A
Anonymous
Guest
alright, this is just general interesting goodness that you should -really- take time to read. i'm so glad i have this message board to finally post and share all my irregular and intriguing finds. =) this was posted at an msn community i'm a part of, and she replied to a story i'd told her of something that happened to me a long time ago [ which i'm too lazy to type out right now. ] giving me the reccomendation of viewing this. i'm glad she decided to type some of it out.
The Quest
I am reading some fascinating books right now. One of them is called Daimonic Reality by Patrick Harpur. Sadly, this book is out of print, even though it is a new paradigm regarding the gods, the supernatural, shamanism, and the like. (Perhaps this is why it's out of print? Many didn't like having their pet theories and "conventional wisdom" challenged?) One of the most sane views I have ever seen, and even many skeptics should give it heavy consideration. It is also based on the work of Jung, although again, it is a new paradigm.
I am taking from one section on the Quest. The reason is that this shows his new paradigm in action, contains many useful bits of information, and just in case any of you find it useful!.
From pages 250-55:
John Keel's quest
A quest can perhaps be imagined as an extroverted version of the shaman's introversion--perhaps they are the outside and inside of the same Way. Unlike the shaman, who is passive in the face of the dismembering otherworldly beings, the quester is active, single-minded, even obsessive. To draw mythological analogies, he is less like Orpheus, the archetypal shaman, than like Odysseus, Jason and Aeneas, whose journeys take place through this world while beset at every turn by intrusion from the other. (In Christian terms, the quest becomes the pilgrimage, while the shaman's journey becomes the mystic's ascent to God.) Then danger for the shaman is that he might travel too far or too badly prepared into the Otherworld and so lose his soul; the danger of the quester is just the opposite--the Otherworld is too close to him, threatening to overwhelm and possess him. Even as he clings to this-world perspective, which the shaman is compelled to give up, he is bombarded by the otherworldly. The song of the Siren lures him towards the mind-wrecking rocks. Paranoia is always just around the corner. He is particularly vulnerable to that mixture of delusion and revelation I discussed earlier.
But let me give an example of a modern quest, undertaken by the pioneer anomaly researcher John A. Keel Although I have to abbreviate his account considerably [The following account is taken from Keel (1973), pp. 273-5; for a fuller account still, see John A. Keel, The Mothman Prophecies (New York, 1975: re-issued IllumiNet Press, Avondale Estates, GA., 1991)], I will nevertheless quote more lengthily than usual in order to give some idea of the quest's distinctive flavor.
'Within a year after I had launched my full-time UFO investigating effort in 1966,' writes Mr. Keel, 'the phenomenon had zeroed in on me, just as it had done with the British newspaper editor, Arthur Shuttlewood, and so many others. My telephone ran amok first, with mysterious strangers calling day and night to deliver bizarre messages "from the space people." then I was catapulted into the dreamlike fantasy world of demonology. I kept rendezvous with black Cadillacs on Long Island [New York], and when I tried to pursue them they would disappear impossibly on dead-end roads...Luminous aerial objects seemed to follow me around like faithful dogs. The objects seemed to know where I was going and where I had been. I would check into a motel at random only to find someone had made a reservation in my name....I was plagued by impossible coincidences, and some of my closest friends in New York...began to report strange experiences of their own--poltergeists erupted in their apartments, ugly smells of hydrogen sulphide haunted them...More than once I woke up in the middle of the night to find myself unable to move, with a huge dark apparition standing over me. For a time I questioned my sanity...'
Mr. Keel was indeed close to madness. This is what daimonic reality can seem like when we approach it in a manner that is too rational, too intent on explaining, too this-worldly--when we approach it, that is, in the archetypal style of Apollo. But the Apollonic attitude, as I have already said, constellates that of his brother Hermes, the patron of daimonic reality itself. As a god of borders, roads, and travellers, he is particularly evident on quests; as a trickster deity he specializes in teasing us beyond endurance, leading us beyond all rational limits. He delights in baiting Apollonic consciousness by producing physical phenomena which seem like evidence for the literal reality of the daimonic--only to leave us grasping at thin air. He parodies Apollonic prophecy by sending us predictions which turn out to be unerringly accurate at first. Then he springs the Big One on us--the date of the end of the world is a favourite--and it turns out to be false.
Yet, in another sense, it is true: our own little worlds are ending for ever as they are engulfed by the otherworldy deluge. Keel received a great many Hermetic messages, not only from alleged UFO entities, but also from trance mediums and 'automatic writing'. The startling accuracy of their predictions persuaded him to believe the sudden spate of forecasts, from several of these sources, that a cataclysm was about to destroy New York City. He fled. The disaster did not occur. He had been had. He began to understand that the messages from the extraterrestials and spirits should not be taken literally than the entities themselves. Indeed, he began to realize they were not what they claimed to be--not, for example, from other planets, but from some other order of reality inherent in this one. He called them 'ultraterrestials' or 'elementals.' He goes on: 'I developed an elaborate system of checks and balances to preclude hoaxes. Unrelated people in several states became part of my secret network to that "other world." I wasted months playing the mischevious games of the elementals, searching for non-existent UFO bases, trying to find ways to protect witnesses from the "men in black." Poltergeist manifestations seemed to break out wherever I went. It was difficult to judge whether I was unwittingly creating these situations, or whether they were entirely independent of my mind.'
But it is not a case of 'either-or,' but a case of 'both-and.' And it is not merely difficult to judge, it is impossible. Any attempt to pin the daimons down only makes them stronger, like Antaeus who drew strength from his mother earth every time Heracles threw him. If we hold them to be 'only in the mind,' they appear outside of us, complete with apparently objective evidence; if we hold them to be outside of us, they appear as dreams, fantasies, and voices in our heads. Even as Keel pursued them single-mindedly, believing in their literal existence, they reflected that literalness back at him, seeming to be literal but all the while evaporating under his grasp, leading him up the garden path, driving him insane until he began to get an inkling of their ambivalence.
'Now, in retrospect, I can see what was actually taking place,' Keel continues. 'The phenomenon was slowly introducing me to aspects I had never considered before. I was being led step by step from scepticism to belief, to--incredibly--disbelief.' He means, of course, disbelief in the literal existence of his tormentors. He believes in them alright. But he has learned that they are not as we think they are--nor as we would have them be: reliable, spiritual, pure Beings who purvey higher wisdom. And yet, 'when my thinking went awry and my concepts were wrong, the phenomenon process led me back to the right path. It was all an educational process and my teachers were very, very patient. Other people who have become involved in this situation have not been so lucky. They settled on a single frame of reference and were quickly engulfed in disaster.'
Here we see the other side of Hermes-Mercurius, not the Trickster but the psychopomp or guide of souls. His tricks not only confuse, but also lead us toward the truth; his messages are not only misleading, but are also 'messages from the gods' whose messanger he is. He is also, we remember, in charge of dreams, another form of divine message which features prominently in quests.
'Educational process' is a mild way of describing Keel's quest, but it is apt. For the characteristic that most distinguishes the quest from the shamanic initiation is perhaps the emphasis on learning. In the course of their quests among magical islands and Keel-like supernatural antagonists, Homer's hero Odysseus and Virgil's hero Aeneas both visit the Underworld where they might be expected to have been shamanically initiated. In fact, they went there simply to consult the dead and learn from them [cf. Hillman 91979), pp. 85, 112.]. If all questers showed their willingness to listen and learn, to pay deep attention to daimonic phenomena instead of either fighting them off or trying to fit them into a rational framework, then they would learn, like Keel, to walk the narrow sword-bridge between one kind of madness and another.
The first is the madness that confines the Otherworld to 'a single frame of reference,' and so cuts us off, not only from daimonic reality, but also from our own souls, like dogmatic over-rational ideologues. The alternative madness is to lose all frames of reference and be confined in the Otherworld alone, like the poor souls who eke out their days conversing with spirits in the lunatic asylum.
Keel learned the sanity of 'double vision,' the ability to believe and not believe. He learned to recognize and name the daimons for what they are, in all their ambiguity. If he constructed frames of reference, they were all provisional and relative ones that safeguarded his reason without doing violence to the infinite richness and complexity of the daimonic realm. Above all, he learned that the quest does not lead to some final solution, some absolute truth; it is itself truth. We are transformed by the Way we take, at home with Hermes and the road which has no end in this world, nor even perhaps in the next.
The Wise Fool
The heroes of mythology embody different styles or ways of approaching the Otherworld; and it is to this vital question of how we should broach the Otherworld (and especially the Underworld which, in our time, is the most crucial because most neglected spatial metaphor for the Otherworld) that I shall be devoting the last chapter.
However, to end this chapter, I want to note that, if any single attribute is indispensable for a successful otherworld journey, it is humility. 'All visions, revelations, heavenly feelings', wrote St. John of the Cross, 'are not worth the least act of humility, being the fruits of charity which neither values nor seeks itself, which thinketh well, not of self, but of others...many souls, to whom vision have never come, are incomparably more advanced in the way of perfection than others to whom many have been given.'
The humility which is essential to the mystic has to be exercised equally by the shaman and learnt painfully by every quester, from the Grail Knights to John Keel. But all these great ones would have done well to have taken a few trips from that hero of a thousand folktales, who quests for the Treasure (of truth, or wisdom) or the Princess (of his own soul).
Typically he is the youngest of three brothers and, significantly, he is not really a hero at all in the accepted sense. He is foolish, dismissed as useless by his father, fit only to look after pigs; he admires his elder brothers who treat him with contempt. They are more conventionally heroic--well-favoured, clever in the intellectual sense, dressed in fine clothes, handsome, accomplished and so on. They expect to win the hand of the Princess (together with their father's wealth) without much trouble. Thus they set out on their own journey with every expectation of success. They are single-minded, so intent on travelling with all speed that they brook no obstacle on the way. They are haughty, brushing aside the old woman who attempts to give them directions at the forking of the road. They reach the Princess by sheer force of will, as it were--only to find she is unimpressed by their intelligence, their self-importance and humourlessness. They bore her. She laughs in their faces when they ask for her hand in marriage.
The youngest brother, on the other hand, is a fool in the eyes of the world--but not such a fool as he seems. He is thought to be an idle day-dreamer. He passes no exams. He has no accomplishments, except perhaps trivial ones such as being good with animals or able to play a wooden pipe he has carved for himself. He decides to set out, too, and is ridiculed by his family. Even he has to admit that he stands no chance of success compared to his brothers. He lacks their confidence. But he has some sort of belief in himself, no more perhaps than a vague feeling that he might be lucky. Besides, he reckons that it is a good day for a journey--the weather is fine and there is the possibility for adventure--and so he sets out to enjoy it for its own sake, regardless of the outcome.
He is unfailingly courteous to beggars, old women, and talking animals, to whom he pays deep attention, gaining useful tips and, often, talismans to help him on his way. He is not sharp or suspicious; but he is not unwary. He takes no nonsense from deceivers, seeing through their schemes to delay or obstruct. If he encounters ogres, he does not quail before them or try to defeat them by brute force, as his brothers might fatally try to do. Instead he outfaces and outwits them, often acquiring some powerful magical attribute in the process. He is ingenious, adaptable, even cunning. He is witty and full of good humour; and the Princess accepts him at once, if only because he makes her laugh.
I hope this may help some of you who find your own quests, or your own shamanic journeys that become a little stranger than you thought they would be. As something of an appendix, I thought I would add from two small sections, one of the Otherworld itself in overlapping this world, but also on the interaction between diamons and humans. Keep in mind this is explained in much greater detail, should you be lucky enough to find this book somewhere. And that humans are diamonic. Our astral/dream/after life selves are also diamonic in nature. The daimonic is the soul of the world and of ourselves--as one described it, "A prism of the Divine Light that is One."
Keep in mind that those claiming to be ET's here in human form very well could be daimons. (Then again, they could be ET's in human form.) The Daimonic can manifest within as easily as outside of ourselves.
First, I would like to share the author's perspective on how the Daimonic interact and overlap our own world/perspective:
(pp 266-7):
At it's best, a spiritual perspective regards the daimons, not as literal, but as if they were literal, just as traditional cultures recount their myths as if they were history. The daimons themselves insist on this as-if literalness, as we have seen from their traces, such as UFO landing marks and crop circles. Reciprocallly, the spirit needs soul whose many daimons not only subvert, but also soften with their beauty, spirit's drive towards absolute unitary truth. As the hero searches for his princess, so spirit seeks to make connections with soul, perhaps through the diverse images of Art or Nature. Spirit needs soul to make the world personal, palliating its remote God with a personal Christ, human saints and a human Virgin Mary. The dismembering of the shaman is the disintegration of the ego, ruled by one of spirit's perspectives, into many perspectives; the forging of the 'new body' is the construction of the new diamonic ego-body which can take on any of spirit's perspectives at will, moving freely through the Otherworld of soul.
We are daimonic--but we are not daimons. Like animals, daimons are sufficient unto themselves. We are both farther from divinity than they, and nearer, because the tension in us between spirit and soul engenders that self-reflection, that capacity for self-transformation, which they cannot know alone. Yet, through us, they can--and wish to--know; for our self-reflection i s a reflection of them, their transformation and our self-transformation.
On the Otherworld itself:
1. Paradigms regarding the other world...
The non-spatiality of the Otherworld is represented by multi-spatiality. It is, so to speak, everywhere and nowhere--and this is what the competing theories of UFO origins express. We have seen already that, in Celtic cultures, views concerning the origins of fairies did not so much compete as they were held simultaneously. The fairies [just like UFOs today] were said to live underground and sometimes in the air; sometimes in the sea, sometimes on islands out West...
Hades was demonized by Christianity into Hell, while Heaven was promoted further away from the living into some remote celestial sphere. For Christians, there was to be no other world anywhere near this one, unless it be some infernal region, and certainly not to the north or west where tribal cultures--the native Americans, for instance--often situated their afterlife paradises. In Norse mythology, Hel and Valhalla...existed alongside other realms, whether of the gods (Asgard), of daimons (Alfheim and Iotunheim for elves and giants repectively), or of humans (Midgard).
Here, as in all traditional cultures, the afterlife was conceived less as a place of reward or punishment than as continous with this life. Indeed, the Otherworld could be entered while in this life, a belief that continued well into the Christian era. Dante, for instance, was pointed out on the streets of Florence, not as the man who had written The Divine Comedy, but as the man who had visited Hell.>>
The Otherworld is always imagined as beginning at the edge of our known world. It can be the wilderness outside the city walls or the unexplored regions at the edge of maps labelled 'Here be dragons'. It can begin at the brink of the ocean--or at the garden gate. As the boundaries of the Unknown are pushed back, the world largely mapped, the Otherworld is located in outer space. Early aliens claimed to come from Venus, Mars, or the Moon; later, when these planets seemed more local, less remote, they claimed to come from distant star systems such as Zeta Reticuli or the Pleiades...
It is worth lingering a moment over the Otherworld of the nuclear physicists, if only because their discipline is widely held to be the doyen of sciences. They, above all, seek to establish the 'facts' of matter. I would maintain, however, that their subatomic realm is merely another variant of daimonic reality. Everything that is predicated of it could, for instance, be applied with equal justice to the land of Fairy.
Both worlds invert the cosy Newtonian world we inhabit: laws of time, space, causality, and, of course, matter are ignored. (Once past the 'event horizon' of a black hole, say the astrophysicists, time slows to a standstill; or, once inside the black hole, it 'runs backwards'.) Subatomic physics introduces extra dimensions--'string theory' allows for ten, I think: our four, plus six more, compacted very tightly. Multi-dimensionality is a staple of science fiction and ufology.
The diamons of subatomic 'inner space' are called particles, although strictly speaking they aren't--electrons, for example, are both particles and waves at the same time. They are paradoxical, both there and not-there, like fairies. Like UFOs they cannot be measured exactly; we can calculate their speed, or their position, but not both. This, roughly, is what Werner Heisenberg called the Uncertainty Principal, and it applies to all daimonic phenomena. We cannot know subatomic particles for themselves; we can only identify them via their daimonic traces...
...Each newly discovered particle promises to be the fundamental building-block of matter...I remember when there were only four quarks, diamonically named Upness, Downess, Strangeness and Charm (good names for UFO types). The last time I looked there were over forty. And counting. Ever smaller, every more impish and less substantial--the massless particles--they recede from us like quasars, those enormous daimons said to be moving towards the edge of the known universe at speeds close to that of light.
As with all anomalous entities, the very act of observing the particles disturbs them. Observer and observed, subject and object, cannot finally be distinguished. Particles whose existence is predicted obligingly turn up. If we didn't know better, we might almost say that we imagined them into existence. The so-called New Physicists smelled rat long ago. They began to compare the whole thing to oriental religion or suspect that its reality is primarily metaphorical, not literal and factual...
...the subatomic realm is not a literal world of facts which [spiritualists, UFOlogists, etc] can derive support the literal reality of their own. It is simply another metaphor for the Soul of the World. It is not even an especially good one: daimons prefer to appear as persons, not as impersonal, quirky little particles...
...There may well be an end to this literal world of ours, but there can be no literal end to it because it is continous with that other world, without end.
Good journeying to you!
----
and that was it. leaves you wanting to read more, hm?
The Quest
I am reading some fascinating books right now. One of them is called Daimonic Reality by Patrick Harpur. Sadly, this book is out of print, even though it is a new paradigm regarding the gods, the supernatural, shamanism, and the like. (Perhaps this is why it's out of print? Many didn't like having their pet theories and "conventional wisdom" challenged?) One of the most sane views I have ever seen, and even many skeptics should give it heavy consideration. It is also based on the work of Jung, although again, it is a new paradigm.
I am taking from one section on the Quest. The reason is that this shows his new paradigm in action, contains many useful bits of information, and just in case any of you find it useful!.
From pages 250-55:
John Keel's quest
A quest can perhaps be imagined as an extroverted version of the shaman's introversion--perhaps they are the outside and inside of the same Way. Unlike the shaman, who is passive in the face of the dismembering otherworldly beings, the quester is active, single-minded, even obsessive. To draw mythological analogies, he is less like Orpheus, the archetypal shaman, than like Odysseus, Jason and Aeneas, whose journeys take place through this world while beset at every turn by intrusion from the other. (In Christian terms, the quest becomes the pilgrimage, while the shaman's journey becomes the mystic's ascent to God.) Then danger for the shaman is that he might travel too far or too badly prepared into the Otherworld and so lose his soul; the danger of the quester is just the opposite--the Otherworld is too close to him, threatening to overwhelm and possess him. Even as he clings to this-world perspective, which the shaman is compelled to give up, he is bombarded by the otherworldly. The song of the Siren lures him towards the mind-wrecking rocks. Paranoia is always just around the corner. He is particularly vulnerable to that mixture of delusion and revelation I discussed earlier.
But let me give an example of a modern quest, undertaken by the pioneer anomaly researcher John A. Keel Although I have to abbreviate his account considerably [The following account is taken from Keel (1973), pp. 273-5; for a fuller account still, see John A. Keel, The Mothman Prophecies (New York, 1975: re-issued IllumiNet Press, Avondale Estates, GA., 1991)], I will nevertheless quote more lengthily than usual in order to give some idea of the quest's distinctive flavor.
'Within a year after I had launched my full-time UFO investigating effort in 1966,' writes Mr. Keel, 'the phenomenon had zeroed in on me, just as it had done with the British newspaper editor, Arthur Shuttlewood, and so many others. My telephone ran amok first, with mysterious strangers calling day and night to deliver bizarre messages "from the space people." then I was catapulted into the dreamlike fantasy world of demonology. I kept rendezvous with black Cadillacs on Long Island [New York], and when I tried to pursue them they would disappear impossibly on dead-end roads...Luminous aerial objects seemed to follow me around like faithful dogs. The objects seemed to know where I was going and where I had been. I would check into a motel at random only to find someone had made a reservation in my name....I was plagued by impossible coincidences, and some of my closest friends in New York...began to report strange experiences of their own--poltergeists erupted in their apartments, ugly smells of hydrogen sulphide haunted them...More than once I woke up in the middle of the night to find myself unable to move, with a huge dark apparition standing over me. For a time I questioned my sanity...'
Mr. Keel was indeed close to madness. This is what daimonic reality can seem like when we approach it in a manner that is too rational, too intent on explaining, too this-worldly--when we approach it, that is, in the archetypal style of Apollo. But the Apollonic attitude, as I have already said, constellates that of his brother Hermes, the patron of daimonic reality itself. As a god of borders, roads, and travellers, he is particularly evident on quests; as a trickster deity he specializes in teasing us beyond endurance, leading us beyond all rational limits. He delights in baiting Apollonic consciousness by producing physical phenomena which seem like evidence for the literal reality of the daimonic--only to leave us grasping at thin air. He parodies Apollonic prophecy by sending us predictions which turn out to be unerringly accurate at first. Then he springs the Big One on us--the date of the end of the world is a favourite--and it turns out to be false.
Yet, in another sense, it is true: our own little worlds are ending for ever as they are engulfed by the otherworldy deluge. Keel received a great many Hermetic messages, not only from alleged UFO entities, but also from trance mediums and 'automatic writing'. The startling accuracy of their predictions persuaded him to believe the sudden spate of forecasts, from several of these sources, that a cataclysm was about to destroy New York City. He fled. The disaster did not occur. He had been had. He began to understand that the messages from the extraterrestials and spirits should not be taken literally than the entities themselves. Indeed, he began to realize they were not what they claimed to be--not, for example, from other planets, but from some other order of reality inherent in this one. He called them 'ultraterrestials' or 'elementals.' He goes on: 'I developed an elaborate system of checks and balances to preclude hoaxes. Unrelated people in several states became part of my secret network to that "other world." I wasted months playing the mischevious games of the elementals, searching for non-existent UFO bases, trying to find ways to protect witnesses from the "men in black." Poltergeist manifestations seemed to break out wherever I went. It was difficult to judge whether I was unwittingly creating these situations, or whether they were entirely independent of my mind.'
But it is not a case of 'either-or,' but a case of 'both-and.' And it is not merely difficult to judge, it is impossible. Any attempt to pin the daimons down only makes them stronger, like Antaeus who drew strength from his mother earth every time Heracles threw him. If we hold them to be 'only in the mind,' they appear outside of us, complete with apparently objective evidence; if we hold them to be outside of us, they appear as dreams, fantasies, and voices in our heads. Even as Keel pursued them single-mindedly, believing in their literal existence, they reflected that literalness back at him, seeming to be literal but all the while evaporating under his grasp, leading him up the garden path, driving him insane until he began to get an inkling of their ambivalence.
'Now, in retrospect, I can see what was actually taking place,' Keel continues. 'The phenomenon was slowly introducing me to aspects I had never considered before. I was being led step by step from scepticism to belief, to--incredibly--disbelief.' He means, of course, disbelief in the literal existence of his tormentors. He believes in them alright. But he has learned that they are not as we think they are--nor as we would have them be: reliable, spiritual, pure Beings who purvey higher wisdom. And yet, 'when my thinking went awry and my concepts were wrong, the phenomenon process led me back to the right path. It was all an educational process and my teachers were very, very patient. Other people who have become involved in this situation have not been so lucky. They settled on a single frame of reference and were quickly engulfed in disaster.'
Here we see the other side of Hermes-Mercurius, not the Trickster but the psychopomp or guide of souls. His tricks not only confuse, but also lead us toward the truth; his messages are not only misleading, but are also 'messages from the gods' whose messanger he is. He is also, we remember, in charge of dreams, another form of divine message which features prominently in quests.
'Educational process' is a mild way of describing Keel's quest, but it is apt. For the characteristic that most distinguishes the quest from the shamanic initiation is perhaps the emphasis on learning. In the course of their quests among magical islands and Keel-like supernatural antagonists, Homer's hero Odysseus and Virgil's hero Aeneas both visit the Underworld where they might be expected to have been shamanically initiated. In fact, they went there simply to consult the dead and learn from them [cf. Hillman 91979), pp. 85, 112.]. If all questers showed their willingness to listen and learn, to pay deep attention to daimonic phenomena instead of either fighting them off or trying to fit them into a rational framework, then they would learn, like Keel, to walk the narrow sword-bridge between one kind of madness and another.
The first is the madness that confines the Otherworld to 'a single frame of reference,' and so cuts us off, not only from daimonic reality, but also from our own souls, like dogmatic over-rational ideologues. The alternative madness is to lose all frames of reference and be confined in the Otherworld alone, like the poor souls who eke out their days conversing with spirits in the lunatic asylum.
Keel learned the sanity of 'double vision,' the ability to believe and not believe. He learned to recognize and name the daimons for what they are, in all their ambiguity. If he constructed frames of reference, they were all provisional and relative ones that safeguarded his reason without doing violence to the infinite richness and complexity of the daimonic realm. Above all, he learned that the quest does not lead to some final solution, some absolute truth; it is itself truth. We are transformed by the Way we take, at home with Hermes and the road which has no end in this world, nor even perhaps in the next.
The Wise Fool
The heroes of mythology embody different styles or ways of approaching the Otherworld; and it is to this vital question of how we should broach the Otherworld (and especially the Underworld which, in our time, is the most crucial because most neglected spatial metaphor for the Otherworld) that I shall be devoting the last chapter.
However, to end this chapter, I want to note that, if any single attribute is indispensable for a successful otherworld journey, it is humility. 'All visions, revelations, heavenly feelings', wrote St. John of the Cross, 'are not worth the least act of humility, being the fruits of charity which neither values nor seeks itself, which thinketh well, not of self, but of others...many souls, to whom vision have never come, are incomparably more advanced in the way of perfection than others to whom many have been given.'
The humility which is essential to the mystic has to be exercised equally by the shaman and learnt painfully by every quester, from the Grail Knights to John Keel. But all these great ones would have done well to have taken a few trips from that hero of a thousand folktales, who quests for the Treasure (of truth, or wisdom) or the Princess (of his own soul).
Typically he is the youngest of three brothers and, significantly, he is not really a hero at all in the accepted sense. He is foolish, dismissed as useless by his father, fit only to look after pigs; he admires his elder brothers who treat him with contempt. They are more conventionally heroic--well-favoured, clever in the intellectual sense, dressed in fine clothes, handsome, accomplished and so on. They expect to win the hand of the Princess (together with their father's wealth) without much trouble. Thus they set out on their own journey with every expectation of success. They are single-minded, so intent on travelling with all speed that they brook no obstacle on the way. They are haughty, brushing aside the old woman who attempts to give them directions at the forking of the road. They reach the Princess by sheer force of will, as it were--only to find she is unimpressed by their intelligence, their self-importance and humourlessness. They bore her. She laughs in their faces when they ask for her hand in marriage.
The youngest brother, on the other hand, is a fool in the eyes of the world--but not such a fool as he seems. He is thought to be an idle day-dreamer. He passes no exams. He has no accomplishments, except perhaps trivial ones such as being good with animals or able to play a wooden pipe he has carved for himself. He decides to set out, too, and is ridiculed by his family. Even he has to admit that he stands no chance of success compared to his brothers. He lacks their confidence. But he has some sort of belief in himself, no more perhaps than a vague feeling that he might be lucky. Besides, he reckons that it is a good day for a journey--the weather is fine and there is the possibility for adventure--and so he sets out to enjoy it for its own sake, regardless of the outcome.
He is unfailingly courteous to beggars, old women, and talking animals, to whom he pays deep attention, gaining useful tips and, often, talismans to help him on his way. He is not sharp or suspicious; but he is not unwary. He takes no nonsense from deceivers, seeing through their schemes to delay or obstruct. If he encounters ogres, he does not quail before them or try to defeat them by brute force, as his brothers might fatally try to do. Instead he outfaces and outwits them, often acquiring some powerful magical attribute in the process. He is ingenious, adaptable, even cunning. He is witty and full of good humour; and the Princess accepts him at once, if only because he makes her laugh.
I hope this may help some of you who find your own quests, or your own shamanic journeys that become a little stranger than you thought they would be. As something of an appendix, I thought I would add from two small sections, one of the Otherworld itself in overlapping this world, but also on the interaction between diamons and humans. Keep in mind this is explained in much greater detail, should you be lucky enough to find this book somewhere. And that humans are diamonic. Our astral/dream/after life selves are also diamonic in nature. The daimonic is the soul of the world and of ourselves--as one described it, "A prism of the Divine Light that is One."
Keep in mind that those claiming to be ET's here in human form very well could be daimons. (Then again, they could be ET's in human form.) The Daimonic can manifest within as easily as outside of ourselves.
First, I would like to share the author's perspective on how the Daimonic interact and overlap our own world/perspective:
(pp 266-7):
At it's best, a spiritual perspective regards the daimons, not as literal, but as if they were literal, just as traditional cultures recount their myths as if they were history. The daimons themselves insist on this as-if literalness, as we have seen from their traces, such as UFO landing marks and crop circles. Reciprocallly, the spirit needs soul whose many daimons not only subvert, but also soften with their beauty, spirit's drive towards absolute unitary truth. As the hero searches for his princess, so spirit seeks to make connections with soul, perhaps through the diverse images of Art or Nature. Spirit needs soul to make the world personal, palliating its remote God with a personal Christ, human saints and a human Virgin Mary. The dismembering of the shaman is the disintegration of the ego, ruled by one of spirit's perspectives, into many perspectives; the forging of the 'new body' is the construction of the new diamonic ego-body which can take on any of spirit's perspectives at will, moving freely through the Otherworld of soul.
We are daimonic--but we are not daimons. Like animals, daimons are sufficient unto themselves. We are both farther from divinity than they, and nearer, because the tension in us between spirit and soul engenders that self-reflection, that capacity for self-transformation, which they cannot know alone. Yet, through us, they can--and wish to--know; for our self-reflection i s a reflection of them, their transformation and our self-transformation.
On the Otherworld itself:
1. Paradigms regarding the other world...
The non-spatiality of the Otherworld is represented by multi-spatiality. It is, so to speak, everywhere and nowhere--and this is what the competing theories of UFO origins express. We have seen already that, in Celtic cultures, views concerning the origins of fairies did not so much compete as they were held simultaneously. The fairies [just like UFOs today] were said to live underground and sometimes in the air; sometimes in the sea, sometimes on islands out West...
Hades was demonized by Christianity into Hell, while Heaven was promoted further away from the living into some remote celestial sphere. For Christians, there was to be no other world anywhere near this one, unless it be some infernal region, and certainly not to the north or west where tribal cultures--the native Americans, for instance--often situated their afterlife paradises. In Norse mythology, Hel and Valhalla...existed alongside other realms, whether of the gods (Asgard), of daimons (Alfheim and Iotunheim for elves and giants repectively), or of humans (Midgard).
Here, as in all traditional cultures, the afterlife was conceived less as a place of reward or punishment than as continous with this life. Indeed, the Otherworld could be entered while in this life, a belief that continued well into the Christian era. Dante, for instance, was pointed out on the streets of Florence, not as the man who had written The Divine Comedy, but as the man who had visited Hell.>>
The Otherworld is always imagined as beginning at the edge of our known world. It can be the wilderness outside the city walls or the unexplored regions at the edge of maps labelled 'Here be dragons'. It can begin at the brink of the ocean--or at the garden gate. As the boundaries of the Unknown are pushed back, the world largely mapped, the Otherworld is located in outer space. Early aliens claimed to come from Venus, Mars, or the Moon; later, when these planets seemed more local, less remote, they claimed to come from distant star systems such as Zeta Reticuli or the Pleiades...
It is worth lingering a moment over the Otherworld of the nuclear physicists, if only because their discipline is widely held to be the doyen of sciences. They, above all, seek to establish the 'facts' of matter. I would maintain, however, that their subatomic realm is merely another variant of daimonic reality. Everything that is predicated of it could, for instance, be applied with equal justice to the land of Fairy.
Both worlds invert the cosy Newtonian world we inhabit: laws of time, space, causality, and, of course, matter are ignored. (Once past the 'event horizon' of a black hole, say the astrophysicists, time slows to a standstill; or, once inside the black hole, it 'runs backwards'.) Subatomic physics introduces extra dimensions--'string theory' allows for ten, I think: our four, plus six more, compacted very tightly. Multi-dimensionality is a staple of science fiction and ufology.
The diamons of subatomic 'inner space' are called particles, although strictly speaking they aren't--electrons, for example, are both particles and waves at the same time. They are paradoxical, both there and not-there, like fairies. Like UFOs they cannot be measured exactly; we can calculate their speed, or their position, but not both. This, roughly, is what Werner Heisenberg called the Uncertainty Principal, and it applies to all daimonic phenomena. We cannot know subatomic particles for themselves; we can only identify them via their daimonic traces...
...Each newly discovered particle promises to be the fundamental building-block of matter...I remember when there were only four quarks, diamonically named Upness, Downess, Strangeness and Charm (good names for UFO types). The last time I looked there were over forty. And counting. Ever smaller, every more impish and less substantial--the massless particles--they recede from us like quasars, those enormous daimons said to be moving towards the edge of the known universe at speeds close to that of light.
As with all anomalous entities, the very act of observing the particles disturbs them. Observer and observed, subject and object, cannot finally be distinguished. Particles whose existence is predicted obligingly turn up. If we didn't know better, we might almost say that we imagined them into existence. The so-called New Physicists smelled rat long ago. They began to compare the whole thing to oriental religion or suspect that its reality is primarily metaphorical, not literal and factual...
...the subatomic realm is not a literal world of facts which [spiritualists, UFOlogists, etc] can derive support the literal reality of their own. It is simply another metaphor for the Soul of the World. It is not even an especially good one: daimons prefer to appear as persons, not as impersonal, quirky little particles...
...There may well be an end to this literal world of ours, but there can be no literal end to it because it is continous with that other world, without end.
Good journeying to you!
----
and that was it. leaves you wanting to read more, hm?
