The Persistence of Memory
“Nothing that happens is ever forgotten, even if you can’t remember it.”
~ Hayao Miyazaki, Spirited Away
The train line Berlin Bratislava runs along a deep scar of separation. My German world of grown-up frustrations dissolves in the last tunnel before the main station, and I magically appear in a dingy little town, so much smaller than I remember. A couple of joyful days are filled with almost unbearable tenderness and I’m followed by a trail of scarlet trickle from freshly re-opened wounds.
Once I’m away, most of my memories of the place are remote, washed out by the daily hustle of the city. I am an adult now, competent and independent, in control of my own emotional nourishment. The before jumbled into a warm soup of faded emotions, usually forgotten with the first inhales upon waking. But when I confront this dream-like world in reality, it shakes me to the bone - for better or worse. You know, the good ol’ “if you think you’re enlightened, go home for Christmas”.
What happens when the brain forgets the names, faces and linear narratives? I came to believe that all the fragments trickle deeper into the undercurrents of the psyche. This wisdom acquired and transmuted into the soft lining of the mind reveals itself as intuition. The gut feeling is not just a mode of thinking for people who can’t reason rationally - it’s far superior to any argument you can note down in a few glyphs. But outside of the ordered realm of linguistic thinking, spectres easily merge with one another. I’ve been pondering, surely more than once - how to tell apart the voice of the wise intuition and the pre-conditioned reactions, contorting the perception out of fear and past hurts?
The Shadow and the Self
When I first stumbled upon Jung, I knew he was onto something. He was thinking along similar lines, and defined the problem as ‘telling apart the Shadow and the Self’. Both of these entities generate irresistible urges and impulses - following one leads to the bondage of delusion, the other promises progress towards mystical individuation.
Jung points out that the rational mind is not of much help here; He tells a story from Koran, of Moses’ not-so-funky meeting with the angel al-Khidr:
Moses wants to learn from the angel, but al-Khidr claims he won't have patience unless Moses promises not to make any hasty judgements. During their travels, the angel commits several vile crimes and illogical acts - he sinks a boat full of fishermen, kills a young man, repays inhospitality with repairing a fallen wall in a city… Moses tries to keep his promise, but eventually, he gets angry and scolds al-Khidr for his actions. To this, al-Khidr states that this violation of the promise marks their separation and now he shall address Moses’ scorns. He explains that many acts seem evil or malicious, but are actually merciful - the boat was saved from falling into the hands of a cruel king, the young man was about to gravely disobey his pious parents, the wall hid a treasure belonging to poor orphans.
Moses thought he was ready for wisdom. But his narrow mind didn’t allow him to grasp the greater picture, the interconnectedness of reality. He could see and trust only what his two eyes revealed to him - his intuition wasn’t strong enough to let him yield to blind faith. Maybe if he had proof, an official paper, stamped and sealed. But he didn’t, and for all we know, in his eyes, al-Khird could have been our old friend hiding his red hat with a cockerel’s feather.
Divider of fortunes
As the old tale of Cinderella tells us, telling apart the good peas from the bad ones is much easier with external help. James Hillman, a founder of the Archetypal psychology movement explored this helping voice existing as an external entity, a Daimon. He treats it as a psychological complex that appears as a guiding spirit of a person. Hillman deals a lot with terms like ‘fate’ and ‘calling’ and a daimon is that part of the psyche that points in the right direction towards this ultimate fulfilment of one’s potential.
While the Jungian school had a very formative influence on me, our opinions diverge in regards to the ontological status of the concepts discussed - I simply don’t think it’s all ‘in your head’ in the conventional sense of a ‘head’.1 The idea of a daimon runs deeply through the fabric of western thought and the question of the actual or virtual reality of this entity is not too important for the following passage, so let us look at a couple of examples.
Originally a lesser deity in the ancient Greek canon, daimon is considered a guiding spirit of a person who helps realise one’s full potential. Socrates claimed to have his daimonion (literally, a "divine something") in the form of a voice that guarded him against mistakes (but never told him what to do). In the Myth of Er that concludes Plato's Republic, we read that the soul has to choose before incarnation a daimon, spirit helper which will guide it during its existence.
Many Christians believe in guardian angels as protectors of an individual. The idea of a Holy Guardian Angel is central to the techniques of Abramelin the Mage, a German Christian Cabbalist that laid a founding stone of most of the later Golden Dawn based traditions. Not to mention that Crowley received his Book of Law from his extraterrestrial genius, Aiwass, which is pretty much perfectly in line with our definitions.
Maybe the ancient people lacked the understanding of the anatomy of consciousness, so they extracted a complex biochemical process into an external entity. Or perhaps the ‘intuition’ is a materialist explanation of these genuine, more-than-human relationships. I will leave these questions to the reader. But no matter which metaphysical operating system you run, we can see the universal effort to cultivate the voice of ‘inner wisdom’ into some comprehensible form.
Spirit Animal
These helping entities are acknowledged far beyond the regions influenced by Abrahamic religions. From Siberia to Mexico, the shamanic practice is found all across the globe. Of course, the local environment determines the use of particular plant teachers, musical instruments and costumes in the rituals, but the similarities in the cosmological believes are striking. Michael Harner is a founder of the ‘core shamanism’ that attempts to strip all the regional specificities from the practice. It names a few principles: the existence of different planes of reality connected with the axis mundi, the possibility of soul travel into these realms through trance states, the existence of compassionate spirit helpers. Even though these spirits usually appear in an animal form, their function at least partially overlaps with that of a daimon.
American Cosmic
As a big fangirl of Jacques Vallée, and a kid raised on Erich von Däniken’s phantasmagoria2, I can’t pass this topic without at least a brief mention of the extraterrestrials. If someone thinks that we, as a society, grew out of the need to believe in angels and demons, I’ll leave this one here: American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (honestly, I can hardly think of a more alluring title). Even though I closed the book with a semi-disappointed 3.5-star review3, I somehow keep coming back to its content.
In a similar vein to Vallée, Pasulka analyses UFOs with a theological attitude: to study the claims in a field such as religion, you don’t need to deal with the actual truthness of the statements; you work with the social implications of phenomena. She takes the reader on a ride through analogies between traditional Christian apparitions and modern reports of the alien abductees, MK-ultraesque experiments in manufacturing of false memories and various musings on the relationship between the folk tales and the UFO mythos.
(I’m really trying my best not to get on a wild tangent here - as you can see in the screenshot below, the overlaps between aliens, cults and religion have long been one of the hottest topics in my obsidian)
What I wanted to say with this little detour is that the notion of aliens as ‘spirit helpers’ guiding individuals or groups, were properly milked through the psychedelic UFO cult craze of the 60s (and 70s, and 80s and actually, also 90s). Draw your implication arrows whichever way you fancy, but the significant body of similar reports of ‘alien’ encounters can’t be ignored, they are something. In the end, it’s always the subjective experience we consider when dealing with all topics magical. These concepts bear more than superficial resemblance and need to be addressed as related phenomena.
Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
Now, to tie it all together. The question of which voice in you is the ‘right one’ is a topic as old as humanity. Spiritual traditions prescribe countless ways of revealing the wisdom of the body that knows much more than what’s available to the conscious mind.
Even though there isn’t a single prescriptive way to achieve this, I’ve got some good news: the golden rule of ✨‘ don’t be a dick’✨ applies almost universally! And the best method I’ve discovered so far towards cultivating this truly godlike virtue is mindfulness. Being mindful of how the thoughts leave sediments in one’s psyche, how everything experienced is remembered and internalised, how each action induces a reaction. It’s a great help in starting a conversation with a daimon, spirit animal, or your favourite mechanical elf of the hyperspace.
And how aggravating this could be! I hate it. I realise how my back hurts, how tense my shoulders are, how upset my stomach is all the time, how stressed and frustrated I am, all the passive-aggressive behaviour around me stands out, the stupidity, poverty, shallowness, senseless suffering and I mostly want to hysterically scream until the world stops. The meditation apps promised me an instant inner peace - my ass! If that’s your goal, save your money for the subscription. It gets worse before it gets better.
The thing is, all these awful things affect you all the same - the blinders on your eyes don’t neutralise the poisons; they just let them fall deeper into the unconsciousness. And the debris will wait there, and you will have to laboriously fish it out with your therapist a decade or two later. It’s said that it takes some time to get gradually adapted to being mindful and perceptive, especially in the middle of this 21st-century battleground. Be gentle with yourself and get used to failure. There won’t be any miracles in the beginning, but even a single minute more of your conscious presence is better than none.
Mindfulness lifts the veil of ignorance and exposes all the problems you will need to chew through. It helps you inspect the nature of your impulses, recognize the real ‘inner voice’ and guide you onto a path where eventually, you won’t need to restrain your mind anymore - because all the fruit it bears is pure. This is the key to ending the Sisyphean attempts to be a good person despite yourself - think of the effortlessness of Dao. We need to cure the disease, not just mitigate the symptoms.
You can poison the deep waters of our unconsciousness by repressed emotions and selfish drives - grab the phone and scroll the feed when you feel uncomfortable; it’s much easier than feeling shit. Or you can stay with the trouble and approach experiences with a gentle touch that allows their heaviness to sublimate into the present moment, without cramming the soul with worthless flotsam.
It’s all on you.
Every single minute.
Thank you for staying with me, and thank you for all your warm words this year. I never dreamt of finding such a stimulating and inspiring community of people and it makes me very happy to hear when the words resonate! Stay kind and have a smooth start to the new year. I wish us all plenty of time to read good books in 2022! 🖤
P.S. here are some AI generated pranks that really made my day
k.
Note: all those AI images are generated through text-to-image (CLIP + FFT) algorithm Aphantasia
My friend Matt likes to cite someone whose name I can’t recall now: it might be all in your head, but you don’t know how big your head is. :)
That’s a very different sport than Vallee, hahaha
The personal taste of the author just rubbed me the wrong way
https://www.amazon.com/Low-Magick-Your-Head-Just/dp/0738719242