There’s an interesting reference to the two suns of the Splendor Solis Plate 1 in Dyane Sherwoods article
Alchemical Images, Implicit Communications, and Transitional States: The Splendor Solis in the Consulting Room. (The above image is from her article; see my previous post on some reflections on the two suns of Plate 1.)

In the image above we can clearly see the difference in the countenances of the two suns: that on the left conveys layers of suffering; that on the right is confident and healthy. That on the right is able to be penetrating, to affect its world (with its strong, pointed rays); while the rays of that on the left are turned away from contact; they become like barbs, possibly ensnaring this sun itself.

Sherwood’s reflection on the suns points to a way we can work with the complex images, such as these suns, in the Splendor Solis:

Let’s look more closely at the strange coat of arms, in which there are two suns, one that appears – what? Serene? Thoughtful? Wise? Slightly sad? And the other on a shield, which seems to be falling off the banner into three-dimensional space, askew, so that we cannot easily make the eye-to-eye contact that we so innately prefer. What is even more disturbing is that where the eyes and mouth should be, we see three more faces, hence a further fragmentation. How are you affected internally when you see these images? When you take into account the two men conversing [see my previous post for the two men], does that change your internal response?

Sherwood points out how exquisitely attuned we are as babies to the distance between ourselves and our mothers; and to the emotional state of our mothers, as interpreted from their facial expressions. So much is conveyed to the infant, and there is so much potential for connection and health (or its opposite). Sherwood’s inviting us to reflect deeply on these images, to enter the world of the painter of the Splendor Solis images and to be moved by the inner truths that she/he’s portraying.

(“A Sick Sun and a Healthy Sun” is a chapter title in Joseph Henderson and Dyane Sherwood Transformation of the Psyche – The Symbolic Alchemy of the Splendor Solis.)

As I mentioned in a previous post, I want to write on each of the plates of the Splendor Solis. Well, I’ve not got far: the first plate is so compelling I’m posting on it again. Others have commented on it (Adam McLean, Joseph Henderson, Dyane Sherwood) and what I know about the plate is informed by them. The feelings, however, are mine.

A commoner/knight is coming to the end of his road; he’s an empty husk, a carapace. The brown helmet is tilting, as was customary for burgher arms. And while the mantling is impressive, it’s also empty and somewhat overdone.

It’s the escutcheon (shield), though, that’s the real give-away: dropped and bearing a “sick sun” (Henderson’s term). There’s possibly hell in those eyes. As Wikipedia says:

The escutcheon can be a metaphor for a family’s honour. The idiom “a blot on the escutcheon” is used to mean a stain on somebody’s reputation.

In contrast, the upper, confident sun has dropped from the sky; and possibly holds knowledge of a way of redemption – through a process of incarnation into this shell (outworn persona). This, we are shown, can only occur via the feminine (shown by the lunar crests atop the coronet). There’s a sense of a potential union of solar and lunar energies, a possibility of injection by the solar barbs.

A man had this dream:

[First there are many, interminable scenes of darkness, exploitation, betrayal, excruciating torture and fear.] Then he finds himself in a celestial room, in plan the shape of one half of the yin-yang symbol. He calls it the tear-drop room. In this room are are many exquisitely beautiful maidens clad in diaphanous gowns. However, each one carries a huge hypodermic syringe filled with a rainbow-coloured liquid, called Chroma. He has great fear of these syringes, but finally can no longer escape: one of the maidens injects him in the thigh with a syringe the size of a sword. He sees his body filling with Chroma. Then a beetle nips him.

The dream points to a transformation through (unwanted) injection, at the hands of the feminine. It is only through this process that the beetle can nip him (i.e. that a shift in consciousness can occur).

In this Plate, what’s depicted is the plight of this commoner/knight. It’s a poignant scene, observed and probably discussed by the alchemist and his adept/student; by therapist and client. The scene’s laid out for us to observe, before a rich red banner; to consider the suitability of the path it proposes. (As as aside, the Splendor Solis was written and painted at a time when the power of the knight was under attack by the developments in warfare and changes in society in general associated with the Renaissance.)

James Turrell
Within Without, National Gallery Canberra

Listening to Gangaji’s audiobook The Diamond in Your Pocket at the gym yesterday, I was impacted by this passage:

Inquiry is like shining a light into a basement where a creaky old furnace that you never knew existed is spewing noxious gases through the house. Inquiry opens the door and shines a light in the basement, so you can see and realise “Oh my God, no wonder I feel sick in body, mind and spirit”.

And I thought immediately of James Turrell’s Within Without, which I enjoyed at the National Gallery Canberra last Christmas. (Images here are from that visit.)

The metaphor of light in psychological and spiritual inquiry is a favourite, in ancient and contemporary practices. But Turrell’s not content with metaphor; his opus (over the past 50 years or so) has been about the experienced luminosity and materiality of light, of what light actually does to spaces.

He’s in a sense a modern alchemist, not content with the concept, but committed to the material. (The alchemists understood the Hermetic axiom “as above, so below” – the microcosm is the macrocosm, and vice versa. That’s why, for example, not content with the idea of dew as a prima materia, they went out and actually collected dew.)

James Turrell
Within Without, National Gallery Canberra

Returning to Gangaji’s statement, it’s a great summary of how we work in deep psychotherapeutic inquiry. And referring to the first plate of the Splendor Solis (see my recent post), it’s relevant particularly for the start of the work, to the opening of the door. In the Splendor Solis plate there are two light-giving suns. But I imagine that the light they give is very different: that from the sun above is healthy, but that from the sun below is in some ways neurotic; producing (and seeing by) a false light. It’s inquiry that enables us to see by the light of the upper sun.

James Castle
Barnyard scene/Garden Valley
Soot and saliva on paper, 25 x 32 cm

Not sure if there’s something about a three year cycle (see my previous post on Billy Benn) but I also last posted on James Castle about three years ago (“artist of silence, grayness and folded cardboard”).

Now I’m experiencing a similar re-run of appreciation of Castle’s work as I recently did for Billy Benn’s. So here are two more pieces of Castle’s work, made with soot and spit, from the Greg Kucera Gallery.

The gallery site has some interesting notes from a Village Voice article: Home Alone – Visual art review from the exhibition at The Drawing Room, New York by Jerry Saltz:

Castle was especially good at establishing complex stratas of space. In one drawing of a farmhouse, he positions himself just beyond the building, so that the porch is very close-up, then there’s the yard, some trees, a stable, then another house, hills, then sky. By the time your eye reaches the back of the drawing, you’ve traveled an enormous metaphysical distance.

In the indoor drawings, he might focus on a door seen from the side, just a molding, two plates on a cupboard, or the ceiling as seen from the floor. His pictures of beds and bedrooms can stand beside van Gogh’s without losing much. One features an open door through which we catch a tantalizing glimpse of an old-fashioned wood-burning stove in the kitchen and a shaft of sunlight through a window. Everything is quiet, private, and almost unknowable. Back inside the bedroom, the eye relishes a messy dresser top and Castle’s own pictures hung crookedly on wallpapered walls. In another work, he moves about three feet to the left and redraws the scene, this time conjuring a more contained space. Finally, he goes around the side of the bed and draws it again.

James Castle
Landscape with house
Soot and saliva on found paper, 14 x 20 cm

The notes describe a meditative life of rich internal spaces, exquisitely depicted. Castle was deaf and evidently uninterested in signing. One wonders if such spaces served the purpose of maintaining inner health. Winnicott spoke of the potential space between mother and baby, the learning ground by which the authentic self is nurtured. And an augmentation and deepening of space has been for me a powerful aspect to contemplative practice. Further, ideas of building internal space continually arise in the therapeutic work with those in recovery from addictions (drug and alcohol, shopping, eating, subtle cravings). The space between therapist and client is another powerful potential space.

To appreciate Castle’s works, to hold on to and relax into his spaces, is the same work (from Winnicott’s point of view, it’s true play) – a deepening of our sense of what it is live richly in the world, in this sacred moment; to be able to hold on to ourselves. This is Winnicott’s “going on being” (his words for this skill the child learns in its true playing).

Winnicott’s true Self understands space; the individual with a developed sense of the authentic (for them) is able to withstand, by authentically inhabiting internal space. It’s the false Self that collapses internal space; the addictive personality, for example, finds no space between themselves and the desired object. The good news is that with psychotherapeutic work the space develops, the individual is relieved to experience it, to experience internal stratas that are inhabitable, making the moment bearable. Such spaces are akin to those that Castle depicts.

Billy Benn Perrurle,
Artetyerre, 2009

Catherine Peattie has contacted me to let me know she’s written a book (2011) on and with Billy Benn, about his life and art. The book’s called Billy Benn and you can get it from IAD Press or at Fishpond.

I posted on his work three years ago and I get the same prickly buzz when I see his work now as I did then. There’s common ground; I feel I know the place from which his landscapes arise (not having been to these places physically). Much pleasure, and thanks Catherine.

I am the Way and even Road,
Who passes here without a Rest,
Will find a goodly Life abode,
And in the End be ever Blessed.

Here’s the beginning of my intention: to post each of the 22 plates of Splendor Solis, over the coming months (as moved to do so), along with some thoughts and reflections on each plate.

And here’s the first of the 22 plates. It’s an introduction to the work, and an immediate indication (due to its complexity) that this is not stuff to be understood by the mind alone.

And a personal admission: I know little about this work; and can only do what I think its creator, Salomon Trismosin, intended of me: to meditate upon the text and upon these plates; to let the work in (in true alchemical fashion) and to allow it to operate upon me if and as it will.

I like the PDF version of Open Library’s Splendor Solis and am grateful for its availability. I’ll also refer to my (paper) version of the book with commentaries by Adam McLean.

From the explanatory notes by JK (Open Library version):

Trismosin in veiled language and by means of artistic Symbols reveals his mind about that mysterious and disputed subject – the Red Tincture – the Philosopher’s Stone.

At a psychic, transformational level, this is the “heart” of the work for me: how we can bring the Red Tincture into our lives, can live as fully as possible from the heart, can have a powerful connection to spirit, to essence.

And to further emphasise the meditative level at which Splendor Solis works, here from the Preface:

…the Philosophers have founded this art in a natural beginning, but of a very hidden operation.

This hidden operation is called by Trismosin Mercurius – an extensive concept that held a great fascination for Jung, and with which he equated the unconscious (Mysterium Coniunctionis, p526).

So with this preamble let’s turn to the plate. If we take the view that each element has been intentionally placed to impart meaning, it’s a rich depiction of the nature of what’s to be achieved. (There are explanatory notes at page 41 of the Open Library version.) Some elements that appeal to me now follow.

Two men appear to be entering a grand edifice from a landscape. There is a dialogue between the man in red and the man in black. Two suns are presented; the upper valiant and somewhat serious; the lower tilted and more human. This lower sun is rich in symbolism: each eye and the mouth is a face; as JK says (Open Library):

Three faces shown in the one. The eyes themselves seem as if suffused with tears, the mouth as if the tongue was slightly protruded and parched, the face blotched or mottled as from Smallpox, or impure living.

The rich blue drapery is studded with golden stars around the helmet; I get a sense of emptiness, as of a shielded and defended character, defending something that does not in fact exist.

The text Arma Artis refers to the heraldic arms of the Art of Alchemy, indicating how the series of plates is to be taken. The replication of threes in the faces in the lower sun and in the crescents above the heraldic arms mirrors the three principles of alchemy, the Salt, the Mercury and the Sulphur.

Adam McLean says of the suns and the shield:

This is a picture of the alchemical work of incarnating the spiritual in material form; it brings the macrocosmic sun into the lower world (symbolised here by the emblazoning of the image of the sun on the shield). The shield is the blank tablet of matter, the ground into which the alchemist must lead the spiritual. (Page 95 of his commentary, Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks.)

We can think of the plate as a summary and introduction to “the way and even road”, a transformational way in which matter has the potential to become spiritualised through certain operations which are in some ways secret, and yet also in some ways extremely natural to us, while paradoxically being also contrary to our current nature. (Alchemy was, of course, the work against nature; the work of becoming our deepest potential rather than our current fixation.)

Cave, Vanuatu

My wife Karima sent me an interesting article recently on The myth of the eight-hour sleep, deconstructing the commonly held view that this is what we should be having: one block of uninterrupted sleep, of about eight hours long. It turns out this (at least in part) is a socially constructed behaviour, driven by the upheavals of the industrial revolution. Yet two sleeps per night seems to be more natural, with a waking period between.

As the article says of pre-industrial days:

[sleep psychologist Gregg] Jacobs suggests that the waking period between sleeps, when people were forced into periods of rest and relaxation, could have played an important part in the human capacity to regulate stress naturally. In many historic accounts, Ekirch found that people used the time to meditate on their dreams.

Well, for those with a contemplative bent this is not news. To be awake in the depths of the night, to hear traffic or the rain falling (we have no shortage in Sydney at the moment), to listen for the calls of birds and maybe of bats… This is a part of life for those who have befriended the night, who love darkness, who know its softness as their trusted pillow.

Perhaps the article can help normalise the concerns of some that their sleep patterns are not “correct”, and perhaps that night and gentle darkness are experiences to be turned from.

Two Studies of a Swan-Hermaphrodite in a Vessel
Colour pencil on paper

The alchemist and his soror mystica tend the swan-hermaphrodite, wiping away its tears. She/he is submerged in water, within a heavy glass vessel, the exquisite pale skin in constant need of protection from sun and from dryness.

The two who tend the swan-hermaphrodite know of its deep sensitivity, of the depths of sapientia within it. To this they know they must both be true, despite their minor quarrels.

More on the boat theme and contemplation, here’s a beautiful quote from the Discourses on the Gita by Acharya Vinoba Bhave:

It is not difficult to push a boat floating in the water; but how hard to drag the same boat on land, on rocks? If there is water under the boat, we can cross over to the other shore as without effort. In the same way, if our life’s boat floats on the waters of bhakti, we can sail gaily in it. But if life is dry and the way dusty, stony, full of pitfalls, it would be indeed hard to drag the boat along. The principle of bhakti, like water, makes easy the voyage of our life.

(I took the picture in Vanuatu last year.)

It’s only when someone’s had spontaneous fantasies or dreams with alchemical symbolism (to which they’ve otherwise not in any way been exposed) that Western (medieval) alchemy can become a problem for them. The problem comes in trying to figure out the symbols, or read the mediaeval literature to get even an introductory understanding of what alchemy could have been about then, and what it means for them now.

Without really experiencing symbolic material, it’s simple: alchemy’s just a muddled proto-chemistry. (So read no more if that’s the case for you, otherwise…)

I caught the alchemy bug some years ago, but my understanding hasn’t moved very far. Alchemists contradict each other as to the meaning of symbols and processes. Even a single alchemist can contradict himself within the same work. None of that helps. But what I’d like to do over the next few months is to post on areas of alchemy that currently interest me, with a view to getting deeper into the material.

The image above seems like a good place to start. Here the alchemists tools are laid out on his table, ready for work. An alembic (two vessels forming a still), two furnaces, jugs, and various other pieces of paraphernalia… it’s all waiting for the processes to begin. To me there’s a great stillness about this image, and care taken in drawing it. (The image is from Volume 1 of the Manly Palmer Hall collection of alchemical texts in the Getty collection.)

What does this have to do with contemplation? To Jung, the alchemist was primarily working at the psychic level, trying to perform a series of transformational operations on himself. What he sought was the rich archetypal symbol that would perform the internal changes he felt were necessary, by bringing unconscious contents into consciousness (a process called the opus contra naturam, the work against nature).

This is work we too can do in contemplation. Here’s Jung from Mysterium Coniunctionis (p526):

Take the unconscious in one of its handiest forms, say a spontaneous fantasy, a dream, an irrational mood, an affect, or something of the kind, and operate with it. Give it your special attention, concentrate on it, and observe its alterations objectively. Spare no effort to devote yourself to this task, follow the subsequent transformations of the spontaneous fantasy attentively and carefully. Above all, don’t let anything from the outside, that does not belong, get into it, for the fantasy image has “everything it needs” (Omne quo indigent is frequently said of the lapis). In this way one is certain of not interfering by conscious caprice and of giving the unconscious a free hand. In short, the alchemical operation seems to us the equivalent of the psychological process of active imagination.

I hope you can check from time to time and see how I’m going on the topic. (Look for the Alchemy tag.)

Here’s another camera-phone photo from our recent trip to the Ruapehu area of the Tongariro National Park in New Zealand. We had a beautiful walk in a stunningly beautiful place.

A Vernon Howard quote came to my inbox at around that day, and I immediately liked it. For a start, it’s got a boat in it. (Boat metaphors work well for me in speaking of lives lived with contemplation at their core.)

So here goes Vernon, from a talk given in 1987:

Suppose you’re in a small boat that you like to take out into the ocean and sail around, and when you’re out there, unexpectedly, because you’re paying more attention to the pleasure of the boat, you finally look up and see dark clouds coming down and the waves getting choppier and choppier. And you realize that while you were simply looking at the scenery, you were not conscious of the change in weather conditions. And so now, you realize you’re in trouble. And you realize the problem was your own carelessness and your own absorption in the pleasure of sailing the boat around and getting the fishing rods out, so that you never interrupted your thought processes long enough to see what was changing around you.

Ever find yourself in a position like this? You have, haven’t you. However, you do remember the instructions on safety you had when you first bought the boat, and one of them was to send up the distress signal when something came up that you couldn’t handle. So you put up the appropriate flag, and it waved in the breeze. And now you looked around, and to your great pleasure, you see a Coast Guard boat heading for you, and the boat comes over and rescues you.

Why were you able to be saved from your own carelessness? Now, think about this inwardly and apply it to your own careless experiences. You were able to be rescued from the perilous seas because the Coast Guard boat was not in trouble as you were. Ah, we can send up our distress signals when we’re in trouble to Truth because Truth is never in trouble.

The connection to Ruapehu and Ice Melt? Well, one of the heart: “Truth is never in trouble”.

Particularly, seen in nature: the unarguable reality of each moment, the relentlessness of the ice melt, the endless insistence of the water coursing its way down the mountain; a sense of its intelligent certainly, its unstoppability; energy in each gravity-determined water fall, each eddy, each roar.

And Truth is like that, as axiomatic as gravity (while we’re on this earth as least!); the force of the absolutely imperishable.

Here’s an image taken on my phone on a recent trip to the Tongariro National Park in New Zealand. The area’s an old stamping ground for me, and a pleasure now to return to – even for short periods with Karima, my wife – en-route between family visits to Auckland and Wellington.

It’s a place with a deep sense of the power of nature. In this image, Toi Toi (native grass) shifts relentlessly in the wind; New Zealand flax (right side of the image) thrusts strongly into the air; Ruapehu sits impassive in the background, draining ice melts into scores of relentless streams and water falls.

As Te Heuheu Tukino IV said in 1887 when, as chief of the Ngati Tuwharetoa (the Maori people whose mountains these were), he gifted the sacred mountains of Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu to the Crown (fearing they would otherwise be sold into private ownership):

They will be cut up and sold, a piece going to one Pakeha and a piece to another. They will become of no account, for the tapu will be gone. Tongariro is my ancestor… it is my head, my mana centres around Tongariro.

How lucky to have this legacy of the spiritual world view of Te Heuheu and his people (in marked contrast to the individualistic, materialistic approach to land usage and ownership to which we’re accustomed), to have this place that remains relatively untouched by man, where nature impresses itself upon us so powerfully that the boundary between “us” and it is thinned.

Michael Brien
The Artist at Four-and-a-Half years Old, Lichfield, Staffordshire, 2009

Here’s another lovely work by Michael Brien, with whom I’ve had some recent email conversation. Michael says of this work:

I painted it in 2009. It shows my brother chasing the geese. He was chased by the bull and it lifted him into the hayrick and all I could see was a couple of legs sticking out!

I have a couple of photos of me and my family on the farm where we stayed after the war. I remember a teacher coming out to talk to the Uncle about me starting school. He said “Do you know where this comes from (butter)?” and also said that if I wasn’t there to help making the butter nobody would be able to buy it.

I ended up bicycling to school which was about two miles away. But I got fifty yards up the road, and fell into a ditch, getting covered in nettles.

It was about 1937 we went to the farm and we went to London in around 1940 first to my Nan’s who was living above a jeweller’s shop, then to various places as the war broke out and we were bombed out seven times. We went there as my stepfather was stationed near London on the coast. He was in the artillery regiment. I made a remark sometimes that he couldn’t shoot very well, when the doodle bugs came through and was clipped on the ear for it!

So it’s a work rich in personal history. But it’s not just this that makes the work linger in my mind. As well, it’s the formal qualities that are appealing and satisfying (the “T” formed with the central brown vertical path and horse preparation area above, the fields marked in strong graphic blocks, the sure placement of the figures and animals).
 
And there’s more. It’s a work to contemplate, a work that comes with its own set of rules, its own stillness. So hard to express in words! But for me it speaks an underlying message of groundedness, a sense of the rightness of the world depicted here, and a strong sense of what energises this world.   

In some peoples’ lives, a contemplative practice becomes the still axis around which all else revolves. They eagerly await the time set aside for contemplation.

Or, something deep and still comes upon them unbidden when in nature (or in a crowded room). This is contemplation too, for the intention is there to walk in the dark land. And meditation itself can offer images and visions of ways forward, of natural places that could and do themselves become future loci of further deepening.

The contemplative truly becomes the “pilgrim of eternity” when he or she gives high priority to this deepening. There’s no conflict here with worldly priorities, even with the priorities of love and intimate relationships, because paradoxically to closely hug the practice in one’s heart means all others in that life are also closely hugged.

Yet contemplation requires will, resilience, commitment. An experience of the presence of eternity is not guaranteed, and many mystical writers have spoken of the tracts of desolation that can be encountered. It’s then that the words of these mystical writers are valuable, as way marks and humbling references. We may never attain the states of which they speak, and that’s of no matter. By their words we are encouraged to keep walking.

Here’s George William Russell (known as AE) on the subject, speaking of when he was still a boy:

I began to be astonished with myself, for, walking along country roads, intense and passionate imaginations of another world, of an interior nature began to overpower me. They were like strangers who suddenly enter a house, who brush aside the doorkeeper, and who will not be denied. Soon I knew they were the rightful owners and heirs of the house of the body, and the doorkeeper was only one who was for a time in charge, who had neglected his duty, and who had pretended ownership. The boy who existed before was an alien. He hid himself when the pilgrim of eternity took up his abode in the dwelling. (AE, The Candle of Vision)

Michael Brien
Sermon on the Mount

An image search for “Sermon on the Mount” in Google returns lots of drapery and grand gestures. Here’s another view, one I find very appealing. Here Michael Brien succeeds in depicting the very qualities espoused in the Sermon (especially in the Beatitudes; those of simplicity, poverty, humility) with naïve honesty.

These qualities are finally about our internal state rather than our material world. And they are hugely topical qualities (especially given the recent predictions of a Global Financial Crisis Mark 2).

What does it mean to be meek in such a scenario? Or to be poor in spirit? These are old ideas yet they contain eternal, inner truths; ideas that are entry points into the depths of the psyche:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Of course some of the words are a little wonky, even repellent to many. What is “heaven” in contemporary language? What’s the “earth” (those swathes of green in the painting) that could be inherited? Meister Eckhart gave us a clue:

I have spoken at times of a light in the soul, a light that is uncreated and uncreatable… to the extent that we can deny ourselves and turn away from created things, we shall find our unity and blessing in that little spark in the soul, which neither space nor time touches…

And Robert Adams was another relentless sermoniser in the same direction:

The wise person, therefore, does really not look to change anything. They become quiet. They have patience. They work on themselves. They watch their thoughts, watch their actions and observe themselves getting angry, observe themselves getting depressed, observe themselves getting jealous and envious and the rest of it. Little by little they realize, “That’s not me. That’s hypnosis. That’s a lie.” They do not react to their condition. To the extent that they do not react to their conditions, to that extent do they become free. They no longer care what anybody else is doing. They compare themselves with no one. They compete with no one. They simply watch themselves. They observe themselves. They see the mental confusion.

There are listeners in this work of Brien’s, little people prepared to open their arms, people arrayed upon the slopes. These are our internal people too. Briens’ work can be taken as a map of a psychic landscape, a potentiality for transformation through true simplicity.

Sacral
(Pen and colour pencil on paper)

Belly (Pen and colour pencil on paper)

Someone emailed me recently asking if I knew of any writings that integrate narrative therapy with mindfulness practices. (If anyone knows of such writings, please let me know.)

I wasn’t really able to help him but I liked the question and it’s made me think more about what “mindfulness” means and about what “contemplative therapy” means for me.

The word mindfulness is charged with many meanings. (See, for example, this Wikipedia article.) In a psychological context, the Wikipedia Mindfulness (psychology) article also has lots of good stuff. (I notice the Gestalt section is fairly scant!) However, I guess because I didn’t come to my approach thorough these practices I do not use this word.

For me, contemplative therapy is an inner process that’s discovered, rather than taught, with and for each client. It aims to be true to the uniqueness of each client; and to remain open to what is revealed. It’s a process in some ways akin to the incubation practices in ancient Western cultures.

Contemplative therapy is an ongoing practice for me as well; one I’ve been involved in for many years, and one that reveals ever deeper levels of truth and understanding. I doubt I’ll ever be finished.

My experience is that there’s an ongoing deepening of connection to, and understanding of, the truth that all the answers we need are, and have always been, inside ourselves. The master is within, a deeply intimate and ever-to-be-trusted guide.

The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (1822) by William Blake

I’ve been reflecting recently on oil, rich natural olive oil, and its importance in the Mediterranean diet and culture. (This possibly has something to do with a planned trip to Italy and Greece next year!) And going further, the symbolism of oil for our souls, for the deep centre of us that knows of the possibility of transformation; that is, in a word, creative.

Here’s Eckhart Tolle in a recent essay, Eckhart on Creativity:

There’s a particular dimension where creativity arises. It’s a little bit like the wick burning the flame, and its sustenance is the oil – it’s in an oil lamp, and you are the flame. All the analogies, by the way, are very deficient, but it’s just a distant approximation to get you into a sense of what that place is. So you are the flame, and you feel your way into the very source – down the wick into where the oil is, inside yourself. That’s the place, the source, so if anything is new, creative, then it has a fragrance of the source.

William Blake deeply understood the New Testament Parable of the Ten Virgins, rich in the symbolism of oil. (Look at the energy in his painting!) This beautiful parable is, for me, about being prepared for huge change – the change of heart. “Watch therefore, for you do not know the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man is coming”, as the scripture says.

And Hubert Benoit, in Zen and the Psychology of Transformation had something interesting to say about this parable in relation to Zen practice:

The sleep of the virgins symbolises the identification of my egotistical life with all the dreams of my hopes and of my fears. The oil symbolises the expectation of the unimaginable, of satori. As long as I have not this oil in me, this new expectation born of understanding, I am the foolish virgin who cannot receive the bridegroom.

My take on this is that we have not failed if we never have the Zen satori. Oil is about the place of waiting, about the acceptance of the expectation. In the waiting, to live, to as much as we are able, in Presence; and that is what we are asked to do in the scripture (“Watch”).

It’s this place of watching that is itself transformative; the place of the heart. It’s where the universe wants us to be!

Tragedy heals self-righteous people; it humbles them back down into their hearts. Comedy heals self-wrongeous people by lifting them back up into their hearts. Nature knows this; the divine order uses both humiliating and pride-building circumstances to make sure you don’t stray too far from your heart. (John DeMartini, The Breakthrough Experience.)

The Sun Never Says

Even after all this time,
the sun never says to the earth,
“You owe me.”

Look what happens with a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.

Sydney Harbour from McKell Park, Yesterday

From the Course in Miracles:

Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is done to you. Acknowledge but that you have been mistaken, and all effects of your mistakes will disappear. (A Course in Miracles, T-21.II.2:6-7)

And from Eckhart Tolle:

The purpose of the world is for you to be lost in it, ultimately. The purpose of the world is for you to suffer, to create the suffering that seems to be what is needed for the awakening to happen. And then once the awakening happens, with it comes the realization that suffering is unnecessary now. You have reached the end of suffering because you have transcended the world. It is the place that is free of suffering.

… It’s welcoming this moment, embracing this moment, and that is the state of surrender. That is really all that’s needed. The only difference between a Master and a non-Master is that the Master embraces what is, totally. When there is nonresistance to what is, there comes a peace. The portal is open; the unmanifested is there. That is the most powerful way. We can’t call it practice because there’s no time in it.

… the way I perceive the world is like ripples on the surface of being. Underneath the world of sense perceptions and the world of mind activity, there is the vastness of being … There’s a vast stillness and there’s a little ripple activity on the surface, which isn’t separate, just like the ripples are not separate from the ocean.

(Eckhart Tolle, from Ripples on the Surface of Being)

Tibetan Skull Crown
Human bone, fabric, cotton thread (1800s, AGNSW)

At the Art Gallery of NSW (AGNSW) I recently saw this new acquisition and was impressed by its power of conveying the urgency and importance of the process of transformation and transcendence of our habitual ego-defended state (further intensified by its use of human bone). From the label accompanying the work:

Crowns are integral to Vajrayana ritual practice. Lamas wear crowns (and other bone ornaments) during meditation for assistance in transforming their consciousness into a fully awakened state. The five skulls that constitute this crown represent the five insights (panca-jnanas) that constitute enlightenment, and the five Buddhas that embody those wisdoms. The flames issuing from the crania and moths of the skulls symbolise the purification of the body, speech and mind. The terrifying aspect of the imagery indicates the strength necessary to defeat the forces of evil and ignorance.

These “forces of evil and ignorance” speak to me of ego, of the carapace that prevents us knowing our real place, our true home. There’s nothing, of course, really wrong with ego – we need this carapace for survival in the world. The problem comes about when we think that’s who we are. And then ego becomes that which actively prevents us from finding out who we in fact authentically are; some would put it “why we actually came here”.

On this subject I like Christiane Northrup‘s acronym for the delusion associated with ego: E.G.O. = Everything Good is Outside (thanks Jeff Belyea).

A beautiful word that doesn’t get much air-play is entelechy (“enTELici”) – literally “to have or realise the goal” (the telos). And that’s really our axis, our interest, in contemplative therapy.

Sure, these two are talking at cross-purposes, but Marlon Brando’s understanding of our moment-to-moment constructions of identity is keen.

This week in Sydney two mothers unintentionally ran over their children in their 4-wheel drive vehicles (SUVs). I’ve found myself reflecting on the wasteland of unimaginable grief in which those two mothers must now be journeying. I imagine they will be feeling that it’s without end.

I have a Facebook friend, Vicki Woodyard, who has travelled through such a dark wasteland, following the death of both her daughter and her husband. Here’s Vicki, speaking of herself:

I am following the trail of Vicki as she recovered from her daughter’s death at the age of 7. She was 35. Why do I speak of her in the third person? As my grandmother said to me, “One day it will all feel like a dream.” She had buried two boys, each aged two, so she knew whereof she spoke. She was dying at the same time as my daughter. I did not attend her funeral fifteen months after my daughter died; I could not summon the energy. For grief is physically exhausting.

I found myself wondering how these Sydney mothers will get to this place of “One day it will all feel like a dream”. Only through long and relentless travel into the living hell of trauma that won’t listen to the cognitive mind but which has a foreign life seemingly of its own.

In Peter Levine’s view, trauma is related to mobilised energy that has not been able to complete itself. When we are in a traumatic situation in which fight or flight is not possible, we freeze, and the energy becomes stuck in the nervous system. The energy becomes bound up with overwhelming emotional states of terror, rage and helplessness and does not become discharged. The ways we attempt to control this energy are the symptoms of trauma.

I’ll post more in the future on a contemplative approach to working with trauma. Enough to say in this post that the way through is for this energy to be released. And (related to this) to see that beneath all the torture is something bigger, something more essential and elemental that is us. We can discover, or rediscover, the infused, embracing Love that is known as that from which all arises (including trauma). Paraphrasing Byron Katie, we then see that “things happen for us, not to us”.

Vicki Woodyard’s intimate and honest account of her journey through grief and trauma is LIFE WITH A HOLE IN IT: That’s How the Light Gets In – The Wisdom of an Awakened Heart. Highly recommended.

Vernon Howard, by many accounts, was a ruthless teacher and some were unable to handle his onslaughts. But here’s a more gentle quote from him:

Place the truth that you know before the desire that you feel.

(The Power of your Supermind, Chap. 12, p. 156)

For me this speaks of the power of a contemplative approach; about when we begin to really know something, something other than what’s mediated by the senses.

So then, while it’s still true that we should feel our feelings and tell the truth about them (as we often say in therapy), something else can now operate.

I use the metaphor of the Deep Pool. Here is the place we can find ourselves in contemplation; it’s the fount of all knowledge, the dark bottomless source of truth.

Once we have an experience of this, we know that it’s truer, deeper than all the feelings, all the thoughts that inhabit our waking lives. The knowledge of the Deep Pool underpins these thoughts and feelings; we can now place the truth we know before their constant demands; can live from the sense of well-being with which the Deep Pool infuses us.

Early in the day it was whispered that we should sail in a boat, only thou and I, and never a soul in the world would know of this our pilgrimage to no country and to no end.

In that shoreless ocean, at thy silently listening smile my songs would swell in melodies, free as waves, free from all bondage of words.

Is the time not come yet? Are there works still to do? Lo, the evening has come down upon the shore and in the fading light the seabirds come flying to their nests.

Who knows when the chains will be off, and the boat, like the last glimmer of sunset, vanish into the night?

Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore, #42.

crone

wraps the shawl around her
in a way of saying

i’m enough –

sits in front of our block
her old bones chilled –

warming now, us seeing her

knowing we want her,
the wise crone in our lives