Islands ~ Formentera Lady

Chapter Sixteen

ISLANDS

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Formentera Lady

"He who has come through the fire
will not fade in the sun."

- Hindu proverb

"The first man comes from the earth and is of the earth."

- line one of C.G. Jung's epitaph

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting."

- Plato

"Kundalini, the Sphinx of Yoga, is Shakti, the king's daughter, who must be awakened if Yoga is to reach its supernal goal. For Hatha-Yogo, Shakti is in microcosmic form the revelation of the primaeval force of the feminine in the physical and etheric bodies. She is shown in the form of a serpent, but also as a young woman of enticing beauty. As long as the Shakti force in man is asleep, he cannot attain to higher wisdom."

- A Rosicrucian Notebook:
The Secret Sciences Used by Members of the Order
by Willy Schrodter

"Gazelles are leaping, feeding on the mountains. Near are lakes. Round their shores file shadows black of cedargroves. Aroma rises, a strong hairgrowth of resin. It burns, the orient, a sky of sapphire, cleft by the bronze flight of eagles. Under it lies the womancity, nude, white, still, cool, in luxury. A fountain murmurs among damask roses. Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes. A wine of shame, lust, blood exudes, strangely murmuring."

- James Joyce: Ulysses, Circe

"The Maiden caught me in the Wild
Where I was dancing merrily;
She put me into her Cabinet
And Lock'd me up with a Golden Key."

- William Blake, The Crystal Cabinet

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As the album begins, flute and piano depict a stirring out of sleep or unconsciousness. This is our own Prince Rupert, the intuitive "Fool", returning from ego-death, awakening to the world as if for the first time.

"For indeed our consciousness does not create itself-it wells up from unknown depths. In childhood it awakens gradually, and all through life it wakes each morning out of the depths of sleep from an unconscious condition. It is like a child that is born daily out of the primordial womb of the unconscious."

- C.G. Jung, CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.935

Gradually becoming aware of his surroundings, the narrator describes the Island and what he sees is his own re-emerging ego.

"Houses iced in whitewash guard a pale shore-line
Cornered by the cactus and the pine."

Standing apart from his once proud ego he is able to see it as "pale" and weakened. Note that the ego is on "guard" against the unconscious (the sea) and that what the ego upholds is a "whitewashed" version of the truth. The outlook of the ego is unchanging, frozen or "iced". "Cactus" and "pine" needles represent the pain of ego-attachments.

"Cactus, why have you thorns on your leaf also? --I am the heart of the wicked, who take pleasure in hurting others."

- Quotations from The Five Stages
by Hazrat Inayat Khan

"Here I wander where sweet sage and strange herbs grow"

1. Pushing Aside the Grass to Look for the Ox

"Wanting to break through to Emptiness with my white cudgel I cried out louder than the bellowing Ox, mooing through my senses. I followed mountain and stream searching for the Ox, seeking it everywhere. But I couldn't tell in which direction it had gone... west?... or east?"

- Xu Yun's Commentary on the Oxherding Pictures

"Sagittarius (The Intuitive Function); The seeker of truth, religious, philosophical. ...The eternal wanderer..."

- Applied Psychological Astrology

"...we see the first picture shows a man wandering through a landscape, you don't see any animal. It's called "Searching for the Ox". He's wandering around, he's looking for something. He doesn't know what. This is what I say is the stage of spiritual searching. We're all familiar with that. We're looking around restlessly for something. We're not quite sure what it is, but we feel that something is missing. The Zen Master Kakuan, in the twelfth century wrote commentaries on these, and he said, "Actually the ox has never been lost. So why are we searching for it? Because the man has turned away from his original nature. He cannot find the animal. He's confused by his perception."

- Ralph Metzner

"Sweet sage" refers to the "sage" advice being imparted by Intuitive insight. "Strange herbs" tell us that the world our protagonist thought he knew so well is now being experienced as new and different.

"One of the principles of Zen is known as Beginner's Mind. It is that open, unbiased state with regard to everything. In other words, everything is experienced as brand new, even if one has encountered it thousands of times. This is one of the deeper meanings of the Zen saying: "Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water." The experiences, though said in the same way, are profoundly different. After enlightenment, everything is different because you are different. The experience is not in the object, it is in you."

- OrdinaryZen & Raja Yoga
by Robert E. Gangwer

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"Down a sun-baked crumpled stony road."

"Sagittarians are truth-seekers, and the best way for them to do this is to hit the road, talk to others and get some answers."

- Understanding Your Sign - Sagittarius

"The motif of the fallen angel and the motif of fallen humanity both appear to be related to the abandoned child/hero archetype, who usually is a divine or magical child, and like Lucifer or Adam and Eve, has lost his original parents or original home. The purpose of his journey is to find what was lost, what Campbell calls "his ultimate god."

- The Genesis Model
by Gerry Anne Lenhart

"Adam Kadmon (Primordial Man): What remains in the void forms the "body" of Adam Kadmon, Primordial Man. For Luria, the very first figure to emerge as a result of the tzimtzum (divine concealment, contraction and withdrawal) is a Primordial Man who embodies in potentia the entirety of all created worlds.

Jung, who himself explored the Kabbalistic notion of Adam Kadmon, held that the Primordial Man, is both the "universal soul" (Jung, 1963, p. 409), and the archetype of the self (Jung, 1963, p. 383-4) as well as the process of personal transformation. He is man's invisible center, the core of the great religions, and as the self-archetype, the psychological equivalent of the creator God.

From a psychological point of view, the spontaneous emergence of Adam Kadmon from the unknowable void is symbolic of the psychological birth of the self. However, at this stage, the "self" is far from complete. The Primordial Man must first embark on a journey of creation, destruction, and restoration before the archetype of the Self can be said to fully emerge."

- The Lurianic Kabbalah: An Archetypal Interpretaion
Sanford L. Drob, Ph.D.

The "sun" is consciousness (as opposed to the unconscious). Wandering again on the well-worn road of consciousness, he now understands that he has over-relied on consciousness (the "sun-baked" road) and under-estimated the importance of unconscious content.

"Dusty wheels leaning rusting in the sun;"

Like the "spokeless wheels" in Dawn Song , the "wheels" here connote a lack of movement - in this case, toward spiritual growth. Again, too much "sun" (consciousness) is implicated as a cause of our protagonists troubles.

lizard by Mark Taylor / Talking Wall Studio

"Snuff brown walls where Spanish lizards run."

We know the "lizards" from Prince Rupert Awakes . They, like the "houses", are ego formations and are now seen as foreign ("Spanish"), something apart from who the narrator really is.

"The individuation urge promotes a state in which the ego is related to the self without being identified with it."

- Method: Individuation

"Walls" are barriers or (ego) defenses. The "lizards" are on the "run" in the face of the truth.

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