Eva

Last month I wrote about the blind contour drawings of three objects that represented three things that made our life worthwhile/meaningful. We then used the drawings for an exercise on letting go. Not everyone gave up all their drawings. There were many different reactions to the exercise. In general, people found that it was easier than they thought it would be.

Here are the steps so you can try it on your own:

1. Identify three things that made your life worthwhile/meaningful.
2. Analyze what these three things mean to you.
3. Pick out three objects to represent these three things.
4. Imagine you had to give one of these things up — that it would no longer be an active part of your life. Which of the three objects would you give up?
5. When you have chosen one, move it away from you.
6. Of the two remaining items, can you give up one more? Which one would it be?
7. When you have chosen one, move it away from you.
8. You have one item left. Can you give that one up too?

It is not important that you be able to give up all three objects. What is important is going through the process and learning about your relationship to these three things.

After the exercise, how do you feel about your three things? Have your feelings about/toward them changed? Has how you relate to them changed? Has what they mean to you changed?

This exercise is not just about learning to let go of the things most important to you, it is also about learning to let go of the fear of losing the things you love — learning to appreciate them without fear creeping into your relationship.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca said, “It is not the man who has little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.”

Let me know what you thought of the exercise when you did it.

Blind-contour drawings are made by drawing the contour of the subject without looking at your drawing. It fosters a more direct connection between the eye and the hand. I enjoy making blind-contour drawings because it gives my intellect a break and I can just do. Often people draw what they think they see and not what they actually see. Practicing blind-contour drawing helps you draw what you see without interruptions from your conscious thoughts.

The drawings are not meant to be accurate representations of the subject. Rather the drawings mark the activity of the eyes and the communication and spatial-awareness of the hand. Sections that the eye has lingered and spent more time are often larger and more detailed than sections the eye moved quickly over.

Just doing/acting allows the unconscious to be brought more into balance with the conscious. Most of us spend too much time using our rational mind and as a result neglecting our emotional mind. We do what we think we should and not what is most in-line with our needs.

For Religion Kitchen we practiced making blind contour drawings of three objects that represented three things that made our life worthwhile/meaningful. Here are my three drawings.

This is my sewing machine Uki-jay that represents tools that help me make things.

This is Vesuvius my motorcycle and he represents independence.

This is my plant Pauline. I enjoy working with people and she represents my community.

When we look around the world today, we see that one of the main motivators of disharmony among people is religious ideology. Religions are meant to provide guidance for living. The dominant religions today are guiding people to hate, fear, and destroy. Many who seek more constructive guidance choose to reject religion. This path however still focuses on religion, just in opposition. It is the classic story of the hero facing a demon.

In the Hero’s Journey (a cycle that is found in many stories throughout the world, past and present, that Joseph Campbell details in “A Hero with A Thousand Faces”), at some point the hero encounters a demon. In order to progress the hero needs to get rid of the demon, otherwise the demon will continue to make trouble for the hero. Everything in the hero’s external world is a manifestation of the hero’s internal world. The demon is something significant to the hero that the hero is experiencing it in a negative way. The key is not to obliterate the demon, but to turn it into something that works with the hero instead of against the hero. In other words turning the demon into a god.

It is helpful to look at the things we see or experience every day from a different perspective to gain insight. Putting things in symbolic terms can help us focus on the important aspects and filter out the distractions. One view that we can take is to look at our lives as a story and see where we are in the cycle of the Hero’s Journey.

We are each the hero of our life and on a hero’s journey. The beginning of the hero’s journey is the call to adventure. Did you hear the call? Did you answer or refuse the call? What is going on right now in your hero’s journey?

At one Religion Kitchen session we shared a story about our hero and one of the hero’s demons. Here is my story. It’s about the “Never-ending To-do list.” The Dreamer Marilyn is flying in the sky dreaming up things to do, which creates the To-do list. The On-the-ground Marilyn, to whom the Dreamer Marilyn is tied, is busily checking off things on the To-do list. No matter how fast Marilyn works, she can never get through the list. The To-do list demon that plagues Marilyn is actually created by Marilyn.

What is one of your demons?

Below are some excerpts of material for further reading.

From An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms, Harper and Row Publishers, New York:1989, p.33
“The Waste Land [of the grail quest] is a world where people live not out of their own initiative, but out of what they think they’re supposed to do. People have inherited their official roles and positions; they haven’t earned them. This is the situation of the Waste Land: everybody leading a false life…. Now, the hero of the Grail is one who acts out of his own spontaneous nature…. The meaning of the Grail and of most myths is finding the dynamic source in your life so that its trajectory is out of your own center and not something put on you by society…. There are two aspects of the hero, I think. The hero is someone whom you can lean on and who’s going to rescue you; he is also an ideal. To live the heroic life is to live the individual adventure. One of the problems today is that with the enormous transformations in the forms of our lives, the models for life don’t exist for us…. The hero-as-model is one thing we lack, so each one has to be his own hero and follow the path that is no path.”

From “An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms,” Harper and Row Publishers, New York:1989, pp.28-29
“My definition of a devil is a god who has not been recognized. That is to say, it is a power in you which you have not given expression, and you push it back. An then, like all repressed energy, it builds up and becomes completely dangerous to the position that you’re trying to hold.”

From “A Joseph Campbell Companion,” Harper Collins, 1991, p. 156
“What is the obstruction in your life, and how do you transform it into radiance?… In India, demons are really obstructions to the expansion of consciousness. A demon or devil is a power in you which you have not given expression, an unrecognized or suppressed god. Anyone who is unable to understand a god sees it as a devil.”

From “A Joseph Campbell Companion,” Harper Collins, 1991, p. 77-82
The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide must come to say, “Look, you’re in sleepy land. Wake. Come on a trip. There is a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there.” And so it starts.

The herald or announcer of the adventure … is often dark, loathly, or terrifying, judged evil by the world; yet if one could follow, the way would be opened through the walls of day into the dark where the jewels glow.

The call is to leave a certain social situation, move into your own loneliness and find the jewel, the center that’s impossible to find when you’re socially engaged. You are thrown off-center, and when you feel off-centered it’s time to go. This is the departure when the hero feels something has been lost and goes to find it. You are to cross the threshold into new life. It’s a dangerous adventure, because you are moving out of the sphere of the knowledge of you and your community.

The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world, macro to microcosm, a retreat from the desperations of the waste land to the peace of the everlasting realm that is within. But this realm, as we know from psychoanalysis, is precisely the infantile unconscious. It is the realm that we enter in sleep. We carry it within ourselves forever. All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there all the magic of childhood. And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of ourselves, are there; for such golden seeds do not die.

When one thinks of some reason for not going or has fear and remains in society because it’s safe, the results are radically different from what happens when one follows the call. If you refuse to go, then you are someone else’s servant. When this refusal of the call happens, there is a kind of drying up, a sense of life lost. Everything is you knows that a required adventure has been refused. Anxieties build up. What you have refused to experience in a positive way, you will experience in a negative way.

If what you are following, however, is your own true adventure, if it is something appropriate to your deep spiritual need or readiness, then magical guides will appear to help you. If you say, “Everyone’s going on this trip this year, and I’m going too,” then no guides will appear. Your adventure has to be coming right out of your own interior. If you are ready for it, then doors will open where there were no doors before, and where there would not be doors for anyone else. And you must have courage. It’s the call to adventure, which means there is no security, no rules.

When you cross the threshold, you are passing into the dark forest, taking a plunge into the sea, embarking upon the night sea journey. It involves passing through clashing rocks, narrow gates, or the like, which represent yes and no, the pairs of opposites. There will be a moment when the walls of the world seem to open for a second, and you get an insight through. Jump then! Go! The gates will often close so fast that they take off the tail of your house. You may be dismembered, lose everything you have. This is Christ leaving the Mother, the world, and going to the Father, the Spirit. This is Jonah swallowed by the whale, its jaws being the pairs of opposites.

What this represents psychologically is the trip from the realm of conscious, rational intentions into the zone of those energies of the body that are moving from another center: the center with which you are trying to get in touch.

As you now go towards the center, there will come more aids, as well as increasingly difficult trials. You have to give up more and more of what you’re hanging on to. The final thing is a total giving up, a yielding all the way. This is a place directly opposite to your life experiences and all that you’ve been taught in school. Psychologically, it’s a shift into the unconscious; otherwise, it’s a move into a field of action of which you know nothing. Anything can happen, and it may be favorable or unfavorable.

The deeper you go, the closer you get to the final realization, the heavier the resistance. You are coming down to those areas that are the ones that are repressed, and it’s that repression system that you have to pass through. And there, of course, is where magical aid is most required. The hero may here discover for the first time that there is everywhere a benign power supporting him in his superhuman passage.

You come then to the final experience of discovering and making your own that which was lacking in the place from which you departed. This experience can be rendered in four different ways.

One rendition is the Sacred marriage, the meeting with the beloved which brings the birth of your own spiritual life, with the bride being whatever the life is that your relating to: male/female, I/Thou, this/that.

Another rendition is Atonement with the Father. The son has been separated from the father, meaning he has been living a life that’s inappropriate to his real heritage. The son is the temporal aspect, and the father is the eternal aspect from the same being. The father represents the natural order from which you have been removed. You are trying to find your character, which you inherit from your father. Atonement is bringing your own personal and contemporary program into accord with the life momentum out of which you have come.

Then there us Apotheosis, the realization that “I am that which all these other beings are.” The hero knows that he is It, the Buddha image, the knower of the truth. “The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.” That’s the illumination that comes with Apotheosis. You are not allowed that realization in Christianity, except in Gnostic Christianity. You can’t say, “The Christhood is in me.”

Finally there’s the Elixir Theft, an entirely different sort of realization. Instead of a slow progress through the mysteries with the good will of the powers, there is a violent pressure through and a seizing — the fire theft by Prometheus or the use of LSD in the 60s — and you flee from the powers that you did not appease on the way. This is the transformation flight, where the hero, with the powers after him, carries his good back to the light world as fast as he can. Or one can have a schizophrenic crack up and stay down there….

You do not had a complete adventure unless you do get back. There is a time to go into the woods and a time to come back, and you know which it is. Do you have the courage?…

The final thing is knowing, loving, and serving life in a way in which you are eternally at rest. That point of rest has got to be in all of it. Even though you are active out there in the world, within you there’s a point of complete composure and rest. When that’s not there, then you are in agony.

For those who cannot attend the Religion Kitchen meetings I’d like to share some topics for you to ponder at home.

Topic du Jour: Why is there a need for a Religion Kitchen group?

The Religion Kitchen participants meet to commune with other like-minded people who enjoy exploring life and thoughtfully creating our world. As we discuss our individual life paths we have the opportunity to hold each other accountable to the things we want to accomplish and to help each other see when our reflections/perspectives are distorted.

This is important because when we do not examine our beliefs and actions with intention then we are apt to merely imitate our surroundings. Discovering your true self is difficult. It is my hope that the Religion Kitchen is a compassionate environment conducive to self-exploration and self-determination.

For those of you interested in exploring further I’ve included some excerpts of material you may be interested in reading below.

From Carl Jung, “The Portable Jung,” Penguin Books, 1971, p.103.

“Human beings have one faculty which, though it is of the greatest utility for collective purposes, is most pernicious for individuation, and that is the faculty of imitation. Collective psychology cannot dispense with imitation, for without it all mass organizations, the state and the social order, are impossible. Society is organized, indeed, less by law than by the propensity to imitation, implying equally suggestibility, suggestion, and mental contagion. But we see every day how people use, or rather abuse, the mechanism of imitation for the purpose of personal differentiation: they are content to ape some eminent personality, some striking characteristic or mode of behavior, thereby achieving an outward distinction from the circle in which they move. We could almost say that as a punishment for this the uniformity of their minds with those of their neighbors, already real enough, is intensified into an unconscious, compulsive bondage to the environment. As a rule these specious attempts at individual differentiation stiffen into a pose, and the imitator remains at the same level as he always was, only several degrees more sterile than before. To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.”

From Joseph Campbell, “Myths to Live By,” Penguin Books, New York 1972, pp. 257-258.

“Mythologies and religions are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a ‘presence’ or ‘eternity’ that is whole and entire in each. In this function all mythologies, all great poetries, and all mystic traditions are in accord; and where any such inspiriting vision remains effective in a civilization, every thing and every creature within its range is alive. The first condition, therefore, that any mythology must fulfill if it is to render life to modern lives is that of cleansing the doors of perception to the wonder, at once terrible and fascinating, of ourselves and of the universe of which we are the ears and eyes and the mind. Whereas theologians, reading their revelations counter-clockwise, so to say, point to references in the past (in Merton’s words: ‘to another point on the circumference’) and Utopians offer revelations only promissory of some desired future, mythologies, having sprung from the psyche, point back to the psyche (‘the center’): and anyone seriously turning within will, in fact, rediscover their references in himself.”

Reference: Thomas Merton, “Symbolism: Communication or Communion?” in New Directions 20 (New York: New Directions, 1968), pp.11-12.

From Sri Swami Satchidananda, “The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali,” Integral Yoga Publications, Yogaville, Virginia: 1978, p. 6-7

“3. Then the Seer [Self] abides in His own nature.

You are that true Seer. You are not the body nor the mind. You are the Knower or seer. You always see your mind and body acting in front of you. You know that the mind creates thoughts; it distinguishes and desires. The seer knows that but is not involved in it.

But to understand that eternal peaceful You, the mind must be quiet; otherwise, it seems to distort the truth. If I explain this through an analogy it will probably be easier to understand. You are the Seer who wants to see itself. How? Even in the case of our physical face, if I ask if you have ever seen it, you have to say no because it is the face that sees. The face itself is the seer or the subject. What it sees in the mirror is its image, the seen or the object. If the mirror is corrugated, curved, concave, or convex, will you be able to see your true face? No. It will appear to be awful – too big or too high or full of waves. Will you be worried seeing this? No. You will immediately know something is wrong with the mirror. You are seeing a distorted reflection. Only if the mirror is perfectly smooth and clean will it give you the true reflection. Only then can you see your face as it is.

In the same way, the Seer, or true you, reflects in the mind which is your mirror. Normally, you can’t see the true Self because your mind is colored. If the mind is dirty you say, “I am dirty.” If it’s all polished and shining: “I am beautiful.” That means you think you are your reflection in the mind. If the mind has a lot of waves like the surface of a lake, you will be seeing a distorted reflection. If the water of the mental lake is muddy or colored you see your Self as muddy or colored. To see the true reflection, see that the water is clean and calm and without ripples. When the mind ceases to create thought forms or when the chittam is completely free from vrittis, it becomes as clear as a sill lake and you see your true Self.

Hearing this analogy, you might turn around and ask me, “Does that mean the Seer misunderstands Itself or has forgotten Itself?” No. The Seer can never misunderstand nor forget Itself. But we are talking on the level of the reflection. The reflection is distorted, so the seer appears to be distorted. The true you is always the same, but you appear to be distorted or mixed up with the mind. By making the mind clean and pure, you feel you have gone back or you appear to have gone back to your original state.”

chitta = of the mind-stuff

vritti = modifications

The Religion Kitchen

In December 2011 I started a group called the Religion Kitchen. The mission of the Religion Kitchen is to promote constructive and creative approaches to religion. Our vision is to lead by example, so we explore and foster the creation of new religions. We value compassion and open-mindedness.

We define religion as any shared belief system that provides guidance for living and tools to keep one’s values and actions aligned.

Meeting: We meet monthly to discuss and develop our personal belief systems.