Chapel Perilous

It is difficult for any of us to free ourselves from our enculturated, a priori beliefs about existence. When we firmly believe what we say, we sell others a confabulation of our own truths and lies. It is hard to view anything from outside of our own fundamental philosophical, spiritual, and psychological perspectives but it is possible to persuade others and many speakers have staked their careers on it. These theories, dogmas, and experiences condition how we perceive reality. Their influence may be so subtle we fail to notice where our position originated, when the shift occurred. Our viewpoint is relative to our position.

One position is the traditional initiation in the presence of the Grail; another is the mystical initiation into spiritual knowledge. The first, if successful, initiates rebirth through love and sex; the second, self-initiation and rebirth without either. If both fail, the quest fails, or another way must be invented. But a maze of self-doubt, fear and revelation accompanies the dissolution. The problem inflates at the collective level of remaking the world via evolution, repatterning, regenerating society and breaking horizontal and vertical boundaries. Mankind has seized these reins from Nature, morphing reality at a dizzying rate.

The prime expression of beliefs is through spontaneous imagery. We never experience directly, but interpret our experience of our perceptions through imagery. All our input comes through multi-sensory channels. We never directly perceive ourselves, soul, or "God." We don't perceive our bodies directly, only our sensory impressions. But, Jung points out we do have first-hand experience of our body image, soul-image, and God images. That is all we know directly. The rest is pure speculation.

We need a new cultural proving ground, a new paradigm for the potential of the bodymind and the culture for which it is the ground. In our culture, the body and our fantasies about it, have come to represent the lost Feminine element. We have lost touch with our primal femininity, the animating principle (nature, body, instinct). We have become estranged from the body through the Cartesian mind/body split, which is also non-relativistic. We talk a good game about 'wholeness' but don't really connect as much as nostalgically yearn for it.

There is a way that joins spirit and body through the spontaneous imagery of soul. It seeks neither to solve our troubles (pathologies) nor "save" our souls. It suggests direct engagement with images for soul-making or deepening through personal experience. We can see through the nature of apparent reality for ourselves, if we but try. Then we develop our own philosophy, apart from consensus. When it comes to questions of speculation on the unknown, we can either accept what others have said, or look for ourselves.

We seek the lost soul primarily because of the intense degree of wounding in our modern consciousness. This wounding has "opened" us to transformation. We can embody soul by seeing-through appearances to an acute awareness of the archetypal, subjective perception of our experience.

Pillow of Paranoia

A proving ground is a reservation for testing new prototypes and technologies. The purpose of a proving ground is to provide quality scenarios for all players of the mission, the Great Game. What is in peril in Chapel Perilous is your soul, in a mental place in which you learn so much that all your thoughts and belief structures are challenged. As Jung says, "we are not concerned here with a philosophical, much less a religious, concept of the soul, but with the psychological recognition of the existence of a semiconscious psychic complex, having partial autonomy of function, [anima].
That Anima is embodied as The High Priestess arcanum, the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother from the archetypal "usual suspects" of Tarot. She is the embodiment of psyche, the animating force behind all events, images, and material forms.

We can shift our focus from saving the soul of the individual to saving the soul of the world, resurrection of the world, rather than man--a raising of consciousness of created things, the world's psychic reality. The difference between soul and external things no longer matters. Inner and Outer worlds are real. They are One World beyond the deepest layers of the Flux, as in the alchemical Unus Mundus.

The high priestess is the muse lurking behind the pews at chapel perilous. It's not a real place but a virtual outpost, the empty gaps in consciousness between our breaths, deeply informed by the unconscious. It's like the jumptime in your computer when you do a search, the nanosecond between the question and manifold of possible answers. Jumptime is a quantum leap in consciousness into the Uncertainty Principle, a quantum cloud of mutually-penetrating potentialities that describes reality better than any single theory.

The soul in depth psychology is an empirical manifestation of imagination, fantasy, and creativity which is always in the process of becoming--images forming, and dissolving, and forming anew. Even paranoia can be consoling. It is an attempt to self sooth. Imagination is the essence of the life forces, both physical and psychic. These fantasies always permeate our beliefs, ideas, emotions, and physical nature. When the fantasies turn obsessively negative, paranoid or seemingly inescapable, we are in Chapel Perilous.

Dancing Barefoot through Serpents in the Valley of the Shadow of Death

Chapel Perilous is the transfer station for your sanity on the road to wholeness, or not. In Daath (mysterious 11th shadowy sphere of the Tree of Life) we enter into unity. Although there is still a sense of duality between "I" and the Divine, this unity is a felt sense of merging with everything that exists. This is a profound transformation, an integration of the energy body, the Diamond Body, that is realization of one's "true essence."

The Abyss has the same meaning as the veil behind the High Priestess in the Tarot. Crossing the Abyss means a superluminal leap into another realm. This Abyss is a real experience, a void, a profound emptiness of the mind where each thought is annihilated with its opposite.

It's difficult to even imagine going beyond the Illusion. Meaning only comes from deepening the process, as if you could escape the gravity well of Chapel Perilous by reversing your steps. Faith is the key to crossing the abyss between Kether and Tiphareth. But how do you do that when this crossing is exemplified by loss of faith in virtually everything, including the existence of any grounded Reality? The way leads through a gruesome whirlpool of blood.

Chapel Perilous exists in an Otherworld, the dreamworld, or hall of mirrors. We can ask ourselves Parcival's question, "Who do these things serve?" Or we can follow the modern investigative imperative to "Follow the Money. The answer is the same, "the Lord of the land."

The Priestess knows but she remains silent. She keeps dealing Tarot in the back corner of the Chapel, knowing it isn't her Time. Parcival, Jung, Leary and RAW raise a toast with their own holy grails to the Chapel Perilous meme and its new owner - YOU. Being there means you become the person you must be, but don't yet know how to be. The vision of the Grail is often accompanied by a view of the bleeding spear. If the hero asks the critical qestions, the never-healing wound Lord of the land IS healed. In the initiatory process you identify with the healed King.

But in the Chapel events appear to be completely out of our control, nothing is ever what it seems, and the only ways out are to escape, return to your old world, or lose your mind (i.e. drop into a randomly bad reality model). Worse still, you often think you've escaped, only to discover that escape itself was simply another illusion.

Paradigm Shift

The problem is that the reality model we've each built up, around which we base our entire lives, has turned out to be incorrect and we have to find a new, personal model to replace it. The quest is to carve ot an individual identity beyond the cultural myth imposed on us. We are effectively returned to our childhood state, except that now we do not even have many 'adults' to help us. There are two ways out: either allow another person to reprogram you or learn to reprogram yourself.

One traditional method of finding another model is to join an established religion or mystic group through which you can be 'reborn' into another ready-made reality (e.g. 'born-again'). Another is to fixate on another individual and let them tell you what to do, adopting their reality model and effectively creating a substitute parent. Finding your own way out is much harder. No one can advise you but your self.

Paranoia is invasive – it intrudes and worms its way through the psyche like a computer virus. Alienation in extreme cases disturbs relationships and ability to function in daily life. Authority feeds on fear. Yet, paranoia could be the basis of our collective shadow, including our unlived potential for the good.

There is no final correct reading of Reality – a final, definitive, unequivocal one. Tyrannical unification certainly isn't the solution. Reality is too wiggly, too mercurial for that. The tyranny of the one, that single-minded thought, demands struggle on behalf of the ethical imperative to find ways to love together in our differences.

The highlight of any great drama is "the reveal." When we speak poetically, we hint gently at the proposed nature of reality, neither hidden nor revealed. Freedom from desire's materialism and denial's formalism is found in the middle earth of the poetic, the fantastic, the numinous, where things are not “one way or the other.” Things are not meant to be taken literally. Facts have nothing to do with it.

Paranoia is a defense through mobilization, against suppressed anger and depression, the malaise of our age. Giving in to external domination and giving in to internal pressure are equaling threatening. More than delusions of persecution, who doesn’t fear being tricked into surrendering some element of self-determination?

Unseen Order

Can we out-trick the Trickster? Can we use our imaginations to cure the imagination? Can we elude our own delusions? Maybe the veils themselves are delusional. Maybe the whole framed consruct is faulty. Does meaning hinge on our individual view? It may depend on our worldview, our reality filter: do we serve the gods (religion), or become one (New Age), or eschew that in the name of science? Is there a clear distinction between delusion and revelation?

The fervor of “conspiracy freaks” can take on quasi-religious dimensions: revelatory, salvific. Spreading the word takes on a missionary quality. And at the core is the eternal mythic “quest for the Holy Grail,” for the meaning that anchors the soul to life. When life is perceived in the context of tyranny, meaning and freedom are lost, and rebellion is aroused. We may feel we are personally targeted, but aren’t we all the target in the psychophysical (psyops) war that is 21st Century life? Or is all that just a head trip?