Truly one of Canada's great treasures, Marion Woodman, Jungian analyst, author, and wonderfully evocative and playful workshop leader discusses the deep meaning of environmental illness with filmmaker Nancy Riley in Abandoned Soul, Abandoned Planet (Interview, 1998). In her recent book, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness, she explores why the Dark Goddess must be honoured in daily life. In The Dark Goddess Returns (Interview, 1996), she talks about the need to recognize, welcome, and integrate the Deep Feminine. In an earlier interview, Empowering the Soul Through the Feminine (Interview, 1992), she shares her insights into the need for soul and body work in the quest for wholeness. She speaks here and in her books as one member of a culture emerging from years of "patriarchal thinking", attempting to incarnate and elucidate the feminine, crucial in allowing the soul its place in individuals and in the world.
There are a lot of books out on the concept of the soul. Do you have a definition?
Well, for me, the soul is the divine part of us that is embodied in this physical form for a few years. Eventually it is released, but I see soul as the embodied part. I see spirit as the energy, the disembodied energy that can come in to union with the soul in the body.
For example, a great dancer like Nureyev can prepare his instrument. His muscles can be in perfect shape through his attention and his concentration. So, his consciousness, his light in his body--which for me would be soul--can be a perfect instrument. But, he's a great dancer when spirit is in union with that instrument. The leap is in the union of soul and spirit.
So, a lot of your work is freeing up the soul so that it can be able to get in that union?
Yes, so the soul is strong enough to be able to accept that union. If it is weak, or if the body is not conscious, the spirit could come flashing in and cause a psychotic episode. It's like a Rolls Royce engine in a Volkswagen car. The energy could blast the container to pieces and that does happen to people.
I think of the soul as feminine, because it's the receiver--in both men and women. The artist, for example, has to have a receiver and just hopes to God that the spirit will come and touch into soul so that there will a poem come out of that union or a piece of music or art. It's in that surrender to the transcendent, or however you want to call the spirit energy, that art is created.
That manifests in dreams. A lot of people dream that there's going to be a wedding and the bride is all ready but there is no groom or there's something wrong with the groom. He's too young or he's got no legs or no heart or he's dying. Sometimes there's something wrong with the bridesmaid--the shadow side of the bride. So the union can't take place until they come together as equals and some people are at that stage now.
It seems that's the place at the end of a long quest. Does that have to be done through processes like psychoanalysis? Not everyone is going to be able to find the therapist to get them there.
I don't think it has to come through psychoanalysis. I mean not many people will get there if it did. I think it can come through life, with an experience, through loss--if people care enough about consciousness. You know, what does this loss--of relationship, of my partner in love, the job--mean? Suffering does seem to give us a chance to really come to consciousness.
I think the world we're in so many people would rather go into an addiction or into unconsciousness. The journey I'm talking about is a conscious journey and certainly many people in the past, through their religious faith, have gone on this journey.
But, I do see psychotherapy as a speeding up of the psychic process. In the Middle Ages people were terrified of miners and blacksmiths. Miners went into the earth and raped it before the jewels or minerals were ready to come out. They thought this was going against God's timing and that they would be punished.
A lot of people have similar feelings about therapists and analysts, that they are raping the unconscious by putting this kind of heat on the psyche. What this process does is speed up the maturation process and one has to be strong to take that kind of fire. Not everybody that goes into therapy goes into the fire.
No. They step back or...
They fool themselves. They're just not committed and are more interested in being supported than they are in doing the work. That sounds rough, and I certainly support so long as I see a need. Some people come in very, very broken and then one does support, but there is a point I think in our culture where people are addicted to being victims. It's very important to want to walk on your own legs instead of on crutches.
You said something like staying with the process is what matters, through imagery...
Yes, and body symptoms and experiences that just seem to come in from nowhere. It's amazing how synchronistic things become when you're going through the process. You can get to the point where you can hardly tell the difference between inner and outer. When you realize that inner and outer are the same the kind of person that you love in your dreams will be the kind that you are seeking in your outer life or indeed are married to.
As the inner relationship changes the outer relationship changes or you find a different person outside.
Dreams seem to be of primary importance in getting in touch with what's stopping the process or encasing the soul.
I put dreams and body symptoms on a par. Dreams bring to consciousness what's happening in the body. The dream imagery will tell you what the blocked energy in the body is about. For example, if you've got a frozen shoulder, often if you work on that the dream will tell you the conflicts that are holding that shoulder frozen. So, I keep working with dreams and body images toggether.
You have people do all different types of bodywork?
I don't think it matters what kind you do. I think it's the practitioner that matters. That means for me that they will not be trying to exert their own power, that they will allow the soul to express itself through the body just as it expresses itself through the psyche. In my experience the soul has been so raped that it just can't deal with power. It just turns off completely from anybody that tries to use power over it.
So the process is fairly subtle and empathic.
Yes, it's very subtle, because we're so used to power we don't even recognize it. Often the body recognizes it before the ego does. In other words, the ego may like a certain practitioner, but the body doesn't want to work with that person and will pull the energy back. You have to really look at that when it happens.
I've worked with people that I've really, really liked and yet when they touched my hand it said, "Thank you and good-bye". The energy just went out. The practitioner knew it had gone out and I knew and we knew we couldn't work together. Afterwards she found out from her own teacher that she was moving into another level of giving up power and my body had picked that up.
When you talk about giving up power so many women feel they're only just coming into their power, so the word power has a lot of connotations.
I'm using the word in the sense of controlling somebody else or trying to control yourself or your own body. An anorexic, for example, will drive her body as if--well, in their dreams they dream about concentration camps and Nazis, just so so cruel to the body.
When I'm talking about power I'm talking about the kind of attitude that does not value other people, certainly isn't interested in soul and couldn't care less about holy spirit. They just leave no room at all for things to happen.
What I strive for is empowerment, where you sense your own strength right through your whole being, that you are in touch with your feelings, anxieties and needs in your body. You are grounded in that and are embodied and through that embodiment you are empowered. You can act out of who you are, stand in your own truth and express your own truth.
At the same time--and here's the paradox--you're strong enough to step aside and let the much greater energy through. That's a real strength, the real power too, because you're in the tao if you're able to do that and not trying to push your own stupid little ego desires and trying to force them on yourself and other people. To me that's power.
You have said that you try to write your books in a way that's not of the will of the patriarchy. You're trying to write from your own voice, in a different way, trying to write from the feminine.
Yes. I don't always succeed and the more I work with it the more I'm coming into that feminine voice, but I used to be able to work according to the laws of unity and emphasis and coherence and I used to lecture from that point of view. But, there was nothing spontaneous and it didn't leave for anything to come flashing through. I found it very boring.
I read a paragraph in your books and all of a sudden there'll be a line in there coming right out of left field that will be totally pertinent and it will stop me. I can't read the book for a couple of weeks.
I don't experience it as coming out of left field, but I know people do. I think it's because I'm so used to working with the unconscious. I work with dreams six, seven hours a day so I'm used to the logic of the unconscious and it is very logical in its own way. It will just fire in an image that just hits you right in the belly, but sort of brings it all together and says, "Okay, you want to bring together emotions, intellect, imagination - there's the image." And it does make your gooseflesh zip up on your arms.
People have told me they don't understand the books at all, but their stomach is going round and their heart's beating fast and they can't understand why. It's because the unconscious is ringing in at the body level. I assume that's what's going on.
You're hitting something that some part of one knows is true.
Yes. I don't try to do that.
No, you wouldn't succeed.
No, I wouldn't. I just let it flash through and I hope I never do understand it. I think if I ever did I'd lose it. You know, it's like after Gretzky saw himself playing hockey on TV he couldn't hit the goal for a few weeks. He suddenly got his consciousness between him and the goal. I think he's a real Zen hockey player and in that sense I'm a Zen writer. I really don't try to do that, but I'm delighted when it happens.
Your writing in some way is an antidote to what's been called patriarchal thinking, some way of moving out of the bind that we seem to be in.
I try to stay more with feeling and imagery is, of course, tied into that feeling.
I want to make clear that I don't associate patriarchy with men any more. To me men are the victims of patriarchy just as much as women are, in fact moreso. I know many women are now coming into their femininity and they're looking for a masculine to balance that in themselves and they dream of poor broken men with no hearts and no legs. They're often little boys who've been smashed over the mouth so that they're very damaged. I think the full horror of what's happened to the masculine is just beginning to come into consciousness and to me patriarchy is a power principle of which Nazism was the epitome.
I think all of us have to really look so carefully at how we collude with patriarchy. We're so used to it that we don't even know how we're being struck by it.
In these buildings and architecture and technology and air conditioning, whatever, it all seems to be a product. We live McLuhan's curse, that the medium is indeed the message.
I always think in terms of microcosm and macrocosm and I think the body is the microcosm and time is the macrocosm. Every addict that I've every worked had to have their knees against the wall before they did anything really. They have to come to a place where they're on their knees asking for help and it's choosing between life and death.
That may sound apocalyptic, but I suspect we may have to suffer on this planet a lot more before we're going to change. But, I also have huge faith. I do believe in the evolution of consciousness and the evolution of God and I think that the feminine side of God is now going to come into consciousness and we don't want her. She sure is going to make one chaos of patriarchy and yet if she isn't brought to consciousness the planet is going to die. We know that, and we'll die in our own garbage.
So, I have faith that, maybe not in my lifetime but..., the feminine will come into consciousness. By that I mean the manifestation of light in matter, that matter is sacred, and that God can be manifested through light in matter. That's what the French Impressionists were trying to paint and what the Romantics were trying to write music about.
So, the Gaia principle and all these ideas that are coming to the fore are ways of bringing this symbology at least here and the reality...
I think the reality will come. We are living in the atomic age and Einstein is about matter releasing into energy and that's what I'm talking about. Unconscious matter is actually, at a cellular level, capable of becoming energy and radiating light.
So long as we just go along defiling it and thinking that we've got the right to do as we please we're raping the feminine side of God and we will not get away with it. We do it to our bodies. We treat them like junk shops.
A question about Leaving My Father's House. It's quite different from your other ones in that you've had three other participants.
I like other people to have a chance to express their creativity and felt that each of those women was totally able to express their own experience and what was the point of me getting between her and the reader. I had my input in the book. It's an example of stepping aside.
That book wanted to be. The three of them all started writing at the same time. They were all totally on their own, miles apart, beginning a process of articulation and that's how it turned out.
Is the process for doing this sort of work different for men and women?
I think the rituals involved are different. Women's rituals tend to be around body, menstruation, women's biological worlds. Men's rituals, I'm sure, are around men's biological worlds. They'll likely be on a very spiritual level.
Every process is different. No two women's process is the same either. So I think while the imagery is different in men's and women's dreams and certainly while the energy in the body is different--you know, when I worked with men only in body groups I used to get blown against the wall. But, there is an archetypal part that is very similar.
The journey, the quest.
Yes, the fundamental images of the quest seem to me very much the same. In the man's dreams he has to separate out from the mother, then reconnect and find the virgin within himself. I think many men think that once they've found mothering they've found the feminine and they aren't anywhere near the virgin in themselves, with that kind of femininity. But, it's all beginning to flower.
I do have men in my practice. I like to hold that balance. But, I like to take 30 women away into nature alone and let the process take over. Most women can't endure being with men at this point. They're too vulnerable. They don't know what their own femininity is and they can't deal with the confusion of being with men, at least until they get stronger.
I've experienced that with men's groups, too. They feel they've finally made some leap to actually get together in some meaningful way and that they need to do the work by themselves for a while.
Yes. That's what Robert Bly and I try to do at our conferences. He works with the men, I work with the women and then we bring them together. It's always immensely moving when the two come together. The moment is unforgettable.
You once said that once you rely on dreams it's like a rudder in the unconscious and will help convert the conscious ever so subtly. It's important to stay with those images.
Yes, I see the whole cycle of life as a ship and a sailboat specifically, because it's not got a motor that's going to propel it. It's going to take its energy from the wind and the sails and the wind, of course, is an image of the holy spirit.
At the same time the hand is on the rudder, taking the energy from the sea itself, and you have to direct your boat with the imagery that's coming from the unconscious, so that the dream will tell you if you have been true to soul during the last 24 hours. Often it will echo back through the years to the places where you betrayed soul in the same way as you betrayed it in the last 24 hours.
It may give you a dream of living in your house when you were 20 years old and what happened yesterday is the same kind of thing you did when you were 20.
So the soul wants 24 hour awareness.
Yes. Some people, of course, it takes 36 or 48 hours. People have to figure out how long it takes a dream to respond. Some people it's not the same day, it's maybe even the third day. The body will come back to equilibrium through sleep and the psyche also comes back to equilibrium through sleep. It's the dreams that bring equilibrium.
They've found that it's not the sleep deprivation so much as the dream deprivation that makes people wild if they don't sleep.
I know some people can't get their dreams if they're wakened by an alarm clock or if they don't have enough sleep or they'll get them later if they sleep in.
Yes. Certainly the process we've been talking about is dependent on bringing the dream into consciousness, but I think the dream can do a great deal even if you don't get it. It's doing something to re-establish a balance.
Even if you only get the feeling of the dream and don't try to interpret at all the feeling can give you a very different kind of balance for your day.
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So she's very accepting.
Of human beings, yes. She's very accepting, but in loving and honouring her we can accept our humanity. This is what is at the root of so many addictions and so much shame and guilt in our society. People cannot accept their humanity. They cannot forgive themselves for being human.
If this figure comes into a dream and is kind to you or takes you in her arms and holds you, it is such a shocking shift of energy that I've known people who've radically changed after such a dream. It's not orthodox Christianity, but on the other hand in Europe many churches do have a Dark Goddess or Black Goddess right within the church walls. I've never seen one in Canada or the States, but they're not uncommon in Europe and they have been beloved for centuries.
Well, this accepting energy that allows us to be human is different than the all-encompassing Mother Goddess energy, I gather?
Yes, because she's not only mother. She does have a child always with her and that child is a god. We have to remember that. She is a madonna, but also, certainly throughout the middle ages, people worshipped her in their sexuality, in childbirth. They prayed to her that they would have children in marriage--very much related to sexuality.
So, one of the things that leads to transformation is this great acceptance of our humanity, and that's . . .
Yes, that's right. You see she's also a Goddess of chaos. Chaos is darkness. In India, for example, they call her Kali. We all know the pictures of Kali with the skulls around her neck and dancing on a dead corpse and carrying the knife and the cupful of blood and the head she's carrying--she has four arms and she carries the head and the cup underneath it with the blood.
This figure is beloved in India because she lives in the moment. They will spend weeks in an Indian village creating a mud statue of her. They work very very hard to make her as beautiful as possible. Then on her day they celebrate and they sing and they dance and they carry the statue through the streets and when the day is over they throw it in the water. It's gone in a minute. That's their acceptance of death and the realization that life and death are two sides of one coin.
That is something we have yet to learn in our culture. In our culture death is taboo and we don't really believe that new life comes out of death. So, we're very liable, when we lose our job or our marriage or our partner in death, to think that our life is over and we tend to get caught in dead imagery. Whereas with the honouring of the Dark Goddess we can accept life and death, rebirth, as part of an ongoing pattern.
When you say honouring or worshipping what do you really think we here in the West, in Canada, now in 1996, need to do to make that happen and why do we need to do it?
Well, we're faced with the breakdown of our old civilization, I think, and the institutions are collapsing. The morals and ethics that I valued throughout most of my life are not valued now. Our own country is collapsing because we cannot see anything but the opposites. The feminine perspective, the Dark Goddess perspective, would hold the opposites as paradox, not as oppositions. Death and life are simply the paradoxical reality.
It seems to me that if we cannot move to that place, if we stay with our either/or patriarchal vision, our country is going to break apart. At a planetary level what possible hope is there of ever bringing anything together? How can we live on this planet if we don't develop a both/and vision.
The other thing that's so important with this Goddess is her honouring of matter and her love of the Earth, this humus, this humility, the Oneness of every living thing, that we the animals and plants are all part of her. So, in honoring her you can't take a buzz saw and go out and start sawing down every tree you feel like massacring. You can't bear to see the sap weeping down the side of it, because you're cutting down part of yourself.
That may sound exaggerated, but we have lost the unitary vision on which this planet depends. We are a global village now and we have no idea how to deal with that.
And to make it even more impossible to deal with these huge changes, much of the local has broken down. There are moves to amalgamate towns and school boards into greater and greater areas, to make society even more impersonal. There's such a huge tendency to go against what needs to happen instead of, for instance, honouring the local.
And honouring the individual. There's a huge move on the part of corporations to simply fire a third of their employees. What are those people going to do? There aren't going to be jobs for them because machines are going to be able to do those jobs. So, we're going through an immense transformation. I think it's even bigger than the industrial revolution. We have no idea where we're going. All we know is what we're losing. Our leaders don't know where we're going, obviously.
So we're dependent on our own imagery to guide us.
You see the Dark Goddess imagery emerging in dreams trying to tell us something that we need to have in our individuals lives. You're saying we need to move beyond both matriarchy and patriarchy.
Many people, if they let this awareness in at all, know that everything is being destroyed and they are, I think, quite shattered and brought up short about what to do.
Eat, drink and be merry.
Because they don't have a sense of their beingness?
And those values are the ones of honouring body, Earth, self?
You're basically saying that in order for human beings to survive the only choice we're being offered--and I guess that's the paradox in the situation--is that we find ourselves so we will act in a way that is in accordance with the energy of what you call the Dark Goddess.
The words masculine and feminine, like Goddess, are quite loaded, not necessarily understood.
That's right. A matriarchy was never brought to consciousness in the world, and I don't think patriarchy was very conscious either, but certainly patriarchy has become a controlling, power-over principle, and that cannot work any longer on this little planet. It will only destroy both the tyrant and the victim.
That's right. I think they're falling back into addictive behaviour as a result. They find it very hard to face the reality of what's happening.
Well, or even just depression, drinking or drugs. I think many people are isolating themselves because they are so frightened and, with a patriarchal vision, for good reason, because they are losing their homes and jobs and identities that made them who they thought they were.
The feminine principle will look to the being of the person, not to the persona or the doing. It will honour the beingness. This, of course, is where so many people feel empty.
No, they don't. They will say to you that they can't go home at night because the apartment is empty. I say, "But you're there", but to them that means emptiness, nobody there. Now that is tragic, for a person to experience themselves as nobody. We've lost the feminine you see and now that our structures are collapsing where is the beingness and where are the values of the feminine that could take hold now and make it possible for people to live in a different way? That's what this book is about.
Body, Earth and also honouring paradox. That's extemely important. If you get into either I have a job or I don't, and you've lost it, then you've got nothing but despair. Either I do or don't have my wife, there again despair if you've lost her. But, if you can accept paradox you can say, "Well, yes maybe I have lost this but maybe there's something else in my destiny here and maybe I can find the light in the darkness. Maybe there's another job that would be creative and if I go into this chaos I'll find the creative seeds."
You see, the Black Goddess is associated with chaos, but people who don't go into chaos never find their own creativity. They follow the train tracks. They follow the collective values. They may never find themselves, but if the train takes off and starts going through the bush, they'd better find something else or they're going to die.
Yes, I would say it's the laws of the universal feminine. Now, we're not talking about the universal masculine at this point, but they are in union. The two go together. We're focusing on the feminine because it has been so lost for 2000 years. But the masculine that has also been so damaged and so profoundly emotionally wounded by the patriarchy is now beginning to come forward. When those two energies start working together it is so exciting in an individual. It's going to happen culturally, I think, as well, ultimately.
I think the people who will become the leaders in the new century will have a balance of those energies. Otherwise they won't be able to hold this country together, for example. We are so disparate now that we have to find our unity in our diversity. That takes masculine and feminine union to bring that about.
In the lecture, I will carefully define what I mean by those terms. It's a whole different way of thinking. The feminine is interested in process, in living right here in the now. The Kali is here right now, she's thrown in the water, she's gone. You have to live in the moment.
People who have lived through an addiction or faced death through an illness (and I think many people are facing that now with the immune systems that are breaking down), have to live in the now, right here, because there is no future. It just makes life so exquisite when you have today and maybe not tomorrow. Then you begin to see what you do have. That's the present tense feminine. It's based on matter and matter does not live forever. It is subject to life, death and rebirth.
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Nancy Ryley: Marion, you have said that we have to confront our addictions first, before we can connect to nature. Does our refusal to confront our addictions lead indirectly to our destruction of Mother Earth?
Marion Woodman: I think so, yes. As children many of us feel a deep connection to Her. But our culture warps our natural instincts. That warping leads to addictions. But there’s a suicidal drive in the addicted individual and in the addicted society. Our planet is coming up against the wall. There’s famine over much of the Earth, problems with the rain forests and the ozone layer and over-population, and garbage that we put into ships and set afloat because we don’t know what to do with it.
Yet, despite these horrors, we are still doing precisely what we know will be ultimately destructive. Denial! Denial! We are still accepting a cultural value that annihilates the Earth. If we don’t change, we are going to our own extinction. This is precisely what addicts do. Addicts—in other words most of our society—pretend there’s nothing wrong. As they laugh and talk and plan, they deny their dying souls. That’s what we’re doing to the planet. We fight about things that won’t matter if we are extinct.
You mean addicts have lost touch with the instinct for survival?
That’s right. We have a consumer society where there’s no hope for a satiation point, because we’re cut off from our instinctive roots that would know when to stop eating, or drinking, or consuming, or whatever.
And what’s the result of that on the planet?
To destroy it. An addict is destroying himself. Or herself. And if we have no respect for our own matter we will certainly have no respect for the planets matter. We’ll just go on plundering it.
How can we stop all this, Marion?
The only way to stop it is to reconnect with the roots.
When Jung said that we had "lifted ourselves up from our roots and were about to lose our connection to the earth," is that what he meant?
Yes. He meant that we’ve lost touch with our archetypal instincts, with the feminine, with matter. In the physical dimension the archetype is a natural pattern. The pigeon follows a natural courting pattern; the mourning dove has a slightly different one. Every creature has its own inner antenna that says hibernate, or fly south, or whatever. Everything in nature has an archetype within it that directs its growth and its behavior. One day someone is going to say, "Of course, the archetype contains the DNA." The DNA is the pattern that makes you what you are, physically.
In our society, we don’t relate to our instincts in our bodies any more than we relate to the spiritual side of the archetype. Jung pictured the normal rhythmic flow of energy between the two as a spectrum with red at one end of the spectrum representing our instincts, and blue at the other end representing the spiritual dimension. He saw this as the energy of the psychoid archetype, because it has two sides. And he considered the physical end of the spectrum just as important as the spiritual dimension of the archetype. In other words, our relationship to the patterns of our bodies was as important as our relationship to the patterns in our psyches. That’s where the totality lay.
And you’re saying that if we lose touch with our instinctive knowledge of those natural patterns we no longer know how to function and respond in a normal way? Is that because they no longer knew where the sea was? And as addicts we too have lost our proper orientation to the planet? Because of us, the Earth has never before been in such a diminished state. You know, we talk and talk about these things, Marion, but very few people seem to be registering. I don’t even know that cancer will do it, or environmental illness, because we humans seem able to adapt ourselves to anything. If the tap water is contaminated we buy bottled water. If the air is giving us problems, we buy an air filter. But the poor can’t afford vitamin pills to make up for denatured food, or filters for the air and the water. What worries me is that by adapting and then hunkering down to look after ourselves, we better-off people are forgetting the bigger picture. I did that myself—I went right off into that self-protective space. Psychologically, I couldn’t get beyond the four walls where I knew I was physically safe from the contaminated world. Then my life became a prison. How do you make people understand that as long as we’re "addicted" to patriarchal/materialistic values we run the risk of destroying ourselves? Is it only out of the world’s awareness of its collective pain that soul awakening will come? Do you think that the pain many of us are now enduring is being given to us so that we may reconnect with God?
I would suggest that when we pollute the earth because of our various addictions—when we destroy the natural unity in nature—that physical human responses, and plant and animal responses, are disturbed and in some cases destroyed.
There was a tragic film made years ago called Mondo Cane which showed the devastation wreaked by the 1945 atomic bomb on the Pacific. Great sea turtles, instead of following their natural archetypal patterns to the sea, turned and went inland to find water. They died there in the sand.
Exactly. It was the saddest thing; I just sat in the theater and cried. Here were these 400-year-old turtles, and the darling things had done what they had always done: they’d laid their eggs. Then they turned in the wrong direction. They turned away from the sea and they climbed the sand dune, and turned upside-down as soon as they got to the top. They tried to go over the dune but their bodies had upset and they died stranded like that. They had lost touch with the instinctive side of the correct thing to do. An addict is like that great turtle turning around to the sand dune instead of to the sea.
I think so. If the Earth isn’t functioning the way it was meant to, we have no guide, no compass to steer by.
That’s exactly my point. Why is the universal sperm count so diminished? Why doesn’t the body remember how to get well? This is a very important point because of your interest in the mystery of why the body turns against itself when the auto-immune system breaks down. Why does this happen? Why does the body become its own enemy?
My point is that it has disassociated from the physical energetic field of the archetype. It has done so because the Earth is so full of unnatural pollutants that it no longer carries the pure archetypal energy for us to relate to. Now even our food is in danger of genetically engineered tampering—which, incidentally, we may be oblivious to as we eat our tinkered-with tomato.
People, as you say, aren’t registering—but we aren’t just talking words, Nancy. That’s where people like you and me come in; I am one of millions of people with cancer, and you are one of millions with environmental illness. What will wake people up if their own death sentence doesn’t?
I know; I have had people in my practice who went from sickness to sickness. It became a neurosis, and all their energy got tied up in nourishing the neurosis because they couldn’t look at the larger picture. This is not only annihilation of the individual, it’s annihilation of the planet. It’s all one. That’s the point, Nancy. It is a uni-verse. If we don’t relate our individual illness to the planet’s illness, life becomes purposeless.
I don’t try anymore. I did for a while, but I think people have to come to a place where they’re against the wall and on their knees before they turn around. If we haven’t been on our own knees in front of our own wall, to the point where we want to do something about the plain fact that we can’t get up, we won’t do anything for anybody else. Certainly we won’t do anything for a tree. Not to mention the Earth. So long as we’re trapped in our arrogance, we know nothing about compassion.
I know from my own experience, and from my experience with my analysands, that until we’re against the wall we don’t really do anything to change. It’s terrible that we have to learn in this way, but it seems that extremity is necessary to open people’s hearts. I think that it’s that striking down that opens the heart. And the opening of the heart is where the forgiveness comes in.
Yes. I think we have to open our hearts and feel our collective wound. That’s where we learn love. Through our own suffering, our hearts are broken open in love for one another.
But love in our culture is such a sentimental chocolate-syrup word. So often it means need, compulsive need. But love is an energy. It moves through our bodies; it moves between people, a force that holds atoms together. That’s how I understand love.
If you think of God as an energy coming from inside, and God as both masculine and feminine (I insist on that because for most people God tends to have only masculine connotations)—if you think of that energy as God and Goddess, then yes, I believe ours is a journey to the realization, the making real, of the god and goddess within each individual. "The Kingdom of God is within you." It is also without.
But I think that to mature into the society where we are now moving, we first have to be free of the old father and his patriarchal laws that protect the old mother and her deadly security, because they cripple us. We have to be free of the archaic images of God and Goddess.
God and Goddess are manifesting in new imagery. Our task, I believe, is to connect with those images that are now the new perceptions, the new experiences of love within us.
Can you elaborate on these new perceptions of God and Goddess imagery? Do you think that the new imagery will connect us to the higher energies we need to evolve, even if we don’t understand it right now? The imagery that’s coming into your life now, are you able to work with it and have it help you?
I have talked about God and Goddess as archetypal energies, and the fact that we cannot see those magnetic fields with our eyes. But artists have always created images of them. Dreams are images of those archetypal dimensions, and how their energies are relating to each other. We look at a medieval painting and we see the old God, God the Father, whirling fishes about in the sea. We may admire the artistic energy without being able to connect to the image. Or we may look at a nineteenth-century sentimental Christ and not be able to connect to that either. Different periods of history have different images that they put onto the archetype of this huge energetic field called God, or this other huge field called the Goddess
The images that were once so popular in the church, images that satisfied the imaginations of people who believed in them (transubstantiation as metaphor, for example) are no longer satisfying for many people. In part because technology has made such inroads on the imagination, people can’t imagine the mystery. For us there’s got to be new imagery.
So the Dream Maker, or whatever you want to call the energy that creates these dreams, gives us these miracles—these images—every night. Sometimes we’re struck down by the uniqueness and originality of the images that appear. We’ve no idea where they come from: we call them bizarre. Yet, if you pick up a book on quantum physics, you may see the image that appeared in your dream; you may see the energy moving in the electrons and photons as it manifested in your dream. There is a profound connection between quantum physics, the body, and the spiritual mysteries. The new imagery is connected to that relationship between matter and energy.
Many artists today are painting energy; many healers "see" energy fields in the body and attempt to reconnect them into a harmonic whole. It’s in our unconscious and it’s been this way from the beginning of time.
Yes, I think we’re going into a totally new ethos, one that is beyond our imagination, where there’s a new masculine and a new feminine. But we still have no idea where it is that we’re going. Still, the images in our dreams each night take us a little closer. I think that by keeping in touch with our dreams we will very slowly move towards a different Reality.
Cultural patterns are being shifted through individual dreams. For example, a person who is locked in matter (a negative mother complex) in a body that is dense, without consciousness—if that person works daily with dream imagery, body consciousness, and sound in the body, then the metabolism of the body changes and the cells vibrate with new, light energy. The sensibilities and sensitivities are transformed. Perception is opened to other levels.
So that all we can do is stay on our paths and move with the imagery that is taking us. That’s the feminine principle: enjoy the process. Trust the process. We may never see the product, but that’s all right.
The imagery that’s coming into my life now is brand-new imagery. It has to do with vibrations. That’s why I’m so interested in quantum physics, and in the power of images in dreams to change the chemistry of the body. The images that we eat, psychically, are able to change the chemistry of our body. Do you know that, Nancy? It’s the science of psychoneuroimmunology.
For example, we can choose whether we’re going to watch the television news every night at eleven o’clock. We can choose whether to eat those horrendous images and take them to bed and try to digest them all night. We need to be conscious of the connection between those images and the fact that we can barely crawl to work the next morning and that our immune system is gradually breaking down. Which I guess is one reason why we’re raping and plundering everything—we pick it up on the tube every night. Tell me about the sword. Are these the questions that everybody should be asking themselves? This is a lot for most people to take on, you know, Marion. Most people will say, "I’m going along all right in my life; why do I need to do all this soul-searching? Why do I need to go through all that pain?" What do you think life would be like without doing this work? What is your purpose?
Just as we have the power to choose to eat junk food physically, so we have the power to choose to feed ourselves murderous imagery psychically. Then we create a murderous interior. And that is partly what’s going on in our whole technological world.
That’s right. And that’s where the masculine sword has to be used, where we say, "I will turn those images off at this time of night." This is where a lot of people haven’t got the masculine strength to protect the feminine. The sword is important, Nancy. I’m not talking about blinding ourselves to reality. I’m talking about making space for our soul to communicate with us.
Well, the sword I’m talking about is the sword of discretion, with which I say, "Is this program of value to me? Is this the right time to watch it? Is it sapping my energy?" Questions such as these have to be asked about ideas, relationships, possessions, anything that may be becoming destructive to the soul’s growth. What is destructive has to be, first of all, recognized; and, secondly, cut. That takes courage.
Time is huge now. We have to ask ourselves, "Is there time for this in my own individual life? Have I got time to spend on this, or do I have to work on the new imagery? Where is the value here?" That’s what I mean by using the masculine sword in one’s life.
Yes. But it’s easier to sleep in the past than to open our eyes to a future we don’t know.
I think that the people who are doing the soul-searching have no alternative. It is very painful, and it gets them into painful situations. But I think some people are, either by destiny or by their own nature, called to do it, and they have no alternative.
I don’t think anybody chooses to do this work. On the other hand, I don’t really think anyone escapes either. Some people die rather than do it. Things happen to all of us. Jung tells us that what is not brought to consciousness comes to us as fate.
Well, it would be unconscious—vege-ing out; it would be living the life of what I call a happy carrot. And if you’re a happy carrot you just say, "Well, that’s fate, this was meant to happen. I accept what comes along, and I get on with it. I don’t ask a whole lot of questions and I don’t pretend to be God with a whole lot of answers. I can’t see the point of philosophizing and intellectualizing everything until there’s no joy left. And all this business of writing down dreams—it’s all fantasy. Mystical crap."
That’s what they say. And I’ll tell you, I honestly envy them sometimes. I would love to be a happy carrot. But I can’t be. I have to keep asking questions. And I can’t be bothered living if there’s no purpose; that’s the truth. I cannot be bothered living if there is no purpose.
I believe there is a higher purpose. I believe that my soul has work to do while I’m here on this earth, that there is a karma, that I have to burn off a certain amount of darkness, unconsciousness, garbage from my soul in the few years that I’m here, in order to go on to the next life.
Because I don’t believe the soul can die, Nancy. That’s the agony of it. You can see the abandoned soul looking out of the eyes and saying, "See me. Don’t let me die in here." The soul can be abandoned and left in a dark hole in the attic, a dark hole in the cellar. But it doesn’t die. That is the agony that manifests in dreams.
In India they say that the soul repeats, and comes back again. And the process goes on and on and on. That’s what is meant by burning off our karma. Experiencing life through the inner eye of the soul, and through the life of the imagination, is everything to you, then, isn’t it, Marion? About the tie of the imagination to the Divine, is there "a glory to be expressed," as you once put it? You do see hope for "the Forsaken Garden" then, do you, Marion? Was there ever such a place?
Addicts tend to abandon their souls. They go screaming and roaring off in whatever direction, but if they’re drinking themselves into eternal sleep they’re not living the soul. In dreams it shrieks and screams and begs for attention.
Finally there is a moment in life when they’re thrown against a wall and have to decide: "Do I want to live or do I want to die?" And that means, am I going to let my soul live or am I going to abandon it and hold onto my addiction until I die? Which is it? And they choose.
Many people go to sleep and never ask themselves the question. They just quietly go on sleepwalking. But the soul is no less abandoned.
Now, once you make the soul choice you’re in different territory—totally different territory because you allow the transcendent to manifest through your body-instrument. It’s like being a dancer, or a cello, or a paint brush. You are the instrument that’s being used to animate that’s coming through.
If soul and imagination are surrendered to God and Goddess, then it is everything. It’s the real purpose of being alive. For me the creative masculine is the surrendered imagination. My conscious feminine container surrenders to that creative masculine. Then life is intercourse with the Divine. Out of that union comes the Divine Child, the new consciousness.
Yes, there’s a glory to be expressed! But it depends on how you see that. I’m not going off the earth in saying that. For me the glory to be expressed is the glory of the violet with a raindrop on it, or the glory of the pink on that cloud out there. Or the clouds of glory surrounding a newborn baby. Or the fact that I can move my finger and know what it takes to move that finger. All these are miracles. Matter is sacred: the human and the Divine interwoven.
This is why I have such faith that the planet will survive. I don’t think that we are the ultimate boss. I think that there is an evolution going on now from within the psyche that is pushing consciousness towards a recognition of the conscious feminine. And it’s never been on this planet before. Human beings have never before had to perceive the sacredness of matter in order to survive.
Whether we like it or not, we are being forced, right now, to recognize that. It’s not in the future. Right now if we look right there, we can see the manifestation of the Divine on earth. If we can’t see it, then we’re either blind or stupid; our eyes aren’t open to the miracle that is happening every minute in nature.
You know, Nancy, maybe this is the period in which we are returning to the Garden. Adam and Eve, when they were thrust out of the Garden, had to then walk all the way around it, experiencing the other three gates until they understood the meaning of the whole Garden. Then they could re-enter it at the gate from which they were turned out. Maybe Eve, who originally introduced Adam to the Tree of Experience, is now taking him back and introducing him to the Tree of Life.
If we ever did return to the Garden it would be a very different place from the innocent paradise of our childhood because it would have within it our awareness of a balance of nature, humanity, and divinity.
No, but we do have a dream of wholeness inside us. It would be a Garden where human beings would treat each other in a very different manner than we do now, a place where there was a natural moral law that could be depended on.
I grew up in my father’s garden, and I took everything for granted. If I wanted a carrot I went over and pulled one and ate it. I was innocent. But there’s a greater innocence than childhood innocence. It’s the wisdom of someone who has gone through life and realizes the price that is paid for consciousness, and who can then value the Garden. Older people can come to that simplicity, that higher innocence. The ordinary things? As you said earlier, your illness took you there. Do you feel that one of the reasons that you are still here is so that you can convey the meaning of your experience to the rest of us? Do you feel that most people try to avoid the pain of consciousness—the pain of the life-death-rebirth experience—in our culture?
The return to the Garden is about coming full circle. It’s about returning to a place with knowing, bringing to it a consciousness that was not there before. It’s a new vision of the Garden because we have changed. Understanding the meaning of the Garden makes us a part of the whole of life. Blake talks about the child’s world of innocence. Then we go out into "generation," as he calls it, or the world of experience. We live in that world until we return to the Garden, bringing to it our knowledge of experience and consciousness so that we see it as if for the first time. That conscious seeing is the higher innocence, Blake’s Jerusalem. Now we can see, and we can hear, and we can smell, and we can touch—with a totally different perception.
That’s where my illness has taken me. I thought it was all being taken from me, then suddenly I was able to see in a totally different way because I valued what I was looking at.
The very ordinary extraordinary things. Ever since I’ve had cancer the whole world has become the sacredness of matter. That’s the Garden that we return to. I feel that I’ve done the full circle.
Well, I can describe it, but I really feel that we human beings have to go through some near-death experience in order to value the Garden. Everyone has to go through that in some way. Once you realize that life could end tomorrow, you see trees, you see the sky, you see everything differently. I’m very aware that this could all end in a flash, literally. One heart attack and it’s all over.
A fundamental principle of the feminine is that it’s a transformation process based on death as part of life. That’s nature. In winter we’re into the death cycle, in spring it’s a rebirth. That’s the important thing about the feminine: you always look to the birth. When I’m lying in bed at night, Sophia very gently whispers and reassures me that Her cycle is life, death, and rebirth. Accepting that principle makes death possible.
Yes, I do; that’s where the addiction comes in. When it comes to pain, we don’t want it; so we avoid it in any possible way we can.
As you know, Nancy, I see this culture in terms of addictions. An addict can be blind to the death wish that is killing him, or he can open his eyes and choose life. As people on this planet we can do the same thing—we can choose to live in the Garden or we can destroy it. We can either stupidly proclaim that we are all-powerful; there is no miracle out there; there is no life-force that we have to bow to. Or we can humbly acknowledge that there is an incredible mystery creating all those different life forms.
Including us. Are we each a spark of some Greater Soul, do you think? What do you think will happen?
That’s how I see it. If we believe in a divine order, then everything, everything on the Earth, is part of that divine order. We’re all little sparks of One Soul. We are "ensouled" on this planet. And once that comes through to consciousness, we understand what love is. The atoms are held together by love; love is the glue that holds it all together.
Maybe that’s what the new millennium will be about, realizing that we are all ensouled in One Soul. I do believe in Divine Providence. I don’t think that the globe could have evolved this far only to be annihilated. My sense is that this chaos that we’re going through could go on for a long time yet—that maybe we’re only at the beginning of the real chaos. But when we finally come to our knees, something else will happen.
We might realize that we are one people inhabiting one country—that we are all part of One Soul. That we do belong. That we are all part of one cosmos.
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