Becoming Friends of the Immediate Things: the New Age Task

“’You shall become friends of the immediate things’ (said Nietzsche). And the immediate things are this earth, this life. For quite long enough our ancestors, and we ourselves, have been taught that this life is not the real thing, that it is provisional and we only live for Heaven. Our morality is based upon the negation of the flesh, and so our unconscious often tries to convince us of the importance of living here and now. In the course of the centuries man [sic] has repeatedly experienced the fact that the life that is not lived here, or the life lived provisionally, is utterly unsatisfactory. It leads to neurosis.” C.G. Jung, Interpretation of Visions

The next meeting of the Utica Temenos will focus on James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code. My intention here is to provide some context that might help our discussion. Sorry if much of what I say is “old information.” It is old information, but I am re-working it through my own chewing process and hope you - the Temenos group and beyond - find it useful

This reading, like everything we have read together in our Temenos gatherings, fits generally into the “New Age” category, which I understand as the literature of the re-emergence of the Divine Feminine, or the Great Mother archetype into western modern consciousness. That this emergence is happening is to me the most exciting occurrence of our age. The emergence had already been noted in the previous century in the work of mystics like W.B. Yeats, and of course prominently in Dr. Jung’s archetypal psychology. In the 1960’s the consciousness actually emerged in society in a big way, due in large part to the experimentation with psyche-altering drugs that was going on at that time.

Since the 60’s, we have been dealing with the counterattack to that emergence on the societal and political level, but also with a lot of work being done on many levels to further incorporate that consciousness, to understand its meaning and what it requires of us in terms of how we shall live on the planet.

For the Divine Feminine is also the expression of the earth and of Nature. She arises at this time due to the huge imbalance in consciousness that is the consequence of centuries of patriarchal dominance within a dualistic consciousness, and its particular manifestations in imperialism, industrial capitalism, rationalistic scientism, and so on. It is an entire and self-re-enforcing system that is anti-nature, anti-body, anti-feminine due to its need to survive as a system. That is, it is not driven by “bad people,” necessarily, but by people faithfully doing their part within the collective consciousness. The problem is, of course, that the collective consciousness is destroying the planet, cannot stop warring, violence, exploitation of poorer/weaker people, or using up the planet and its “resources.” What the imbalance has produced is a destructive, insatiable death culture.

The people we’ve been reading in Temenos have attuned themselves to this other wondrous and awesome thing that is happening; that is, the re-dress of the wrong being done by the lopsided materialist and rationalist system, and the emergence of the corrective consciousness, that is, Great Mother consciousness. This is the consciousness that returns the sacred, or spirit, the “invisibles” to nature and to the physical universe. Not that they ever left, but western consciousness lost its ability to know the Spirit nature of things. Western theology separated the Divine (perceived as a Father God) from Nature, and placed priests and scripture between human beings and the divine; this left the way clear for top-down system of domination and the using up the earth’s bounty as “dead matter.” Western consciousness, as opposed to indigenous consciousness, sees the world as dead matter and has essentially reduced human being to a kind of machinery, too.

The divine feminine, on the other hand, is an Immanence. The feminine aspect of the soul, or the soul itself, suggests the sacredness in land, sky, trees, rivers, etc., but this knowledge cannot be accessed via the rational mind. It can only be accessed by each individual her/himself coming into contact with her/his own inner divinity. Each individual, in order for the Great Mother to emerge into consciousness, has to make that journey into the Unconscious (Great Mother, Nature in us) for him or herself – that is the “hero’s journey.” It is also initiation, transformation, shamanic journeying, etc. It is the same process known to Jesus and the other great spiritual teachers – that is, it is the process whereby they became spiritual authorities. The religions that grew up in their names are a different matter – each worthy in its way, but partaking in the shortcomings of attempting to institutionalize an experience!

Our times ask of us that we each become a spiritual authority, that we each become divine knowers. Of course, the Eastern religions have been the great teachers in this mysticism because their religion is rooted in the transformational Divine Feminine. But wedding that transformational understanding to the western, more individualized and ego-developed mind is what we are about.

How do we know how to take on this mystical knowing, this mythic journeying into the Unconscious? Sounds scary. One look at Kali, or at the Baba Yaga, and you know we are talking scary. Hillman says that the soul or psyche, long buried in western consciousness, or the gods, speak to us through our symptoms – our illness. Pathology itself provides the door to the Unconscious, to the divinity within, to gnosis. As Marion Woodman attested, though her path has involved pain and suffering, she would not have had it otherwise; the rewards are incomparable. And remember she called the surrender to the Goddess a great humility. The hero’s journey calls for the right kind of grandiosity – one must surrender to one’s divine nature and calling, to one’s “extraordinariness.”

Joseph Campbell famously called on us as individuals to “follow our bliss.” This is another way of speaking about the same path to Divine Mother consciousness, which is an erotic path. If we follow the call to our bliss, to our genuine wanting, we will be likewise drawn into that mythic journey with its trial and its danger and its suffering. Estes calls us to the Wild Woman within. Same thing.

But there is a problem that is not addressed by following the wild woman within, from knowing one’s own greater being within. That is, how do you make sure that this changed consciousness, this attunement to mystical reality, actually gets manifest in the real world? How does it go from being wonderful and personal to bringing the individual back into this terribly flawed, terribly imperfect, frustrating and ungrateful world? Into Utica, we might say. For Utica represents as well as anything the unidealized world of our society. How do you make sure this consciousness does not remain a few inches above the earth, but actually touches down into the shit where, as Yeats wrote, “God has pitched His tent?” How do you get across the rather distasteful idea that the soul must grow down and it must “become friends with immediate things”?

I asked this question as if there were some mastermind at work planning and strategizing the change in consciousness. Of course there is not. And, in fact as Hillman points out, the necessity that the soul grow down was already an idea present in pre-Christian western mythology. The ancient mythology of the daimon, a mythology we can confidently claim as western, contains both the notion of following one’s bliss (i.e., the calling, the acorn) and the sense of a destiny realized in this life – the destiny of one’s character. According to this mythology, we are meant to become characters, that is, individuals as seen from the point of view of others. As you can see, this is a very earthy, this-world outcome. Like the pine tree or the owl or the barnyard chicken, we are meant to become that which we are in this-life terms, a goal that is as humble as all hell.

The suggestion is that by each of us becoming the character that is our in-born destiny, by growing down into that, we are fulfilling not only our individual destiny, but our meaning and purpose as “envisioned” by the Divine Feminine in her guise as Necessity. We become part of the diversity that the Divine Feminine is, which we can only become through this humble surrender to that inborn destiny, daimon, or “bliss.”

It is in this way that the soul of the world can be addressed, which absolutely depends upon the soul-making taken on by each individual. As Hillman writes: “We make soul with our behavior, for soul doesn’t come already made in heaven. It is only imagined there; an unfulfilled project trying to grow down.” (p. 260) Now, we can refuse our call, absolutely. Our consciousness gives us that freedom. And there are a thousand reasons not to take it on, and a thousand messages from the culture seducing us into “why bother?” On the bulletin board that hangs in my studio, several prompts toward this decision are posted, and have been there guiding me for more than 20 years. One is from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Another is from the author and Jungian psychoanalyst John Lee: ”Why are we afraid to go down into our pain? ‘I’ll go crazy, you think. No one will understand or tolerate me. It will destroy my family.’ Well, if you don’t go into your pain, every single one of those things will happen.

In a milder way, Hillman hints at the difficulty of choosing the path of the daimon: “Awakening to the original seed of one’s soul and hearing it speak may not be easy. How do we recognize its voice; what signals does it give? …it is hard to get it through our hard heads that there can be messages from elsewhere more important to the conduct of our lives than what comes through Centel or the Internet, meanings that don’t slide in fast, free and easy, but are encoded in the painful pathologized events that perhaps are the only ways the gods can wake us up.” (p. 278)

Hillman’s science, like Jung’s, partakes of the truth of myth and imagination as much as it does empirical science. That is precisely because he follows the great feminine in his work, and trusts in his own inspiration as being truth, the same as we are called to do! Not truth as orthodoxy, not necessarily true for all time, but the truth we each are called to express now, in the present we inhabit. He’s just doing his job in service to the Great Mother; we each can only do the same, in whatever capacity we are called to (“character is not what you do, it’s the way you do it.”) p. 252

This is exciting stuff – fully inspirational and fully revolutionary. I confess that I see Temenos not so much as space wherein we contest such ideas, but wherein we seek to understand what they have to say to us as we each seek to do our part in the re-emergence of the Divine Feminine. I am committed to doing everything in my power to help with the intelligibility of these ideas in the belief that ideas are part of the transformational process.