"Panic and Vision," Part 2 of an Essay by Louis Gallo

 

THE MEANING OF MEANING

 

 

In the original preface to Myths, Dreams and Mysteries Mircea Eliade writes that "the religious experience is at once a total crisis of existence and the exemplary solution of that crisis." These words sum up, I believe, my experience in the Ironto wilderness, even if that experience did not begin or end with merely a series of visions that felt "religious." The crisis began long before, during a savage custody battle, the details of which I have accounted for elsewhere. My inability as a father to help rear my own child also contributed. Thus, on a sweeping scale, my identity as a man and a father crumbled; on a physical level I finally collapsed, succumbing to panic attacks. My entire being had been ravaged; whatever made me, me no longer had any meaning. By definition, such assaults upon our very substance can be characterized as "ontological," a word that means pertaining to being, that which exists, supreme reality. Throughout the ages ontological crises have been closely associated with religion. Again Eliade puts it most succinctly: "Religion 'begins' when and where there is a total revelation of reality; a revelation which is at once that of the sacred–of that which supremely is, of what is neither illusory nor evanescent–and man's relationship to the sacred, a relationship which is multiple, changing, sometimes ambivalent . . . " Only the modern objective-empirical mindset has dissociated being and the sacred, and before 1987, as a hardened skeptic, I too blithely dispensed with spirituality as a bogus category. It was quite possible, I assumed, to approach Being from the perspective of profane cosmology. God was unnecessary; not a ghost in the machinery, God had become a nuisance in the machinery.

 It seems, given the visual nature of visions themselves, that we must begin with what is called eidetic and oneiric imagery. The former pertains to the picture-like quality of visual material, and the latter to those eidetic images we "see" in dreams. These areas have been thoroughly investigated by psychologists, literary and film critics, philosophers and artists; indeed, throughout my career as a writer and teacher of literature, I have studied the structure and meaning of images, especially as they function in poetry and fiction. I was, however, unable to apply my theoretical knowledge to what I saw in the Ironto woods; none of it seemed pertinent. Literature and experience obviously belong to different orders of being in the same way that direct spirituality differs entirely from conventional religious "observance," a point philosopher-historian Eric Voegelin maintains constantly throughout his work. Whatever I had learned, knew and taught about imagery paled beside my perception of actual "living" imagery. Moreover, since technical discussions on the nature of imagery could consume entire volumes, suffice it to say that Carl Jung supplies the best explanation of such images (what he calls symbols) that I have found. Symbols, Jung claims, are not merely devices which reveal hidden meaning; they themselves create meaning. I lift the following from Stephen Larsen's The Mythic Imagination, although the words belong to Jung: 

 

The protean mythologem and the shimmering symbol express the processes of the psyche far more trenchantly, and in the end, far more clearly than the clearest concept; for the symbol not only conveys a visualization of the process but-–and this is perhaps  just as important–it brings a re-experiencing of that twilight which we can learn to understand only through inoffensive empathy, but which too much clarity only dispels.

Note, however, that the psyche itself, and specifically that portion we call the "unconscious," is Jung's source of symbols. This means that the idea of an "other world" has no bearing on visions, that our own minds create the visions we see, which if not metaphysical in nature, are nevertheless therapeutic. Eliade rejects such reductionism in his discussion of myths; "The myth," he writes, "defines itself by its own mode of being." I think the same can be said for visionary, or archetypal, symbols, although I am not aware that Eliade has come right out and said as much; in fact, Eliade, while sympathetic to all spiritual experience, is quite cautious on the matter, stating that the historian of religious experience (which he considers himself) cannot venture into the realm of parapsychology in order to assess the veracity of such experience. Nor am I aware that he would pinpoint this "mode of being" he refers to in another world, however often he verges on doing just that. Mythogems, which are really nothing more than complexes of symbols, if psychically generated, belong, says Eliade, to not the personal but the transpersonal psyche of all mankind. Obviously, we are on elusive ground here.

Eliade puts it this way:

[...] among primitives and well as among the civilized, religious life brings about, in one way or another, a religious use of 'sensibility'. Broadly speaking, there can be no religious experience without the intervention of the senses …  When the collective religious life is centred [sic] in a 'sensory experience '—such as, for instance, the communion of the first-fruits, which lifts the tabus on foodstuffs and makes it possible to eat the new harvest—the act in question is at once a sacrament and a physiological action. Moreover, among 'primitives' every responsible action is charged with a magico- religious value and meaning…  In short, throughout religious history, sensory activity has been used as a means of participating in the sacred and attaining to the divine. If we have chosen to speak only of the "mystics" of primitive societies, it is because their experiences more readily afford us glimpses of the processes which lead up to the transformation of sensory activities in contact with the sacred (Eliade, 74, italics mine).

Eliade has also put to rest my fear that seeing visions might be a product of derangement.  There is derangement all right, but it ensues from an original existential crisis; those who remain deranged are those who cannot heal themselves through spiritual renewal or who suffer terror because of their visions. Communing with the sacred is ultimate healing, as Jung would agree, although, again, he would locate the healing within both transpersonal as well as individualized psyches. The spiritual for Jung is some deep part of our being but not necessarily transcendent or other-worldly in the usual metaphysical sense. It is also important to note that for both thinkers the results of spiritual experience become moral factors in society because we come to lead exemplary lives in accordance with the force and impact of such experiences. Our ethical and moral behavior, when grounded in reverence or sacramentality, cannot be aberrant, twisted or destructive–except to the extent that, after all, we remain human and make mistakes. Spiritual renewal both heals and makes us better people. I am thus tempted to recommend to deans of law schools that they add courses in shamanism to their curricula. 
     

 SPECIFICS/EXPLICATION

We have drifted a long way, however, from the meaning of my particular visions in the woods.  The "explication" to follow remains tentative, although I think it is on the right track. You recall that I did indeed "cry" for a vision that would help me solve some very specific child custody problems and felt I received no answers to my questions. Instead, I saw what could be called a Roman temple, a mysterious slat-work structure, a fiery figure, two larger eighteenth-century dancers, a flood of more fiery folk, my cat Toby and a series of concentric circles. If we accept these images as symbols, whether derived from my own psyche or another world, we can perhaps think of the entire complex as some sort of non-discursive message, a communication or, as I prefer, a communion. If my immediate questions were not answered, it might be because there were more important initial questions which I failed to ask. 

The Roman architecture falls under the category of "ruins" in all oneiric lexicons. To dream of ruins apparently means exactly what it suggests: one has become ruined. However, to dream of well-preserved ruins (my temple was ancient but immaculate and solid) means that one's foundation, one's being, remains in good shape. Freudian and Jungian analysis further reveals that any building represents the body itself, the physical self. A building subdivided into varied stories, as mine was, represents also different levels of mind, specifically in Freudian terms, id, ego and superego. The architecture, thus, suggested that I was still basically solid, although venerable. Its temple-like nature represented the sacredness of the body itself. It could also point to a revelation of, in Alice Walker's phrase, the "temple of my familiar," a familiar being one's guardian spirit. The most valuable symbols are always multivalent, that is, they contain and display many, often contradictory, levels of meaning at once. So we should not mind at all that the temple could  represent both my own body and the holy shrine of my guardian spirit; the two disparate meanings in no way contradict one other, rather, they are superimposed upon one another for maximum, condensed expressiveness. But there is more, and, as usual, it comes from Eliade.

 

In The Sacred and the Profane Eliade describes the temple as an "imago mundi," that is, an image of the world, because "the world, as the work of the gods, is sacred … the temple continually resanctifies the world, because it at once represents and contains it. In the last analysis, it is by virtue of the temple that the world is resanctified in every part" (59). He goes on to say that cosmos, house (architecture) and human body are equivalent images by virtue of their function as dwelling sites of, respectively, everything, people and soul. "A fact to be emphasized," he continues, "is that each of these equivalent images –cosmos, house, human body–displays, or is capable of receiving, an upper opening that makes passage to another world possible" (174). [Or, put differently, "In one way or another, the cosmos that one inhabits –body, house, tribal territory, the whole of this world– communicates above with a different plane that is transcendent to it" (177).]  Any entrance or opening to the "sacred enclosure" becomes an image depicting the "possibility of transcendence" whereby "communication with the gods is made possible" (26). It seems obvious enough, if Eliade is right, that my vision of the temple served as a message that ultimate healing cannot occur in a profane context, that in order survive and prosper I had to re-sacralize my very being. For whatever reason, the sacred had chosen to reveal itself to me. 

More importantly, with respect to the mysterious slat work figure I have described, Eliade offers the following, which I will quote in its entirety since it seems more than pertinent:

... we have a sequence of religious conceptions and cosmological images that are inseparably  conected and form a system that may be called the "system of the world" prevalent in traditional  societies: (a) a sacred place constitutes   a break in the homogeneity of space; (b) this break is symbolized by an opening by which passage from one cosmic region to another is made possible (from heaven to earth and vice versa; from earth to the  underworld); (c) communication with heaven is expressed by one or another of certain  images, all of which refer to the axis  mundi: pillar..., ladder (cf. Jacob's ladder), mountain, tree, vine, etc.; (d)  around this cosmic axis lies the world (= our world), hence the axis is located "in the middle," at the "navel of the earth"; it is Center of the World (37)

Suddenly, we see that the slat work is a variant of a standard religious image, the ladder, universal in application and scope and symbolizing the passage from the mundane world to the transcendent. The fact that the slat work appeared almost superimposed, in the foreground of the temple, suggests that it amplified rather than modified or changed the meaning of the temple; both images represented links between two worlds. Now, the "opening" to which Eliade refers can only be, in this case, one of the windows or doors of the temple, and since one of them was occupied by a fiery figure, it would seem that the fiery figure, located within the temple, represented some spiritual, transcendent being I had the privilege to glimpse. As the temple symbolized my body (one of its "equivalent" meanings), it follows that the fiery figure represented my soul within that body. As a sacred locus, the temple stands for that "break" from this world Eliade describes, and the fiery figure a spiritual entity inhabiting the upper world. The two (my body/my soul –temple/spirit) correspond precisely.

Explanation of the shadowy projection of the fiery figure is perhaps more difficult. My first impulse, you recall, was to connect it with my father, that is, another human being. It could be that the figure represented spirit in corporeal form, that is, spiritual beings when they take on flesh, which is, after all, if the message is to be believed, our very condition. But I am more inclined to treat it in terms of what Jung called "The Shadow," not only because it looked like a shadow but also because of what Jung meant by shadow. Jung believed the shadow develops alongside our ego structure, that it amounts to what might be called our antithetical self, containing everything (emotions, instincts, fears, urges, tendencies) we try to bury or repress. The shadow is not negative in itself; its repression is, however, urgently destructive since no matter how hard we try, we cannot possibly escape any aspect of our essence. The shadow, Jung says, will erupt at some point and can unleash its horrific force not only on our own psyches but on the entire world. Perhaps, as the temple and fiery spirit signaled the emergence of the transcendent, the shadowy projection signaled that I had to come to terms with aspects of my character I was reluctant to acknowledge, e.g., the rage, my own combative nature, my growing obsession with exposing corrupt lawyers and so on.

The problem here is that Jung's formulation is wholly psychological, however collective, whereas Eliade's thesis brings up face to face with ontological realities. We can synthesize the two, however, by recalling that in archaic culture, especially in native American tradition, the sacred has two faces: a serene, glorious, heightened divinity versus the trickster figure who is often malicious, mischievous and callous to human concerns. I have already said that the fiery figure in the temple seemed somewhat irreverent and feisty. It would be tempting to go on and claim that the shadow wholly "embodied" these more sinister features of the original spirit. Alas, the shadow, while foreboding, did not seem to mean me any harm; it seemed more curious than anything, as if it wanted to inspect me close up .In the end, I have to admit that I have great difficulty interpreting the projection, although I feel I am on the right track. Perhaps it betokened merely a transitional phase between myself and my soul, or spirit, i.e., a kind of incorporeal body-state I would have to pass through in order to merge with spirit and vice versa.

With respect to the above, the two eighteenth-century figures become relatively easy to translate. I believe their message was that one must forsake rigid, rational, systems thinking if one is ever to gain access to the transcendent and thereby be liberated; the sacred, that is, will never manifest itself via logic or reason. This can be ascertained by the dancers' mockery of their very stylized, formal dance. You must, I believe they were trying to say, move beyond the limitations of reason (litigation?), to heal. (The very fact that I am writing such a book I think testifies to my taking their message seriously. I am well aware of the outright bashing I can expect from hyper-rational academic critics.) This message then becomes still a further amplification of the original more metaphysically put instruction vivified in the temple itself: open yourself to the sacred.

                                               

The remaining segments of the vision(s), the swarming of fiery spirits, the resurrection of my cat Toby and the concentric circles also follow this same instructional pattern. Once I was sufficiently "entranced," that is, beyond reason, it was permissible for the full range of spiritual being to display itself, which it did in the form of myriad beings. Toby's reappearance suggested that while the flesh may die, the spirit remains immortal eternally. I have no idea if the fiery spirits were the souls of the dead or independent spiritual entities, but I am not sure it makes any difference. The "other world" was right there, before my eyes. The concentric circles may have represented some vague notion of perfection, since circles have been associated with perfection throughout time; or perhaps they were cosmic equivalents of my own more limited sacred circle constructed of lowly twine and tobacco pouches. They could also illustrate many more "openings" through which we can make our passage to the transcendent. [Mandalas–also slat work.]

I offer the above as a tentative, and "rational," solution to the mysteries that unfolded before me. Just about every commentary one reads on mystical experience specifies that the mystical is ineffable and cannot be explained or illustrated by words or imagery, which restrict and suffocate it by, in effect, normalizing it into acceptable, even scientific format. The mystical explained ceases to be mystical, becomes rather another text for study and analytical scrutiny. I too feel I have greatly debased my immediate reception of the visions I saw in this attempt to understand them, but, on the other hand, aside from remaining glorious, I am not sure they would have meant anything to me otherwise, especially in the domain of behavior modification. We are human, after all, and must consult with our rational faculties, however limited. One of my major complaints against purely surrealist artwork, especially literary surrealism, reduces precisely to this argument, that beyond immediate sensory delight, such artwork cannot really move us ethically or morally in any way. It reduces to visual or verbal kaleidoscope, and, in the end, we merely forsake it. Since we live in a community, we must, unless we intend to forsake community altogether, communicate; there would be no moral evolution otherwise; the Buddha's nirvana would have amounted to a sublime but utterly private experience with no instructive value. The point of reverential thinking is that we must not only celebrate our good fortune in communing with the transcendent, we must further communicate that communion with others so that they too can perhaps share the joy. The holy man Black Elk was, we recall, invited to share his vision with the tribe in order that everyone could learn from his otherwise solipsistic insights. In no way do I compare myself with a seer like Black Elk, but if what I saw, which I believe helped heal me, can serve to heal or instruct others, then I feel a moral obligation to pass along the "good news."