MODERNITY HAS HAD A BAD HABIT OF FORGETTING ITS FORERUNNERS. Too often, in our efforts to critique the status quo and pursue progress, we have cut off our cultural roots. Ironically, this problem is most apparent in the conservative Christian insistence on biblical literalism. In their attempt to return to what they imagine were the …
Confronting a Cosmic Revenge Fantasy
IMAGINE WHAT IT MIGHT BE LIKE TO DIE AND DISCOVER YOU’VE BEEN SENT TO HELL. Never mind the fact that in the cosmos, as we now understand it to be, there’s no “below” for hell (and no “above” for heaven). In the Western tradition, hell is believed to be an infernal, fiery place for eternal, …
Images Come Trailing Clouds of Mystery
THIS YEAR, I’M WORKING TO BRING A GROUP OF ORIGINAL SONGS TO LIFE, recording them with my band, BlueStoneMojo, and sharing the recordings online. Although organizational challenges have tended to dominate the project, it’s still a fundamentally creative process in which mysterious influences can manifest in unexpected ways. Here’s an example of what I mean. …
Soulfully, on the Edge
ON THE WAY HOME FROM A WEEKEND GETAWAY, my wife and I chose to drive one of Colorado’s most scenic mountain highways, one the AAA guidebook warns “should be traveled with caution.” During the weekend trip, we also went to see the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park. The highway and the dwellings both …
Mist on a Breeze #9
Solitude “When one is not alone when one is alone, when one is aware of a goodly presence within oneself, then one has achieved solitude. Our popular culture is a tacit agreement to flee the terror of loneliness, and it therefore circumvents the possibility of solitude. The avoidance of solitude is the flight, ultimately, from …
The Trouble with Following “the Leader”
THE PROBLEM IS PROJECTION — AND THE DARK SHADOWS IT CASTS. For anyone to ascend to the heights of popular power in a society, he (or, rarely, she) must provide an adequate “hook” on which the mass of people can hang their archetypal projections. The primary archetypal image at play here is the Sovereign. Like …
Just an Ordinary Woman, She Transforms the World
WITH ONLY A FEW EXCEPTIONS, THE EPISODES IN THE GOSPEL OF JOHN ARE NOT found in any of the other three gospels. One episode that does also appear in the other gospels is the so-called “Anointing at Bethany” — and in each gospel, it’s a story that turns the status quo on its head. Each …
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How Deep Does Depth Psychology Go?
IT DIVES TO THE DEEPEST DEPTHS OF YOUR SOUL — at least in theory, if not always in practice. Take a glance at Jungian theory, for example. Jung’s structural model of the psyche traces an inward trajectory that begins with the ego, and quickly descends through unconscious complexes and the shadow (something like a neglected …
Mist on a Breeze #8
Meaning, Myth and Human Consciousness “My old Pueblo friend … thought that the raison d’être of his pueblo had been to help their father, the sun, to cross the sky each day. I had envied him for the fullness of meaning in that belief, and had been looking about without hope for a myth of …
The Mystery of a Creative Dream
IF YOU’VE BEEN READING MY POSTS, YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED a recurring theme beginning to appear with some frequency. That theme recently crystalized in my mind as a short, declarative sentence: Love is the answer. Until this morning, I “knew” the sentence was one that came to me some nine years ago as I woke …
Soul Spirit Wisdom 