like a gestation--is happening deep within. Unseen, unknown, the energies of the psyche are coalescing around a new potential which, when its term is fulfilled, will bring about a rebirth of soul.

Satan as the Personification of Resistance
to the Creative Movement of Life

Consciousness, whenever it is facing a major transition, is countered by a resistant, antithetical force. Stasis--the static--stands in opposition to the dynamic. In this sense the Self, as the dynamic creative principle, is opposed by an aspect of the ego which seeks to hold onto its hardwon ground.

A time of transition upsets the status quo. It forces us to ask questions we thought were settled: Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I go from here? In order to sort out and resolve such issues we are led by Spirit into the Wilderness--if not into a geographical Wilderness, then into an inner one.

Like the hatching of a chick whose time has come to crack out of its egg, so when our time is at hand to crack out of our cosmic egg, we too must overcome the resistance of the shell in which we have been contained.

The resistance--the opposition--comes from without as well as within, even from those with whom we have the closest ties: those who over time have become attached to our being who they want us to be. John Sanford, in speaking of family and "tribal" loyalties, reminds us of Jesus' warning:

A man's enemies will be those of his own household.(11)

And even if they don't voice their disapproval we may sense their disappointment. More than likely this will cause us to feel guilty. Doubts and fears will enter our minds and we will be tempted to fall back into line--back into the box, the container, the shell that has become too tight, too constricting.

By both inner and outer pressures we are constrained to preserve things the way they are. But equally we are compelled to follow the new creative urge. For once it has taken hold it serves as the fire--the inner dynamic--by which we are thrust out of one stage of life (or consciousness) into another.

Sanford refers to a time of "standing alone," and being

plunged into the inner fire, there to be purged, purified, and made fit for the kingdom. In the group we are protected from direct contact with the fiery nature of the process of coming into selfhood, but when we stand alone we feel the burning intensity of the inner life. (12)

Here Sanford quotes also from The Gospel According to Thomas:

Jesus said: Whoever is near to me is near to the fire, and whoever is far from me is far from the Kingdom. (13)

The creative impulse leads to the Wilderness. We are impelled by a sense of urgency: We sense that if we follow where the compelling force is leading something in our soul will be reborn. On the other hand, we fear change and so resist. But what is the cost of holding back? Will something in us then die? Will we miss the Kingdom?

Resistance to the creative movement of life puts us in touch with a force or a principle the Bible calls Satan. Thus it happened that when Peter tried to keep Jesus from his destiny with the Cross, the Master--who loved Peter with all his heart--nevertheless turned to him and said, "Get behind me, Satan!"(14)

Trouble at the Beginning

The ancient Chinese "Book of Changes" The I Ching, speaks of "trouble at the beginning". As is characteristic of Wisdom teachings, we are alerted to the interplay of opposite, or opposing forces that is typical (archetypal) of a situation such as the one in which the Israelites find themselves at this new beginning of their lives.

Through the Cloud of Unknowing they had escaped the Egyptians . . . only to fall into the hands of another enemy: their fear and mistrust of the unknown. However were they to survive in so inhospitable a land? Perhaps it was at this point that it became apparent to them that Moses had neither plan nor resources for getting them through this desolation in which they found themselves. As for Moses, all he knew was that up until then whenever he had come to an impossible situation where there seemed no way out, he had been told exactly what to do. And when he had done as told, then Yahweh had done the rest.

Their problem was not so much an expectation of trouble as the depression of their spirits due to the disappointment of their high expectations. Having so miraculously crossed the Red Sea they had sung and danced for joy.

Miriam's Song by Poynter

Their exuberance, however, was so short-lived. As their spirits fell they began muttering about the barrenness and harshness of the land into which they had been led. What were they to eat? What were they to drink? In Egypt they had been desperate for freedom. Now, only a few days into their journey, they were ready to abandon hope and return to their lives as slaves.

Egypt as Symbol

Symbolically, Egypt is where we are conditioned for survival, where even the Christ Child was taken for that purpose. But if we stay there too long (and four hundred years was too long) our lives become subservient to Pharaoh and to Great Mother--to the dictates of ego and instinct.

In Egypt we learn what we must do to survive. Since ego and instinct rule through fear-of-consequences, they keep us under bondage by preventing us from letting go of the ways we have learned to protect and guard our physical, emotional and mental vulnerability. Under Pharaoh's rule spiritual consciousness is obscured--the sun is darkened. The desire to escape is met with omens of disaster. We are plagued with doubts and fears. Time and again our will to break free is undermined.

Only when Moses appears, as the heroic impulse to individuate, do we stand a chance of escaping from the land of our bondage. If Egypt is where we are conditioned to "save our lives," the Wilderness is where we undergo the de-conditioning--the dying--by which the gift of the eternality of the soul--the essence of being--is born.

Bitter Waters

In the Wilderness, where survival is foremost, whatever threatens life has the power to evoke fear. But fear has an other side--anger. When threatened, one of the things human beings tend to do is fall back into reliving the past in order to find someone to blame for the emotions that presently threaten to overwhelm consciousness. The effect is to stir the stagnant waters of bitter memory back to life.

When the Israelites were only three days into the Wilderness and had run out of water, they began envisioning themselves dying of thirst. Imagine their relief when word came that water had been found. But their terrible disappointment when the water turned out to be too bitter to swallow. It was as though in this one experience all the bitter disappointments of their entire lives came flooding into their minds. They had expected that once out of Egypt their lives would be better. But this? To die of thirst. The cruel irony of it all.

At Marah--place of bitter waters--the Israelites mirror an aspect of human nature that feels all too familiar: how just beneath the surface of consciousness the emotional charges of past hurts and frustrations await detonation by some present, triggering situation.

And so, with the blink of an eye, the Israelites' dashed hopes turned to anger and they began "murmuring" against Moses. He was the one who had gotten them into this predicament. In response Moses cried out to Yahweh (who after all had gotten him into it). Yahweh, in turn, showed Moses a tree. When Moses threw its branches into the water, the water turned sweet.(15)

What is the tree that turns bitter water sweet? What but the tree that unites the soul to God . . . the Heaven/Earth Axis . . . Jacob's Ladder . . . the Tree of Life . . . the Cross?

It also may have been that Moses was familiar with the belief among native healers that within the immediate vicinity of every harmful substance was another that was its remedy. In any event, for the time being their bitterness was put on hold, as similarly we sometimes have put the lid back on our own bitter memories. But only on hold, because sooner or later the bitterness will have to be faced and purged . . . if, that is, the Promised Land is to be gained.

Sometimes, however, bitterness can go so deep as to be a bitterness towards life itself, and therefore towards God. For the Israelites, bitterness was something that came up again and again. But always there was Moses as a target upon whom to project their deep-seated anger at life, and at his Yahweh. Moreover, the projection phenomenon appeared to have been mutual, with Moses retaliating by threatening the Israelites with Yahweh's "wrath," which wrath was hard to tell from Moses' own outbursts of vindictive anger.

Hunger and Satiety

The first instance of murmurings against Moses had involved the scarcity of water. It had been this incident that had laid bare the deep-seated roots of bitterness the Israelites had brought with them out of Egypt. Next there arose from the people a cry of hunger. This time their fear, anger and self-pity was directed at both Moses and Aaron:

Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.(16)

The Bible calls those engaged in breeding discontent "the rabble." Nevertheless, Moses again intercessed for the people, and their hunger was met with the manna that had "the taste of cakes baked with oil." Since it fell with the dew every night and appeared fresh each morning, there was no problem of spoilage. It was the perfect food for the Wilderness. But as with the miracle of the water, the manna also served the secondary purpose of exposing an ingrained attitude, this time of dissatisfaction. Back they harped to "the fish, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks."

[And] now there is nothing at all but this manna.
O that we had meat to eat!(17)

The Hazard of Complaining

As Moses had been accustomed to doing, he passed the complaints along to Yahweh who "caused a wind to blow" that brought in from the sea more quail than could have been imagined. Ironically,

While the meat was yet between their teeth . . . a very great plague [fell upon] the people who had the craving [and they died.](18)

What can we make of this other than a case of gluttony overriding the sense of smell and taste that would otherwise have detected spoiled fowl. I think here of a plaque I had hanging in the kitchen when my children were young. Its words, at that point in my life, summed up my sentiments:

Complaints to the cook can be hazardous to your health!

The Pull of Regressive Tendencies

Kluger, in describing the Israelites' outbreak of reproaches against Moses, speaks of their "menancingly negative projection." He comments concerning the tenacious manner in which they cling to their "satiated unconsciousness." In light of the sheer instinctual power behind regressive tendencies, Kluger would have us see the miraculous in the process by which consciousness is gained.

In the New Testament the rich young man asks Jesus: "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" "Sell all," Jesus tells him, "give the proceeds away, and follow me." Can we see the risk in even questioning the status quo of the life to which we have become accustomed?

In the young man's place, would we have had the courage to ask the question: For the sake of the kingdom, what of my attachments must I give up? Where in my life is the temporal usurping the eternal?

If one compares the wilderness with the satiated unconsciousness of the Egyptian house of slavery, it has something prospective about it in that it signifies being ultimately confronted without any possibility of evasion. [The wilderness] is the symbol of a more conscious suffering which inevitably compels an encounter with the greater. It is the emptiness before fullness, the privation before fulfillment.(19)

The Reconciliation of Conscious Intent and Unconscious Need

The Israelites, upon entering the Wilderness, were in their spiritual infancy and, therefore, unable to distinguish their various needs and fears other than through the typical "mad cry" of a colicky, high-strung infant. Similarly, in order for unconscious emotional needs to make themselves known, they must somehow get our attention. If our ears are deaf to their cry, then their plea for attention turns to an anger bent on getting attention, one way or another. Above all else, the cry of the emotional self asks to be acknowledged. Once our attention is gained, and we truly listen, then nearly always we will recognize the need as a valid human need.

In Man's Ultimate Commitment, Henry Nelson Wieman singles out the highesthuman achievement as the capacity "to get the viewpoint of the other person appreciatively and profoundly and reconcile it with his own so far as possible." This, Dr Wieman pinpoints, "is the supreme achievement of man and his highest vocation." (20) If we apply these same words to inner as well as outer relationships, we begin to appreciate the magnitude of the effort called for if a reconciliation between the intentions of the will and the needs of the emotions is to occur. First of all, there is the ego's self-protective resistance with which to contend. Then second, a sufficient and enduring effort must be applied to the work of becoming conscious. For the predicament of the human psyche remains: no matter how many or how repeatedly good intentions are marshaled, they will continue to be opposed and undermined by unconsciously-held attitudes and obsolete assumptions. Reconciliation, in the end and whether between inner or outer relationships, must be based on self-knowledge--self-knowledge gained as unconscious determinants are exposed to the light of consciousness. This is how self-defeating patterns are overcome; how opposition is transformed to empowerment; how we will come to that "purity of heart" Kierkegaard characterizes as "to will one thing."

The Angry Father and the Placating Mother

The biblical account of the Israelites in the Wilderness characterizes them as rude and demanding children., which is also a good description of the way ignored emotions behave, and from which account we can learn the dynamics of unconscious, self-defeating emotional patterns and how they keep leading us around in circles, or in eastern imagery, keep us chained to the wheel of rebirth. James, in the third chapter, speaks of the tongue as "setting on fire the cycle of nature". James, playing with words in the same passage, refers to the tongue as the means by which the fires of hell are ignited. How aptly his words depict the Israelites' undue suffering due to their maligning tongues, up against which Moses flipped back and forth between helpless frustration and anger.

Sometimes, however, the Wilderness account casts Yahweh in the role of an angry father, with Moses as the placating mother. At one point, Moses appears absolutely driven to distraction by the Israelite's unruly behavior, much like the helplessness a mother feels when she is experiencing her children as out of control. It is then her frustration may turn to anger and cause her to resort to threats: "Just you wait until I tell your father." In like manner we hear Moses threatening the children of Israel that if they don't change their ways Yahweh is going to zap them off the face of the earth.

Moses' threats of an angry Yahweh seem also to approximate the way projection works: Perhaps it is Moses who colors Yahweh as an angry, punishing God to be feared. That Moses does so because of the fear of punishment he believes he deserves--punishment for his own anger that once burned so hot it killed; an out-of-control anger he therefore fears and distances himself from by putting it onto Yahweh.

There are, however, other occasions when Moses seems overly eager to pacify, or overly willing to accept the blame that his people are so quick to put upon him. If their basic needs are not provided for, Moses accepts it as his fault. If anything goes wrong, he is to blame. If Yahwah is breathing smoke and fire, it is up to Moses to cool him off. Whatever the problem, Moses seems to end up feeling both responsible and inadequate--like a sow whose sucklings outnumber her teats . . . until finally his patience breaks and out comes the involuntary "why me?" of helpless frustration.

Why hast thou dealt ill with thy servant? And why have I not found favor in thy sight, that thou dost lay the burden of all this people upon me? Did I conceive all this people? Did I bring them forth, that thou shouldst say to me, "Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries the sucking child, to the land which thou didst swear to give their fathers? Where am I to get meat to give to all this people? For they weep before me and say, 'Give us meat, that we may eat. I am not able to carry all this people alone, the burden is too heavy for me. If thou wilt deal thus with me, kill me at once, if I find favor in thy sight, that I may not see my wretchedness."(21)

Having had to cope with a mere six children as compared Moses' reported 600,000, nonetheless I can relate to what it is like to feel over-extended, over-burdened, and over-responsible. And sometimes you just have to make a scene in order to get the attention and help of the father of the children. In any event, and as the Bible tells the story, Moses' pleas are heard and Yahweh does come up with a plan to get others to share some of the weight of responsibility:

"Gather for me seventy men of the elders of Israel . . . . and I will take some of the spirit which is upon you and put it upon them; and they shall bear the burden of the people with you.(22)

Thus it worked out that when Moses was able to unburden the frustration he was feeling he was given a plan for sharing the burden he had been trying to carry alone. This, in turn, relieved him of the terrible aloneness of one who feels singularly responsible for a situation that is beyond the ability of a single individual to handle.

The Complaints Continue

The complaints had begun at the very beginning of the journey. Considering the extremity of the circumstances, the fact that they were able to survive at all was no small miracle. How irritating to Moses their complaints must have been. In Egypt they had acquired particular tastes and an attitude towards food many children display when they make mealtime a matter of contention, and in this way displace their more deeply rooted dissatisfactions.

If slavery had been bad, life in the Wilderness now seemed worse. As slaves they had wanted what they couldn't have. Now that they were free they wanted back what they'd left behind. They seemed to express the sense that if they indeed were God's "chosen people," why weren't they being treated better?

Sometimes as parents we make our children feel "special." This then makes it difficult for them when they are up against circumstances where "specialness" doesn't count, or at least where it is lost to larger concerns. It is at this point that a child, seeking to regain the center of attention, may create a scene which, in effect, is a demand for attention. When this happens, a parent may choose to placate rather than face the matter head-on. Moses seems often to have made this choice. Nor was it that the problems in the Wilderness weren't real. It was just that the Israelites, like children, had learned that whining got them what they wanted. And so, what worked for them once they tried over and over again, each time sending Moses back to Yahweh to plead their cause.

Never once, as far as is recorded, did anyone come up to Moses and say, "You're doing a great job." Or even, "We know you're doing the best you can under the circumstances and we appreciate it." Nor was anyone ever straight forward enough about the situation to say, "When we've had problems before you have asked Yahweh for help and he has always come through. Would you let him know we need his help again." No, rather than being appreciative and direct they continued to deceitfully "murmur" their bitter resentments and discontent.

The Fiery Serpents

From encampment to encampment and from year to year their complaining continued, until only a few of those who had left Egypt remained. Nearly forty years had gone by without their dispositions improving one iota. Now it was the children and grandchildren of those who had left Egypt from whom the disgruntled complaints arose. Even within Moses' earshot they made so bold as to plot mutinous intentions against him. Moreover, a time came when they spoke openly not only against Moses but had the audacity to speak out also against Yahweh:

Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no water, and we loathe this worthless manna.(23)

"Okay," its not too difficult to imagine Yahweh responding, "What about snake meat?" Thus came the infestation of serpents whose fiery bites caused the Israelites such widespread agony and death that, for the first time ever, the people woke up to the fact they had brought this latest disaster upon themselves.

Sometimes it takes doing something totally out of line before we can see and acknowledge our act for what it is--what the Bible calls sin. But in that moment, in the act of becoming conscious of how sin manifests in our life, it is transformed into wisdom.

At the point in the Wilderness journey when the serpents appeared, the greatest miracle of all happened. The people repented. They actually came to Moses with straight forward self-honesty and humility:

We have sinned for we have spoken against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord, that he will take away the serpents from us.(24)

How deeply moved Moses must have been, knowing that finally the breakthrough had come. His task was all but complete. The Promised Land was within reach. Their bondage to unconsciousness had been broken. Their psychic tie to Egypt--to the regressive pull of great mother--had been severed. They were now (but without knowing it) on the home stretch of the journey.

Detail from Dore's Brazen Serpent

The Brazen Serpent

In order for the Israelites to become a free people they would, of their own free will, have to come to see that enslavement not only had been the outer reality of their lives in Egypt but also the inner condition they had brought with them into the Wilderness. In the incident of the serpents the seeing had begun.

In response to Moses' intercession concerning the death-dealing serpents, he was given an image that embodied the Israelites' need to be healed in both body and soul, a healing symbol that involved them in a sacramental enactment of the elevation of consciousness that was taking place in them. Towards this end, Yahweh instructed him to

"Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and every one who is bitten, when he sees it shall live." Moses made a bronze serpent, and set it on a pole, and if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.(25)

Perhaps it was because Moses was "slow of speech," that he recognized the importance of symbolism. But he also demonstrated an uncanny awareness of the necessity for appropriateness in the application of a symbol towards a specific end. And in light of recent studies in immunology and others on how visual imagery effects physical change, it could well have been that the Israelites were healed as their immune systems were strengthened through a combination of faith, imagination and suggestion. In any event, the poison of the "fiery serpents" was overcome.

Healing Symbols

We might wonder: Is the power to heal intrinsic to a particular symbol or symbolic act? Or is the power to heal in the symbol's capacity to establish a link between the conscious and unconscious levels of the psyche, between the personal and transpersonal? The serpent upon the staff was such an image, one directed towards awakening and quickening a desire and willingness to be healed. More than a millennium later, Jesus would refer to this symbol in connection with his own death and rebirth, and relate it to the way eternal life is gained.

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.(26)

Here Jesus, as "Son of Man," was drawing a parallel between himself and the serpent, and by implication between the Cross upon which he was to die and Moses' staff. In another scripture Jesus referred to a life that on one level must be given up, be "lost," in order on another level to be regained or "found"(27) Taken together, these two scriptures help clarify one another.

In the Wilderness the Israelites, by looking up to Moses' spirit-and-meaning-infused image, were physically healed, but not before their suffering had brought them to the point of repentance. In Jesus' analogy he presented himself as a living symbol through whom the way to a higher reality can be found. In both instances the life-from-death theme is repeated. In each case something also was required of the participant: a change of focus that must take place; a change from looking downward and to the past to looking upward and towards the future. In the case of the Israelites, their change of focus led to a change in consciousness, which in turn led to a change in circumstance.

From the point that the Israelites repented and the Serpent/Staff became their healing symbol, things began to go very well for them. It was as though a power beyond their control had taken over their lives. It was as though Yahweh, as in the beginning of their journey, was able again to guide their destiny.

Moses next sent a request to the Amorite king asking permission to travel on his highway. He went so far as to give his word his people would neither eat his food or drink his water. But instead the Amorites attacked the Israelites. And the Amorites lost. As a result of this miscalculated aggression, the Israelites took over the land "from the Arnon to the Jabbok."(28) Moreover, they continued to press forward taking possession as well of the land of Moab and Og, until finally they were positioned right across the Jordon from Jericho, at the very edge of Cannan--the Promised Land.(29)

The Ascending Spiral

As noted in Book One, Part Two the serpent is symbolic of both elemental life and wisdom. The reappearance of the serpent so near the end of the Wilderness journey suggests another move up the evolutionary spiral. It could even be that the "fiery" element of the wilderness serpents points in the direction of something that only now, in light of Twentieth Century quantum physic, can be understood--that at the very heart of matter is spirit. In the words of a song inspired by Teilhard, Sebastian Temple paraphrases this idea:

Everywhere we turn, O Lord we find that You are here,
In every form and shape we see Your substance sharp and clear.
You are the inner fire that keeps our earth aglow,
Heart of the living matter from which every creature grows.(30)

Teilhard saw the light of consciousness as hidden within and animating all life--even the density of matter. He saw this as the divine matrix by which everything is united, and by which everything is a part of everything else:

The true light that enlightens every man
. . . . the light [that] shines in the darkness
[but that] the darkness has not overcome.(31)

Moreover, we now know that encoded within matter is the secret of each particular matter's form and function: The pattern of the oak within the acorn. The blueprint within the molecule. The Self within the self. For Teilhard the discoveries of science were no threat to faith. Rather he saw the two as converging paths, bringing both science and religion closer to the truth that in Christ all things in heaven and on earth are reconciled.

The Scepter of Authority

Symbolically read, the staff upon which the serpent ascends, whether a rod, a scepter, or a crook, is symbolic of movement from outer (or unconscious) motivation to an inner and consciously-directed authority. Moses' rod symbolized his authority, an authority based on his confidence in the inner Voice he had come to trust. But no matter how miraculous the deeds he performed, he never claimed to do anything by his own authority, rather he always acknowledged that it was Yahweh working through him who accomplished the deed. Similarly, Jesus pointed to the Father as the source of the power behind all he did and said.

The change from outer to inner authority comes about as a result of the establishment of an axis of communication between Self and God. The authentic Self hears the inner Voice and follows where it leads . . . often into the Wilderness. From Adam to Abraham to Moses to Jesus, humanity was ascending the evolutionary spiral. It fell upon Adam to be forced from the edenic womb of unconsciousness, and to Moses to bear the burden and carry the vision of freedom for his entire people. Moses, although he was a man of power, was also said to have been the most humble of men. In and of himself he knew he was as helpless as his people. His ability to keep the Israelites moving towards the Promised Land was dependent upon his staying in constant communion with the directive Voice he knew as Yahweh.

The Union of Instinct and Ego

In the symbolism of the serpent ascending the staff, the two most essential polarities of the human psyche are united: the feminine or earth-related instinct for survival, as symbolized by the horizontally slithering serpent; and the vertical and therefore masculine or heaven-related standard upon which the serpent is raised. In this image the instinctual or lower level is elevated to consciousness. The result is a power-infused symbol incorporating and uniting the two tension-creating but potentially balancing principles of psychological wholeness--instinct and ego.

Through this symbol the Israelites were restored to health of body and, at the same time, put back in touch with a higher order of meaning and purpose for their lives. They could now view their Wilderness ordeal against an historical backdrop. Hope had returned; their vision had been regained. With their renewed determination to press on they were, once again, the people of the Promise.

For us, also, the constant need is to turn from looking down to looking up.

"Look up" the Voice told Abraham.
. . . Look to the heavens and to the eternal.

"Look up", the Israelites also were told.
. . . Look up and be healed.

And in John's gospel:

. . . as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
. . . and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.(32)

Finally, from the last page of Teilhard's Journal: (33)

. . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christogenesis
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Noogenesis
. . . . . . . . . . . Biogenesis
Cosmogenesis

Illustrations Credits
Dore's Finding of Moses
Miriam's Song, Sir Edward John Poynter, circa 1864, English artist, from The Old Testament and the Fine Arts
Dore's Brazen Serpent

End Notes
1. Edward F Edinger, The Bible and the Psyche, Inner City Books, Toronto, 1986, p 52
2. Genesis 45: 5-8
3. Genesis 45: 6
4. Ex 1:8-11
5. Ex 1:22
6. Ex 2:15
7. Ex 3:2
8. Ex: 4-5
9. Genesis 15:12-16
10. Rivkah Scharf Kluger, Psyche and Bible, Spring Publications, Zurich, 1974, p34
11. John A Sanford, The Kingdom Within, Lippincott, NY, 1970, p 82, quoting Matt 10:36
12. Ibid, p 81
13. The Gospel According to Thomas, Logion 82
14. Matthew 16:23
15. Exodus 15:24-5
16. Ex 16:3
17. Numbers 11: 4-6
18. Numbers 11:34
19. op cit, Kluger, p 37
20. Henry Nelson Wieman, Man's Ultimate Commitment, So Illinois Univ Press, 1958, p 170
21. Numbers 11: 11-15
22. Numbers 11:: 16-17
23. Numbers 21:5
24. Numbers 21:7
25. Numbers 21:8-9
26. John 3:14-15
27. Matthew 10:39
28. Numbers 21:24
29. Numbers 31:12
30. From the title song of Sebastian Temple's album The Universe is Singing
31. John 1:4-5
32. John 3:14 & 13:32
33. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, Harper & Row, NY, 1964, p 309