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Ephemeral

Writer's picture: CroneCrone

Updated: Mar 31, 2024

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question — for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. - William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)


I love this quote and it chimes with what I have been thinking about regarding a presentation I am preparing for September's trip to Vienna. Yes, the Crone will be on the road, sharing her half-crazed wisdom. [Half??! - Ed.]


What if there are worlds out there, not a world? Worlds witnessed by different beings dependent on their sensoria and psychologies? What if the symbolic understandings I can reach toward in Active Imagination are as real as trees and birds and cats and computers?


I spoke to Nina about my meeting with the old lady and being "sprung born". To her it articulated a way of being sensitive to entanglements and connections with the more-than-human. It articulated a way of being aligned with that described by Jerome Bernstein in Living in the Borderland. She suggested that I seek healing in my next journey.


I went to the Lower World, deeper than before, and met people like Inuits. They were welcoming. They took me into a hide tent and laid me on a table to give me back lost fragments of my soul. A ladybird, a desert rose and a peach coloured rose. Crow pecked at my ear because a part of my soul was trapped inside me, but he couldn't get in that way. So Lynx went into my blood and down to my lower abdomen where he found a crumpled up scrap of paper which he uncrumpled. It was a bird that flew out of me and away. Then I was to heal a hole. Crow took me into a white ice cave and we went in and through and came out on a ledge above a precipitous Y-shaped canyon, deeper than the Grand Canyon. It was the tear inside me. How to heal that? Crow flew to the other side and caught hold of a vine in his beak. He flew back pulling it and the earth closed. Then the Inuits were stitching up the surface, which was on my stomach.


So, all this is in a symbolic language. It's a symbolic reality - me being healed by a crow and some Inuits... but the important thing is that if I believe in the symbolic reality, maybe I will experience myself, in this aspect at least, as healed. If I discount it as clap-trap, nothing changes. The only way that I can be open to change is to suspend disbelief. Ha! This is like Pascal's Wager, no?


Anyway, this belief in the reality of the symbolic - the idea of inhabiting a world where real things happen in visions, is hard for us Western folk to do. Except for those idiots who believe in The Secret - which is a way to commercialise, consumerise, simplify and desecrate the deep traditions on which this miscarriage is based. What I am talking about is an acceptance that knowledge, agency, happening all inhabit more space than we tend to believe. It's the world(s) that Marisol de la Cardena and Edward Kohn write about in their anthropological books.


It demands thinking at the borderland, a rich space, like edge habitat, where two (or more) worls are both present.

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maplekey4
29 mar 2024

Just read this now, fairly late in the day. My first reaction is that your exploring such richly visual, "symbolic realities" as a way to search for healing is an exciting use of active imagination and a good use of Pascal's Wager. Thanks for sharing the journeys and your thoughts. It helps me too ... The surprising or new is an opportunity to open up to possibilities. I just re-found that book by Wm James on my shelf. Put it on my desk so it's handy. I haven't opened it up to read for 20 years or so. Anyway ... good post Crone. (ps ephemeral and ethereal -- I suppose something is often both ... grin ...) Another p.…

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maplekey4
31 mar 2024
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YES, Excellent idea!

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