pandora's box

Knowledge that leads to understanding enables a process which is like the peeling away of layers to an onion to get to the core. Each successive layer of understanding which is bequeathed to me, grants me the ability to go deeper into the forest of enlightenment. I am grateful for the process, as unravelling the puzzle seems to be my reason for incarnation. It seems that every week I say to myself: Well, for sure I have reached the end and there's not much more to learn. Then I'll have some epiphany, usually while smoking Mapacho tobacco. The analogy of the onion is fitting because the root of existence is a mystery. If I ever do peel away all the layers, I intuit the last layer will reveal the absurdity of my seeking. The joke is I already know the answer to the riddle, as I am the inventor and designer of the puzzle. The gift of eternity leads to a sense of adventure. Laughter, joy, play, friendship, connection, discovery, and love. At the heart of the great cosmic drama are these values. All stage plays, whether they may be poignant dramas or gruesome tragedies, will point towards these aspects of love.

A couple of years ago, the word Pandora kept showing up in my life and it still does. I didn't understand the connection because I hadn't peeled away enough layers of the onion to figure out why. Well, I finally reached that layer last week, helped by a recurring theme of opiate drug abuse and the helplessness and despair caused by the addiction. Derivatives of the poppy are everywhere, and it makes sense when one realizes earth is a place of suffering. Opium takes away the suffering, both physical and mental. It becomes highly addictive because of this ability and the continual use will send you to the depths of hell. A lesson of the poppy is the higher the high, the lower the low. The poppy teaches that in a world of duality, there is no escape from the reconciliation of high and low. It's a zero-sum game. If you see the connection between all life, you further see that when you are in the positive ledger, someone else is in the negative.

I see that Pandora's Box is life on earth. Pandora's Box is Maya; the weaving together of an illusion which creates the stage for biological life to do its dance. The Great Mother Goddess created the playground we desired. She enables the suffering and within this world she places the gift of the destroyer. When we see through the game and tire of the dance, we hail the destroyer and he puts an end to the drama, dancing the Rudra Tandava. Pandora's Box is once again shut up, until the next curious seeker unwittingly opens it.

Subconsciously as a species, we know this. Peering back into the sands of time, we find Mother Goddess worship. She is the creator of life buttressed by her destructive masculine offspring. The practitioners of the mesa in pre-Columbian South America seek to balance the feminine and the masculine - the energy of creator and destroyer. The balance creates healing and harmony. The attentive student sees the dualistic relationship between the two and knows they must work at maintaining the balance, against all odds, in order to curtail the suffering to come. As a species we worshipped the Great Mother and then later we buried Her. We wanted to forget about her and wipe away the memory. Our religious past as taught is patriarchal and there is no room for the Goddess. Why did we do this?

Misogyny is a good answer to begin with and may explain the situation. I don't buy it 100% though because it defies what just is. If we worship a masculine god, he is just half of the equation. Of course, there is a counterpoint that makes the worship whole. Having a divine masculine god and his son being the be all and end all is preposterous when you think about it; notwithstanding the initial preposterousness of a religion that allows you to get to that point to begin with. But this is not intended to be a polemic against religion, so I'll let that be. What I think is that we collectively stamped out goddess worship because we know she initiates our suffering.

I came by this knowledge through plant medicine use - specifically Ayahuasca. I experientially met the Great Goddess through the use of Ayahuasca and I have had multiple visions of what I am describing. My knowledge is from a subconscious origin, is not verifiable, and could be considered a tale of fancy. I'm totally down with that and don't expect anyone to take my word for it. I'm just writing about my experience.

In vision, I've seen the illusory nature of the world. I saw through the transparent curtains of the dream - a spinning realm of fortune and chance, defined by the four suits in a deck of cards. I saw the worship of the Goddess and how man stamped it out. I was harassed to no end in vision by an inherent dark warning to stay away from the Goddess and her charms. I didn't heed the warning and soldiered on. I am a student of history, and so I know about Goddess worship and what it entailed way back when.

The study of the Goddess reveals a connection to the earth and her bounty. You see her in full display in ancient cultures such as Egypt, the Levant, Crete, Phrygia, and Greece. You can trace the stamping out of her influence in mythic stories of the taming of the serpentine monster of the sea or in stories of the crushing of the lunar bull such as in Phrygia where the sky father Sabazios is depicted on horseback placing a hoof on the head of the bull, which represented the crushing of Goddess worship. The Minoan snake goddess of ancient Crete is iconic in the depiction of Goddesses because of the serpents and the poppy. The poppy is the teacher. The roshi. The head of the poppy instructs, and you'll find the word for the head teacher congruent with the idea: "Siri, what does the Hebrew word 'rosh' mean?" Goddess worship involves the ingestion of narcotics and for some this would lead to addiction and a life of hell. Goddess worship would be equated to being ensnared in her world of intoxication, enchantment, and pleasure seeking. Give in to the worship and all will be fine. Try to leave and suffer. You can find polemics against pharmakeia - the plants of the Goddess, within ancient sources. We now call these substances drugs, i.e., the bad drugs. The New Testament warns of her witchcraft. In Galatians chapter 5 of the King James Bible translation, we read:

19 Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,

20 Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies,

21 Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.

In verse 20, pharmakeia is translated as witchcraft. Other translations will use sorcery for the translation. The term was used a pejorative for the woman healer. In the Book of Revelation, we find the mention of pharmakeia in chapter 9, where many are killed by the wrath of God.

20 And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:

21 Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts.

Those made to suffer did not repent of their sorceries, sorcery referring to the drugs of the Goddess. A last mention of drugs is in Revelation chapter 18 where the sins of the great whore of Babylon are enumerated. The whore is the Goddess, and in this setting, she is a great city of the world, namely Jerusalem, who has been soiled by the company she keeps. Here's the passages:

23 And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.

24 And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.

It is by her enchantment and seduction that all the world was deceived. The deception is taking men away from the worship of God back to Goddess. These attitudes permeated all ancient cultures. A student of the Greek play-write Homer will find plentiful comparisons in the story of the hero Odysseus. Odysseus spends seven years with the nymph Calypso in a narcotic haze, seduced by her witchcraft until he finally leaves her for home. The Greek warrior and his men are also ensnared by Circe and her magic potion. Odysseus and his men also become trapped on the island of the Lotus Eaters, another warning against the use of narcotics. Also extracted from this story is Odysseus' run in with the Sirens. Delving deeper into the tale, one realizes the Sirens are the call of the addictive properties of opiates. Odysseus' men are given beeswax by Circe to plug up their ears so they wouldn't heed the call, while Odysseus is bound by rope to the ship's mast and tells the sailors under no circumstance should he be untied. The pull of narcotics is strong and would summon Odysseus to his doom much like the fields of wasted men on the rocks of the shore of the Sirens' call. Odysseus urges his men to free him, but they sail on. The hold of the addiction and cravings is defeated. The lesson being taught is the warrior spirit of a man is crushed by the enchantment of the Goddess. Narcotics will definitely do this to you, but underlying this understanding is that love and compassion for your fellow human as taught will make you think twice about conquest, pillage, and the killing of others. I'll bet you want to re-read the story now that you have been given the understanding!

The Goddess will take away your pain with her poppies but then make you see it's not free. Opiates will take you to hell. There's a terrible lesson of reconciliation in duality within the pain reliever. Hers is the toughest course of them all. The man on his journey of conquest wants to get to the top of the mountain, not find unity at the intersection of the valley plain and the base of the mountain.

There is another way to escape the suffering and ultimately the course of the Goddess will take the studious practitioner to the doorstep of what it is we all eventually seek. The way is through the heart and the path is only discovered through the fires of transformation which involve suffering. Every course on my spiritual path is designed to lead to the heart. In hindsight, the progression is obvious. The path of the heart is laying it all bare. The Goddess is showing me all she has done and how the immense suffering is designed to lead you back to the heart. She is showing me how you can't escape the lessons. You can deny them, but all is reconciled and eventually comes together in the middle. The Tao Te Ching teaches one to go with the flow. Following the flow leads to the centre.

The world is perfect. With all the environmental destruction how can I say that? I didn't say it was ideal! It's progress. We are making our lives easier on earth and accumulating more and more stuff and the corollary to this is the destruction of our habitat. This is how perfect duality works. The lessons stare you in the face and you can't escape it. Eventually, we will destroy ourselves. I look at this with ambivalence. What we have been gifted by Pachamama, we will destroy. What we have been bequeathed, we turned into hell. We will destroy hell and close Pandora's Box. Maybe we should put a sign on it warning against ever opening up this gift of the Goddess? The illusion will lay its trap once again and it will take another monumental nuclear blast to destroy it. On and on it goes. What a vision of existence I hold!

It's what we wanted so we opened the Box. Leave it alone! Our desires and curiosity will once again lead us to her magic and sorcery. She will conjure another world of our dreams into existence so we can play out our eternal recurring fantasies of conquest. We will ask her once again and being love, she will give her children what they want. Within her creation is placed the destroyer so that when we have had enough, we can blow the whole thing up. In our eternal universal travels, we will pass by the big blue marble jail cell and shudder at the memory of what the siren call of desire can do to us. Will we pay heed?

My experience with drugs is not with opiates. I have an addictive streak within, and so I know enough to stay away from the highly addictive substances. I am curious about the juice of the poppy in its unrefined form and if given the chance at the right time, I would smoke opium or drink opium tea, preferably in a group ceremony. I picture a scene from Eleusis in ancient Greece and a crowd of ecstatic adherents welcoming the Goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone in a shared vision; feeling the connection between the group and the divine feminine. My history with pharmakeia is with the psychedelics. I have enough experience with them to know they are definitely not addictive, but they do offer a doorway into the occult, if that is your intention. Magic, sorcery, mystery, and knowledge are at your fingertips if you do want to see for yourself. From these trips, I came to know the Goddess intimately. No one can take that away from me or convince me it was a flight of fancy. She showed me love and taught me the answer to all I seek is love. It's that simple.

So, what's to make of the lessons of the Goddess and her opiates? To me, it is as it should be. I make the statement from the standpoint of duality. Within my masculine self, I see the light and I see the darkness. I hold them both in equal esteem and I make no exultation of one over the other. On the contrary, my discovery of the divine nature of the darkness strengthened my love of the gifts of the Goddess. I posed a question to the ether a while back in which I acknowledged I have no idea of what a woman grapples with. I saw in myself God and I saw Satan, but I knew a woman does not see the same. Externally, I see love in the woman and exuded by the Goddess. I see maternal instincts and I pedestalize these aspects of the divine feminine. True to the unfolding of understanding in due time, I have been shown the opposite spectrum of the feminine. I see the enchantment and possession and how the pursuit of her charms can lead you to destruction. As with my own darkness, I know that not only is this the way it has to be, but I see how the enchantress who sends you to your doom is just as divine as the maternal feminine who is full of love. The tension between the opposites in this mysterious world we inhabit is what keeps the world spinning.

I am grateful for the remaining layers of the onion, as I head towards the core of the mystery.