Am I Finally Getting the Message?

Am I beginning at last accurately to penetrate the cryptic philosophy of C. J. Jung?

Jung reminds us in his Red Book that between crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus descended into Hell for three days.  The Bible is quite clear about this, though the sojourn seems to have been swept under the rug in most traditions.

But why this interlude in the depths?  Jung explains it in rather Taoist terms.  There can be no Light without Darkness.  If He hadn't descended into Hell, He could not have risen into Heaven.  Likewise, Jung himself never would have become an integrated, "individuated" man but for a long journey, recounted in the Red Book, into a hell that I cannot call "private" because it resides in the collective unconscious.

How does this tie to my own experience? 

The narrative contents of my dream are trivial, stupid even.  I am a lawyer.  I have been tasked with arranging to have a broken washing machine fixed, one that services a hospital where two of my friends, also clients, are confined.  I go down into the basement of the hospital and crawl inside of the tub of the machine, which is very large.  From within I can move the contraption, but only a little bit before it seems to hit an obstacle.  It becomes clear to me that no one in a position to help me get it fixed will ever raise a finger.  It is permanently broken and will not be replaced.  I have failed in my task.

Worse, when my boss and mentor, who is named David, interrogates me about the job, I tell him that I am making good progress and that all will soon be well.  From the first words out of my mouth, David can see that I am lying, and he holds me in contempt for it.

When I awaken from the dream, it seems to me on a visceral level that it has captured my dilemma and also my contemptible spirit.

What I don't understand, to now, is how individuation is supposed to give rise to contentment, and in particular how it arms one against the terror of death, if indeed it does so.

By contrast, consider the work of another sage who has just come to my attention via the podcast world -- Prof. John Vervaeke of the University of Toronto.  His field of study is cognition and consciousness.  He argues at length, based very much on a Buddhist perspective, that none of us should wish to be immortal, that immortality would soon become a hell of its own, as we run out of goals and our true journey of exploration grinds to a halt.  In his mid-sixties, he says emphatically that he does not wish to live more than an additional 20 years.  "So the blackness of Death does not terrify you?" asks his interlocutor.  "There is no blackness" he replies.  "You need an experiencer for there to be blackness.  The experiencer has been annihilated."

 

Yaldabaoth (or the "Child of Chaos")

Have you worshiped this false god, even as you do not know his name?  Like the Chaldeans, have you committed the grave sin of polytheism, tricked into it by the very Scriptures that you hold dear?

According to the Gnostics, or at least according to one significant strain of Gnosticism (see The Secret Book of John), the Source, the Ultimate Godhead, permitted visions to pass through His head, more out of passive amusement than out of intention.  His power was such that these visions took form. The visionary process begat a pair of demi-gods, and this pair begat another, and so on, until there were 182 pairs.  But there was also one last demi-god who was formed unpaired and whose name was Sophia, or Wisdom.  In her loneliness, Sophia decided to create a child companion for herself, using her own lesser, and derivative, divine powers.  According to the Book, "something came out of her that was imperfect and different in appearance from her, ... it was misshapen ... an abomination."  This abomination was called Yaldabaoth, the son of Sophia and the "Child of Chaos."

Sophia forsook her defective son, but he was able to steal some of her divine power, and with it he created Archons, angels that were counterfeit versions of true divine realities.  The Book says that "he mated with the mindlessness in him and produced authorities for himself."

And then, crucially, Yaldabaoth created an entire material universe -- one that was fatally flawed and irredeemable.  And yet in his arrogance, and once again according to the Book, echoing Genesis 20:3 and 5, he said "you shall have no other gods before me ... for I the Lord your God am a jealous God."

It is no accident that Yaldabaoth echoed the words of Jehovah in Genesis because, in Gnostic belief, our Creator, the one portrayed in the Old Testament, was Yaldabaoth.  

While this entire narrative sounds to us today like a fringe heresy, we need to remind ourselves that the Gnostic texts had as much currency in certain early Christian circles as the books that much later made it into the King James Version of the Bible, and that these texts were ruthlessly suppressed by the early bishops at around the time of Constantine's conversion and the development and promulgation of the Nicene Creed, which is recited still, routinely, in modern Christian churches.  "We believe in One God, the Father Almighty, the Maker of all things visible and invisible."

And if we are able to drop from our minds for a moment the literal "indoctrination" to which we were subjected in childhood Judeo-Christian classrooms, we see plainly that the God of Abraham was indeed petty, vindictive and often arbitrary.

And so, in the Gnostic version of things (which resonates deeply with the kabbalistic, but that's another story), this god whom we have been taught to worship from childhood should be viewed by us as an unfortunate cosmic speedbump around whom we must navigate in our quest to find union with the One True Divine.

 

Another Random Childhood Memory Arisen at the Hour of the Wolf

In the dark basement, my father's professional-grade whetstone. (He was a professional carpenter and shipwright after all.)  It sat in something that looked a bit like a dirty butter dish.

The whetstone became wet only when he spat on it, after which he would use a forefinger to spread the spittle all around the top surface as, perhaps, his own father taught him to do.

 

The Unfortunate Demise of Tinkerbelle

I tried to articulate an overarching theme for the UFO course that I recently led in a town that neighbors my own.  It was a simple one -- It is easy to get on the UFO train, a/k/a "the Woo-Woo Choo-Choo," if one is not led astray by prejudices, but it is very hard to know where to get off.  That is, there are anomalies in the atmosphere that are impossible for a reasonable and informed person to dismiss, but if one follows the rail line from there, it soon leads to very high strangeness indeed, and ultimately to the three pressing questions that followed Paul Gauguin all the way to Tahiti, inspiring the masterpiece that hangs in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts -- "D'ou venons-nous? ..."

And now comes a budding ufologist from Australia, a young man who, in his latest Youtube segment, tries to borrow credibility from his late grandfather, who was a hero of the Battle of Britain, as if that lineage will protect him from skepticism.

"R" was nine or ten years old, sitting outside in a teaching circle next to his female friend "A," when she pointed with wonder and horror at his right foot.  Stuck to the bottom of his shoe was a fairy or sprite that he had crushed to death, inadvertently.  (He knew about the look of death because a venomous snake had lately dispatched his dog.)

The sprite was stereotypical -- tiny, slender, with no gender markings, but with dragonfly wings sprouting from its back.  R examined it closely enough to remark on little wrinkles on its eyelids.  After a time, it disappeared, but A always affirmed that this happened in conversation with R, and R has never fully escaped the ontological shock that the incident caused him.

There are many more than 10,000 such tales.  If this one is in any sense true, then what kind of world do we live in?  And "Ou allons-nous?"

 

Say It Ain't So Sabine!

Sabine Hossenfelder, the somewhat celebrated public-facing German theoretical physicist, has announced to the world via Twitter/X that she is optimistic about the future, for several reasons.  One reason is that we need not be concerned that Artificial Intelligence will stage a mutiny, perhaps enslave us or even kill us all.  Why not?  Before technology progresses to a point that makes such an eventuality possible, says Sabine, we humans will have "merged" with AI.

Raise your hand if you want to live in a world where man and machine are one.

 

A Thanksgiving Epiphany

Admittedly a minor one.  I have long been trapped in a room with two doors.  One is labeled "Transcendence" in big letters.  Since it is transcendence that I have been after for quite some time, I have turned the knob in vain, kicked at the door in vain, tried to shake it off its hinges in vain.

Why did I not think before to try the door marked "Clarity?"  It opened with no fuss when I tried it and I am out of the room.

You might say that clarity is a lesser goal than transcendence.  Or you might say that achieving one is achieving the other.

And now, if I could only do the same with another room, in which one door is labeled "Redemption," and the other ... "Lovingkindness" maybe?

 

A Dream Within a Larger Dream

The ayahuasca trip of 2020, my first, was long and arduous.  It was also expensive.  I dropped about seven thousand dollars just on the journey to the journey in fact.

There were two days of spiritual preparation in the jungle.  I found myself in a state of high anxiety during that time of preparation.  I was in the company of a score of other psychic explorers, most of them young people from Europe and the British Isles.

In the event, on the third day and in the deep darkness of a large yurt, I drank the wretched brown liquid from a bowl held by our Colombian shaman.  Only about 15 minutes later I purged.  That experience was characterized more by relief than torment happily.  A young woman related to the shaman then took me by the hand and led me to what would become "my spot" for a week.  I reclined there with my back against the wall of the yurt.  She lay a large candle at my feet.

At about 2AM (we weren't equipped accurately to track the time) I lapsed into what felt like a lucid dream.  I was walking along a trail back home, not far from Walden Pond.  I turned a corner to find a woman sitting in a small clearing in a meditative pose, but with her eyes half open.  As I approached she raised her right index finger, gently to stop me.  She then opened her eyes completely and said "Young man, do you mind if I ask you a question?"

"Of course."

She sighed. "Now that everything material has come to dust, and everyone can see it, and we can see as well that we inhabit a realm filled with spirits, some real, some imaginary, some mocking our fears of them, whom shall I choose to worship?"

Somehow inspired to speak without hesitation, and only half joking, I said "There's an algorithm for that."

She sighed more deeply.  She had by her side a plastic Halloween pumpkin.  She drew from it a single Chinese fortune cookie, still in its cheap plastic wrapper.  She tossed it at my head.  I caught it mid-air, but could not open it with my fingers, so I tore it open with my front teeth.  I cracked it in two and read the fortune aloud to her. "Garbage in; garbage out" it read.