Chapter 2

 

Goddess Rising

134 [70] ‘Goddess Rising’

Oil on Canvas 42″ x 30″ 1987

This painting is intended to carry some of the experience of a curious effect of the feminine on the masculine psyche. From NEPSIS, SECTION III: EAGLE ROCK:

When I first visited this place that we later named Eagle Rock, I was with my friend and partner. She is a very beautiful young woman and rare for me in that she is one of the few for whom I might have preferred marriage to celibacy. We remain platonic friends. My mother accompanied me on this subsequent visit about to be described. This is an important change of characters for two reasons. One is that my mother, nearly eighty years old, is not so interested in religion or paranormal phenomena. She prefers politics and history. Therefore, she is detached from enthusiasm about religious, psychic and other paracritical phenomena. The second reason is that an archetype showed itself here. The archetype is, I believe, a catalyst for the paranormal seed of this story. The archetype is that of mother and son/goddess and hero. (It amuses me, and others, to think of myself as a hero, but even the least among us have moments of glory. Rather than this being an exercise in self-glorification, I merely point out an archetype that has been glorified in the past. Heracles=”the glory of Hera,” Hero/priest sacrificed in communication with the divine. Jesus and Mary, Theotokos, is another example. This important dynamic, largely ridiculed in modern culture, is essential to creativity, light mysticism and much traditional lore… See The White Goddess, Robert Graves, p. 124. Also see, The Cyclical Serpent, Paul Halpern, for how Dionysius saves his mother from Hell.)

…This “old dispensation” includes a Shamanism that reaches out from Paleolithic times into our own because there are people who still live a stone age existence to some degree and because Shamanism is a trans-temporal function of human personality. This old dispensation also includes the priesthood. This topical reference might start with the sacrificial priesthood of the Great Goddess from around the Mediterranean wherein the hero/sacred king/priest/son/consort is adulated for a time, then sacrificed to become divine. His initiates would often eat his flesh and blood in communion with their deity. This function of the mediatory priesthood, hieros or hierophant, extends to the priesthood of Jesus Christ, in the order of mythic “Melquizedek of old.” [See, First Eucharistic Prayer from the Order of the Mass for Melquizedek reference.] These realizations lead to “Memo to a Bishop” that heads up the conclusions to this project. See NEPSIS Section III for “Memo” and “Eagle Rock” in the same section, for the story referenced above. Also see paintings #44, #80 and #96.

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Chapter Two

In which:

-The Warrior appears.

-Art, Priesthood and Martial Arts

-The Black Widow; the Black Widow again

-Rainstorms, Sharing and the Snake

-2nd India

 

What happened next brings us, Bishop, back to the point, as well as the conclusion to this first twenty years of pilgrimage.

I had been working, in my art, on painterly sculptures that deal with the themes of death, disease, with themes of light and redemption, enlightenment. The result of all the death and destruction that seems associated with that first Yemen trip. What I have finally come to treat in this series of art works is the priestly/shamanic character of human personality that breaks through the cycle of suffering, delight, death, life and birth characteristic both of the natural and artificial or institutional systems of the world. What is developing in this is my understanding of the path of the spiritual warrior as the one who makes this breakthrough as well as battles against the entropy of Being. Artist as spiritual adventurer belongs to the ranks of the medieval knight errant, Hesychast pilgrim, and monk: God seekers and defenders of sentience.

I have been studying the internal, spiritual, martial arts of China and have been led by the following experiences to the concluding episodes of this “Nepsis”, this “awakening”. I come to these martial studies because they ‘communicate’ my experience of the divine Mystery, not because I am interested in militant violence. Just the opposite. They are a ‘practical’ mysticism not a theology, analysis, or commentary. I do not regard this study as contradictory to the mystical tradition of the Church, rather an evocation of the deepest resonance of God in our tradition “to fight the good fight”, to “fight the devil”, that is the mindless egotism of ‘self’, personal or corporate. The art work is not so much pointing to this experience, but is potentially an occasion of the Divine power. It is a technique of the sacred. It is meant to catalyze vitality, as are the techniques of the “soft” martial arts when applied with a spiritual intention. They transfer Energy (chi) directly to kill or transform the opponent, that is, the (entropic) self!!

In the Spring of 1989 the last journeys in this story began. Without any warning at all, while I was peacefully occupied with other things, the Great Old Man awoke in my interior world, ignited the steel staff from Yemen days and struck the Black Widow. She was deeply wounded. She retreats out of sight. This was a massive retaliation from the Great Old Man against the Black Widow. I don’t know why exactly… To me the psychological implications are as interesting as the spiritual meaning. I waited several days for her to respond. I didn’t know what to make of this rationally, but feared that she might try to blast me for good. I just waited. I didn’t want to destroy her but then I didn’t want her to destroy me either. I became rather nervous about the whole thing. I decided to do a vision journey with a friend to try to determine what was happening. This friend, a woman, and I have done this before.

At this same time as well, Panikkar is giving the internationally acclaimed Gifford Lectures, perhaps the peak of his academic career, and considerable influence. I have just received the enthusiastic approval of the Doctoral faculty in Berkeley regarding my proposal for Ph.D. studies. My migraines have also resumed. There is a lot of tension amidst all this.

My friend and I commence. I am to travel, she is to facilitate psychically. All I can think about is the Black Widow. The spider comes for me. In terror, the only way that I can escape is to leave my body. I do so. I leave it along the shore of the ocean. She finds my body and inserts her fangs in my right side. But instead of sucking, she inserts something, then heals the wound with her webs. While this is going on visually, I am writhing about as my friend facilitates the event. I see myself standing on a saddle between two hills overlooking a countryside and a village that I know represents the human community. There is about it a golden, hazy light not unlike the golden light of Egypt from last summer. But this light is not so pure, rather a little smoggy.

As I stand on the hill looking toward the village, I am dressed in a great monk’s robe. I have in my right hand the steel staff of power and light from Yemen. But this regalia is somehow incomplete. Then, I am given a cincture (symbolic of religious intentions) and to attach to this belt, a steel sword. The blade is sharp as glass. It is hard, blue dark steel. It is a wonderful and terrible weapon shaped like a samurai sword but not exactly. Yet, this still is not enough. Something is missing. Then I am given the crystal skull reliquary of sentience to hang on the belt opposite the sword. Thus the figure of the warrior monk is formed.

I identify with this warrior figure as described above though it no longer quite looks like me. There is some confusion about handling both the sword and the staff. I don’t want to give up either.

Soon, the day after my Ph.D. project was voted on, I went for a day of reflection to the monastery in Big Sur. This place sits 2,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean with a view along miles of the most beautiful coast in the world. My room had a garden that looked out along the coast. In the afternoon of my second day there, I was sitting on the wall of my garden in the warm sun. The sea below was covered with a vast undulating spread of fog. I took my shirt off because of the heat. I noticed that the fog started to reach up the hill directly below me. The rain rituals of the past usually had some sexual aspect to them. The thought crossed my mind that the fog might be responding to my presence. Deluded? Maybe. But I thought that I should try anyway to call it up. I did. And it didn’t. Well, just a bit. Nothing definitive. Any little breeze could have caused that much upward movement.

So, I laughed at myself a bit. Forgot about weather-working pretensions. I continued to explore my little garden. One bush in the corner had around its roots what looked like miniature caves, gopher holes probably. Spread across these gaping fissures was a web. On closer inspection, I saw it to be a Black Widow’s web. She was waiting just visible at the mouth of one of the tiny caves. I found a long piece of straw and teased her web. She quickly retreated, a bullet into darkness. I waited. She came back so slowly so that no potential prey would ever notice her movement, so slowly as to send chills through my body. I left her alone after that.

That evening I went to bed early, but awakened about 11:00 p.m.. Rather than just toss and turn, I thought a vision journey might be worth a try. I started out in the usual way. But I could not go anywhere but to the spider’s web outside. I resisted. I really have an aversion to spiders, especially black widows. But there was nowhere else to go. I consented and tried to slip past her into the caves to the right, below her web. She was on me like lightening. I didn’t have time to be terrified. But she could not hurt me because I had become clothed in an armor of shining, silver light the surface of which her fangs could not pierce. Then she stood back and taught me things. Among these things was how to send power with both the Yemen staff and the sword gained in the recent vision journey. At the end of this teaching, all the power of both weapons ignited and struck down to the house where you, Bishop, live. This power was light exactly like the light from the four black widows that struck in the dream described in Part I, Chapter 8 of LETTER TO A BISHOP.

( A few days after this vision journey with the black widow I received your letter announcing my suspension.) After you, Bishop, I sent the energy in beautiful strands all around Chris also in Southern California. (I live in Northern California.) Then I fell asleep. I wake a little later because the full moon is so bright that its light coming in my window hurts my eyes. (Migraine people are light sensitive at times.) I fall asleep again after closing the curtains. I wake in the early morning to the sound of rain. I visit with one of the monks a little later. He says to me, “Well, Father did you bring this unseasonable storm?” I laugh. We both laugh, for different reasons I suspect. I left the monastery soon after for San Francisco.

Wednesday, the following week, a friend and I do a rather spontaneous ritual. I am looking through my boxes to find a power object for her. I did not intend to do a full blown ritual, just find her a gift. What happened was that all my “objects” gathered in my travels were spread out on a “mesa”( a shaman’s altar) around my room. I moved into a very pleasant altered state. Both of us were impressed. The association with all this was beauty. Intense, inexplicable beauty. The altar area in my room during these weeks radiates an invisible but perceptible power and beauty. Deep, searing beauty and clear light. After the ritual with my friend, I felt no inclination to put the objects away. So my small room remained a “mesa” through Saturday night when I finally did straighten things up. On one hand I felt that I was just lazy to leave it out so long. On the other, I felt some justification that I could not understand. (When Chris and I had made a similar ritual in preparation for Egypt just a year before, I also left the objects out for several days.) The following Monday, Chris called. He had had this following dream/vision experience on Friday.

But before I tell you about that let me mention that at this same time, he also had his first experience of Chi-gung energy transference while sparring in a black-belt Kung-Fu class. That is, while sparring, he kicked a student in the stomach, lightly. The student was thrown ten feet. He tried it again. The same. Again. The same. Then with other students. The same. His teacher can do this quite regularly, controlling the amount of energy expended each time. Chris’ experience is not as regular. But even so, this is very impressive. (This transfer of energy that Chris experienced is called “projection” (of chi). It is something that advanced practitioners are able to control at will. It is the enticing frustration of novices. First one masters alignment, compression, and other exoteric physical practices, then the esoteric, such as the manipulation of chi, “projection” being an example. Then, the mysterious…)

My ‘energy’ development has been with weather-working (etc.) rather than Chi-gung combat.(See bibliography under,Yang Jwing-Ming, pg. 8.) But the essential principals are the same. At the right moment in a special circumstance, one transfers this limitless energy to this ‘other self’ to transform or to kill.

The transference/translation of energies between Chris and I are operative; mutually “energizing” if we are to believe that there was some connection between events preceding/including the ritual described above and Chris’ energy transference experience. The reason I believe that there is a connection is not only because of our closeness but because of this dream of his:

His dream vision experience came to him exactly in the middle of the ‘object ritual’ described above. It was that Friday night. He and his wife have just gone to bed. As he falls asleep, he starts dreaming immediately. He is a child at his childhood home in Orange. He is doing Pau Qua, a very sophisticated Chinese internal martial art which he would not have known about as a child. As he is doing this he begins to levitate in the dream, up, then backwards over the family car. He is experiencing irregular, uncomfortable breathing patterns and waves of powerful, wonderful energy flows in his body. He wakes up. He is sure that he is awake. He is still experiencing the same discomfort of breathing and excellence of energy flows. He looks up at the ceiling. There is, appearing and disappearing, a vast sparkling, colorful, though mainly silver-blue, spider web cast across the top of the room. Awesome delight. He is impressed by this and calls to tell me about it the following Monday. Take note

Though my altar radiated great beauty during this period, psychic and physical exhaustion followed. It was all I could do to continue the normal events of my life.

A similar experience happened to another friend around the same time. She and I had been working on some major physiological disorders; acute, chronic tendonitus, progressive nerve dysfunction and a lesion in her brain. We were working on her survival in this world, in the next. Perhaps both. One evening during a whole scenario of psychic experiences, she envisioned the following:

…Was awakened from an unusually deep sleep…by a sense that I wasn’t alone in the house. (My husband was away) I checked all the doors, visited the bathroom and climbed back into bed.

Suddenly, I noticed the bottom half of the doorway was draped in a copper colored spider web (beautiful! The light from our bedroom illuminated it against the hall) ethereal, golden angel hair, very soft. Magical, inviting, not at all threatening. There was a spider somewhere and if so that must have been the unknown presence. Noted that the lighted dial on the alarm clock showed 4 A.M.’ish…

I’d decided to write the whole experience off as a figment of my overactive imagination when I noticed that the one of the cats with me on the bed was staring at the doorway(while the web was still there). Suddenly the other one’s eyes opened wide and she also began look at the same spot…

Somewhere in the midst of all this, during a meditation or dream, perhaps before the copper Web, she envisioned the Black Widow coming out of the back of her head and crawling around her shoulder…

Also, one of my art works, “Rice Deer Sculpture”, operated as an “object of power” catalyzing the transformation sequence of her vision.

I believe the significance for me of these two cases of Chris and my other friend, Margaret, who is a female Episcopal Seminarian being trained to be an Episcopal priest, is to indicate that the Spirit of the pilgrimage is extending tangibly beyond myself to include and to initiate others. These are at once a support group helpful to my completing the pilgrimage, as well as being subject to the edifying influence of this whole process. Unlike the rainstorms, these are verifiable events that happen to others as well as myself. What I believe is set up here is a mutually catalytic interaction of increasing power. But to what end…?

This interaction is, no doubt, the result of stress and power of suggestion. I want to ‘stress and suggest’ that all this is a necessary part of a larger process that leads not to self-deception but hopefully spiritual breakthrough, growth, independence, empowerment and healing. Even the integration of negative, horrific elements (spiders, earthquakes, fires, deaths, etc.) contribute in a religious process as particular and ancient as this.

While this Episcopal friend was having the above experience, Chris and I were in L.A. attending a Kalachakra “initiation/empowerment” given by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. (It was part of my Ph.D. research.) We were also working our own ritual. Which by the way, peaked the day after my Episcopal friend’s meditation.

The Kalachakra can be described as follows:

Thus, if you are sincerely intent on receiving a Kalachakra initiation and then following its meditational practice, you should go not only with this highest motivation (altruistic compassion), but also with prior experience of renunciation… and some insight into the actual way in which all things exist. In addition you should visualize the area in which the initiation is to be given as the actual mandala abode of Kalachakra and view His Holiness the Dalai Lama giving the initiation as Kalachakra himself. (…and yourself as the Kalachakra deity.) By the strength of your visualization and motivation you can then be assured that you are receiving, at an initiation given by a master…full permission and empowerment to practice the Kalachakra teachings–a most advanced and profound path leading to Buddhahood. (Kalachakra Initiation, Los Angeles, 1989)

I believe we have been so initiated to the degree to which we were able to visualize ourselves as the Kalachakra, which I arbitrarily identify with the Christ. At least I can visualize myself as a spiritual warrior in the service of the Lord. The vision is still quite clear in which I move through crystalline black space, around the central figure of the golden, radiant lord.

The Dalai Lama said during some of his talks, that Christians should seek refuge in Christ, Buddhists in the Buddha. That there are certain doctrinal differences that separate the religions. That is indeed true. I also believe in the value of maintaining the separate integrity of religious and cultural traditions. But there is no separation in the experience of service to the deity, to the world. The Dalai Lama noted the concept of the immortality of the soul as a stumbling block, since Buddhists generally don’t believe in such individuality as do most Christians. But what does it really mean for one’s “glorified” body/soul to be in “union with God” or to enter Nirvana? No one here really knows; at least in any way that can be communicated in normal language. No one really knows what the “Glorified Body” is. Who is it after all that climbs up on the Cross? Who is the Buddha? Such identity is rooted in “Mystery” and cannot be reduced to doctrine or concept.

Human identity is the real issue. What is “true form”…? The world is wrong when it assumes that it knows the answer, or doesn’t care, then goes ahead destroying and consuming wherever there might be material profit without even guessing at the Secret Life of what has been destroyed. The Church is wrong when it accommodates the world in its own self-destruction. (See note #4 containing the letter that describes why we are dysfunctional and the poetic intuition of that about Original Sin.)

“Nepsis” is New Testament Greek for being ‘awake’, ‘sober’, ‘watchful’ for the Lord. As I wake, I find myself embattled, yet the weapons of response are stillness, peace, compassion, detachment and prayer– ritual action. The strategy of battle, the technique, is drawn from the vast wisdom of human spiritual heritage. Bishop, even as I acknowledge the “horror” as well as the delight of history, and explore what other religious people have done in face of the “Tremendum”, I keep a tender faith in the Lord and the Church. I realize that some of my action and thought seem to wander from the norm of most spiritual traditions, but because of the extreme and dangerous condition of the world and because of my particular spiritual path, I have felt justified, after much and well advised discernment, to go beyond/outside what many sacred traditions advise as the norm. I hope to help turn the poison of our time into vision, salvation, survival. The Lord and his creatures have helped me in ways that fill me with delight and health and wonder–In deep appreciation for this fulfillment and healing, I offer holy water, flowers and fire before the image of the Blessed Virgin and her Son– visualize that. Perhaps this journey has only been for myself, but I hope that it is for the world as well. But in any case, let me now conclude.

After a peaceful and productive summer, I faced a difficult situation financially, artistically, emotionally, and academically. During this time, Black Widow visited me again as I visited again the Camaldolese hermitage at Big Sur. On arrival at the monastery, I had sensed a beautiful, clear light flowing from the monastic hill down the mountain side like mist or fog curling along the downplay of gravity. Wonderful. The visit from the Black Lady occurred the last of my three day stay. At first, there was trepidation about the relationship between the Black Widow and I. She is dangerous. But as the day advances, we come to trust one another. Even become friendly. She allows me up close. She has certain jewel-like qualities about her fangs. Evening comes. I converse with one of the monks. An artist. Images of the spider come and go. I go to my room to bed. The spider and I are together in my mind’s eye. I know that she wants to do something to me. I know that it is alright. I lay down on my stomach. She inserted her fangs into the back of my neck. No pain, no fear. Then she pumped me full of all her energy. Everything in one great blast. Then she collapsed. The image of her collapse and my reaction is very strong. Very clear. I see myself standing, pumped full of energy, almost levitating, bouncing, I am so full of energy. Somewhere in these visions, a demon comes into my room. The Black Widow attacks and devours it. I feel invincible. At another point I see myself leaning against her in intimate, easy friendship.

I returned to normal consciousness. A spider crawled across my arm. I jumped up, startled, knocked it to the floor. I fell asleep. Woke about 1:00 a.m. I was so exhilarated, drunk with energy. I continued in that state for over twenty hours. When my ride picked me up the next day, he soon commented that I had a goofy smile on my face. I did, I could’t help it. I’m still inebriated with energy.

The days before and briefly after this experience are a dismal time for me. Very difficult. I am financially strained. Living expenses have gone up too much. I had become involved in an intensely mystifying, non-physical “love affair”. Whatever that was about, it took up all my emotional attention. As well, my studio contract was coming to an end. At a certain point, my plans for the academic schedule for the Fall semester fall apart. This is directly related to the impossibility of the “love affair”. My vocation is elsewhere. I am nearly desperate, under severe psychic and emotional stress.

People are beginning to return for school. I construct several rituals with returning friends. The rituals are beautiful things. Healings. Earlier the people of my parish had offered me a trip to Korea for a Eucharistic congress there. I refuse because of the expense and because, at the time of the offer, I had been committed to the Fall semester classes. But shortly after the Korean offer was made, the class schedule fell apart and seemingly so did the ‘relationship’. I was at a loss as to how I might resolve these emotional, spiritual and practical issues.

During one of the rituals mentioned in the previous paragraph, all of my spirit animals gathered. I am the eagle. The Black Widow was there as a spirit guide, also the Great Old Man and the dragons. My parent animals as well are there. All are gathered in the “land”, the interior landscape, to observe something. We waited and watched for several days. Then, “It” appears. It was awful. A terrible thing. A vast thing. Something out of a primordial place, black with fecund decay; it emerges. It wakes. Vast. My pantheon seems rather paltry in comparison. But then, after several days of dismay, I remind myself that the spider is the feminine aspect of God himself, and the Great Old Man is the Christ. But still, this new beast is horrible. It is like a great black snake. I waited for several days as it continues to rise. I have to go into it. Awful. I do. I must enter into the feminine, earth, fecundity, must identify with it. Sex, death, life; a swamp. I fit into a moist slit in its body. We begin to travel. Travel at a speed unimaginable even in these days of imaginable light speed. Then we arrive somewhere. I won’t describe that. What I am sure about is the rising and the travel of the beast, it is “neg.-entropy”.

I knew that in order to solve the financial and other problems this time, I would have to be very creative. It is at this time that the idea occurs to me that going to India, a research requirement for my Ph.D., would solve all the above situations. Though it would demand a major change of plans in the schedule of my Ph.D. program, it could be done. Travel at this time would give me distance and distraction from the “affair”. It would solve the financial problem because it is cheaper to live in India, therefore the extra expenses that were so defeating here would not exist. Most of the ticket would be paid for by the Korean connection.

This decision to go to India changed the entire mood of my life. Positive energy flowed into my situation. People sent money and gifts, more than I needed to cover the expenses of the trip. In the middle of all that, someone else offered me the use of a large studio and storage for all my books, art, and equipment. That offer also involved the favor of a significant art patron. My academic advisors are all delighted with my activities, especially my going to India. Many blessings came from this decision. It seemed directly associated with the ‘travel’ of the black snake “being”.

The travel to India, though academically justified by my study of Tibetan mandalas there, is really the next stage after the “Yemen Experiment”. This journey will conclude this long initiation on the spiritual path and describe definitively the figure of the spiritual warrior. The black ‘worm’ is a beast of vast power, raised to effect what is necessary for a broader vision of God’s intention in creation than what urbanized, humanistic and religious motives usually allow.

Finally, the black snake entered my central nervous system, macrocosm into microcosm, through the perineum. It stayed there for several days, stretched through my spinal column, tail to crown. In fact, psychically, it is that bone and nerve structure even now and will become a white and gold dragon that is the skeletal, nerve structure of the world. The kundalini connection seems obvious. (Compare with Bone marrow experience on the way to Dharamsala. That is the one foreign element in this developing Kundalini experience. See White’s Kundalini in Bibliography and compare with Shri Chacra Mandala- Tucci, Mandala– Art is deeply involved in this work, Bishop, in a powerful way.)

The results…. I am ready for India.

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hg75

98 [75.] Edge of an Ice Age, 100,000 B.C.

Mixed Media 42″x 32″ 1988

Sense the pressure (threat) of Nature on human consciousness, ‘civilized’ as well as ‘pre-historic.’

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hg76

99 [76.] of an Ice Age, 50,000 BC

Mixed Media 42″ x 32″ 1988

The pressure (threat) of Nature on human consciousness, ‘civilized’ as well as ‘pre-historic.’ Or, just the pressure/threat of/to existence, that can also be productive– or catastrophic!

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hg77

100 [77] Edge of an Ice Age, 10,000 BC

Mixed Media 42″ x 29″ 1988

The pressure (threat) of Nature on human consciousness, ‘civilized’ as well as ‘pre-historic.’ Then, a third salvific element is introduced to irreconcilable duality… resolution flows.