Affliction Rules With Vinegar

“So we must press onward to the final stage, the rubedo, which has often been called the 'Marriage of Luna and Sol', the fusion of the human and divine, the union of the personality (Luna) with the essential Self (Sol). Now the retort can be opened to reveal the philosopher's stone, the pure gold of Wisdom, the diamond body, the Gnostic Anthropos, the Heavenly Man, Salvator, filius macrocosmi; by whatever name it has been called, there now stands forth the divine original man, long buried and forgotten in the very centre of our being. Jung quotes the 17th century alchemist, Gerhard Dorn: ‘Transform yourselves from dead stones into living philosophical stones!' [Jung, C.G., Psychology and Alchemy (Collected Works, Vol. 12), page 256.].”
Joy Mills ‘The Human Journey - Quest for Self-Transformation’ (The Blavatsky Lecture delivered at the Annual Convention of the Theosophical Society in England, 27 May 1978)


Are we all golems, fragile mounds of stardust, which may only be animated by the divine spark which we stoke within us? I think so. We spend too much of our lives trapped between competing conceptions of self, which any degree of contemplation would reveal as false, every one. It is our secret thoughts, the ideas and visions, dreams and ideals that we fear to reveal, that we hide and obfuscate, that we will not express even to our friends - until the candles have burnt low, and the wine is nearly drunk and curtained windows comfort us – it is these secret thoughts that are us. It is the secret thoughts that are our spark, your own mind fires make you what you are. It is that spark, that fire which is your parcel of the infinite, your essential fragment of the divine. Become what you are.


“The philosopher's stone. the lapis philosophorum, is frequently spoken of as hermaphrodite, containing within itself all opposites, binding together all the elements in the world. It is said to radiate a cosmically healing effect and indeed he who has found the way to his own inner transformation, healing all divisions within himself, becomes the healer of the world. What began as a lonely way to one's self is found to be, in the end, a glorious path trod in the company of the gods. As Michael Maier, another 17th century alchemist quoted by Jung, has expressed himself: 'There is in our chemistry a certain noble substance over whose beginning affliction rules with vinegar but over whose end joy rules with mirth. Therefore I have supposed that the same will happen to me, namely that I shall suffer difficulty, grief, and weariness at first, but in the end shall come to glimpse pleasanter and easier things.[ lbid., pp. 260-61.] ”
Joy Mills, Ibid.


Did anybody say it would be easy? I don’t remember saying it would be easy. I don’t remember anyone else saying it would be easy. I think we might have just assumed it would be easy. But what do we really mean by ease? Don’t we mean something that can be achieved without me changing, aren’t we saying that we want a change without actually transforming? That we want to eat our cake and have it? Stop associating your life with ease and safety, security and stasis, ease and safety are not life, security and stasis are death. Engage with joy, take a risk, follow your bliss, kiss me you fool.


“If, as Jung has pointed out, ‘The terrors of death on the cross are an indispensable condition for the transformation,'[Jung, C.G., Psychology and Religion (Collected Works, Vol. 11), Bollingen Series, Pantheon Books, New York, 1958, page 221.] we may also be equally certain that out of the long series of reincarnations and metempsychoses there will come that experience of the Self which, as Dr. von Franz has so beautifully stated, 'brings a feeling of standing on solid ground inside oneself, on a patch of inner eternity which even physical death cannot touch.[von Franz, Marie-Louise, C. G. Jung, His Myth in our Time, G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1975, page 74.] ”
Joy Mills, Ibid.


Affliction Rules With Vinegar

Two great queens have risen from the dust about me
and whether I am the:
king;
consort;
confidante;
or serf,
in this repertory theatre
of incarnations -
I know not.

How many correlations
will the mathematics
of life on Earth allow?

Is each particle of soil
a fraction of us
every parcel of earth
an anthrosol
from which we are again and again
conjured, summoned
to this dance of dust?

The White Queen and I
phase in and out of pattern
some misprint, misalignment
of image and of song
mis-stepping, tripping
in a spiral about the ballroom
which nevertheless holds
never falling, never striking the walls.

The Black Queen
moves slowly, alone on the balcony
but I guess every move before she makes it
and my gesture is a sentence she finishes.

Night after night
in a dream of morning
a soldier to matriarchy.
Offering my service
to the grapeyard.
Old wine in new bottles.
The revolution of selves
across centuries
balanced by the terroir
that attracts us
again and again.

Our own viticulture
of blood and belonging
uncorked once more.


James Piers Taylor, 29th November 2006 - London


IMAGE: The Mystic Marriage of St Catherine - St John Altarpiece [central panel] (1474-1479) by Hans Memling.

De Natura Rerum

“A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.”
Alfred Adler

The theme runs something like this – how to synthesise the lamas and the lineage, the psychologists with their insights, the slippery wilful mind with its annihilation…
Go on retreat and sit for hour after hour; be silent and feel the pressure of your mind at its margins; dive into systemic therapeutics or experiential magic; let the green and red world behind the world of appearances nestle its battered brow against your awkward shoulder and feel the tears run.

I was thinking about Anne Ancelin Schützenberger and her work with ‘the ancestor syndrome’, how in families there are often correlated dates on which people die in each generation (or get married or become ill or whatever); she uncovers traumas extant in the contemporary French and stems these wounds directly from the 1789 Revolution and subsequent Terror. Makes Tony Blair’s (old piano-grin himself) recent whispered not-quite-sorry about slavery tinkle the ivories of lip service more clearly, doesn’t it? The basic naked principle here, as Freud taught us, is the return of the repressed, or perhaps, dressed in velvet, the return of the unremembered – it matters not. As Adler points out we’re into the ice-sheet of lies, now melting in the frosty mandala of eco-collapse – and remember, the environment doesn’t begin where your skin meets the atmosphere, it interpenetrates your bios, your genus, your history and memory too – inside and out are of one taste.

Sticking with Adler a moment, he also notes somewhere that “Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority” – something to bear in mind for those of us inclined towards feeling – and perhaps this is why (to the best of my knowledge) even the very astute Derrick Jensen has yet to light the literal fuse of his metaphoric weapons and blow up any actual dams. Certainly pertains to therapy and the dance of spaciousness and challenge – something we’ll focus into soon. But first, there are a few others to meet, starting with Virginia Satir. She told us that “problems are not the problem; coping is the problem”, and she was right, just as Jacob Moreno was right to identify the ‘unmittelbare Begegnung’ (‘living encounter’) as the time-limited, here and now, healing-potential of the moment where past and present meet. Just as Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy referred rightly to “violent pursuit of one’s entitlement” as (I can hear Derrick Jensen applauding) ‘destructive entitlement’ that is the root of ‘family pain and hurt’. Can you tell what it is yet? No? How about if I introduce Milton Erickson? Bert Hellinger perhaps? Or Franz Ruppert or Albrecht Mahr? Alright, alright, you’ve got it – we’re steering a course for systemic or constellation based modalities of healing and the ‘knowing field’ approach to the therapeutic dynamic. Let’s pause a moment and take in the view – I can see the vessel emerging out of, say, Hellinger's ‘rules’ (chaos and order appearing together, naturally): – he sees radical inclusion (a systemic conscience requires the re-membering of anyone ‘forgotten’ in any systemic story – forgotten ones are re-folded into presence); he sees temporal hierarchy (in the system ancestors prevail, age counts and the flow of respect for those who went before is an index of constellated health – contrast that with the slippage of PoMo unremembering and the loss of all ‘Founders’); he sees that everyone has their own fate (and because of this no-one can take on another’s fate or replace them); and he sees the ‘unchangeable givens’ (the place where we can only agree to ‘what is’ – where, at the speaking of the permissive ‘Yes’, our fate becomes our destiny); finally he sees the need for a balance of giving and taking (the appropriateness of gratitude, recognition, reciprocity and the spiral flow of ‘upwards giving’ – a system enhancing its capacity to express love). Furthermore, he also sees that non-observance of these ‘orders of love’ leads to systemic imbalance, to hubris, inflation, delusions of grandeur and illusions of our own uniqueness and power.

Its useful at such points to recall that a ‘good intention’ is not always synonymous with a ‘right intention’ from a systemic perspective, for example, the child may try to save the mother, since this will make the child safer as well as remembering the echoed lost one three generations back – however, systemically, the child can never replace the parent – the temporal hierarchy trumps the good intention and an entanglement results – a trauma, a localized dysfunction within a broader system where disharmony is isolated into crisis seeking the shift of awareness.

Are you seeing what I’m seeing? What Hellinger calls ‘contextual is-ness’ becomes all important here – the dynamic balance between what we bring (trailing clouds of glory) and where we stand – an existential experimental razor-blade of now enfolding then. So we carry the wounds of the past, not just the personal past, not just the collective past, not only the transpersonal past, but the weight of life having existed at all. Like Joanna Macy’s ‘Work That Reconnects’ – you and I are a flash in the species past, we could choose to remember having gills, or leaves, or the intention to manifest at all – and in so doing we could approach the stars we are and always were and will become. This is ‘intergenerational psychotraumatology’. It's also Kairos, the place where we notice our fascination with resistance, the phenomena of our own wilful non-healing (as identified by Mark Jones in ‘A Change is as good as a Red’). This represents the edge and the experiment – the ordinary magic beyond the inflations of a needy ego.


It also points full-square at the necessity of continuity, of lineage, we might say. So there has to be a thread reaching back, not only the blood-line and cell-structure of our mitochondrial DNA (although certainly it includes that), but also a pattern of sound holding mind, of symbols leading heart, of imagination on fire with compassionate regard and inclusion. And more, even where lineage still exists in an unbroken and self-realised way, what is still required is a question. No constellation will work without an initiating issue, and no immersion into lineage will be permitted or opened without abisekha – anointing. Where there is a question it is not the question ‘does God exist?’ but, as Chogyam Trungpa shows us, ‘does the question exist?’. He goes on to note that of course, it doesn’t exist, and therefore neither does the asker, nor, by extension, God – yet it exists specifically through the perception of the asker, contextually, not from its own side – the very nature of illusion. He concludes, typically (and joyfully) – “let there be contradiction” as a sign of wellbeing.

I want to end with another consideration, in part from Adler, who says

“No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences so-called trauma - but we make out of them just what suits our purposes.”

And in part from the work of Thogme Zangpo, author of the ‘37 Practices of a Bodhisattva’; he writes in stanza 24 that

“the various ills in our life that we suffer resemble the death of our child in a dream”

The dream runs, we grow old and grey but forget to notice that a dream is unfolding, forget that there is dream at all, become stuck to the reality we insist upon that all is at it seems, and as a result surmount our suffering with terror, holding “as truth what is merely illusion”. The child who died was always a dream child. The dreamer who is dying is also a child. There is no distinction between child, dream and dreamer worthy of the name – they are each empty of each other, yet manifesting difference for the sake of a healing flash.

The fruit, the path, the base of all this is the realisation that emptiness exceeds our ego, and that whenever we fail to hold this realisation (which for me is all the time I ever experience) we experience only illusion. We engage with a dancing fog-bound light shifting in deep currents of which we know nothing and perceive even less, yet we insist that we are ‘dealing with reality’ and are full of ‘good intentions’, systemically hamstrung by our partiality. Lacking all lineage, all linkage and flow, we become marionettes in the danse macabre. Let us go to the cemeteries and crematoria, inside and out, Now and Then, and dance until the veils become offering scarves stretching back to the arising of life, forward to illusion’s last breath, and the liberatory orgasm of being.


Kh
28.11.06

IMAGES: Kinkara [Special Dharma Protector for pratitioners of Heruka and Vajrayogini, also known as 'Father Mother Lord of the Charnel Grounds'.] (date unknown) by Andy Weber, Cupid and Centaur (1992) by Joel-Peter Witkin.

A Change Is as Good as a Red

“Imagine a patient who goes to a doctor and tells him what he is suffering from. The doctor says, “Very well, I’ve understood your symptoms. Do you know what I will do? I will prescribe a medicine for your neighbour!” The patient replies, “Thank you very much, Doctor, that makes me feel much better.””

Anthony De Mello, Awareness (1990: Zondervan)

Inside our inner cinema the story goes something like this…if my wife was just like that film star; if my brilliance was just understood by the world; if my friends could just see how I am right about everything; if my children respected me…then I would be…

What? Happy maybe. Anthony De Mello (a Jesuit priest whose was alternately sanctioned and slated by his church) was clear about one thing: we do not want to be happy, because to be happy means we would have to sit up and recognise who we are and what is going on inside our heads…to be happy is to awake and we are all rather cosy inside our thick duvets of muddled thinking and projected need.

We ascribe meaning all over: to other people, to exterior things, events…if I could just get enough money; if I just read (and understand) the complete works of Western Civilisation; if I could just get that pretty girl/guy (delete as appropriate) on the street to take me in their mouth; if I was just as handsome and successful as that inner movie script said I could be…then what? Then what next?


De Mello is clear, we are not in love with someone but with our idea about someone (and a darn hopeful one at that); we are not sacrificing ourselves for others unless we want to (and we do for our own need, our own selfish generosity our own mutated crucifix); we are not a great person and we do not want to wake up…even as we sit on the meditation cushion for day 2 of the ever-so-long retreat we planned for months before - we do not want to wake up, we do not want to let go, because it is just too convenient to find meaning in anything, anything, but our own state of mind, our own being. Anything but that rag and bone shop, anything but the litter of myself strewn across the park of my biography, anything but that.

The martyr in my mind is but a sick point to prove to all those that crossed me…the pain in my body as I sit is my mind painting Rorschach sulks on my subtle skin. I do not want to wake up, and when I do want to wake up, I still do not want to wake up - for somewhere the fantasy remains that I will not have to let go of what I do not really want to (this is the negotiation we undertake as we endeavour to spiritualize… “surely now I am being too good to have to change that…”).

Without this real dark soil, the terra preta, the heaps of black Gold in the open cast mine of our selfish wisdom then the whitening will never really whiten. Without the whitening as pure as snow, as pure as the TV soap powder wet white dream then the chance to change and become red and full of life again will simply become a pressure against change, a funnel of everything about life we hadn’t tainted – discharged down the drain. If I then really try, my brothers, really try to do good in the world, and meditate and change for the benefit of sentient beings, if I always really try - then how trying will I become, if I do not give up on trying…?


So if I love sleeping - can I love sleeping so purely (with such white emotion) that sleeping becomes transparent? If I love sleeping - can I dream in such vivid Technicolor that the moths of the past bleach in front of the rainbow windows?…that the moths of the past change again into dreams which are happy to disappear against the midnight blue sky?…If so, then now what might I become? Or not become?


This is for Anthony De Mello whom I encountered for the first time yesterday (and for James whom read him to me) and who could, even in that short acquaintance on the page, inspire a sense of genuine loss when I read of his ‘untimely death’. This is also for Patrick whose decision to delay our meeting in order to meditate produced this fragment.

Mark Jones

IMAGES: Moonflower and Moth (c.2005) by Anita Munman, Meditation at Sunrise on the Varanasi Ghats, Uttar Pradesh, India by Olivier Follmi, Moth Prayer (2002) by Elizabeth Gómez Freer, Anthony De Mello [photographer & date unknown].

The Constant Gardener

I was moved to write this brief piece after a solitary night viewing an old video of Bill Mollison the bearded Aussie who coined the phrase perma-culture (from permanent agriculture) to indicate a sustainable way of feeding ourselves and enjoying an abundant life without undue stress or harm to the land on which we live. The aspect of the video Global Gardener that inspired me the most was the way this man travelled, to parts of rural Africa, urban India, the Pacific North-West islands, Tasmania and the States (to name but a few of the places) and on arrival he taught people skills to adapt a sustainable way of living to suit their own particular environment and way of life. Here is the good bit though, this man returned to the places he had visited the next year, or within the next few years and the people that he had taught were up and running and were teaching the next generation! They had become a seed force sending new arrivals out to cultivate their own new area, like a veritable aussie apple-seed this man was planting a living tradition wherever he went in order that the life of that area was not dependent on him, or even those he taught in order to proliferate and grow. This surely is a way forward, an inspiration in a world of vast corporate farming conglomerates and mono cultures. This was a man who had tasted Eden back on his own ranch where he delighted in showing the camera how you could pick fresh fruits from countless varities growing wild and laze down for a snooze in the gardens close by the house (not even to be seen or disturbed) and who felt generous enough to share that potential. A man who could calmly clamber through the vast increasing deserts of the American South-West and illustrate very soberly how our greed, for water, for land reclamation was destroying the earth whilst quickly moving on to another place to do his little part in the counter flow to these dominating and disturbing trends. I was appalled at our ignorance, I was delighted by our potential when a real teacher comes.


The genius of Bill Mollison for me was that he taught the future teachers, that he gave to people in such a way that it empowered them to become carriers of the same wisdom to the extent as he openly admitted that many of his pupils now know more about the environmental needs of their own particular landscape than he ever would. Is this not the goal of psychotherapies, of spiritual teachings, the perennial wisdom? Not that the message should be displayed in shop windows as a kind of 21^st century window dressing for the existentially exhausted psyche…but that people take the time, the care (soren, in the formulation of Heidegger) to reach out and touch others so that this initially foreign other can unfold into their own potential so surely as to go on to touch others in equal measure. For Bill cared for the earth as true home, so those he taught cared also, for the true. The truth is a light, let us not worship gurus and institutions but instead this light that can guide us on our journey into the earth, the journey into ourselves. We need not sit and bow to the light house when it is the light itself that will guide our small ship home. The true teachers know that it is the light that guides and no edifice no matter how prominent or structurally immense can substitute for finding the compass and sextant inside. I thank all of those that helped me see the light inside myself, I thankyou Bill.

Mark Jones

IMAGE: Bill Mollison (2005), image lifted from Tagari.

Papier-mâché

The week crumpled into a ball and discarded
faces we wore folded in on its surfaces
interior origami of the past
paper refuse, recyclate
mâchéd in the rain or machine
pulped to new purpose
and un-Friday-nightable.

The fresh perfume
in the first evaporations of alcohol
meets the taper of expectation
and IGNITES
like pure hydrogen in a test tube
filling the street
with the humidity of possibility.

Lariats of laughter
cracked through the air.
Lit windows are new stars
competing with gravity,
we spin in the pause between two
and
d
e
s
c
e
n
d.

Pockets light before coinage
the shrapnel of fractions
from rounds of notes
- easy to flag down bar staff
with a sterling banner.

The fist hit of pils
on the lips and the tongue
the purity of the premier cigarette
with its sincere cruelty
at the gum line,
& on the throat.

Right now,
we could carry on forever.

James Piers Taylor, 1st November 2006 - Ormskirk

IMAGE: L'anglais Warener au Moulin Rouge (1892) by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Late Rising

Closing my eyes
and facing the sun
stare into a nebula of blood


James Piers Taylor, 26th October 2006 - Wolverhampton

IMAGE: The Red Rectangle (2003), An archival image of the Red Rectangle, or HD44179, taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 onboard the Hubble Space Telescope. From NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.