- The Upanishads : Vedanta
Paradise, from the British Library © website
THE URGE TO FLY
Magical flight is the expression both of the soul's autonomy and of ecstacy. The fact explains how this myth could be incorporated into such different cultural complexs: sorcery, mythology of dream, solar cults and imperial apotheoses, techniques of ecstasy, funerary symbolism, and many others. It is also related to the symbolism of ascension. This myth of the soul contains in embryo a whole metaphysics of man's spiritual autonomy and freedom; it is here that we must seek the point of departure for the earliest speculations concerning voluntary abandonment of the body, the omnipotence of intelligence, the immortality of the human soul. An analysis of the "imagination of motion" will show how essential the nostalgia for flight is to the human psyche.
Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
On the Inner Techne of getting Earth into Air
EVEN though in our modern world 'we have the technology' to get matter into the air, it is undoubtedly the case that the wretched soul of Western man has forgotten how to fly. It takes balance and all-of-a-piece wholeness to get Earth into the Air, a lost alchemical art we are only beginning to recall and respect. Our dreams and fantasies sometimes urge us to look even further into the forgotten past to rediscover the shamanic techne of ecstacy that would enable us to fly. The psyche is symbolized by the butterfly, and we therefore know that the ancestral soul has within itself the capacity to fly. But without wholeness we cannot get psyche off the ground and a certain disparing driveness haunts us. We have searched for ways and means to fly, to the extent that mechanically we have long since mastered the air, yet it remains the case that Western man cannot lend wings to the alchemical lapis elevatus cum vento (stone uplifted by the wind) and paradoxically has never been more grounded than in the century just past.
The East appreciates the paradox of flight better than the West. The Upanishads describe the inner Self as a transcendent being 'swifter than the senses' and beyond the reach of thought. Plato described the world-soul as a winged sphere sufficient to itself. In the West this became the crowned or glorified body of alchemy, produced through the spiritualization of matter and the materialization of spirit in the spherical vas hermeticum of transformation. In Jungian terms this is the vessel of the transcendent function, produced between consciousness and the unconscious by the therapeutic method of active imagination which leads to a more harmonious living of one with the other. In the East the techne of active imagination is a self-brooding tapas, the power of meditation that produces the divine child of the Self, known to alchemy as the filius philosophorum, whom Paracelsus called the star in man.
From Jung's typological perspective the urge to unite spirit and matter requires the apotheosis of the fourth 'inferior' function, which is the Earth to be united with and carried into the Air, whereby the unconscious psyche is united with the spirit of consciousness in the final 'hieros gamos'. Thus the question is how do we get the fourth to fly? No amount of technology can make this happen, though undoubtedly technology continues to substitute for man's floundering attempts to fly.
One day I'll fly away...
like a leaf in the wind
from the tapas tree of wild ecstacy
Published by New Alchemy © MM
Author : Philip Williams (phil.williams@new-alchemy.net)
Further Reference :
