Descent, Fear & Becoming

There is something so profound about this work. Like many parts of our life journey, there’s a way that we understand that if we knew what we were in for, we might not have chosen this fork in the path. Thank goodness for the bliss of ignorance!

When we embark on the journey, we have expectations about what we will “get” out of it. But then we learn that Archetypal Dreamwork is not about feeling better, it’s not about becoming a better person, and it’s not about becoming successful in the world. It’s about finding out the truth of who we are, why we are here. Some might say that is enlightenment. I wonder. To be enlightened would be good right? But what if enlightenment is neither good nor bad. What if it is just a state of being that is about standing in the truth of who we are?  We try to be good, we want to be good, but Carl Jung says that even the hero must die.

I Am a Battleground

©Isabel Castaño. www.isabelcastano.com

As the layers of the onion are peeled away, I see more clearly how the battle lies within me. I am a battleground. The battle is in me. I see how I have fought, but did not know or understand my enemy. I see how I have fought, but I did not understand my allies. And, thinking I was alone in the battle, not trusting anyone or anything, I see how I fell prisoner. How I have lived in the stockade, the gulag, fighting just to survive. Knowing, yet lacking even the rudiments of faith, I have been the bewildered one.

Huge swaths of me have been laid waste. There are war-torn lands whose skies roil with the lightning and thunder of gods and angels. I see the smoking, shadowed places whose bleak and hollow landscapes are filled with restless, irritable and discontented demons.  I hear the rise of many voices, the cries of my own humanity and the whispers of the angels and demons.

If I kill off all my demons, will my gods and angels die too?

Revelatory Power of the Soul

What if the problem with my anger is that it is simply a manifestation of the finite, a psychological defect that is a manifestation of the lie that I am finite? When I am in my anger, it is like my soul is in chains. It is bound in the finite. It cannot be what it truly is because the “I” that is living in the hell of my future as I stare back at the reflection of my past cannot see beyond the reflection of my three dimensional world. So I think this is it.

Only when I am rocketed into the 4th dimension through difficult spiritual work and the alchemy of the dreams, can I even know my own ignorance. My soul lives on the other side of a mirror. It is like a two way mirror, she sees me and yet I do not see her as I am trapped in the deception and illusion that the “I” is real and that she is not.

And yet, I feel her there. There is a way that I know her. I feel the truth of her existence in the attraction that she exerts upon me. Her power is revelatory. She manifests in me as desire.

I believe that there is an attraction that we all feel. We often don’t recognize it as attraction because it manifests as the pain of our separation, which is often projected out into the material world and so we think the longing we feel is about something else outside of ourselves.

It takes a warrior heart to activate the desire sufficiently to allow her to engage us. In the dreamwork, the dreams provide an opening into the 4th dimension where she lives.

As I continue to follow this path, I realize that what she gives to me are revelations, revelations about who she is not and revelations about the possibility of what she is. If I am willing, I am shown what has happened to me, how I became lost, what chains hold me hostage, what feelings I can allow which can lead to the alchemy of true change in the spiritual sense, what is being born in me, what I might become.

The cumulative acceptance of these revelations creates in me a sufficient opening for her to work with the Divine in bringing into being herself.

Thinking vs Feeling - The Serpent

Encapsulated more and more in my dreamwork homework, is the forethinking vs pleasure that Carl talks about in The Red Book. My cut continues to be to notice when I am in the spin of story or thinking I know something and to bring in the feeling part of my homework. This week it is to bring the pain of my wound to the Anima as we tumble and tumble in each others arms in the waves of the ocean, or to bring it to the place of spinning round and round with the 13 year old girl. Both these places carry feelings, such as sensuality, joy, and desire but they also move me into disorientation, which cuts through my mind's powerful re-orienting abilities.

Two Coils, Lorena B. Moore’s Ironwing Tarot

This cut is actually the movement from thinking back to feeling. I have written before about Carl’s serpent, the serpent that moves from black to white and back again.

Noticing when I go to thinking I know something or spinning out a story in my head about something is like trying to live in the blind spot since it seems I am doing this all the time. Someone could walk in the room and I have a whole story about them within moments!

Fracking for the Soul

Dream:

I am at some kind of retreat center and I am lying on my stomach on the ground with another woman. There is a boy sitting on a chair and Bill (Animus) is sitting on another chair. Some music starts and I think it is from a kid’s movie or show. The boy leaps up and starts to dance and lip synch to the song. He is very high energy and physical. Then it begins to feel sexual too. He is aggressive and suggestive in his movements. Then he takes off his shirt and pulls his pants down. He has on tighty-whiteys. Then Bill jumps up, he has his shirt off and starts dancing too. They both leap in the air and twist and land and then leap again really high. The boy lands in front of me and I reach out and touch his back, running my fingers down his skin. It is very soft. Then suddenly Bill falls on the woman next to me really hard. She struggles to get up. I see that it is B. D. (manipulative, controlling, aggressive). I ask her if she is hurt but I don’t see that she is. But then she reaches for her chest and back and says something inside her got hurt. She looks angry and upset. Bill picks her up and pulls her away from me.

This an example of how the Divine can mitigate the pathology that is shown as separate from me. The not me. When he takes away the pathology, I am left to be the boy. When the boy is dancing with the Animus, there is the just the wild energy which carries the joy and the passion for life. This is how it can work. The thing that is the pathology doesn't actually die, but instead, I now know it for what it is which makes it easier for me to notice it in the moment and withdraw whatever projection I may have around it, resulting in less reactivity and greater access to my Divine connection.

In the willingness to look at all the ways I live from my ego place and not my soul, I have been noticing a hardness in the world, the hardness of my "stuff" and of everyone's “stuff” as it moves through the world. In seeing it in myself, I notice it more and in a different way in my partner and I see it in most of the people around me...a certain hardness, a defended place that is about survival.

In the dreamwork we call it the substrate. The substrate is a good word for it. It implies hard and impenetrable. It is terrifying because it all seems so impossibly set...like the geological strata of the earth. How can we ever truly change?

And, I feel how the Archetypes are "fracking" through this dense substrate to allow the me that is the true me to emerge. The Animus in the dream above is "killing" my demon of control, manipulation, aggression, distrust.