The Hero's Journey

Rudolph Steiner wrote about reality as composed fundamentally of sound - that is, vibration.  He spoke of a range of vibration that travelled through the spectrum of vowel sounds, from A-E-I-O-U.  These sounds composed reality, he reasoned.

There may be anecdotal evidence.  God is Jah, Allah, Wakan Tanka, Yahweh.   Steiner spoke of this end of the vowel spectrum as being the masculine God, which, as it loses connection with its own center (the Tao), inherently decays into own perverse antithesis  - excessive yang, with the characteristics of automatons.  Ahriman is the name of the anti-deity residing within the syllable, according to Steiner.  Likewise, the Goddess side of the vowel spectrum, represented by "Uu," represents yin, and as it loses its relationship to the middle-center-way of the Tao it inherently decays into yin's perverse antithesis.  Lucifer is the name of the anti-deity residing within the syllable of the other end of the vowel spectrum - Uu.  Ah to Uu.  Ahriman to Lucifer.  The aspiration for unity decays into the prison of conformity - order.  This is the realm of Ahriman.  The aspiration for diversity decays into the prison of endless variety without center or focus - chaos.  This is the realm of Lucifer.  Either extreme is excessive, and balance between the two must be maintained.  This is the Tao, or the Way - the Way of the Middle Path.  
 
 
The uninitiated masculine is the thinking mind.  Men and women both contain this uninitiated masculine; it is ungrounded, and thus excessive, yang energy.  It is the energy of our thoughts, our language-using center, our ego, our monkey-mind.  The uninitiated feminine is the feeling body, which both men and women have.  The body is unconscious, feeling, instinctive, and thoughtless.  It is ungrounded, and thus excessive, yin energy.  Both aspects of the self require initiation in order to be whole.

  The uninitiated masculine enters the path that leads to the Dark Tower - the endless labyrinthine prison of the ego.  The destruction of the ego is the destruction of the dark tower, and the annihilating chaos which follows is the wasteland.  The journey through the wasteland is the dark night of the soul, which leads to the garden, where the water is.  At long last, water is found!  And so the feminine enters the picture, and the terrible empty masculine logic of the wasteland is forgotten.  

Yet water is wily in its ways.  You can't pin it down, it's always one thing turning into another.  It has no real shape, just capacity to manifest any shape.  Consciousness itself is actually responsible for choosing the shape of water.  Water itself is shapeless and formless.  

To follow the metaphor, Looking-for-her is Lucifer.  If you are chasing after the allures of the feminine, He's - I mean she's - gotcha.  Not because there is anything wrong with the feminine, but because water is mutable and changes as soon as you think you can count on it.  Water is not solid and is not stable as a foundation.  Water is change.

What this means, if Steiner is to be believed, is that the pendulum swing away from the atrocities of Trump - I mean Ahriman -  towards the feminine may not be the end of the story.  The reawakening of the divine feminine may need to contain within it a reference to the divine masculine - the initiated masculine, the consciousness that has seen beyond the inherent change of the world, the world of infinite desire, represented by water, the feminine, and Lucifer.  This initiated masculine has let go of thinking in order to find freedom and has also let go of the allure of feeling and its inherent unsatiablilty.  This consciousness is completely undesirous of the absolute, seeing the relentless pursuit of the eternal as ultimately an odious descent into judgment and condemnation, the conformist and intolerant fundamentalism of Ahriman.  The pursuit of something eternally perfect in an ever-changing world reveals a discontent with the perfection of a changing creation.  This initiated masculine sees both the pursuit of the absolute and the pursuit of the relative - the pursuit of God and the pursuit of the Goddess - as ultimately unsatisfactory.  We've all heard the stories of the saintly gurus from Asia who come to America and can't help having bad, immature sex with their students - they have realized God within themselves, but are still pursuing the Goddess outside of themselves.  The initiated masculine is a tantric, and has become whole.  He pursues nothing, and is merely present with what is, accepting the reality of paradox being perceived by perceiver.

  By turning to perceive the perceiver, the mind sees itself, like pouring water into water.  This is the end of philosophy, the final conclusion of thought, the disappearance of language, like a mirror being held in front of another mirror - mere awareness without content, described by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche as "emptiness and light."  This is the nondual state,  which the Tibetans call Rigpa, the pinnacle of Dzogchen.  This is Mahamudra, the nondual state that remains in the world.  Neither favoring samsara nor nirvana, but finding the paradoxical seed of its own opposite deep within all phenomena,  the initiated, self-aware consciousness chooses neither yin nor yang, neither Lucifer nor Ahriman, but the Tao, the center between opposites.

One of my meditation teachers (a woman, of course) stayed in the nondual state Rigpa for six weeks, while working as a consultant for Kaiser Permanente.  Truly, the interweaving of opposites!  Emptiness is form, and form is emptiness.  They are interpenetrating and interwoven.  Nirvana is found within the context of samsara, and samsara is found within the context of nirvana. The path of profound initiation is Tantra.

Thus the journey to the dark tower and beyond, through the wasteland, to the garden and the waters, does not end with the revival of the divine feminine.  The goddess is desire herself, life existing as desire itself, desire itself manifesting as life.  Women sound so sexy when they screw that some angels actually chose to fall out of heaven into the physical realm just to hanky panky with the very creation they helped create.  And by procreating, these very angels close the door to the road home!  Awkward truth, that.  Physical life takes place within the realm of desire - the desire to have sex and procreate.  Life is desire, and desire leads to sex and death.

Beyond desire is the realm beyond life and death, the realm of the Tao, the realm found in non-meditation, the realm of nonduality.  Thus the end of the hero's journey is the return to the self, having discovered the true life available beyond both ego and instinct, and the true nature beyond the empty impermanence of true life.

The endless pursuit of desire may indeed be the work of Lucifer, may it not?  I'm being told by my tinfoil hat-wearing sources that Lucifereans have been secretly running things for a long time - this would explain a lot about modern capitalism and the endless pursuit of desire, right?  And according to Steiner, Lucifer represents the extreme yin element - the feminine.  We have escaped a wrathful, judgmental and adolescent Patriarchal God only to be seduced by an unquenchably slutty Goddess!  The Lucifereans who have been selfishly building a world of insatiable desire and suffering are doing the work of the Dark Goddess - the Black Madonna, Isis!

So fascist Trump Ahriman is not the answer, and sexy Isis Lucifer is not the answer either.  Between the extremes of Aa and Uu is...

...A-E-I-O-U...

Any guesses?  Anyone?  Beuller?

Between the extremes of Ahriman and Lucifer is the I of Christ.  This is the Way, the Tao.  The initiated consciousness is at long last revealed as the consciousness of Christ, a state of unconditional love for all beings.  Only when we learn to practice infinite compassion for both Ahriman Trump and Isis Lucifer are we whole.  Not easy, that.  Of course, as any decent parent knows, real love contains within it both forgiveness and accountability, yin and yang, the divine feminine and the divine masculine...

So.  After the dark tower of the ego, and the wasteland of language, and the goddess of the body, we at long last encounter the irrational wisdom of the heart.  Faith overcomes logic, kindness overcomes reason, and love overcomes hatred.  Love is illogical, and the universe is built out of it.  Come to terms with that, if you can.  And if you can't, just surrender to it anyway because it's paradoxically true.

And so from the blind obedience of patriarchy we evolve through the chaotic allure of the goddess and ultimately arrive at a place of peace where desires are set aside, even the desire for wholeness and completeness, and only love remains.  This is the Hero's Journey - the return home to wholeness, the path leading to the self.  The mind cannot find peace.  Peace returns to letting-go mind.

I like to think that the Aa of Ahriman is in my head, and the Uu of Lucifer is in my you-know-what, and the I of Christ dwells halfway between the two, in my heart.  Of course, you could go the other way around, from the Uu to the Aa, and end up mushing them together, like an Uu-aa, like a
Buu-ddhaa.  Buddha and Christ - same same only different. Both balance the extremes of yin and yang, dwelling in the center of the heart, promoting the Middle Way, the Way of the Tao.
 
The hero's journey - the journey to the self - goes like this:
"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of our exploring will be to return to where we started, and know the place for the first time."

I love you so much, if you only knew...
(It's what compels me to write- )