Theos-Talk Archives (June 1994 Message tl00012)

This is by Brenda Tucker.  The first three paragraphs are a revision to
part 1 of 1991 speech, dated 6/7/94.

Westerners show an experience of some of the same frustration, and as
Nietzsche says, Christians had killed God and were worshiping his
antithesis.  Meister Eckhardt said "To seek God by rituals is to gain
the ritual and lose God in the process, for He hides behind it."

If Invisible/Infinite cannot be made visible/finite, how may it ever be
approached? Well, the answer in the Tao Te Ching is this: With pairing.

Verse 1

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name;
    this appears as darkness
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.

       TAO TE CHING, translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English


The following is part 2 of the 1991 speech.

The paragraph that follows is by Richard Wilhelm and found in an
introduction to another meditation text which appeared with THE SECRET
OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER in a Chinese edition.

"The text combines Buddhist and Taoist directions for meditation.  The
basic view is that at birth the two spheres of the psyche,
consciousness and the unconscious, become separated.  Consciousness is
the element marking what is separated off, individualized, in a person,
and the unconscious nature the element that unites him with the cosmos.
Unification of the two elements via meditation is the principle upon
which the work is based.  The unconscious must be inseminated by
consciousness being immersed into it.  In this way the unconscious is
activated and thus, together with an enriched conscious mind, acts upon
a supra-personal mental level in the form of a spiritual rebirth.  This
rebirth then leads first to a progressing inner differentiation of the
conscious state into autonomous thought structures.  However, the
conclusion of the meditation leads of necessity to the wiping out of
all differences in the final integrated life, which is free of
opposites." (from the Forward to the Fifth Edition by Salome Wilhelm)


There may be two conditions of seeking the one.  Kierkegaard, a 19th
Century Danish philosopher, had coined phrases to illustrate the two
ways of knowing and being in touch with the Infinite.

He referred to one method as the "knight of infinite resignation" and
describes him as one who is reconciled to an irreversible and complete
division between the infinite world of Oneness and the finite world of
dualities, in which we live.  The sublime can be glimpsed by this type
even more than once, but each time a falling back occurs, a falling
back into the finite existence we all share.

The "knight of faith" on the other hand has also glimpsed infinity, but
has passed beyond the previous state, the resignation to an utter
inaccessibility for more than a moment of the infinite world, and has
somehow magically learned to live as if the infinite were within the
very heart of the finiteness which contains us all.  And so the "knight
of faith," depicts a world in which simple things contain greatness,
and so it may be said "if you can't find justification in the act of
doing dishes, you can't find it anywhere."

Mother - Father

In fact archetypes of the Great Mother and Great Father are both
extremely fluid and mercurial and difficult to distinguish.  If Great
Mother has been represented in a bewildering diversity of forms and
functions, Great Father has as well.  He has been known for both his
creative and destructive powers, has been benevolent and cruel, adored
and feared.

We can borrow Carl Jung's terms anima and animus, Mother and Father
respectively, as they manifest in the unconscious mind of the
individual.  They reverse depending upon sex, so that females use the
male role, and males use the female figure to symbolize the
unconscious.

This coincidence of opposites present in the use of anima and animus is
also present in physics and biology.  In physics it is referred to as
the principle of complementarity (things are caused by chance),
uncertainty, randomness, simultaneity and synchronicity, the presence
of probabilities to help predict rather than laws of nature.  In
biology, objectivity is profounded by an organisms pursuit of purpose,
or its teleonomic character.

In the TAO TE CHING, this same coincidence of opposites is called wu
wei - doing by not-doing, creative quietude or actionless action.  A
wise man is also a fool or a clown.  So a sublime figure may sometimes
be represented as absurd as in the case of Mother Goose.

THE TAO AND MOTHER GOOSE compares an Eastern tradition with Western
nursery rhymes.  The Eastern figure is Tao, a religious, philosophical
poetic figure meaning the Way or God, stemming from the 6th Century
B.C.  The Upanishads' audience has been preoccupied with "secrets," but
"to instruct," psychologically, may be more useful to our existence.

The Mother Goose rhymes, at least 200 or so, are from the 16-17 Century
or earlier.  Mother Goose may have been a historical person and if so,
perhaps she was Queen Bertha (d.  783 A.D.) or Bertha, the wife of
Robert II (980-1031 A.D.).  This woman seems to have had embarrassingly
large feet, by which she was known as Queen Goose-foot and Goose-footed
Bertha.  Americans identify Mother Goose with a Boston lady whose
surname was Goose.  Her son-in-law published Mother Goose melodies in
1719.  She was a story-teller, but also a witch who portrayed dark and
Kali-like features.  In 1952, one writer called for a nursery rhyme
reform.

The Great Mother appears in the past symbolized by a goose, lioness, or
a snake, then ceases to be seen as an animal but riding on one or
accompanied by it.  She takes a human form and rules the animal
kingdom.  She rules over unconscious powers that still take animal form
in our dreams.  It is quite common for beastly characteristics to be
used for the conveyance of heavenly ones - the dove for the Holy
Spirit, etc.

The goose lives in three elements-water, air, and ground.  Its habits
are regular, the cry is poignant, and she is faithful to a mate.  You
may remember Hamsa, a wild gander.  Consider all the symbolism in egg
laying and that a pair of geese used to be a traditional wedding
present.

So this humble and familiar figure of the goose is shown in company
with the divine.  Myths contain part fiction and part Truth.  Some of
the rhymes may have been aimed at public figures, and by being
entertaining they are valuable to adults as well.

The post-Renaissance period in development of Western cultures - which
produced Mother Goose - has tended overwhelmingly to favor growth of
rational, physical, and material concerns over the deeper unconscious
and spiritual drives.  A rise in materialism is accompanied by a
decline in centrality and importance of myth and religion.  If Great
Mother is to be preserved at all, she may have to be presented as a
Hollywood sex goddess for example.

Because the Mother Goose rhymes would never be included in any branch
of religious literature, they are folk and fairy tales, myths designed
for the purpose of entertaining, They don't necessarily on the surface
invoke religious awe.  You be the judge after rhymes are examined here.

Mother Goose fairy tales have been probed by researches, rhymes have
not.  They contain a delirious sequence of images which nonetheless
does not lack a certain hidden coherence.  They strike directly to
their target in the unconscious of the young child, operating outside
the realm of orderly time and space, beyond causation.  They may be as
nonsensical as dreams.  They are like the toddlers who are only
beginning to emerge into the world of consciousness, only barely
acquainted with its concepts of ordered time and space, principles of
causation, notions of death and eternal life, and subjects and objects
of interest.  Poetry or rhymes can be sung rather than simply said.
The Bhagavad Gita, Tao Teh Ching, Bible, Shakespeare, too, evoke the
greatest inner richness with greatest outer simplicity.  Perhaps the
rhythm of the rhyme above all else reverberates and echoes within us
repeating both inner and outer rhythms, heartbeat, breathing, tides,
cycles,

There is evidence of incredible persistence in the rhymes as mother
after mother recite the rhymes the same way they learned them as
children in exactly the same words as they learned them.  Generation
after generation, they are being passed on in virtually identical
forms.  Neither Buddha, Socrates, nor Christ committed their teaching
to fixed written word.  Teaching spread orally, person-to-person in the
living moment of the present.

Well here they are present in an irrational sequence of images which
have a certain hidden coherence, serving psychic needs of early
childhood by containing archetypal imagery drawn from the collective
unconscious.  The nursery rhymes: 1.  Introduce concepts, values, and
traditions or the ways - of consciousness.  Some acquaint children with
customs.  2.  Show order or system, some are tongue-twisters or riddles
delighting in sounds, associations, and ideas.  Some are counting
rhymes, and some build up a sequence.  3.  Convey a moralistic systems
of values.

The rhymes initiate a young person into the ways of waking
consciousness, away from the chaos of unconscious.  Why do they
interest us? Robert Carter has compared The House that Jack Built with
16th Century Hebrew chants: present are a ritualistic quality and
fatalism: one thing controlling the destiny of another.

Children can understand a complete lack of moralizing or piousness,
only adults are shocked.  Classifying the types and examples and uses
of rhymes turns up rhymes that are not so easily understood and not so
easily classified.  It is these exceptions that are puzzling and of
greatest interest.  These are the ones the author investigates in the
book.