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Creating Bridges: The Spiritual & Philosophical |
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Teachings from the Western Mystery Traditions:
The Esoteric "Paths of Return"
Ritual Elders
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by Jacquelyn Small
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The Numinous Life
Our calling is to a sacred vocation ? being technicians of the soul. Technology is defined by Webster?s Dictionary as "the practical application of knowledge, especially in a particular area." Technicians of the soul are Ritual Elders, who work through the science of the soul: We set up an experiment, go through the experience of it, then become an expression of each new process that we?ve learned through our own direct knowing. This is how we bring Spirit into human form.
As we train, and learn, and evolve, we become guides for the human race, able to access, protect, and ultimately utilize the creative energies of the sacred in the ordinary world. This is not "an ego trip." When the ego gets involved in one?s sacred personal evolution, the person will fall rather than rise in stature. You can?t just decide to be a spiritual guide; people see this in you and call you out.
As a Ritual Elder, you will experience many inner events that are numinous in their character. The word numen means something that appears as mysterious and ineffable and causes a felt reaction in one?s psyche. A numinous event refers to a universally appearing object or experience that cannot be reduced to some psychological or social explanation. A numinous event seizes and controls the human subject, who is always rather its victim than its creator. Its mystery is beyond the power of words to define it. Its meaning can only be sensed by the intuition, or gained through direct knowing.
A numinous experience can also be intoxicating. As a source of religious longing, it bestows the feeling of beatitude beyond compare. Too many of these mystical experiences happening close together can even bring about a "spiritual emergency," which can look exactly like a psychotic episode, and is often misdiagnosed or treated as such. We must learn to move into the non-ordinary with a sense of protection and reverence, while keeping our Observer Self consciousness in tact. We begin and end this process with very clear boundaries between the inner and the outer, between what?s sacred and what isn?t. This protects us from the "high voltage" of too much spiritual force hitting us at once.
Here are two such examples of numinous experiences from my own life:
I had been studying esoterics for years and had attended several powerful workshops where much talk of past lives had occurred. One morning, shortly after one of these workshops, I was getting dressed in my bedroom ? just an ordinary day ? and suddenly the whole room became a Greek marble-floored, expansive dressing room. There was a large bathing tub complete with the sound of running water and the smell of lavender. Several urns of greenery surrounded me, like I?d never even seen in this reality. On one side of the sunken marble tub, I saw a lioness lying peacefully, looking at me with large, adoring eyes. The flash occurred, the picture in brilliant color was clear and distinct, then instantly, the scene was gone.
Another time, after a lengthy period of deep study and meditation, I went out to my hot tub at midnight during a full moon. As I sat there in its warmth, I became aware of a small space vehicle sitting beside the hot tub, about the size of a golf cart, with a being sitting at the wheel staring at me. He was telepathically telling me to come with him. For a moment, I panicked and started to run into the house. Then, I got ahold of myself and simply told him "No;" I couldn?t go with him, I said, because my son was getting married the following week and I was needed here. When this vehicle lifted off, every light in our house sputtered into complete darkness all at once. A complete blackout occurred. (And I found out the next morning that all the electricity in our entire neighborhood had gone out that night for 3 hours!) Later I realized I?d drawn a picture of the driver of this space ship in my journal. I had entitled the portrait "A Messenger from Another World." It was as though I?d manifested him with my own creative imagination. The creative imagination is how our psyche "thinks." And its impact can cause felt shifts of consciousness or even cure sickness in the psyche. Images and symbols produced by the unconscious are more than mere signposts to a deeper understanding; they have a healing power in their own right. The experience of the numen is the real therapy.
The archetypal Self is the creator of these inner processes. It is always seeking balance and wholeness. The Self is the ordering, regulating, harmonizing, and meaning-giving agency of the psyche. The Self has a spiritual or god-like quality to it ? a spiritus rector -- far greater than the ego can conceive or integrate. It functions as a spirit guide, inner genius, or power animal. The Self is the archetype of orientation and meaning. And though the ego seeks to organize our lives, it must have a relationship to our deeper Self, where true order and meaning reside, if we are to come whole.
Does the true Self magically identify with the numen? Do we seek "what eye hath not seen and ear hath not heard" because this ineffable sacred aspect of life is our true home? I think so. Its allure and power comes from the fact that the numinous reveals to us the source of our being. We have nostalgia for the sacred. We long for it as we do for home when we are feeling lost or disconnected. For something to be sacred it must be equivalent with reality and with being, simultaneously. Sacredness is a power. We must be able to relate to something greater than our little ego selves and establish a sense of the sacred in our lives for our lives to have a sense of meaning and purpose. Otherwise, we never feel complete.
According to Marcea Eliade, the sacred manifests itself in patterns or themes made up of repetitions of celestial archetypes, heroes, or gods, that come directly from Source. Our myths tell us their stories. These inner repetitious acts of archetypal sacred patterns are what make human beings truly human. For such repetitions assure that one?s life is real, enduring, and effective. In other words, the gods, archetypes and universal patterns are our blueprints for how to be fully human. And myth provides the exemplary form upon which our lives are structured and modeled.
At Our Depths, We are the World
We always already have this ancient Being, the archetypal Self, living within us. Whenever we are wounded or abused, this archaic one we are intended to be ? the one Ken Wilbur calls our Original Face - is thwarted and a certain degree of dissociation occurs to protect us. We develop a "subpersonality" who steps in and pretends that it is us. Then, we act out as an incomplete or unhealed little self who limits and distorts our feelings and perceptions. Usually, everyone but us can see when we are coming from one of these little selves: the rageful one, the one who has to be right, the control freak, the victim.
To put on your Original Face and live as the archetypal Self, you must climb through several layers of psychic deposits before your Self can shine through. It must push through influences that come from
your animal ancestry
primeval ancestors
cultural groups (that provide your archetypal images)
your nation, clan, family,
and finally, your individual personality
Dr. Carl Jung described the Self as a "central fire" which starts at the base of ourselves, and rises upward through all the layers of the psyche, touching them with its numinosity.
In non-ordinary states of consciousness, the most archaic levels of the psyche can be activated in such a way that the deeper aspects of the psyche can be awakened and integrated. These give rise to archetypal imagery such as we experience in dreams and visions, and messages from our greater Self. Such imagery often compels our attention, entices the imagination, and awakens creativity. It helps us realize how big we are. This realization is transformational in itself.
Like the Platonic forms, the archetypes exert a sacred attraction upon the psyche and give it structure and direction in its libidinal flow. They come through as powers, gods, spirits, demons, laws, ideals, or anything we can name as being powerful, helpful, dangerous, beautiful or meaningful enough to be worshipped or feared. Archetypes may seize, invade, or possess the ego and are therefore experienced as ego-alien powers. Like jealous gods, they may compete for our total allegiance.
This kind of deep psychic work increases our harmonious and intense experience of being human. And the more deeply we go into the psyche, the less individual we become. Carl Jung believed that at bottom, our human psyche is simply Œthe world.? Whenever we can reach this depth of understanding of who we truly are, we have the power to arouse, affect, and take possession of our personal will and bedazzle ourselves with the awesome sacredness of being human.
Without our human effort and a strong commitment to do this deeper work, there is no way the sacred can be formulated in this world. We are the vehicles that Spirit uses to consciously materialize its transformative processes in this reality.
The Power of Ritual
Ritual will always intensify the vividness and potency of therapeutic imagery upon body, brain, and psyche. Ritual functions as a psychic container for personal or communal transformations. It imposes a restrictive form upon archetypal energies. Sacred ritual effects a transformation from a lower to a higher level of consciousness, a death of the old and birth of the new.
Transformative ritual is necessary when there is a lot of chaos or destructive power around. Because of the law of inertia, a body in motion will remain in motion, or a body resting will remain at rest until something unusual intervenes and propels it to change. The transformative power of ritual and rites of passage bring about dramatic shifts in consciousness in ordinary living and passage through life cycles. Sometimes a vivid ritual needs to occur to integrate a subpersonality with the Self. Sacred ritual cuts across psychological, anthropological and neurobiological domains. To do this work most effectively we learn to think with the heart rather than just through the head.
Ritual Elders enter into the dreamscape of another and travel through the collective unconscious with them. It is both a subjective and an objective experience. They travel together with their clients in non-ordinary reality and bring back to this earth the boon. These seasoned travelers of inner space help people see the world as ensouled or inspirited. Everything is alive with the ineffable, mysterious power of Spirit. There are both benevolent and evil spirits, however. Everything that exists on this planet has its dark side, since we live in apparent duality here. So we must learn to harmonize with the benevolent spirits and dispel the evil ones. Often, the evil ones are banished simply by our lack of interest or attention paid to them; they die of attrition.
Ritual Elders work with all kinds of mystical arts and transpersonal or psychospiritual methodologies -- such as breathwork, guided meditation, musical journeys of Self-remembrance, shamanic journeying, and esoteric astrology -- to access and retrieve lost parts of the Self. In sacred space, Ritual Elders evoke the senses with incense, fire, chanting, rhythm, movement, gesture, and trance. They can mobilize the healing energies of one?s inner physician. For the Ritual Elder, religious values become more about connecting with the archetypal Self than with any outer form of religion. They help people seek a meaningful experience with the spiritual life, one that gives them a sense of fulfillment and sacred purpose.
When a Ritual Elder becomes your mentor, the process of your personal transformation, called individuation, takes on a life of its own. It is through the constitution and stewardship within the boundaries of sacred-transformative space that this process can safely unfold. Sacred space is created by our willingness to cooperate with Spirit. Humans cannot make sacred space happen. But we can be stewards of this holy expression of Spirit by following the formulas Spirit requires. We set up the experiment, surrender to the experience, and then express it for the world. Step by step we transform into who we?ve come here to be.
The Self is an ultimate divine Reality living right inside our skins that leads us to our completion as human souls. We?ve become estranged from our deeper unconscious and bodily processes and never integrate this amazing archaic Self. Consequently, we are out of touch with our human instincts and the ageless wisdom that lives within us. This inner ancient Being is our highest identity. We can step into the Self by evoking images of the ideal we intend to be. This is how it guides us.
The loss of the sense of the sacred in our world today is our greatest defeat. We must return to the numinous, mysterious attracting/repelling, ineffable ways of Spirit. Otherwise our lives are devoid of depth and meaning. Our sacred vocation is to do our inner work and awaken to our responsibilities as Ritual Elders when we are called.
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Jacquelin Small,
Spiritualist, Clairvoyant Psychologist
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JACQUELYN SMALL, LMSW, is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Texas at Austin with degrees in human psychology and clinical social work. She is a licensed non-denominational minister and a licensed psychotherapist who works with both spiritual and psychological concerns.
Jacquelyn is a popular presenter and consultant in academic settings, new-thought churches and new paradigm conferences and mental health settings, known for her easy-going, self-disclosing, humorous style of intimate relating with her audiences.
She has a long history in addiction counselor training, consulting and counseling, and trains all kinds of health professionals in the emerging field of spiritual psychology. She is one of the teachers who has been selected by Unity Church for their national TV ministry. She served as the Director of Training for the Texas Commission on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse for nine years, and served on the adjunct faculty of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Stanford, California for four years.
Jacquelyn has authored eight books about soul-based psychology and the process of personal transformation, some of which have become classics in the counseling and consciousness fields. She is represented by the Tom Grady Agency. She has many audio tapes as well through Eupsychia's publishing company, Eupsychian Press.
Her published books are:
* Becoming Naturally
Therapeutic (Bantam)
* Transformers, the
Artists of Self-Creation
(DeVorss & Co.)
* Awakening in Time
(Eupsychian Press)
* Embodying Spirit (HarperSanFrancisco
/Eupsychian)
* Rising to the Call with
co-author Mary Yovino (DeVorss & Co.)
* Becoming a Practical Mystic (Quest Books)
* Psyche's Seeds-The 12 Sacred Principles of Soul-Based Psychology (Tarcher/Putnam
/Penguin)
Jacquelyn is a regular columnist for Science of Mind Magazine and is featured often in other magazines. Among the many conferences and programs for which Jacquelyn has keynoted or presented programs, include:
* The Association for Humanistic Psychology
* Association for Transpersonal Psychology
* Omega Institute
including their Body &
Soul Conferences
* Tracor and Texaco, Inc.
* Church of Religious Science Annual
Conference
* Great Lakes Addiction Conference
* Whole Life Expo
* The College of William & Mary's Annual Addictions Conference
* Most major universities
in the United States
* U.S. Department of Heath, Education and Welfare
* Omega Institute's
Body & Soul Conferences
* New Age Magazine's Bahama Teaching Cruise
The ConferenceWorks!
She has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show, America's Talking, Wisdom Television and Radio, New Dimensions Radio, NPR's People's Pharmacy and a CNN's series on Alternative Healing and continues to make regular guest appearances for radio and television.
Jacquelyn Small serves on the Advisory Board of the International Psychosynthesis Association, the National Council on Codependence, and The Holistic Alliance of Professional Practitioners, Entrepreneurs and Networkers, Inc.
She is the Founding Director of Eupsychia (pronounced u-si'-ki-a) Institute which means "good psyche" or "well being" in Greek, a not-for-profit professional training and healing program in Soul-Based Psychology and Integrative Breathwork. With her staff of dedicated, experienced spiritual therapists, she conducts workshop intensives throughout North America on a regular basis.
Eupsychia Institute
PO Box 151960
Austin, TX 78715-1960
(800) 546-2795
Local (512) 327-2795
Fax (512) 327-6043
eupsychia1@aol.com
Contact Webmistress
www.eupsychia.com
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