Psyche is God without theology. Psyche is God without the baggage. Psyche is God in the raw. Psyche is God newborn. Psyche is exactly what we need here, now, in each situation as it arises.
Psyche is the Life Force. Life eternal, unending, always, forever, here, now. Psyche is LIFE everlasting. Blowing in the wind through the Cosmos, made manifest in the infinite numbers of Life’s children through the ages and eons of time. She is the mother of all things. She knows the names of all that is, has been, will be. She knows all things. She knows what’s what, what matters, what is called for in each situation as it arises, and forgets not one thing.
Here, now is eternal in the mind and being of Psyche. It is always now there. And Psyche is always here, now. With us, within us, and without. We know it when we know what we know. In the emptiness, stillness, silence. When are we ever that quiet? For long enough to be fully present, here, now? For long enough to be free of wanting, desiring, having to have? Whatever disturbs the emptiness, stillness, silence is a barrier preventing the realization of Psyche with us, within us, as us, here, now.
When Jesus said, “The father and I are one.” “When you have seen me, you have seen the father.” He was speaking of Psyche. Psyche and we are one. When we see ourselves fully, as we are, we are seeing Psyche. Who has ever seen themselves fully, as they are?
Being Psyche, not knowing Psyche. Remove the diversions. Remove the distractions. Enter the emptiness, stillness, silence, become who we were before we were born, there is Psyche. The return to Psyche is the return to the emptiness, stillness, silence before birth and after death. The water and the blood of birth, The ashes and dust of death. Psyche is with us all there. And all in between. And we know it not. Because we know not the truth of emptiness, stillness, silence.
When we are quiet, the noise is deafening. Memories, fear and desire, shame, sorrow, anguish, agony… The list goes forever of the things that meet us in the quiet, disrupting the quiet, preventing the quiet from being quiet. And so, the practice of seeing, hearing, knowing, what’s what and what is called for, doing that in the right way, at the right time in the right place in each situation as it arises, no matter what—just as Jesus did, and the Buddha before him, and all those like them throughout all times and places—being who they were, when, where and how they were. Meeting each moment as the moments needed to be met, with their original nature, their innate virtues (The things they did best and enjoyed doing the most, their intrinsic intuition and their inherent imagination. In the service of Tao and Intuition, and Psyche.
Intuition is the interface between Psyche and us. And all life forms everywhere. Intuition is Psyche with us and all living things. And where does the line between life and matter? Between ert and inert? Between space and spirit?
The Greek poet Aeschylus said 500 years before Christ, “He who learns must suffer. And in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon our heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us through the awful grace of God.”
And another Greek poet, Heraclitus, who also lived around 500 BCE, said, “Traveling on every path, you will not find the boundaries of the soul by going—so deep is its measure.”
Both poets are talking about Psyche, who is at once, the source of our knowledge, and one who defies our interests, remaining far beyond our seeking, searching, and attempts at exploration. My own efforts at experiencing Psyche directly have led me to conclude we can come as close to Psyche as we can ever hope to be only through self-induced trance states that religions throughout time have employed to conjure up experiences of “The Wholly Other” who always “remains within our reach, yet far exceeds our grasp” (Source unknown).
Trance states are essential in the search for Tao, Psyche and Intuition. They can be produced by repetitive chanting, humming, drumming, singing, hand clapping, foot stomping, praying silently or out loud, meditating, drugs and alcohol, etc., which enable us to achieve an altered state of consciousness which open the way to experiencing/projecting aspects of apparent reality unavailable to us amid the routines of daily life. And therefore, cannot be counted on as a source of knowing that withstands the scrutiny of the scientific method. Meaning the experience of the Psyche thus produced can be easily dismissed as nothing more than an aspect of our imagination, and “When Jones follows his inner light, Jones is following Jones.” (H.L. Mencken).
And what Mencken missed (Or ignored) in this remark is that when Jones doesn’t follow his inner voice, Jones follows Jones. Jones is all there is! There is nobody but US here, or anywhere! Us (and our projections) is all there is! Even Psyche is a human projection when we move beyond the faint, ever so faint, sense that “something’s there!” And “the life force” is as close as we can come to identifying “what is there” as we can get without going over into total projection. The more theology we add to the sense we sense, the more immersed in our own imagination, embellishment, we become. The Old Testament prophets’ idea of “the something that is there,” worked its magic throughout time to produce Christianity’s cosmology/theology as it is today.
We cannot hope to SEE until we see ourselves seeing, and so the development of double-blind experiments world-wide. As close as we can come to a double-blind evaluation of our own seeing is to simply sit with it, knowing that what we think we see may not be at all what is there, but only our interpretation of what is there, and “be slow to jump to conclusions.”
The way this works with Tao, Psyche, Intuition is to be overly sensitive about where we stop and projection starts, and understanding, remembering, that “the less we say, the better.”
That said, there is this: Dropping into emptiness, stillness, silence and simply waiting for what meets us there to enter our awareness with its sense of what’s what and what is called for here, now, and what needs to be done about it in each situation as it arises with the gifts of our original nature, our innate virtues (The things we do best and enjoy doing most), our intrinsic intuition and our inherent imagination coming together to do what needs to be done, when, where and how it needs to be done all our life long. This is the Hero’s task through all the ages, and always will be.
And we always have Tao, Psyche and Intuition to work with, delight in and enjoy here, now, everywhere all the time.
Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy 