Hypnosis Reprise


Hi Dan,
I liked your latest musing. I liked the ego values versus the shadow behaviors. When they conciliate do they disappear and become 1? I like the way your piece moves from disbelief at what the professor says about the past being fiction to the end where you do come to the idea that our past is also made of fiction and stories. I am not quite sure I understood the part about remembering the rituals even if you do not know their original meaning. (Aurelia)

Hello Aurelia,

I don't know about ego shadow consolidation, but I do know it makes me think of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the realm of the Bardo. In the TBD the process is from death to escape from the wheel of time, or absolute freedom.

When I first read it I thought the death meant real death, and it was an instruction on how to achieve immortality after you die. Now I know that ego death is both feared as real death, and experienced as real death, by the ego. Here is how the book describes the process:

First of all a bright white light shines on the forehead. This is the light of objectivity. There is no ego and thus no shadow. There is unity and thus a vastly more powerful consciousness. If one stays with that, and doesn't look back, then freedom is attained.

However, there is another light which shines. This is an amber light, and it shines down just below the navel. In comparison to the white light, this amber light is more comforting and familiar. The white light begins to be overwhelming and altogether too white. And so the dear departed goes to heaven.

Whatever you have imagined heaven to be, that's where you go. And then when the energy exhausts itself sufficiently it can't block out the dark energy, you descend to hell, and all your most horrifying fears are realized. You are on the run from the headhunters.

If at any time during this process, you realize that all of it, the heaven, the hell, all of it, is projection from your own intellect, then you are off the wheel, having taken the long way home.

If you do not come to this realization, without reservations, you are born into the body of another woman and you start over.

"You and I have lived many lives, Arjuna. I remember them all. You do not remember."

The part about remembering the rituals is hard to understand, because I'm not sure I understand it myself. On the one hand the rituals work whether you know what they are for or whether you don't.

On the other hand, without a consciousness of what purpose a ritual serves, the ritual seems to lose the power to evolve and serve a more complex function.

My example of the use of a patterned ritual in lieu of an actual ritual murder carries with it the understanding that somebody figured this out. Somebody had the idea that maybe they could pretend to offer a human sacrifice to the gods, or to God, if they were monotheistic.

Now we know it was a good idea, but then it might have been like picking wild mushrooms. If you fuck up there's hell to pay. So somebody tried out that idea, and it worked. So there was this amazing discovery about how to build more complex civilizations by using theater to avert the usual destructive shadow forces which tear it apart.

Theater can gather people together in a ritual enactment of one or more of the most basic patterns of the collective unconscious. The pattern is brought to group consciousness, it is resolved, and there is a moment of aesthetic arrest, a freedom from having gone all the way through the pattern to the conclusion of it, usually destruction of the main character caught in it.

There is the symbolic death of Hamlet, of Lear, of Richard III, each of them caught by a fatal flaw. Desdemona brushes her hair and waits for the end because she was so certain her virtue would be obvious to her lover. MacBeth was cursed with an ambitious wife. But the roles can easily be moved to George Bush as MacBeth and Karl Rove as Lady MacBeth. It's all the same underlying pattern. "Out, damned spot."

Religious theater is still theater. There's some of it connected to the collective patterns, and some of it is pornographic, like the weird old guy -- Pat Robertson is who I'm thinking of -- who has his own network, and has god put out hits on people and blow their houses down for violations of scripture. Surely we've come further than that.

But the fact that such people still have an audience, and they are voting, is a very good argument for paying attention to the power of ritual, and who is using that power in what way.



Posted: Tue - August 22, 2006 at 08:32 PM