kill the disciple as soon as possible

Last September I was blessed to be in the presence of Daniel Odier and Pavarthi for a yoga workshop in Manhattan. (Highly, highly recommend.) Daniel was telling the story of meeting a Ch'an master (Ch'an was predecessor to Zen) in China.

"What is the task of the master?"  the Ch'an master asks Daniel (whom is a master himself these days.)

Daniel said he had a hunch he knew, but wanted to defer to the old Chinese sage, so he answered: "I don't know."

"To kill the disciple as soon as possible," he replied.

This might not make a lot of sense, or it may make superb sense. And I'd like not to interpret too much for you. Consider when Tita hesitates in her attempt at wringing a chicken for the family supper in the novel Like Water for Chocolate that the hesitation yields a chicken running and squawking about in pain with its head half wrung. Tita learns then and there that sometimes the direct immediate approach is the kindest. (This is a merely a metaphor, so comments on vegetarianism and animal cruelty are out of scope here.)

So it may not be an accident that dark Morrigan (the triple goddess of Ireland, more another day, or check out Grave's White Goddess yourself) is my icon. And it may not be an accident that my main blog's title is Crossroads Dispatches (Hekate is goddess of the crossroads).

The triple goddess of death and rebirth claimed me before I was cognizant myself of the deep connection I have with their symbols and signs and, mostly, their significance.

Hekate, Inanna, Kali, Maman Brigitte (a voodoo goddess), Morrigan, and that's just for starters. The so-called dark goddesses of the new moon are truly the goddesses of illumination, rather than the light and airy goddesses of beauty and love.

I have nothing against lovefests - whether they are soul-gazing tantric workshops or full moon trancedances - but often we crash from the "light and uplifting" spiritual high to find ourselves right back in the 'real' world of parking tickets, babies who don't sleep through the night, spouses that say the most exasperating things, the 6 o'clock news, and the nagging boss - and, we feel that short-lived joy and peace scattered to the four winds.

So here I'm after something lasting, rather waiting and chasing after the next peak experience.

"When you've understood this scripture, throw it away," says Jack Kerouac in The Scripture of the Golden Eternity. "I insist on your freedom."

I just started reading the wonderfully insightful A Short History of Myth (and at less than 150 pages it really is concise), by Karen Armstrong. Evoking Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, Armstrong writes of the (perhaps the most ancient triple goddess) Inanna myth:

"This Mother Goddess is not a redeemer, but the cause of death and sorrow [well, I'd say death and rebirth]. Her journey is an invitation, a rite of transformation that is required of us all. Inanna goes down into the word of death, to meet her sister, a buried and unsuspected aspect of her being. Ereshkigal represents the ultimate reality. In many myths, dating orginally from this period, a meeting with the Mother Goddess represents the ultimate adventure of the hero, the supreme illumination. Mistress of life and death, Ereshkigal too is a Mother Goddess, depicted as constantly giving birth. In order to approach her, and gain true insight, Inanna has to lay aside the clothes [defenses] that protect her vulnerability, dismantle her egotism, die to her old self, assimilate what seems opposed and inimical to her, and accept the intolerable namely, that there can be no life without death, darkness and deprivation."

In A Short History of Myth, Armstrong says that myth wasn't a story to be read (would you read lyrics to an opera and say you've been to the opera?), but rather myth used to be a direct, living experience whereby we confronted our deepest fears. That it was inextricably  tied to initiation, direct experience, the Mysteries, prayer, liturgy, ritual, contemplation.

Myth was "an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence, helping us to get beyond the chaotic flux of random events, and glimpse the core of reality."

And so that is why I am into art lately, and particularly the creative mind (spontaneous, aware, original versus reactive mind which is re-acting, repetitive, contrived). 

And why I agree with Michael Beckwith that spiritual growth is "allowing that which is unconscious to become conscious."

As to myth as art and art as myth, this exchange resonates the deepest for me:

Bill Moyers: "Who interprets the divinity inherent in nature for us today? Who are our shamans? Who interprets unseen things for us?"

Joseph Campbell: "It is the function of the artist to do this. The artist is the one who communicates myth for today."

image Picasso's Woman with a Crow reminds of the raven goddesses, such as Morrigan, as the raven's one symbol of transformation