I am not asking you to do anything right now about what you see or find. I am only asking you to glance around “in there.” (Nobody is going to make fun of you.) I am inviting you to see what you are using to cover over the nagging question, “What happens when I die?” What myth do you use to address this question?
I say “myth” because we don’t know what happens after death. We all have the question, yet nobody knows. Any answer we fabricate to cover over a gap in our knowing is a myth. It just so happens that the “hellfire and brimstone” myth is prominent in our Christianized culture. Just look to see if you have it. I have it. It seems to come packaged right along with Christmas and Santa Claus. Even if you removed the myth covering the “What happens when I die?” question, so that you now live with the unanswered question as a gaping hole in the wall of certainty, you still have the old myth lying around in storage. Even in storage the myth can react.
Keep a part of your attention back there – on how the myth responds – while we slowly enter this next conversation. We are beginning, gently here, because confronting core beliefs and underlying myths is a delicate endeavor. The subject is so inflammable because we have made it a matter of belief, and not necessarily something backed by our own authority. We tend to grant abnormal powers to those individuals or institutions who claim to have authority in the religious or spiritual domains, authorities who purport to tell us the truth about our soul. If those authorities define a certain worldview and we start questioning the official view, we fear that we may be putting our soul at risk. Questioning religious authority can also put our life at risk, if we care to recall our cellular memories of what was commonly done to witches, heretics, unbelievers and blasphemers. The dire threats protecting institutionalized authority lie just behind our culture’s thinner-than-you-may-want-to-think veil of civilized behavior.
Taking Authority for Your Own Soul
Archetypal Relationship demands nothing less than you taking back authority for your own soul. Otherwise, how can you do Archetypal experiments? Stepping beyond your Box’s mythology to take back authority for your own soul requires a high level of intelligent courage.
The Box asserts that your myths are more important than reality. Consider how many people have arranged to die in the name of mythologies promoted by religious or political causes. The Box has the power to modify your perceptions and your feelings so that what you see and feel matches what your myth says you should see and feel. Consider the intensity of the reaction that you have when someone eats with their elbows on the table or chews with their mouth open. These eating behaviors only contradict your myths about how to be polite. How much deeper and more serious will be your reaction if something offends your myths about how to preserve your soul?
The Box’s “self-fogging” and “scenic augmentation” mechanisms are controlled by the specifics of your myths. Using any myth empowers the Box to block you from recognizing a wide variety of options forbidden by the myth, before you even know that your perceptions are being blocked. If you do not know when your Box blocks you from seeing something, that thing becomes invisible to you, even if it is standing right in front of your nose and other people around you can see it with perfect clarity.
For example, if your Box has the myth that the amount of money in your bank account is related to your personal well-being, then, if you receive a low bank balance statement, you might feel unhappy, forgetting that money is an intellectual fiction sustained by our culture – with little or no true impact on how well you live. Or if your Box has the myth that getting good grades in school is important, and your child brings home bad grades for the third time in a row, you might punish your child in some way, forgetting completely that the child is a young human being looking to his or her parents for guidance and modeling about how wonderful it is to learn. Navigating your way through Archetypal domains can be quite awkward if your myths keep making things invisible for you.
Over sixteen centuries ago, Western religious authority implemented a brilliant strategy for consolidating its power and property through proselytizing a simplified, polarized, good / bad mythology. The resulting church then justified its authority through the myth that the church alone was aligned with the “good.” Anyone who had “fallen from the right faith” or “erred from the truth” was “evil.” The clincher in this strategy and the force that spread this myth so far and wide was the addendum giving the church authority to punish any evil person who did not accept their myth! In retrospect, you can see how such a protected gameworld (see Glossary) would create an ideal playground, in which Gremlins could use religious bureaucracies for its own nefarious purposes hidden under the auspices of the good.
It is interesting to examine what symbols the church chose to build the brand of “evil.” Before the church came into power, a number of deities received the people’s adoration and attention. How could the church disempower the pagan gods? By transforming them into the epitome of evil! A mythological character was developed and named Satan, the devil. As the personification of evil, his image, even his name, would send shudders of fear down your spine. The church gave him hooves and horns that were stolen from Pan; his three-pronged pitchfork was stolen from Shiva, Poseidon and Neptune. And hell, the devil’s home, was none other than the renamed Archetypal underworld. In the church’s marketing strategy, the long-respected Archetypal underworld was transformed from a neutral map of “what is happening right now” into a terrible place located “down there.” No longer were underworld resources of power, clarity, wisdom and transformation available to the common man or woman. In the church’s redesign, the underworld became hell – the place where bad people are sent for eternal punishment, after they die, if they have not given their authority to the dominant religious organization. If you have ever used phrases like, “scary as hell!” or “hot as hell!” then you have bought the myth and are still using it.
Questioning a Myth
When precise inquiry approaches the central beliefs of a myth that you have long ago pasted over holes in you worldview left by unanswerable questions, you might start experiencing a queasy feeling in your stomach. Your unconscious fear of disrupting a myth can produce sudden unexpected feelings, like anger that attacks the invader, or fear that cuts off contact with them. At this point, for example, you could easily put this book down and let it collect dust. If you do not recognize that your emotional reaction is a Box-defending mechanism, distracting you from discovering that the way you think things are is only a myth, you might be fooled by your own feelings. You might treat your reaction as an omen. You might think your intuition is giving you a true danger signal. In fact, it is only your Box defending the indefensible. Without distinguishing the source of your emotional reaction, you might unconsciously lock yourself into behavior patterns that produce only ordinary human relationship.
I am sorry if directing your attention toward examining your own mythologies feels like a shatter bomb. I remember having a similar experience after first leaving my parents’ house at the age of eighteen to attend a National Science Foundation summer science program in physics and mathematics. Skipping my high school graduation ceremony, I flew directly from a white upper-class suburb of Los Angeles, all the way across America, to a black women’s college campus in Greensboro, North Carolina, where in my dorm room I met cockroaches as big as mice, only bolder.
Other participants of the program were geniuses. One evening, a guy visited my room and presented me with an airtight argument to prove that, if a tree fell over in the forest and there was no one there to hear it, the crashing tree made no sound. I knew the conversation was pure philosophical crap, but I could not argue my way out of it, and he spoke with such assurance that my world was suddenly shaking. An offended queasy rage erupted from my guts. I immediately hated that guy and sent him out of my room. His smug nonsense shattered a part of my innocence and awakened a sharp distrust of anything purely intellectual (which has proven useful ever since). But I also
learned the importance of being careful when delivering someone else with alternative design options for the way their Box handles the world. I apologize if anything in this book has caused shaky feelings for you. If shaking has occurred, I can only sympathize from my personal experience with the same thing.
We may be carrying a myth since childhood, but when we want to explore areas that are tabooed by our myth, we are faced with a decision. Either the myth goes, or the possibility of exploration goes. Neither decision is good or bad. But unless somebody pulls back the curtain, we will never see the little man who is working the levers that keep the myth alive. It all depends on what you want to see.
SECTION 13-B
Map of Worlds
We are here in this book together to call forth and explore the awe-inspiring conditions of true Love, possibility, Men, Goddesses, Archetypal Relationship and high drama. Not theoretically, but actually. Not once, but for the remainder of your days. We are here to establish the foundation for continuously shifting into new ways of relationship. You are making a journey to add consciousness, elegance, multidimensionality, and previously unseen options to your daily experience.
Making journeys into new territory requires new maps because (as was shown in the Map of Maps, Section 5-B) you do not interact with the world as it is. You interact with your thought-maps of the world. So let us begin with a new map, the Map of Worlds, which presents distinctions showing that you participate in more than one world during your day-to-day life.
The term “world” in this case refers to a world of experience. The Map of Worlds is not some weird, science-fiction, planet-hopping through parallel-dimensions, Star Trek idea. The Map of Worlds says that, at different times during your day, the energetic mood of your experience shifts. It is the world of your experience that determines what is possible for you in that moment.
For example, you know what it feels like to be depressed. You also know what it feels like when the depression is over. The whole world looks remarkably different when depressed and when not depressed. You have a different experience of what is possible in the mood of depression than when you are, for example, in the mood of ecstatic elation or serious concentration. This difference in your worlds of experience is addressed in the Map of Worlds.
Without thinking about it, you probably assume that you live in only one world – the obvious world in front of you that you can see, taste, hear, and feel during your daily activities. You might even regard this one world as the real world. As with most assumptions, the assumption that there is one true and consistent real world may provide you with temporary comfort, but it could be a completely false and misleading assumption in the bigger picture.
The reason you may not have noticed and mapped out other worlds is because we experience each world we are in as being internally consistent, since each world includes in its design the injunction: “And this is the only world there is.” So, no matter which world we enter, we have the experience of being certain that it is the only world.
As you experiment with the Map of Worlds and start noticing that, in fact, you do journey through a multiplicity of worlds, your direct knowledge becomes inarguable. Nobody can talk you out of your new understanding because nobody talked you into it. You discovered it for yourself. You may gradually notice, over time, that a boundless and sourceless joy spontaneously arises deep in your heart. The joy does not go away, but instead slowly becomes a supportive background experience. The joy is a side effect of entering new territory; it comes from finding unexpected ways to start again with things for which you were sure you had no chance.
Three Worlds
The Map of Worlds eventually reveals three worlds: the upperworld, the middleworld and the underworld. In one space, any of these three worlds can be happening.
MAP OF WORLDS
For example, your bedroom can be in the middleworld when you are vacuuming the floor, putting the laundry away, or changing a light bulb. Your bedroom can be in the upperworld when you are arranging the pillows with the same loving care you would use to tend a sacred altar for the Goddess of Archetypal Love. And your bedroom can be in the underworld when you are feeling alone and betrayed and are sobbing on the bed, or when you are fighting with your partner and trying to prove yourself right.
For another example, your car can be in the middleworld when you are on the way to the grocery store and you are busy making a mental list of what you need to buy. Your car can be in the upperworld when you drive toward a sunset sky changing from turquoise to orange to pink and you are in awe about the beauty of the world. Or your car can be in the underworld when you are late for an appointment and start swearing at the guy who cut in front of you, forcing you to stop at a red light.
For yet another example, your parents’ house can be in the middleworld when you are helping repaint the kitchen or raking fallen leaves in the garden. Your parents’ house can be in the upperworld when you notice for a moment that you and several other family members have unexpectedly released your family history and entered the present, and are having an inspiring new conversation that opens useful possibilities for each other. Or your parents’ house can be in the underworld when dinnertime is contaminated with televised horrors from the evening news, or a quarrel erupts repeating the same ancient judgments that broke hearts in childhood.
And so on, day in and day out, wherever you are.
Middleworld
The Map of Worlds starts where we are right now, in the middleworld. the middleworld is concerned with common, ordinary, practical details of life such as cooking breakfast, taking the kids to school, brushing your teeth, going to work, paying the bills, or figuring logistics for the family holidays. You are industriously occupied with handling paperwork, washing the dishes, fixing the car, personal fitness, taking out the garbage, doing the laundry, reading a book, having sex, going to the movies, being social with the neighbors and relatives, and so on. Money, food and sex, busy, busy, busy, these are the basic ingredients of the middleworld.
Upperworld
From time to time you behold something very different and Brighter than the usual middleworld activities. Perhaps you are walking along a tropical beach at sunrise. Perhaps you are praying in a cathedral and look up at a mural of heaven or into the compassionate eyes of a statue of a saint. Perhaps you are having sex and it shifts into something transcendent. Perhaps you are sipping a rare wine, listening to Beethoven, reading poetry, or maybe just staring out the window at the rain and doing nothing. In that moment the world softens into a different sensuality and reflects in a wondrous light, as if that light were always present. You may find yourself saturated with feelings of optimism, joy, expansiveness, generosity, wonder, clarity, oneness, completion, love, brilliance, perfection, healing, possibility, union, and so on. This is the upper-world, and you already know about it. Everyone has had moments in the upperworld, perhaps even moments every day, if he or she is willing to admit it. Being in the upperworld is still being in the upperworld, even if your experience in the upperworld is only two seconds long. If you do not start taking responsibility for your two-second-long upperworld experiences, you may never notice how often you are actually in the upperworld!
Transforming the Middleworld
Upperworld qualities seem so wondrous and so near that, without much thought, you may have already concluded that your job in the middleworld is to make the middleworld into the upperworld. As a perpetual effort, you may be trying to make the middleworld into the upperworld right now, even in this moment. You may have tried many times in many different circumstances over the years to make the middleworld into the upperworld, and failed with each attempt. You may have failed so badly, so often, that you have given up trying, but your hopelessness about ever succeeding to bring heaven to earth has not changed your conclusion that this is still your job.
Two clarifications can make a difference here. First, thinking that we can go directly from the middleworld into the upperworld is the definiti
on of “new-age” psychology and philosophy. It does not work that way. The upperworld represents perfection as a possibility, as a Principle, as an aspect of Archetypal Love. Such perfection, although simple to conceive intellectually, is only a catalog of possibilities, only a guideline. Perfection is the normal operating condition in the upperworld. In fact, if you are experiencing perfection, you could well be in the upperworld. But perfection is not achievable in the middleworld because in the physical reality of the middleworld things fall apart. Things change, things move, things are evolving or devolving.
MAP OF WORLDS
For example, think of an apple. It is easy to think of an apple. In the mind it is utterly simple to conceive of one individual thing, such as one apple, one idea, one person. But in the middleworld, one of anything cannot actually exist. No one thing stands alone, apart, and truly distinguishable from everything else in its framework. In the middleworld everything is connected to everything else. If you walk into a room and see a shiny red apple in the fruit bowl and smell its sweet tempting juicy crispness, you may pick up the apple to take a bite and think that what you have in your hand is one apple. But that is not true. The apple is actually a trap, and you have just been caught. The apple exists within a webwork of all apples. The apple is a vector, a momentum, a wave on the surface of an ocean of appleness as it extends through this moment from the past into the future. The apple came from an apple tree and contains seeds that can grow more apple trees. Human beings are used by the webwork of apple-DNA as the transportation to move apple seeds from one place to another for propagating the species of apples. There is no such thing as one apple. Apples are an interactive flowing interconnectedness integrally woven into the whole of middleworld existence. So are human beings. (Think about that the next time you are feeling lonely.) Perfection is a concept that the mind can easily grasp in the upper-world, but perfection does not exist in the middleworld.
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