culmination

• The Answer
• The Path
• Decision
• The End (?)
• (or) The New Mythology
• Define "From"
• The Darkness
• What is the treasure?
• What is the sacrifice?
• The void @ the center (of evertyhing) [is you]

 

culmination |ˌkəlməˈnā sh ən|

noun [in sing. ]

the highest or climactic point of something, esp. as attained after a long time : the product was the culmination of 13 years of research.

• Astronomy Astrology the reaching of the meridian by a celestial body.

The Left-Hand Path and Right-Hand Path are a dichotomy between two opposing belief systems, whose meanings have varied over time. The distinction is generally used by self-proclaimed followers of the "Left-Hand Path." Opponents often argue that these definitions improperly divide belief systems (a mislabeled or false dichotomy), or claim that many Left-Hand beliefs are illegitimate.[citation needed]

Modern definitions of "Right-Hand Path" elevate spirituality, the strict observance of moral codes, and the worship of deities. The intent of "Right-Hand Path" belief systems is to attain proximity to divinity, or integration with divinity. Conversely, the "Left-Hand Path" belief systems value the advancement and preservation of the self, as well as the pursuit of terrestrial goals.[citation needed] These goals are achieved either by seeking the guidance of one or more deities via theistic practices, or more commonly, via non-theistic uses of instincts and logic.[citation needed]

Although some sects value proximity to the divine, most followers of Left-Hand Path belief systems seek to become divinities in their own right.[citation needed] A simplified outlook would state the RHP teaches divinity through association, while LHP teaches divinity through emulation. Both doctrines ultimately lead to the annihilation (marginalization) of the old, unenlightened ego through its inferiority to the awakened genius.  .  .  Wikipedia

 

The Path

One can view the dropping of Jake Chambers by the Gunslinger in two ways.  The first is metaphoric.  Jake is the child within the Gunslinger that must die for the Gunslinger to become and to continue his quest.  This is a threshold point, and the Gunslinger understands what must be done, grows up, and continues on his quest after the Man in Black.

 

However, one can also view this dropping as a literal dropping of his son.  He is so consumed with his goal, that there is nothing he would not sacrifice to reach this end.  Would he kill his own Mother?  Yes.  Kill his son?  Many times.  This reading describes obsession.  One consumed by the flames of obsession is not lead by Temperance (who Jake Kotze recently decided was personified by Kate Winslet).

 

With this conclusion in mind, I re-watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind the other night.  I enjoyed this film when it came out in 2004 and watched two or three times in the theater before I bought the DVD.  I'm very familiar with its twists and turns yet still enjoyed it as I re-watched it.  It did put me in mind of The Fountain though.

 

These movies deal with The Moment.  Wall-E also dealt with The Moment.  This is the unit of time that we have.  It is what is authentic.  The whole of The Fountain is concerned with one walk in the first snow of the season.  That was the authentic moment that Hugh Jackman's character missed through his obsession with his quest.

 

When Clementine tried to reenact authentic moments with someone other than Joel in the film Sunshine, the moment was hollow and not real.  She felt amiss.  And as Joel was being erased, he was experiencing those authentic moments good and bad one after another in reverse order.  He then understood the value of life as it was being taken from him.

 

There is an interesting little sync between these films that I found.  When Joel and Clem are enjoying the fall leaves in Sunshine he wears a bright yellow Tommy T-shirt—Tommy being The Who's famous rock opera named for its hero Tommy Walker, a deaf, dumb, and blind messiah who leads people . . . out of the matrix?  Tommy is also the name of the Hugh Jackman character in The Fountain.  Tommy Walker achieves his freedom when he smashes the mirror of his past and is.  Tommy Creo has to eventually make the same decision upon his path in The Fountain and "Finish it."

 

So then what is "the path"?  I would describe this as the normal progression all humans have ever taken.  This path of course can be illustrated by the major arcana of the tarot.  The cards describe three stages and two segments.

 

The three stages describe that of an entire life.  Childhood, Maturation, Initiation.

 

-Childhood is describe in cards I – VI:

I Magician – II High Priestess – III Empress – IV Emperor – V Hierophant – VI Lovers

 

-Maturation is the Departure, it is the building and development of one's Ego seen in cards VII – XII

VII Chariot – VIII Justice – IX Hermit – X Wheel of Fortune – XI Strength – XII Hanged Man

 

-Initiation is the transpersonal opening, a return to wholeness through ego death and/or physical death.

XIII Death – XIV Temperance – XV Devil – XVI Tower – XVII Star – XVIII Moon

 

-The transpersonal opening hopefully leads to the goal, which is "rebirth–redemption–wholeness–the consciousness of the unity of all things (67 Tarot and the Journey of the Hero)."

 

Know that my tarot info comes from Hajo Banzhaf's book, which I suggest to you for its completeness:

Tarot and the Journey of the Hero. Samuel Weiser, Inc. York Beach ME: 2000.

 

This path also takes on two qualities.  The first half of the path as described by the cards is the active masculine portion of the journey.  The second half of the path is the feminine portion of the journey where one must allow things to happen.

 

The active portion of the journey is illustrated in cards V – IX

 

Masculine Path:

V Hierophant: teacher

VI Lovers: crossroads/decision

VII Chariot: departure

VIII Justice: maturation

IX Hermit: threshold (self knowledge)

 

The Call occurs in card X, The Wheel of Fortune, and separates the masculine portion from the feminine portion of the path.

 

The passive portion of the journey is illustrated in cards XI – XVIII

 

Feminine Path:

XI Strength: acceptance

XII Hanged Man: letting go

XIII Death

XIV Temperance: guidance

XV Devil: shadow

XVI Tower: liberation

XVII Star: hope (discovery of fountain?)

XVIII Moon: return

 

So. My blog, From The Belly Of The Whale, has been mostly concerned with the "night sea journey".  This is the portion of the feminine path from Death to the return through the Moon.  Of course the word "from" is open ended.  My intention was that this report comes to you from inside the belly of the whale.  However, I'm beginning to think that more importantly, we are exiting From The Belly Of The Whale!

 

I started the blog to address The Darkness that I had been seeing everywhere in our culture for years without any proper explanation as to why or how things had gone so wrong.

 

"But the right way to wholeness is made up, unfortunately, of fateful detours and wrong turnings.  It is a longissima via, not straight, but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites, reminding us of the guiding caduceus, a path whose labyrinthine twists and turns are not lacking in terrors." ~Jung

 

The Darkness

"Has the light gone out for you?/Because the light has gone out for me./It is the 21^st Century./ It is the 21^st Century." ~Radiohead: "Bodysnatchers" from  In Rainbows.

 

I've wanted to write an essay about the darkness now for quite some time.  I'm thinking, three or four years.  A lot of people reconsidered everything about the 3^rd anniversary of the war.  I did.  How did we get into this clusterfuck?  One looked back and the path began on one day, September 11, 2001, my mother's Birthday. 

 

I thought about this so much, that I even had music to go with it.  It is an endtime playlist that puts one in accord with "The Darkness".  Perhaps this list would get us ready to consider the underworld?

 

1. "Things That Scare Me"                  Neko Case                  Blacklisted                 

2. "Sit Down, Stand Up (Snakes & Ladders)"                  Radiohead                  Hail To The Thief                 

3. "Song to the Siren"                  This Mortal Coil                  It'll End In Tears                 

4." Hold On, Hold On"                  Neko Case                  Fox Confessor Brings The Flood                 

5. "Werewolf"                                    Cat Power                  You Are Free                 

6. "Missed The Boat"                  Modest Mouse                  We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank                 

7. "The Mess We're In"                  PJ Harvey                                    Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea                 

8. "Dirty Knife"                                    Neko Case                  Fox Confessor Brings The Flood                 

9. "4 Minute Warning"                  Radiohead                  In Rainbows [Disc 2]                 

10. "Windowstill"                                    The Arcade Fire                  Neon Bible                 

11. "Night Light"                                    Sleater-Kinney                  The Woods                 

12. "The Biggest Lie"                  Elliott Smith                  Elliott Smith                 

13. "A Wolf At The Door (It Girl. Rag Doll)"                  Radiohead                  Hail To The Thief

 

The Navajo believe that everything is connected.  There is no coincidence to them.  To achieve happiness then, one must take the middle way.  Meaning that the Navajo way is the road of Temperance.  A Navajo achieves harmony by staying in balance with his world.  The opposite of the Navajo way is witchcraft.  A Navajo witch, known as a skinwalker, or a Navajo wolf chooses to be out of balance to achieve his own nefarious ends.  I'll speak more about the Navajo way in the mythology section.  For now, it's enough to say that the idea of being out of balance with no coincidence helped me to become a synchromystic as I waded into the murky waters that was understanding 9/11.

 

9/11 was my entry into "The Darkness".  And when one tries to understand what happened that day, one ends up out of balance.  Suffice to say, the best way for me to understand what happened that day was by reading a book by Tony Hillerman that had nothing to do with 9/11.  I even got to the book through a synchromystic route.  I was reading DeLillo's Falling Man.  I had been reading lots of 9/11 fiction then.  Let's maybe look?

 

The Zero                                                                        Jess Walter

Falling Man                                                                        Don Delillo

A Disorder Peculiar to the Country                  Ken Kalfus

Fast Food Nation (audio)                                     Eric Schlosser

In the Shadow of No Towers                                    Art Spiegelman

The Fallen Man (audio)                                                      Tony Hillerman

Julius Caesar (audio)                                                      William Shakespeare

 

So to understand 9/11, I read a Navajo murder mystery about Shiprock, a holy Navajo rock tower, which had nothing to do whatsoever with 9/11.  This book, The Fallen Man, synced with a book about 911, Falling Man, and it came out 9/10/1997.

 

I guess, where I'm going with this is to tell you one mustn't look "out" for the answers.  Perhaps going "in" is the correct route.

 

So, the book and film No Country for Old Men asks a simple question about "The Darkness".  Have things gotten worse?  Were things "better" as old timers suggest?  The conclusion that Cormac McCarthy comes to, is yes.  His villain is the devil, and his theme has to do with fate/coincidence/luck/destiny.  Basically, Cormac McCarthy comes to the conclusion that there is no order.  His devil gets it in the end via bad luck.  Now is this Justice?  Not really.

 

When this film came out, it was not alone in considering darkness.  There were a many films considering the darkness.  Think of the "Mexican Trilogy":  Pan's Labyrinth, Babel, Children of Men.  No one was safe from this devil.  And it was chance—yes, that was the word—that brought you in his path.

 

Peter Jackson fresh off the heels of battling "The Darkness" in his epic Lord Of The Rings trilogy decided to bring the shadow back to New York.  I find the dates of King Kong fascinating:  1933, 1976, 2005.

1933 is the great depression, a time of darkness.  And here is a giant, new building, The Empire State building.  A Tower.  And the darkness climbs to the top of it and is defeated.  He, the devil, returns in 1976 to the top of two new towers.  Again, he is defeated.  After the WTC was completed, they had a difficult time filling all the space due to economic hardship, a recession caused by oil prices and the Viet Nam war.  I imagine it was also difficult to fill the Empire State Building in 1933.

 

In 2005, the monster, our shadow, had to climb the same building he climbed in '33.  The '76 tower[s] had come down.  Interestingly enough, we are now in a recession.  Some say that this time is going to be worse than the Great Depression: 1929-1939.  Was it a massive war that returned the country to prosperity after the Great Depression?

 

One interesting point, to stay current, has to do with our economic times.  Right now we are focused on the solvency of our national/global money-center banks—the so-called pillars of our economy.  Their instability due to bad loans in the housing market is seen as the problem, but is this really the problem?  I've heard from several places, most recently This American Life's Planet Money team that the real problem is debt.  We are the problem.  Our debt is 100% of GDP.  We owe as much as we make.  This country had the same amount debt in 1929 before that crash.  What of other matters though?

 

Does our nation have any other goals other than economic ones?  Was our country more rounded at one time in the past with a spiritual center and spiritual goals?  Our life now seems to be concerned only with economics which leads to an over identification with material.  That is why this is happening.  Want, Buy, Have.  We are loosing our real treasure in the pursuit of material. 

 

Here is a weird split though.  Part of our problem is that we don't value anything.  We live in this weird disposable time.  It is the age of plastic, and we will be historically known as "plastic man".  We are cheap, and inauthentic.  There was a tremendous piece in Harper's about our trash by Donovan Hohn called "Moby Duck".  Read it!  You will understand how and why our mother cries "mermaid tears" now and forever.

 

Melville's Moby Dick has been my lens to this darkness.  I understood our country's citizens as isolatoes on board our ship of state headed by what, for all intents and purposes, seemed like a madman driven by unknown forces toward an incomprehensible goal.  That madman's term has come to an end.  Strangely, in forgiving my father, I ended up forgiving our tyrant as well.  They are mixed together in my mind in typical literary fashion.

 

I think that our night sea voyage has ended though.  We've come out from the belly of the whale.  I know that I'm mixing metaphors there a bit, but forgive me.  So what does this mean?  Well, I think that it means that this blog as it was first envisioned has reached its conclusion.  To continue with a focus on the darkness would be to cultivate an obsession.  Did we learn anything from our shadow?  We must have.

 

Although the news today is dark, I do believe that "The Darkness" is over.  What is coming to light is the result of our trip to the underworld.  It may take some time to understand how we are different after having faced our shadow self, but perhaps our perception now will be different?

 

Do we see any signs of hope in film?   I do seem to remember a funny little tin-man who saw the true value of an object, and who enjoyed song leading us back to paradise, back to earth.  In light of this. . .

 

Now that our money is worthless, or going to be, we are going to have to learn to appreciate life without things, or else we will have to have another massive war to numb/trick us into continued worship of material.  In God WE Trust, on our note of faith, the dollar.

 

 

New Mythology?

 

"Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously see himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle." ~Jung

 

As I mentioned earlier on another post, part of my collegiate work was a search for a modern hero, one relevant to our time and land.  A country's myth serves a purpose, well actually four purposes according to Joseph Campbell.  Perhaps it would be worthwhile to revisit J.C.'s ideas about the purposes of myth.  It was his prompting that led me to question the relevance of Jesus to 21^st century America.  Campbell believed that a country's hero must be tied to the physical land.  One needed a local center to then relate to the eternal.  One lives local, and thus should have a personal holy land, a sacred highest point.  This is illustrated in how the Navajo live within the four sacred mountains in the southwestern US and how the heart of the monster, which to the Nez Perce is the world navel, lies in the middle of their territory in Kamiah, Idaho.  Our land's hero, which by default and majority, is Jesus, is tied to the Middle East.  How is he relevant to our land?

 

So here are the purposes of mythology according to Joseph Campbell that together create a complete mythological structure.  The first function of mythology is the mystical, which is the realization that the eternal, one source, shines its light through all things.  This is awakened awe.  The second function of myth is the cosmological, which represents our physical world as a manifestation of this divine source.  This is a metaphorical sense making activity of existence.  It is how a society understands its place in the world and universe.  The third function is the sociological, which defines a given people that the myth serves.  It validates and maintains a social order.  The final function of myth is the pedagogical, which describes the stages of life and transformations of an individual, which hasn't changed for 10s of thousands of years and which I talked about when describing "the path".

 

The problem then as Mr. Campbell saw it, was that our cosmological relationship had changed to the universe since Copernicus, which was never readdressed in a new mythology.  Others disagree with this notion stating that although our facts have changed, our perception has not, and thus the traditional cosmological mythology is still valid.  The other important change that Campbell stressed was that the world order had changed in the 20^th century with the advent of rockets and jets rendering our bordered world irrelevant.  His philosophy was that the tribe that a new mythology needed to address with it social ordering function was the entire globe.  The people is everyone now.  There is no "other".  With those thoughts in mind, I searched for a new hero to save us from "The Darkness" my senior year of college, and, I thought that I had found her:

 

Bridges between:

Renan Demirkan

M.I.A

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

May Ayim

Recall the quote from Jung at the beginning?  It speaks to the middle.  These gals don't have a place.  They lie between the black and white of the culture.  Despite Campbell's desire to realize that you and the other are one, societies still have a majority and minority component.  A black and white.  It is the group that lies outside the in and out groups and doesn't fit into either that leads us to unity.  It was my contention that the artists listed above could bring us together.

 

M.I.A. recently being pregnant added a level of meaning to this idea too.  Could she give birth to the new age?  Some think she is on the wrong side of an ugly conflict (which I don't pretend to understand).  Her loyalties in this conflict were recently questioned in a piece in the Times.  If both sides are dirty, as is usually the case, then we should probably look to the middle for guidance (I don't know anything about the Sri Lankan civil war, and M.I.A. might not be as middle as I perceive, bear in mind.).  Women it should be said, also are between in this man's world.

 

But here is an interesting conundrum.  Can one intellectually "find" a new mythology?  Probably not.  And folks say that our lack of a complete mythology might be what is wrong with the world.  It seems to me like politics in this country is the stand in for mythology.  Our state houses are our temples, and they give us our structure.  We even have rites within this mythology.  We vote.

 

Rite is a component that Campbell would stress.  Ritual puts one in accord with one's myth.  Thus, if the mythology organizes one's cosmos, then the ritual sets one in harmony with one's world.  This is seen and illustrated with the Navajos.  Their traditional houses, Hogans, mirror the world in their design.  The cardinal mountains are built into it as well as the vault of heaven.  They create the macrocosm in the microcosm.  When one is out of harmony, they have a sing for him.  They paint with sand on the floor of the Hogan, and create a metaphoric picture of the universe.  The ill person is placed literally in the picture as to restore the person to balance with the universe.

 

The pre-Vatican II Catholic mass was a reenactment of the myth—something that I went to great lengths to describe in T—the sacrifice.  One went to mass to participate in the myth, to be a part of the mystery.

 

Participating in the myth huh?  Do we participate in films?  Most definitely yes as youngsters.  Myth is very much alive in this fashion.  And the Gods and Goddesses are still with us.  Maybe we don't need a new mythology at all. 

 

But, the focus of this blog, From The Belley Of The Whale, has culminated.  I set out with a question, basically wanting to know the secrets of the universe, and.  I have an answer. 

 

So, this blog is done.  I don't know if I'm done as a synchromystic, but From the Belly Of The Whale is.  It is likely I will start a new blog soon that has to do with participation in the myth.  We have one story that is retold over and over through different heroes.  Perhaps I'll nail down an American hero.  Maybe Chief Joseph?  Maybe Crazy Horse, or Sitting Bull.  Did you know that Arthur and Beowulf became Christianized?  Their stories changed as the times changed.  The Gods names change, but the source doesn't.  The Holy Grail precedes Christian knights, but its idea continued in and through a Christian world.  Have you found it, or do you still seek it?

 

Questions

What is "The Treasure"?

The treasure that you seek is the relationships in your life.  Your partner.  Your children.  Your parents.  Your Friends.  Your coworkers. Your community.

 

What is "The Sacrifice"?

The Sacrifice is your selfishness.  It is your ego.  Obsession with quest could cause you to loose the treasure.  Acceptance.  You are not your role.  You only have this moment to spend with your child.  Know that the only difference between the beginning and the end of the journey is perception.  George Bailey changed.  Nothing else.  The beginning of the grail quests always started with the grail.  They already had it!

 

The void you try to fill with food or drugs or booze is you.  You can't fill a black hole.  It is your center, and the center of everything.  You are the void.

 

Why is the human on earth?

 

The Answer

Relationships:  

-Communion (union w/ your community).

-Your family.  

That is why you are here.  To go any deeper would negate all this.  This is why you came.  

Sight. Sound. Smell. Taste. Touch.

Marvel.  It is all beauty.

Enjoy.  

Motion. Stillness. Breath.

Love.