the night sea journey

"When the role called "I'm a human being" ends, we call it death. It's a lot easier if you let that role die before the body dies, and let it be put to rest now... you can awaken to being what you eternally are and have true life." - Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing

"The night sea journey takes you back to your primordial self, not the heroic self that burns out and falls to judgment, but to your original self, yourself as a sea of possibility, your greater and deeper being." - Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul (excerpt, thanks for the reminder, Julian)

I'm juggling several books including The Path of the Priestess, Not in His Image, A Short History of Myth, White Goddess, among others in my weaving dream of bringing the ancient Mysteries to immersive life in a modern day mythos, as I wrote the other day.

The truth of it is I don't really know how this will unfold. The truth of it is I'm pretty sure I'm playing with fire, and I suppose it sounds romantic to imagine being a moth consumed by the flame. Yeah, that's the melodrama the ego spins although I sense that what animates the moth, animates the flame. But like one of my teachers says it might not be the cruise ship voyage we imagined we'd signed up for, "The mind starts to think it's being handed candy when it's not. It's being handed a sword."

"I live in the flame
of a still desire
I flicker there
a not-lived love
Shadowing these likenesses
living beyond the ear of my own speech
      - A Still Desire, from Like A Woman Falling, by Stephanie Pope
(poem in essay, Descent's Alchemy: The Imaginal Process of Falling Apart)

My explorations are around the themes of the dark night of the soul, perpetual beginner's mind, and (seeming) death and rebirth into the primordial self -- through the medium of art -- and, not forcing any of it.

Why? Seems like a good question. But I don't really have any grand answers to Why? It just feels like it's calling. And these days I'm trying to listen to, rather than second-guess, these calls as they come.

"'From the Great Above Inanna opened her ear to the Great Below.' In Sumerian, the word for ear and wisdom are the same." - from Interpretation of Inanna's Descent Myth

Last night, I felt like reading some Campbell, and re-read his incredibly lucid essay, Zen, which now makes more sense than ever before. Something in there spoke to that me deeper than me, and I think it said something about suchness, life and art too that's relevant to the night sea journey (like I like to say, Explaining Kills Art):

"A number of schools of Occidental psychological therapy hold that what we all most need and are seeking is a meaning for our lives. For some, this may be a help; but all it helps is the intellect, and when the intellect sets to work on life with its names and categories, recognitions of relationship and definitions of meaning, what is inwardmost is readily lost. Zen, on the contrary, holds to the realization that life and the sense of life are antecedent to meaning; the idea being to let life come and not name it. It will then push you right back to where you live - where you are, and not where you are named.

...The Buddha is known as the one "Thus Come," Tathagata. He has no more "meaning" than a flower, than a tree; no more than the universe; no more than either you or I. And whenever anything is experienced that way, simply in and for and as itself, without reference to any concepts, relevancies, or practical relationships, such a moment of sheer aesthetic arrest throws the viewer back for an instant upon his own existence without meaning; for he too simply is - "thus come" - a vehicle of consciousness, like a spark flung out from a fire."  - Joseph Campbell, Zen, 1969 essay, reprinted in Myths to Live By

p.s. Of all the myths, the biblical Jonah's story of the whale (featured in this excerpt of Dark Nights of the Soul), Inanna's descent into the Underworld, and Percival's quest for the Holy Grail ring loudest for me personally.

image Marc Chagall's "So I came forth of the Sea..."