Quest Magazine

Devic Consciousness

By Dora Kunz

Originally printed in the Fall 2009 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Kunz, Dora. "Devic Consciousness." Quest 97. 4 (Fall 2009): 152-153.

Theosophical Society - Dora Kunz née Theodora Sophia van Gelder was a Dutch-American writer, psychic, alternative healer, occultist and leader in the Theosophical Society in America. When teaching meditation, I always suggest that we should try to listen to the sounds of the brook, birdsong, or the wind in the trees, for by so doing we open ourselves to the inner harmony of nature. It is the realization of this harmony that brings us in touch with the consciousness of the devas.

Devas should not be thought of merely as spirits which animate nature. They are much more than that, for their consciousness reaches to the heights of buddhi, or direct insight into the archetypal ideas upon which the patterning of physical forms is based. They have a unitary concept of vital energies. Nature spirits, on the other hand, work directly with growing plants, interacting with these and with each other through the devic consciousness.

At Pumpkin Hollow, for instance, working in the garden sensitizes us to the different rhythms of the growing plants, and thereby we gain a sense of relationship not only with the devic consciousness which presides over the land, but also with the archetypal pattern they embody. If you are in harmony with that pattern it permeates you right to your fingertips, and then you can do with your hands what is right and good for the plants. When they are sick or ailing you get a sense of imbalance in their vital energies, and then you instinctively know what to do to correct it.

If you want to become sensitive to plants or trees you have to lose your sense of separateness. Setting aside your ego, you become aware of the vital energies you share with the rest of nature, and feel their rhythm. For example, when listening to the brook you must really listen, without letting ideas or mental images interfere and occupy your mind. It is through the rhythm of pure sound—which is eternal—that you can be genuinely influenced. This is the reason why Buddhists chant the mantra Aum. Through listening, we feel ourselves part of the eternal rhythm, one with the flow of the river. It is like being washed clean of our distractions.

The ways we look at life give us what is called "eye knowledge," seeing things out there, separate from ourselves. This leads us to make judgments based on our reaction to the external aspects of things. We see nothing but the form, which at once either attracts or repels us. Devas, in contrast, perceive life in terms of energies; to them the harmonics and rhythms of nature are most important.

In my own work, I have learned to think of life in the same way, because I perceive disease not as a malfunction of a particular organ, such as the liver, but rather as a loss of synchronicity in the body's vital rhythms.

The development of sensitivity, whereby you can begin to feel at one with the devic consciousness, can start with a personal experiment. Pick out a tree, and acquire a personal relationship with it: go out to the tree and have a really friendly feeling towards it. Learning to be still is a key element in this practice, for without stillness within one cannot listen. Therefore, sit quietly and look around you at the grass, the trees, the bushes. Be still, let go, and feel this sense of harmony.

The experiment will not work unless you can experience the harmony for yourself. Therefore, choose a part of nature that appeals to you, whether it be wind or water, rocks or trees. But it is important that you really listen to the stream—well enough so that you can remember the sound when you are away from it. This focused listening can produce changes in your consciousness.

Such attunement to the rhythms of life is important if you would draw closer to devic consciousness. As we travel about, we see that every landscape has different trees, a different shape, a different rhythm. Try to become sensitive to these, to attune yourself to the rhythm of the consciousness of that particular place. You will find this very interesting, because there is an infinite variety of vital energies at play in nature. They are never static, and they give each place its special character.

The earth is full of vitality, and therefore it is very healing to be in contact with it through one's hands and feet. Long ago in Australia, C. W. Leadbeater used to insist that we children go barefooted. His theory was that there is an exchange of the Earth's magnetism with the chakras, or energy centers, in the feet. At Pumpkin Hollow you can test this for yourself, engaging in a healing exchange with these abundant energies.

Since we do have these centers in the hands, as well as in the feet, we can also be energized by touching a tree, which has a large amount of energy and its own stable pattern. If you are practicing healing, it is a good thing to recommend to patients. Sickness always results in a lack of energy; therefore have the patient touch or lean against a tree. By doing so he will be renewed in energy and calmed by the tree's stabilizing rhythm.

The most basic characteristic in nature is relatedness. Communication between one individual and another takes place wordlessly, through experience. Such practice is a useful training in sensitivity which, rightly used, can be energizing and extremely helpful in many ways.

Letting go of our preconceptions and learning to be still and listen can make a link with the devic consciousness. Because of the nature of that consciousness, this link is at the archetypal level, at the level of unitary concepts. But meditating in a place like Pumpkin Hollow also puts us into contact with the earth and its magnetism on the lowest physical level. Thus there is an energy exchange on several levels at once, and this can create remarkable changes in our own rhythms.

Some of those who come to Pumpkin Hollow are in the midst of emotional conflicts or preoccupied by personal problems, and because they do not let these go, they sometimes are not open to all the benefits Pumpkin Hollow has to offer. But if we can put such things aside for the moment, we will find that there is an enduring state of consciousness beyond any human conflict, and that this permeates the very atmosphere of the place. Pumpkin Hollow offers us an opportunity to contact the wider consciousness in nature, by letting go.

Pain and anger and anxiety are transitory, whereas within the cycling energies in nature there is a pattern of order that is eternal. Therefore, if we can recognize that in spite of our failures we always have access to the order and harmony which lies within, we gain certainty that there is something, some power, which lets us feel whole again.

Frailty and failure are part of the human pattern, but that is the challenge of life. Participation in the experiment in consciousness which I have described lets us experience the inner order within nature and within ourselves. This experience is both healing and holistic, for it puts us in touch with the background of our lives which is beyond frailty and failure—the reality which is eternal.

Shadow Gazing

By John P. O'Grady

Originally printed in the Fall 2009 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: O'Grady, John P. "Shadow Gazing." Quest 97. 4 (Fall 2009): 148-151.

Theosophical Society - John P. O'Grady teaches English at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. "Telling the Bees" is from Grave Goods: Essays of a Peculiar Nature, a new collection of his work to be published by the University of Utah Press, which will include also a number of other articles first published in the Quest. The things of the world, according to reliable sources, are not as they appear. Nor are they otherwise. Little wonder then that so many spiritual traditions warn against the power of "false images." Consider certain venerable photographs in this regard, such as those in the family album or the old yearbook—how they attract and return the interested gaze until the image opens up like a tomb unsealed and the dead come back to life. This is the imagination let loose. The ordinary snapshot becomes a frolicsome illusion, which, if we are not careful, will lead us into delusion.

Illusion and delusion: both words arise from the same Latin root, the verb ludere, "to play." Any photograph can become a playground for the mind. The favorite game here is hide-and-go-seek. You enter through a gateless gate, above which hangs a sign proclaiming, "No Adults Allowed Unless Accompanied by a Child." Ah, but like any designated playground, especially those in larger cities, this place attracts its share of shady characters, figures lurking along the edges where the carousel music fades into a dark stand of cypress.

Enthusiasts in the nineteenth century referred to the process of photography as "shadowcatching." By extension we could say that the act of viewing a photograph is a form of shadowgazing. To lavish attention upon a picture, to muse over it—or over any image, for that matter—is to get beneath its surface and become like a shade oneself, ready to join the troop of Penelope's slain suitors as they descend with their tearless escort through a cavernous expanse along a moldering path to the Land of Dreams. A photograph, says Diane Arbus, is "a secret about a secret." She is simply echoing ancient wisdom. "Believe me," writes Ovid, "an image is more than it appears to be." And St. John of Damascus declares, "Every image is a revelation and representation of something hidden." A photograph is somewhat akin to an abandoned house or a shuttered church, one of those haunted stomping grounds ripe for evocation, a place where you can petition or call forth the fantastic spirits and render the unseen seen. It's a veritable altar of Hades.

We speak of "the consumption of images," little knowing that it is the images that consume us. An image in anybody's head is wild, which is why religious authorities have always cast a wary eye on the mental habitat known as the imagination, doing their best to domesticate its remarkable fauna by herding them into the stockyards of conventional wisdom. Something inherently erotic pulses at the very core of the word "image," as its etymology indicates a "striving after" or a "rushing toward" something, like fire to fuel or lover to beloved. Thus the medieval admonishment to monks was, "It is dangerous to follow your thoughts"—thoughts in this case being images. Similarly, George Fox, founder of the Quakers, wrote: "For following thy thoughts, thou art quickly lost." And Zen lore is chock full of cautionary tales concerning those who fall victim to the "monkey mind," that ornery, craving part of ourselves that leaps recklessly from one image to the next. Parental control software is intended to restrict children's access to images on the Internet, but what is it that monitors the imaginal predilections of adults? Understood in traditional terms, a "muddled thinker" would be one who is drowning in a sea of images, unable to discriminate the good from the bad, the useful from the irrelevant.

Yet wholesale subjugation of the imagination comes at a cost. To do so is to cast ourselves into the desert of surface appearances, refusing to find any meaning in such imaginative activities as poetry, omens, or dreams; we may even cease to dream altogether. These days we have all but forgotten what Aristotle expressed so clearly almost two and a half millennia ago: "Thinking is not possible without phantasms." In other words, ideas themselves are images. Though we today distinguish "thinking" from "imagination," they are, according to ancient sources, one and the same thing. Or to speak more precisely, they are one in the same place. Diotima of Mantinea, the female philosopher who plays an important role in Plato's Symposium, explains to Socrates that the imagination is located "betwixt and between the divine and the mortal," where the mysterious agencies by which the gods communicate with mortals are free to frolic about. Neoplatonic philosophers likewise regarded the imagination as a place. Synesius of Cyrene, for instance, describes it as "the hollow gulf of the universe," abundant with fantastic intermediary places, "partly obscure and partly luminous, wherein the soul has its habitation." To think—that is, to imagine—is not so much something that we do but a realm that we enter. The invention of photography—itself a kind of theurgy or magic applied to an imaginal purpose—simply opened a new portal into this "hollow gulf of the universe."

A tale coming out of down east Maine in the late 1970s concerns a fortune-teller who employed a curious method for conducting his divinations. He was locally known as the "Snapshot Shaman," a nickname as difficult to pronounce as his talent is to believe. Word had it that he was a Zen dropout and failed astrologer who supplemented his meager income by peddling magic mushrooms. He worked out of an old barn somewhere down around Penobscot Bay. His particular gift was the ability to hold conversations with the images of dead people depicted in photographs—not all of them, apparently, for the dead can be choosy—just those who were willing to have a word with him.

As far as he was concerned, the snapshot was nothing less than a gnomic utterance or a tabernacle for tutelary deities. He was once quoted as saying, "The universe fires portents at us like hockey pucks. Unlike most people, I don't bother with keeping a goalie—mine's an open net." He had the knack of being able to slip into an old photograph like a breeze through a keyhole. A rare and undated newspaper interview offers a glimpse into his technique: "I stare at the picture of somebody and wait for the edges to catch fire, you know, in my head. It's like a bonfire in my brain. When it's all over I can see the person standing there, all shimmery, in a pile of ashes. That's when I ask them, 'How you doing?' Maybe they say something or nod their head, but a lot of the time they just keep quiet and stare at me with a kind of muffled look. Every once in a while, one of them will cock a thumb in a certain direction, meaning I should follow them, but I never do that. You just don't know where it might lead."

Even though an anthropologist at the University of Maine wrote a scathing letter to the editor dismissing the Snapshot Shaman's performances as "Halloween hokum," clients flocked to his barn from all over the region, from as far away as northern Aroostook County, bearing treasured photographs of deceased relatives in the hope that this odd man with a curious trick might coax the dearly departed into sharing a few pleasantries if not offering a heads-up on the afterlife. It was a talent that provided him with a bit of renown and a modest living, not as lucrative as, say, lobstering or robbing the vacant houses of rich summer people, but enough to pay the bills.

For a time, things went well for the Snapshot Shaman. But all that changed when a less wholesome clientele began showing up at his barn. These individuals were not interested in having a chat with dead relatives; instead, they desired more sordid truck. Such people were always male and inevitably showed up alone, swathed in an aura of dinginess. They would thrust into the shaman's hands one of those wilted photos picked up from the "instant ancestors" bin at some flea market. "Here," they would say, "this old guy looks like he didn't trust banks. Get him to tell you where he hid his money." Initially, the shaman found that he was able to cajole a few of his shadowy interlocutors into disclosing the location of their long-hidden wealth, though truth be told it never amounted to more than the occasional Indian penny or buffalo nickel. Minor exploits such as these enhanced the shaman's reputation but in the end only served to attract increasingly avaricious customers.

Then one day a dark van pulled up at the shaman's place. According to the lone witness on the scene, a strange man dressed in a soiled Nehru jacket emerged from the windowless van and walked slowly into the barn. He carried with him a large, old, leather-bound book, which he dropped with a resounding gallows thud on the shaman's consultation table. "I brought some people I'd like you to speak with," the man said in a lily-soft voice. That's when the lone witness made a shrewd decision: to hightail it out of there. Thus the record gets a little sketchy from here.

All we know for sure is that, not long after this fateful encounter, the Snapshot Shaman was committed to a mental health institute up in Bangor. Some speculate that he lost his mind after gazing into those photographs, which, they say, turned out to be in an old NYPD mug book. Others insist the shaman had simply eaten one too many a funny mushroom. In any case, he has not been heard from since. Whether he still resides in a Bangor asylum or is huddled away in a lonesome saltbox down on the Maine coast is anybody's guess. What can be said with some assurance is this was a man who trespassed into dangerous territory. He found his way there through the gateway of a photograph but did not proceed with the necessary caution and reverence. In the end, he landed in one of the many dungeons provided by the imagination for feckless prophets and errant fools.

A story such as this suggests that photography ought to be included among the "dark arts" that the Greek philosopher Gorgias condemned as "mistakes of the soul and deceptions of the understanding." Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography, immediately recognized the occult implications of his work: "The most transitory of things, a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of our 'natural magic' and may be fixed forever in the position which it seemed only destined for a single instant to occupy." Like necromancy or shape-shifting, photography can be a dangerous hobby if you actually get the magic to work. Luckily, for most of us it doesn't. But when an accomplished photographic artist such as the wily Walker Evans tells us, "I enjoy the human trick of turning an object into an image," there's cause for concern. The photograph possesses a Medusalike power, which most of the time lies dormant. But should it be aroused, instead of turning us into stone it joins us to the ranks of phantasms. Photography, after all, is a form of latter-day alchemy, all about turning one thing into another. Once such a powerful transforming agent is unleashed, the danger erupts that anything can become anything else. Identity itself is now dissoluble, and we are lost in a house of mirrors. "A sound magician is a mighty god," declares Dr. Faustus in the opening act of Marlowe's tragedy, but let us not forget that at the end of the play this magician is hauled off by a pack of devils.

Over the course of history, sorcerers far less capable than a Walker Evans or a Diane Arbus have been burned at the stake for exploits that, by comparison, seem mere trumpery. When Oliver Wendell Holmes famously described the photograph as "the mirror with a memory," he may well have been alluding to the "perilous mirror" of medieval legend, a false looking glass said to distort and obscure everything it reflected. John of Ruysbroeck, the great Flemish mystic, warns that we "should beware of those deceived persons who—by means of their empty, imageless state and through a bare, simple act of gazing—have found a natural way into God's dwelling." That in itself is a shocking image: the divine mansion overrun with empty-headed squatters. Yet who among us is not deceived when it comes to what's going on in our own minds?

The photograph, like the dream, the omen, or the poem, is not so much a personal creation as it is an imaginative lure, leading finally to the recognition that there is more going on—both out there in the external world and inside our heads—than we have been led to believe. Henry Fox Talbot said that one of the "charms" of a photograph is the inclusion of so many things oblivious to the maker at the time the picture was made, things that are revealed only upon subsequent contemplation. And Minor White, perhaps the most spiritually inclined photographer of the twentieth century, reminds us that the imagination recognizes no property claims. "Unlike other arts," he writes, "photographs can be made so fast that before we dare claim ownership we must study them for hours to make them ours. And even so I lately feel that even my most intimate images are only on loan to me."

We have little control over what goes into our photographs, even less over the images that come into our heads when we gaze upon them. These phantasms catch us up for a while, take possession, and lead us who knows where—into love, despair, heaven, or hell. But in the end, if we are lucky, we fall out of that enchantment back into our ordinary lives, where we might then reflect on where we've been and what we've seen. Before we go striving after the next image.

John P. O'Grady is a writer and astrologer. He is currently working on a book about the erstwhile graveyards of San Francisco. He can be contacted at johnpogrady@comcast.net, and his Web site is http://johnpogrady.com/index.html .

From the Executive Editor - Fall 2009

Originally printed in the Fall 2009 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard. "From the Executive Editor - Fall 2009." Quest 97. 4 (Fall 2009): 122.

Theosophical Society - Richard Smoley is editor of Quest Magazine. These days many are calling for a rejuvenation and revitalization of the Theosophical Society. At the risk of adding to the din, I thought I would throw out a few thoughts of my own.

Personally I don't think the TS will be saved by state-of-the-art technology or clever promotions or membership drives. Nor will it be rescued by infusions of cash. I don't even think it will be saved by an influx of bright-eyed young people. However welcome and necessary all these things may be, they are secondary. Whatever else it is, the TS is an esoteric organization, and its survival will only be ensured by fulfilling an esoteric purpose.

What, then, is an esoteric purpose? To examine this issue, let's go back and look at the earliest days. Initially the Society faced two crucial tasks. In the first place, it had to reintroduce the Ageless Wisdom to a Western world that had all but forgotten it. In the second place, it needed to break the back of the aggressive European proselytizing that was threatening to uproot this knowledge, particularly under the British Raj in India.

Now, over 125 years later, we can see that the TS's current problems are more the consequence of success than of failure. Teachings long hidden are now common currency. When the TS was founded, very few people in the West knew anything about reincarnation and still fewer took it seriously. Today polls consistently show that somewhere between 20 and 28 percent of the American population believe in this teaching. The same thing is true with the situation in Asia: Partly as a result of the TS's work, religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism have been able to reclaim their rightful place among the world's great religions.

Neither of these goals was seen as important by intelligent opinion of that era; indeed intelligent opinion, to the extent that it was aware of these goals, probably opposed them. This suggests that an esoteric purpose is not, in general, what society at large thinks is important at a given time. War, poverty, terrorism, environmental destruction—these issues are all acknowledged today by exoteric, outward society, which is dealing with them as well as it can. Those with an esoteric perspective have to look deeper and further. Like the early Theosophists, they have to work not for today but for fifty or a hundred years in the future. (Blavatsky advocated independence for India but foresaw that it would not come in the nineteenth century.) That was the secret of the success of TS in its earliest days. If we emulate this approach, we will be far more loyal to the Society's heritage than if we turn it into an airless shrine to the memory of HPB.

What esoteric tasks confront us now? One has to do with the place of the Ageless Wisdom in mainstream civilization. Although this knowledge (or a version of it) thrives in mass culture, the intelligentsia still don't take it seriously. The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Harpers, and their kin usually cover mystical spirituality only to make fun of it; at best they treat it with a mild though contemptuous bemusement. While there are academic scholars who are exploring esoteric thought—Antoine Faivre, emeritus professor of Western esotericism at the Sorbonne, and Arthur Versluis of Michigan State University are two prime examples—by and large this knowledge has yet to inform disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, and theology, all of which are floating rudderless in desperate need of a more profound and authentic perspective.

Another purpose has to do with a goal that the early TS did not meet as well as it did with some of the others: reconciling science with spirituality. Although esoteric thought has served as an occasional inspiration to twentieth-century science (Einstein is said to have kept a copy of The Secret Doctrine on his desk), the two remain as far apart as two continents separated by an ocean. The Zens and Taos of physics have at best only suggested intriguing resemblances without creating any lasting change in the scientific worldview. In fact science seems to become more and more relentlessly materialistic with each decade—or is it merely its atheistic camp followers who make it seem that way?

In essence, these two goals converge. They both have to do with taking esotericism out of the closet and using its ideas and principles to enlighten our civilization as a whole. While for an individual this is a matter of inner work, it is a task that must be approached on a collective scale as well. This cannot be done as a matter either of proselytizing or of preaching to the converted. It will be done by approaching esotericism with an intellectual rigor and honesty that is on a par with spiritual depth and authenticity.

This may sound too aridly cerebral, too much in the head for those who say spirituality is all about the heart. But it is about both heart and head. Many of today's New Agers act as if thinking doesn't matter, while the mainstream intelligentsia often behave as if they have no emotions whatsoever. You need to be in touch with both: "Only connect," as E. M. Forster urged in his novel Howards End. It was this
connection between head and heart that he was talking about.

Admittedly it isn't easy to see how the present TS can advance these goals. Theosophy itself is often derided in works such as Peter Washington's Madame Blavatsky's Baboon, and one recent post on a Theosophical Web site said that the public perception of the TS collectively is that of a "crazy cat lady." But sometimes goals must be set without seeing where the means are to be found or how the purpose is to be achieved. These are often discovered only in the doing.

Richard Smoley

Pie in the Sky

Ptolemy Tompkins

Originally printed in the Fall 2009 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Tompkins, Ptolemy. "Pie in the Sky." Quest 97. 4 (Fall 2009): 128-131.

That which is feared also belongs to the wholeness of the self.

—C. G. Jung, Psychological Reflections

And I just had a feeling that something is going to happen, and I don't know what it is. And I hope I won't be too afraid when it does happen.

—UFO abductee Betty Hill

Theosophical Society - Ptolemy Tompkins is a columnist at Beliefnet.com and the author of This Tree Grows Out of Hell, Paradise Fever, The Beaten Path, and The Divine Life of Animals (forthcoming).

These days I jog a lot. Occasionally, after running for a while and feeling more comfortable in my body because of the endorphins I've coaxed it into releasing, I'll get a small, sharp inkling that even as I slog along down here on the physical plane, somewhere just above and behind me, someone—or something—is following me: a being that (though I describe it using physical terms like "above" and "behind") isn't of the physical plane at all, but of a higher, more mysterious one.

Higher. . . . There I go again, using a this-worldly, physical term to describe something that I've just said isn't physical at all. Of course, it's almost impossible not to use physical terminology when describing the nonphysical world, and the fact is that though this entity isn't there when I turn my head to look for it up in the sky, there is, all the same, a sense in which it really is there, coasting along just above the trees, tracking my progress like a flying saucer sent down to investigate just what exactly it is that people on earth get up to.

What is this entity? My suspicion is that it's me. Not the me I know and feel myself to be on a day-to-day level—not the me that struggles and frets and feels itself constantly swamped by the petty concerns of the world—but a larger, secret part of me. The part that never came down here to earth in the first place, but drifts along far above it—serene, imperious, gorgeously immune to all the clutter and idiocy of the world below.

I was fourteen in 1977, when both the original Star Wars and Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind arrived on movie screens, and even have a hazy memory of my first viewing of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1969, when I was only seven. The first record I ever purchased for myself—the debut album by the rock group Boston—featured a garish, '70s-style flying saucer rising up above the earth. Flying saucer imagery was everywhere in my childhood, especially in my teen years, so it makes sense that when I try to picture this mysterious larger part of myself that I feel hovering and brooding somewhere above me, a flying saucer is the first object that comes to mind.

Not that I'm the only one to have made this connection. Writing about the flying saucer craze of the '40s and '50s, C. G. Jung argued that the swarms of flying disks suddenly being spotted in the skies around the world were manifestations—in modern technological guise—of the mandala: the ancient Far Eastern symbol of the higher or total self. Mandalas are typically circular, and circles are the most ancient and widespread symbol of wholeness—of completion—there is. For Jung, it didn't really matter whether flying saucers were real or not. What did matter was that they carry a strong psychic charge for modern humanity because they stand for totality—for a condition of fullness that we moderns have stubbornly shut ourselves off from and secretly long to recover. Whatever else they might or might not be, Jung suggested that flying saucers are a psychic reality, "an involuntary archetypal or mythological picture of an unconscious content, a rotundum, as the alchemists called it, that expresses the totality of the individual."

I didn't run into Jung's interpretation of the flying saucer phenomenon until I was an adult, but by that time, I'd been pretty well prepped for it by my father. Driving home from a viewing of Star Wars back in the early summer of 1977, I asked him what he thought about the scene in which Luke and the other rebel fighters flew their spaceships down the trench that runs around the Death Star. As the camera hurtled along the impossibly narrow trench with the walls rushing by on both sides, I was overcome by a strangely pleasant sensation. Why, I wondered, was the feeling of zooming through a narrow channel so attractive–and so oddly familiar?

"It's a memory of when you were a sperm cell, shooting into your mother," my father replied decisively.

It was a characteristic response: irritatingly simplistic, patently reductive, yet at the same time curiously interesting, curiously right. A sperm cell shooting toward an egg is, after all, a fragment seeking to become a whole, and it is the whole—that lost and larger part of ourselves—that all space objects in one way or another stand for.

Can we ever really find our way back to that wholeness? That, said Jung, was not only the central question posed by the flying saucer phenomenon, but also the central dilemma of our whole modern age. Seen from a psychological perspective, said Jung, UFOs "are impressive manifestations of totality whose simple, round form portrays the archetype of the self, which as we know from experience plays the chief role in uniting apparently irreconcilable opposites and is therefore best suited to compensate the split-mindedness of our age."

When we do finally overcome the split between ourselves, when we open the doors that lead to the vast, cold, but vivifying rooms in the rest of our unused psychic mansions, what sort of beings will we become? Will we still be the individuals we experience ourselves as down here on earth, or will we lose our individual identities entirely, merging into some larger form of consciousness that we can't even conceive of?

It is here that Jung's thought, which over the decades drew consistently from both Eastern and Western sources, runs into an ambiguity. For the East, the ideal man is the one who has melded with the cosmos—who has rejoined, without remnant, the great cosmic unity. Individual identity for the East is a momentary, provisional, and ultimately rather unimportant affair: a bubble on the surface of a vast black lake. What counts is Brahman, shunyata, the Tao . . . the Absolute by whatever name it goes by.

For the West, it's just the opposite. The human ideal is precisely someone who, far from being one with the cosmos, has worked hard to struggle and hack his way free of that oneness, in order to become (in a battle as long and exhausting as it is brutal and dangerous) a separate self. The last thing the ideal heroic figure of the West wants to do is merge with anything.

That's why the father God of the West—who divides the waters to create the heavens and the earth much as his Babylonian predecessor Marduk cut the water monster Tiamat in half to create the world—has always retained such a conspicuously masculine and warrior-like character. While Lao Tzu, in the Tao Te Ching, describes the Tao in consistently maternal terms (the "mother of the ten thousand things," etc.), in the West, female cosmic unity is something we must break free of rather than rejoin.

The word "individuation"—which Jung used to describe the process of becoming the fully rounded psychological entities we are truly supposed to be—carries the whole story of this long hard battle within it. Jung strongly believed that to become an individual we must establish ourselves as separate beings. But how does this goal jibe with the Eastern notion that to really become "oneself" one must cease being individual—cease being a "self"—altogether?

Unity, in other words, is great. Joining the circle of the larger self, which in the Eastern view turns out to mean the same as melding once and for all with the Absolute, is fine too. But what of the individual identities that we spent so much time and care building while down on earth? When we rejoin the full round pie in the sky that forever haunts us during our lives down here on earth, what becomes of that tormented, fragmentary, and stubbornly individual pizza slice that we were while we were here? Do we just leave it behind?

Everyone knows about the problems of the modern Western self. It's lonely. It's isolated. It's scared. Having differentiated itself into a truly unique and independent being, it's like a fully furnished hotel room in a vast, empty desert. Inside, all is personable, homey, and familiar. But outside, just beyond the curtains, looms a huge and terrifyingly impersonal wasteland. If the Eastern path is the way out of the isolation, anxiety, and loneliness of the human condition through reunification with the great impersonal circle of the One, the path of the West is the way to a greater feeling of personal identity—of me-ness. This me-ness is in equal parts heroic and tragic because, in the battle to fight free of the great maternal circle, the individual takes on the full brunt and burden of individuality; and the final name of this burden is death. The single all-important fact of life for the modern Western self is that it is doomed to die.

Is this paradox surmountable? Can we have our Eastern cake (in the form of an end to existential loneliness) and eat that cake (become fully actualized Western individuals) too?

The answer to this question, if we listen to a great many poets and philosophers in the West from the Romantic period on, is yes. And one way it becomes much easier to see why is by envisioning the soul as moving through time from one incarnation to another. A number of contemporary writers on reincarnation have borrowed the American Transcendentalist term "Oversoul" to describe this entity that moves from life to life. "If our ego-self is our natural identity in the physical world," writes Christopher M. Bache in Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life, "the Oversoul is our natural identity in the spiritual. . . . When we leave our physical bodies behind at 'death' and return to the spiritual domain, we (ideally) exchange our ego-identities for the larger identity of the Oversoul. This larger identity consists of all the lives we have ever lived. To be reunited with the Oversoul, therefore, is to experience simultaneously a profound expansion of our being and a coming home to a deeper identity."

According to this line of thinking, the "me" that we feel ourselves to be actually encompasses a whole crowd of smaller "me"s—a "hive of selves," as Coleridge once put it. Much like the UFOs, which (in Jung's words) send out "large mother-ships from which little UFOs slip out or in which they take shelter," each of us in our present, earthly state is in fact a kind of courier sent down to earth from the mother-ship of our larger selves.

Why do we come to earth to begin with? Why don't we just stay up on the spiritual plane, where—according to virtually all the statements of people who have experienced it—there is altogether less junk to deal with? The answer is deceptively simple: to grow as individuals. As the British philosopher Edward Carpenter wrote, "Limitation and hindrance are a part of the cosmic scheme in the creation of Souls. Soul-stuff is capable of infinitely swifter and more extended perceptions than we are usually aware. What purpose does this limitation serve? It subserves the evolution of self-consciousness and the sense of identity. It is only by pinning sensitiveness down to a point in space and time, by means of a body, and limiting its perceptions by means of the bodily end-organs of sight, hearing, taste, etc., that these new values could be added to creation—the self-conscious self and the sense of identity. Through the development of identity, mankind must ultimately rise to a height of glory otherwise unimaginable."

This enormously optimistic scenario of descent and return just might be the new spiritual narrative of our time—the true synthesis of East and West. It's a vision of the cosmos, and human life in that cosmos, that combines the positive aspect of the Eastern view (unity and wholeness) with the positive aspect of the Western view (complete development of individual personality) while leaving the negative aspects of East and West (impersonality and alienation, respectively) behind.

Traveling down to earth in the partialness of our individuality while our true and total self floats above us, we live a life that, when it ends, will be added to the vast library of experiences that constitutes the larger self. John Donne once wrote that "death is an ascent to a better library," and there is, indeed, a sense in which our larger selves are a kind of library of experience. "We are the bees of the invisible," the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, in yet another bee-and-hive analogy. And there is indeed something very beelike about the smaller self as it goes out into the world to gather the pollen of earthly experience so that it can be distilled into the honey of character.

Did Jung believe in reincarnation? Opinions differ—and Jung, characteristically, never fully committed himself either way. But there is no question that Jung had an appreciation for our need to see our lives as stories—for the idea that each individual life is a narrative in which we travel from small and needy fragment to full and self-sufficient whole. With the doctrine of reincarnation or without it, attaining to the possibility of such a marriage of whole and fragment is a challenge that hovers, flying-saucer-like, over our entire age.

Ptolemy Tompkins is a columnist at Beliefnet.com and the author of This Tree Grows Out of Hell, Paradise Fever, The Beaten Path, and The Divine Life of Animals (forthcoming).