GOLDEN AND DARK SHADOW REFLECTED IN OTHERS, WAIT WITHIN US, FOR OUR FREEDOM

All of us at some time in our lives, are confronted with parts of ourselves that get in our way, that limit us, and keep us from becoming more than we are.  It might be a manipulative behavior, or avoidance.  It might be an unexplainable attraction to bad boys, or even attraction to a “golden child” or person who seems to move in complete grace.  This is our shadow in action, and our ego instinctively looks away because shadow holds the limited portions of our personality and habits developed in the past that no longer serve, and are not part of conscious awareness. These are the parts of ourselves that we have learned to repress. 

Our dark shadow holds repressed negativity while our golden shadow holds our repressed potentiality.  These two aspects of shadow are the Guardians of the Threshold to spirit, to non duality, and to living in grace.  They prevent us from being all we can be, from reaching our highest potential, and from living our lives in the experience of heavenly, loving spirit. 

When we come to the same place with our science and our mysticism, the importance of understanding our viewpoint and our place in it cannot be denied.  That threshold of fear, where our own shadow keeps us from the non dual experience, is where I find most verbose folks whose need to rail against the world's ills might be threatened by taking responsibility for the world in a new morality.  This anxiety can be difficult to let go of, like the fear that guards the threshold.  Letting go of the need to find the world wrong so that we can feel right is releasing our own golden shadow.  What we cannot know without crossing the threshold, is that releasing the shadow is also stepping into it, and opening the door to infinite possibility for ourselves and our experience.  We choose possibility with our viewpoint, creating our experience, and when we cross the threshold and accept the will of God as infinite possibility, we accept all that is as our own.  The paradox can be unimaginable, especially to those who hold tight to fear, good and evil and its sweet fruit, me and not me.  The promise of the Kingdom and infinite possibility is just beyond, and so much more...

Excerpted from All About Living by Molly Brogan

Our Own Asemic Symbolism Leads Our Way

I firmly believe that we each have within us a pattern of archetypes or symbols that lead us in our conscious and unconscious recognition and responses to them. The symbols we see in our dreams over and over are much like the symbols we see in our waking life again and again. Can we pay attention to them differently than we do now, and what would we learn if we do?

One of my favorite contemporary artists, Ronald Isom makes this idea of asemic symbolism integral to his artwork. He sees it like this:

Asemic symbolism has no verbal sense, though it may have a clear contextual sense. Through its design, composition and symbolic content, asemic symbolism may evoke an understanding, meaning or intuition. Through its composition and symbolic content, asemic symbolism may provide an understanding of complex ideas. This form of art depends on the viewers knowledge of philosophy, art history, mathematics, religion, philosophy, physics, sociology, nature and other esoteric subjects for it to make sense, or it can be understood through aesthetic intuition.

Asemic symbolism is truly a product of the Internet. Search engines have made it possible to generate thousands of links for words, and images. It also provides a way to unify esoteric ideas in a spontaneous manner.

The asemic symbolism process has five parts:

1. Creation of a spontaneous drawing (the genesis or nexus of all asemic symbolism; proceeding from natural feeling or native tendency without external constraint )

2. Manipulation of the drawing through the use of a computer (with image software)

3. Formation of a spontaneous title using Asemic Symbolic Divination a technologically advanced form of scrying.

4. Researching the title on the Internet to provide possible explanations or meanings of the drawing ( link the drawing title to as many sites as possible)

5. Publishing the manipulated drawing, title and links to a web site

The bi-product of this process is an acute awareness that everything in our universe is related. Much like the physics concept of a "theory of everything", asemic symbolism is rooted in the ancient idea of causality. Publishing on the Internet allows the asemic symbolic art work to grow in geometric proportions. Linking is the key to provide a self sustaining life to the art work.

Asemic symbolism is not an art movement. Movements have almost entirely disappeared in contemporary art where individualism and diversity prevail. It is however a creative process that utilizes the manipulation of materials to find or define unity in the known or unknown universe.

Asemic symbolic predation is an organic metaphor that describes an
interaction where a predator design feeds on another design or visual source known as the prey

An example of an asemic symbolic listing on the internet: http://metrogadfly.blogspot.com/

Artwork also by Ron Isom Many thanks.

Our Own Wonderful Infinite Nature

Ronald D. Isom said...

Great response to the question! The Goethe quotation is outstanding. Artist absorb what they see, hear, taste etc. and it emerges as new thoughts and idea. We must continue to absorb the world around us and keep the internal silo filled with fodder for new idea and creative thought.

Thank you, Ronald. Your artwork is an excellent example of just that. For any of you who have not seen his artwork, I heartily recommend checking out Ronald's blog through the link on his name. Like Dr. Carl Jung before him, Ronald has given life to the symbols of his unconsciousness and mapped the archetypes of his soul in his marvelous artwork. In Jung's memoirs, he recounts the three years that he spent documenting and categorizing the symbols of his dreams and fantasies, leading to his theories of the unconscious and archetype.

I know that developing this kind of intimacy with my own infinite nature allows me a clear path to my creativity. I am most inspired when I allow spirit to speak to me in this way, and all ways.

Artwork by Paul Klee

Logos Moves Between You and I

Robert said...

"We are the writers, and the readers and the stories and the Logos."

What do you mean by Logos?

Through this Word – Logos – all things became. In it was life, the light of human beings. It shone in the darkness, and the darkness received it not. It was in the world, and the world did not know it. It entered in individual being and, to those who received it, it gave the ability to become children of God. Its radiance was seen, full of grace and truth.” – Georg Kuhlewind

In Carl Jung's analytical psychology, the logos is the masculine principle of rationality and consciousness. Its female counterpart, eros (Greek, love), represents interconnectedness. I think the term is really both.

To become aware of Logos is to become aware of logos in ones self. Logos shines through the visible and invisible alike. It is the light in relationship between persons, between words and meaning, between God and man. It is the knowing that you are. The speaking and knowing to what you are speaking … is logos. It is a living, present truth. What man cognizes, what is communicable, is the world. That man cognizes, is Logos. It is brought into meaning and passes between. This world exists for and through the knower, through Logos.

Thanks for the question, Robert. Molly Brogan
Artwork by F. Rassouli

Personal Mythology Expressed in Dream

Callie said...
One of the things I like most about Remember Me is the dream diary. Does this have anything to do with shadow?

This is a great question, Callie. In Remember Me, Mary Margaret takes the wonderful first step necessary in understanding her dreams at a very early age. She begins a dream journal at the suggestion of her mother, who does not want to have to hear about them anymore. This is significant to the character because while it gives Mary Margaret a place to record and examine her dreams, she is also given the message that they are not worth attention. So, throughout her life, she records her dreams, but does little interpretation or integration of the dreaming process.

I see our sleep time as a time for our body-soul-spirit to relate in ways unfettered by conscious constructs. Vivid dreaming, creative dreaming, and dream analysis are all wonderful processes wherein our soul speaks to our mind and spirit in ways that allow our conscious, continual becoming. The spoken language here is symbols, devices by which ideas often too complex or highly charged to articulate in ordinary language are transmitted. Developing a personal mythology of dream symbols involves using a body of personal myths to form a system for organizing one's conception of reality and guiding day-to-day behavior. Mary Margaret’s soul was instructing her to examine shadow through her dreams, she did not understand because she never learns the language.

Writing the dream journal in Remember Me was like writing a novel within a novel. I began by establishing symbols that were related to Mary Margaret’s current age and daily events, but also her collective unconscious. I then developed the symbols in her dreams to speak to her of life unfolding – trying always to guide her into becoming through soul. It was one of my favorite parts of writing the book and you may see this device used again sometime in the future! Dreaming, and all it can offer us, is a true joy for me! Thanks for asking.

Heroes, Villains and Rudolph Steiner

Linda said...
Can you tell me about "the Opposing Spiritual Powers," and how they are like anti-heros?

Thanks for the question, Linda. I should preface the answer by saying that I have read the Rudolph Steiner teachings for several years now and find them to be mythical and complicated. I feel that whatever organization there is to life is much, much simpler, but I do admire some of his concepts. One of my favorite is his idea that humanity has a soul that influences and evolves along with our individual souls, much like CG Jung’s collective unconsciousness. Another is that our awareness unfolds, and humanity evolves due largely to the interplay of opposing forces (the tree of knowledge or good and evil.) The Steiner teachings tell us that in the course of human history, three specific opposing forces have provided our common soul and individual souls with opposition to our perfect nature (the Christ impulse) or the God within us. The dynamic of these forces are such that either we transcend the opposition and realize freedom by reconciling the forces (transcending duality) or we continue to battle.

Lucifer was the first, providing our natural, darker side. He is closely linked to nature and the mechanics of human nature so that the opposition he presents are storms or plagues or the fall of an civilization or the domination of our ego nature. His gift to humanity was free will, obtained in the choice to realize the Christ impulse and to transcend.

Ahriman was the second. His influence was first felt about 4M years ago and is still present today. He is associated with technology and materialism and prevents us from not seeing through the material to the spirit. He is also closely linked to the laws of karma, and keeps us from understanding the process of our freedom from karmic debt. But once the Ahrimanic forces have been reconciled, and we are free from karmic debt, we enter the age of Azuras. The Steiner teachings tell us that humanity is just beginning to enter this age but is still primarily ruled by Ahriman.

Not much is written on the Azuras and to research, I joined the Steiner library in New York, and read several of his books and lectures that hadn’t been taken out of the library in decades. I also joined Steiner discussion groups all over the world, talking to folks who had their own ideas about where Steiner was going with this. The forces of Azuras distract us into looking away from spirituality and convince us that our material experience is reality, not a reflection of our conscious awareness. It tricks us out of taking our objective into the subjective and becoming the creator with it, and believing the reverse is true. The Azuras has both the natural quality of Lucifer and the Ahrimanic qualities of technology and materialism. There is a bit written and much discussed about Steiner’s notion that once we give any part of ourselves to the Azuras, it can never be recovered. My (controversial) belief was that Steiner understood that once we transcend duality, mind and soul (karma), our lives and the formation of our experience is more immediately effected by universal laws. Once we consciously understand how to reconcile the opposition and realize our connection with all of life, we are distracted less easily even though the distractions become more dramatic. Ken Wilber would say it hurts more but we suffer less after the One Taste.

It’s easy to see how these opposing forces can be used as the hero/anti hero of a novel. I develop the characters of the three anti heros in my trilogy to reflect the nature of Steiner’s opposing forces. This allows me to develop the character of the heroine along a natural line of spiritual development, learning to release her karmic debt and move into a more harmonious storyline. And who doesn’t love a happy ending?

Dreams as expressions of soul and spirit

Kim said...
I very much enjoyed the dream journal entries in Remember Me. It seemed to me that Mary's dreams changed as she aged, the way an adult dreams differently than a child. How did you develop the dream journal for this character?

Thanks for your post, Kim. I liked it so much I thought it would make a great stand alone discussion. I did indeed develop the dream journal entries like a story of their own, that might reveal the maturation process and character of Mary. There are many theories about what our dreams might mean. I do think that we have many different kinds of dreams and that dreaming serves a function in our expression and development.

Like Jung, I think that sometimes our dreams can form around symbols that mean more to our soul or spirit than they do to our conscious mind. I tried to develop these symbols in the dreams throughout Mary's life to tell us the story of how her soul cried out for recognition and freedom. Mary's inability to recognize this contributed to her confusion and demise. She was not self aware enough to see the patterns in these symbols or look within herself for the direction they might give her. Her dream journal habit was, to her, like an exercise for the physical body that does not include the Zen for the rest of her. All parts of ourselves need to be communicating and integrated, and here she fell short.

Thanks again for this insightful question. Molly Brogan