Jonah

transpersonal visitation

OK, you’ve got thirty minutes

Thanks

What do you want?

What do I want — what don’t I want — I don’t know what I want — I want to know what YOU want. I want to know how to get over this unease.

Describe this unease.

I don’t know — anxiety, guilt, a fear of falling short, of being a bullshitter, of being unholy

Unholy?

Yes, unclean. Not dirty, but ritually unclean and not allowed to enter the temple.

I remember that dream you had about breaking into a church every night and being afraid you’d get caught.

You remember that? I forgot all about it.

Why were you locked out in the first place? Why are churches locked up?

They lock it up at night because vandals will come in and shit on the altar.

Really? 

They must be angry with God or angry with anyone claiming to represent God. If you are going to claim to speak for God you should expect to be crucified by someone. Likewise, if you shit on an altar.

Claiming to be God’s representative seems to be profitable for some of them, for the ones whose followers are willing to surrender their brains, and worse, their hearts, to have no compassion for the unholy.

Thanks for bringing the dialogue back to that, to unholiness.

You are afraid that God is holier than you?

Yes, I hate God’s holier than thou attitude. 

No, I suspect you are projecting a shadow of a god to talk to so you don’t listen to what is being said.  

Or I don’t hear what I’m not saying because I’m talking to myself, having a silent pretend conversation with some transpersonal wisdom figure perhaps and not sure that this shadow, I mean I know it’s a shadow, I think, on my studio wall —

or an angelic entity generated by my own brain?

Let me tell you a parable:

A man is swallowed by a sea monster and in the guts of the fish, in his distress, because he is a poet given to ecstatic prophecy, he sings an aria, a psalm of thanksgiving, in which  

he refers to the fish guts that enclose him as

the belly of Sheol

the deep,

the flood,

the heart of the seas,

and weeds are wrapped around his head at the roots of the mountains

in a land whose bars are closed upon him forever,

the Pit. 

His prayer is a pastiche, they say, of images from several psalms, a plagiarized prayer, or a collage poem, maybe?

Inadequate as it was, the song is heard in the holy temple, the sacred unconscious, and was effective enough, I guess, because the monster puked the poet onto a beach where he was rescued by surfers. 

Nice. Birth trauma leading to violent ejection from the womb? Kind of a second birth maybe? Help me with the hermeneutics.

So, the human being spends three days and nights in the heart of the earth, buried like a seed, the shell cracks, and the soul bursts into an eternal flower of psychedelic flames. 

Really?

Is that what you want to hear?

I don’t know what I want to hear and I don’t know what I’m afraid to hear. I’m afraid I’m the monster that swallowed myself and I think I’m going to throw up.

We weave a veil, a screen upon which we project, or a tapestry on which we embroider, a heiroglyphic pattern out our immediate concerns and our familiar desires, a web of perceptual habits and reified concepts from a  lifetime of wants, beliefs, fears, and all that. Vain idols clutter your headspace. Sometimes something happens, something catastrophic or something ecstatic, that blows away the veil, an apocalypse that leaves you unhoused and stark naked, if you will, in blazing Light, and that can be unpleasant.

That’s what I’m afraid to hear.

I’m sorry but these things happen, and now our half hour is up. We will continue next week.