In my previous blog, I explored ideas about wholeness, consciousness, division, thought traps, and the dangers of dragons and vortexes we create through personal and collective bits of unconsciousness that accumulate in our psyches over time. My ideas were inspired by a piece my friend Jürgen Hornschuh wrote as part of his Yurugu Series, specifically #2: How to identify imperialistic thought. As I wrestled with my divergent ideas, I blended the thinking of Carl Jung, Dalai Lama, David Bohm, J.M. Berger, Aqua Man, and others who are speaking to the challenges of our time. To be honest, I had not read any of Jürgen’s other pieces in his series until after completing the Yurugu Mirror. One exception is I read Fingerprints on water, which is an elegant and deeply enduring piece. Now, I am reading all Jürgen’s posts in his Yurugu Series as well as two other writings that two other friends recommended I read after they read my Yurugu Mirror piece.
As I read and digest new ideas, my thinking-word consciousness is taking a break. However, my art-vision consciousness remains busy. Below are two short videos created from art emerging from dreams and visions from my work on the Yurugu Mirror piece.
The image for this piece, Flying, comes from a fragment of a dream that is obviously speaking to the section on vortexes in the Yurugu Mirror. Putting words to what I have drawn immediately diminishes it, as Western thinking usually does. Thus, it is best to refer you to the vortex section in A Yurugu Mirror and the Role of Consciousness Warriors and watch the video, then draw your own conclusions. I will simply say I believe it broadly speaks to our unconsciousness and how we might impact and affect each other with unexamined (or unintegrated) personal and collective pieces of unconsciousness that glob together in our psyches over time. At least in my experience, it can create a dead weight that can keep a person stuck in the lower realms of conscious existence. But, remaining here becomes toxic over time, and especially so when we compete for psychic recognition and space in our shared reality. The evolution of the images in the video hints at the possibility that what we see and can measure with our physical senses is limited, and there is something far vaster and more beautiful beyond what we can see, hear, touch, and smell. This something is a divine mystery–that is the final image of the video, which I find deeply comforting.
This piece, It Came From Inside, explores the lost inner landscapes existing inside every human being. In the Yurugu Mirror, I write throughout how our inner landscapes are disappearing. The originating image for this drawing was a crumpled skyscraper in a devastated city. I was not up to drawing an entire city, so I settled on a partly destroyed skyscraper in a dried up, barren landscape. On a ridge stands the beautiful being inside who witnesses this devastation in sadness. This is how the drawing begins, but then something miraculous unfolds as a new landscape appears in parallel with the first. This one is whole and beautiful and alive. The video documents the journey between the two evolving inner landscapes as they mature through time. Again, to describe the images with words diminishes them. It is best to simply watch the story told through art and music and draw your own conclusions based on your own journey through time and awareness of (or lack of awareness of) your inner landscape.
From the very beginning of drawing this series, I knew the title was It Came From Inside, which hints at the possibility we may be destroying our shared reality (Earth) by destroying our inner landscapes first. We destroy them by forgetting they are there, forgetting how to get there, forgetting how these spaces nourish and guide us throughout our lives. As more and more of us lose access to our inner worlds, our outer world reflects this lost reality. The song came to my mind just before I started working on the video. I knew I could condense 40 minutes of video to fit the length of the song They Move of Tracks of Never-ending Light (and this 40 minutes condenses hours and hours of drawing time). I had not listened to this song in over a year, but I knew it was the right one to tell the story of this journey. The name of the group This Will Destroy You is also perfect in every way for when we become aware of things inside ourselves or about the pain and struggle of others, we inherit a responsibility that is measured by what we do or do not do with what we know. This burden of knowledge might be a huge reason why so many of us choose to live unconscious lives—it is easier if we do not see the pain inside ourselves or in others, and if we don’t see it, then we don’t have to do anything to comfort ourselves or those around us. To heal is painful, so most of us just live with a wound inside that never heals. One may wonder where the medicine men and women, shamans, and seers have gone. They are the ones who have always been there to help us heal from these deep internal wounds. They have guided people and tribes going through crisis, change, and transformation from the very beginning of our emergence into conscious beings. Today, they exist as musicians and artists—and of course indigenous people all over the world who never lost this capacity. These are the people of our time who voyage into the deepest realms inside the human psyche (and collective soul). They are the ones who bring back glimpses of the treasures and dangers residing deep inside every human being. They are the ones who can get to the bedrock of human consciousness, which is the primeval place where we first emerged from the deep and restless Sea of Unconsciousness. This is where we are barely standing Now, or maybe we are crawling on our bellies too weak to even venture beyond this point of emergence in our unstable, fragile consciousness of today.
When our inner landscapes crumble, disappear, and sink back into our unconsciousness, they become lost to us, leaving us weak, indecisive, confused, and trapped. Compounding this, the more we forget who we really are, the more we cast these forgotten parts of ourselves onto our family, friends, neighbors, and world. These cast-off parts become the “other” who we then give ourselves permission to demonize for whatever it is inside ourselves we lost. This is dangerous… really dangerous… and we have been here before 100 and 75 years ago. We are here again, except this time, in addition to rising waves of war, hunger, and hate, we teeter on the edge of climate catastrophe. I don’t know, but I feel unless we find a way to heal inside….what we see rising today is our future. If we can find a way back to our lost inner places, we can get back to the lost wisdom and knowledge needed to make different choices. This is where the strength can be found needed to be Consciousness Warriors. It is here where we find nourishment that feeds our appetite for life. It is here we are empowered to be a force for good in the world. There is no collective way inside to our inner spaces. This is an individual journey. Each person must find their own way based on their own challenges, circumstances, and pain. I don’t see one great transformation on the horizon that happens in one fell swoop of conscious light that suddenly can be seen by billions. I see it as a courageous journey that must be taken individually. But perhaps it is one that can be encouraged, supported, and helped like comrades who are on a great and perilous journey who support, comfort, and aide each other so they can all make it eventually. If we can do this, then we might have a chance.
I love what Jürgen writes in Fingerprints on water:
“Owning less goes straight against the paradigm of separation; consuming less is incompatible with the locust culture currently ruling the whole planet; and doing less, to me, is the confession that the complexity of the world is way beyond my understanding. I just don’t know what is good for everybody. I hardly know what is good for me. I’ve got an intuition, and I follow it. I don’t know where this ends, but it feels good to trust that feeling, and I do not suffer from less stuff. There is no sacrifice, no loss, no self-denial. It’s rather the opposite – every gadget, every insurance, every untruthful relationship, every idea, every activity that fell away provided space and time for something much more valuable: the essence of it all, the unadulterated sensation of living, the meaning of being alive. Not that I got that to the fullest; as already shared, I still own things, thoughts, personae. Life is becoming more and more interesting though.”
Jürgen Hornschuh, Fingerprints on water
This movement away from everything we have been told to value feels right to me. It feels like moving away from the thinking that has taken us to the great chasm of our time—the chasm that exists inside each of us.
Postscript:
Three things I read within 24 hours of finishing the above suggests a precedence for achieving this elusive inner transformation. They are:
My former philosophy professor John Visvader wrote a piece entitled Reflections on a Chinese Garden where he talks about the differences between Chinese/Eastern thinking and the philosophy of the West. He uses the story of the Garden of Eden to highlight differences in Chinese and Western thinking saying:
“From a Chinese point of view, Adam and Eve turned a garden into a wilderness or wild place by imagining themselves to be superior to the garden, by trying to be equal to the creator of the garden. The moral knowledge they gained told them that gods and humans were qualitatively different from and superior to the world of nature. Thus, they narrowed the realm of obligatory behavior and chose to be associated with gods rather than gardens…”
John Visvader, Reflections on a Chinese Garden
This he suggests created a division in the wholeness that governs our natural world, which we are apart (we really never left… only our thinking did). This is what created the disharmony and incoherence we see today. He ends saying:
“…and our search for our own broken wholeness has made us search out paths long forgotten and lead us to believe that something like the Chinese view of human nature must be true. We have also learned in stark pragmatic terms that we are living in a smaller and more interconnected world than we might have imagined. The idea of wilderness has become a metaphor for that other metaphor of the self-so, the garden. Many of us find that we need to have a place where nature can be itself so that on some fundamental level we can also be ourselves. (…) If we find important healing in wilderness and its preservation we must recommend it to others, but the “correct behavior” which we sense and may try and spell out in terms of ethical or moral principles cannot easily convert those whose sense of self is constituted differently.”
John Visvader, Reflections on a Chinese Garden — [When it gets uploaded, the COA Magazine can be found here (p. 12-14): https://www.coa.edu/coamagazine/]
In a lecture to his peers (Analytical Psychology Its Theory & Practice), Carl Jung describes the deeper levels of knowing needed to understand the workings of the unconsciousness and to diagnosis the troubles it can cause when critical parts inside of our psyche fail to be integrated or transformed by consciousness (the engine that strives to achieve inner wholeness). He talks about the learning and understanding developed in the far East saying:
“… We Europeans are not the only people on the earth. We are a peninsula of Asia, and on that continent there are old civilizations where people have trained their minds in introspective psychology for thousands of years, whereas we began with our psychology not even yesterday but only this morning. These people have an insight that is simply fabulous, and I had to study Eastern things to understand certain facts of the unconscious. I had to go back to understand Oriental symbolism.”
Carl Jung, Analytical Psychology Its Theory & Practice (p. 74)
A little later, he describes the concept of Tao to his peers saying:
“… Tao can be anything. (…) I call it synchronicity. The Eastern mind, when it looks at an ensemble of facts, accepts that ensemble as it is, but the Western mind divides it into entities, small quantitates. (…) The Eastern mind is not at all interested in that. The Chinese mind asks: ‘What does it mean that these things [these people] are together?’ The Chinese mind experiments with that being together and coming together at the right moment. (…) It has a method of forecasting possibilities, and it is still used by the Japanese Government about political situations; it was used in the Great War. This method was formulated in 1143 B.C.”
Carl Jung, Analytical Psychology Its Theory & Practice (p.76-77) [Note: This method is the I Ching or Book of Changes]
In a book about the I Ching (i.e., The Philosophy of the I Ching), Carol K. Anthony writes:
“What we learn through the I Ching is a substratum of universal truth that underlies all major religions and philosophies of life. As these universal truths emerge in our learning, we understand the relationships that these truths have to philosophies and religions. By contrast to them, however, the I Ching way is to live in an unstructured manner, free of precepts and rules. Just as we constantly interact with the changing environment as we canoe down a river, so we learn, through the I Ching, to interact with our continuously changing lives. With the I Ching as guide, we learn our natural limitations; as we apply our knowledge, we gain experience; we avoid rocks and underwater objects; we find the channel; we learn when to paddle hard and when to rest, when to get out of the water and portage around dangerous falls. We start with the stream when it is small, at a time when our errors are less serious; then, down river, we are able to face the larger challenges. We are never totally secure; we can never plot what we are going to do more than a few feet ahead. This means we continuously adapt to the conditions as they show themselves. In finding that our abilities are up to the challenges, we develop the courage to take the risks that are always involved in a continuous learning process. Although we have a master guide in the Sage who speaks through the I Ching, who knows what lies ahead, throughout the trip we are only helped to develop our skills. It is we who make the trip, who do the paddling, who take the risks, and who, in the end, become our own masters.”
Carol K. Anthony,The Philosophy of the I Ching (Introduction, p. x)