NIGHT TERRORS 

Leaving myself is a way of leaving the world

and my soul is left to guess what is left when I am gone 

in a time of silence, a time of stillness, a space undivided.

If I remain undivided my world must suffer the fate, the folly, the terrible fortune.

The trace of a ghost of a jubilant spirit, the vestige of vitality I once had

lurk in dreams and remembrances and prayers and the in-between spaces.

Within the cave of coarse carnality I’m tormented by vampires of craven yearning.

Cavorting shadows on the wall entrain and entrance beyond measure of my resistance.

They lure me to keep fast watch with a dark eye upon the imprints of past regret

for erotic longing simmers in molten pools awaiting explosive release.

Such release is grief, always a personified figure, a deity of a personal darkness.

The agonized children of night play cat’s cradle with my consciousness,

spurning my wakeful dreams and bullying my inner child into fawning silence.

Wisdom emerges from my body in its own time, in its own way, 

for purposes that exist without explanation or approval,

awakening me to the delirium of eventful darkness that surrounds.

Why do I need to see the darkness, why feel its depth and its claim to my blank attention?

I feel an answer come, for in the dark demons bring me new ideas chasing old impulses.

In the night I learn my feelings are not quite mine. They belong to my dreams, my meaning.

I’m besieged by visitations of shadowy night crawlers,

those compulsive passages that flow within me in toxic streams of sadness,

provoking my soul to manifest glorious nightmares of salvational hope,

for only hope is foolish enough to persist in the face of delayed acceptance,

a fitful surrender to the need to let go of myself, let go of my dreams,

let go of the need to let go. All the while my core being has an energy body

and it uses that body for carnal knowledge of the steaming night,

enabling the incestuous relationship with my invisible world of wishes.

Remorse mixes with lust and forbidden fantasy, layering the mud 

of secrets kept upon the crystalline vessel anchoring the underside

of my wishes and prayers. The ordeal of obsessive desire challenges the need

to believe in visions of relief and wellness, those promised healings of my essence.

Night terrors awaken my wild tempers in emotional union within.

Anxiety sparkles energetic venom, eliminating my resistance to new moods.

Refusal to listen to my night will only swell the trivia of chaotic discontent.

Repetitive details of bother nail me to the moment and bleed me dry.

A persistent wraith won’t leave my sight and a trance of horror befalls me.

I long to ignore no more for I ache to be released from the daylight of my dread.

A stirring in the holy Mooladhara raises intimations of a way forward.

The dark is no longer an impediment, it transforms into the Axis Mundi through which

my soul moves creative purpose up from the root of meaning into the world 

as an ongoing ejaculation into my spirit. My isolation is a climax of intent

destined by my nature to besiege my awareness with joy’s total distortion of me.

There are stars somewhere in my darkness, there are voids somewhere in my stars,

a sea change rises on the tides of a suffering that’s too much for me to bear.

Pain is the excretion of my meaning, sorrow the pus oozing from soars in abandoned ideals.

Convulsing in my catatonia, I breathe into Yin and wrestle my thoughts asleep.

My value emotions awake to something sweet and sacred, a moment lengthening,

an erection of wishful intent, a dream of fantasy realms revisited

where nothing interrupts the full expression of my golden dream,

everything joins with the celebration of innocence found,

the very air I breathe sparks alive with delight, for only through night terror am I

pressed down far enough to give way and allow my ridiculous dream to hold sway.

My dream is my meaning and the absurd realm of night, as terrible as it is,

offers the only way through a failed reality to make possible my unreasonable dream,

it’s the only place where my dream is not shamed or ignored for what it holds true.

My dream attracts a wonderful rearrangement of creative madness in my unconscious,

it brews the strange elixir of hidden volition which when accepted and taken as medicine

calls forth a full glorious expression of my purpose.

What I think I want collides with what I need, as desire ignores them both.

Innocence once again asserts itself as a source of balance and dignity and direction for my energies.

Those energies are boundless but seethe within a body limited by a aging human shell.

I may see but will never be the dream I dream when night terrors force me into my purpose.

I awake tired and regretful that the day has come. I awake an orphan to my world.

I awake to be reminded of what I lost. I awake to feel myself sinking away.

My time passion-wrestling with my dream is gone. I have only nourishing grief for solace.

The prayer of my innocent heart can do nothing else but persist in the hollow left for me. 

That same heart drifts into a day too bright in its unexplained struggle, 

a day searching in vain for fulfillment of the meaning in the dream if not the dream itself.

It’s a day where it’s already too late. Night terrors into day terrors for a soul stuck in twilight.

I am split and I am told my divide cannot be rectified 

if ever I should be whole again. They say the terror and the dream must persist,

each must be resplendent in their own power, and I must somehow embrace

the need and the illusion of both. Until the unlikely day my wholeness is attained,

night terrors into dreams are my only relief from a world misaligned with the Self.

This world is not a place for my dream. I am told my dream is not a place for me.

They say I must fashion a new dream, a dream compatible with this world.

But this I cannot do. For the world will pass. I will go on.

And where I go I will take myself, not the world.

I know I am in the world, no longer of the world.

My dream persists. And therefore, so does the terror.

 

CHOIRS IN HELL

When you believe your wound is necessary for your salvation,

it is then you may hear the angelic choirs in hell. 

With every ache of redemptive satisfaction that sanctifies your suffering,

the cathedrals of perdition fill with laughing voices of ecstatic surrender.

With strained beauty, perfected imprecision echoes in a mournful minor key,

reminding you always no one evades their flawed nature or mortal destiny.

When there is no escaping the heartbreaking joy of the chorus’ lilting loss,

no avoiding the horrendous harmonies of knowing the depths of your fate,

with every crescendo the notes shoot home to the heart of the matter,

a sinking feeling takes you away on the realization – they all sing about you.

They greet you with a requiem mass sung backwards from your death to birth,

a beginning with a pre-ordained end as assuredly as the coda trails into silence.

When you cling to vestiges of faith that your dreams in lost ideals are not in vain,

it is then you may join in and empty your heart in a boisterous solo, Canto Sciocco. 

As the gibberish of your tortured verse reverberates through a shaming life review,

the key changes and you cry out for the trickster truth to twist away from your heart.

A horrible insight bridges to the last movement of despair, for this requiem is not for you 

but for your hopes of resurrecting the innocent desires of your pure, inner child.

PRIMA MATERIA ICARO

You sit on the moist dirt of your past, eyes closed to the darkness falling.

A fragile circle forms around a wise fire. Your spirit takes notice.

The plaintive call of the night bird invites you to drink-in 

the stars and their release from all dodging and vigilance.

You start where there is no beginning at a changing place 

awaiting the mercurial serpent of your fanciful awareness

in a time frozen on your ardent but imprecise judgments,

fully intending from within a vision of a grave illusion.

In flurries of fear you realize your mind is not purely personal,

it gathers intuitions from autonomous alien agents

and unconscious energies of divine reflexes

and invisible revelations from aching somatic voids.

The untouchable stone of the mystic is brought forth 

out of filth by fractaling birds and fishes to reveal 

the charging surrender of eternal medicine

swirling the night deeper within you.

A sympathetic inside and autonomic outside

form a force de jure from the collapsing soul center.

A moment before it sustained the languishing suspense of being alive.

Now it taunts and tempts with torments from your ego-inspired heaven.

Raise your silent voice to the suffering Earth.

Proclaim yourself the chthonic child of the fornicating Sun and Moon. 

Release all defenses and allow the snake being swallowed

safe passage through you into the golden eye of unconscious promise.

There is no escape from knowing yourself as only the reaction to pain

or feeling yourself the instrument of self-dissolving insight.

True Love is the purge of everything we are and we want

for everything we need in place, to go beyond ourselves.

We cry out – if our dreams don’t exist, then what is the purpose of Love?

Stare into the flame of dancing shadows.

Let your cleansing convulsions be a merciless call to fleeing angels.

Night is the eternity exhaled with each raucous breath.

Light is the memory made absurd in frolics of alien laughter.

You are the alien of yourself as in waves of agony

you realize your deepest meaning is no meaning at all,

the hoped for healing is only the acceptance 

of your sudden estrangement from your golden imago.

Enlightenment awakes to see you as nothing,

holding onto nothing. All the while, the stubborn thing that asserts

it’s something endures the pain of endlessly trying.

You must chose what to endure – the nothing of enlightenment

or the pointless pain of your own meaning.  

In the depths at the lowest point lies a despairing peace of nowhere else to go.

It’s there where the ego crushes into the Soul and both are wounded.

It’s there where we purge and find – it’s never been a life to hold onto.

It’s only been a show, a sacrificial surrender in a passion play of empty dreams.

What you think you are is nothing, 

but you must empty yourself anyway.

The purified Soul is the kenosis of the Void.

Empty the golden illusion from the false vision.

Empty the nothing.

Breathe.

 

UNCONSCIOUS VIOLATION BENEDICTION  

Night falls on the ghost imago of my soul.

Near the transforming fire an alien voice begins to sing.

It’s the sound of my mother the instant before I was conceived.  

An ache convulses in her temple of splendor.

A penetration will oppose and exalt itself over

everything called love or is worshiped.

It sets itself firmly in her tabernacle, exalted in completion.

I waver and feel prophecy revealed in my instantiating pain.

It’s the escape of fetid vapors from the rise in energy of my instinctual dirt.

The mystery of iniquity smiles in the shadows, assuring me, 

like Paul, I must embrace the evil in God’s universe,

accepting the one conceived within me who precedes 

the second coming of my wholeness.

No ecstasy of union compares to the potential of a promised first breath.

The greedy thrust of creation’s unconscious violation

imprints in psychic energy as the perfect benediction of my suffering.

No one falls so low unless he has a great depth.

And there will be a life to fall within, endlessly, tumbling to a complexing depth.

There are things one needs not from desire but from one’s most pure nature,

things that give life and sustain, bring meaning and purpose,

things as necessary for life as breath itself. But they are not to be.

The blissful song of Mamacita fills the starless sky and sinks my hopes

for release from the revelation of dualistic fate.

The fire dances to her song, the night air pulses 

with her pleasure contractions into the moist darkness.

There are things that you avoid, that torture your soul and torment you in daily life, 

that sap energy and vitality, things as loathsome and despairing as hell itself.

These are unavoidable if one wants to claim the return to Garden route.

My Self convulses on a sudden indwelling of time and space.

My mother and the one who precedes the second coming of my wholeness

make a fragile sanctuary for me, that I may dwell in their midst.

Reduced from the numinosum to become a vessel of iniquity,

my soul shudders with the womb’s violation of my imago’s goldenness.

I surrender to the rushed infusing medicine of human existence

as the starless skies remind me with hypnotizing clarity --

Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling,

but only from experiencing them to the full, even if I’ll never control their extent.

It’s an original sin to buy relics so I won’t pray to pay for deliverance.

I must await my day of reckoning, the dire splendor of my redeeming grace,

the moment of becoming a person, forever damned to be saved.

 Lightning  

Slowing down lightning to reveal its wonders.

 Mass Psychosis - Our Greatest Threat  

“All one’s neighbors are in the grip of some uncontrolled and uncontrollable fear. . . In lunatic asylums it is a well-known fact that patients are far more dangerous when suffering from fear than when moved by rage or hatred.”
-- Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion

“Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.”
-- Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life

“. . .the totalitarian systems of the 20th century represent a kind of collective psychosis. Whether gradually or suddenly, reason and common human decency are no longer possible in such a system: there is only a pervasive atmosphere of terror, and a projection of “the enemy,” imagined to be “in our midst.” Thus society turns on itself, urged on by the ruling authorities.” 
-- Joost Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind

“Crimes the individual alone could never stand are freely committed by the group [smitten by madness].”  

-- Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life

“The phenomenon we have witnessed in Germany was nothing less than [an] outbreak of epidemic insanity. . . No one knew what was happening to him, least of all of the Germans, who allowed themselves to be driven to the slaughterhouse by their leading psychopaths like hypnotized sheep.”  

-- Carl Jung, After the Catastrophe

“If a man imagined that I was his arch-enemy and killed me, I should be dead on account of mere imagination. Imaginary conditions do exist and they may be just as real and just as harmful or dangerous as physical conditions. I even believe that psychic disturbances are far more dangerous than epidemics [of physical disease] or earthquakes.”  

-- Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion

“Once upon a time men were possessed by devils, now they are not less obsessed by ideas. . .”  

Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion

“We can never be sure that a new idea will not seize either upon ourselves or upon our neighbors. We know from modern as well as from ancient history that such ideas are often so strange, indeed so bizarre, that they fly in the face of reason. The fascination which is almost invariably connected with ideas of this sort produces a fanatical obsession, with the result that all dissenters no matter how well-meaning or reasonable they are, get burnt alive...or are disposed of in masses.”

– Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East

“Just as the technological advances of the modern world have refined and perfected the weapons of physical warfare, so the advance in man’s understanding of the manipulation of public opinion have enabled him to refine and perfect the weapons of psychological warfare...(and) totalitarian psychological warfare...is an effort to propagandize and hypnotize the world into submission.”

– Joost Meerloo, Rape of the Mind

“Ideology – that is what gives the evil doing its long-sought justification and gives the evidoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.”

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

“The comparison between totalitarianism and psychosis is not incidental. Delusional thinking inevitably creeps into every form of tyranny and despotism...evil powers from the archaic past return. An automatic compulsion to go on to self-destruction develops, to justify one mistake with a new one; to enlarge and expand the vicious pathological circle becomes the dominating end of life...this (delusion) starts with the leaders and is later taken over by the masses they oppress.”

– Joost Meerloo, Rape of the Mind

“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”

– Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

 

The Hellacious Comedy

The Fool wants to take Dante’s journey,

but being The Fool he doesn’t realize 

that Dante’s sojourn was literature

whereas The Fool’s experience will be real life.

And so The Fool must follow his heart 

which sends him to Heaven first,

yet real life manifests Heaven on Earth

in ways that can’t help but become Purgatory.

Realizing the fall from the sought ideal

sends The Fool to Hell

where he discovers, the more he yearns for his perfect ideal

the more he will feel equal pleasure and pain.

Mistaking the Shades for his shadow,

The Fool commits to remain in Hell

to do the work and heal all of them

so he may achieve a wholeness of Self

and realize the ideal of individuation.

But every perfect ideal produces equal pleasure and pain,

and so his quest for the ideal Self 

merely ensures the creation of the Anti-Self

who knows no ideal other than 

negation of identity itself.

In the Eternal Void we disappear

and in that instant of surrender

we may transcend both Heaven and Hell.

But the trinity of Self and Anti-Self and The Fool as Himself

cannot be one with The Eternal Void

until a fourth factor is enjoined.

Heaven has a Trinity,

Hell has one too.

Caught in Hell, The Fool realizes too late,

the fourth factor in the ideal quaternary 

was and always will be

his imperfect life of pain, defined by lost ideals,

something that, in his idealism, he can’t embrace.

And his devils laugh and whisper in his ear

to complete his despair,

“Heaven is an ideal, just as Hell,

both produce equal pleasure and pain.

In Hell, pleasure is pain.

In Heaven, pain is pleasure.

The only path to The Eternal Void

is by negating Heaven and Hell and yourself

but as soon as you try for any of these three

you assert a fourth factor – yourself

and thus renews the pain of Being!”

“...as the thing more perfect is,

The more it feels of pleasure and of pain.”  

         – Inferno: Canto VI, The Divine Comedy