The Divine as Encompassed Dualities

As we are full of dualities, leading to non-wholeness and non-integration of attributes, the Divine is the integration, the wholeness: The Divine is all dualities encompassed. As such the Divine is the unmanifest. We are the manifest, with the potential to come closer and closer to that immense wholeness, without ever reaching it. But we have choice, and so we are free to choose whether we will fall asleep in the dualities and indulge their compulsive nature, or scrutinise them, transmute the pain and encompass them. These two divergent paths can be called evolutionary and devolutionary.

As wholeness, the Divine has been depicted in various religions. In Christianity one symbol of that wholeness is the tetragrammaton - a square, depicting for one thing the 4 elements of astrology and alchemy, giving rise to the unpronouncable name JHVH which are the acronyms sitting one at each corner. This gives rise to the name for the Divine of JeHoVaH. This name is simply a shorthand for the wholeness symbolised by the tetragrammaton. Wholeness can only be a merging of masculine and feminine attributes and principles, thus it seems appropriate to name the divine, as J.Todd Ferrier always states, the Father-Mother.

Symbols of wholeness come in several forms, emanating from dream imagery which occurs in anyone the world over. It could be the square, the circle, gold, a precious stone, a ring, the uroboros, our house with its many rooms and levels, the hermaphrodite (being the dual sexed being containing all encompassed polarities from both masculine and feminine). Practically in dreams, these symbols seem to depict our current attitude to the process of becoming whole, or encompassing a duality that we are currently involved in on the surface of our life. They depict how we are resisting the inner divinely guided process towards wholeness.

The Tibetan Mandala is a good depiction of the nature of duality. Half beast, half human beings are lined up at the bottom. Around the circle of wholeness are depictions of male-female couples having sex, joining their attributes (as far as the dream meaning of sex is concerned). At the top sit the saints, having encompassed what is below them. Edinger says of the mandala symbolism in The Mysterium Lectures - A Journey Through C.G.Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis:

The first [inner] circle would represent the condition of initial unconscious unity that we start with when we are born. It's the state of unity which animals live their whole existence. Then, in the course of ego development, the gradual and conscious discrimination of the four functions [synonymous with the four elements] turns the initial circle of unconscious wholeness into a square.... Harmonizing and unifying can only be achieved by a further circling of the square. First the original circle must be squared and then the achieved square must be circled in order to achieve wholeness on a conscious level.

In the Western and Christian symbolism the mandala, the sacred circle, is in the Celtic Cross. When the corners of the tetragrammaton are joined across its square, it gives rise to the cross. So the Celtic Cross with its circle and cross combined is similar to the Eastern mandala in symbolic interpretation.

The Source of Elemental Potencies

In the alchemical framework there are many "operations" which can act upon our resistance patterns to help transmute them. The potencies behind these operations come from our inner divine nature - they are part of our fundamental makeup. These operations include the four elements. Fire purifies the desire nature gradually through burning us through to the essential inner desire (and as said previously, this fire is particularly noticeable in a discipline powerful enough to evoke it as an intense bodily sensation). The sublimation of air gradually enables a divine reasoning of things (reasoning from an understanding of the inner divine laws and the real cause of things). Water dissolves the hardened one-sided persona bringing in compassion for, and empathy with, our disowned parts. Lastly earth brings us for one thing the solidity, containment and limitation of our alchemical vessel (either willingly created or forced upon us in life), and for another the inner under-standing - the solid rock of realisation from which we are sure of how to be and how to act and can proceed with commitment and patience.

These potencies are brought to us in life entrenched in resistance - when we are in their cross of matter they are turned outward only, so that any standard definition of them we might read depicts them only in this gross aspect. Only harnessing them for the process of transmutation can take us out of the square or cross of matter and into the circle of wholeness or encompassment of duality.

The Divine Nature as Guide

Not only does our deepest inner nature create our outer experiences to show us our one-sidedness, and provide the potencies from within us to transmute our way out of the resultant mess, but it also acts as the guide to use these potencies to do it. In alchemy this guide is "The Spirit Mercurius" - although really Mercurius is the totality of the divine in the process and cannot be pinned down to something, because it is the source of everything we need to become more conscious. Our more striking and profound dreams contains symbolic representations of our outer life and how we are dealing with it - or more to the point how we are not. Such dreams show us how we are misusing the inner elemental forces for one thing, and they speak in a rich symbolic alchemical language, ever trying to teach us our own process of transmutation - all the more avidly once we make attempts to understand the language.

In body electronics pointholding we only get what we need and not what we want. So many people come to pointholding expecting things to happen to them physically and emotionally, only to be met with disappointment when none of it happens as they yet again lie on a therapy table sound alseep or completely detached. From what I see of someone with a persistent attitude who still continues, everything we get coming to the surface is part of what we need to go deeper into our real problems of one-sidedness. Such things are deeply buried and unconscious, so making a conscious choice of what we need to work on is fruitless - it is always brough up to be right in front of us, we just have to spot it. Once we can put our expectations to one side we can accept that something far greater than us is guiding the content of the sessions and heading us towards a definite goal, even though we are likely to see every session initially as a being on a completely different topic. Essentially all a facilitator is doing is reminding us how to harness the forces for the work of transmutation and acting as a co-guide into spotting what is just coming to the periphery of our awareness. We are at best only the real alchemist's assistant.

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