The Owl & Heron Press

Dear Paco,

I just want to say this in response to your dialogue with Russ. I have read your work over the years, along with yours and my exchanges, and I feel an impulse to tell you what you already know I am sure—you are a Great Lover. Your dreams, perhaps encapsulated by the dream, “I have an Aphroditic responsibility,” demonstrate this truth clearly. From the two-year old’s experience with the honeybee to your more recent “Mary-Honeybee-Lute” dream, love shines forth in you. Cosmic love! You have access to Cosmic love and the Guest knows when he/she is welcome, thus bringing his/her reality through you in beautiful ways to the community, starving as it is of that love. All your life, you have faithfully taken up the Aphroditic responsibility your dream assigns to you. All the reader has to do is read your dreams if anyone wants to know and feel how Cosmic love presences. (Customary) words fail and the heart opens! The possibility of a new way of speaking arises…

Much warmth to you and Russ, who knows how to pace with you gracefully, to bring this love forth into actuality.

John

Dear John,

I know you know how welcome your reflections are, in your response to ONTSO #7. I thank you once again for your kind thoughtfulness.

From the moment I first registered, then recorded, that dream of Mary—Lute—Honeybee, I knew with fair precision and unusual clarity just how valuable and important it would prove to be. For me, of course, but also for anyone else “with eyes to see.” Or as Blake put it, not just with “eyes of flesh,” but also “eyes of fire.” That’s why I write about dreams in the way I do. If I intuitively feel that a dream has collective import, I want to write about it—if I can—for others. Why? So that those who are inherently suited for such work—and it is definitely a lot of work—may be spurred to inquire into their own dreams, in search of the “gold” dreams so often contain, even when they frighten us. Or especially so!

With the advent of the honeybee dream, it was also quite obvious that, once again, I was being gifted—and “saddled”—with a tremendous responsibility.

I’m also pretty sure you understand the dimensions of such a multi-faceted responsibility that goes in so many directions and on so many levels. Such an important word: Response + ability = the ability to respond, i.e., the ability (and therefore the sacrificial willingness), to re—spond. That’s one of my favorite etymologies:

Re = again, plus spondere = to betroth, to make a promise. In return. It bespeaks a relationship to something or someone other than one’s own conscious ego-personality.

So, the responsibilities that you and I both carry and take seriously imply that it is not only for ourselves (i.e., out of sheer egocentrism) that we make such efforts as we do. Knowing that we are giving up a normal life of following the “norms” that others take for granted, as if those were the only sources of value.

It’s a long road of labor that we tread, as our “personal practice,” a road and value that few—among our now eight billion souls—recognize. Russ, of course, is one of the very few. And we are only two among those with the good fortune to have shared the vicissitudes of that “path” with Russ, who I am sure has mentored and guided many over the active years of his practice. In his depths of wisdom, he generally eschews the inflationary dangers of “praise,” but I mention it anyway! I know that Russ does not get “puffed up.”

I hope we can offer some of these reflections to others—perhaps even this “ONTSO” project might provide a forum to share. I generally leave those decisions to Russ.

Hope you and Anita are thriving, if that’s the right word. I like the Spanish verb aguantar. Which means to hold up or endure when faced with difficulties. So when I come to the coffee shop that I favor, I speak Spanish with the staff, who form much of what’s left of my “social life.” Mi sociedad. In effect, mi segunda familia!. Sometimes when they ask how I am, I reply: “Aguantando,” but I say it with a laugh or a smile. Because I actually do find it funny. Being old is a pain in the ass, but funny at the same time.

Take care, John.

Paco

THE WORLD-AS-METAPHOR
Daniela Boccassini
In considering Russ’s question, i.e. “What is the spirit of the depths seeing
now?”, Paco was suddenly and spontaneously presented with the (mental)
image of “the monstrous, sub-seafloor earthquake-and-tsunami of 2004, in
Indonesia”. He then submitted to what was seemingly being asked of him,
namely, a re-membering of those cataclysmic events. Paco felt that the
magnitude of energy that “Nature”, aka the earth, harbors as a living planet,
and is capable of releasing, is, as such, humanly un-thinkable, yet nevertheless
understandable as a “resounding metaphor for the magnitude of what we
humans are most likely to undergo, one way or another, in this Age of
Consequences.”
Russ’s initial reaction to Paco’s recollection was in line with Paco’s
interpretive move: the tsunami offered “a potent metaphor for what the Spirit
of the Depths was seeing.” But then a dream came to Russ, not just to correct,
but seemingly to censor — not the seismic event as such, but rather our all-toohuman attempts to relocate it within the precinct of our “poetic or imaginative”
efforts at making sense of the unthinkable. “This is not a metaphor,” the dream
announced — thereby seeming to deny legitimacy to our age-old way of turning
the wildness of the more-than-human world into a series of orderly rhetorical
figures. In trying to cope with the dream’s brazen pronouncement, Russ was in
turn forced to admit that “perhaps the dream wants to call attention to some
aspect of reality that we are not tending to.” Hence, he surmised that “there is a
problem with reality, or, rather, a problem with how reality is being related to.”
In so far as reality keeps being degraded and drained of necessity, the dream
leaves Russ to conclude that, at our human scale, “the metaphoric function of
reality loses all vitality and potency for those caught up by the plague of denial.”
I was struck by this coming together of different aspects of “reality,” as
well as by our misguided essays at handling “them” through “metaphor.” Russ’s
dream raises the stakes to a staggering new level. If we welcome the dream’s
statement as a pronouncement by the Spirit of the Depths, what is this
paradoxical affirmation/negation of metaphor demanding of us now? In
sweeping aside our inane ways of metaphorizing reality, this affirmation
prompts instead the revitalizing of the metaphoric function of reality in all its
untamed power: as such, it carries as much explosive power as the 2004
tsunami did. Through this dream statement, the Spirit of the Depths conjures an
all-encompassing re-wilding: of the earth, and of our way of relating to it. As I
ponder the dream’s wreckage of our cognitive assumptions, and the
alternatives it may be foreshadowing, I find myself back at first principles,
asking: “what is a metaphor”?
Merriam Webster defines metaphor as “a figure of speech in which a word
or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another
to suggest a likeness or analogy between them”. As such, a metaphor is neither
a comparison nor a symbol. A comparison highlights similarities between
“things” that are deemed equally well-known within our cognitive system. A
symbol, on the other hand, aims at opening new cognitive horizons by
suggesting the possibility of a new relationship between a “thing” or level of
reality we believe we “know,” and something else that, while still unknown to
us, beckons from afar. Along with simile and symbol, metaphor aims at
promoting a unitive mode of cognition, but it does so through the specific act of
“carrying over” (meta-pherein, μεταφέρειν).
We can hear echoes of this “carrying over” (φέρειν) in the name of the
primordial bearer of light: Lucifer. On the mythical level of our accounting for
cosmic phenomena, Lucifer’s forgoing the “metaphorizing” he had been
entrusted with, turned him into the Great Separator (dia-bolon): severed from
light, the universe entered the age of darkness, and the tsunami-like
consequences of this fracture, of this denial of the metaphoric, enlightening
power of reality, are still with us.
We can also hear echoes of this “carrying over” in the name of the vessel
that ferries goods, humans and vehicles across waters, from one shore to
another. Even if we discount our millennia-long misunderstanding of “meta” as
“higher,” the point is that a relaying needs to take place between a “here” and a
“yonder,” such that a transformation of sorts also has to occur in the process,
for reality to be the wild, living and enlivening process it is. Hence, the
transformative power of metaphor may well be the “aspect of reality we have
not been attending to,” or have been attending to in such a way as to strip it of
“its vitality and potency”: in our aim to corral reality and make it subservient to
our colonizing impulse, just like Lucifer turned into Satan, we keep preventing
the “ferrying over” of untamed goods from beyond, so that what we are left
with is a shuffling of inanimate, meaningless, stuff: we live in the deprived,
deadening world of severed entities, where we cringe at the possibility of
comparison — abhor metaphor, and obdurately disprove symbol, as the
delusional fabrications of a deviant mind. As civilized humans, we take pride in
severing ourselves from the very possibility of a unitive mode of cognition. And
the more we persist in our technologically-warranted stance of literalizing
reality by dissecting and desiccating it, the less capable we become of tapping
into the regenerative power of reality as metaphor.
Merriam Webster’s approach to the question is revealing: “when we use
metaphor, we make a leap beyond rational, ho-hum comparison to an
identification or fusion of two objects, resulting in a new entity that has
characteristics of both: the voice isn’t like silk; it is silk. Many critics regard the
making of metaphors as a system of thought antedating or bypassing logic.
Metaphor is the fundamental language of poetry, although it is common on all
levels and in all kinds of language. Lots of common words were originally vivid
images, although they exist now as dead metaphors whose original aptness has
been lost.”
If metaphor antedates or bypasses logic, is foundational to language as
poetry, and its once enlivening presence can still be traced in our mummified
speech, clearly the problem lies in the deadly severing of metaphor from reality
that we operate, by reducing metaphor to nothing but a figure of human
speech. What offends us is the unthinkable fact that in the more-than-human
world reality is metaphor, and metaphor is reality. Hence, when the dream says:
“This is not a metaphor,” what the Spirit of the Depths is “ferrying over” to us is
the apocalyptic, tsunami-like revelation of the all-pervasiveness of reality as
metaphor. From all quarters, life conspires against our deadly fixation on
literalism: everything, in its poetic becoming, is and reveals itself as metaphor.
Approaching reality in these terms entails sitting on this shore, watchfully
waiting for the gifts from the other side. It also entails understanding that as
living beings, we too, like everything else, are metaphor: conveyors of a mystery
that in transcending us, can only ascend into existence through us. We, along
with everything else, are metaphor.
What would happen, should we become capable of remembering our
primordial, Luciferian task — should we wish to embrace the transformational
power of reality-as-metaphor? Only a re-wilding of this magnitude, it seems,
might have the power to carry us back to the shore of our senses, and bring the
more-than-human world back to life.
Metaphor understood in this rewilded way “ferries over” words, and
beings, as images: that is to say, as symbols. Thus, I am reminded of another of
Russ’s dreams: “words as eggs”. Re-membering how to approach words, and
images and things as eggs — as symbols, as living archetypes — is a truly
luciferian task. The cosmos has been waiting for us to embrace and carry
through this light, for us to re-enter life as the primordial experience of the
alam* al-Mithal: the world as metaphor.
*[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alam]

Response to Spirit of the Depths

There is no doubt that the current upheaval in the world is vast and
deep. Somehow, I remember the Boxing Day disaster more specifically from
the destructive tsunami that hit Thailand. It seemed to be the primary
disaster covered by the news media, but this event was just one part of the
catastrophic destruction that occurred over a significant area of the world. I
did not know how vast and destructive it was until I read Paco’s description of
what occurred both above and below the Earth’s surface that day. The news
media did not fully cover the incredible force of what came up from the depths
of the Earth that resulted in the subsequent earthquake and tsunamis.
For some time now, since the 1980’s, I have been watching the natural
disasters that have been occurring around the world, as well as the changing
climate conditions that have led to these events. I have considered these
events, as well as other natural disasters that are increasing and intensifying
around the world, as a sign of the toxicity that is on and in the planet due to
the exploitative and neglectful nature of our relationship with the Earth and
life itself. These occurrences indicate how the natural world is reflecting the
collective psyche and particularly its shadow side.
Russ, you state that the dream you had in response to Paco’s
metaphorical perspective of the Boxing Day disaster indicated that what was
at issue was that it “called attention to some aspect of reality that we are not
tending to.” You say that there is a problem with how we are relating to reality.
This set me off to thinking about the nature of reality and how we experience
it in general. In Buddhist philosophy, reality is seen in two ways: Ultimate
Reality and Relative Reality. Ultimate Reality is the true reality that underlies
all other realities, that is, Relative Reality. As time has gone on we have
essentially split ourselves off from Ultimate Reality, the source of our being,
thinking that we can know and therefore control the natural world we live in
and thus created realities that reflect our ego desire to gain power over it. So
instead of taking care of the natural world, we have neglected and exploited it
in pursuit of resources that enable us to live in ways that are predominantly
commodified rather than natural and sustainable. Of course, it is not only the
natural world that is subject to these ego desires.
When you say that we are not tending reality in some way, I “see” the
garden of our home (Earth) not being nurtured in a way that promotes
generative growth that is sustainable. (This goes back to the etymological root
of the word “coalesce” that you refer to in the words “synchronic coalescence,”
which means “to grow, to nourish”.) Part of the process of tending the garden
also includes tending the dream world in order to connect with the SOTD and
receive guidance on how to relate to the “living energy.” It is an important
relationship to tend in order to maintain the vitality of life itself.
The garden as metaphor, as well as symbol for the unconscious, is one
that provides a context within which to cultivate a mindset along with
attitudes that allow engagement with the “living energy” in a positive and
generative way. With all the destruction around us in the world at this time, it
is a daunting task to take on. The transformation of the darkness and
suffering that is occurring now is an enormous undertaking that requires
developing the ability to cherish all life and caring for it in a loving way, while
confronting the shadow. The garden as a microcosm of life provides an
example of the interrelated connections that sustain it as a whole. The
question now, I believe, is can we and how do we open ourselves up to the
necessary task at hand in a heartfelt way that restores our connection to life.
Without this basic connection, humanity as a species is doomed and the Earth
is in peril. Even though there are many who are aware of the gravity of what is
occurring and are working to turn the tide around, as you and Paco say, it may
well be too late.
NOTE: Russ, I have been mentally and emotionally grappling with the
question you have posed for the last two weeks. It has led to several intense
conversations in our household about the nature of what is occurring in the
world today. I am sure that my brain synapses are all tangled up as a result of
all this reflection and conversation.
When I first read the SOTD, there were some aspects that struck me as
first impressions. As I began to write about these impressions, the words
came together as thoughts trying to respond in an organized and coherent
manner. But then something happened when I began to “see” into the
question. I saw the garden image and that led the words in a different
direction. After writing about the garden image, what I wrote seemed too
simplistic a notion for addressing the dark complexity of what is occurring in
the world now. Yet, the metaphor seemed to plant itself in me, so I followed
up with some preliminary research.
I began by reading a couple of articles in a Parabola issue that is
focussed on the garden theme. One article was about alchemy and the garden,
while another is focussed on the imaginal world and the garden. There are
several more articles to read with varied perspectives on the garden in
spiritual traditions. I also found some information on the Internet regarding
books on the garden and soul, and the garden and individuation, on the L.A.
Jung Institute site. It seems that the garden is connected to the great
archetype of life. So there is great potency in this image on various levels.
I had been working on a response to your post on “synchronic
coalescence” when I received the SOTD writing. Because of its strong impact
on me, I decided to respond to it first. So I will be back tracking to the first
post and most likely connecting it to what I have written here.
Estela

Dear Gentleman,

What a powerful question you present for us to contemplate, Russ:  What does the “Spirit of the Depths” see now?

And what a powerful image you present, Paco, in answer to that question: the “seismic mega-thrust” of Indonesia’s “monstrous, sub-seafloor” 2004 massive earthquake & tsunami.  Your description of it boggles the mind.

It allows us to feel the “magnitude of what we humans are most likely to undergo” if we allow ourselves to compare it to what the “Spirit of the Depths portends for us.  We are all being sucked into the tornado of your dream, Paco.

You write: “Whoever is able to grasp the relevance of such magnitudes … should.  Should what?”

And you answer: “Create whatever they can — while they can — even if their contributions … are only grains of sand on those scales of destiny.”

But what exactly do our “grains of sand” make better?  Our own inner development?  Does it help those few who are conscious of what’s happening to better themselves?  What difference do our contributions to such an enormous, vast seismic shift possibly matter at this point in time?

Russ, you felt the potency of Paco’s use of Indonesia’s 2004 tsunami as a “cautionary metaphor for our time & psyche” — and even had a dream voice announce:  “It is not a metaphor.”  Then what?

You say it must be a corrective of some sort.  The “Other” speaking wants us to see what’s happening as reality,  as something that is literally true.  In the Indonesian tsunami the animals, birds, insects and spiders all detected the vibrational waves in their bodies and ran to the high ground.  Snakes and salamanders put their ears to the ground to detect the same waves — even though the earthquake in the sea occurred up to 6,000 miles away!!  Most of the animals escaped the devastation.  What’s more, the Islanders from the Nias people also headed for the mountains, crying out, “Smong!  Smong!”   There was an Indonesian song, passed down by parents and grandparents, and sung by Indigenous children for centuries:  “When animals go crazy, run away from the sea.  Run to the mountains to save yourself, and yell out ’Smong!  Smong!’ as you go to warn the others.”

The tribal people of Rajasthan, India, anticipate floods by noticing changes in the color of the clouds, movement of the sea, and activities of animals and plants.

Anthropologist James C.Scott describes this intense, observed learning with the Greek term metis, meaning “a wide array of practical skills & acquired intelligence responding to a constantly changing natural & human environment”.  But, says Scott, metis is passed down primarily thru experience and storytelling which is being lost in developing countries like Indonesia as modernization takes its inevitable toll on tradition.  To incorporate this nature wisdom into the formalized technical knowledge valued by institutions teche is a daunting task today.  Scott thinks one way forward is through systematic efforts by scientists to incorporate indigenous knowledge into more formal warning systems — bridging the gap between metis & techne.  Of course, that’s not likely to happen.

Part of the breakdown going on in the world right now is due to our culture’s disconnection — and we are part of that culture — to our own animal nature and intuitive feelings.  That certainly does drain this reality of something vital.  Our high-tech warning systems fail us.  They failed during the 2004 tsunami.  And we have lost direct communication with Nature’s warning system.

What kind of response can we make to being caught up in this plague of denial?  Paco’s example of the Indonesian tsunami is very clear:  It’s flight (not fight) or fright.  Flight was the natural response of the animals and indigenous people, most of whom lived to see another day.  And being frozen in fright was the response of those trapped in our Capitalistic Western culture leaving 230,000 dead.

Richard Tarnas said at the end of his book COSMOS & PSYCHE that he felt the question up for humanity today is (this is a loose translation since I don’t have the book with me): Is the Universe silent and inert, or is it alive and trying to communicate with us?  And, if so, how?  Tarnas sees the Universe speaking to us in three ways: dreams, synchronicities, and nature.

Russ, you say that you and Paco feel the need and even the necessity of “speaking out” no matter how few ears may be hearing what you have to say.  It does help me to keep this kind of conversation going and share dreams with people — for my own sanity, I guess.  I have a drive to delve as deep as I can into the human psyche, of which I am a living part, no matter what.  And I can’t help hoping this all has a larger meaning, one that the Spirit of the Depths will help me to SEE — or at least glimpse.

Russ, you say that Paco’s dreams reveal a very specific form of reality, i.e.

1) An ordinary disaster has shifted into a vast disaster

2) Though our situation is “inescapable” we still must act, the best way we can, in this difficult task … which may yet lead somewhere

3)  The archetypal “who” behind this vast disaster is/will be revealed

4) There will be more turbulence

Then, you say, “There IS something we can do in the face of ‘the end’.”  But what that is will come only from the Spirit of the Depths.

So, in regard to that last statement, I want to tell you a dream of mine that revealed to me what I could do in the face of the “end”.  You may have already heard it, nevertheless, it feels pertinent to repeat it for this discussion,

Dream:

I’m in the Art Museum in Chicago, only it’s now a combination of the Art & History museums, and I lose my reading glasses.  I’m distraught. In the middle of the first floor is a room that is all white with big windows.  The people inside wear white coats and look like scientists doing chemistry experiments.  I’ve looked everywhere I can think of to retrieve my glasses.  Then the white room empties.  I sneak in and open a few drawers.  In one of them I find my glasses.  Delighted to have possession of them again I go to the front doors to leave the building.

On my way, one of the people working there comes up to me and says, “Sekhmet wants to see you.”  I’m flabbergasted.  This person tells me the goddess is waiting by the bridge over Lake Michigan and points to the exit I need to take.  I immediately go to the exit.  There are two flights of steep stairs, and I’m hurrying so fast I stumble and fall down the last one.  My reading glasses smash.  I let out a wail of grief at their loss.

It’s dusk when I leave the building now.  I go to a railing on the bridge over the Lake and peer into the dark water.  Sekhmet rises up out of the lake sitting in her chair with an ankh in her left hand.  The chair stops mid air so that our eyes meet.  She holds out the ankh and I grasp it.  Powerful vibrations shake my body, then she withdraws the ankh and begins to sink back into the water.  But before she disappears she cries, “Flee the city!”  She descends, then calls out in a final shout, “NOW!”

The scene changes and I’m on a street in a place like Iowa City.  The street is empty of traffic but there’s a pile of discarded strips of white linen with a bucket next to them.  A figure in a brown robe and cowl — I can’t see the face — stands beside me and gives me instructions on how to build a pod.  The bucket has a brush and is filled with glue.  I begin to glue the strips to form a large white, almond-shaped “pod”.  It stands alone on the deserted street.

“Find a mate and put him in the pod,” says the figure.

A man is walking along the sidewalk.  I go up and ask him if he’ll be my “mate” and get into the pod.  He agrees to do this and takes his place at the front of the pod.  He sits in front on the left side and I will sit on the right side of the pod across from him.  Then I’m told to get a “father” and “mother”.  This man and woman sit opposite each other in the bulging middle of the pod.  Finally, I’m told to get a child who sits in the tail of the pod.

With that a storm comes up.  The turbulence increases until the pod is lifted into the air and tossed around.  It’s not water that makes up this storm.  Clouds of pure CHAOS toss my pod furiously to and fro.  The “father” cries out, “We’re all going to die!”  I look around at the pod’s interior and say in a clear, calm voice, “No, we’re not .  There’s not a single tear in this pod.  We’re going to be fine.”  And I know that it’s true.

End of dream.   

So I guess my task at the “end” of this world we are still embedded in is to build a pod and find those who are needed to seed a new world once all the chaos/turbulence subsides.  And my reading (left brain) glasses won’t be necessary in this new world.

Sekhmet = sekhem = life force   This is the same root as in Shakti, though ancient Egypt was flourishing 1,000 years before the first civilization in India.

Some further thoughts —

It seems important to maintain our connection to our body, to our instinctual nature, yet nature is brutal.  Predators rip the flesh off their prey.  Prey chews up living plants who definitely feel fear … and perhaps pain.  Even prey, like stately giraffes, can heave a lion off their back like an irritating fly, or smash a lion’s face.  This has been recorded.

The IRON LABYRINTH is a world of rational, disciplined men who have the ability to repress or contain their emotions and even fears to do important tasks (when they go out on missions).  Whereas, the CAVE is a place of the dark, chaotic feminine filled with volatile, fiery swings of emotion.  Which reminds me of where we are today.  Has our creation of such an extreme rational, left-brained, capitalistic, literal, patriarchal, scientific, masculine world with its insight into the mysteries of physics, the Cosmos, algorithms, the human body, etc. triggered an enantiodromia that is flinging us at tremendous speed to its polar opposite — the Maga forces around the entire world with their fury of emotions and fierce indifference to logic?

After the gods withdrew from the Earth (see Julian Jaynes on that one) spreading destruction and chaos across the face of the earth, then came the Axial Age bringing Buddhism, a thirst for justice and equality, compassion for all sentient beings.  Susuzki says, the essence of Zen Buddhism is:  ALL THINGS CHANGE!”  And the mantra of my 2nd book, The Cave of the Dark Moon is, “All things are in flux!”

The pod in my Sekhmet dream allows us to ride out the next round of CHAOS & FLUX and to birth new life on the other side of whatever huge metamorphic change is coming.

In THE IRON LABYRINTH, Uncle says to Colum after manifesting the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden:  “You could never have seen the tree so powerfully if not for your swim with the pyrite.” Colum had to swim in the molten core of the Earth —  the molten core of his own being — in order to see the Tree.

In the Sekhmet dream I find myself on the quiet street of a small town and discover strips of white linen and a bucket of glue (a gift from the lion goddess?) after being told by the Goddess — she who dispenses the life force of the Universe —  to flee the City.  Does Chicago represent all cities?  Does it stand for our current civilization and culture?)

The pod is built under HER auspices, and Sekhmet is the goddess of those who are no longer dependent on Mother or Father — on humans who can stand by themselves … in their own inner authority.

Think of Leo, the most individual of all 12 signs with a single wave for its sign.  Directly opposed to Leo, and in tandem with it, is Aquarius (the most collective of all 12 signs) with two rows of waves.  One way to think of our moving into Aquarius is — we aren’t looking at the Flower Children (with their tender feelings) of the 1960s who yearned for communes where Mother would take care of them — versus Aquarians, Leos who come together for a purpose, achieve that purpose, and then disperse without regret, because they are far more individuated people who can stand on their own just fine.

Merrilee

One of the most outstanding aspects of this 4^th dialogue for me lies in the the initial appearance of images of natural phenomena in dream, vision, or memory (tsunami, river, tornado, whirling clouds), but which then scales up to catastrophic “unnatural” proportions. This scaling up factor is expressed both in dream or in outer reality in spatial/temporal terms: normal events moving abnormally faster, or things getting unnaturally bigger or smaller—we could say unrealistically—all the while generating a mood of looming catastrophe. Paco gives some powerful examples occurring in his dreams and visions. People also dream of the sun speeding up (temporal scaling) or “spatial entities” deforming, expanding, twisting, shrinking, etc. A good movie that portrays these spatiotemporal distortions taking place is Everything Everywhere At Once.

I was intrigued to see the 18^th century quote at the beginning of this dialogue. If one were searching for an historical origin of chaos theory (1970’s) this would be a good start. One of the key notions of chaos theory is the phenomenon of cascading across scale (scaling up or down). Patterns at tiny scales become visible at huge scales through a cascading process. As Paco notes, tiny tremors at great depths become catastrophically visible at the surface.

All these distortions occurring in outer reality or in dream reflect a psychic process, (the spirit of the depths) as Paco says. But here we must also invoke Russ’s dream voice: “it is not a metaphor”. A metaphor is a linguistic device for linking spiritual reality with sense-perceptible reality—it establishes a hidden identity between the two otherwise separate worlds, also known as the two-world myth—for example “nature is the book of God”. By studying nature we come closer to God’s word. But here is the rub: what happens to metaphor when this two-world myth (spiritual/material), the ancient spiritus rector of Western culture for millennia, collapses? Metaphors point to a invisible link between two separated worlds. But if the two worlds are collapsing, Russ’ dream voice seems to tell what is next: “it is not a metaphor”. This voice carries echoes for me from Jung’s Red Book in which Jung accuses Philemon and company of being just symbols but is sharply corrected (“we are not symbols, we are real”). P. K. Dick says something similar in his declaration that he was taught by a girl that his fictions were, in some sense, very real (i.e., not metaphorical).

The looming catastrophe we all face, then, is at an unheard-of scale and is decidedly unnatural (even if natural imagery is invoked). Reality as we have known it has been based on the two-world myth, requiring stable rhetorical and syntactical language to make this dual reality intelligible to us. All signs point to not so much enormous natural disasters (the earth has witnessed five mass extinctions, for example) but to a completely new situation in which the psychic background to our age-old stable cultural and linguistic world seems to be undergoing a transformation—one in which the two-world logic no longer holds. This is suggested in the upheavals taking place not so much to entities in our given space/time, but to the logic of our given spacetime itself.

We are witnessing the visible tremors of this transformation in “all the lying, denial, disinformation, ignoring, and other such” as Russ says. These linguistic distortions are no longer moral problems but hint at a breakdown in intelligibility as the language structure that sprung from and reflects the intelligibility of the two worlds is now giving way under the collapse of the two-worlds’ once stable logic of spacetime (eg eternity/time; inner/outer; mind/body; past/present/future, etc.).

Our looming catastrophe is first and foremost a catastrophe of unintelligibility. To get a profound yet hilarious sense of what people are capable of doing to one another under conditions of unintelligibility, I heartily recommend C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength: Ch 16. It begins with Merlin casting the spell of Babel on some men “without chests”. Each man’s speech was intelligible to him alone while every one else heard him babbling. It ended in violent murders with the wild animals having the last say. A must read for what is to come. It is prophetic!

How anxiety about the planet’s future is transforming the practice of psychotherapy.

An important article from the NY Times:

How anxiety about the planet’s future is transforming the practice of psychotherapy.

Russ

W O R D W O R K

Wordwork is a method of revealing the deep psyche hidden in words and images. From time to time, I’ll post an example to illustrate how to make use of this method. For more details, consult my paper, “Words as Eggs,” in my book, Words as Eggs: Psyche in Language and Clinic.

consider

The first step is to find the word in the dictionary. For wordwork, I suggest The American Heritage Dictionary. Here is what you will find:

con‧sid‧er (kən-sid’ər) v. –ered, –er‧ing, –ers—tr. 1. To think carefully about. 2. To think or deem to be, regard as. See Usage Note at as¹. 3. To form an opinion about; judge: considers waste to be criminal. 4. To take into account; bear in mind. 5. To show consideration for; considered the feelings of others. 6. To esteem; regard. 7. To look at thoughtfully. — intr. To think carefully; reflect. [ME consideren < OFr. < Lat. considerare : com-, com + sīdus, sīder-, star.]

The initial entry will show the word in bold and separated into syllables. Here you can see that “consider” is a three-syllable word. Next comes the phonetic spelling showing how the word is pronounced. Then the part of speech is indicated; in this case, consider is a verb. There follow different grammatical forms of consider. The entry then tells us this is a transitive verb, meaning that it requires an object to be acted on, to make sense. Then there will be a number of entries showing what the word means. Most dictionaries will list these meanings historically (with current-meaning first) or in terms of commonality (the most common-meaning first). If the verb can also be used intransitively (as a stand-alone word not requiring an object to make sense), this will be indicated.

So far, while some of this may be useful in various ways, none of it has any impact emotionally, psychologically, or imaginatively. All necessary, of course, and not to be ignored, but essentially utilitarian and rather boring.

But now something interesting begins to happen as the dictionary shows us the origin and history of the word. We rarely think about the origin of a word, but every word in every language was born at some point in time and somewhere in the world. And every word that has been born has a history, a story to tell. This birth and story of a word is referred to generally as a word’s etymology. You will recognize the “-logy” of this word, which means “speech.” The component “etym-, refers to “truth.” So, etymology literally means “truth speaking.” Notice that the dictionary “brackets” the etymology. It’s the last entry. Some dictionaries omit this altogether. But this is where the gold is.

Current meaning and definition are too often only the shell of a word. We use words but do not know their soul—or even care; we are all word abusers. Anything that will help free us from the prison of current meaning, the literalness and speed of the present, will help us to free Psyche from her prison shell. Words take on life, induce images, excite the imagination, begin to weave textures with one another, and tell whole stories, if we but scratch the surface of the word.

The sider part of this word is the root-word for star—the same etymon we see in such words as sidereal, meaning “in reference to star time,” and siderite, the iron from meteorites—that is, “what falls to earth from the stars.” In earlier times, a sidus was one who observed the stars. That required care and time—one could not hurry the heavens. And in watching the stars in this slow and attentive way, the psyche was stirred, began to move, and projected itself into the starry lights. In such careful looking, the psyche began to see itself, and man perceived the relationship between himself and the stars. In such con-sideration, being with the stars, the psyche gave birth to astrology.

In these days of instant, this sense of “consider” has been lost.

So, paying attention to the word’s birth and its developmental history is one effective waay of slowing down. And by slowing down, we become psychically prepared to experience the “shock” of what is revealed, that what is hidden in the birth and history of “consider” is the image of “star.” Now this revelation can set the imagination in motion.

Even more. Sometimes, the dictionary will follow the origin-story further back, to the primitive Indo-European roots. In this case, the I-E root for “consider” is sweide¹. This root means “to shine,” and “to consult the stars.” A further development is the word “desiderate,” which originally meant “to hope from the stars,” but in modern time has given rise to our word for “desire.” Neither of these images (star, desire) is available to us unless we do this sort of word work.

In future posts, I’ll illustrate more fully how wordwork can lead one into unexpected places in working on a dream. In the meantime, keep in mind what Emerson said: “Every word was once a poem.”

With the publication of Dreams, Bones & the Future: Endings (soon), our trilogy focused on the dire straights humans find themselves in is complete. As the pace of collapse and likely extinction increases, we feel the need for a forum where we can continue to dialogue on the ongoing catastrophe. The immediacy of developments requires an immediacy of response and waiting for books to appear, while always useful, feels too delayed as a means of focusing one’s attention on what we can do now in the present moment to best be with what is coming.

To this end, we have started a new dialogue, entitled “Our Need to Speak Out.” We will have no set schedule but we intend to post regularly. We will follow the same alternating format in dialogue form. Paco will begin with The Pot Calls the Kettle Black and Russ will respond with Antihuman, Transhuman, or… These will appear on the OWL AND HERON PRESS website. If you have not already become a member of the O&H Press, please do so. You will receive an e-mail when a new post in the series is online with instructions on how to access it.

We would like to encourage an active participation by all members. To do so, please send comments and contributions to either Russ (ral@ralockhart.com) or Paco (mitchell@cybermesa.com). Feel free as well to share any of these pieces with anyone you feel would be interested in this work.

To join OWL & HERON PRESS, go to owlandheronprress.website and click on the Register link under the Meta section. If you are already a member, click on Log in.

Russ & Paco

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