Balanced Composition


The other night I was looking at my iPod and found a lecture by David Lynch on Transcendental Meditation; he was talking about the power of turning inward and releasing your mind into what we fondly call the infinite. I remember when I was a kid and I'd hear about how we believed that in heaven you never die, and it just lay there like undigested food. It was some kind of magic.

At some point a writer -- probably Maurice Nicoll -- pointed out that the only way you can think of infinity if you remain "in time," is as a line that comes forever from the left and disappears forever to the right, or from in front of you to behind you. At some point I realized that infinity is static time.

And as I began to look at the idea I considered Einstein's pointing out that time and space are relative, and at this point I began to look at perception as a faculty that interacts with the environment for a purpose, as opposed to simply recording what is "out there." Like Don Juan said, the warrior's life begins when he or she moves to the abstract. And from an abstract point of view it was easy to see that the other end of the spectrum would be a static background of time.

If time became static there would be no separation of things. They would be all in the same place, and access would depend on intention, as it does in the creative process. Once I got hold of that then I could see that it really is like that. All of my memories and all the events of my life are not out on some timeline. They are all there right now, without separation in time unless I intend it, for example, by sorting information based on when it was stored. But even then, there is no way to know how much the creative visual faculty has altered the original event memory.

This could go on and on but the point is that the inner process isn't just some blissed out retreat from the world. It is a process of breaking things down to their components so that you can reverse engineer them. This works the same way whether it's how a car works or how the psyche works. You start with an undifferentiated mass and begin to put consciousness into the component parts. Once it is encoded into the muscles consciousness can move into increasing subtlety, always trusting the unconscious. After awhile a good mechanic can sense what's wrong with your car, and can make fixing it look easy. A good executive begins to know, intuitively, the relationships between the spread sheets and the job sites.

Jean Martin Charcot was a fine example of a seer. He would have somebody brought into his office while he was working and later have them taken away. One day he would suddenly "see" what was going on. He took an undifferentiated lump of symptoms and began to define them down into their separate manifestations, single handedly creating the field of neurology.

While I was listening to Lynch talk about "happy accidents," in creating art, I thought how strange it is that people who paint or write or sculpt or make movies, know that the actual creative information comes from something beyond them. It is like having "good luck." Things just end up coming together, and you know you could not do it again that way. There is obviously a part of you that is better time integrated than the part you normally identify with.

So there are these two forces, one of them supporting the moment from below, with the programmed muscle memory installed in the past. It is already materialized. The other force is in the creative ability to hallucinate, or what is called visual constructive thought. The eyes are part of the brain and when they access visual memory they move up. If they move to the right they are accessing the left hemisphere, which means they are constructing the visual. It does not have to match anything remembered. This is what leads the process of creative work. If the eyes move left they indicate that the person is accessing images from the memory storage.

Becoming a hypnotist is a matter of knowing these things, but not paying much attention to them consciously. You have to trust the unconscious because you simply don't have time to collect all that data and do something brilliant with it. It is not you who has that kind of time integration. I remember the first time I really began to understand that, was when I heard a story about the Sufi who went to heaven and they asked who was there.

"It's me."

"Go away."

He was crushed, but finally he got back to work on himself and educated himself and overcame his pride and helped others. He went back and knocked again. Again he was asked who was there, and this time, with more humility, he said, "It is I."

"Go away."

This time he laid around and smoked hash for a year and forgot to tie his shoes and talked to himself like a fool. Then he pulled it together and helped his brother in law dig wells. Time passed. Then one day he went back to the Gates of Heaven and knocked again. "Who is it."

"It isn't me. It is thee."

"Okay, come on in."

There are plenty of stories about the consequences of not doing what the better time integrated part of you wants to do. Jonah turned away from God and got swallowed by a monster from the deep. That is a pretty good description of a man being consumed by his mother's animus. In fact, I had a client who dreamed a variation on that theme. There was a whale or shark, now I forget, with a buzzsaw for a mouth, and it cut through a ship and wrecked havoc. That combination of beast and technology ripped through a sailor like he was made out of butter.

The unconscious is the sea, and when there is too much unconsciousness the water rises and in your dreams you find yourself in a flood situation. When there is too much consciousness you might find yourself on top of a shaky structure, with severe vertigo. There is no way out through the top and there is no way out through the bottom. As Dylan said, "You ain't going nowhere."

But that's not necessarily true. You can move into the center and begin to relate the conscious, masculine (that creative fire) into the body. Marion Woodman talks about it as infusing spirit into matter. And at some point you might realize that it really is not you, it is something larger, more time integrated, and with a better security clearance than you've got.

The oldest creation story recorded is that Father Sky was once right down on top of Mother Earth because they loved each other so much. But there was not room for new life. A new hero came who braced against them, feet and hands, and pushed Father Sky away, creating room for new life. This is what the ego does. It creates space between what is already materialized, and what exists in Spirit, or potentia. It doesn't get hauled off down under the sea by the mother's animus and it doesn't get hauled off into the sky by inflationary pressures.

It finds a pleasing balance.

Understanding the need for balance is one thing, but converting it into a hypnotic induction is something else. You can't put somebody in a trance and tell them all that. In the first place a trance depends on suspension of the inductive process, and that is almost all inductive process. So the entire thing has to be taken down to a single image.

What I have often used is having the client imagine that he or she is doing a piece of artwork, a painting in which they are finding the balance between the cultivated fields, the farmhouse and grounds, and the surrounding wild nature, where the laws move from beneath, upward, as in any natural ecosystem. As you move into cultivated property, the rules come from the top down and are imposed on nature.

By working with this image, I instruct the client to find the pleasing balance between these two elements of the artwork. The active imagination is like a dream process, and the unconscious will appreciate the movement away from trying to impose even more rules from above on it. The unconscious is completely amoral, as you can easily observe from looking at dreams. So in general there is a great deal of relative value in recognizing the unconscious, or bottom up ecosystem design, as an equal to Pi in the sky.

Posted: Thu - July 5, 2007 at 04:43 PM