COMPARING THE EXPERIENCING OF COUNTENANCE WITH THE
EXPERIENCE OF ARCHETYPAL LOVE
COUNTENANCE ARCHETYPAL LOVE
Requires eye contact. Does not require eye contact.
It works at 30 yards distance. It can be felt in any space
It works through a mirror. where two or more are gathered
It works in the dark. in the name of Love.
It works through glass and plastic It works over the telephone.
(windows, glasses and contact lenses). It works in a whole group of
It does not work over the phone. people in general and all
It is specifically between two people. at once.
Long For Longing
Taking pleasure in the experience of longing is the opposite of our cultural habit. We are trained to avoid longing by fulfilling any imagined desire or need as fast as we possibly can. Our desires are inflamed to the maximum with tantalizing advertisements that tempt or frighten us into immediately buying what we want.
Based on your own personal experience you have probably discovered that fulfilling desires never gives you lasting peace and contentment. Even though contentment is possible in any circumstance, with or without anything, you can watch the Box at work causing you to forget this and quickly arranging the next thing for you to desire.
Peace and contentment are about having what we do have. Fulfilling desires is an effort to try to have what we do not have. Fulfilling our desires neither eliminates longing nor establishes peace and contentment. Thinking that gratifying a desire will eliminate desire produces an artificial union. For example, we may think, “If I only had that car I would be happy.” Or, “If I could also buy the large ceramic salad bowl then my dish collection would be complete and I would be satisfied.” After we have the car and the salad bowl will we really be happy? Will that be the end of our desires? No. Fulfilling a desire does not stop desires. The habit of fulfilling desires opposes the practice of cultivating longing.
Cultivate longing? Yes. Longing is one of the great joys of life. Longing makes any moment precious because if we long for the extraordinary and we enter the extraordinary we still know that the extraordinary will again leave us. Longing can be a life-spicer – like adding cayenne pepper to soup. The burn keeps us awake, alert, and bright. Trying to stop longing is as futile as attempting to stop hunger. The hunger and longing always comes back and will never be finally fulfilled. Acceptance of our longing is the true completion. Longing is the way.
Cultivate your appreciation of longing. As an experiment you can choose something that you long for and purposefully evade the Box’s attempts to fulfill that particular longing. Start with something simple, such as the urge to scratch an itch, to see a movie, to eat chocolate, to turn up the volume, to put down a heavy load, to go to sleep, to turn on a light, to tie your shoe, to have just one more. Don’t do it. Instead, sit with the longing as if it were a coal in your belly warming you up; as if it were flavor enhancer for life; as if the longing itself were what you wanted, not the thing you originally desired. Learn to love the longing for Archetypal Love as much as you love Archetypal Love. “Long live longing!”
Requirement #13: You Must Be Able to Tolerate the Intensity of Being the Space Through Which Archetypal Love Does Its Work
Our Box sets the intensity limit for our experiences. No matter how convincing the threat story told to us by our Box, the Box has in mind only its own self-preservation, not our general well-being or our fondness for evolution. High-intensity experiences paralyze the Box’s defense mechanisms. If we encounter high-intensity experiences and survive even though the Box is paralyzed and is unable to put on its usual performance, we will see that the Box is not as necessary as it makes itself out to be. Your practice can be to gradually, over time, enter conditions of greater intensity with the idea that the Box slowly raises its allowable intensity limits. You can internally reassure your Box that its hard-earned skills and capacities will always be needed and respected, even if they are not always given priority. This assurance will go a long way towards calming the Box’s absolute resolve to avoid unbearable intensities such as are encountered during Countenance.
Working with the Requirements
Any one of these thirteen requirements is daunting – each one challenging enough to make a modern twenty-first-century heman pee in his pants or a prom queen to run home with uncontrolled terror. So what? Do not let that stop you from trying. Our culture provides us with no way to make sense of what it would be like to fulfill even a few of these requirements. And yet, in order to enter Countenance you will need to fulfill all of these requirements all at the same time.
Do not be disappointed if you do not meet the requirements immediately. Experiencing Countenance is a rare privilege, worth working towards. At the same time, successfully encountering Countenance engenders great responsibility. You can only enter Archetypal territories when you can enter Archetypal territories. Meanwhile, you have plenty of things to do to get ready.
The most precious thing is just knowing that the answer is yes. Countenance is possible. If it takes you only seven years to accomplish such a feat, that in itself would be a miracle. Do not let how much time it takes worry you. Do not let your Box convince you to take no action or give up too soon. What better way is there to spend your life than learning with someone else to be the space where Archetypal Love meets Archetypal Love?
Obstacles to Countenance
As soon as you actually try entering Countenance you will realize that not only are there requirements (as we have already considered), but there are also obstacles. As you encounter the obstacles, pay attention to the feedback you experientially receive about what works and what does not work. This specific information is all you need to create your own map for how to navigate through or around the obstacles. Obstacles are not bad; they are teaching instruments. The feedback you get from your attempts provides exact instructions for how to improve your attempts. Too many people encounter an obstacle and then give their project up for lost. Instead, develop the disposition of a sword being hammered on by the blacksmith. Let the obstacles reshape you into something thin and resilient enough to get to the next obstacle.
Obstacles can come in a wide variety of forms, including inexplicable panic reactions, old resentments, being distracted by accidents, headaches, illnesses, addictions to the adrenalin rushes of low drama or insecurity or near calamities, lack of money, a tendency to withdraw or hesitate, sloppy communications, assuming you are a victim of circumstances, fear of clarity, fear of leading, fear of being betrayed, and so on. Your obstacles become your way to refining your abilities to deal with obstacles.
To engage your obstacles you will be using two approaches. First, you will do experiments in changing your behavior so it bypasses obstacles rather than colliding with them. Second, you will journey to the source of the obstacles and unwind them. A third and most effective strategy is to do both at once. Refine the shape of your Box at the same time that you unwind the source of the obstacles. Do the experiment of radically trusting your four-body system to provide you with bountiful signals for navigating with an obstacle even if you’ve never met this obstacle before. Your mind gives you thoughts. Your heart gives you feelings. Your soul gives you yearnings. And your physical body gives you the sensation of very fine and wise distinctions. What an abundance of support and guidance! If you listen for it, your bodies inform you clearly about what area of relationship or self-awareness or risk needs to be addressed next, and how. Trust your bodies.
You will discover that the source of many of your obstacles is a wound. Working through these wounds so as to enter Countenance is a tremendously profound healing process. Give yourself plenty of time and permission for the healings to occur. Do not try to rush your development. The healings can take years of work and take you into domains of learning that were previously unimaginable. No matter how daunting the challenges may sometimes seem, you are designed to mak
e the leaps from the known into the unknown, and then to do it again. Just go ahead and work steadily with whatever comes up next.
SECTION 15-H
Cultures Evolve
If you end up somehow experiencing Countenance you may discover a cascading series of subsequent events occurring. You may discover that the experience of Countenance is neither explained by nor able to be integrated within Western culture. It does not fit. Nothing matches up. In one hand you have the well-known and familiar cultural understanding of reality. In the other hand you have your incontestable first-hand experience of Countenance. The two are in radical opposition to each other, mutually exclusive. You are left with a dangerous question: Do you keep the culture? Or do you keep the repeatable experience of Countenance?
You could keep both. But since Countenance does not integrate into our culture, the culture no longer looks the same after experiencing Countenance. The popular worldview no longer applies. The known culture has a gap, a hole in its foundation. Something is missing, and no one in the culture could successfully convince you that what is missing is not important or real.
What before has always been seamless has suddenly disintegrated into a rubble of unanswered questions. Countenance causes disillusionment. The illusion was that our culture was real. Suddenly our revered culture is demoted to being a mere story, a fabrication of the mind, just one of myriads of possible cultures.
Cultures evolve. The fact that you or someone you know can enter Countenance could be a sign that our culture is evolving. When an individual within a culture has an experience that is outside of the boundaries of the culture the individual is evolving the culture.
If you have the experience of Countenance – or even try to have it – you may well be part of an experiment being done by the Bright Principle of Evolution to evolve the culture. It is an honorable profession, being used in experiments by a Bright Principle, although at times the experience can be significantly disturbing: evolving can force you out of the mainstream and into the fringes. Evolution happens most abundantly at the fringes where there is an interface between two cultures – between the present culture and the future culture, for example, or between the known culture and the possible culture. The first few billion fish to crawl out on land did not necessarily have an easy time of it. The whole transition from sea creature to land creature or from land creature to air creature was probably neither comfortable nor comforting. Sustaining the possibility of Countenance is an equally upsetting proposition. And here you are, in the middle of it all, at cause for evolution.
Keep in mind that while experimenting with Countenance your success could be far more disturbing than your failure. Everything that you once thought of as real could be annihilated in Love. If it is any consolation, you could consider that there are worse things by which you could be annihilated.
Just Once More
I sit.
If I am fortunate and sitting happens,
Then Shiva sits in my place.
A sitting Shiva attracts Shakti, Parvati – the Archetypal Feminine.
I ponder the little bronze Goddess that I bought.
She is not so little, and hardly made of bronze!
I sit.
You sit with me.
You sit so closely I can feel You breathe.
You breathe me.
I breathe You.
Oh beautiful One! Oh Goddess!
The whole nervous system sings
With electric love
So strong
That breathing is barely necessary anymore.
You can sit forever like this, Goddess.
You love, never go away.
Never.
But I have a body.
I stop. Sooner or later I stop,
And I go on about my human life.
Yet my cells remember.
In a short while my nervous system grows hungry
And aches for the moment
When I can sit again
That there may be a chance
That You, as the Goddess (such an inadequate word!)
That You, as the beautiful, radiant, pure, endless, love One
Might appear and sit with me
Once more.
Oh, please, just once more.
– C.C.
CHAPTER 16
Encountering The Goddess
TfThe Goddess wants to live. For the Goddess to live there needs to be a flow of energy through her. This is true of all life. Living organisms are sustained by the energy that flows through them. Air, food, water, sunlight, sound, smell, attention, information, and love are all examples of energy flowing through and sustaining the life of a human being. When a structure is sustained by energy flow, this structure has the capacity to be perturbed and to suddenly reorder into a form that is more elegant, more complex, more beautiful, and more sophisticated. This is how what was once woman can suddenly become Goddess. Being in the presence of and witnessing the transition from woman to Goddess transforms what was already extraordinary into the unprecedented Archetypal.
For energy to flow there must be a completed circuit, a connection. The Goddess is only one pole. No matter how voluptuously radiant her intelligence and beauty are, no matter how dear she is, she does not come alive without a witness, someone else to kneel before her and appreciate her. The appreciator serves as the other pole. This is Archetypal theater between Woman and Man. It also works.
In other species it is the male who wears the brightest colors, shows off his feathers, dances, squawks and preens. This is because the highest purpose of other species is survival. The strongest most virile masculine provides the greatest chance for the female’s offspring to survive. Human beings may be the first species to be able to transcend survival and have an additional purpose: to appreciate. In the human species it is the female who wears the brightest colors to attract the attentions of the masculine. This makes sense if survival is no longer the highest purpose. Archetypally, Woman is Everything. Man is the one to place his attention on and appreciate the endless abundance of the feminine Everythingness.
The Man who recognizes and appreciates the Goddess is like the receiving antennae for a television. Without the antennae and the receiving circuitry there is no distinguishing between the true signal and random electrical noise. It is the Man’s job to ongoingly make these distinctions, not with his mind and perceptions, but with his body and experience. This is sword work. The ability of Man to select and pay attention only to the true signal, and to let the noise go by without notice, transforms raw feminine energy into the exquisite presence and movement of the always-present potential of Goddess. The Man’s sword work is essential for letting the show go on.
The Goddess is ready and waiting to deliver the show. She will come through any door that is appropriately opened for her and she will bestow her blessings and her gifts. The door can open when Man places his attention on the possibility that the door can open and waits for the Goddess patiently, attentively, expectantly.
You have probably heard of the Goddess appearing through living human portals – such as an oracle, a priestess, a healer, or someone in a state of prayer or an attitude of openness and discovery. The idea that the Goddess would come through an inanimate portal is also not strange. Human beings have created physical doorways – sacred artifacts and ritual sites – for accessing the Goddess for tens of thousands of years. We have discovered Goddess artifacts dating back nearly to the origin of our species: figures shaped out of clay, wood, bone, stone and metals, symbols scratched on the inside of caves, painted on pottery, drawn on papyrus scrolls, hammered in gold ornaments, tiled into temple floors. The Goddess lives in the hearts of human beings from every culture and time. Why would such artifacts be so common and persistent throughout human history if they did not work?
I have my own story to tell about a Goddess artifact. The portal in my story is a piece of metal. Not just any piece of metal. The metal is bronze, an alloy created by blending m
olten copper and zinc. Bronze has different qualities than its component materials. Bronze is gold colored, for example, whereas copper is “copper” colored, and zinc is silvery. The particular piece of bronze in this story has been fashioned with great care into the shape of a sacred Goddess. To my astonishment I found that a sacred bronze Goddess statue can function like a human female body to serve as a doorway to the Archetypal Goddess.
SECTION 16-A
A Personal Encounter
This story begins when I walk into an attractive little gallery tucked into the corner of a side alley of a quaint French village. The building is some six hundred years old, made of handcarved limestone blocks, thick hand-hewn oak beams, and mud, just like all the other buildings of this era. From the perspective of an American whose country did not exist before 1776, it amazes me that the whole village is not in some museum.
In this building several beams have been recently renewed. A few stones are new. The shop is well cared for, and the window display draws me in with strange and tantalizing objects. I wasn’t planning to shop for trinkets, but in I go.
It is dark inside. I cannot see much, but as I enter I overhear the shopkeeper talking to another customer. “I love these things,” he says. “I really love these bronzes. If I didn’t love these things I wouldn’t have the confidence to sell them to you.”
I strain to see what the “things” are that he so passionately sells. You guessed it. Bronze figurines. At the same time I wonder, What does love have to do with it? The mind goes crazy with questions like this.
By now my eyes adjust to the lower lighting and I scan the merchandise. I am stunned, stopped in my tracks. Hundreds of pieces of bronze-ware sit shoulder-to-shoulder, rim-torim, haunch-to-haunch, all waiting, no, begging for my attention. New, old, shiny, tarnished, huge, miniature, pristine, damaged, bowls. There are cups, implements, animal figures, Goddesses and Gods of every description, all available for a price and waiting for my glance, my touch – or perhaps waiting to touch me?
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 67
