THE COMING STORM: Prophetic Dreams and the Climate Crisis
February
5
This is Paco Mitchell's extraordinary essay on what we are facing and it could not be more timely!
This is Paco Mitchell's extraordinary essay on what we are facing and it could not be more timely!
I’m sorry Sibelius, I cannot help it.
Your rousing protest against Russia
Helped secure freedom for Finland.
Here, now, in present time,
Our freedom becomes enslaved
To those very things, those lies
Those deceits, those corruptions,
You freed your Finland from.
I listen now to your Finlandia
And look around for something
Here in America that might rouse
Us from our sleep of indifference.
Some voice, some sound, some
Music to set us free again.
I’m listening but hear nothing.
American Beauty and the End of the Bull Market
Russell Arthur Lockhart, Ph.D.
| THE MARKET IS NOT AN ISOLATED PROCESS, but |
FOREWORD
Shards of a Broken Mystery
The Restoration of Hekate
by
Shira Marion, Ph.D.
Mystery! Mystery! Viva mystery! The word itself means “seeing with the eyes closed,” in the context of initiation. Shira Marin’s Shards of a Broken Mystery: The Restoration of Hekate, is itself a mystery, and must be approached as a mystery, seeing with the eyes closed, preparing oneself for ritual initiation. Likewise, dreams—a province of Hekate—are seen with the eyes closed, and this is why dreams too, must be approached as mystery—so unlike how they are approached in the contemporary world, forgotten, neglected, disregarded. For the modern eye and ear, tethered to computer screens, this may strike one as nonsense, as hardly a challenge to the hegemony of seeking the security of the rational, the protection of explanation, the surety of understanding. But these are not the haunts of the goddess Hekate, who has touched Dr. Marin and placed on her shoulders the task of restoration of this long-forgotten one, variously named “Queen of Night,” “The Sender of Nocturnal Visions,” “Goddess of the Paths,” among others.
After finishing the text of Shards—as if finishing were possible—and before writing this foreword, I had a dream as if sent by Hekate herself. In the dream I was alone in a grand ballroom of sumptuous dimension. Overhead, there was a spectacular crystal chandelier brightly lit but dimming as I looked at it in awe. When it went dark, there was nothing to see, nothing to hear, until a loud crystalline crash filled the air and told me the chandelier had fallen and broken into bits and pieces. I knew in the dream, that it was to be my task to repair the broken light.
I take this to mean that Shards is “psychoactive,” that it may impact you in ways you cannot imagine, do not expect, may not even want, but like it or not, agreed to or not, you too may be recruited to the task of restoration.
Do not read this book as a straight-on narrative. The book itself is like shards, and the restoration occurs with the bits and pieces undergoing a process of assemblage within your own psyche. Read a page. Look at an image. Close your eyes. Wait. Hekate may come to you as “Queen of Ghosts.” Or she may appear as “Child-Nurse.” Or as “The Terrifying One.” There is no predicting. But into the blank space of your imagination—if you permit blank spaces or are able to recruit them—she will come in the old ways, or in new ways, in recognizable form, or in disguise.
I suspect women will have an easier time with this way of relating to Shards. Women are more at home with mystery, more comfortable with letting the “unknown” engender, more at home with the brokenness that is the too-common fate of patriarchy’s scourge. But as a man, I must urge my fellow men, do not miss this opportunity to grow, even if the path seems crooked and untoward, even if you can’t see very far ahead, even if you can’t let go of the rational, the explanatory, the sought-or understanding. Take it on as an experiment. Read a bit. Gaze at the images. Let your mind wander. Under the influence of Hekate, you will come upon the trivia, and you will find yourself, even involuntarily, on the branch path, leading away from the straight and narrow, the bright and glorious, leading to the place of dead things, Hekate's realm. Don’t turn away. This is the place of deepest psyche, the access to layers beyond layers of deepest knowing. Hekate’s realm is the place the poet Rilke, a man, knew: You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the hour of the new clarity. This is Hekate’s doing.
Gods and goddesses, those presences incarnated in the depths of psyche, all demand devotion when they present themselves, recognized or not. What manner of presentation is not our choice. How we respond to the reality of their presence is, though such choices are never easy, whether we choose to serve or not to serve.
Should you be so fortunate as to be chosen to serve—even an unlikely presence like a goddess of old—make no mistake, nothing less than your future is at stake. Taking part in possible futures, rather than having futures thrust upon one, is the best possible course. Shards of a Broken Mystery facilitates the awareness of possible futures through the agency of Hekate, and even more so as she is restored to vitality in the individual psyche. This is the gift that Shira Marin, through her devotion to Hekate, has presented to us.
Russell Arthur Lockhart, Ph.D.
Everett, Washington
May 11, 2017
Shards of a Broken Mystery is available at Amazon: https://amzn.to/2sQwULJ
Cynan Jones' electrifying series set in a tangible near future in which water is scarce and an armed Water Train feeds the thirsty capital city.
This is a masterful rendition of The Sounds of Silence, most certainly a song for our times now more than ever.
A new resource from Aeon looks good!
If you treated your dream, not as property but as guest--
What a difference!
--Arlan Condon
When Dreams Become Real
Melville’s initial publication of Moby Dick was in three volumes released in London in October 1851. The text had been subjected to considerable censorship, and many manuscript changes had been made unseen by the author. In addition, Melville’s Epilogue had been lost and was not published. The Epilogue had made it clear that Ishmael had survived. Without the Epilogue, readers raised a chorus of protest. If there was no survivor, who was narrating the novel?
In November 1851, the novel was published in New York with the Epilogue intact.
The error in London, whatever its nature, is interesting from a psychological point of view. Readers experienced a complete disaster without the “comfort” of a surviving narrator.
As we enter the Sixth Extinction, with the distinct possibility that humans will not survive, the “error” edition of Moby Dick begins to add depth to a question I posed back in 1979: What whale does America pursue? 1
That article began as a review of Edward Edinger’s Melville’s Moby Dick: A Jungian Commentary. I said at the outset that Edinger’s commentary was “definitive,” meaning that nothing further need be said. Everything was clear, explained, understood. While I understood and practiced interpreting art psychologically, I was more interested in what art contributed to psychology. Edinger’s analysis, while brilliant and definitive, left me feeling “high and dry.” I wrote in the margin: …why am I so thirsty while reading this commentary about such a story of water and passion? I asked a lot of people about Edinger’s analysis. Except for one or two, all had read Edinger but not Melville. I found this dispiriting because analysis does not excite the imagination in the way art does. What happens in your imagination while reading Moby Dick, is the “fruit” of the artistic seed. That is when psyche gives birth to images that will guide and nourish.
Melville’s Ahab puts everyone in peril as he pursues revenge on Moby Dick for having injured him. If we think of much of the world as embodying Ahab’s revenge, what does this lead to? We can clearly see that profit and power are leading to the destruction of much of life in various forms, in its mad passion for “more.” If we think of Moby Dick as much of the embodying much of the spirit of life, then if we try to “do in” life, life will do us in instead. Thinking this way suggests that what underlies the massive juggernaut of profit and power is an injury, some form of trauma. This is no doubt why profit and power become severe addictions and seemingly incurable.
What is at work in the world today is incurable which is why it cannot and will not change course as it adds to the inevitable consequences of climate change, economic inequality, and a threat to life itself.
Like the London version of Moby Dick, there will be no Epilogue, no survivors to tell the story of our demise.
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1. Russell A. Lockhart. “What Whale Does America Pursue?” Los Angeles: Psychological Perspectives, Spring 1979.