Keeping the Poison

Jean Cocteau wrote, "After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to remove its poison, to blunt its sting."

This is true sometimes. A piece of work will stab at something, and you'll become scared others will not understand. The artist is always daring to push out, then pulling back.

I pull a card: What is this temptation to remove the poison? 10 of Pentacles.



We desire completion, to be done with it. The 10 of Pentacles is the end of the suit of earth. We live life yearning for an ending that will provide the meaning for what we've lived through. In the art we create, we are tempted, time and time again, to make the story neat, no loose danglies to confuse.

You'd think that taking the poison out would make things safer, but it does anything but.

A Church Without A Roof

©Robert Potts

Redwoods are a communal species. While they can grow from seed, more often they grow from shoots sent up from the roots of older trees. They form communities growing together in various arrangements. Whatever architectural style the trees choose, semicircle or something else, there is a distinctive feel to a cathedral of redwoods that isn't present in a grove or stand. I mean, sometimes you come up to a bunch of redwoods and they're just a bunch of redwoods, nice and beautiful. And other times you walk in and your whole spirit is lifted to heaven.

The Speed Of Consciousness

Modern occultists, alchemists, and magicians will sometimes say that consciousness speeds up evolution.  Dion Fortune was a proponent of this. She was pretty experienced when it comes to things like the nature of consciousness, much more than me, so I certainly don’t want to second guess her. But I really don’t think the point of existence is to get through it as fast as possible.  It’s not a race.   

It's not that we are speeding up evolution by doing alchemy. It's that consciousness slows down and complicates the way to the divine source.  Consciousness makes the path tricky.  Consciousness adds turns and switchbacks, dead ends, detours, and the occasional roadside tourist trap.  What had seemed in childhood like an obvious and delightful traipse up the mountain because a lifetime walking in your own shoes.

And I note a cool thing about the effect of consciousness.  It’s like how sometimes, everything just goes by so quickly and other times it goes by slowly.  Consciousness can affect those rates. Sometimes we enter a state of heightened consciousness and it’s like flow. We are apprehending many things at once, easily, a billion points of existence all at once with ease, and we come out of the state to find that hours have gone by in what seemed like a timeless moment. 

And sometimes, consciousness is like a road trip through the back way.  You leave behind the mindless interstate that transports you unchanged to your destination and instead see every tree and roadside attraction, you feel every turn.   You pay attention to all the small places on the map. Consciousness may make evolution go faster, but it also gives us more to evolve.  We end up not going any faster than non-conscious matter, but we have so many more opportunities for doing so, so many ways to do it.

Adorable Ouroboros

I found him in a treatise on alchemy. He looks like he’s playing. So often alchemical processes are inscrutable, but this little guy is showing how the re-creation of self out of self can be recreational as well. He is obviously having a lot of fun.

In the ouroboros, everything that happens comes from within, drawn out through consciousness then consumed, brought back into the body to await the inevitable rise into consciousness again. Recreation of the self out of the self, a self-sustaining process. The ouroboros does not need to pull in sustenance from others. He doesn’t need to talk to others, or pay attention to anything outside of himself.

I often fantasize about this state, but really, it can be a drag. When this process happens in a small part of reality, say an individual human, the law of entropy comes into play. Every time we consume ourselves, we lose a bit of energy. Every time a thought re-emerges into our consciousness and instead of doing something to change it, we simply break it down and forget it, the thought will re-emerge later with a little less verve. Eventually, our thoughts will feel pale and boring unless we allow something new to enter the system.

But the ouroboros is only one state of a dynamic process. Look into his eyes. He’s spotted another game to play.

The Up And The Down

In Alchemy, direction matters. Up and down. In and out. But these directions aren’t necessarily ones that would show up on a compass. You can’t find alchemical up and come back to it by turning your feet the right way. Up today isn’t necessarily up tomorrow. Rather, existence is like an Escher print, with directions changing depending on whether you are looking with your eyes or your heart.

Rather than learn which direction is kept where, we must learn to recognize paths wherever they appear. Paths have flavors and textures. Directions are also places that have denizens to meet, activities to do, special foods and even architectural styles. You don’t learn where a path is, but what it feels like, what it tastes like.

What is Down? Down under earth, the roots plough through the dark dirt. They branch, and branch again, blindly reaching out. At the tip of each root end, is a cluster of hard cells that can press through bedrock. But along their sides, the skin of the roots are open to the world, drawing in nutrients: nitrogen and potassium, phosphorus and magnesium. Roots are opportunistic. They do not plan ahead and contrary to popular perception, they do not grow towards water or food. Instead they take the path of least resistance, using what is already available such as cracks in the soil, worm tunnels, and old root channels. When they find a resource in abundance, they proliferate, but such a discovery is always a happy surprise rather than the result of a deliberate plan.

What is Up? Leaves open, airy, light gathering. So short a life span, just a year or less, while the tree lives for years and years. Evergreens shed all year round keeping their canopies continuously intact. Evergreen means always shedding leaves, a continuous sacrifice. Leaves are high up, sometimes hundreds of feet above the roots. they create the outer edges of the tree. They grow at the foremost edges of trees, creating a field of energy collection. The leaves themselves work to shed rainfall down to the ground where it will be absorbed by the roots and brought back up through the trunk. The real purpose of the leaves is to collect sunlight energy. To receive. And here, at the other edge of the being, we find another kind of absorption. The absorption of light.

This is one example of the Up and the Down.

Synchronicity

Synchronicity exists in the person, not in the “real” world (whatever that is.) Two things happen all the time. Why do we sometimes go “Whoa! Those two things just happened!”

My theory is that humans are weird and we don’t really need to survive most of the time. We have all this extra time to get in trouble and a neo-cortex that’s only been around for a few million years. Who knows what all it does.

We are apparently wired to supply meaning to just about anything. (E.g. socks!) There’s a part of the brain that supplies a sense of importance to what we experience. The attribution of importance is great for survival: that lion sneaking up is more important than that grazing giraffe. If you drop acid, this part of the brain will fire like crazy and suddenly everything will be super meaningful.

There is also an area of the temporal lobe that when artificially activated creates feelings of “oneness with God”, just like there are areas of the occipital lobe that when artificially activated produce visual hallucinations. It’s only logical to assume that these parts of the brain evolved to respond to real stimuli; we have yet to find an example of a physical body evolving to adapt to something that does not exist. But again, it’s up to us to figure out whether we are hallucinating or not.

So, I have this body and it does this weird thing where it sees two things and goes “whoa! that was awesome” when part of my brain supplies the importance and another part supplies the god-touch. And sometimes this is completely made up and leads me on a merry chase through the illusionary astral. Sometimes it leads to good luck. And once in a great while it does lead up.

Learning the difference is helpful. Learning to find the one you want is magic. But what the heck do I know? All I am certain about right now is that I’m in a body that does certain things that may or may not lead to other things and I get to decide if I like where I’m going but I don’t necessarily know how to change course and anyway, most of the things that are happening to me are really happening to other people.

Oh, and atoms are made of nothing and dreams. I’m apparently quite convinced of that as well.

How To Form Gold Out Of Baser Metals

You want to know how to make gold out of other metals? It’s simple and we already know how to do it.

Blow up a star.

The first stars started out as clouds of hydrogen. Hydrogen is a very simple atom, just a proton orbited by an electron. It is the most basic physical expression of yin and yang, of Binah and Chokmah. Clouds of this stuff were floating around in the dim afterburn of the Big Bang. When enough of these atoms collected, gravity took over and the atoms began to fall. At first, there were many directions to fall in, but eventually the forces of complexity sorted things out and a single center was found.

The hydrogen atoms fell faster and faster toward that center until they were going so fast they started to smash into other. Now realize, every atom has a defensive shield called the Weak Nuclear Force that normally operates to keep out protons and electrons from other atoms. But when atoms go fast enough, they overpower this force, crash through the defensive shield and achieve fusion. This fusion of hydrogen atoms is the most basic recipe for light.

This first recipe in the life of a star calls for four Hydrogen atoms. There are several steps involved. First you have to make Deuterium. Smash two Hydrogen atoms together to get a Deuterium atom, a neutrino, and two gamma ray photons. Let the neutrino and the photons escape. When you have two Deuteriums, smash those together to get a Helium atom and a bunch of energy. That energy is light and heat. It shoots out from the star and may eventually land in your eye when you look up at the sky. When this starts happening, we say a star is born.

Now, in order to make something out of Helium, you have to achieve much greater speeds than you did with Hydrogen. So at first, the Helium just falls to the center in darkness. But eventually, it too starts going fast enough to overcome its defensive shields and when Helium smashes into itself at the heart of a star it makes Carbon and Oxygen and Nitrogen, Sulphur and Magnesium, Calcium and Titanium. The recipes for these elements are more complex, but this is how the air you breathe was made as was the calcium in your milk.

These transformations produce a lot of energy that keeps the star from collapsing entirely. The star depends on this energy not just so it can shine in your sky, but also for its structure. The energy released by element creation escapes toward the surface of the star keeping it expanded through convection like a pot of boiling water. Stars are constantly boiling over into themselves.

Over the course of a star’s lifetime, it will repeat this basic motif, creating new, more complex elements out of simpler ones and using the released energy to fuel itself until it gets to Iron. Iron stops the chain. For whatever reason, if you want to make new elements by smashing iron atoms together, you have to add energy. So there is our star, going along happily producing new building blocks of existence and wham, suddenly, it cannot go any further.

When Iron starts to collect at the center, the star begins to lose its source of energy. The flame under the pot is turned off and the star begins to settle in on itself. What happens next depends on how big the star is. A small star will just collapse becoming a very dense Brown Dwarf. But a bigger star will do something else, and here’s where it gets personal. When a big enough star gets to the Iron stage, it too begins to collapse, but being so massive, the collapse reaches epic speeds and ignites a supernova.

Supernova.

These conflagrations of stars release so much energy that they can be seen on Earth. The Crab Nebula was formed this way and even though it’s 6500 light years away, Chinese astronomers saw the explosion in 1054AD. These explosions - and frankly I don’t know if you can still call them “explosions” when they are this big - are so massive that they smash atoms together with abandon, and in the process produce all the heavier elements on the periodic table, including all of the other metals of the Alchemists: lead, tin, copper, mercury, silver and - you guessed it - gold.*

And because we have all these heavy elements here on Earth, we know that our solar system is at least second generation. Earth was formed out of the remains of a supernova. Otherwise we wouldn’t have all the heavier elements only a supernova can make. Otherwise, life wouldn’t be here.

We are made of stars. And not just any stars, we are made of stars that transformed themselves, at least a small part of themselves, into gold. We have that history encoded in the physical fabric of our being. Not just in our cells or our DNA, but in the atoms that make those cells and that DNA. When Alchemists talk about transforming metals into gold, they are remembering the past lives of their own bodies.

*For those of you keeping track, the only planetary metal not made in a supernova is iron. Turns out, Iron is a gateway metal.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU); Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin (Skyfactory).

Dissolution and Augmentation

The caterpillar shakes in time lapse like one possessed. It shrugs off its skin, like an overcoat, wads it up and sets it aside. You’d think you would be able to see it now, the real thing, the caterpillar naked, shorn of ornament and true, but underneath the mask of colored bands lies armor. We can never see the transformation itself: the rearrangement of cells, the shifting of body parts, the dissolution.

Inside the chrysalis, nothing has a name, but then, before the conscious idea of a form even emerges, the goo inside the armor aligns itself, the unnamed and unnameable cells have been shunted into a pattern and suddenly there is a body. The wings are carefully folded in on themselves, like a parachute ready for use, except that no one has folded them. Instead the cells have just arrived in their places to tell a story.

Once upon a time there were wings. We don’t even know what they look like yet, but we are becoming these wings.

The story breathes and the cells remember. And in remembering, they discover what wings are. The breath of capillary action moves through the wings and they become what they always were, what they were even when the caterpillar was scrunching along eating leaves. It could feel their presence, on another plane, waiting, whispering their story. As the imago emerges from its armor, the cells remember and slowly tell the story of wings.

What story do your cells remember?

The Real Alchemy

This is for you, this is just for you.

I'm getting too heady and theoretical. I need to bring this whole subject back into the real world. So I'm going to focus for a moment on something that may seem at first to have little to do with whatever you've read before about Alchemy. But this has everything to do with Alchemy. It's Alchemy taken out of the laboratory and done right here and now, every minute.

Depression is unlike anything else. It is its own thing. And we don't have much in the way of language to talk about depression. This makes depression even more isolating. It's impossible to tell someone your experience when they've only ever been sad. So to understand what depression can be like, we have to liken it to other things.

Depression is, in some ways, like diabetes. If a diabetic's blood sugar gets too low, all sorts of bad things, including death, can happen. Diabetics have to learn how to avoid doing things that will bring their blood sugar down too low. They have to eat well, test their blood levels regularly, measure their insulin accurately, and understand what might make their blood sugar levels irregular (like coming down with a cold or being under a lot of stress at work.)

People who are prone to depression–either those who are in a major depression or those, like me, who deal with the continual state of dysthymia–will find that lots of outside things will bring on depressed symptoms. Eating the wrong food, seeing the wrong movie, failing, succeeding, falling in love, getting in an argument, can bring on depression just like too much insulin can bring on low blood sugar.

Depression, like a diabetic low blood sugar, can be fatal. Depression is a delusional state (whether it's any more delusional than happiness is another matter.) When our sense of well-being drops too low, we become delusional and capable of really hurting, even killing ourselves. Just like a diabetic with low blood sugar may struggle against eating, a depressed person will struggle against whatever might help them out of that state. It's really, really important to remember this when you're severely depressed. Just like a diabetic must just eat something, a depressed person must just do what they've learned will help.

Eat blueberries. Get some exercise. Look at uplifting images. Listen to happy music. Make these responses to depression a medical treatment; think of these activities as tools. They are not the end in themselves. They are the way. Doing them will physically change how your brain is working. You can calm your amygdala and invigorate your basal ganglia by doing certain simple things.

You will have different things that lift your well-being. When you are less depressed, look for these things. Collect them. When you get depressed, do these things, even if you feel they can't possibly work this time. (That feeling is part of the delusion. Simply deciding to do something and following though will be enough to get some wiggle room.)

Like a diabetic must learn what drops their blood sugars, you must learn what drops your well-being. Well-being is a feeling of aliveness, of optimism. It is the sense that we can plan for a future we desire and take steps that move us toward that future. We experience ourselves as beings who can affect change in our lives and in the world. We sense our deep connection to other living things.

When we are not feeling this, something is dropping our well-being. It's okay to arrange your life to include enough good stuff to keep your well-being up. It's okay to exclude those things that drop your well-being. It's more than okay. It's what you need to do to live.

love,
Yvonne