Soul Matters, Book 2: Wrath of the Goddess

Phil finally got around to exploring his childhood to find the moment when he denied Nature, repressing it in favor of the consensus reality. The talk with Sandy made the job less onerous, because he could see a shared confusion, which he hadn’t seen before. The awareness of this confusion was probably prompted by his decision to explore his past – the primal source of his confusion.

Sandy’s earlier logic about male role models was on target, even with the Boomers. The Viet Nam War left another generation of men with PTSD, and what was worse was their reception by the public when they came home. Veteran organizations wouldn’t let them join, because they had ‘lost’ the war, which was the response on the right of the political spectrum. On the left, there was the ridicule and disdain that came with the epithet ‘baby killers.’ Not only was the question about what constituted a ‘sensitive’ man a legitimate question, but it led to the fuller question of what constituted a ‘real’ man to begin with. Phil and his generation were surrounded with ‘wounded’ men. This pattern was continuing with the War on Terror. The one consolation was that these soldiers weren’t blamed for the war and were welcomed home as heroes.

Determined now to gather some answers, at least those available in his own life, Phil sat on his leather pillow and quieted his mind. Instead of meditating, he brought the trail through the forest before his mind’s eye. Stepping onto the trail, he advanced a few steps though a thick curtain of energy to the bookcase. He sat on the up-trail side of the bookcase, which Manuel said allowed him access to memories difficult to get to. Placing his hand on the bookcase, he formed the question, ‘When did I repress Nature?’

He held the question in his mind, repeating it softly like a mantra, and filled himself with the energy of this reality-state. The woods around him stilled into a vibrant clarity. He could see the veins on the leaves of the trees next to him.

The question echoed in the silence of his quieted mind until tendrils of fear leaked up from his belly. He breathed into the fear. Then he felt his mind tightening in resistance, and random thoughts began to intrude. To counter this he focused more firmly on the mantra, ‘When did I repress Nature?’

Then came the sound of the ocean. The pungent smell of the sea filled him, and a memory swam into view. He was carrying his surfboard from the waves to the beach. At the time, he sported shoulder-length hair, and he shook his head like a dog expelling water.

Planting his board in the sand, he grabbed a beach towel from his pile of belongings and wiped off. Friends called their greetings, and he grinned replies. The surf wasn’t bad today, and other surfers were still carving passages through the waves under a tolerant sky.

“Son,” he heard his mother’s call from the bluff behind him. “We’re waiting.”

Scooping up his board and belongings, he ran to the nearby road. Pacific Coast Highway was a two-lane road back then, and the family station wagon was parked on the dirt shoulder of the road. He threw his board into the back, took his towel to sit on, and climbed into the rear seat.

Once he was situated, his father steered the car onto the pavement. When they were in the flow of traffic, he turned to Phil and said, “I thought we agreed you would be spending more time with books than surfing. We can’t afford college, you know, and if you’re going to get any kind of a job to keep you in the style you’re used to, you’ll need to go to college.”

Phil’s face fell. The feelings of exhilaration and connectedness to the ocean evaporated in a rush. Surfing was his only escape from the demands of his life, and they were determined to take it from him. It seemed, at the time, completely unfair and arbitrary. Yet he knew protesting was futile.

“I know,” young-Phil groaned. “I just had to do it one more time. Like a good-bye or something.”

“I understand,” his mother cooed. She was dressed in a flowered dress and wore a floppy straw hat. “It is really hard to grow up. I had this kitten when I was your age. It broke my heart to have to give it up when your grandfather was assigned a new duty station.”

No, Phil thought at the time, she didn’t know. She didn’t know anything about him at all. This was the Sixties. The world was one button-push away from total annihilation, and she was prattling on about a cat. For him, life was more precious, each moment of it, because of the fact that the world was fifteen minutes away from nuclear suicide. It sharpened the senses and made everything vibrant. The sea, the wind, the friendships, the whole world was precious and deserved better than what the leaders were providing.

He turned to his younger sister and brother who were sitting next to him. Neither of them wanted anything to do with this conversation. His brother was looking out the window, but his sister was rolling her eyes in a way mother couldn’t see.

Phil sighed deeply and made himself think of his future. He forced himself to believe his parents. He must sacrifice what he loved for what was right. If he was to make a difference in the world, he had to do so from within the existing institutions, not outside demonstrating in the streets. He did have to join the mainstream, learn the lessons available in college, and launch a career that would provide him with a meaningful way to contribute to the peace and love generation’s goal of a world that worked for everyone.

He looked once more at the ocean and pushed down the tears beginning to form within him. Clearing his throat, he turned away from the ocean for the last time to stare out the front window, his mother nattering on about her cat.

Phil bounced out of this memory because a rich mixture of emotions began pumping through his body. He still sat next to the bookcase on the trail, but he removed his hand from contact with it. The movement didn’t quiet the emotions building inside him. Since he couldn’t identify them, the emotions congealed into anger.

As the anger filled him, he jolted all the way back to the leather cushion. His eyes slammed open, and a primitive rage boiled up to overflow his puny self.

Quivering with this primal outrage, he sat there and impotently tried to control his breathing, while his mind screamed the teenage question, ‘Why? Why did you do this to me?’

An adult voice within him answered, ‘Because they did the best they knew how to prepare you for modern day life.’

‘The ocean gave me life,’ the teenager pleaded in reply.

‘But it doesn’t fit in the real world,’ was the calm response. ‘You have to grow up some time and accept your place in society. Adult responsibility does not allow for lolly-gagging at the beach.’

To which there was no answer -- except the unacceptable one: ‘So what?’

But today in Phil’s study, ‘So what?’ seemed reasonable. Why not have both? Why not live in the ‘real world’ and live in the Natural world at the same time? Why did it have to be either-or? What’s wrong with both-and?

The reasonable voice responded in a more ominous tone, ‘Because the flesh is mortal. It must ultimately be denied. Only the mind can be immortal. It must ultimately be who you are.’

Phil responded to the equation by simultaneously noting its inexorable logic, but also realizing for the first time the true meaning of the Divine-within. The mind was not immortal. Only the Spirit was. And the Spirit in him was known as the Goddess, and She liked to surf.

Then Phil began to cry. It was not the kind of crying he would have expected. Tears just dribbled from his eyes as he put the horrible pieces together. He was duped into belonging to a world in flight from the fear of death. Even his parents bought into the lie about the mind being immortal -- their minds lived on in their children, in their work, in their writings and history, in their last will and testament, in their financial legacies -- in their immortality projects. And they bullied him into the lie just as surely as they had been bullied themselves.

His body quit trembling, and the tears stopped flowing. He stood on unsteady legs and made his way to the liquor cabinet. Pouring himself two fingers of scotch, he raised the glass high and said, “To both-and, the better solution to life.”

When he finally toddled off to bed, he knew he was closer to a showdown with the Typhon.

The next day at work, he was more focused than he had been in a while, and he inspired his team of associates to greater customer service. He even made a couple of jokes they weren’t sure how to deal with. He never made jokes in a staff meeting.

During an early dinner with Betty, she reviewed with him the backdrop to a committee meeting she would be attending later in the evening. There was tension brewing, once again, in the Garden Club between rival factions vying for supreme power on the board of directors. Phil reiterated the basic management technique of active listening as the tactic to bring rival factions together.

“What does that accomplish?” Betty inquired as if confronted with a quadratic equation for the first time. She showed confusion but also awe in Phil’s ability to understand these issues.

Phil answered, “Through active listening, you can establish the common ground. From the common ground you can find solutions to the conflict each side can sign up for.”

“I don’t see how?”

“Okay,” Phil sighed, but then an impish impulse took him. “What’s the common ground between the pro-life people and the pro-choice people?”

Betty recoiled in horror, “There is none. The pro-choice people are baby killers.”

Phil suppressed a grin and said, “The common ground is unwanted pregnancy. If both sides accepted that, they could work together towards a common goal.”

Betty frowned, “Well, maybe, but I don’t think I could associate with those people.”

“That’s not the point. The point is, once you find common ground, you can work out solutions -- no matter how ideologically opposed both factions might be.”

“I see,” Betty smiled. “I wish you could come to our meeting and help us with this.”

“I will if you want, but it would be better if the executive committee did this on its own.”

“Of course,” Betty said in finality and stood to begin cleaning the table. “Thanks for your insights. I’ll bring it up in our executive session tonight.”

Phil could tell she was upset, and he knew it was because there was common ground between extreme points-of-view, in this case pro-life and pro-choice. At some level, she was intuiting the moral bankruptcy of political partisanship. And, since fundamentalist Christianity was all about feeling beleaguered, simple conflict resolution tactics would fatally undermine their strongest right to exist.

Betty left for her meeting, and Phil snuck away to Sandy’s house. The question in his mind was the bigger why-question -- why had Western society built itself on a foundation that separated it from Nature? This became a burning issue now that he was freshly reconnected to Nature.

He rolled in with a half-rack of beer. Sandy was finishing up his own dinner with a couple of surfing buddies. They left as Sandy plopped down on the living room couch. Phil joined him.

“Nature is a tricky thing,” Sandy said with a tired smile. “In the esoteric tradition, we lost our connection to Nature last, and it’s the first one we can regain.”

“I don’t follow.”

“If you assume the Law of Involution, then you can conceptualize Involution as a process of hardening. Things got denser and denser until Spirit was trapped, slumbering in Matter. At each step, we forgot the level above. The Mystery Schools say that we slowly lost our connection to Spirit, which is what those school tried to preserve.”

“Like a successive form of amnesia.”

Sandy nodded and slurped some beer. “The Mystery Schools talk about the Law of Evolution as a series of battles. In the first battle, consciousness established knowledge of where we are -- the space-time continuum. Then came the delusion of Eros to seat desire in animals. Finally the skull hardened. The third eye closed over. And man was trapped in his own head, self-aware by now, but so completely alone.”

“He wasn’t before?”

“No. The theory goes that the Elohim were there at the beginning. Yahweh stayed on after they left with the Sun. Yahweh was stationed on the Moon as a reminder of the self-reflection man was capable of.”

Phil shifted uncomfortably on the couch and breathed to release his tension.

Sandy didn’t notice and continued, “The Olympian gods came next to aid mankind -- they were concurrent with the Watchers in the Hebrew Bible.”

“And the Nephilim?”

“Well,” Sandy drawled and rose to get another beer, “in both cases, the story is that the gods mated with human women. Those giants were one result. However, the fuller story was the pattern for mammals wasn’t set yet. There were all kinds of animals running around. Centaurs, and whatnot. Sort of a Lord of the Rings universe that ended about 12,000 years ago.”

“There’s no fossil record of that,” Phil pointed out, but remembered Manuel had said the same thing.

“I know,” Sandy said and sat down. “But the esoteric history isn’t about objective events. It’s a subjective history of how we all came to be here when the Age of Man began.”

“Okay,” Phil conceded. “The Olympian gods show up. Then what?”

“The next battle came with the Typhon,” Sandy said. “He defeated Zeus, and it took Cadmus, a human hero, to save the day.”

“The gods needed our help.”

“Because we were drifting further away from being able to deal directly with the spiritual domain.”

“That sounds reversed.”

“I know, but think about it. We lost our connection to the Elohim, Yahweh, and finally the Olympians. Mankind no longer walked with the gods. We were almost on our own. Cadmus, Hercules, Perseus and that lot were the transition to what we have now.”

“Relying on our own resources.”

“And there are hints in the stories about how the bridge worked. Orpheus, the musician, created the musical scale.”

“The octave.”

“Which isn’t really eight notes, but seven. The eighth is the first one at a higher level. He bridged the spiritual with the mathematical. In one sense, he created science.”

“Okay,” Phil squirmed again. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know about the esoteric history of the world, but he pressed on. “Typhon, according to Manuel, is the monster each person has to defeat to gain individuality.”

“He is a consort of the Great Mother. Defeat him, and you lose your link to Nature.”

“But can’t you defeat him in a way that preserves a relationship with Nature?”

“Transcend and include -- the rule of developmental psychology,” Sandy chuckled. “And some cultures managed it. Ours didn’t. You could argue that Native Americans, prior to 1491 did, but that culture was destroyed primarily by diseases the Europeans brought with them. So we don’t know for sure.”

“How would you accomplish it?”

“Maintain a connection with Nature?”

“Yes.”

“Surfing. Subsistence living. Shamanism. Yoga can do it. Focus your meditations on Gaia. There are a bunch of ways to stay connected.”

Sandy finished his beer as Phil thought about the dilemma Sandy presented him. If he defeated Typhon, then he would be free from the ravenous cycles Mother Earth presided over. The new problem would be to preserve his connection with Nature -- which he broke from long ago and tentatively reclaimed in his meditation. He wasn’t sure how that worked out as a prerequisite for entering into the realm of Nature Mysticism, which Manuel alluded to a number of times and in a number of different ways.

Phil asked, “What do we know about the mechanics of the Law of Evolution? I mean, how do we get to Nature Mysticism?”

“Yoga, shamanism,” Sandy laughed, “meditation, taiji and all those practices that connect you to the ch’i field.”

“That’s what it is? Living consciously in the ch’i field?”

“Pretty much.”

Phil checked his watch. He may still have time for a meeting with Manuel before Betty got home. He thanked Sandy and drove home.

In his study, he calmed himself and commenced meditation. Soon he stepped into the angel’s patio. Manuel was waiting on the marble bench, “So you’re ready for Prime Time.”

“How did you know?” Phil queried as he clothed himself in jeans and white T-shirt.

“Your guardian angel told me,” as the reply.

“How come I’ve never seen him?”

“You haven’t looked.”

Phil realized it was true, because the only place he agreed to the existence of any entity other than human beings was here, in Manuel’s patio.

Just then, the magic-wall blurred, signaling the start of a journey.

“Wait a minute,” Phil said. “I’ve got a number of questions.”

“I’ll answer them along the way.”

The scene on the wall resolved to clouds. As the scene resolved, he was looking at the top of an endless cloudbank. It was a view he knew from flying at 35,000 feet in a commercial jet.

As he looked at the scene, he noticed dark objects. Monoliths of some sort stood on the cloudbank, littering the white floor with their ominous black height.

“Let’s go,” Manuel said and walked into the scene. Phil followed.

The cloud-top ‘ground’ was spongy but not hard to walk on, and Manuel led Phil towards the lurking monoliths.

As they walked, Manuel said, “The ones we don’t use much are stored here.”

“What ‘ones’ are we talking about?”

“Archetypes. Masks of God.”

As they neared the dark shapes, Phil began to make out details. In fact, these were statues -- large statues, some twenty feet tall. As they drew closer, each became recognizable as a distinct personage. Some were male, some female, and some were mixtures of human and animal or human and vegetation.

“Typhon is over here,” Manuel said.

Phil turned to follow the angel and asked, “You said the Typhon was active in my world. Why is he in storage?”

“Sammael took over his duties once mankind forgot about Typhon as one of their deities.”

“Who is Sammael?” Phil asked, although he wasn’t sure he wanted an answer.

Manuel chuckled and stopped before the statue of Typhon.

As Phil examined the beast -- a man to the waist and serpent below, Manuel answered, “Sammael is the leader of the fallen angels. He’s the one most people mistake for Satan or Lucifer. Beelzebub is one of his lieutenants.”

Phil remembered Manuel had previously clarified ‘satan’ was a title which meant ‘adversary;’ whereas, Lucifer got a bad rap and was really the seraphim in charge of radical insights in humans.

As he continued to examine the lifelike statue of Typhon, Phil remarked, “I’ve never heard of Sammael.”

“If you thought Beelzebub was bad, Sammael is a seraphim, not a cherubim. Sammael can eat your soul before you even know you’re under attack.”

On that scary thought, Phil changed the subject, “What do we do with this statue?”

“Bring it to life.”

Phil’s high forehead showed a frown as he turned to the angel for clarification.

But now Manuel was examining the statue. “There’s a door somewhere.”

The angel strolled around the statue until he found the door, which was hidden in the scaly scrollwork of the Typhon’s twin tails.

“Okay,” Manuel grinned. “Let’s go inside.”

With some hesitation, Phil followed the angel into the damp, musty-smelling interior. He noticed the entire statue was hollow, and a ladder reached up to the Typhon’s head.

“Up we go,” Manuel’s tour-guide voice returned.

They climbed to the top of the ladder to a ledge, and stepped onto it. From there they could look out through Typhon’s eyes. Manuel looked through one port-hole-sized eye, while Phil stationed himself at the other.

“Now what?” Phil asked the angel.

“We fill him up with life,” Manuel answered. “And since you are the one seeking answers, it’s your job.”

“What do I do?”

Manuel’s patience slipped about then, and his frustration burst through. He shouted at Phil, “Why do you have to be so dense?”

The question seemed to uncork the angel’s frustration. He gushed on, “Why did God plague me with you in the first place? Other archangels get to influence people with some clue. But no, not me! I’m stuck with an insurance salesman from the land of the fruits and nuts.”

Then he shouted out the eye of Typhon, “God, why are you doing this to me? What have I done to deserve this?” Adding with a more sober tone, “Lately.”

Phil stood in mute shock and again wished he could run screaming back to Dr. Loreen’s office. This whole thing was really shaping up as an elaborate deepening of a bonifide psychotic break.

But Manuel had closed the escape route. Dr. Loreen was probably out of business by now and on her way back to Kansas or somewhere.

Manuel paused in his rant to close his eyes and assume a more subdued posture. Presently he spoke, “Okay, I hear you. Yeah, I’m sorry... I know... You do work in mysterious ways... Just grant me more patience. This job is like the one you gave Sisyphus.”

In a telepathic aside, Manuel elaborated: Albert Camus said, in his book about Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” His existentialist argument was people hang onto life even though life has no meaning or purpose to justify it and life is thus “absurd.” I feel that way sometimes dealing with you, Phil.

Phil began to wonder if the angel was the one in psychotic break. The ramifications of that idea, though, were beyond disturbing.

“Okay,” Manuel said, refocusing on Phil. The angel went on in a cheery voice, “Imagine yourself inside the redwood tree on your staircase and channel the Universal Life-force into this statue.”

Ignoring his growing doubts about this adventure, Phil closed his eyes, breathed deep, and on the exhale shifted his awareness to the step on his staircase where he was surrounded by the redwood tree. Immediately, his mood changed to deep contentment. He felt the Force-energy as a pulsing but grounded field fully engulfing him in its warmth.

Then he opened his eyes and made himself into a conduit for this energy. It swirled out of him in amber waves to fill the hollow hulk of Typhon.

Slowly the beast came to life. As it did so, Phil released his connection to the Force-energy and instantly became aware of Typhon’s thoughts.

They weren’t good thoughts. An alien animalistic cold was their matrix; pursuing heroes was their purpose. Typhon slithered forward to the task.

“Since we’re in his head,” Manuel spoke. “You can link up with his mind and get the answers you need.”

Phil was becoming too filled with horror of this alien being to even remember what those questions were. The horror came from a primal place within him. Objectively he knew this fear was the same fear early man must have felt as his consciousness struggled out of the Ground Unconscious. However, knowing what this fear was all about brought scant comfort.

Manuel was speaking to him in a calming voice, “You remembered the exact moment you repressed Nature. Now you can learn how to transcend Mother Earth.”

“I can’t do this,” Phil stammered as the fear overwhelmed him and he slumped to a ball on the floor.