i feel like I’m coming back to myself.
Much of the explorations I’ve been doing around spirituality lately seem to keep circling me back to psychology, healing trauma, discovering or rediscovering myself. I could see these things as distractions from the spiritual task, or I can see that they ARE the task. Strange to think it was only through spirituality that I could complete the healing journey that I started in secular psychology. But that is what is happening.
Damn this is almost exactly what Jung said about Mandalas. That the circles go out far and wide in all directions but all still come back to a single point, which he labelled the “self”.
One must “get out of the way” of inner things, one must release resistances and clear blocks, one must attempt to feel deeply into the internal intuition, listen attentively, and not obstruct what comes. To be the transparent channel, to let the will/intuition move the body. It’s both surrending to some Other and actively pushing towards some SelfThing. Orient to a north star… or surrender to a higher power. Both ways work, it kinda all the same.
One must create or accept symbols. We are taught in the West that every day things are meaningless, that to ascribe life to objects is a childish thing, that scientifically they are ordinary and therefore dead. But science does not study the realm of meaning and it has no right to say what rules apply. The world of meaning and emotion has its own workings and those workings are as subtle to discern as the invisible forces of science.
One *can* and *is allowed* to ascribe meaning to everyday things, so that the will or the unconscious or the numen may speak to us. These things are both subjective to just our experience and also shared, even if only because humans tend to associate the same things with other things, we are not super creative in that regard. Meaning is very rarely purely subjective, it is rather inter-subjective, and it’s real. It might be differently real to gravity, but as real and consequential nontheless.
Without an adequate array of meaningful symbols the non-verbal parts of us cannot communicate with the verbal conscious, the higher self, the “us” of the mind. We need these symbols to hear ourselves and the world.
The only mistake of psychosis is to believe the meaning inscribed within the symbols is absolute or eternal. That the voices in the head have the ultimate authority. They don’t, they are parts of the whole. As changeable and flimsy as our more socially accepted versions of voices, thoughts and emotions.
In my experience of people who arrange everyday objects symbolically, those highest attuned realise that the objects have quickly lost their meaning again, sometimes almost immediately after having gained it. Being aware of the end of a divination is just as important as being sensitive to its beginning. As with the artist, the *process* of birthing the image is the sacred activity, but the end result has little meaning for the creator. If others delight in it, so be it, but it is already over for the creator, it was only ever a means, not an end, and once the process is over the object or image itself is merely the dead record of what transpired.
Attuning to an inner light, a “religion” is important, and it is less important exactly what that religion is. Fixing a process of attunement in words and stones is to transform it from process to object, transform it into deadness. Certainty is not for us in this world. Desiring it will only give you death.
There is uniqueness to every experience, it *is* important if an atom is within one body and not another, but that’s not to say it’s not an atom, and will stay within the body forever. In one sense it has a kind of fixed essence, but in another sense it is always being transformed. Life is an unfolding process, not a dead end. Subjective reality matters, but interdependence is also always present, and the two do not contradict.
Our social norms as apes are powerful, to enable us to all get along, but they are not absolute and one should do as one wants as far as possible, within the guide rails or stances that one must do no harm to other beings, including onesself.
Frideswyth 