Dream Talk with June

This is what can happen during, and particularly I think at the end, of a series of major astrological transits. From  Dream Talk with June: 

More about Big Shifts

For some, there comes a time when even the archetypes seem to collapse, when the very functioning of the psyche departs familiar symbols.  The themes and structures that carry the life story shift and break.  The heroes and villains, the magicians and shamans are called home from their places in the world.  If you are somewhat of a monk you can watch the shift, the unraveling, see how the story has worked in you, where in the world you’ve pasted the field of action, the actors.  All that was and isn’t anymore.

In this kind of internal cataclysmic change before new images offer themselves there is a brief opportunity for an experience Joseph Campbell describes as the true experience of the Other.  The shocked mind stutters and, for a moment, it stops, is beyond the symbol, the story.  Before awe, before fear, before questions and answers, it stops because it is beyond or outside all of these.

This moment is the goal of most initiations; “the killing” it is sometimes called.  Intentional experiences are brought about to achieve exactly this shock beyond conscious reach or participation.  Emptiness.  Even the unconscious attachments, the deepest dynamics, can shift.  Even the archetypes, for a brief period, seem suspended, unless it is the archetype of absence, the archetype between stories.

Once the new arrives, the psyche has remade itself not by offering new symbols for old roles, not to tinker with the old story, but it is as if the characters called home during the crises have abandoned form.  What is left is a color, a shape, a tone, a sequence of numbers.  Later these expand; the psyche does its work; new archetypes arrive.  Or perhaps they’ve been there all along waiting in the wings.  Other cultures would say they waited on the mountain, the beach, or in the woods.  Something comes inside that has been waiting for you, or someone like you, or for the human opening, the right human opening.

It can feel a bit like possession, invasion.  (More...)