j west - work in progress selection 2 ("the reincarnations of venus and mars" ?)

J West, Work In Progress selections #2, 2015 (“The Reincarnations of Venus & Mars” ?)

1

“What must these people have suffered, that

they might have become this beautiful?” – Friedrich Nietzsche

“The recent pre-historic and historical

planetary changes . . . have imprinted upon the human mind a multiple personality in our divided brain. Our collective consciousness is afflicted with severe post-traumatic stress syndrome, which keeps in place so many of our denials and contradictions. The sky-gods were real and omnipotent to our hominid and homo sapiens ancestors. At times they were terrible and terrifying, touching and transforming the very geology and physics of the planet, metamorphosing the very neurology and psyche of living organisms.”

– Richard Stern


2

And when they were driven out of Paradise

they made for themselves a tent & mourned for seven days in great sorrow. But after seven days had passed they had become very hungry, & they rose up & walked seven more days through the whole land. And yet they did not find any food to eat at all.

(The Life of Adam & Eve 1:1)

(. . .)

The first reaction was panic. There was a feeling that everything was going

awry, everything was falling apart. Nothing worked as it used to — nothing came naturally anymore.

It was if their entire way of life was completely rotten, and there was no solution to anything at all. Everything was crumbling to pieces. They had been living in a world that was finally breaking completely apart.

Plato’s version of the story, that it was the gods who brought about their catastrophic disunion, is basically true. These were the old gods the Bible calls angels.

But it was not really a punishment, even though the survivors typically interpreted it as a punishment, and even though Plato had Aristophanes describe it as a punishment.

So what was actually happening then?

The continents were breaking apart. And they were breaking apart everywhere in the world. And water was rushing out.


3

And absolutely everything was falling down — truths as well as falsehoods. Nothing could stand up straight anymore. The world was becoming suffocating now.

What had gone wrong?

It had always been self-evident that the searing light and heat of the close approaching stars would inevitably transform everything they touched.

A global cataclysm or series of catastrophes eventually destroyed the old world, and sunk mankind’s collective mind into unconscious complacency.1

The dead never knew what hit them. But the survivors never forgot the strange lights they had seen in the sky. Nor did their children, or their children’s children’s children.

1 “Neither Empedocles nor Freud ever discovered the true nature of that trauma." (Rose 1983)


4

(. . .)

Later that night, after lying awake for hours, he went out in the dark and listened to the quiet, and looked up once more thro the two huge trees at the swaying stars.

“Where in the world is the woman the man in me is seeking?” he wondered aloud.

The truth was that neither of them knew what love was anymore. Nor could they remember what had really happened. It was as if they had been asleep their whole lives until then and had only been dreaming. Now they were awake and things were very different.

(…) Silence enveloped the marsh. It was the hour of the first watch.

She sat apart from the rest of them in a small row-boat, slowly but surely loosening the tangled ropes that just moments before had bound her swollen wrists. In the darkness there were no more sights or sounds to distract her and she could devote her thoughts wholly to her grief.

“Don’t they think we haven’t already suffered enough? Torn apart from each other, washed out (who knows where?) by a flood, lost in a thousand dangers at sea — when will the torments of our separation end?”

She thought about throwing herself overboard so that no man could fall in love with her ever again.


5

(…) Broken parts of a fractured whole, dismembered limbs of what was once one body — they lived life as nameless wanderers now, but it had not always been so.

The world that had always been there for them before the catastrophe had disappeared into a perilous chasm standing outside of time. The pathways that spread before them now through past lifetimes seemed endless — and hopelessly confused. It was appalling to find out all that the conscious mind was blind to.

Occasional flashes of visionary insight, true hallucination or lucid daydream – these seemed to leap across that chasm, lighting up one aspect of the lost world or another for a brief moment or two. But such peak experiences were at first very rare. And with each new birth and death their quest began all over again new.

Against such unavoidable despair only one course could be set — an occult quest to cultivate as many of these momentary experiences of eternity as possible,2 and thereby extend their inner visions beyond the limitations of single lifetimes, so that they might continue to remember all of the details that later cultures had denied or excluded or repressed or otherwise hidden from view.

2 Yet these experiences themselves never quite take clear shape in the book. Or rather many pseudo-experiences seem to masquerade as the true one.


6

(. . .) Earlier that evening he and she had become all couples. Every dancer in the dance. Their being together was the still point of the turning world for them. Together they had become the meeting place of all opposites. Hand in hand they held together the flying apart of time. It was their only one real way to escape the despair of what was about to come next. His angel had warned him about the enduring risks of this indulging in these types of experiences between lives, but said nothing regarding her chances of escaping the world’s perilous plight with him.

All he would say was, “Though we may not be permitted to foresee her fate, it may still be possible for her to evade it.”3

(. . .) After that they had set out in search of some of the most desperate underground existences imaginable, all in order to emerge from the purgation of the old world alive.

But those years were also long lost in mist after the wheeling stars once again turned the world’s fortune upside down.

3 “I have other pages in the same book here that describe more details of their journey.”


7

(. . .)

“It must have been horribly painful to be stuck inside that skin when it had to grow wings!” she laughed.

It was indeed suffocating to transform; their

metamorphosis had been exceptionally excruciating. The experience was shattering; it felt like everything inside them had been torn up in little pieces.

And that was the meaning of those thousands of

years of suffering. They had gone from one cataclysm to another on their way to the next species, to force themselves to gradually rediscover and remember their own long lost secret.

And that was still what was happening now.


8

(…) The subtlest secret the serpent ever taught them was that “there is no better way of life than to make the two one.”

When the holy sages of ancient times set forth their own thoughts about the re-unification of body and soul, they did so by means of words and images taken from the external world. They were reluctant to speak openly and instead concealed cryptic clues in myths and allegories.

Therefore the secret was lost. What this book documents, through its series of

words and images, does not easily give away the secret either. On the contrary, because it combines Adam’s testimony and the secret thoughts of Eve with occasional references to other incarnations in order to summarize them in the context of the bigger picture -- this book seems to confirm the ancient precept that, in order to eventually disclose the secret, the truth must first be hidden in plain sight.

The true secret is invisible; it has neither words nor pictures.


9

(…) Each still felt an intense yearning for the other. Delighting in each other’s company, eager to jest, each continued to darkly hint his or her true wishes in cryptic coincidental riddles and parenthetical side remarks.

There was clearly more to their story than just the mutual pleasures of sex. There was something else their souls still wanted so deeply they could not quite say, something neither of them could properly name but which both felt repeatedly compelled to express.

Seeing her again was the one true turning point of his life. So that very night he attempted, with his own voice and the reach of his own arms, to reconcile the opposites within himself by winning her back to his side.


10

(…)

Though the myth narrates events of the remote past, it speaks at the same time about who we are, where we come from, and where we are going right now.

“’The soul—’” she was reading aloud from the book again,4 “listen, babe, listen how far back we might trace the way we feel. ‘The soul, prior to entering this world, consists of a man and a woman united in one being. They are the right and left or the front and back sides of a single soul. When this thing descends to earth the two parts separate and animate two different bodies.

So that’s why each of us today is born apart from his (or her) other half. And this might be why we are born with fears of death, and such strong yearnings to be loved. We are really just one soul, together, all alone, searching for itself in two bodies.’

But listen to what else it says here: ‘If the man remains pure he will be united to the woman who was the female part of his soul before birth. Though she may become lost or hidden in the world, disappeared in the mists of time — in his memory her presence will always still be very much alive.

If the woman remains pure she will also be united to the man who was the male part of her soul before birth. Having found each other at last, they will wish for nothing more than to be welded together as one. So at the time of their marriage these two will be brought together as they were before, and will constitute a single body and soul once again.’”

4 The text is a commentary from the Zohar on the scene in Genesis where the originally androgynous Adam is split into Adam and Eve. A remarkably similar narrative appears in Plato’s Symposium also.


11

(…) Their love affair had suddenly become magnified into a cosmic visionary experience. Gazing into her eyes, he quickly got lost in a kaleidoscopic mirror that spiraled up and down through all of space and time.

The ultimate realization he had that night was that each of them, before being born, had both been part of one being. This realization expanded into the discovery that there could therefore only be a single identity inhabiting the whole surrounding universe — a single soul alive in every animal, vegetable, mineral and man.

(…) They returned to the book again and again. And with each return, new facets of meaning were discovered and new depths of feeling were found.

The many little stories inside seemed to hint at a much bigger story no one book alone could adequately tell. Their underlying themes could not be summarized in concise statements, but instead appeared to them as components of an ongoing dialogue that unfolded in different directions every time they opened the book.

Repeatedly finding themselves here and there in its pages helped keep the many meanings of the myth alive in their minds. Soon enough they realized there could be no one single meaning waiting to be revealed; there was only the potential for additional layers of meaning to be unpeeled and more hidden messages to be recovered.


12

(…)

In the end, everything in the cities and forests of the world he had loved and called home, everything seen in the deep of sleep that seemed to magnetize him with joy —in the end he saw that all these things truly had been premonitory of her presence in his life.

In her he had indeed found that part of himself he

could never really recognize — though it followed him his whole life, everywhere he’d go. She was the incarnation of the promise that, at the conclusion of his exile, the bliss that he once knew might be known again.

And for him that was enough.

(…) After coming home with her one evening, he stepped out on her veranda before going back to bed, to have another last look at the stars.

It was there that he slipped on a patch of ice, struck his head against a pillar and dropped dead.

(…)

Which came before, and which comes after? In the unconscious mind nothing is ever completely lost. All our stories are written there, and their hidden subtexts too, if we know how to read carefully enough between the lines.

j west - work in progress selection 2 ("the reincarnations of venus and mars" ?)

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