Searching for God # 133

 The beauty of the world, human consciousness now thought, was “external” to the perceiving consciousness of it. Poets are the last reminders of this primal connection – what is called in literary criticism “the pathetic fallacy”. Northrop Frye, commenting on Blake’s image of the divide into male and female, as quoted in the last post in this space. 

Can the perceiving consciousness be integrated into, and an intimate part of, the beauty of the world? We have lived with, drunk in, absorbed, and come to believe that the subject and the object are, by definition, separate, different, opposite and opposed. Juxtaposed with the Christian ‘fallen human,’ in and through original sin, there seems to be no way to restore what Blake considered a ‘primal connection’. Is any imaginative speculation of reconnecting humanity to the beauty of the world mired inevitably in the literal, empirical and universal evasion, both psychological and spiritual/religious/ethical/moral, of anything remotely analogous to hubris, pride, arrogance and presumptuousness. Is this another ‘either/or’ into which our conventional, societal, normal, perception and language have dragged us for so long that by now we are fully embracing our own ‘alienation, separation, isolation’ from God, from the beauty of the world? And have we been left chasing our tail to perform correctly, appropriately, politically correctly, and legally/morally/ethically, as we have been taught and inculcated into its throes, not to mention building structures, systems, monuments and heroes to what we call justice, in what is really an obsession with ‘cleaning up’ a mess the origins of which are bottomless, like the deepest caves from the mythical Hades of our collective minds? 

Are we, then, engrossed in a futile and obsessive pursuit of our own part of the ‘beauty of the world’ as some universe completely separate from our existence, perception, attitude, and belief when it is inherent in our existence from the get-go? Have we been fed a diet of a divided world, Heaven and Hell, for starters, that fundamentally distorts the inescapable paradox of unity, androgyny, belonging, acceptance, inherent dignity and respect, and love and a full and indisputable ‘birth’ as children of God, made in God’s image, not only of original androgyny, but also of the implicit universal oneness? 

Do we have to ditch, abandon, trash or worse, ‘kill off God,’ in order to restore an original connection? Have we so embraced, drunk, absorbed, and drowned in the requisites of rationality, objectification, separation, alienation, isolation and the concomitant anxieties, desperations, perversions, obsessions, escape mechanisms, and zero-sum competitions, to prove our inherent worth? Especially on what has to be now, the odd perception, conception and attitude, that such unity with the beauty of the world has been our ‘inheritance’ from the beginning? 

Have we collectively, joined a world-wide rush to the ‘bottom’ of our least favourable, most desperate and most feared state, abandonment, in order to feel that we have solved the dilemma which is an inescapable and intractable perception of every human’s life, that s/he is really fraught with sin, really no good in the sight of some God and, unless redeemed in some sacrificial manner, analogous to the ‘sacrifice’ of the Crucifixion, we are condemned to an eternal Hell. A corollary that accompanies that sentence, is for the few who have ‘succumbed’ to the requirement of that sacrifice, is a promise of an eternal life in Heaven. What deity worthy of the name is either capable of, or even remotely interested in such a proposition? And yet, we have had two thousand years of such a conflux of psychic, religious, moral and ethical forces, demands, rules, and norms, all considered necessary because of our inherent evil. 

It is not a question of the guilt or responsibility of Adam or Eve, although we continue to debate, and even enter contentious conflicts over that question. Gender politics, while perhaps another entertaining pass-time, and certainly lucrative for those writing books to ennoble and uphold the feminist voice, cause and overcome the oppression men have inflicted for centuries, has a potential to obscure Blake’s image of the androgynous God and the original divide. As I once wrote to a couple of men who were fully engaged in the question of why men do not participate in formal psychological therapy in an attempt to investigate their resistance, and, ultimately find the paths to reverse that pattern: Does the rose have to apologize to the lilly of the valley for not being bell-shaped and white? Does the cardinal need to change to be more like the loon? Why, then, would we expect, or even wish, for men to be more like women? And the inverse, why would we expect or even wish, for women to be more like men? It is our distorted perception, and the belief in what is ‘normal,’ from a rational, and a literal/empirical metaphysic that generates such an energy. 

Dystopias, like The Handmaid’s Tale, based as it is on documented evidence of the horrors perpetrated by men on women, as Margaret Atwood has attested to whenever such testimony was needed and appropriate, serve as dramatic wake-up calls to both genders, after centuries of the despicable, yet considered normal, abusive attitudes and actions of men against women. Not incidentally, such horrors continue to this day, irrespective of the valiant, creative and explosive exposure Atwood and others continue to proffer. And, for many white Christian males, the subjugation of women, now dubbed the subduing of women who are expected to submit to their men, has reared its ugly head, in the halls and boardrooms of what is alleged to be the most powerful nation on earth. The suggestion in some quarters, for example, that women who need  an abortion should be convicted of a crime. The men, many of whom have raped their victims, however, are left out of the equation of how to regard and treat this ‘public issue.’ 

So long as the complete separation, alienation, isolation of the beauty of the world, and God, and Paradise, as different, apart and divided from the people of the world, the desperation to ‘correct’ the chasm will continue unabated. Whether we are subject or object in that equation, we are, irretrievably and terminally caught in a trap.....and although our imaginations continue to bridge the divide, in literature, fantasy, dreams, art, drama, dance, nevertheless, the world of those artists, their perspective, their life-style and their ‘outsidedness’ from the norms of society, a state of which few ever complain, remain alien, foreign, misunderstood, and even maligned as ‘foolish,’ ‘rubbish,’ often ‘outlandish,’ ‘irresponsible,’ and deemed unworthy of a life-choice for the children of high-achieving parents and family. 

What if, just for a moment, their foolishness and their foreign attitudes, perspectives and life-choices were at least as significant, relevant and leavening to the modern, contemporary Western life styles....and were the life-line that has the most promise of helping us restore a very different perspective and attitude of our relationship to God, the universe, Paradise and the beauty of the universe? 

This argument may seem specious to many, who have grown not only comfortable, but also convicted, of the need for the divide...now extended not only to the battlefield, the market economy, the academic research foundational funding applications, and deeply ingrained as the rationale for corporatism and capitalism. Nothing is off limits, in the pursuit of ‘dominance’ in business, in government, in international relations, and, nothing but the empirical evidence has meaning, relevance or significance in the medical arena, while the legal fraternity has begun to broach the ‘motivations’ and ‘circumstantial evidence’ in some legal cases. We exist in a physical, literal, empirical and nominal universe as allegedly comfortably compliant mirrors and lamps to a universe we have inherited. 

As mirrors, we underscore the rules of the game, that each and every action needs to be measured in comparison with other similar actions, that my salary for my work must be analyzed as fair or unfair depending on the list of variables of the person doing similar work under similar conditions. We expect to be ‘law-abiding’ whether the laws are based on reasonable expectations, deduced or induced by reasonable men and women charged with the design and implementation of those laws, as well as the ‘resonableness’ of those enforcing those laws. And we are finding that that expectation of reasonableness is not always operating among either or both of those groups, the legislators or the enforcers. 

We are witnessing the galloping spread of surveillance cameras, AI algorithms that enable our phones to capture our private conversations, while the cameras capture the public movement of millions of faces, now recognizable by those same instruments. And, who knows who currently ‘owns’ those images, and to what profitable deployment those images might be put, in the interest of those whose billions seem to have captures the playing field for the near and medium-term future, with or without our compliance, or even with or without our full access to the risks, dangers and security exposures we might very well all face. 

The divide has long ago left Pandora’s jar, releasing all the troubles of the world, leaving hope inside. As the first mortal woman, in Greek mythology, Pandora was told by the gods never to open the jar....and of course, overcome by curiosity, she opened it, releasing all the evils miseries, diseases, sorrows and hard work into the world, slamming it shut in time to trap hope before it could escape. (From AI) The human trait of curiosity re-appears in many of the myths we have inherited, as the debate continues over whether that trait is consistent with human hubris or merely a normal human trait. Control by the gods, however, is also a theme which reappears in many of the myths of our inheritance....and could it be that the Christian myth owes some of its DNA to these earlier myths? 

Perhaps, here in this space, as an octogenarian ‘fool,’ I am hopelessly in search of the kind of hope that remains trapped in Pandora’s jar....can’t blame a guy for hoping and imagining! 

Searching for God # 132

 Today we borrow, humbly, gratefully and ‘ekstatically’ from William Blake: 

It will seem both ironic and perhaps even inappropriate to find these words inserted into a piece entitled, ‘Searching for God’....nevertheless.... 

From               Proverbs from Hell 

The pride of the peacock is the glory of God, 

The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. 

The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God. 

The nakedness of woman is the work of God. 

The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man. 

The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. 

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. 

What is not proved was once only imagin’d. 

Improvement makes straight roads: but the crooked roads without improvements are roads of Genius. 

Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. 

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. 

He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. 

Eternity is in love with the productions of time. 

No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings. 

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. 

Exuberance is beauty. 

(From Rag and Bones Shop of the Heart, p. 15-16) 

Consider those words as an hors-d-oeuvre for some more offerings from Blake. 

They essentially explode the conventional, conservative, buttoned-down God and theology that have emerged from the creeds, the dogma and the centuries of correction, purification and effective sterilization of the Christian faith.  

And, from Blake, as we might expect, there is more.    

From Gender and Perception: William Blake and the Fall into Male and Female, by Northrop Frye Posted onSeptember 18, 2022 by Golgonooza,  

we read: 

Blake believed that Consciousness was originally integrated, non-gendered, and “androgynous” (as he terms it). Human consciousness was, before the Fall, the “image” or likeness of this: indeed, as the Book of Genesis itself notes: “God [“the Elohim”, an honorific plural] created man in his [ie their] own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” “God” here is originally both what we now term “male” and “female”, denoting the integrated sexuality of the sacred. As our imagination fell, due to the advance of rationalising and moralising (judging) processes within the brain, the world appeared increasingly literal and separate from this integrated consciousness. In Blake’s terms, it “fell” (or divided) into a rationalising Spectre (Adam) and a feminine Emanation (Eve). The beauty of the world, human consciousness now thought, was “external” to the perceiving consciousness of it. Poets are the last reminders of this primal connection – what is called in literary criticism “the pathetic fallacy”. Except of course it’s not a fallacy. If anything it’s a “phallus-y”, a newly gendered schizophrenia within the perceiving consciousness – that is to say, within perception itself – which now fragmented or divided into “subject” and “object”, perceiver and perceived, active and passive, and eventually “male” and “female”. This was the world of Eden now seen in terms of Generation, of divided opposites, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth. 

Blake’s ‘concept’ of God, as we begin to unpack this paragraph, is androgynous, both male and female, as Frye writes, ‘an integrated sexuality of the sacred.’ While the words may well have been surprising when they were originally inked to paper, today, given the highly enflamed politics of gender they appear as more of a political manifesto than as a religious, Christian interpretation of Original Sin. For some readers, the ‘time warp’ may be difficult to span. It may take more than a cognitive ‘splits’ stretch. Rarely, if ever, in today’s parlance, as well as in contemporary Western culture generally, is the notion of androgyny given even a dismissive and superficial glance. And there is a legitimate case picked up by James Hillman and others, that the split in consciousness has resulted from a ‘fall in our imagination’ as well as a burgeoning dependence on, if not a sacralizing of, both rationalism and moralism. We have, in a word, inherited a world of divided opposites and the legacy has seriously wounded, if not anaesthetized at least the Christian faith. 

Let’s humbly, patiently and, even if feasible, reverentially, attempt to enter a space where the return to an integrated ‘perception’ where subject and object are no longer opposite and at odds, are integrated as Blake imagines they once were. The cornerstone of the conventional interpretation of the Eden myth is that man and woman, by disobeying God’s forbidding, were driven out, forever condemned to a state of ‘original sin’, to which Augustine piled on with his linking that sin through the passage of semen in sexual relations. Talk about a ‘religious/Christian’ starting block for the human race (both species and path)! And then, pile onto that inescapable hole from which we are supposed to climb, the sin of sexuality. Nothing could be dismissive, denigrating and shameful than the Christian ‘marriage of sin-and-sex.’ 

That perversion/division of the beauty of human love into the ‘either/or’ of procreation or sin, exemplifies the divide even further. And try to wrap your ‘heads’ around the centuries of ‘moralizing’ about inappropriate sexuality, as well as the New Testament reinforcement of sex as sin in and through the immaculate conception of Jesus. Centuries after both his life and death, the question: ‘How could Jesus be ‘holy’ and apart, a Son of God, without such an immaculate conception?’ needed an answer. By the way, such a metaphor/myth/birth was ascribed to many of the Greek gods, as a mythical attempt to elevate them above ordinary humans. 

The contemporary, insidious, and yet pervasive, gender conflict between male and female, sits at the centre not only of human sexual relations as wedge ethical and poliical issues, and also divides well-meaning men and women about the appropriate ‘power-relationship’ between men and women. From a psychological perspective, Jung attempted to lay out a kind of metaphoric picture of human unconsciousness, offering the spectre that for males, there is an unconscious anima, female, and for females, an unconscious animus, male. 

We find this on the website, appliedjung.com from Applied Jungian Studies, in a piece entitled, The Archetypes of the Anima and Animus: 

The Anima/Animus relates to our inner or soul life. Not soul as understood in metaphysical terms, as something which lives beyond our physical existence but rather soul as the inner force that animates us....The psyche is such that it contains and embraces both the feminine and masculine. It is inherently an androgynous entity regardless of what the gender of the physical person is. The personality or persona naturally takes on the gender role that you are born to physically. Not always, as we know, but this is the general default orientation. Women take on a feminine role and persona. Men take on a masculine role and persona. The psyche compensates for this by birthing a contra sexuality in the inner life of the person. So: 

Women have a contra sexuality which is masculine in nature and this is called the Animus. Men have a contra sexuality which is feminine in nature and this is called the Anima. An amplification of these archetypal characters is that the Animus is the woman’s rational function, and the Anima is the man’s irrational function. 

While perhaps enriching our notion of both masculine and feminine, Jung’s archetypes of anima and animus also may be an attempt to bridge the genders, as perhaps a preliminary step toward recognition of, respect for and a psychological as well as faith-conformist image of Blake’s original reading. Hillman, a student and protege of Jung reminds us that Jung was attempting to reform the Christian faith, whereas Hillman himself was not interested in that pursuit. 

Can Blake’s (and Jung’s) vision do anything to bring a moderating/reconciling lens to bear on the violence of the abuse of women by men, in a contemporary world where gender images have become so granitized? Is the Christian church, (not by denomination, but collectively) even open to re-imagine the Eden myth through the eyes, faith and imaginations of either or both Blake and Jung? A male does not have to be ‘gay’ in order to recognize, respect and acknowledge the anima; similarly, a woman does not have to be lesbian in order to recognize, respect and acknowledge the animus. Both genders have significant capability both to rationalize and to relate. And yet, there seems to be considerable difficulty in sensing, hearing, witnessing any shared public recognition of what might appear to be paradoxes, based on our fixation with gender stereotypes. 

Another question that emerges here: Is this question of gender identity primarily one of human psychology and/or one of faith and religion, including one’s relation to God?  

The image of separation, alienation, abandonment mythically perceived, attends most of not all civilizations, including the Western world’s history of Christianity. A healing from the many alienations/abandonments/separations, including, one has to interject, one’s alienation from God, underlies much of human thought, imagination, activity, prayer, and reconciliation. Jung’s concept of individuation seems relevant here. 

From scottjeffrey.com, in a piece entitled, ‘The Individuation Process: A Beginner’s Guide to Jungian Psychology and the Path to Wholeness,’ we read: 

As Jung explains in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology: The aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand, and the suggestive power of the primordial images on the other. That is, to individuate, one ultimately needs to strip away two things: 

1. The social mask and false identity the ego created for itself in the course of early development, and 

2. The unconscious influences of the archetypes. 

The purpose of this individuation is to increase the person’s consciousness. With greater consciousness, individuals can heal the splits in their minds between what’s conscious and what’s unconscious. Bringing what’s unconscious—what a person doesn’t know about themselves—to consciousness helps guide an individual to wholeness in the psyche. 

By contrast, Hillman never writes of the unconscious, positing that ‘basing consciousness upon soul accords with the Napoleonic tradition—which we still find in Blake—where what today is called ego-consciousness would be the consciousness of the Platonic cave, a consciousness buried in the least-aware perspectives. These habits and continuities and daily organizations of personality certainly cannot encompass the definition of consciousness, a mystery that still baffles every area of research. To put it together with ego limits consciousness to the perspectives of the cave which today we would call the literalistic, personalistic, practicalistic, naturalistic, and humanistic fallacies......Consciosuness arising from anima would therefore look to myth, as it manifests in the mythologems of dreams and fantasies and the pattern of lives: whereas ego-consciousness takes its orientations from the literalisms of its perspectives, i.e. that fantasy it defines as ‘reality.’......Rather than analysing fantasies, we analyse by means of them; and translating translating reality into fantasy-images would better define becoming conscious than would the former notion given by ego of translating fantasy into realities. (From A Blue Fire, ed. Thomas Moore, excerpts from Hillman’s ‘anima’ p.33) 

Additional notes from Moore, in A Blue Fire, on Hillman’s ‘finding necessity in deviancy’... 

Instead of making a norm of singleness of soul, he (Hillman) portrays the psyche as inherently multiple. He does not use a mild word such as polycentric or multifaceted for this multiplicity. Rather he takes a word from religion and mythology, polytheism, implying an essential and profound division in the soul....A polytheistic psyche (soul) is not the same as a fragmented soul. ...Hillman diagnoses cultural fragmentation as the return of repressed polytheism. When we chase multiplicity from our own self-definition, we are condemned to live out fragmentation in society. In Hillman’s view, we need a psychology that gives place to multiplicity, not demanding integration and other forms of unity, and at the same time offering a language adequate to a psyche that has many faces. Hillman’s psychological polytheism does not portray a life of chaos but one of many elements rising and falling in prominence, conflicting and dovetailing, in a rich counterpoint of themes and episodes....The psyche is not only multiple, it is a combination of many persons, each with specific needs, fears, longings styles, and language. The many persons echo the many gods who define the worlds that underlie what appears to be a unified human being....Psychyological polytheism, therefore, is not only a matter of quantities-many gods and many impulses, but also quality. It implies a life that can embrace conflicting directions, one that doesn’t resort to hierarchies and overarching principles to impose order....We find vitality in tension, learn from paradox, gather wisdom by straddling ambivalence, and gain confidence in trusting the confusion that naturally arises from multiplicity. The sign of a soulful life is its rich texture and its complexity. The soul’s complexes. Therefore, are not to be simply ironed out, because they are the stuff of human complexity......Balance, integration, and wholeness, important values in a monotheistic psychology, have no place in polytheism, which demands a stretching of the heart and imagination. The polytheistic soul is richly textured and texted. It has many qualities of character and is the theatre where many stories are enacted, many dreams mirrored. (Thomas Moore, from A Blue Fire, in an essay entitled, ‘Many Gods, Many Persons,’ p.36-7-8) 

There is no single myth that dominates Hillman’s perception/portrayal of the human soul/psyche. And, while not excluding Blake’s ‘separation from androgyny’ image of the Fall, Hillman seeks to celebrate the many ‘faces, voices, images, tensions, conflicts, dramas and dreams of the human psyche/soul. Unification, as a psychological ideal, must follow a discerning, empathic and open observation/regard/imaginative ‘reading of the consciousness’ of a person in an ‘extremis moment.’ He does not seek or intend to dismiss, devalue or deny their relevance in a monotheistic culture; he invites his readers to begin to imagine a psyche/soul that, at least to this scribe, complies more fully, compatibly and also ‘realistically’ with the streams of images which flow into and out of this mind. 

The presupposition of a defining myth of ‘human evil’ that currently, and for centuries, has constricted millions of consciences, consciousnesses, and unconsciousnesses, might well ‘use’ a nudge out of its absolute dominance, both from a perspective of religion and psychology. And whether the ‘church’ is or will be prepared to open its ‘mind/heart/psyche/anima/animus/imagination to such a psychological perspective remains an open question. 

Doubt and skepticism would suggest a negative response. Courage, imagination, and an institutional soul linked to reality would be open to a positive response. The image of God, as a single ‘personalized, personified, pragmatized, anthropomorphized’ entity could also evolve into a much more complex ineffable, unknowable paradise....yes?.....maybe?....not on your life?