The Soul of the World

Epiphany in the City: 1/15/11*
CC Jean Stimmell

Eureka!

The writer in his loft exclaims,

believing he has birthed a brilliant idea

not aware he is merely channeling the recesses of his soul

the collective unconscious of Gaia, our living, breathing Earth

who has been incubating this truth for ages in the wood beams

and clay bricks of this converted old mill building,

steeped in wisdom and soul.

Epiphany in Nature: 1/15/14*
CC Jean Stimmell

Just as beams and bricks incubate the word until the time is ripe,

So do the sparse but persevering dead trees cradle these nests

holding them in sacred trust for the Great Blue Herons

to lay eggs in when they return in the Spring

birthing yet another truth.

*Amazing synchronicity: These two photographs were taken exactly 3 years apart: January 15th 2011 and January 15th 2014.

A new telling of the Adam & Eve Myth

The Descent
Wetland heron nests at dusk: January 15,2014
CC Jean Stimmell

To my way of thinking, the Adam and Eve Myth shares common ground with my first big dream about the fierce, Buddhist nun passionately grieving her dead baby. This was transformational to me, igniting an instantaneous paradigm shift, which, among other things, brought me into therapy: I saw in that instant that the Nun’s visceral, raw passion and fierce, primal emotion were what is really real,  more so than the pale, stale, static image of Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree.

And infinitely more really real than the conventional telling of Adam and Eve story – and the conclusions drawn about what it is to be human!

Here’s what I mean: In the Jewish, Islamic and Christian religions, Adam and Eve were created by God to live in his creation and to have a relationship with him, something like a human getting a dog. Their very names are indicative of their roles. Adam comes from the Hebrew meaning "man." Eve is from the Hebrew for "life."

God wanted for Adam and Eve to live with him in his transcendent life, pure, cerebral, static, unchanging, unemotional–an eternity of no surprises. He made a deal with them: They could live in the Garden of Eden, a perfect place with no thorns or weeds, cultivate the garden, name the animals, and eat of the garden's fruit, everything but the dark fruit from the tree containing the knowledge of good and evil.

This sounds to me like the master of the house telling his dog that you can live in my palace and eat the finest food but don’t ever bite me, piss on the floor, or go outside to have fun chasing the mail man or fucking the neighborhood bitches. I’m warning you, if your do, you are out of here! Do you understand!

How boring thought the dog...that’s no fun al all.

No doubt both Adam and Eve felt the same way: You can’t have yin without yang, you can’t have up without down, you can’t have heaven without hell, you can’t have the transcendent without the descendent.

[Enter Stage Right] At that point, the Serpent appears to get the plot moving. She represents by her very shape her connection to the earth and moist mysteries, to emotion, intrigue, betrayals, and dark passions: the ecstatic, irrational, imaginal: the Realm of Dionysus.

But not according to the Bible which claims that the Serpent was not Dionysus but Satan himself!

Specifically, the Bible says that Eve was seduced into eating the fruit by Satan, who then disguised as the Serpent deceived Adam to get him to also eat the fruit (of course, he was no fool:  he damn well knew it was against the rules, but didn’t have the balls to take the lead, so he let Eve take the Fall.)

Because they disobeyed God by following Satan’s advice, God expelled Adam and Eve from the garden. How dare them! What a nerve to place their earthly desires above God’s transcendent vision.   It was very bad! According to the Bible, it was “through this act that sin entered the world."  

My alternative version is that the serpent was the voice of the Earth, freeing Adam and Eve from being eternal captives, programmed robots in a stale, unchanging, transcendental mansion in the sky. The Serpent sprung them out of dullsville, allowing them, instead, to to descend into the uncertainty, dread, and wonder of the land of the living.

XXX

(Biblical facts from http://www.allaboutcreation.org/adam-and-eve.htm)

Is Shiva casting a spell or dead tree casting shadow?

Dead tree casting a shadow in the woods behind our house

or is it Lord Shiva ?

CC Jean Stimmell: January 2014

Shiva the Destroyer and Restorer

Heading through the woods from my house to Wild Goose Pond,

I found myself in the last light of this sun-shortened, solstice day

drawn toward an enigmatic shadow cast by the gnarly roots

of an ancient toppled tree.

The wind rustled paper dry beech leaves as I approached,

a drum roll in anticipation for what happened next:

The emergence of Lord Shiva,
He of many limbs.

Shiva, the destroyer, zapped my brain, erasing all thought

 Shiva, the restorer, rebooted me to my primal state,

reconnecting me to my body and sense of place,

grounding me in the precious Earth.

It seemed like it was over with before it started:

I was confused and couldn’t quite remember,

dazed like after electroshock therapy.
Did something happen or not?

The New Year: A madness or a beginning

Sun rising over ocean at Odiorne Point: New Year's Morning 2014
CC Jean Stimmell

On this the first day of 2014

The sun rises over the ocean at Odiorne
glowing like a digital blowtorch,

stunning but surreal,

radiating neither warmth

nor juice to cut the gloom:

“A madness or a beginning?” *

* Excerpt below from “Buddhist New Year © 1990 by Diane di Prima.

“in the dawn confronted Shiva, the cold light

revealed the “mindborn” worlds, as simply that,

I watched them propagated, flowing out,

or, more simply, one mirror reflecting another.

then broke the mirrors, you were no longer in sight

nor any purpose, stared at this new blackness

the mindborn worlds fled, and the mind turned off:

a madness, or a beginning?”

Most people visit dream animals while they sleep; I see mine during the day walking around

Along Great Bay at Adam’s Point last Friday, the sun was melting new snow off the rocks. The interesting play of dark and light on this particular stone (pictured above) attracted my photographic eye. When I looked through the viewfinder to compose my shot – to my great surprise – I saw not a boulder but an elephant.

I’d always thought of elephants as magnificent social animals, big and strong, non-violent and wise. However, my heart went out to this animal because she appeared just the opposite: sad and all alone, drenched and freezing, covered with snow, melting away.

Then I went home and did some research: I found out Jungian analysts like Daryl Sharp place great importance on elephants:

"On a dreary afternoon in the fall of 1974 I was walking in the hills of Zurich, feeling bleak and very sorry for myself, when I spied an object on the path. I stooped down and picked it up. It was a little black elephant made of ebony. It was numinous to me, a magical thing. On the spot, I fell in love. 
"I took it to be a case of what Jung calls synchronicity, where an outer event coincides with what is going on inside. I assumed it had something to do with my psychology and I spent the next few years exploring what that might be. [i]

Was this the case with me, too? Was my introduction to this elephant a case of synchronicity, an outer event coinciding with what was going on inside me?

Chopra says this about that in his “Archetype Series: Who is Ganesha?

“Ganesha is one of the most distinctive Hindu deities, with his large elephant head and pot-bellied human body. Known as the Lord of Obstacles, Ganesha has a dual role of removing obstacles as well as creating obstructions for those whose hubris and ambition have become destructive.”[ii]

That part rang true to me. While I have worked hard emotionally and spiritually to remove obstacles from my journey, nevertheless, a set of new obstacles have recently reared their heads.

Revered for his cleverness and wisdom, according to Chopra, Ganesha is also known as the patron of letters and learning. I, too, am a patron of books and learning but, in my case, I know this cuts both ways as I have the bad habit of carrying it too far, of over-intellectualizing, of favoring my head over my heart, of thinking I know more than I do. Certainly, reviewing my history, my elephant self has created at least as many obstacles as it has removed.

Humbleness, of course, is a virtue for all humans. As Carl Jung once said, “The idea that man alone possesses the primacy of reason in antiquated twaddle.”[iii]

Jung favored the indigenous and primitive way of life over the modern. He praised the African zoological classification scale which put the elephant is at the top, followed by the lion, then the python or crocodile, and finally humans and other creatures. While our capacity for reflective consciousness may be a unique human attribute, it does not necessarily imply superiority.[iv]

Then I found the best explanation yet!  This one definitely resonates with me: Is my elephant a rogue premonition of an increasing madness that is consuming animals and humans alike as capitalism and climate change drive us past the point of no return?

Indeed, it is already happening.

G.A. Bradshaw has written about escalating elephant rampages in India. This unsettling trend is continuing unabated as attested to in several recent articles. [v]  Often humans and livestock are killed or sometimes only massive property damage as in the following example:

An elephant herd from Jharkhand turned violent as the locals tried to chase them away while they were guarding a female jumbo which had given birth to a calf in Nilagiri on Sunday.

The herd went berserk raiding nearby villages and damaging 10 houses. They also consumed paddy crops and other food materials that were stored by villagers in their houses.

After another group of 12 elephants joined the herd, the number of Jharkhand elephants in Kuldiha reserve forest here has reached 97. So far, the elephants have damaged 56 houses in six villages.[vi]

Indian officials openly admit to the cause, "yet another case of elephants being forced to venture into human habitation because their natural habitat is being eroded," as well as a constant threat of violence by guns, poison, electrocution, and other lethal methods of control… According the India's Elephant Task Force, the problem is systemic and solutions require …"new institutions and mechanisms" if the elephant is to be saved.[vii]

G.A. Bradshaw then asks a provocative question: is this “a case of elephant breakdown, elephant madness—or our own madness reflecting back?” As he notes: while the definition of madness remains a matter of debate, “most agree that madness reflects the soul in pain.” And in all of psychology, Carl Jung lays bare the most moving account of such angst in the pages of his Red Book:

" The work is gripping. It is impossible to remain detached from Jung's psycho-spiritual maelstrom. As we follow elegant prose along the edge of reason and irrationality, the dark, timeless abyss of the unconscious in Jung's journey swallows us. Primordial images simultaneously assault the senses. At times, the tissue-thin veil between reader and writer, past and present, real and surreal, completely vanishes. In the chapter entitled Descent into Hell in the Future, we fear for our own soul as Jung becomes a terrifying prophet from the world within: You all have a share in the murder...[viii]

“But I ask you, when do men fall on their brothers with mighyt weapons and bloody acts? They do such if they do not know that their brother is themselves. They themselves are sacrificers, but they mutually do the service of sacrifice. They must all sacrifice each other, since the time has not yet come when man puts the bloody knife into himself in order to sacrifice the one he kills in his brother. But whom do people kill? They kill the noble, the brave, the heroes.”[ix]

 “They kill elephants.”[x]

Or we kill elephants by benign neglect, letting them fade away into extinction from habitat destruction and human greed.  And that is what I’m seeing through my camera viewfinder: No longer the wise social Buddha, the apex of Jung’s zoological scale but a shrunken being, sad and all alone, covered with snow, melting away.

I guess the ultimate question becomes: who is mad? Is it the elephant, Carl Jung, human greed, capitalistic ideology or just me for mistaking a snow-covered boulder on Great Bay for a pachyderm?

Or is it all of us.

xxx

---

[i] http://www.psychceu.com/Jung/III.Unplugged.html

[ii] http://www.chopra.com/articles/2010/03/20/archetype-series-who-is-ganesha/

[iii] C. G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life edited by Meredith Sabini p. 12

[iv] ibid. page 12

[v] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com /topic/elephants-on-rampage

[vi] http://www.newindianexpress.com/states/odisha/Jharkhand-elephant-herd-on-a-rampage/2013/11/19/article1899140.ece

[vii] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/bear-in-mind/201106/the-tempest-in-my-mind

[viii] Bradshaw: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/bear-in-mind/201106/the-tempest-in-my-mind

[ix] Jung, C.G. (2009). The Red Book: Liber Novus. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, p. 238

[x] Bradshaw answers: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/bear-in-mind/201106/the-tempest-in-my-mind