Sunday, December 27, 2009

Return of the Feminine and the World Soul: reading and internet synchronicity

Though I am a practitioner of the Tibetan Nyingma tradition, I still draw inspiration from a variety of mystical traditions. The time I spent in the company of Purna Das Baul - a Sufi- opened my eyes to the divine Feminine in a most amazing way. In Purna Das Bauls teaching's, a man develops a relationship with the Divine Mother ("Ma", or "Shakti") through developing the divine within: the Man of the Heart. Women are "Ma" embodied, by their very nature. This is the divine play of the longing for the Divine Other, the Beloved.

On Christmas Eve, I found myself reading The Return of the Feminine and the World Soul, by Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee, an American Sufi.
On page 52 was the following passage: "The feminine mysteries of love --the sanctity of longing, the receptivity of the heart that is always awake, waiting for her Beloved, for that moment when love comes secretly and sweetly-- need to be reclaimed and honored. Only through receptivity can we give birth to the divine as a living presence within ourselves and within out lives." I then put the book down for a short break.
I decided to play a game of Scrabble Blast on line. The letters are random, computer generated sequences. I was surprised as I recognized the first word I would highlight on the game board: beloveds.
After completing the game, I picked the book back up to resume reading on page 56. A sentence on the page popped out at me: "For example, the Internet is a powerful, living image of life's interconnected oneness." Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee is talking about how the Internet is reconfiguring our collective unconscious, allowing our unconscious to communicate with us in new and non-traditional ways.
This sequence of events certainly has me thinking about the internet in a whole new way.
UPDATE (12/28/2009)This morning I discovered an relevant post on a Jungian analyst Heide M. Kolb's blog. On 12/26/2009, She had written an entry entitled On Avatar and the Return of the Feminine- a Jungian Perspective. She talks about the archetypal imagery in the movie Avatar, highlighting the World Soul/Anima Mundi. She also points out the parallels between the Na'vi people in Avatar and their similarity with the image of Krishna. (Krishna is also involved in the play of the beloveds through the lila of Krishna and Radha.)

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