balancing act

There is at times this ceaseless chatter in my head spinning all awareness. It's tainted by culture to a large degree. It analyses and speaks in English which kind of gives it away as a product of the language and customs of my local surroundings. It molds my behaviour, points out when I fit in, and warns when I am beyond the pale of expectations. It directs me to lash out at others in anger when it is not respected. Acting on desires will bring with it castigating shame and contempt from this entity as a form of control. Travel to an extent is quite liberating in this regard as being an outsider allows you to transgress their cultural norms and being free of your own expectations is therefore a boon to self. Then there is me who is kind of a puppet to the ceaseless chatter guy but kind of just acts on impulse. That’s the real me! I think. Then there's this part of me that is seemingly on auto pilot though acting like a servant. This guy keeps everything functioning without even asking or reminding him. Breathing, digesting, growing my hair, and so on. Who is this? Who created the universe and keeps it running? Who is the energy behind the stars? Same guy. I wonder if he is the one pushing desires into consciousness? I limit myself to my conscious awareness, and even then I’m split, and because of this I don't realize that the part of me replenishing my cellular structure is me as well. The energy system responsible for the maintenance of you and the universe is the same worker. It is all you. And by it I mean you are it. You do this. We focus on the stream of drivel running through our head as being who we are when it is just a part of it and one that shouldn’t be in the driver’s seat.

That’s the thing that is difficult to move past when I try to identify who I am. The problem is trying to identify who I am because it seems kind of impossible. The advice I usually give to myself is if there is no solution to a problem then by definition it isn’t a problem. It has become a problem because of the insistence on trying to solve it. There really is no I, however long I wish and insist on propagating that notion. At best I am a field of energy that is definable based on others, their feedback, my body shape, and this chatter in my head that tells me I am this guy. I don’t know why I have exalted the chatter in my head guy above the silent worker who keeps this all intact and running and left the guy affected by desire twisting in the wind. I guess if you aren’t loud and get noticed then you get taken for granted and largely dismissed.

Part of why I want to believe I have a higher and a lower self is I have met this higher self. I know it is me but I still can’t reconcile that my localized conscious awareness is not the only me. Damn it, I want exclusivity for what encompasses me in consensus reality and I want it to be the definition of me. So I come to the realization on this spiritual journey I have a higher self but that he stands above me so I separate the two. And then this higher self connects me with everyone else because they have the same one and if they access it then they too are in touch with this universal consciousness. They get tripped up by it as well. How can it be me if it is you?

I look at myself in consensus reality as the controlled looking to break free of the dominance and usurp the power of the controller in my head. In psychological terms it is the ego making a play to become the superego and hopefully breaking free of being the controlled and becoming the puppet master. The puller of the strings is aware of this gambit from the beginning and has tried to prevent me from getting too far in this journey. He scared me, threatened death, and tried to get me to turn back.  I proved my worth, I had the courage to continue, and I was given passage up the mountain. In fact he really helped me to get to the destination. I didn’t stay on top of the mountain and instead chose to come back down. We all seek to be the king of the castle. Our internal drive beckons us to purge the surroundings of our enemies and competitors once we triumph. For the man it is power and the love of women, specifically the feminine divine who is mother and lover, being the ultimate prize. At first she is mother but as we climb the mountain she becomes lover. The underpinnings of everything is desire and this attraction at the level of the sacred is off the charts. Just a hint of her power and the chase is on. In psychology this desire to overthrow the father and capture the mother becomes Sigmund Freud's 'Oedipus complex.’ Delving into ancient Egyptian mythology it was recognized in the form of kamutef ‘bull of his mother' and this motif is also found in ancient Greek mythology such as the overthrow and castration of the King of the Titans, Ouranos, by the son Cronos. In turn Cronus, now the father, waits to devour his children at birth while their mother Rhea goes behind his back and saves the youngest Zeus from this fate. Zeus goes on to defeat Cronus and the Titans and then Zeus becomes the most high and mythologically becomes an asshole. He eats his first wife, the titan Metis, so she wouldn’t give birth to their second child, a prophesied son, who would overthrow him. It’s all an elaborate metaphor of the struggle for mastery within the male psyche and the same outcome is continually the result. The son overthrows the father, gets the girl, and then becomes just like his father and locks her away again. He tries to consolidate and maintain his power. The union of the two powers, the King and the Queen, creates the next iteration of the lower self and he needs to go on the hero’s journey to rescue the princess from the father who has developed dragon like tendencies. And on it goes. How does this cycle break? I think an answer is found in Pre-Columbian shamanism. The process involves taking the two halves of man and mediating them to the centre position. They called this process 'tinkuy.’ Tinkuy is a Quechuan term denoting the joining together of complementary opposites through ritual mediation. It's all about bringing everything into the centre, the in between space, to find balance. This place was called the 'chaupi' and the central axis in this common territory was called the 'chhimi' which means the heart. Once balance is achieved, the complementary opposites are ready for the sacred marriage to the divine feminine who has undergone a similar trial by fire; a figurative burning of the dross. The perfect union ensues when everything is in balance.

Part of being balanced involves recognizing in our psyche this ego and superego that are in a power dynamic. The superego needs a lower self in order to know he is the controller. There’s no superego if he doesn’t have an ego to control. Or to put it in a different way: if you insist on dividing up your psyche then all these pieces must be present in order to create the psyche. They must exist. Well they must as long as you insist on labelling things. It is like the universe. The universe is one enormous energy system. It is us who divide it up and label patterns of contiguous energy as things and then we believe in the things we have given recognition to. For the most part it is arbitrary though there's logic to our categorization. Once we divide things up you can realize that the universe cannot exist without that thing; it is quite illuminating, especially if you ever wonder what happens when this human body gives out and perishes. Your energy is part of the total sum of the universe; in other words there is no universe without you. If there was no you then there would be no this. That’s pretty awesome. I realized because of this that everything is transactional. For instance I transfer energy from my body into a drum skin via a stick and I produce a noise which is another form of the energy. Knowing this, it is then understood there will be a release and transmutation of your energy when you physically die.

Another way to look at this energy process is realizing the ineffable sacredness of what is going on and the opportunity available to act unconditionally and be of service. Plants have mastered this universal precept. They take in their energy from the sun and nutrients from the soil and water without having to take life. Conversely we take energy from others in order to survive, whether it is through taking life and ingesting other plants and animals for energy or by burning wood in order to transfer it into saving heat. The underlying process behind all life is the transfer of energy that enables survival. When we take from others we can offer something in return instead of a constant greed and focus on self. Cultures that are in a symbiotic relationship with their environment realize this and have words in their language for it. In Andean culture it is called 'ayni’ in their Quechuan language, which means reciprocity. This is realizing the energy exchange involved and offering up something in return.

I think I deviated a bit from the original intent of the idea of this split within our localized minds. I was trying to point out the need of a lower ego self in order for the higher controller self to know he is in charge. So when my lower self, with all his warts, embarks on a journey to improve himself and become the model of what his superego wants him to be where does the puppet master eventually go? There's no room for two at the top. Is there a coup, an overthrow of the dominion of this energy field called me? I guess there has to be. So how does the superego self react to this journey? Well at the start I imagine it is made difficult. If you insist on continuing, you know polishing that armour and training for the battle, then various paths will present to you, baiting you to take one of them so you will sidestep the journey to the top. But what if you continue on in the journey to self? You overthrow the father, take what he has including the Queen, and you rule in his stead. But wait a minute. You are destined to repeat the same drama because you assumed the higher position. So there's a new lower self that forms and that needs refining. It's metaphorically the next shit that bubbles to the surface that is not your ideal of what your newly defined self is. It’s a new you with a whole new set of problems! Or perhaps the same desires that frustrated your previous self never went anywhere and will now harangue the new you. Another desire causing havoc to the better man. The cycle begins again and this lower self is going to overthrow the new king unless the incumbent can throw him off the task at hand. This never ends. There's always something that needs improvement. This is the eternal masculine problem. How do I maintain balance once I reach the top?

Oh my god. That's it. That's why I am here. To find out the answer why; why this continual cycle?

What's the answer to this continual problem? Wisdom tells me that an insoluble problem is not a problem at all. The problem is you trying to solve it. As long as you insist you have a separate superego and your ego needs improvement then you must play this game. I wrote about belief a couple weeks ago and I have been empowering this split within myself because I refused to accept responsibility that I am the total package and instead live a life of disintegration with an insistence upon myself being comprised of parts. Accept and recognize what it is that is me without feeling I need to do anything about it. It’s the same way we are fooled into thinking we are isolated from the universe as a whole. There's nothing you need to do. You are already it so instead of trying to improve your lower selfish self, become fit for service and be of service to others and help them. Focus your efforts on improvement of others. Lift them up so they can reciprocate and lift others up and on it goes. If you are at this point in your journey then you can see you don't need to improve yourself, you just need to recognize your own diversity and find balance. In that divine harmony you will acknowledge all that makes you you and and take from each the strengths that will counteract the weaknesses and bring balance into the equation which enables you to become fit for service. Then bring this balance into the world at large. Attaining higher consciousness doesn't mean climbing the mountain and becoming the most high as if you are trying to be the most enlightened in some spiritual contest. Higher consciousness involves Love and forgiveness for yourself and others. It is recognizing your strengths and your weaknesses and that you will never be infallible. Stop trying to make the two ends of a stick, the top and bottom, be the same point. It can't be done. Transform yourself from a stick into a circle. Wherever you are in the circle is perfectly balanced.  

i need some time

Sometimes it is hard to keep track of time or we just lose track of time. Interesting that the same thing applies to the god of time. We have lost track of him and because of it mythology has been thrown into confusion. If we could track down and harness this time, then things will become clearer and orderly.

So, who is the god of time? From Greek sources we get the god of time being Chronos and from this we have the modern words such as chronicle, chronology, and chronic. Chronos means an indeterminable portion of time. He can be depicted with wings and also in the pose of Father Time as a wise old man with a long, grey beard. Also, Chronos was imagined as an ethereal god with three heads - a man, a bull and a lion - but serpentine in form. A common alternative name for Chronos was Aeon, eternal time, and this Aeon would be depicted in Greco-Roman mosaics as a man turning a Zodiac Wheel. In this form, he was a youthful god.

Confusing this line of mythology is another Greek Titan god named Cronus who also had a connection to time. This Titan overthrew his father Uranus after castrating him and ruled over earth's Golden Age. ronus was eventually overthrown by his son Zeus and sent to Tartarus. A little side trip to Tartarus now. Tartarus is an abyss below the underworld where the sinners were sent. Keep this point in mind.
From Cicero, De Natura Deorum 2. 24 (trans. Rackham) (Roman rhetorician C1st B.C.) :

"[Khronos and the Titan Kronos are identical in this passage :] By Saturnus [Kronos] again they denoted that being who maintains the course and revolution of the seasons and periods of time, the deity so designated in Greek, for Saturnus’ Greek name is Kronos, which is the same as khronos, a space of time."
http://www.theoi.com/Protogenos/Khronos.html

At some point in the classical world there was a conflagration of these two deities with this amalgamation further confusing the concept behind the personification of time. To even further muddy the waters would be the Roman name for the the time god which was in latin Saturnus which we know today as Saturn. Saturnus was an agricultural god that reigned over harvest time. He ruled over the Golden Age and was also connected to the concept of justice. During the time of the winter solstice the Romans would partake in a great seven day festival known as the Saturnalia. More on the Saturnalia later. If that didn't confuse enough we have today the planet Saturn. Saturn was named after the Roman god of time, Saturnus. It is important to remember that the planet Saturn was named after, not because of, the god of time. That concept already existed and was applied to a planet afterwards. You will find numerous well intentioned references in books and on the internet that conflate the mythology of Saturnus with the dim, slow moving planet we call Saturn. You will be told that Saturday was named by the Romans after the planet Saturn - not true - they named it after their god of time, Saturnus. Get this planet out of your head and you can start to make sense of and unravel the whole huge edifice.

Now, time to switch gears. As Plutarch tells us, the story of Osiris and Isis in ancient Egypt is a story of the love of these two as they ruled over an age where all was good and pure in the world. They educated man in the use of agriculture and tamed the barbarian so that mankind could enjoy civilization. This Golden Age or as the ancient Egyptians called it, Zep Tepi (The First Time), ended upon the death of Osiris at the hands of his jealous brother Set.

Isis revives Osiris long enough to be impregnated by his seed and from this union she gives birth to Horus. Among other allusions to the dying and resurrected god man Osiris, the ancient Egyptians would see this aspect of Osiris in the the cyclical vegetation cycle where a seed (Osiris) is buried in the earth (Isis) at the end of the previous threshing season and from this is born the fruit in the following growing season. Inside the tomb of Tutankhamun was found seeded dirt or corn mummies in the shape of Osiris that would germinate in the darkness to help with Tutankhamun's resurrection.

"...Effigies made of vegetable mould and stuffed with corn were buried in graves or placed between the legs of mummies. In a representation at Philae we see the dead body of Osiris with stalks of corn springing from it, watered by a priest. There is an inscription: 'This is the form of him whom one may not name, Osiris of the mysteries, who springs from the returning waters.' A religion then of the earth and its fertility; but at the same time, a promise of resurrection for the dead."
John Ferguson, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions

The foregoing survey of the myth and ritual of Osiris may suffice to prove that in one of his aspects the god was a personification of the corn, which may be said to die and come to life again every year. Through all the pomp and glamour with which in later times the priests had invested his worship, the conception of him as the corn-god comes clearly out in the festival of his death and resurrection, which was celebrated in the month of Khoiak and at a later period in the month of Athyr. That festival appears to have been essentially a festival of sowing, which properly fell at the time when the husbandman actually committed the seed to the earth. On that occasion an effigy of the corn-god, moulded of earth and corn, was buried with funeral rites in the ground in order that, dying there, he might come to life again with the new crops. The ceremony was, in fact, a charm to ensure the growth of the corn by sympathetic magic, and we may conjecture that as such it was practised in a simple form by every Egyptian farmer on his fields long before it was adopted and transfigured by the priests in the stately ritual of the temple.
The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazier, pages 377-378.

From the representations we have of the more public Mysteries, it can be concluded that their fundamental theme is that of the permanence of life, even in face of the death inherent in every creature: there is no ultimate death, but only changes of state throughout an ever-renewing genesis from seed to the fruit which is the new seed. When the king himself cut the sheaves with his golden sickle in the harvest season it represented the death of Osiris. The threshing evokes his dismemberment by Seth, while the sowing is his entombment, and at the same time the posthumous fecundation of Isis (the earth) by Osiris (the grain).
Egyptian Mysteries - New light on ancient knowledge, Lucie Lamy, page 86.

Keep in mind that by corn what is meant in modern day parlance is grain.

A symbol of the latent reconstituted Osiris is the Djed pillar.

Osiris as the Djed pillar speaks of the permanence of the soul. It can be torn asunder, scattered but not destroyed. It is eternal. The fourfold nature of the pillar also symbolizes Osiris' dominion over the four corners of the earth. As we can see, Osiris is an agricultural deity as well as a symbol of permanence all in addition to his celestial role as Orion.

From the book Gods and Men in Egypt, we can get a better understanding of Osiris' role as a time god:

 
But we know otherwise that the theologians made an immense effort to make of Re and Osiris two indissociable aspects of the divine, representing the course of the sun in its diurnal and nocturnal aspects, symbolizing yesterday and tomorrow. Neheh and djet are thus con-substantially associated. This double aspect is summarized with great concision in two complex but extremely evocative signs that were used in the Ptolemaic texts. The sun disk, appearing in the horizon and containing a falcon, an image of the sun god, represents neheh, while a serpent wrapped around a mummy, or better still, around Osiris himself, served to write djet, the prototype of the ouroboros. Time, in its form of neheh and djet, time that cannot be quantified, which is counted indefinitely in millions and millions, nevertheless had a beginning and undoubtedly an end.
Gods and Men in Egypt, by Françoise Dunand and Christiane Zivie-Coche, page 70.

Once again, we see the concept of the serpent associated with the time god, this time with Osiris and his role as an eternal god of time.

In the Pyramid Texts, Osiris is described as a time god:

Utterance 577
1520a. To say: Osiris dawns, pure, mighty; high, lord of truth
1520b. on the first of the year; lord of the year.

Okay, let's start making some connections: from Richard Hinckley Allen's book, Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning we get this from his chapter on the constellation of Orion:

 
Saturnus has been another title, but its connection here I cannot learn, although I hazard the guess that as this divinity was the sun-god of the Phoenicians, his name might naturally be used for Uruanna-Orion, the sun-god of the Akkadians.
Richard Hinckley Allen, Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning (New York: Dover Publications, 1963), page 308.

...Cronos had a Latin counterpart, Saturn, whose name probably came from that of an Etruscan god but is traditionally supposed to come from the verb 'serere', to sow. This folk etymology is worth taking seriously, simply because those who took over the worship of Saturn did so. It then becomes clear that we inherit the notion of time as both reaper and sower, which makes Cronos the god of harvest.
Hamlet's Mill, Santillana and von Dechend, page 332.

Saturnus was so named because the completed act of sowing in latin is "satus." Eusebius of Caesarea, known as the "Father of Church History" has claimed that El, which is used as a name for God in the Old Testament, was also the name for Saturn or the Greek Cronus. This he got from reading Philo of Byblos, a Greek writer who gives an account of this El in a tract called Sanchuniathon. In this account, the Phoenician El is the son of the sky and earth, which is the parentage of Egypt's Osiris with the difference here being the sky is male and the earth female. Osiris' mother was the sky goddess Nut and his father the earth god Geb. El attacks his father sky with a sickle and castrates him to in order to force the sky and earth to remain apart so life could flourish. To appease his father sky, El offers his only begotten son as a burnt offering and circumcises himself.

Many ancient sources do compare Saturnus to the sun. In Babylonian astrological texts Saturnus is referred to as shamash - the sun. In Chaldean astronomy Saturnus was called alap-shamas - the star of the sun. Phaenon was a word used by the Greeks for Saturnus which means "the shining one". These appellations have confused scholars for years because they have never made the connection of Saturnus to Orion but held to the beliefs it referred to the planet Saturn. Staring them right in the face is the Roman festival called the Saturnalia, a seven day festival for Saturnus that ended with the birth of the new sun at the winter solstice. This false dichotomy spawned many incorrect assumptions that at some point in our ancient past the planet Saturn must have been as bright as the sun. It is strange to me that no one has ever bothered to look into the ancient Egyptian texts that clearly state that Osiris is the nocturnal sun.

 
The body of Osiris also played an important role in some of the New Kingdom Underworld Books. In the darkest hour of the night, the soul of the sun god Ra reached the cave where the body lay and became one with the soul of Osiris. This allowed Osiris and all the dead to awake and live again.
Egyptian Mythology, Geraldine Pinch, page 179.

A complex and particularly important relationship existed between Osiris and the sun god Re. Although Osiris was incorporated into the Heliopolitan theological system at a relatively early date, the god continued to grow in importance and by New Kingdom times his stature as an independent god was considerable; as is seen in titles which were applied to him such as 'lord of the universe', 'ruler of eternity' and 'king of the gods'. Osiris' position became, in fact, comparable to that of the sun god himself. He came to be regarded not only as the counterpart of Re in the netherworld, but also in some cases as the sun god's own body - so that Osiris and Re came to be considered as representing the body and soul, respectively, of a single great god. The solar cycle was thus imagined as the ba of Re descending into the underworld to unite with Osiris as his own corpse.
The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, Richard H. Wilkinson, page 120.

As I have mentioned many times before, Orion is the constellation that represents Osiris. Richard Hinckley Allen claims Saturnus is an appellation for Orion but he does not know why. If he was still alive I would personally tell him.

Alright, now that we have made the connection of Osiris to Cronus to Saturnus to El and by inference Orion, I'd like to add in a few more bits of knowledge that will give you pause for thought. The god of time's day is Saturday and it is the seventh day of the week. Here is Cronos as Saturday:

http://www.theoi.com/Gallery/Z50.1G.html

Saturnus always had a snake wrapped around its body seven times and sometimes you see the signs of the zodiac in the spaces between the snakes coils. Orion's belt in antiquity was known as the L or Ell.
Seamen have called it the Golden Yard-arm; tradesmen, the L, or Ell, the Ell and Yard, the Yard-stick, and the Yard-wand…
Richard Hinckley Allen, Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning (New York: Dover Publications, 1963), page 316.

It has been said dead men don't lie but also it seems the stars don't lie either. The ancient semitic Phoenicians called their great god El and we know this was Orion. We find Orion in the bible as Nimrod:

 
Later on the Jews called Orion Gibbōr, the Giant, considered as Nimrod bound to the sky for rebellion against Jehovah.
Richard Hinckley Allen, Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning (New York: Dover Publications, 1963), page 309.

The belt of the giant in the sky, el Jabbar, is replicated on the Gizah plateau as the three great pyramids. The celestial Orion as Osiris.

Next blog will start looking for this time god in unexpected places.