THEURGY 3

Jung said, "Consciousness is essentially the psyche's organ of perception,
it is the eye and ear of the psyche." (ETH Lectures, Vol. II, Page 98).

Deific Self

Arguably, individuation can do without the teleological goal of attaining the Self in all its humanity and divinity, but in magic it is primary. The presence of this deific self is not indicated by wonderful personal powers but by archetypal images. "As all images can gain this archetypal sense, so all psychology can be archetypal … ‘Archetypal’ here refers to a move one makes rather than to a thing that is” (Hillman 1977 b). 

The glorification of a subject to divine level, apotheosis, means"making into a god", a belief, and an art. It isn't tools that set humans apart, but art, including the invocation of cosmic apotheosis. From earliest times art and religion went together, the power to represent and create -- the genius of artistic instinct.

If the expression isn't rigid or blank, even a statue can signal interiority and invite us as spectator to psychologize it. It acquires a body, a soul and that is what allows us to interact with it, to bring it into existential partnership. The ideal body proportions, a god-like or perfect form, embodies harmony and virtue of the cosmos.

Art is an adventure into an unknown world. Art engages our spiritual impulses and has always been used to express our spiritual longings. The noetic field is the most inviting medium because it is not flat, but multidimensional.

"...mythical figures... provide the poetic characteristics of human thought, feeling, and action, as well as the physiognomic intelligibility of the qualitative worlds of natural phenomena.” We are, "deliberately affiliated with the arts, culture, and the history of ideas, arising as they do from the imagination." (Hillman)

The collapse of superpositions of all potential, a multiplicity of perspectives, into the singular embodiment of the aspirant means transformation and augmentation as an archetypal image. Archetypal images universalize, depersonalize, and amplify. Everything has a symbolic dimension. This conviction evokes the deific self-image, enlivens the deific mask as we recognize its essential and collective importance.

What do we assume about how the human self reacts in the presence of God, gods, or other 'divine' forces, entities, or elements? What does it mean to physically embody human as temple and cosmos in material being -- juxtaposition, fusion, blending? What is the essential nature of our lived relationship to the divine, the blended self, the centripetal and centrifugal self, divine fluidity and embodiment -- divine/nondivine self-conception? 

Magic is an archaic way of encouraging the unfolding potential of natural individuation, including a way of thinking about the world. In “Access to Western Esotericism,” Antoine Faivre says that magic rears its head when we try to process correspondences that “unite all visible things and likewise unite the latter with invisible entities.”

Magic has always been a traditional but controversial approach in which action precedes reflection. Theurgy is an esoteric approach to enlightenment -- a great multidimensional magical system of self-cultivation through initiation and divine works of consciousness rooted in the subliminal realm. "The magical word is one that lets “a primordial word resound behind it”'; magical action releases primordial action." (Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 59-63)

The mystical center or inner temple of humanity is an internal numinous reality,  the way we perceive and interpret the world and intuitive recollection of implicit memories. An important part of memory actually belongs not solely to what emerges on the surface of our affective consciousness but equally to what stays in the background.

The past remains: not as hidden senses or traces in some deep repository of the mind, but rather in the way these events shape and change one’s experience and thereby prefigure the totality of one’s attitudes towards the present and the future. The unconscious past-horizon is what enables the present itself to be experienced in a way that has a meaning within, and is coherent with, the whole of our experience. 

Unconscious Goal Pursuit

In nature, the “unconscious mind” is the rule, not the exception. We can discover the intentional nature of the unconscious, the unsuppressed mind. Raising subliminal content to consciousness intensifies it. The unconscious mind is a pervasive, powerful influence over such higher mental processes, priming and automaticity effects; it is highly intelligent and adaptive.

The interaction of unconscious reflexes and explicit, conscious memory is to simulate future, potential actions --being and becoming. Unconscious goal pursuit is an open-ended system. The active goal or motive is the local agent by which the genetic influence from the distant past finds expression. Evolution works through motives and strategies. Studies show that unconscious goal pursuit produces the same outcomes as conscious goal pursuit.

Conscious goal pursuit makes use of already-existing unconscious motivational structures (Campbell, 1974; Dennett, 1995). The goal operates on whatever goal-relevant information happens to occur next in the supraliminal experimental situation, which could not be known to us beforehand. The unconsciously operating goal is able to adapt to whatever happens next and use that information to advance the pursuit of the goal.

The goal concept, once activated with or without the participant’s awareness, operates over extended time periods, with or without the person’s conscious monitoring, to guide thought or behavioral impulses towards the goal. This is essentially the transformative process and multidimensional source intelligence.

In contextual priming, the mere presence of certain events and figures automatically activates not only our representations of them, but all of the internal information (goals, knowledge, affect, symbol chains) stored in those representations that is relevant to responding back. The unconscious is no less flexible, complex, controlling, deliberative, or action-oriented than conscious awareness. Individuation actualizes the latent existential self which is creative, living, fluid.

Spirit Becomes Personal

Theurgy is a sacramental mystery rite that overlaps into the realm of magic and the occult. It is a ritual process in which the initiate’s mind and vision is purified to behold and “see” the majesty of the gods, through consecrations, prayers, unintelligible incantations and various meditative practices.

The theurgists were concerned with purifying and raising the consciousness of individual practitioners to the point where they could have direct communion with the gods. They inherited the tradition of ancient Greek Mysteries which aimed to introduce the candidate directly to the gods.

Magic, a triggering stimulus, develops a relationship between them. With theurgy, ideally one could experience union with the divine and prepare ritually for the peak experience of encounter and union with the innermost core of reality. The transcendental condition of the possibility of all knowledge is human as a concrete, embodied, spiritual being who is not above and outside empirical reality but is distinct from purely natural human.

The theurgist had a concrete embodied experience of the doctrines and truths developed on paper. The new living reality comes alive. We are a small universe is the basis for knowing ourselves. Truth as a living force creatively transforms reality. This theurgic aspect of knowledge is the field effect of absolute space.

Direct experience became the only way to determine fact from legends of antiquity. The Egyptian theory of salvation became the purpose of Greek philosophy. The doctrines of Plato are traced to their Egyptian origin, as he taught nothing new. Magic is the key to the interpretation of ancient religion and philosophy.
http://www.thehouseofsankofa.com/books/eBook%20Stolen%20Legacy.pdf

To be a philosopher was a vocation and a commitment to a way of life. In their day Greek philosophers were a minority of undesirable citizens, who were victims of relentless persecution at the hands of the Athenian government. Anaxagoras was imprisoned and exiled; Socrates was executed; Plato was sold into slavery and Aristotle was indicted and exiled; while the earliest of them all, Pythagoras, was expelled from Croton in Italy.

That conscious-unconscious connection is honed down through time into the beyond, not blocked by their philosophy. Concept activation and primitive associative learning can occur unconsciously, enhancing our ability to process subliminal-strength information. (Bargh, Morsella, 2008)

Sacred Art of the Adepts

Magic is a holistic approach prioritizing transpersonal aspects of the unconscious, enhancing complementarity of conscious and unconscious. There are two main approaches in the phenomenological understanding of the unconscious. The first explores the intentional theory of the unconscious.

The second develops a non-representational way of understanding consciousness and the unconscious, the pre-cognitive life of subjectivity. This sedimented unconscious contributes to the way we implicitly interpret reality, fill in the gaps of uncertainty, and invest our interactions with meaning. Archetypes are our non-representational relation to the past, a sort of over-the-horizon GPS from our archaic past.

Theurgy means ritual knowledge, theoretical and operative which connects the aspirant with the one Self, "One" or "All", or "Universal Mind", the unitive agent, ‘perfectly ineffable’,  even "God," to experience other entities and spiritual realities. Divinity is nothing other than the Gods themselves.

A wealth of esoteric knowledge is managed and deployed in an intuitive system organized in a contemporary operational key. Each of these experiences have powerful consequences in the awareness of the Initiate. Proper alignment with the divine current is what true, authentic, and genuine initiation does.

Magic and theurgy share similarities but differ in approach, agency, and intentionality. Both employ varying degrees of ritual, and use mental imagery or words to express the desired goal. In magic, the rituals, mental imagery, and words are used to raise and empower the personal ego and its egoic will. Theurgy is not personalistic, and the rituals, mental imagery, and words are used to merge the personal will with God's Will, The Way of the Heart.

The theurgist gets into a special state of mind, direct access to the wondrous mystery of existence, an ascent into darkness and silence, contacts universal knowledge or Source, and unites in a non-dual epiphany, an experience of sudden and striking self-realization. We can extract meaning from stimuli of which we are not consciously aware.

Theurgy is presented as more elevated than theoretical philosophy, as a legitimate method of ascent in Neoplatonism. It is really a self-selecting path for the very few who are called to the ancient philosophical practice, a synthesis of magic and cosmogony.

Understanding is crucial to properly engage the material and non-material cosmos through the hieratic art. The "hieratic" style, means "sacred" or "holy" -- a sacred aesthetic of awe. “Sacred art,” hieratics implies ritual bound art is a relating quality, awareness of the aesthetic dimension. The hieratic image of an immobilized body is neither passive nor idle, but a disciplined body keeping still -- a statement of undisturbed presence, focus and concentration, even transport.

Visionary Art combines the Humanist and Hieratic Styles throughout history. Hieratic design can be understood anthropologically as an iconographic and ritual mode rooted in imagery, body habits, and physiological disposition. It is characterized by enhanced body postures and embodied power. It elevates the visual and acoustic environment.

Inspired Philosophy

Theurgy is a stepchild of Platonic philosophy, but part of a more ancient tradition -- the hieratic discipline of the Egyptians passed by the Pythagoreans on to the Hellenic Greeks. The story pf spiritual ascent and mystical union has history in it, but it is also a mystery tradition invented and maintained by writing about it. The audience are already philosophers with reverence for the written word. Divine revelation alone is true philosophy.

Theurgy can be applied in principle to any ritual. It flourished and evolved from its original, pagan associations with The Chaldean Oracles in the second century, through a peak in the 3rd to 6th c., to the Christian mystical theology of “Pseudo”- Dionysius the Areopagite in the early sixth century.

“For the theurgists do not fall into the herd which is subject to Destiny,” says the Chaldean Oracles. It implies, the theurgist is not compelled to reincarnate, but may choose to do so to help others on the path.

Porphyry was a skeptic, while Iamblicus was an enthusiast. Critics naturally wondered if theurgy is really essential and whether it achieves what its supporters claim. Each stage must be viewed in its own context. Philosophical discipline and theurgic practice is largely private but sometimes performed with a small group of initiates.

All eras or stages don't map onto one another, but contain discontinuities in timeline, theory and practice, different elements and emphasis, with common underlying themes within the ascension mode, connecting humans and the divine, and producing visions.

Theurgy is the work that the gods themselves do, presumably in and through the theurgist, who becomes a vessel for divine action. It helps enable activation of the full potential of the individual soul at the highest level possible in the hierarchy of reality.

The ancient philosophy, in its original Orphico-Pythagorean and Platonic form, is a way of life in resonance with the divine or human intellect (nous). It is also the way of alchemical transformation and mystical illumination achieved through initiatic 'death' and subsequent restoration at the level of divine light. Cosmic initiations were aimed at the pneumatic and luminous vehicles of the soul. The aspirant is made whole again after dispersion into multiplicity.

The divine way of life that had been the inheritance of Platonists and Pythagoreans was being lost, according to Iamblichus, due to mistakes in metaphysical thinking, especially the exaggerated importance of abstract thought over the direct experience of the gods. He encouraged theurgists to receive the gods in their bodies. For Iamblichus, our aesthetic experience is not an obstacle to deification; it is, in fact, the only way to embody the god.

This is the practice of primacy of experience over belief signifying a heightening in the sensory and imaginal dimensions -- a convergence of  the peculiar properties of visual space,  tactile space, kinetic, proprioceptive, and cosmic space. It emphasizes manifestation of the divine in the created world, as natural objects, the self, and art.

Modern philosophy mirrors the old notion of animism. Animism is mirrored in modern scientific theory as panpsychism, the doctrine or belief that everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness. Emergent panpsychism denies that macroexperience is grounded in microexperience.

Panprotopsychism is the view that fundamental entities are proto-conscious: they have certain special properties that are precursors to consciousness and that can collectively constitute consciousness in larger systems. If it is the ground of macroexperience, all phenomenal truths are grounded in protophenomenal truths concerning these entities -- for example, fundamentals of mass and charge.

This ground for both physical and phenomenal properties may be mixed -- some  phenomenal and some protophenomenal or unrelated to the phenomenal. Panprotopsychism does not need subjects at the bottom level. (Chalmers)

The idea that some fundamental physical entities have protophenomenal properties is a modern retrieval of archaic thought. It's all ensouled psychic being with phenomenal properties. Animism is the extension of human mind into nature.

Neoplatonics is a philosophy, metaphysics, and magical practice. The practice of natural magic is one of its major recommendations. The theurgist enters that ontological reality 'as if' it was real. Shaw (1967) contends that theurgy was a coherent approach, a subtle and intellectually sophisticated attempt to apply Platonic and Pythagorean teachings to the full expression of human existence in the material world. We wake up to ignorance to transform it into wisdom.

Theurgy (3rd-6th c. CE) defines not what the soul does, but what the gods do through the soul. Iamblichus replaced the philosophical ascent of Plotinus with the divine ascent of the theurgists. Both begin with quieting the senses. The later Platonists were after more than a rational understanding of divinity. They wanted to recover an “innate gnôsis of gods ... superior to all judgment, choice, reasoning, and proof.”

Psyche fosters the deliteralization of life. Animism informed all life as the worldview that animals, plants, and inanimate objects—possess a soul or spiritual essence. As Plotinus said, "The stars are like letters which inscribe themselves at every moment on the sky. Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other; as has been said: "Everything breathes together."

To recover this gnôsis was to recover our divinity and Iamblichus maintained that the Greeks had lost touch with this sacred mystagogy -- radical non-dualism. Iamblichus unified the teachings of Plato and Aristotle within a Pythagorean framework and integrated this philosophic synthesis with the oldest forms of traditional worship.

Proclus integrated theurgy with culture, religion, philosophy, myth, and ritual. His key principle was that theurgy and philosophy are both rooted in imitation of the divine demiurgical activity of the cosmos.

Theurgy ritually enacts a way to enter mysteries that discursive thinking, necessarily divided, cannot penetrate. Theurgy is not opposed to philosophical thinking but is its culmination. The theurgy of the later Platonists followed Plotinian lines of reflection to the very roots of thought. The Lesser Mysteries, cleansing of the soul from bodily fixation, is a means to receive the transformative vision, the Greater Mysteries.

Theurgy is described as an effort to bring the Platonic tradition closer to Plato himself (and Pythagoras) and away from the radical dualism of the Gnostics. Theurgy implies a worldview whose consideration of the sensible world is deeply embedded in Plato's demiurgic cosmogony and Hermetic rebirth. The writings of theurgic Platonists and Hermetists share a common purpose: to make the soul immortal and divine. 

Unlike the dualistic and gnostic deprecation of matter, material embodiment became the vehicle of salvation for theurgists,  an attempt to ritually realign the human soul with the cosmos. The practice of this hieratic art united theurgists with gods through rituals specifically coordinated with their conditions and capacities. Deified theurgists do not escape from their bodies or from nature. They embrace both from a divine perspective. 

An initial mistake is to read Platonism as dualism, assuming that Platonists want to escape from the material realm to enter the noetic world of immaterial Forms. This misreading of Plato is based on a literalizing his mythical language regarding the Forms.

It is certainly a misreading of theurgic Platonism. From a theurgic perspective, dualism and acosmicism mark a preliminary stage of the initiate’s experience followed by a monist or non-dualist embrace of the entire cosmos, one that marks the culmination of rebirth and immortalization. The initiate's limited, mortal view is replaced by the universal perspective of a god, the goal of both theurgy and Hermetism. (Shaw)

Hermes insists that rebirth into divinity “cannot be taught.” Hermes demonstrates rebirth as  becoming united with the will of the Demiurge, participating in cosmogenesis, chanting or singing the universe into being. Entering this state is shifting orientation from part to whole, from mortal to immortal.

Rebirth is giving birth to the cosmos. The trigger for this transmission is silence, when the mind becomes still, when we become utterly receptive. What cannot be thought can still be received and enacted.

Iamblichus maintains that theurgy cannot even be thought. For Iamblichus “contact with the divine is not knowledge (oude gnôsis).” True knowledge of the gods, he says, cannot be reached through dialectical discussion, for “what would prevent theoretical philosophers from achieving theurgic union with the gods?

Generated by the gods, this world is the channel of return: “Iamblichus’s solution was that the blessedness of embodiment as portrayed in the Timaeus was available to the particular soul only by imitating the activity of the Demiurge, and this was possible only through theurgic rites” (Shaw, 55).

Magic was pursued as enactment of the divine will and an aid in regeneration. Organic unity of the cosmos was held together by natural correspondences that could be harnessed. Active natural magic can positively reshape identity and destiny.

Theurgy is way beyond our ordinary frame of reference. Even among those occultists, mystics, mages, or Jungians who might flirt with alchemy, qabalah, and astrology for symbolic insight, few become masterful practitioners of such arcane mantic arts and magical formulae. 

The real revival of Neoplatonism ignited when humanists revealed the treasures of late antique Greece to the Renaissance intelligentsia of Italy, France, and Germany. A quintessential religious philosophy, Neoplatonism has motivated the development of both systematic metaphysical speculation and mysticism. Plotinus tried reconciling the Platonic paradigm of the philosophical life with highly elaborate metaphysics. 

The orientation of this movement was an avid intellectual curiosity directed toward imaginal contemplation mainly in terms of the classical ideas and Gods, and by a particular devotion to Eros and to soul. It was held in the net of Neoplatonic metaphysics dependent on the Platonist fantasy of the psyche. Consciousness itself is essentially non-local existing outside of time and space.

Plotinus described an order of three primary, hierarchical realms or hypostases: the One or Good, Intellect (nous), and World-Soul (psyche). The One, worshiped in silence, is a complete unity-in-itself, nondual. The Intellect, the second hypostasis, is a unity-in-diversity. Its nature is undivided while multiplicity simultaneously subsists within it. As the Intellect is a unity-in-diversity, the World-Soul is a unity-and-diversity.

Plotinus asserts that our world and all entities are ensouled. The World-Soul is immanently present everywhere and in everything. This soul is the bearer of a precise form of consciousness. The plurality of souls subsist within a totality. Individual souls are the many facets of the world soul itself.

They also inform the human microcosm (immanence), as well as the universe of the macrocosm (transcendence), and the path of aspiring to the Good -- a participatory metaphysics. This Neoplatonic cosmology of reciprocal sympathy is a top-down view of the universe that is very human, namely what it means to be human.

Theurgy in Neoplatonism

Neoplatonism designates a strand of Platonic philosophy that began with Plotinus in the third century CE against the background of Hellenistic philosophy and religion. Neoplatonist notions on the subtle body inspired Renaissance thinkers such as Marsilio Ficino and Paracelsus in their formulations of the (World or Cosmic) Soul, spiritus, and the astral body.

In Neoplatonic metaphysics, spiritus governs and animates the body. Ficino defines spiritus as the element which links the immaterial soul to the material body. It retains images and memories perceived by the soul and elaborates new representations. Our memories are encased in fantasy. Through establishing contact with this spiritus we can contact the World Soul and the stars, for they are present in this spiritus.

The corpus mundi and anima mundi became linked by the ‘spiritus mundi’. According to Ficino it was ‘necessary’ to practice the ‘magia naturali’, natural magic. He rejected the more ‘demonic’ magic and conjuring that needed to be excluded, to nourish the spiritus and to support a healthy state of being.

Renaissance Neoplatonists developed the overall idea that the microcosmic Soul could merge with the macrocosmic World Soul that enables us to participate in universal wisdom. Spiritus was considered the first instrument of the Soul and it took a central place in the discourse of magic.
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The three basic principles of Plotinus' metaphysics are called by him ‘the One’ (or, equivalently, ‘the Good’), Intellect, and Soul. Plotinus believed in one universal soul, which correlates with the Anima Mundi in which symbols are adoring the immaculate holiness of life. When Proclus proclaimed, "The God is One, the gods are many," he distinguished philosophical monism from polytheistic theology.

The objective psyche is the imaginal world revealing the secret essence of the gods. In the soul psyche is as real as the physical world. Finding, knowing and using mystical signs characterizes the theurgist, a master of the hieratic art. That symbolic understanding becomes fully incarnated by the grace of divine revelation and different modes of 'presence' at all levels of reality.

The Neoplatonists also referred to an imaginal body, theochema, a vehicle for operating in the subtle realms -- a subtle body or virtual reality. Synonyms include the astral body, the glorious body, the spirit-body, the radiant body, the resurrection body, the luciform body, the celestial body, the ‘augoeides’ (radiant) or ‘astroeides’ (star-like or sidereal body), and the diamond body. 

The Western origin of the subtle body is rooted in Hermetic, Platonic, and Gnostic literature. The phenomenon was considered the heart of several forms of magical, mystical, and alchemical practices related to esoteric traditions such as (Tibetan) Buddhism, Theosophy, and Hermeticism.

This body of light, the central structure of worship, can be developed by magical (theurgic) practices. Theurgy is experimenting with the underlying categorical structure of imagination. The symbols of the gods are opaque to the human mind and do their work by themselves. They are for use, not explanations.

Theurgy relates ultimately to nondual experience beyond discourse. The dialogical self can be seen as a multiplicity (radical plualism) of I positions or possible selves, with a decentralized, polyphonic character. This view dissolves the sharp "self-not self" boundary. 

Transpersonal theory is wholly based on the "Dynamic-Dialectical Paradigm," conversations between the ego and the dynamic ground of psyche (Washburn, 1988).  Its static representation is the "Structural-Hierarchal Paradigm." In the therapeutic context, Jungians refer to this dialectical process as "active imagination," engagement of the ego and the unconscious.  

Proclus thought that since philosophy is related to the divine, it should not disregard mythology and theurgy. Myth represents relationships outside space and time as events in mythological history.

Theurgy's invocations symbolically evoke divine illumination. The awakening of the occult life residing in the Divine Name is an image which enlarges the soul's field of vision. Symbolic operations resonate with the imagination and permit communication with the gods. Initiation is theurgic, and ideally culminates in nondual experience.

The history of theurgy is the history of the soul and our cosmological relationship to it and to spirit. Theurgy is an emotionally-loaded topic and magic, naturally, has been the object of religious persecutions in an attempt to keep paganism at bay, as described in Gregory Shaw's Theurgy and the Soul:

"Theurgy and the Soul is a study of Iamblichus of Syria (ca. 240-325), whose teachings set the final form of pagan spirituality prior to the Christianization of the Roman Empire. The theory and practice of theurgy was the most controversial and significant aspect of Iamblichus's Platonism. Theurgy literally means 'divine action.' Unlike previous Platonists who stressed the elevated status of the human soul, Iamblichus taught that the soul descended completely into the body and thereby required the performance of theurgic rites--revealed by the gods--to unite the soul with the One. ...Iamblichus's ideas persisted well into the Middle Ages and beyond. His vision of a hierarchical cosmos united by divine ritual became the dominant world view for the entire medieval world and played an important role in the Renaissance Platonism of Marsilio Ficino. ...But modern scholars have dismissed him, seeing theurgy as ritual magic or 'manipulation of the gods.' Theurgy was a subtle and intellectually sophisticated attempt to apply Platonic and Pythagorean teachings to the full expression of human existence in the material world. (Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul)

Magic is more than the mere use of occult qualities or invisible principles to bring about, by invisible media, a certain effect. The Greek word for magic means wisdom. How should wisdom be pursued and activated? Neoplatonism was an evolutionary leap from the dubious superstitious magic, conjuring, and necromancy of the Middle Ages. 

The special knowledge of the magician is an understanding of the invisible cords which connect everything. Since the only means for manifesting the supra-cosmic gods was through the unity and sympathy of the material world, the theurgies which worked in both orders (spiritual and physical) have the same divine cause and are integrally related. 

Magic is transformation, and the magician causes transformations in the inner world as well as the outer world. We must start with the inner world, however, in order to achieve the necessary self control. 

There is a theurgy which concerns itself with worldly or material benefits from the intramundane gods working through sympathy. Another higher type of theurgy makes use of the lower level of reality but transcends it by analogically becoming it.

The aspirant is raised to the divine level and communes with the transcendent gods for immaterial benefits which concern the very 'salvation' of the soul and union with the radically transcendent divine. The writings of theurgic Platonists and Hermetists describe a common purpose: to make the soul immortal and divine.
 
They Know the Self

The central idea of philosophy is to 'Know Thyself.' If the theurgists were not interested in the ego-fulfillment of lower magic, what exactly were they seeking in rituals of unification? The profound understanding of the one self, the depth of the human being, and the nature of ultimate reality...the mind looking at itself. Cosmological mysticism with theurgy is a means to that nondual end -- using ritual to ignite the unitive state that transcends it.

There was a time when being a true philosopher meant loving wisdom in its nakedness, seeking the underlying principles which embodied her through direct experience -- pure awareness of awareness. The magician finds Nature beautiful in her essential nakedness, and hopes for a sacred union. We should pursue wisdom in that same nakedness -- non-conceptual, pure, intrinsic or natural primordial awareness -- empty awareness. 

The "Great Perfection" of Tibetan Buddhism aims at discovering and continuing in the natural primordial state of being. Dzogchen refers to such self-liberation as 'the ground of primordial perfection,' sustaining our experience of being in naked awareness, by remaining within the field of timeless awareness, wisdom awareness, the radiance of awareness. Kabbalah calls it Ain Soph Aur, Limitless Light, "boundless (infinite) light." Radiant wholeness is the energetic field of being.

Light is an excitation of empty space, which is really a plenum. It is an unobservable infinite energy field – a sparkling, radiant diamond-expanse. This diamond-like clarity of truth unveiled is perceptible through meditation, wisdom, inspiration, creativity and genius. Undifferentiated creative energy is the source of Knowledge, gnosis.

There is tremendous spiritual potential in emptiness. A return to the absolute void is a return to the womb for rebirth after destructuring or creative regression. It means a process of ego dissolution and personality deconstruction, swimming upstream against the flow of the stream of consciousness to our Unborn roots. We reach “escape velocity” beyond our personalistic behaviors, emotions, thoughts, and beliefs about who "we" are. 

The ego "takes the plunge." It lets go and dissolves its old matrix, its old boundaries. When its boundaries melt, ego-consciousness dissolves into deep consciousness. The "wave merges with the ocean," and experiences its own deep transpersonal nature.

It awakens to an infinitely wider reality of universal energy waves. In the ocean of creativity, "your own consciousness, shining, void and inseparable from the great body of radiance, has no birth, nor death." All substances are part of our own consciousness. This consciousness is vacuous, unborn, and unceasing. (Leary, 1964)

Jung associated universal mind, as the transpersonal source of being, with the Collective Unconscious, which contains all information in subtle form. All things in the universe have a connection with the universal mind. Nothing can exist without that unmanifest connection to everything else. Separation is an illusion for we are all one.

Jung termed the nondual "Pleroma," where nothingness is the same as fullness"...an Absolute in which there is no division between subject and object. Jung intuited this nondual Pleroma to be a collective transpersonal reservoir, an ocean of collective unconscious. From this omnipotent universal Pleroma our individual psyches coalesce around "attractor archetypes." In this sense Jung echoed the eastern axiom: "Emptiness is Form, Form is Emptiness."

Cutting through mere stillness reveals an undivided, wide-awake, clear and vivid state. Jung described his intuitive apprehension of the Pleroma exhaustively in Seven Sermons to the Dead. Jung's Plenum is a field of universal potential, unbound luminosity and infinite awareness. We penetrate the true nature of all phenomena.

Only the radiant state of clear consciousness remains. All clarity comes from this luminous substrate shining through normal sensory and mental phenomena. All phenomena emanate from absolute space, including those that constitute our subjective phenomenal experience. Absolute vacuum is only realized by contemplative insight in primordial consciousness. Awareness becomes limitless in scope. All states are permeated by the clear light of primordial awareness. 
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