The Imaginal

The Male Voice(s) of Spirituality: Part IV

Posted by Chris Dierkes in Philosophy, Spirituality, The Imaginal

For Part I, here
For Part II, here
For Part III, here.

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In Part III of this series I argued for the possibility of re-imagining teachings around sexual essences (e.g. the divine masculine and the feminine) in light of the critical insights of postmodernism regarding the spectrum-like nature of biological sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation.

In Part IV I want to look at how we might reincorporate spiritual energies in relation to this the postmodern fluid world of gender, biological, and orientation. In so doing I think we find a way towards a post-postmodernism.

It’s an important line of thought because by nature the postmodern theories of gender fluidity, plural sexual orientation, and the spectrum-like nature of biological sex have a secular bias. They typically deny the value of spiritual energies and insights.

The ancient traditions which do describe the reality of spiritual energies tend to make a confused mess of biological sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation. They tend to reduce the rich diversity of sexual orientation, gender expression, and biological sex into very restrictive, even at times oppressive, static boxes (there are plenty of counterexamples within the traditions themselves but they nevertheless came from societies that had such strictures in place).

So (very generally speaking) we end up with a binary choice between a spiritual but socially regressive view or a socially progressive view absent any spiritual depth.

Asking the question in this way allows us to retain the insights of both the ancient and the postmodern, in the process opening doors to new creative possibilities.

When we look at the depictions of sexuality and gender (and even sexual orientation) among the gods and goddesses we see a surprising diversity and plurality from the ancient world, much more so than our simplistic, more modernist binary categorizations.

Given that I’m biologically male, heterosexual, and that my gender expression is fairly dude-ish, the normative assumption would be that I identify more intrinsically with male deities, male religious figures, and the so-called divine masculine (and perhaps even more broadly the male hero’s quest).

But I’ve spent a great deal of my life in devotion, connection, communion, and even at points identification with female deities, saints, and energies. In so doing, I don’t believe I’ve embraced my inner feminine but rather that through such connections, it’s helped to cultivate a certain energy in me classically defined as feminine but one that doesn’t need to be so named any longer in my view. At least I don’t believe it can be named and described as (divine) feminine in a pre-critical, simplistic way. At minimum to use the term requires a winking sense of humor. Not “feminine” in snark quotes but as if it had an slyly sardonic emoji following it.

After all there is an incredible range and diversity within the so-called divine feminine. There’s Mary in her apparitions (Guadalupe, Fatima, Lourdes, etc.). As Stella Maris, Mary is the The Anima Mundi, The World Soul herself. As The Black Madonna she is something else entirely.

There’s Lady Wisdom from the Wisdom Books of the Hebrew Bible (later Shekinah in Kabbalistic Judaism), walking through the streets seeking disciples–which by the way Christians later understood Lady Wisdom to be Incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, hence a male incarnation of a female deity symbol.

In pre-Islamic Arabian religion there was al-Lat, though she herself was one of a triad of female deities (along with Al-Uzzah and Al-Manat).

As Shakti, the feminine is radiance, light, and manifest reality. In other depictions, the Goddess is thought to be The Moon, The Night, The Virgin.

In Taoism the feminine (yin) is dark, cool, constricting. In Reiki, earth (or feminine) energy is warm and expansive.

And that’s just a very small smattering.

So when people ask me about the divine feminine my first response is always–which one or ones do you mean exactly? There’s 21 different Taras after all!

Also there are historical, concrete flesh and blood woman spiritual realizers–each of them expressing all kinds of various energies, qualities, and insights. There’s more well known names like Lady Tsogyal, Mary Magdalene, Al-Rabia, and Mirabai. There’s less well known (but no less potent) characters like Hadewijch of Brabant, Marguerite of Porete, Sarada Devi, Hazrat Babajan, and Francesa Sarah. Not to mention the many gifted living women spiritual teachers from a variety of spiritual and religious traditions. Really I should say spiritual teachers (who happen to be women).

Now I’m not suggesting we neuter or spade or androgynize these energies or persons (unless of course they were androgynous to begin with as some most definitely are) but rather we take off our preconceived filters of polarity and static essences when approaching the holy.

Also, the plurality described above need not fragment in all directions. There are ways to begin to unify these realities through proper relationship, not melding them all into one homogenous soup but maintaining their uniqueness. Again this is what I’m describing as an attempt at post-postmodernism.

The same is true for the divine masculine (also with an emoji after it).

There diversity, paradox, and humor abound.

Take how Christ Jesus is often attempted to be pigeonholed into Divine Masculine categories with rather absurd results. Christ is often described mythologically along the lines of Apollo (or for that matter Dionysius). But his energy is actually distinct. There are Sun (or Son) like qualities of Christ’s nature which superficially bear a resemblance to Apollonian energy. But in truth there’s far too much heart, far too much true spiritual sacrifice in Christ to parallel an Apollos (and actually also Dionysius). Christ incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth shows an entire range of human emotion: rage, grief, sadness, ecstasy, compassion, disgust, tenderness, abandonment, vulnerability, and terror. What he was able to do was remain conscious in and through and as all of those states. He was neither removed from emotions (in the more traditional Apollonian sense) nor simply succumbing to them in an increasingly unconscious way (as per Dionysius).

So Jesus is male and according to some the incarnation of the divine masculine and yet manifests a series of qualities classically identified as feminine, like nurturance, tenderness, caring, and embrace. So which is it? Maybe it’s easier to let go of the simplistic polarities and let the beings be who they are and open their revelation and insight to us from within their space rather than trying to squeeze them into our preconceived, excessively narrow boxes.

Consider some other examples of the divine masculine (emoji). There’s Shiva, aka The Dark Lord. Not dark in a demonic, satanic sense but as in the Darkness, the utter Void. Shiva sits in graveyards. He is untouched by everything arising and occurring here. As Nataranja, Shiva dances in order to destroy the world, making room for a new creation (he also looks like a woman in this form btw). As Ardhanarishvara, Shiva is actually half-man, half-woman (“The Lord who is half-woman”). Or consider Lord Krishna, an Incarnation of the Creator Vishnu, a beautiful male, often boyish in appearance, living in devotion to life and utterly charismatic.

These are energies that any man (actually any person I would argue) can access, cultivate, and receive through grace.

We could point to other great male religious figures or deities: e.g. Prophet Muhammad, Prophet Moses, The Buddha.

There’s overlap between these beings but there’s also clear diversity and distinction. The Buddha for example brings a characteristic serenity. A nature of equipoise. Buddha held no beliefs about the nature of the after life or questions of cosmic origins. He was solely focused on the nature of emptiness (nirvana) and living the right life flowing from such a realization.

That expression is quite distinct from that of a Moses.

There are thousands of various deities, angels, prophets, cosmic Buddhas in the traditions historically or mythologically male. This multiplicity points yet again I believe to the futility of trying to create a single, normative energy we would call the masculine. These are all spiritual energies with a historical connection (of some variety) to being male. Those energies are not only able to be held by men of course–e.g. women can be Christ-like or realize the awakening of the Buddha. Just that for this series I’m more focused on men.*

I often hear that The Divine Masculine is about witnessing, the background of consciousness against which everything arises. Some of those male beings connect with that aspect of spiritual awakening but plenty of others do not (in fact quite the opposite).

While I’m not myself a big fan of the words feminine and masculine–either as gender terms nor as spiritual ones–it is true that we lack a proper set of terms for these energies we’re speaking about here. Hence I believe we default to terms from biological sex and gender.

My argument is we are talking about energies that are in fact not intrinsically tied to men or women (on that point I actually agree with those teachings themselves). But then I don’t understand why we would choose terms derived from gender, often confused (wrongly) to indicate biological sex, and even within the world of gender are potentially flawed themselves (see for example The Feminine Mystique).

This terminology makes it more challenging to work with these energies in a healthy way.

Worse still, the binary nature of masculine and feminine also prevents more interplay. In the spiritual world I see far too much biological sex-segregation, explicit (or implicit) sexual orientation segregation and gender segregation. There definitely can be a time and place to be with people like us, especially for individuals who need a space to find their own voice. Overall however I think we really need to start supporting one another. I think there needs to be much more intermingling and intermixing and static categorizations of masculine and feminine have not been helpful in that regard (in my estimation).

With polarities (like masculine/feminine) people immediately get split off into various camps. They get labeled one or the other, which now defines them in all situations, contexts, and aspects of their being. This reduces them as human beings to simply being another version of some prior archetype. Their humanity is effaced in the process.

If however we started with a fluid understanding of gender, biological sex, and orientation, we could extend the fluidity into spiritual energies. Polarities then might be one possibled expression of spiritual energies but it would by no means by the only one or even the assumed normative and best one. It would simply be one. One construct among many constructs.

These varying expressions could take many forms (i.e. be formed into multiple constructs). There could be polarities as well as singularities. There could be multiples (beyond the two-ness of polarity) as well as the zeroness.

This way of relating calls upon our imagination as entryway into a world of possible-and- yet-somehow-also-already-existing-realities (aka the imaginal realm). The gods, goddesses, even the historical-based spiritual masters and saints, exist in the imaginal realm. The imaginal is a realm that is both partially constructed by the human but one that partially constructs the human (think Fantasia in The Neverending Story). The imaginal is a two way street in other words.

It’s not so simplistic as Ludwig Feuerbach’s thesis that humanity has created deities in its image--in this case particularly in its normative biological sex and gendered images. In that view, divinity is not ontologically real but simply a creation of human psychology (usually as some kind of coping strategy for the vicissitudes of life).

While Feuerbach was definitely not right, he wasn’t totally wrong either. Humans are, at least in part, (co)constructing the imagery of the divine based on analogies from the human, created world. And a strong–though by no means utterly determinative part–of human created existence is biological sex, sexual identity, and gender expression. So it is no surprise that in terms of co-creating the imagery of the divine humans are (at least in part) playing out their own forays into understanding their own nature (especially around sex and gender) by projecting those questions and images onto the screen of divinity.

It’s also true however that humanity is made in the image and likeness of God (gods, goddesses, deities) as the ancients understand well. Here in this regard the divine is imagining us into being and is playing out the various possibilities (among other things) of sexuality, biological sex, and gender through us.

The secular world is largely beholden to the Feuerbachian thesis. The contemporary spiritual scene is still largely based in the second camp, the metaphysical viewpoint, naively assuming a top-down model of the universe, disempowering and disowning the human (co)construction of divinity, particularly as it relates to the complex issues of biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender expression. Not to mention this nearly unnameable 4th category–the so-called sexual essences.**

In the imaginal realm it is both true that we are partially creating the imagery of the divine through metaphors and comparisons to daily existence but it is also true that the divine creates us through the interaction.

This imaginal two-way street is definitely in place when it comes to this difficult to name fourth reality we’ve been exploring here–what goes by the name of sexual essences (in addition to the “three” of gender expression, sexual orientation, and biological sex).

I think sexual essences is wrongly named and wrongly theorized but I do think nevertheless it’s pointing to another category of experience and insight. I think what underlies the term is a very real thing. This very real thing (for lack of a better word) is something that isn’t biological sex, sexual orientation, or gender and yet is intimately related to all those while remaining distinct. Something spiritual and connected to these others aspects of ourselves and yet not reducible to them either.

What we need is a new word or set of words to convey this reality of the 4th. Sexual essences, Divine Feminine, Divine Masculine don’t in my view cut it, but they hang around because they’re pointing to something very real and very important. The something they are pointing to is not described under more secular theories and rubrics of biological sex, gender, or sexual orientation.

But again as this 4th is described in far too many classic and contemporary teachings, the energies are bound to a very narrow frame of reference. The interpretative context in which these spiritual energies are practiced, understood, and incarnated culturally is often not life-giving. In fact they are often energetically death-dealing in my view.

Hence we need a new frame of reference. We need a frame of reference that is not reducible solely to pluralized postmodern understandings of sexuality, gender, and biological sex, but that is not incongruent to that view either.

At minimum it’s not less than postmodern in other words.

By that definition much of what goes on in New Age and Neo-Tantra communities and the like doesn’t cut it. While they typically market themselves as being progressive and evolutionary and cutting edge, their understandings and descriptions of biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender expression are usually at least 40 years out of date. Often more like 60-70 years behind the times. They are in fact quite regressive in many instances.

Because of that regression the postmodern critical word has denied the underlying reality of what they are pointing to. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater in other words.

Both of those approaches are false starts. We need another option.

Which brings us back to the nub of the problem–the word essences (as in sexual essences).

The word essences originally derives from the root perfuming (as in an essential oil). Maybe the term aromas or essences (understood in this perfuming-way) would be a term to work with.

We let go of the static notion of only two major Essences (The Masculine and The Feminine). We could potentially also let go of the term sexual in sexual essences. The energies are not per se about sex (either biological or sexual attraction). At least not always. Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not.

They are more Eros (or Erotic) than they are sexual. Eros can include any number of intimate loving relationships including but not limited to sexual ones–e.g. friendships, parent-child, grandparent-grandchildren, siblings, cousins. Why is the sexual model of monogamy (and usually heterosexually imagined) the primary model for this fourth spiritual energy?

As a spiritual metaphor sexual embrace does have value and beauty to it. But so long as we are also not incorporating the other metaphors say of friendship or sorority or fraternity or paternity, then we need to ask why we keep defaulting to the sexual to describe our essences?

Once we open up the metaphoric field to other kinds of intimate relationships, then we break up the static polarity model as the only model for practice and spiritual experience. For example, within the multiplicity of energies described under the rubric of the feminine and the masculine, some of those energies do tend to enter into polarity-based relationships. Plenty of others do not. Polarity relates well to two lovers. It doesn’t particularly relate well to say a circle of friends.

In sum then we have a responsibility for (co)creating the frames, the metaphors, and our own meaning around this “4th” reality. We are not simply beholden to some traditionalism–whether real or imagined.

But what we need to co-create has to have significant depth, subtlety, and a supple nature to it. A flattened out diversity that simply keeps extending horizontally leaves only silos of personalized meaning, cages of self-contraction and self-isolation.

We aren’t co-creating these frames and insights entirely out of the blue though either. I’m not advocating a view of denying what has come before and simply transcending into some new creative, evolutionary future of whatever. Inevitably that leads to an enforced and sterile androgyny and asexuality (as opposed to legitimate forms of androgyny and asexuality).

The energies are real. They have been described–at least a good many of them have been. Perhaps there are more such energies to reveal themselves but for now we have a large deck to work with.

Each being can come into a relationship with these energies–those known as The Divine Masculine, The Divine Feminine, The Divine Androgynous, The Divine Non-Gendered, etc–and find their own integrated configuration of them. They can find their own essential aroma or perfume. They can then share that aroma and blend their aromas with the aromas of others, creating a communion of integrations.

They can do this of course in whatever various configuration of biological sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexual preferences they incarnate in human terms. This teaching of the spiritual energies/aromas would never be separate from those aspects of themselves but not reducible to them either.

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While in this post I’m spending more time on classically depicted male and female imagery, it’s also true that there is asexual divine imagery, transgendered, hermaphroditic (really sex-shape shifting), and androgynous imagery amongst others.

** One other fluid spectrum related here could be sexual preferences (which can be seen as distinct from sexual orientation). That would be say a spectrum around various kinks, fetishes, preferences, and the like. e.g. Whether one is more into (so-called) vanilla sex, BDSM, etc. Again this cuts across sexual orientations. In this case, the sexual essences would be a fifth category.

16 Jan 2015 no comments / READ MORE

Against High Vibrations: A Critique of New Age Spirituality

Posted by Chris Dierkes in Emotions, Healing Arts, Mystics, Spirituality, The Imaginal, The Soul

If you’ve ever read any self-help books or attended any personal development workshops or gone to any number of spiritual retreats you’ll very likely have come across the idea of maintaining a high vibration. I hear it all the time.

A quick Google search of high vibration brought up a slew of articles about what is a high vibration, why it’s important to have it, and what you can do to raise yours.

This teaching lies at the heart of almost, if not, all New Age spirituality, as well as various traditions influenced by New Age thinking–which increasingly is a wide range of spiritual teaching.

Of course as long as there is an idea of high vibrations, then inevitably there must low vibrations. You can’t have high without low and low without high. In this specific context the crucial point is that high vibrations are judged to be good, while low vibrations are bad.

All seems straightforward and obvious–we want to maintain a positive outlook, we want to feel good, and it’s a problem to stay mired in a negative outlook on life.

Simple, obvious right?

Well it may be a simple idea to grasp, it may even seem at first glance to be an obviously intelligent idea, but I’m going to argue it contains serious flaws. In particular I’ll focus on the way in which a high vibration teaching does significant damage to our ability to work with our emotions in a wise manner.

To preview the argument:

The central problem with a the notion of high vibrations is that it equates certain emotions with high vibration and therefore being positive. As a result, others emotions are seen as low vibration and therefore negative. High vibration easily elides into feeling good and low vibration easily turns out into feeling badly. That initial mistake opens the floodgates to numerous other consequential mistakes.

Here’s a classic example of this teaching from the spiritual writer David Hawkins.* Some version like this can be found throughout any number of New Age and New Thought writings. (I just find this one a really powerful and simple demonstration of the view–see image here).

You can see shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, anger are all in the negative category. Hawkins classifies these emotions as negative and of a low vibratory nature. Therefore the recommendation is to move out of such emotions into states of peace, joy, love, acceptance, and so on.

Again that all seems pretty logical–better to be joyful and peaceful than sorrowful or fearful right?

Not so fast.

Here’s what I see as fundamentally wrong about this approach–unconscious grief, shame, anger, and fear are definitely destructive. Unhealthy forms of grief, shame, anger, and fear are definitely destructive. But by qualifying these emotions with the words unconscious and unhealthy, we leave open the possibility that there is a conscious and healthy form of grief, shame, anger, and fear. In this simplistic binary system of high and low there is no ability to distinguish between different expressions of emotion–there’s no nuance or subtlety. Each emotion gets put into a good or bad category rather than seeing light and shadow sides to each emotion.

Just for the record, unhealthy and unconscious forms of happiness, peace, and acceptance are also really bad for you. For example, what if I maintain a peace at all costs attitude? What if I try to play peacemaker between two friends arguing and in so doing I actually end up hurting one of them? Am I supposed to accept prejudice? Should I be accepting of unethical behavior towards myself or others?

Hawkins’ schema is off because it categorizes emotions into positive or negative, into high or low, into good or bad. This dualism is seriously flawed and it dominates so much contemporary spirituality in more explicit forms as well as plenty of implicit ones.

This scale (intentionally or otherwise) compares the negative, unhealthy versions of one set of emotions–grief, fear, shame, anger–with the positive, healthy versions of another set–joy, love, peacefulness, etc. The game is rigged from the get go. It’s a game that ends up causing a lot well-meaning but naive spiritual seekers extraordinary amounts of unnecessary suffering.

I submit that healthy, awakened grief, fear, and anger are some of wisest teachers we have. Saying that undoes the whole simple scale of higher = better.

As compared to the terrible notion of low and high vibrations, what we want are deep and upraised vibrations. Notice the different vibration from the word deep as opposed to low. Notice the difference in saying I’m feeling deep versus I’m feeling low. One is about an absence (low) while the other is about a positive state (deep).

Deep vibration comes from integrating in a healthy way all the emotions labeled as negative by Hawkins and other New Agers. Yes it’s better to live out of peace, harmony, and joy than negative and unconscious grief, shame, desire, and fear. Much better still however is to live out of conscious integrated, awakened fear, desire, anger, shame, grief, as well as elation, peacefulness, happiness, and inspiration. To live a full-spectrum psychospiritual existence. That’s true depth.

Moreover, the word high has its own problems. It’s floaty, fleeting. You take drugs you get high but only for a short time. Inevitably you come back down (sometimes crash back down). It’s very easy to get hooked on spiritual practice or higher states of being and become a spiritual junkie.

I thought long and hard about what a better word for high would be–something that would speak to the value of inspirational experience but without the pomposity or ungrounded nature of high, I was kind of stumped, so I went to a thesaurus.

Options include: lofty (again too ungrounded), elevated (too temporary, too spiritual junkie), hovering (way too ungrounded). Another set of words emphasized more the bigness of high. Words like immense, gigantic, huge, formidable, colossal, towering, etc. These are think are again overinflated in a spiritual context.

Which left a few other potential candidates:

  • soaring (might work actually–an eagle soars but is also quite strong and in a sense “grounded”)
  • eminent (would be too confusing but has a truth to it)

And lastly upraised.

I like upraised.

Upraised seems more substantial than its cousin uplifted (again too floaty). Upraised might be a word that fits here. Instead of speaking of a high vibration one would speak of being upraised. There’s up but the raised part has a certain solidity to it (like raising a child).

Rather than talking about a high vibration, we should speak of a healthy ascent under whatever specific name you like there (upraised? soaring?). There absolutely is a place for healthy ascent in the spiritual path. There is Eros, the deep desire of life to evolve, grow, stretch, expand, and push beyond limits. There is Magic, the mysterious force of Creation. There is synchronicity. Things want to manifest into existence. There is incredible allurement to Life. The Universe winks at us constantly. Life is out to seduce us–to call us into partnership to create some beautiful. Following those winks from existence brings a kind of magical playful dimension to living.

That is all wonderfully true, but why is it the opposite of grieving well? Why is allurement the opposite of accessing our hatred to re-own parts of our shadow? Why is it I should have to choose one over the other? Why is one positive and the other negative?

Here is the motto I follow:

  • Awakened fear is the source of our intuition.
  • Awakened anger establishes healthy boundaries.
  • Awakened desire is The Creative Impulse flowing through us.
  • Awakened shame is liberated humility.
  • Awakened grief teaches us how to mourn and therefore how to live.
  • Awakened sadness is utter release.
  • Awakened guilt is proper remorse and contrition.

None of these are available to one who promotes high vibrations. The richness of incarnate human existence is lost. The wondrous fabric of the human being is torn irrevocably by high vibration New Age teaching.

In my church days I once met a person who came to the church I was working from another church. She said she that when she first started attending her old church, she was found the community really helped her in her spiritual life. She felt a deep sense of meaning there. But after a few years it all began to feel flat. I asked her why she thought her soul starting drying up there. She had this great line, she said, “It’s always a sunny day there [at that church].”

That’s a brilliant critique. When a person is in the dumps a sunny outlook seems like a ray a hope. And for a short time it really can be that. But when one comes out of the pits and readjusts eventually they will realize that it’s actually not good to only have sunny days. “It’s always a sunny day over there” was not a compliment. It was a very important insight and a kind of warning.

So it is with high vibration teaching. It can help people start to take responsibility for their lives, focus on gratitude, and put their energy to doing what brings them happiness, fulfillment, and peace. But eventually it comes to feel flat.

We need to find beauty in the rain, in the storms, in the nighttime, the grey overcast days and yes also absolutely in the sunny days. All of them. The high vibration/low vibration teaching can get some people, for a time, out of the ditch. I’ve seen it. But then it creates a new and far subtler obstacle to further depth and growth. It’s easy to see how letting toxic shame destroy our lives is bad. It’s much harder (but nonetheless true) to notice the ways in which being drawn to high vibration is preventing our full conscious expressions as human beings.

Better to be deep than low. Better to be upraised than high. Best to integrate the best of both.

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* My criticism of the high/low vibration scheme from David Hawkins’ is not a criticism of his spiritual experience (which I think is quite real and powerful). It’s a criticism of this aspect of his interpretation and teaching around spiritual experience.

16 Jul 2014 3 comments / READ MORE

I’m Not a Lightworker, I’m a Darkwalker

Posted by Chris Dierkes in Mystics, Shamanism, Spirituality, The Imaginal

In the last year I’ve transitioned from working as a full-time pastor to now working more in the, how do I say this, non-institutionalized version of spirituality popular nowadays. Now that I work in the realm of soul readings, energy healing, and imaginal capacities, I keep coming across the term lightworker. It’s a common term, particularly in the New Age world. I’ve even been occasionally described by others at some gatherings as a lightworker.

This kinda irked me for awhile, but at first I didn’t pay a great deal of attention to it. I just mostly ignored it. Finally at a recent gathering someone introduced me as a lightworker and I gently corrected the person to say that I didn’t identify with the term and didn’t want to be called a lightworker. I said if others felt comfortable with the term I respected that, but personally I didn’t feel right being categorized in that way.

This caused a surprising bit of angsty energy in the room. I received some funny looks (by funny here I mean disapproving).

It’s a strange word, lightworker. First off it’s got the word worker in it, which I find not especially inviting. Worker like worker bee. Seems very corporate-cubicle to me. Very drone feeling.

And then there’s light. Light and work seem an odd pairing. Does light do work? I guess, in a manner of speaking. Light gives birth to plants and food. It warms and heats. But it’s definitely not work in the normal use of the term. There’s a certain ease when it comes to light that doesn’t seem (to me) to gel with the word work.

Anyway, the mechanics of the word aside, what’s the intention behind describing oneself as a lightworker? And why do I have a significant enough disagreement with the term to ask that I not be called it?

What I understand by the term lightworker is the notion that people see themselves as serving the light. The light as in The Light of Truth or The Light of Spirit.

That’s obviously a very honorable intention, one I seek to live out myself. But I find the word lightworker tends to come with a bias towards the heavenly realms. Light is often depicted to be up above. At best this suggests a model in which the Light is needing to be brought down into our human realm. At worst it suggests a seeking to go up and out of our daily existence. It can very easily become an escape.

Admittedly, the higher, subtle planes of reality are more comfortable, pleasurable, and filled with less pain than our everyday world. There’s no denying that truth. There’s less resistance in the subtle, heavenly realms. But as the Buddhist wheel of karma correctly teaches us, even the realm of the gods is still a form of very, very subtle entrapment. It’s the necessary inverse to the realms of hungry ghosts. If there’s a heaven there has to be a hell. If there’s a hell, there has to be a heaven. But what if both heaven and hell were to fall away, to melt into nothingness?

Another potential problem I see is the notion of being a lightworker can be very disempowering–suggesting we don’t have the resources necessary here in material, earthly existence. I’m not suggesting this is the conscious intent. In fact, I think the vast majority of folks who I’ve heard or read use the term seem to me very well meaning, conscientious persons.

Well-intentioned or otherwise, I still think there’s a problem here.

Two questions I often ask myself is: what is the dark side of the light? And what is the light side of the darkness?

I’ve written about this before in relationship to the religion of Jedi-ism (yes it’s an official religion in some places now). I wrote on the Jedi Code and how the original code included lines like:

Emotion yet peace.
Passion yet serenity.
Death, yet the Force.

And then in a later edition of the Jedi Code, the balanced view expressed in the original code became corrupted into a one-sided one with a strong spiritual (“heavenly”) bias against the earthly realm.

The code became:

There is no emotion, there is peace.
There is no passion, there is serenity.
There is no death, there is The Force.

This is what I mean by an overemphasis on being a lightworker. We forget about the darkness totally and make everything “light” or conceive the darkness only as a force of resistance or evil.

Since we’re talking Jedis, a better term than workers would be walkers. Luke was a Skywalker. George Lucas, of course, based the Jedi on various traditions of Eastern monks, who are often said to be Cloud-Walkers (which is where Skywalker comes from). One who walks the high places.

Stephen Jenkinson calls himself the Griefwalker. He walks with people through their grief. The process of undergoing the death journey is called The Deathwalk. Shamans are said to walk between the worlds. My good friend William is literally a Walker (his actual last name) and he literally walked a pilgrimage of his ancestor across Canada and the US (read it, it’s mind blowing).

In other words, there could be a whole ecology of walkers. (I think walker is a much stronger term than worker). Walkers have work to do certainly but they also enjoy the sights.

I wouldn’t push this too far, but maybe I’d call myself a Darkwalker since I advocate for the role of entering into the darkness along the path.

In the darkness is found light.

Consider this teaching from the Kabbalistic tradition (Jewish mystical tradition). In one version of Kabbalah, creation occurs by the Divine Self hiding into The Divine Self, creating a space, as it were, of ‘non-God’. Into this space creation comes forth. There were vessels created meant to help modify, contain, and mediate the Light of Creation. The Light to form creation however was too strong to be held and the light splintered the vessels of creativity, leading to shards (called klipot) scattered everywhere. In shamanic traditions, this is called soul fragmentation. Kabbalah suggests there was a kind of cosmic soul fragmentation–a fragmentation perhaps of the World Soul itself.

The shards are the painful jagged realities of our world. The brokenness, the suffering, the alienation, the loneliness, the enmity, the prejudice, the violence and the chaos that so mars existence.

The Kabbalist is one who neither fights nor succumbs to the shards. The Kabbalist rather transmutes them. For, as the story goes, hidden within each shard is a drop of light, a hidden remnant of the original Light, waiting to be released. When the shard is loved fully, the light is released.

The transmutation of the shards is an act of shadow work. It’s a restoration of the fragmented pieces. It’s a liberation of the light. It’s spiritual, economic, political, social, ecological all wrapped up into one.

This soul retrieval, somehow both personal and cosmic, happens by entering into the darkness. Notice–this is a very subtle and extremely important point–it happens by the embrace of the darkness not just by sending light into the darkness (though that may be a part of the process).

This is why I’ve sometimes half-jokingly/half-seriously said I want to be called a Darkworker. Or now a Darkwalker. Not because I serve the darkness in some demonic sense but I understand the place of the awakening of the darkness. It’s worth recalling that the character of Lucifer is said to be an Angel of the Highest Light who fell–there is then a potential darkness (in the negative sense) in being addicted to the Light.

Not only is there light to be found in the shadowy darkness, there is also a grace to darkness itself. (Darkness here not as the shadow but as the realm of Being).

The great Christian mystic, St. Dionysius the Areopagite wrote of the state of mystically uniting with The Source and Cause of All Reality as “Luminous Darkness.” It’s a light so bright it darkens our minds and hearts. Since we connect to The Cause in this space, this state of consciousness is known as causal.

Dionysius said that we enter into this Luminous Darkness by dropping all preferences. We can’t prefer up over down, left over right, right over left. We can’t prefer sorrow over joy or joy over sorrow. Crucially, we can’t prefer light over darkness. We have to let go, Dionysius would say, even our most subtle spiritual experiences in order that we might rest in Pure Mystery, beyond all words, beyond all concepts, beyond all conventional knowing.

We must be illuminated in the darkness of unknowing, guided only by our burning hearts.

Given Dionysius’ insight, does calling oneself a Lightworker prevent entrance into the Luminous Darkness? Does it perhaps make it harder?

I happen to believe so.

The language, images, and metaphors we use to interpret and frame our spiritual experiences are extremely important. They can push us to greater depth or they can subtly pull us away from certain types of realization and experience. Our frames, especially our spiritual ones, can start to form a deep bias in our minds. As a consequence, there are enormous implications to the frames we placed around spirituality.

So if you think this is all just some word play or heady spiritual talk, here’s a concrete example of how the Lightworker/Luminous Darkness plays out in terms of ethnicity and racial prejudice in the contemporary spiritual scene.

Lightworkers tend to be too addicted to the subtle, heavenly world of Light–chakras, meridians, auras, colors, etc. Those realities have their place and are important but they aren’t more important than the causal luminous darkness–which in turns isn’t more important than the waking-world, material day to day world. Each plays its role and supplements the other.

But because there is an overemphasis on understanding Light in its subtle form, we see a real bias towards light-haired (usually blonde) white woman in the yoga and spiritual communities nowadays. (There are also plenty of social and historical factors at play involved here, in terms of white privilege and power–I don’t want to discount those. But there is also a spiritual reason for this occurrence). I see so many white, often blonde woman, called radiant goddesses on Facebook. I much more rarely see a really very dark-skinned black or brown women called a radiant goddess. If we forget the beauty of the light in the darkness and the luminous nature of the darkness itself, this is what happens. For the record, I have nothing against beautiful white yoga women–I just don’t believe they constitute the radiant goddess norm.

That is just one example, but it points to the reason why I would rather be called a Darkwalker than a Lightworker. If we become overly fascinated with the subtle lights of the heavens, we forget the light trapped in the shadows and we forget there is a realm beyond the subtle, light-filled heaven, a luminous darkness, a Ground of All Being, from which everything comes into existence. Those deserve our time, attention, and love at least as much as the subtle lights (if not in our day more so).

I encourage you (wisely) to walk in the darkness. Walk into the Infinite Abyss of Love, the realm of Luminous Causative Darkness. Try also, when you feel ready, to gently walk with Love into the realm of our personal darknesses–our shadows. There is light to be found there as well.

03 Mar 2014 2 comments / READ MORE

The Soul’s Divine Blueprint

Posted by Chris Dierkes in The Imaginal, The Soul

My dad has spent his professional life working as a project manager at a general construction firm. General construction firms build large buildings or complexes of buildings–usually commercial in nature. When I was a little boy I remember my dad coming home with huge sets of building blueprints (nowadays most of the blueprints are computerized). There was a large table we had in our home where he would place all these blueprints on. After dinner he would often be poring over these drawings.

I was fascinated by the blueprints–their color, their smell, the intricacies. All the lines, dots, numbers. I couldn’t interpret the markings on the page–to me there were like some scroll from an ancient language–but I knew that based on these drawings people built real, concrete actual things like buildings. If my dad was in charge of a project to build a grocery store then these drawings–abstract as they seemed on paper–actually pointed to a place where people would eventually buy groceries to eat and live.

For a few summers in college I worked for the same company as my dad–though I worked as one of the manual laborers in the field. I wouldn’t say my brief stints gave me enormous insight into the nature of construction work, but one thing I distinctly recall from my time was how workers in the field had to be very creative in figuring out ways to make concrete the architectural blueprint. The blueprint would say a wall should go along this direct line, except that there was a huge rock deposit along that line, so the wall would have to be shifted slightly. There was (for me) a surprising amount of improvisation in the task.

But the main point being there was the blueprint itself and then there were all kinds of blocks, obstacles, and impediments to making that blueprint realized.

I’ve been thinking a lot about lately my dad’s blueprints. In my work now I’ve learned how to read a different kind of blueprint–not a blueprint to build a building but a blueprint to construct a soul.

Each soul has its own blueprint–it’s singular set of codes that leads to the construction or building of a soul. A soul’s blueprint is its deep pattern–a soul is created to be a certain way, to offer a specific gift. A soul blueprint is like a building blueprint–it envisions the creation of a certain reality. It also however leaves open a huge amount of room for improvisation. There’s an incredible deal of freedom as to how a person decides to concretely express his/her soul’s purpose and identity.

A soul blueprint, like an architectural blueprint, comes in its own specific language. To gain valuable data from the soul blueprint you need someone who can decode the information. A soul blueprint is not a physical object like an architectural blueprint. A soul blueprint is an intuitive source of information. It exists essentially as subtle energy patterns. Those energy patterns have to be read (like a blueprint) and then translated into the language of our concepts, metaphors, and mind. (The notion of a soul blueprint is itself just such an imaginal construction.)

The value of reading the soul blueprint is to learn who we are at the level of soul, who we are meant to be. Acting in alignment with our soul’s blueprint builds a life of deep meaning. We give our deepest gifts. While our spirit is the transcendent, universal dimension of our being, our soul is the deepest part of our individuality.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, the soul is often the missing piece in our contemporary spiritual world. It’s radically marginalized in our world (even in spiritual circles) and therefore the retrieval of our soul’s deep code, its deep blueprint becomes a source of incredible grace, wisdom, meaning, and wondrous power.

I’m trained to read soul blueprints, just as my dad was trained to read architectural ones. This is why I call myself a soul interpreter. Every act of reading the energetic, intuitive information of a soul is a form of interpretation. I’m like a translator–I speak the language of the soul (what I call imaginal language) and I speak the language of our everyday conventional world. I’m bilingual in that sense–I can translate the language of the soul to the language of everyday existence and vice versa.

My training as a soul interpreter involves four main elements:

  1. The capacity to access the source of the intuitive information (to actually learn how to establish a connection with a soul’s blueprint).
  2. To be able to read and interpret the blueprint once it’s accessed. This step provides an understanding of the soul’s original blueprint–how it is designed to be and to express.
  3. To be able to read for the degrees of alignment (or misalignment) between the soul’s original coding and the person’s day to day life. The soul is both very powerful but also vulnerable. Choices that are out alignment with our soul’s intending coding leads to blocks, restrictions, bruises, ailments, and constrictions, inhibiting the soul from expressing it’s fullest potential and purpose.
  4. The ability to initiate healing and clearing of any of these ailments, blocks, or restrictions to the soul’s original blueprint, restoring the soul more and more to its original coding.

Put together, these four elements, are an interlocking set. They form the basis of a modality of healing and empowerment of the soul. The path of the soul is each person’s to walk and find but an interpreter along the way can be of great assistance. It’s my great honor to have been called and gifted to play that role in the lives of others. Reading the soul of another is a most holy undertaking only to be done with extreme care. It’s a sacred responsibility and privilege in my life.

And like any great act of construction, it all begins with a blueprint.

—

* If you are interested in learning more about soul readings, please contact me for a free consultation.

28 Jan 2014 no comments / READ MORE

What is The Soul?

Posted by Chris Dierkes in Mystics, The Imaginal, The Soul

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece arguing that many spiritual teachings around today neglect the place of our souls. I worked off the notion of spiritual bypassing–which is spiritual teachings that hurt people by teaching them to bypass their emotions. I said that spiritual teachings neglected our souls was another kind of spiritual bypassing.

I received some comments and emails asking if I could say more about how I understand the soul.

Peering in at the soul

The soul is often a very ephemeral, tender, and quiet part of ourselves (though when awoken can be a force of incredible power). It’s a tricky one to grasp and speak about. So let’s start perhaps with what the soul is not and that will hopefully clear out some misconceptions. We’ll then be able to speak more clearly about the soul.

Let’s use a simple (but hopefully not simplistic) three part understanding of the human being, We have three identities: ego, soul, and spirit.

Our spirit is the unconditioned dimension of our being. Our spirit is pristine, always at ease, wise, full of love and light. It’s like a smile within us radiating outward to infinity. Though our spirit easily flows with all life, it is unencumbered by the vicissitudes of time and space. There’s no decay, no death, and no wounding for our spirit. Our spirit is what most spirit-ual teachings are aimed at. Anytime a spiritual teacher refers to awakening to the part of us that transcends time and space, is always peaceful and at rest, they’re talking about our spirit.

Our spirit is neither born nor does it die. It can’t really be said to move. It just is.

Our ego or personality, on the other hand, is conditioned. Very conditioned in fact. It’s the part of us that we share with the world (our persona). We go to a dinner party and introduce ourselves–we’ll be expected to talk about where we’re from, what we do for a living, who are our close relationships, etc. The ego is very much a product of our normal conception and experience of time. It’s born, it ages, it will die. And it’s not coming back.

When compared with spirit and personality, the soul is some of both, a little of neither. Like spirit, soul doesn’t conform to a typical lifespan. The soul however doesn’t completely transcend time and space either–this is what makes it so difficult to discuss. The soul both is beyond our normal timeframes and yet isn’t totally beyond all time and space (like spirit). This is where the teaching of reincarnation (in its many forms) comes from. Mystics throughout history have connected with a part of themselves that they realize isn’t bound to the normal cycle of birth and death like an ego or personality is, yet isn’t completely free from all time and space like spirit is. They surmise therefore that this middle part of us, might live through multiple forms or rounds of existence (however we might want to understand that idea).

In the ancient Greek tradition of Middle Platonism (which influenced the great early Christian theologian Origen), there was the notion of the ochema. The ochema is a vehicle–a vehicle of life being lived in multiple expressions. (Origen by the way did believe in the possibility, indeed probability of multiple incarnations).

Our spirit cannot be said to transmigrate or reincarnate. As spirit, we are never born nor then do we die. As personalities, we definitely are born and we definitely will die. And that’s it for the personality. It’s a one time deal only for a personality.

As souls, it’s a little both, but really neither.

We have conditioned or Unconditioned. Awake or asleep. Birth and Death or Unborn and Undying. This is the language of ego and spirit respectively.

But what about the language of the soul?

How do we talk of something which experiences death but doesn’t fully succumb to death either or has a beginning but not a beginning like everything we’re accustomed to which is born at a certain time?

Language is really unhelpful here. We lack a strong language of the soul. I think this is why the soul is usually expressed much better in art, symbolism, and imagery. Language however often fails us at the soul level.

Let’s consider another comparison.

As spirit, we are never able to be hurt or wounded. As spirit, we are radically, completely, and totally free, totally alive, totally awake, totally at peace, totally full of joyous humor. As spirit, life is a complete miracle.

As egos, we suffer, often greatly. Life is hard for the ego, always is, always will be. As they saying goes, “Life’s a bitch, then you die.” (That’s true, in part, for the ego only).

Contrary to spirit, the soul can be wounded. The soul can carry deep wounds, patterns, blocks and restrictions. Having wounds makes the soul (in this sense) more like the ego–which is often profoundly wounded. Except that the soul carries different kinds of wounds and pains then does the ego and (and this very important) the soul carries the pains and woundings differently than does the ego.

The upside of a soul being able to be wounded is that a soul can be healed. Egos can be healed but only to a degree (and not a great degree at that usually). As spirit, we are never injured, hence we are never healed. Soul-level healing is a beautiful, incredible thing.

Again, this is why it’s so hard to speak of our souls. We’re used to pain (ego) or no pain (spirit), unenlightened (ego) or enlightened (spirit). But what about an identity that is kinda both and yet kinda neither? Our minds are accustomed to this or that but the soul is neither this nor that. It’s on the borderland, in liminal space.

Let’s consider a third comparison to explore this liminality a bit more.

As egos we suffer from separation. The ego, in a sense, is separation, it’s nothing but separation. As egos, we struggle to form healthy relationships–with ourselves, with each other, with other sentient forms of life. These bonds, when formed, are always very fragile and liable to tear at a moment’s notice.

As spirit, there is deep and abiding oneness. There is no separation for spirit. There is pure intimacy.

As souls we are distinct from each other and yet the experience of distinction is not one of deep and painful separation as it is for the ego. As soul, our influence extends beyond our normal sense of spatial boundaries. We effect each other at seemingly great distances at soul level. Yet there is still difference and relationship, not pure and total transparency and intimacy or oneness as with spirit but not total separation (like the ego) either.

What this mean is that the soul is able to hold a very deep form of relationship. My experience of soul-level relationship is a feeling of subtlety. It’s like a pulse that radiates outward or like a router that’s picking up the internet wireless signal and channeling it through the house (i.e. the bodymind). As soul, I feel naturally related to earth, to sky, to children, to animals, to dreams, to the realm of shadows.

As spirit I identify as all of those. I AM That. I am dream-like reality. As spirit, I am earth and sea and sky and all that moves therein. As ego I am quite separate from all those, painfully so in fact. As soul, I’m me yet earth and sea and sky and all its creatures are my sisters and brothers and I feel this familial connection with all life in my blood and bones. I don’t have to work at getting that feeling–it comes naturally to soul. It’s built-in.

Now What?

We’ve proceeded so far more by looking at what soul is not, only implicitly speaking to what it is. Can we then perhaps speak more explicitly of soul on its own terms?

In the Tibetan Buddhism tradition they speak of the soul as the energetic container of all our choices. Choices that align with divine wisdom, compassion, and love strengthen the soul. Choices that are out of alignment with divine wisdom, compassion, and love leave negative imprints, restricting the flow of soul energy.

Gandhi–influenced by the devotional traditions of the Bhagavad Gita and The New Testament–spoke of soul force (satyagraha). Soul force is a soul that is most profound alignment with its divine nature and purpose.

The soul is deep memory. This is what I would say above all.

As egos, our sense of time is so conditioned. We’re always living in the past or off in the future in a very unconscious way. We’re predicting futures based on past experience–and our lack of a hopeful vision of the future negatively colors how we recall the past, which effects how we act in the present.

As spirit there is no past or future. There only is the present, the Eternal Present, The Utter Now.

As soul, we again have access to time but in a very subtle way, a way that is not nearly so conditioned and habitual as the ego’s relationship to time. But it is still conditioned–just very subtly and this is the key point. When we look into soul patterns, we are working with very subtle forms of thought, habit, feeling, and identity.

As soul, we have access to the past, to the future, and perhaps even to parallel or possible timelines. The soul is the repository of our deep memory–it remembers our ancestry, our collective human patterns of consciousness, our earthiness. We include mineral, plant, and animal life within us–and the soul remembers the stories and the songs of each. The soul also has memory of the future (which we call hope). It has purpose and desire.

Our souls need to be seen and appreciated. For many of us they’re hiding. They’ve been marginalized by mainstream secularism, mainstream religion, and even by most alternative spiritual teachings. We’re either ignorant of or embarrassed by acknowledging and working with this part of ourselves. We need to learn who we are at soul level, what are characteristic strengths and challenges are, as well blocks and restrictions.

Ultimately we’re each ego, soul, and spirit. Each identity is whole unto itself and yet intrinsically related with the others. None of these three identities wipes out the others. But soul, I believe, is right now the most misunderstood part of ourself and the one most in need of being embraced.

13 Oct 2013 no comments / READ MORE

Introduction to Shamanic Journeying

Posted by Chris Dierkes in Healing Arts, Shamanism, The Imaginal, The Soul

HEALING TRAVELS IN THE LOWER WORLD, FALL 2013 JOURNEYING COURSE

Shamanism is the most ancient form of human spiritual exploration. Journeying is a primary form of practice within shamanic traditions. In a journey, an individual enters into a light trance state where they become open to nonordinary experience.

In this course we will be taking a series of journeys to the Lower World–a realm of healing and integration. In addition we will learn the ethics of journeying safely and how journeying fits into a larger spiritual path and purpose. Each evening will include both a discussion and a group journey.

This course will be well-timed to nature’s season. Fall is a time where old patterns begin to change and release, creating room for something new to emerge. These journeys to the Lower World will heal of us of old wounds and patterns so that we might give birth to healthier and wiser forms of being.

Time: 7-9:30pm
Dates: Tuesdays, Oct 15 – Nov 5th
Cost: $200. Payment due by end of first class. Payment can be made by etransfer or cash.
Location: Westcoast Reiki Centre, 4424 Main St. (Main and 28th).

The Journeys:
Oct 15th: Discovering Our Soul Contracts
Oct 22nd: Calling Home Our Soul Fragments
Oct 29th: Meeting Our Power Animal
Nov 5th: Locating Our Medicine Gift

Solo Journeying: Included in the cost of the course is an opportunity for each participant to meet with the instructor in a one-on-one setting to facilitate a separate healing best done in a private setting.

Space Limited:  There are only 10 spots available for this course.

Questions or To RSVP: Contact Me

Please Note: For individuals who have experienced severe traumas please contact me first. Journeying is very safe and gentle but any form of consciousness state change can cause some difficulties or potential triggering for those with challenges like PTSD, etc.

23 Sep 2013 no comments / READ MORE

The Problem With Donkey Kong Spirituality

Posted by Chris Dierkes in Emotions, Mystics, Shamanism, The Imaginal, The Soul

Recently father and video game developer Mike Mika redesigned the classic game Donkey Kong to reverse the gender roles of the characters. In his version Pauline became the heroine saving Mario from the evil giant ape. Mika did this based on his daughter’s stated preference that she wanted to save Mario. According to Mr. Mika, his daughter seems to enjoy the game more since the switch. This story became widely distributed over the internet as a much needed victory for empowerment of young women. You can watch Mika’s version of the game here.

While I definitely appreciate Mike Mika’s redesign I think there’s a deeper issue not being addressed by the gender inversion. Namely I believe Donkey Kong reveals a mytheme. A mytheme is the essential unit or kernel of a myth. It’s a structurally similar form seen across a variety of different versions of a myth. In this regard video games like Donkey Kong to me are a holdover, a residue, or perhaps better an echo, of a classic mytheme surrounding mysticism, namely the mysticism of ascent.

When I speak of the mysticism of ascent I mean a spirituality that emphasizes a transcendent reality somewhere up above this world that one must journey towards. One must leave or transcend this plane of reality to reach a more perfect one somewhere else.

This ascending mytheme evident in many video games has some potentially problematic aspects–aspects that are going unexamined and replicating themselves in human consciousness through the proliferation of video games. Donkey Kong is a primordial video game and therefore is a great example to use. It’s one of the first platform video games. It’s the first with a full narrative storyline. It’s also the first to introduce the mytheme of saving the damsel in distress (which Mike Mika’s hack so brilliantly deconstructed).

Whether it’s the Hero’s Journey on TV shows, Shamanism in Modern Day Fairy Tales, The Christ Story in superhero movies, or the Path of Ascent in video games, mythemes play themselves out in our media culture, however officially secular it may be. I see a strong resonance of the ascending mystical traditions in the tradition of video games, particularly in Donkey Kong. This deeper structure–with its potential problems–will not be unearthed simply by a gender inversion process however helpful that is on it’s own terms.

What exactly do I mean by the mysticism of ascent and how is it being replicated in Donkey Kong? Let’s consider some parallels.

The Great and Mystical Donkey Kong

pauline

In Donkey Kong there are levels. One ascends through the levels by mastering each successive one. This is literally the case in Donkey Kong as one scales up ladders and each new level is located up above the one prior.  Similarly, in the mystical traditions there are levels of ascent–usually depicted as planes of reality. The mystical aspirant is taught, through various techniques, how to “jump” up to higher levels of consciousness and being.

In Donkey Kong one must master (“beat” in original video game player-ese) each level and its attendant challenges and opponent. On the mystical path one must defeat various characteristic enemies in order to reach a higher level. Challenges and opponents on the mystical path include deep-seated fears, common misperceptions, potential fixation on pleasure-inducing mystical phenomena…as opposed to say falling barrels and moving fire.

Nevertheless the same basic mythic structure is in place in both–both are a kind of game, a form of hyperreality.

In Donkey Kong, as in mysticism, one is assumed to be a solitary individual who must ascend this obstacle course. Originally the character in Donkey Kong was known as ‘Jumpman’. Truthfully this is a pretty good name for the mystical ascender: A Jumpman (as usually, though not always, they have historically been men).

This solitary individual must journey alone (or perhaps occasionally with the aid of temporary helpers) and overcome various obstacles and challenges. These challenges are overcome through the use of some basic, repeated techniques. In Donkey Kong that’s jumping, ascending and descending ladders, moving side to side, and using the various tools on screen (e.g. hammer). In the mystical traditions these techniques consist of things like allowing energy to rise up the back of one’s body, opening up above oneself, closing the eyes and turning them upward, repeating mantras, guided visualizations, and the like.

In Donkey Kong, Mario (or Pauline in Mike Mika’s version) undertakes all these actions and seek to overcome these obstacles in order to unite permanently with his beloved. In the mystical tradition, one ascends to unite with the Transcendent Source.

Notice that in both the video game and the ascending spiritual tradition there is a journeyer, a set of techniques, a game of challenges, and a love or goal at the end. Having reached the pinnacle, this individual will conquer the final barrier and be forever united with his beloved.

(Sidenote: Though in a brilliant, perhaps even ironic twist, in Donkey Kong once one finished the original four levels and saved Pauline, the game restarts from the beginning in a more advanced form–leaving open the possibility that there never actually is a finish to the ascent, leaving the individual forever struggling upward. In the history of mysticism this is known as epektesis, and was actually the view of one of the greatest Christian mystics, St. Gregory of Nyssa, who argued we would never ever fully completely reach God but would forever journey more deeply into what we could experience of The Divine Mystery.).

There are many variations on this same basic theme of mystical ascent in the world’s spiritual traditions. In the tradition of Merkavah mysticism of Kabbalistic Judaism one meditates and ascends up to the Chariot of God (or the Throne of God). In Shabd Yoga one follows inner sounds upwards, through thee sound’s current until one reaches the Primordial Sound, seen as the Originating Source of all reality. In Kundalini Yoga, the serpent power lying coiled at the base of the spine uncoils and rises up the spine until it pushes through the crown of the head leading to an experience of ascended light. In the Christian mystical tradition primary images include the Ladder of Ascent usually up a mountain or climbing a staircase to heaven. Other examples could be given, these are not meant to be exhaustive, merely representative.

Critique of Donkey Kong Spirituality

ladderThere are some characteristic problems associated with the Donkey Kong-esque mysticism of ascent.

1. The Critique from The Absolute 

As I said the mysticism of ascent assumes the coherent identity and reality of a separate self-sense. It then uses certain techniques to effect a major transformation in this self-sense. Traditions like Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta (along with many others) question the automatic assumption of a self-contained, individual self. They do this through processes like koans or inquiry, repeatedly asking “Who am I?” “Who is asking this question?” These traditions argue that it we follow these processes deeply enough they will show the insubstantial nature of the self sense. With no separate self, then there are no practices to do to effect change for that self. In addition there is no longer any objective outside world relative to that self, nor any prize that self must attain (whether Pauline or total absorption into the Source). The whole self-world-enemy-attainment-God complex falls apart once the separate self drops. No levels, no ladders, no up, no down, no climber–just free fall in space.

2. Critique of Ascent

This critique can be combined with critique #1 or exist on its own. The mysticism of ascent is, as the name implies, ascending in nature. As a result, the history of spirituality in the last 2,000 years, which has largely been dominated by the traditions of ascent, has left a destructive trail. When our ascent becomes driven by fear, then mysticism can become a cover for teachings and communities that deny the value of the earth, of the human body, of women, of sexual existence, of indigenous wisdom, and of our inherently animal nature and connection with all life. I don’t think I need to remind any of the pain that mistake has caused and continues to cause.

Now What?  

halo

Given these trenchant criticisms, is there any value to Donkey Kong spirituality? Is there anything worth salvaging in it? Anything worth rescuing? I think there is.

If we look at traditions of iconography–for example Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Sufi among others–we see halos. We see beings of grace who radiate a light that encircles their heads, shining outward. For our purposes here what interests me about a halo is that they reach up above the top of our physical heads. Our incarnation is more than our physical selves. We extend around, below, and above our physical bodies. The halo tradition is not simply a metaphor, it’s a clear artistic description of a spiritual reality. There’s part of us that are up above what we normally think of as our physically defined bodies. A halo reveals a person whose “higher” forms of themselves are open and full of light. I put “higher’ in quotes there because higher here doesn’t mean better–that was the mistake of many of the ascending spiritual traditions, to see these parts of our incarnation as our salvation and to seek to flee from our “lower” parts and live exclusively in our “higher” selves.

But what if we don’t make that Donkey Kong mistake? What if we aren’t driven by a notion that we have to climb “up there”, to save some Prince/Princess, to finally and forever overcome some devilish or apeish foe? What then? Well, it means we could retain a, maybe the, central insight of the ascending traditions–we could open up these parts of ourselves and become responsible for the full range of our being here as human. Part of the spectrum of our being here does include parts of us that are more transcendent, subtler, more ascended in nature. (For readers interested in a somewhat more technical description of what these parts of ourselves are through the framework of chakras, see this piece I wrote on the subject.)

Responsible is the key word there. The Donkey Kong tradition of spirituality is too much of a game.* It’s too achievement-oriented, too immersed in a mentality of conquering and winning. Responsible, on the other hand, means realizing that these parts of ourselves are always operative. Either we will come into conscious relationship with these dimensions of ourselves and therefore become responsible for what we are putting out there or we won’t and they will unconsciously transmit their conditioning, potentially hurting us and others. (For the record, this exact same mechanism holds for the “lower” end of our incarnational spectrum.)

There’s no winning in the spiritual path.

With the current range towards embodiment in spirituality (one I’ve been critical of) I do think there’s a subtle bias against the ascended portions of ourself. By ascended I mean these parts of ourselves that are extend up above our heads–the subtler domains of ourself that are depicted with halos.

I think we should retain the opening of these ascended portions of our incarnation without this whole narrative of ascent. Ascended yes, ascent no. A model to consider for such a way of approaching the subject would be emotional literacy. Emotional literacy training is simply about learning to name and experience different emotions, recognizing the distinct role of each and how they work together, and how to take proper care of emotional boundaries. I could see an “ascended literacy” which would strip these domains of the narrative of ascent and spiritual heroism (and the subtle or not-so-subtle arrogance that inevitably comes from such a viewpoint). It would just be rather plain and straightforward–creative, fun, and interesting to be sure–but not a game. Not about who has the highest score and can reach the highest most spiritual state. It would just be about the learning the language, the experience, the strengths and limitations of the ascended portions of ourselves–and this would simply be one course, if you like, in a more integrated curriculum. A real spiritual path that would seek to welcome and work with our bodies, our emotions, our shadow, our beliefs, our souls, and so forth.

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* Another article for another day and for another person to write would look at the postmodern turn in video games, particularly multi-player online role games. i.e. The way in which video games are reflective of and furthering the movement towards postmodern consciousness. In the multi-player role games especially the landscape is arguably much flatter (more horizontal) than the vertical orientation of most classic video games. The storyline element, nascent in Donkey Kong, is much more in full flower. The way in which characters can co-construct collaboratively their environments (think 2nd Life). The way in which characters can create their own identities. These are all hallmarks of postmodern consciousness.

15 Sep 2013 no comments / READ MORE

Spiritual Bypassing of The Soul

Posted by Chris Dierkes in Emotions, Healing Arts, Shamanism, The Imaginal, The Soul

In 2010 Robert Masters wrote an excellent book entitled Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us From What Really Matters.* The book explores how we use “spiritual practices or beliefs to avoid dealing with painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs.”

Masters’ approach is, to use some jargon, psychospiritual in nature. It blends the spiritual with the human psyche–it merges spirituality in particular with the body, relationships, and emotions (see his latest book entitled Emotional Intimacy).

The spiritual bypassing critique–in the context of emotions, body, relationships–is very important. It’s real. It’s all over the place. And Dr. Masters insightfully diagnoses the disease and offers practical remedies.

I, however, see another form of spiritual bypassing and that is spiritual teaching that bypass our souls. I’m not claiming I’m the first to realize or make this argument but it’s been on my mind frequently of late. It’s this other form of spiritual bypassing that I’d like to explore a bit in this piece.

A few years back now I wrote a 3 part series that explored different identities we have as humans and how we might learn to bring them into greater harmony with each other. I wrote a piece each on the ego, Spirit, and The Soul.

Ego I defined as our human personality. Spirit I defined as The Ultimate, a recognition one essential nature shared in common by all, entirely free and full–what’s traditionally called Enlightenment, God Realization, or The Natural State. And I defined The Soul as our True Self, aka The Flavor of our Awakening. Each of us has a distinct expression of the awakened state and talking about The Soul as The Flavor of our Awakening is a way of giving voice to that part of ourself. As many mystics have said we are like unique rays (Souls) flowing out of the same Sun (Spirit).

That way of viewing The Soul (capital S) is a crucial one. It’s ignored or obscured in many of our contemporary Spirit-ual teachings. Nevertheless it’s an incomplete view of The Soul…or maybe I should say the soul (lowercase s).

By soul (as opposed to Soul) I mean a subtler dimension of our experience–one that is quite attuned energetically and empathetically to our environment and relationships. It’s a deeper layer of our being, a subterranean wisdom. And importantly, the soul, little s, is able to be wounded. Soul, Capital S, sometimes called The Oversoul, is not wound-able.

Little s soul is the realm of mythology. It speaks in the language of dreams, archetypes, and visionary experience. Often, it’s a quieter part of ourselves, one that therefore is easily drowned out by other voices and agendas.

To make it a little clearer why I mean by soul, here’s a list of the kinds of conditions we see that are unique to the soul (little s).

Auras–energetic and subtle emotional boundaries around ourselves. Boundaries that can be strengthened or depleted through intention and practice. Boundaries that can, under stress or trauma be pierced, leaving long lasting energetic marks.

Karma–aka Stories of Ancestral/Humanity’s Past Living Within Us. These are tendencies, conditions, and stories of personal, familial, and collective human consciousness that are still playing themselves out unconsciously in our lives. The soul is a realm of deep memory.

The World Soul–known traditionally as the Anima Mundi. Nature herself is conscious as are all beings. We can commune with these beings in non-ordinary states of reality. This is the realm of shamanism–the realm of power animals, nature mysticism, journeying, plant medicine, dreaming, and inspiration.

soul wounding/illness–there are many potential forms of wounding at the soul level. Shamans and healers throughout history have developed an intricate classification system as well as treatment modalities for these various afflictions. Ailments like soul loss and fragmentation; cords, hooks, darts, and other energetic enmeshments; attachments of all kinds. (See a list of such treatment modalities here.)

The Otherworld–this is the traditional Celtic term for the spirit world. The Otherworld is home of angels, departed loved ones, and guides. Our soul is the one who is connected to these domains and the various characters who populate them.

Astrology–not only are we in a psychic relationship with Earth, we share a connection with other planetary and cosmic realities. We are, after all, made of star dust. Hence we are intrinsically in communion with these forces and the ability to read those influences upon us is where astrology (done well) comes into play. That influence and mutual relationship occurs at the soul level (not at the personality nor at The Spirit level).

That list is by no means exhaustive but it’s intended to be representative. I hope you get the idea of the overall kinds of things I mean by referring to soul.

Most of these experiences (and the kinds of teachings that relate to them) would in our day be labeled New Age. I think of them as primarily shamanic and quiet ancient in pedigree. But in our contemporary spiritual environment, these kinds of processes and domains are dealt with by New Age teachings, if anywhere.

And this segregation is problematic. Because by and large New Age teachings can be guilty of the various kinds of spiritual bypassing at the human physical, bodily, and emotional level that Robert Masters warns about. New Age teachings tend to emphasize ascending energies and currents. New Agers often call themselves “lightworkers” (as opposed to one who embraces the darkness). They typically interpret states like Peace, Love, Joy as “higher” than ones like fear, anger, or sorrow, leading to a strong bias to maintain a “high vibration.” (This over-emphasis or bias towards ascending energy is not found in the shamanic traditions).

New Age teachings also typically don’t include teachings like Dzogchen, Mahamudra, Zen, Advaita, Inquiry, and the like which are about Spirit Awakening. In turn, those traditions of Spirit Awakening typically deny these soul-level teachings.

Many of The Spirit teachings of Awakening are spiritually bypassing our bodies and emotions. Some aren’t. But all of them are essentially bypassing our souls. Conversely our soul teachings aren’t often recognizing our Spirit teachings. And neither is doing a very good job with our emotional, bodily selves.

This disconnection is one of the primary reasons why spirituality is in a such a poor state currently.

In his book on Spiritual Bypassing, Masters vividly portrays the kinds of problems that continually manifest when spirituality acts to numb us emotionally or disconnect us from pain. It shows what happens when our spirituality breaks our connection to ourselves as emotional, incarnate beings.

The spiritual bypassing of the soul similarly leaves spiritual aspirants with missing pieces of themselves (though they’re often different pieces than the ones Masters focuses on). Spiritual teachings that bypass the soul leave us in a state I often refer to as “energetically skinny”. There’s a certain kind of energetic emaciation that results from teachings that deny our souls. Power and artistry come form the soul realm. Teachings that don’t include the soul often lack power, a basic umph.

The soul is true. It’s a substratum of us, a finer form of resiliency, like a spider-web. Regardless of many of the very real problems of the packaging of soul teachings in our day through New Ageism, this part of us is genuinely alive. It’s significant. It seeks to be honored, heard, respected, incorporated as part of our daily lives.

I referred earlier to the word psychospiritual. I said those were teachings that included both spirit and our psychological selves. By psychological I meant there things like our emotional patterns, personality, and ego. But the original meaning of the word psyche means soul. It could be understood to include both what we typically think of as human egoic personalities and these subtler dimensions of our being…things like soul illness, karma, ancestors connections, The World Soul, and so on.

That fuller psychospiritual teaching is still waiting to be discovered, taught, and embodied. Until then we are left cobbling together bits and pieces here and there.

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* The term spiritual bypassing was coined by John Welwood, another wonderful psychospiritual author and teacher.

07 Sep 2013 1 comment / READ MORE

Meeting The Spider-Lady: A Shamanic Journey

Posted by Chris Dierkes in Shamanism, The Imaginal, The Soul

A number of spiritual traditions, particularly in the Americas, speak of a medicine wheel. These traditions seek to orient us to the four cardinal directions, the earth below, the heavens above, and the self connected to them all. (You can read more about this practice of orientation here.).

Different traditions will often also experience certain animals as totems or guardian figures of the four directions. A person may take a shamanic journey to any of the directions or to the totem animals, to meet them and be taught by them. In a journey one enters into a light trance state–the state that we experience often as a ‘twilight’ state, when we are neither fully asleep nor entirely awake. One then journeys, with an intent, and enters a non-ordinary set of experiences that offer us greater insight, harmony, inspiration, and healing. (Unless you’ve been called by a guardian figure and directly instructed in journeying, it’s best to learn a safe modality to journey from someone experienced in this art.)

One possible journey is to meet an oppositional figure in each of the directions. This oppositional totem animal is not an enemy, so much as one who brings us face to face with something we fear, are neglecting, or trying to suppress within ourself. The following piece is a description of a journey I took to the land of the South to meet my oppositional totem–in this case, the Spider-Lady–and what she taught me. It helps to know that the South is often seen as the realm of fire, summer, instinct, and healing.

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I journey to the Lower World as usual, climbing down a hole next to the tree that I spent so many hours under as a little boy. I pass through a tunnel-like cave and come out in an Edenic paradise. I meet my guide and ask that he journey with me. I connect to my intention to meet my oppositional figure in the South.

We journey across open fields amidst scorching heat. I feel light and relaxed. At some point however I begin to feel the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand up straight. It’s that feeling of heightened awareness right before a Midwestern summer thundershower. I can feel the storm coming.

Instantly, I see large, hairy legs, with incredibly sharp pincers, like swords. Before me stands an enormous frightening Spider. Before I have time to scream or run or even really ready myself for the inevitable, Spider rips me to shreds. I should have expected Mama Spider. I had seen smaller spiders upon my entrance to the cave, but I didn’t really pay much attention to them at the time. By now, it’s too late as I’m being dismembered.* The terror is washing over me; I feel like I’m dying though it’s strangely peaceful. My point of view shifts more to an observer, watching my body (or carcass I guess) be sliced and diced.

Strewn in pieces, Spider then begins to weave a web and puts me back together. I move from this state of peaceful but quasi-frozen terror above my body to an experience back within the flesh. I feel the sinews and the webbing linking me back up. I’m feel wave upon wave of extreme terror at this point.

When she is finishing recreating me, I stand up. Lady Spider simply looks at me through her numerous eyes. I force myself to stand there, to be able to take in the face that instinctually is so terrifying. My sense of her eyes changes. It’s not love that she’s communicating (definitely not that). But a kind of well wishing. Sorta good luck or something. It’s hard to communicate precisely what it is, but I can sense a change within me and a change in our relationship.

I ask her what gift she has given me, what I’m supposed to have learned from this experience. She leaves without answering. I’m left to explore the question and find the answer for myself.

I search for awhile, ask other characters around if they know, but none do. Or if they do know, they don’t share the answer with me. I eventually leave the Lower World and come back to The Middle World, moved by the experience but confused as to it’s meaning.

I take other journeys over the next few weeks to the Lower World. On each occasion, there’s a huge number of smaller spiders there to greet me upon my entrance into the cave. They don’t seem so thrilled to see me and move into attack mode, trying to bite me. At first I think I have to surrender again to them as I did to their Mother, but as they keep biting me it’s clear this doesn’t feel right and I need to put a stop to this. I create an energy field around myself to keep them out. This affords some initial protection but still seems like an incomplete or even wrong response.

I keep finding spiders only in the cave and sometimes just outside the cave–which is the transitional point from our normal waking consciousness in the Middle World to the Lower World proper.

Why are they only here? And why are they so hyped up? I find them very annoying and wish they’d just go away–this of course only riles them up further. I try conversing with them. I begin watching their movements and trying to imitate them. None of this works.

We’re weeks into this now and I’m feeling really frustrated, even angry at this point.

Finally, who knows how, the thought enters my mind when seeing them yet again:

These spiders are not outside your mind, they are your thoughts.

And now it all starts to make some sense. These spiders of my mind are only showing up at the transit point between my normal waking consciousness and the deeper portions of the altered trance state of the journey. I’ve been trying too hard to skip over this part of myself and immediately go from regular mental state to deeper trance state. I was impatiently attempting to bypass this middle zone of my mind. So these thoughts were “fighting back”. Just surrendering to them didn’t work because that was just creating more thoughts in my head. Trying to get rid of them by wishing them away didn’t work. Putting up the barriers temporarily cooled things off certainly but still left thought disowned…on the outside looking in.

It was at this point that I owned these spider-thoughts. I embraced them rather than letting them overrun me. But nor did I push them away.

I simply stated that as my thoughts I recognized and appreciated them but that also they were for the next little while to remain more quiet.

At that point, spontaneously the spiders relaxed. And they began to weave a web. The web was stunning in its intricacy and subtlety. Through this marvellous display the spiders taught me when the mind relaxes and is embraced then it will weave beautiful tapestries of thought.

Sometimes in my journeys to the Lower World the spiders return, sometimes not. When they do, they are reminding me of this lesson, to contemplate their stunning creations.

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* Experiences of dis-memberment and re-memberment are common throughout the shamanic traditions. Something dies, so something new can be born.

01 Sep 2013 no comments / READ MORE

Establishing a Sacred Container

Posted by Chris Dierkes in Healing Arts, Shamanism, The Imaginal

How we create sacred containers for prayer, meditation, or energy work. 

A long time ago there was a Jewish mystic named Honi, known as the Circle Drawer. In one story about him, there is a drought in the land and Honi draws a circle in the sand and tells God that he will not leave the circle until it starts raining. (By the way Honi called God ‘Abba’, which is the same term Jesus used. It’s a term that indicates deep intimacy and closeness).

Honi drew a circle around himself and then set an intention. He felt a deep, intimate connection with the Source.

In a similar manner, The Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree seeking enlightenment. He placed two fingers from his right hand on the ground. His fingers indicated that he was calling the Earth to witness to his enlightenment in the face of temptation and fear.

Both Honi and The Buddha combined physical posture along with intention in their prayer or meditation practice. I’d like for a few moments to explore this use of physical posture to establish space in meditation or prayer practice.

Drawing a circle around oneself is a spiritual practice seen in many different traditions around the world–not only in ancient Judaism but in aboriginal spiritual traditions of The Americas for example.

What is very important is that the circle is actually drawn–whether literally drawn in the ground like Honi did or visualized around oneself. I use this practice myself. I will typically trace the outline of a circle around my body with my index finger as I sit down to pray or meditate.

The circle has no beginning and no end and therefore represents the Infinite. The circle is whole, a representation of healing. Every point on the circle is equidistant from the center of the circle, representing the ultimate oneness and equality of all things.

The circle does however create a boundary and arguably this is the circle’s most important function. First it offers psychic protection. You may choose who or what is able to enter into the circle and conversely what is to remain outside the circle.

By drawing the circle we place ourselves in a spiritual container, in a sacred space. The circle inscribes a space of holiness.

Try it for yourself. Sit down and relax yourself and begin to meditate. Do this for a few minutes…

What do you notice? 

Now, sit down but before beginning to meditate, draw a circle around yourself. If you are a very visual person you may visualize this circle being drawn but I find it is helpful to have some physical gesture to instil the act in your bodily being.

Draw the circle around yourself, sit for a moment in the circle and notice what arises for you.

Now begin to meditate for a few minutes.

Notice if there is a qualitative difference between these two mini-meditation experiences. 

In my experience in the second version I most often feel a much deeper sense of connection and peace.

Further Variations/Additions:

–Orienting to the Directions

I’ve been very influenced by the traditions of shamanism, which is where I learned this practice. Some folks will actually stand and face the various directions often opening the hands to the direction as a sign of reception. They may even call out to the directions, invoke a prayer or chant or beat a drum or shake a rattle. For those who are more extroverted or kinaesthetic I encourage trying that process. I’m generally more introverted so I prefer simply to sit within the drawn circle and to bring my intention in turn to each direction, offering thanks and asking for support. I often point a finger or move a hand towards each direction rather than my whole body. I’ll share the method I follow (taught to me by Alberto Villoldo), but of course I encourage individuals to develop them as they need to in their own creative ways.

The order of the directions I follow:

1) South. South is typically associated with the season of summer, with the element Fire. Here I ask for heat that might burn away that which needs to be released.

2) West. Associated with the season of autumn and the element Water. The West is where the sun sets and is traditionally associated with dying. Here I ask that whatever needs to die within me may do so.

3) North. Season of winter and the element Earth. This is the realm of journeying. I often imagine a vast, dark, snowy landscape and see myself walking out in this land, into the dreamy darkness.

4) East. Season of spring and the element Air. Spring is associated with the rising of the sun and therefore new life. I sometimes imagine flying with the perspective of an eagle, soaring in the clouds with a panoramic view and diving with precision into life. This dimension is about creation.

5) Earth. This realm nurtures us, sustains us, and gives life. I connect here for a sense of grounding and healing.

6) Heavens. Not simply the airs, the rains, and the stars (those it includes those), but by heavens I also connect to a sense of the transcendent and the spirit world. This connects to me a long line of wisdom figures. I feel the sense of inspiration and grace. I feel myself opening to that which is far greater than me.

7) Self. Lastly I bring attention to myself as one being within this vast array. I feel joined to all these dimensions, offer gratitude for the gifts of all of these dimensions, and seek to serve with love and kindness.

–Buddha pointing to the ground

I employ this posture whenever if I ever feel beset by potentially overwhelming thoughts or emotions arising. If I experience deep movements of fear or anxiety (which happens from time to time), then I place my two fingers on the ground and feel the Earth offering her strength to me. I also use this posture when I feel that I’m not paying attention particularly well during prayer or meditation. Immediately I notice a more focused quality once I place those fingers on the ground.

23 Dec 2012 no comments / READ MORE
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