The Alchemist - a heart quote

Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist. p. 129-131: The heart speaks ...

"My heart is a traitor," the boy said to the alchemist, when they had paused to rest the horses. "It doesn't want me to go on."
"That makes sense," the alchemist answered. "Naturally it's afraid that, in pursuing your dream, you might lose everything you've won."
"Well, then, why should I listen to my heart?"
"Because you will never again be able to keep it quiet. Even if you pretend not to have heard what it tells you, it will always be there inside you, repeating to you what you're thinking about life and about the world."
"You mean I should listen, even if it's treasonous?"
"Treason is a blow that comes unexpectedly. If you know your heart well, it will never be able to do that to you. Because you'll know its dreams and wishes, and will know how to deal with them. You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it's better to listen to what it has to say. That way, you'll never have to fear an unanticipated blow."
The boy continued to listen to his heart as they crossed the desert. He came to understand its dodges and tricks, and to accept it as it was. He lost his fear... and one day his heart told him it was happy. "Even though I complain sometimes," it said, "it's because I'm the heart of a person and people's hearts are that way. People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don't deserve them, or that they'll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren't, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly."
"My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.
"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity."
"Every second of the search is an encounter with God," the boy told his heart. "When I have been truly searching for my treasure, every day has been luminous, because I've known that every hour was a part of the dream that I would find it. When I have been truly searching for my treasure, I've discovered things along the way that I never would have seen had I not had the courage to try things that seemed impossible for a shepherd to achieve."
So his heart was quiet for an entire afternoon. That night, the boy selpt deeply and when he awoke, his heart began to tell him things that came from the Soul of the World. It said that all people who are happy have God within them. And that happiness could be found in a grain of sand from the desert, as the alchemist had said. Because a grain of sand is a moment of creation, and the universe has taken millions of years to create it. "Everyone on earth has a treasure that awaits him," his heart said.

I pray we all listen to our hearts speaking and remember the search itself is our treasure.

Connectedness

I wondered about the following due to my interest in consciousness - just what is it? Related thoughts sprung up in thinking about how much each of us is projecting... Then I asked myself why is it we do this looking outside ourselves for answers. It struck me that the psyche, as understood within Jungian psychology, arose out of the "wholeness" of a universal functioning consciousness; then there was no body, no separation of beingness in a physical body. No brain box held it all within, giving it eyes to see, ears to hear, smell, touch, taste. It might be added that then no attachments as we know them existed either. The psyche remains a part of that whole and knows no separation except in the secondary experience of itself. The "it" inside the box that finds itself looking out and listening. The web of connectedness, the universal functioning consciousness, is like a spider's web. A spoke of the wheel is contacted by something material and a vibration occurs, or a transference of energy, like the flow of electricity, that distributes itself throughout the web. In this a priori state there was no ego, ego was born with the birth of separateness and finiteness. The ego protects the vessel, the brain box, that holds the 'psyche' in its a priori universal energies, energies that still by nature flow out, receive and return without boundaries. We are the whole web. But, physically we are separate, cut off from others, alone and vulnerable; all of which emotions were unknown within the a priori state. We are both separate from the whole and yet not separate from the whole. Previously, there had been no one to feel, to desire, to own, to realize, or to have awareness of an experience that was unique to itself and could only be shared secondarily at best. Is the reason we each of us automatically use our psyches first to reach out to the "other" in this resonating way, perhaps searching way is because none of us remembers in such moments that we are physically separate. Something instinctive to the a priori condition of consciousness leads the psyche to searching for answers from the collective. Is it that we forget to seek answers from the Self because in the beginning there was no Self. Self was born as the stars were born. Conditions existed that could have no other outcome? I wonder why universal consciousness became the individuated Self? What is the purpose? Why did we have to leave that state and become separate from the whole... and why did there have to be a memory of the wholeness to plague us... is it to find the God spirit within us? Some say without consciousness there would be no universe. Is that our purpose - that the Universe must be self-aware.

Study of Individuation

So I was reading Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, his chapter on A Study in the Process of Individuation, it describes a woman, my age, who (as he writes) "lived with the unconscious equivalent of a human partner, namely the animus (the personification of everything masculine in a woman)..." This woman teaches him about mandalas, as a tool to reach the unconscious, making it conscious in its manifestation and testament. I feel in some real ways, like this woman so I found this chapter intriguing and the series of images of her mandalas (about 20) are inspirational. The woman is not an "artist" and over the years her work, her creations from the unconscious, are more and more sophisticated and beautiful to look at even without the interpretation of meaning that Jung describes in detail here. In the conclusion of this chapter, Jung writes, "... the masses are not changed unless the individual changes." Then, "[T]he bettering of a general ill begins with the individual, and then only when he makes himself and not others responsible." I wanted to share these quotes as even though Jung wrote them many decades ago, they are apt and perfectly expressive of what is still needed now during the "change time." It serves to inspire us all as individuals to remain involved in the "change" that must be present now and in the future. We can't rely on some other authority to do what must be done. It is you. It is me. This individual effort and focus can be worked from the smallest and most personal scale. The ripples will be felt as they spread out from the source of creation, the conscious with the unconscious collective flowing out and all around....

Mystery of the Unconscious - c.f.Jung

It is always awe inspiring to find the breadcrumbs left on the trail to assist us in finding our way. Assuming we are looking down in this analogy (see post on the Night Sky here). In reading Jung's The Undiscovered Self (1957) I came across the following to add to the previous post> "Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only insofar as it is consciously reflected and consciously expressed by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being. Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position coequal with the principle of physical being. The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche of his own volition but is, on the contrary, preformed by it, and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. If the psyche must be granted an overriding empirical importance, so also must the individual , who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche. ... [T]he common psychiatric experience that the devaluation of the psyche and other resistances to psychological enlightenment are based ... on fear ... of the discoveries that might be made in the realm of the unconscious. ... It is the fear of the unconscious which not only impedes self knowledge but is the gravest obstacle to a wider understanding and knowledge... Often the fear is so great that one dares not to admit it even to oneself." I believe this is essentially bringing up what philosophers call the the mind/body problem. Which is what is consciousness, our creation from biochemical and physiological derivation, but some entity all its own that we tap into (and out of). I thought about what I finished my last post with, "Copernicus lives!" What did I really mean by that when thought through in the context of the whole post. I wasn't sure anymore although it felt "sure" enough when it popped out through my typing fingers (LOL!) It felt right then, some kind of encapsulating summative statement. I find myself now seeking to interpret more deeply that which "I" brought forth. The thing that was born of "me" - my psyche's creation. My psyche is me - but "I" only give it form, temporary manifestation in words in this vehicle. I have been drawn for some while to the view around our consciousness being the "center" of the universe. Perhaps my calling on Copernicus is a reference to a belief in our desire to know our place in the universe... the place from whence the "I" comes. Copernicus dared to think differently in a time when such thoughts were heresy of the worst kind. The kind that dares to think of ourselves as more than the "children" of God. If God did make us in his image, perhaps it is not the physiological image at all.

Mystery of Consciousness

In reading an article in the current Discover : entitled "A Universe Built for Us" (Dec. 08), I was pleased to run across the following by a scientist at Stanford named Andrei Linde, "[Linde] is especially interested in the mystery of consciousness and has speculated that consciousness may be a fundamental component of the universe, much like space and time. He wonders whether the physical universe, its laws, and conscious observers might form an integrated whole. A complete description of reality, he says, could require all three of those components, which he posits emerged simultaneously. 'Without someone observing the universe, the universe is actually dead.'" The term being focused on in this article is "multiverse" instead of universe. Another quote I liked: "Physical Laws Clamor for Life: The Universe knew we were coming." Awesome idea. Copernicus returns!!

Creation

Today, I updated my blog, abandoned for several months. I have moved its encompassing vision to a different Mandelbrot set. I posted a wonderful graphic drawing of my friend to the site today on the opening page. I like the way it points you down into the body of the blog entry page. This is the first time I have written here for many months. It is November. I think it is a year since I first created this blog with the intention that some intergenerational need would be met. A year later, I am hopeful that my expanded definition of family will invite some I cherish to join in the account of writing stories of "thisness" - what is this life at this point, this moment of experience. I promise myself to learn and let go every step of the way. Anything written here is the expression of a moment in time only. No expectations. I went to a spiritual workshop in September. During a particular exercise, I pulled the words "letting go" many times. On the third one, I uttered a deep sigh. I need to work on this one I guess. What to keep and what to let drop away. Thoughts drifting in, darting around like minnows in a jar - letting go of the idea that such thoughts and the ideas that may arise from them are meaningful. If one of the minnows jumps out of the jar and into the pond nearby, that might mean something!

The stars

Tonight when I got home, walked to the mail box in the cold night air, I looked up. In the night sky to the south I saw the Big Dipper and above my head I think I saw the red star Betelguse. I only recently learned that besides the planet Mars, which often looks orangeish to our eyes down here, the other "red" is Betelguese. I subscribed to an university astronomy site that sends me weekly notes on what to look for in the heavens. I always find the night sky when there is no moon out to be truly awe inspiring... I am overcome for a few moments by the sense of my Self as a truly small and inconsequential being. I think longingly for a few moments about my oft-remembered desire to spend more time looking up at the stars. As a young girl, I drove across West Texas one night with my grandmother in the car. It was the wee hours. I opened my eyes and looked out the back window. It must have been moonless and far away from any city then because the sky was so filled with stars and small, medium and larger dots of light that it seemed crowded. Now that I am grown up, and the world is a brighter place at night even when there is no moon, I have never seen again a night sky so full of twinkling mystery.
Look up and wonder. Look up and learn.