Guardians of the Threshold

OUR OWN FEARS GUARD THE THRESHOLD TO SPIRIT AND OUR ENTRY

I love Rudolph Steiner's story about the Guardians of the Threshold, who guard our entry into spiritual awareness, until we understand that one Guardian is the golden part of us who's beauty is too blinding and we must look away (or accept our self worth) and the other Guardian is our dark nature that holds the archetypes of the thief, whore, and all other undesirable natures that we look away from and cannot own up.  Until we do, we cannot cross the threshold.  Once we do, the guardians vanish, because they ARE us. 

I think it is worth noting, that according to the Steiner teaching, once the threshold is crossed, the experience of the seeker changes to one who's experience does not contain direct violence and chaos - because duality is transcended, harmony can rule the day.  It does not mean that duality no longer exists, only that it is no longer the experience of the seeker who has crossed the threshold. 

You cannot cross the threshold into integration until you know that you can illuminate darkness yourself.  The first Guardian contains all of our fears in aspects of good and evil. These fears prohibit our crossing the Threshold until we reconcile all good and evil within and see them interwoven into our whole being.  The unseen then becomes seen. 

The second Guardian, our golden shadow, is a sublime, luminous beauty impossible to describe.  It holds our highest potential, and our low self image and our perceived limits keep us from embracing this Guardian and crossing the Threshold.  To embrace the second Guardian we must realize that our highest possibilities (unseen) within ourselves creates our character and that our world of sense is a seed ground for the higher world.  By embracing the second Guardian, everyone is redeemed and all are connected.  We cannot cross the threshold in separation.

Excerpted from All About Living by Molly Brogan
Artwork by Alejandro Silveira Bruno.  Many thanks.

An Excerpt From the Upcoming Novel Shadow Dancing

Next to me, a boat appears, small but seaworthy.  Stepping into it, I feel my spirit torn asunder.  Like an infinite mirror, I become the deeds of every man, and feel all matter of the earth move through me.  I feel the pulse of my being, involution drawing in, evolution giving out, my worldly conditions alternating between the two activities.  My mind reaches out into form, my heart reaches in to love, and both have limits.  And within these endless limits shines the blaze of eternity that lays my soul to rest.  I reach my hand out and touch the guardian, and in the touch, I am immediately humbled.  All feeling is drained from me.  All thought is gone.  I become the divine vessel, empty and ready.

I close my eyes now, and by releasing the gaze of this guardian, feel it unite with the lesser guardian before it.  In the unity comes the knowing that I am connected to every one, the many are one in all that I am. Everyone is redeemed, and in the redemption is harmony.  My love involves all others, who receive my spirit of love and evolve toward the future.

My eyes open and I am dropped back in time.  Lifting my hand to rub my eyes, I look around my hotel room and wonder where I am.  I notice the clock by the bed reads 2:00 PM, and fall back to sleep after feeling my entire body moan.

Excerpted from Shadow Dancing, a novel by Molly Brogan
Copyright invoked, 2011
Artwork by Jules.  Many thanks. 

Reconciling the Problem of Evil

THE FEELING THAT WE ARE IN THE PRESENCE OF EVIL IS OUR INVITATION INTO HEAVEN ON EARTH

 There is a wide variety of opinion on the existence of evil. Some see any opposing force as evil, while others think that to be termed evil requires an act resulting in an injury to life of some kind. What are your thoughts? How does your belief about evil affect your life?

I think that "evil" is much like fear. Overcoming fear doesn't mean that I will never experience it again in my life. It means that I understand it differently and process it differently than I once did. Overcoming evil is much the same. Once we understand that evil is a value judgment of negativity in our world, and that judgments assigning positive and negative value are a function of mind, but we are much more than our minds, we can transcend our dualistic mental constructs. When seen at this viewpoint, the world is in balance; what we value as good and evil can be seen differently, as aspects of the same experience.

We sometimes take identity in holding ourselves separate from others as we judge and value the differences. Not good or bad, it is something we humans do as we identify ourselves. This is a function of our ego, which is limited to duality because it creates our identity separate from the world. Here, good and sometimes evil is established as we explore the "I am not" of I AM. This exploration is important to raising consciousness and expanding awareness.

Who we are and what is possible is reflected to us in the moment. We can live these moments in a separate string, or in the eternal moment or both - the one and the many. But however we choose to live these moments, they are a reflection that invites us into spirit and the possibility of more, all ways.

All material copyrighted 2010: All About Living, Molly Brogan
 Artwork by Val Jean.   Many thanks.

Merry Christmas One and All

I wish everyone the best during this season of love and renewal.  For me, Christmas has always been a time to confirm life by expressing my love to those around me.  And although my surroundings change each Christmas, within me, there is an essential Christmas that I express with love, now, to you. 

Dylan Thomas said it best in the opening paragraphs of A Child's Christmas in Whales:  "One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.  All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street."

As I diligently work to get through the editing phase of my latest book, I take a deep breath and give a life affirming shout, "Thank you, my friends, and Merry Christmas!"
Artwork:   Alessandro Botticelli, Mystic Nativity

Tapestry of Characters in Each Story

e said: Molly is a writer, maybe she can tell us where her characters come from?

Thanks for this great question, e! My characters are drawn from aspects of myself. I spent a good deal of time in research to clarify for myself how to best develop characters with believable motivation and behavior. In other words, based on the belief system of a character, how would that character behave. Each character plays an aspect in the overall development of the main character.

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.

Love as Becoming

Anonymous said...
A beautiful expression of love as emanation.

I would like to thank this anonymous viewer for this comment on my poem. It got me to thinking about emanation, or the unfolding principle, the outflowing from the source of creation. To me, this statement speaks to love as becoming in ways that completely connect us to all of creation. How wonderful.

The expression of primal urge into an emanation is also conveyed in one of my favorite James Russell Lowell poems, The Vision of Sir Launfall:

“And what is so rare as a day in June?

Then, if ever, come perfect days;

Then Heaven tries Earth if she be in tune,

And over her softly her warm ear lays:

Whether we look or whether we listen,

Every clod feels a stir of might,

An instinct within it that reaches and towers,

And groping blindly above it for light,

Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers.”

The Map of Beauty Translates

The Semanticist S.I. Hayakawa believed this about general semantics: “The end product of education, yours and mine and everybody’s, is the total pattern of reactions and possible reactions we have inside ourselves. If you did not have within you at this moment the pattern of reactions that we call “the ability to read” you would see here only meaningless black marks on paper. Because of the trained patterns of response, you are (or are not) stirred to patriotism by martial music, your feelings of reverence are aroused by symbols of your religion, you listen more respectfully to the health advise of someone who has ‘MD’ after his name than to that of someone who hasn’t. What I call here is a ‘pattern of reactions,’ then, is the sum total of the ways we act in response to events, to words, and to symbols, signs and symbol systems. Our reaction patterns or our semantic habits, are the internal and most important residue of whatever years of education or miseducation we may have received.”

As I view the artwork of Ronald Isom, these feeling responses for my deepest archetypal signs and symbols well within me. I am inexplicably moved and left with mystical feelings better left unspoken.

To a person who asked for a definition of jazz, Louis Armstrong is said to have replied, “Man, when you got to ask what it is, you’ll never get to know,” proving to be an intuitive semanticist as well as a great trumpet player.

To give the artwork of Ronald Isom an intuitive semantic response is not to ask for a definition, but to know our own intrinsic value, as we are led right to our core with each view.

PW Bridgman, Nobel Prize winner and physicist, once wrote, “The true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not by what he says about it.”

Ronald illustrates his intuitive semantic reactions to his symbol systems. His paintings and drawings are kinetic in ways that allow us to FEEL what he feels. Organic in inspiration, his artwork brings us to our own symbolic systems, as they emerge and fly free, allowing us to see and know our own semantic responses.

In this way that the symbols of Ronald’s artwork brings us to ourselves and allows us to feel, I aspire, as a writer, to bring my readers into their intuitive core, and allow them to explore the possibilities of their lives, through the eyes of my characters.

Artwork: Spiritual Growth Form by Ronald Isom

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

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.

Archetype as a guiding template for humanity

Aiko said...
I have been looking at your google book preview. What do you mean by "the original man?"
October 16, 2007 1:03 PM

Aiko, your question is a very good one so I thought I would include it in a new post and new discussion of the role of archetypes in the development of our personal and collective consciousness.

In my play, Without a Word, the main character, Word, is described as the original man. Many writers have used the concept of "everyman" for their characters, but the original man is a little different. Word is the original man in the biblical sense, meaning he has functions and attributes that, together with the play's other characters, create the original man or the collective man or humanity as one. For instance, some bible scholars have theorized that the 12 apostles are each an attribute or archetype that together, create the Christ, or collective man. Here is an example: http://mollybroganenterprises.com/business%20form%20model.pdf

Throughout the play, Word articulates his process of integration as he becomes aware of his personal and collective archetypes, i.e., the other characters in the play. This is a process that we engage in throughout our lives, consciously or subconsciously. In microcosm, it is the fruition of an idea. In macrocosm, if we reach a point in our lives where we consciously understand self as other, and can feel the thread of connection in all of us, and hold that connection as sacred, we no longer need to hold the archetype in separation and can fully integrate.

By the end of the play, Word has integrated the other characters and owns his role as the original man. Every day I feel myself closer to this integration and every day marvel and how it effects the quality of my life. I can only imagine how wonderful the world can be when we are all consciously aware of the sacred nature of our relationships, including the relationship with self. I can feel it coming. I believe it will be brilliant.

Thanks for asking. If you have more questions, please feel free to post. We can recreate this play together. Molly Brogan