Sand, Water, Silence - The Embodiment of Spirit: Explorations in Matter and Psyche

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Sand, Water, Silence – The Embodiment of Spirit

of related interest Foundation and Form in Jungian Sandplay Leonore Steinhardt ISBN 1 85302 841 X

Clayworks in Art Therapy Plying the Sacred Circle

David Henley

ISBN 1 84310 706 6

Spirituality and Art Therapy Living in Connection

Edited by Mimi Farrelly-Hansen ISBN 1 85302 952 X

Psychological Aesthetics

Painting, Feeling and Making Sense

David Mclaghan

ISBN 1 85302 834 7

The Revealing Image Joy Schaverien ISBN 1 85302 821 5

Studio Art Therapy

Cultivating the Artist Identity in the Art Therapist

Catherine Hyland Moon ISBN 1 85302 814 2

Sand, Water, Silence – The Embodiment of Spirit Explorations in Matter and Psyche Mary Jane Markell

Jessica Kingsley Publishers London and Philadelphia

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, England W1P 9HE. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the publisher. Warning: The doing of an unauthorised act in relation to a copyright work may result in both a civil claim for damages and criminal prosecution. The right of Mary Jane Markell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published in the United Kingdom in 2002 by Jessica Kingsley Publishers Ltd 116 Pentonville Road London N1 9JB, England and 325 Chestnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19106, USA www.jkp.com Copyright © Mary Jane Markell 2002 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 1 84310 078 9 Printed and Bound in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press, Gateshead, Tyne and Wear

For my mother and father

It is not wisdom to be only wise – And on the inner vision close the eyes – But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Santayana

Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

8

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

9

Foreword by Lauren Cunningham

11

Introduction

13

Chapter 1 The Vision

23

Chapter 2 Sacred Time, Sacred Space: Creating Temenos

37

Chapter 3 Meeting with the Serpent: The Divine Secret of Renewal

64

Chapter 4 The Flowering of the Serpent: Chakras as an Archetypal Path

94

Chapter 5 Origins and Source

132

Chapter 6 Ordering Rhythms: The Play of Subtle Energy 171 Chapter 7 Loon and Fish: The Emergent Integration of Opposites

197

Chapter 8 The Manifestation of the Compassionate Heart 227 BIBLIOGRAPHY

256

SUBJECT INDEX

265

NAME INDEX

Acknowledgments Many thanks to all those gentle souls who over the years courageously shared their personal sandplay journeys with me and thereby expanded my own wisdom; to Lauren Cunningham and Linda Dean who helped in the birthing of this book through their reading and support each step of the way; to my Dutch colleagues, students and friends who held and contained the process throughout; to my friend, David Corner, whose mercurial mind created so many dialogues which bore fruit; to my friend, Jan van Embden, for his kindness and encouraging voice as well as a considerable technical know-how; to Kay Bradway, Harriet Friedman and Karen Signell, who all held up a lamp for me; to all my colleagues in the International Society for Sandplay Therapy who have created an international temenos of friendship, sharing and inspiration; to Nancy Forest-Flier for her editorial work; to Nancy Fairbrother for her inspired and creative administrative assistance; to my publisher, Jessica Kingsley, and editor, Jo Gammie, for their vision and deepest gratitude to my teacher, Dora M. Kalff.

List of Illustrations Cover illustration: Hand, Nantembo (1839–1925), private collection 1.1

The Wu-chi diagram known as “On the Rock”

1.2

Kokopelli, Mimbres pottery

2.1

The threshold, Palacio de Pena, Sintra, Portugal

2.2

Thunderbird carrying whale with lightning snake and wolf, British Columbia

3.1

Hand, eye, serpents: early woodlands culture, Mid-America

3.2

The dream cure of the temple sleep, Attica

4.1

Enso, Torei

4.2

Krishna as divine child dancing on the head of the serpent, Kaliya, India

5.1–5.10

Ten Ox-herding pictures by Kaku-An

5.11–5.20 Ten Ox-herding pictures II, China 5.21

Smiling frog, Sengai

6.1

The Kalachakra, a typical multi-armed deity

7.1

Loon and fish, Jackson Beardy, Ojibway Indian

8.1–8.2

Hand, feet, head and skull: an embodiment

8.3

Stillness and movement: sand image of the zia and yin-yang

FOREWORD Lauren Cunningham

You are holding in your hands an important book that helps elucidate why imaginal work in healing modalities such as sandplay therapy holds such transformational power. Sandplay therapists long have needed an in-depth review and elaboration of what Dora Kalff taught about the transformational process in sandplay therapy as it affects the body. Kalff believed that working imaginatively with the elements of sand and water had the possibility of engaging a person in a transformative experience at a cellular level that touched upon the deepest sources of healing. This occurs at a non-verbal, symbolic level that has analogies in the ancient mystery religions. Markell writes “The logical conclusion of this process is the self as shaman, and it is in this area that the greatest changes in Western scientific and medical thought are now occurring.” Jung intuitively knew about the unconscious connection between body and psyche at what he called the “psychoid” level, and it was Kalffian sandplay that demonstrated and offered the experience of this connection. Mary Jane Markell’s book offers extensive amplification of this wisdom. Sand, Water, Silence – The Embodiment of Spirit provides a container for the author’s considerable creative and intellectual energies that focus on distilling and uniting a wide array of traditions and viewpoints. These include Eastern and Western, scientific and spiritual, spatial 11

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and temporal, body and mind. She draws on and integrates ancient and modern ideas and wisdom from such diverse sources as quantum physics, Mesopotamian myths, Taoism and Buddhism, and Jungian depth psychology. She points the reader towards an integrative view that she thinks is already happening in the human collective consciousness of a transcendent state of non-duality in the reunion of the mind–body disharmony that has plagued modern man. She believes that with the conscious balancing and reconciliation of opposing traditions and perspectives into a unitive world-view a deepening understanding of the cosmos as well as a personal, individual unfolding will evolve. Mary Jane Markell has written a book that emerged from the currents of her own individuation journey that had one beginning in her relationship to Dora Kalff and her sandplay therapy process. In the years that followed, her connection to natural and internal landscapes as well as to the world of ideas incubated. Mary Jane Markell’s inspiration springs from her own internal alchemy that began in the water and earth and in the “woods and valley” of her life experiences. These provided the foundations that led to writing this book. She integrates her intuitive connections that come directly out of her with objective learning from studies and reading that she shares extensively. This is a book both to savor and enjoy.

INTRODUCTION All of nature is organized according to the activity of significance. David Bohm, in Dialogues with Scientists and Sages (Weber 1986)

An idea is a kind of seed which unfolds. Every idea must be vulnerable. David Bohm, in Dialogues with Scientists and Sages

My particular mythology has led to my having lived during a certain period of history in which a singular event seems to be happening in the human collective consciousness. While quite subtle in the general scheme of cultural events, there is a shift occurring, an earth movement, in which science and spirituality, the two greatest forces that the human race has known, are coming together again. I say singular because the new element in this contemporary manifestation of perhaps a more subtle process is the richness of the spiritual traditions of the East blending with the materialism and technological scientific endeavor of the West, introducing the possibility of an entirely new level of consciousness to the collective and individual life. This adds a new dimension to our thinking, for one could say that the East lives in space while the West in time, the one centered in a spiraling movement and the other riding the crest of wave through the void. So at many more subtle levels this outward form or manifestation speaks to a hidden form which at its most sublime hints at a transcendent state of non-duality, for this indeed is the reflection of that state we call the union of opposites. When the first faint stirrings began that led to the writing of this book, I could sense the necessity of retreat. Indeed the allure of the inward retreat beckoned to me, something already foreseen many years earlier when I was studying sandplay with Dora Kalff. During one partic13

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ular workshop Kalff suddenly stopped, and staring intently at those of us in the audience, she asked, “Do you see a change in the awakening understanding in the world?” The silence in those around me was palpable! For myself, I believe it was another of those synchronistic events that often happened in our sandplay community in which life’s meaning and direction were unalterably changed. A curtain had been lifted just slightly, and I had had a glimpse of something in the wondrous Beyond. As yet I had no architectural form for the book but began with bits and pieces of flotsam and jetsam floating up from the unconscious and demanding attention, nudging me, leading me down a path whose direction and time dimension were both unclear to me. I knew in an intuitive way that this urge would require sifting the known, the related and the unknown, in an attempt to comprehend the natural character of my own individual – and of our collective – being in the world. It would require an immersion in a process of creation to discover the world’s secrets – into the continuous creation of a world spilling forth like a never-ceasing fountain. I would enter again into that universe of the four elements – solid earth, the infinite sea, the spacious air, the fiery heat – and a fifth dimension encompassing time and space, whatever the risks. But to pursue this path, the first steps had to be taken into the forest, for that is where every serious writer must begin. And this entails entering the forest, the green wood, the dark, mysterious place of the free and independent imagination, the green wood of the soul. That is, a place outside the normal world, intensely private and enclosed, haunted and haunting, sometimes numinous, often lonely, sometimes dark, often lost, but possessing a sense of fertility and greenness, and indeed, a sense of divine magic. So it was to that wilderness that I took myself, or I should say was led by those earliest promptings. A significant symbolic figure for me during that initial period was the great Kokopelli, the infamous American Indian trickster figure, carrying his bag of corn seed on his back, piping his flute. I could say this had been prefigured earlier when I traveled to Nepal some years before and first encountered those living embodiments of the archetype, the wizened old man carrying a huge piece of carved wood held high up above him like a tree, from whose branch-like notches were balanced dozens of hand-carved wooden flutes. One could often hear the song of his flute on

INTRODUCTION

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the wind in strange and lonely places even in the furthest reaches of the high mountains. It echoed for me another symbol of equal significance, a small Zuni fetish, coyote, howling at the moon in his solitary night. What I found in my wilderness forest, of course, was a deep, abiding and rich valley, verdant and abundant, miraculously lush, intensely secret, with a sense of a mysterious yet profound unity to all of existence, and that became the valley of my mind during the necessary retreat from the real world. And rippling out from that inner valley of the mind was an often pressing need to mirror the richness of that natural world in my own writing process. So it was that the path led me syncretically to a place of natural beauty in the real world as I hesitantly brought forth fresh chapters of the book. What I discovered about that wilderness retreat as I approached the end of the book was the great temptation, or perhaps risk one might say, not to return from the wilderness. So a great lesson came in having known two kinds of exile: the first, the formidable real exile from home and homeland, friends and family, in undertaking the original path of retreat into the wilderness; and the second much later, the exile from that discovered and enchanted valley existing far off in space and time, for that latter exile, painful as it was, represented a retreat from the imagined that I had discovered in my secret valley. That became a formidable transition requiring the integration of a certain loss and a new struggle to find a suitable bridge for return. So the reader perhaps feels the movement from myth to image and back in this inner journey of mine where, as Jung once noted, “the living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression,” the process suggesting that the names and forms which we have given that spirit “mean little enough for they are but the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the eternal tree of life” (Jung 1933, p.244). I say this in humility, for much in my book is not new but of a very old character. I had simply outgrown my own earlier forms of expression and explored some new forms and perhaps an idea or two on the nature of sandplay. During the first year of my journey I spent a considerable amount of time simply reading, not in any organized or systematic manner, but rather what “drew” me intuitively. One of those books quite early on

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happened to be about the great Gilgamesh myth, for I had already spent quite some time studying the Innanna myth and felt a need to explore further the great Sumerian and Babylonian teachings. I remember a beautiful evening on my roof terrace in Amsterdam, when as the sun was setting and the sky was a gentle mauve I began to explore with a friend some ideas that were dawning on me or emerging from that myth. What suddenly struck me profoundly, in particular in the ancestral imperative that sends Gilgamesh to the sea and becomes the context of his meeting with the serpent, was that most solutions lie in matter. This was a tentative thought, a chink in the door, through which one could glimpse a tiny bit of light. It did not come as a fact but rather as a seed, something in the dark which still had to grow. And as the night came upon us with the first stars, I somehow felt this thought too had to do with the nature of human suffering, for I had long felt that the greatest cause of human suffering comes from a sense of body–mind disharmony. These ideas had to remain in the darkness of maturation for almost a full year before they were to be set down in writing and explored in the context of psyche and matter in sandplay. However, they remain the fundamental structural of the entire work. In retrospect I could appreciate the value of the Gilgamesh legend from a fresh perspective in the context of my own quest. I had passed through the underworld and feminine journey of confrontation, had even had a period of hanging upside down in the dark, all that stripping away in the process of dying and return, all those sacrifices whose ultimate intent becomes a more natural state of self-knowing. So it is not surprising that in some mysterious way the Gilgamesh legend held some insights for me – which I just happened to find at the right moment. Now, these several years later, it seems almost as though those ancestors, Utnapishtim and his compassionate wife, the wise old man (and woman) synchronistically chose me! About the same time as I had begun digesting the vast subtleties of the serpent wisdom, I read The Ending of Time, a series of 13 dialogues between David Bohm and Jiddu Krishnamurti. This had considerable impact on me, for I had recognized that the retreat I had chosen for myself necessarily drew me out of the “known” of many of my own old conditionings in which I may have felt my own creativity blocked. This

INTRODUCTION

17

approach also suggested a movement in the direction of the transcendental, a freeing of the mind and its constraints through a merging whose goal was a religious–philosophical union of the individual with the ultimate totality. Further, through awareness and attention to the overall movement the mind could come to a state of silence and emptiness without any division. In this way one recognizes one’s own potential for entering the ground of all being or, experientially, a state that transcends space and time. I do not profess great knowledge of physics or the natural sciences. Indeed my own experience has been limited to the rudiments provided through several university courses in physics. I do recall that experience to have been a pleasant one in that it demanded of me that I master certain workings of the natural world. I used to burn the midnight oil in the dormitory cafeteria tutoring other students in the often difficult comprehension of those natural laws and see, in retrospect, my own curiosity and enthusiasm again reflected in the writing of this book. But the writing involved in this project became a deeply meditative process, a process which from the start was like the massa confusa and only slowly sorted itself out into an essential clarity and unfolding meaning which will go on long after the writing project has concluded. As I read the dialogues, the parallels to what I had experienced in the power of sandplay and its process, moving toward that same silence and emptiness and ultimately to a renewed sense of the totality, again drew me. For prior to reading them I had long since chosen the title for the book, which included one of its most fundamental aspects, that of silence. And, of course, I mean here something far more profound than ordinary silence. Silence moves ever more deeply to far more subtle levels than ordinary language can convey, for how do we give words to infinite space, timelessness, or indeed, emptiness! What I had yet to comprehend were the questions I had about the movement itself and the deeper connection to matter. What indeed was the meaning of transformation or the “transformation of the energies” of Kalffian theory, which we tacitly take for granted as part of the infrastructure of sandplay? How does it (how do we?) become both embodied and ensouled? Most importantly, I recalled Kalff ’s insistence on the signifi-

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cance of the body as the true path to the awakening of the spiritual dimension in life, that is, the body as mediator between nature and spirit. In this circuitous way I found myself drawn back to quantum theory and the work of Bohm, for here was a physicist whose ideas seemingly sprang from both Eastern and Western thought and whose greater intent was to encourage profound cultural and social changes through a “creative surge” in the scientific, artistic and religious dimensions of life such that there could be a totally new and fresh experiencing of the totality at the individual, cultural and collective levels. This approach to change and transformation is similarly based on the notion of free creative play, or, seen in another way, play as the very essence of creative thought. For many years my understanding had been deepened by my own attraction to Taoism, which in the context of this book had been furthered elaborated to include both the cyclical movement of the body’s internal energy and the recovery of our own original nature. Early on I had discovered the beauty of the writings of the Englishman John Blofeld, one of the first to bring Taoist thought to the West. Convergences, motifs, mythologems and meanings had thus begun to coalesce and deepen for me in the context of my own life, where I was discovering my own bridges to integration. I have often felt that we are most drawn to those landscapes, places and perhaps countries, in which we truly awaken, or should I say rediscover our original nature. I do not mean to imply that this is a solitary event in the course of a lifetime, for there are many such awakenings, subtle and profound, as we journey along our separate individuation paths. The energies aroused in such an encounter can stimulate and accelerate conscious awareness in such a way that the inner experience is one in which time, space and the land itself coalesce into a flow of images and potent symbols. In this way my own writing process acquired a life of its own with a richly international character. One of my most profoundly life-altering experiences, akin to the blinding light on the road to Damascus, had occurred in the majestic Alps of Switzerland during a period many years earlier when I was in my own sand process with Kalff, so it comes as no surprise that I had managed to haul my computer and paraphernalia off to

INTRODUCTION

19

a mountain retreat in the Engadina, where Chapters 4 and 5 emerged alongside a roaring glacial river. Indeed, nature increasingly became a critical necessity for me, and in the winter months I managed a long retreat in the southern Algarve of Portugal, situated with a view of the southern Atlantic and the surging winter sea and windswept cliffs reminiscent of the Cape Cod I had known as a child and young adult. Added to this were the tiny Portuguese fishing village, where the people welcomed me with their elemental life and daily rounds, as well as the courage of my 85-year-old mother, who flew over to be with me during a flood that inundated a considerable part of the country! Most of the final chapter was written in a tiny trekkers’ house on a small Dutch island in the North Sea during a blustery late spring, with long walks on deserted beaches between the flowing movement of conclusion. Landscapes continued to intrigue me as I began to look more deeply at the universal tendency to mythologize them, ensuring the psychic atmosphere or mood that specific and highly meaningful places can evoke. This, of course, led to the entire complexity of mirroring. Inevitably I saw that just as psyche becomes entwined with the external environment in a process of matter reflecting and mirroring psyche, so must psyche be just as entwined with the internal physical environment or matter. It is not only the outer landscape that is spiritually enlivened but the inner one as well. How do we go about finding that reflection? This interior landscape, which I refer to as the “inner geography,” can be evoked in a most subtle manner through images of grottoes, forests, mountains, rivers and seas or equally the roaring wind, blazing fires or tom-tomming drums – in short, the shapes and forms of elemental life revealed through ritual process whose most fundamental aspect is ordering rhythms. Simplifying and ordering through reflection. Do we see in these occasional glimpses of psyche and matter a continuously moving process of the one being mirrored in the other? Is there something there – in that in-between world, that watery world, neither wholly matter nor wholly psyche or spirit, but ever so subtle, fully alive, and carrying the meaning of the two? Deepening reflections on the rippling pool. Images beyond time and space.

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So it was by means of these external and interior landscapes that I explored our mutual and individual life tasks – combining the elements in an exactly proportioned and immutable state in order to discover the power that comes from perfect harmony. This is the alchemy of nature’s rarest creativity, the key to the door of creation, the philosopher’s stone, finding the rarest of the rare that dissolves contradiction and reconciles opposition – and in the process exploring a metaphor we call method which turns common sand and elemental water to enduring gold! This is the thread and tapestry of this effort: to create a dialogue on the significance of Kalffian sandplay in our time and in so doing to explore ever more subtle aspects of psyche and matter. And beyond all that to observe these paradigms simply as manifestations of a greater underlying process, an enlivened manifestation containing elements of both ancient magical tradition and the modern materialist concern with the expansion of consciousness at the individual and collective level. As the song goes, “pursuing it with weary feet, until it joins some larger way where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say” (Tolkein 1954, p.384). For as Jung clarifies at the end of “Answer to Job,” “that is to say, even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky” (Jung 1969, par. 758). And from the beauty and wisdom of the East, Seccho (Hsueh-t’ou) says: What life can compare with this? – Sitting alone quietly by the window, I observe the leaves fall, the flowers bloom as the seasons come and go. Do you understand, or not?

Yengo (Yuan-wu), who offers a commentary on Seccho’s poem to his monks, says:

INTRODUCTION

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“Look and see with your own eyes! If you hesitate, you miss the mark forever.” He then raised his hossu and said, “Do you see?” He then struck his chair and said, “Do you hear?” Coming down from the chair, he said, “Has anything been talked about?” (Suzuki 1960, p.127)

The book itself is intended to arouse discussion within the sandplay community as well as the larger Jungian tradition from which it is derived. In no way does it set up hard and fast conclusions. Rather, I would hope that it provides the fertile ground from which successive generations of students of sandplay as well as Jungians can begin to explore the questions it unearths in relation to psyche and matter and the nature of healing. For it suggests the possibility that two worldviews, East and West, bringing together the materialism and scientific technology of the West and the richness and wisdom of the ancient traditions of the East with their emphasis on the inner science of the body–mind, have a fundamentally complementary nature which in union lends itself to a deeper understanding of the cosmos and the natural development of the individual within that cosmos. In that respect it becomes an honoring of Dora Kalff for the prophetic and visionary nature of her teaching. Vnà, Switzerland

chapter 1

THE VISION He who realizes the truth of the body can then come to know the truth of the universe. The Ratnasara

In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Jung asks: In primitive tribes we observe that the old people are almost always the guardians of the mysteries and the laws, and it is in these that the cultural heritage of the tribe is expressed. How does the matter stand with us? Where is the wisdom of our old people – where are their precious secrets and their visions. (Jung 1933, p.25)

Those who knew Dora Kalff and studied directly with her, as well as those more recent students of sandplay, are heirs to a great legacy in her teaching. In the early years of the development of sandplay there was scant literature available, and much of the teaching was handed down in an oral “storytelling” tradition based on the copious notes taken by those first students who participated in Kalff ’s visiting seminars and workshops in Europe, Japan or the USA, with their rich clinical and slide presentation. Other than her book, Sandplay: A Psychotherapeutic Approach to the Psyche (1980), first published in English as Sandplay: Mirror of a Child’s Psyche (1971), students had little support in terms of either theoretical backing or a collective community of others struggling for clarity. The late 1960s and 1970s were difficult ones for any clinician endeavoring to follow Kalff and the emerging Jungian sandplay development. As Mitchell and Friedman (1994, p.73) point out, many of the originators and early leaders of the broader sandtray movement were no longer 23

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actively working in the field, and it was during this period that Kalff’s Jungian symbolic approach to sandplay took center stage. In a retrospective look at Kalff’s wisdom – for surely she was one of those exceptional teachers who imparted considerable vision to her students – one can now say that her contributions were prophetic. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her contributions to healing and the creative mystery of the transformational process in sandplay as it affects the body. In this, Kalff has reconnected us with the ancients and has helped redeem the “lost mysteries” through healing with the gifts of the imagination. The logical conclusion of this process is the self as shaman, and it is in this area that the greatest changes in Western scientific and medical thought are now occurring. This is not to say that Kalff was in any sense one-sided. In an early article on sandplay she comments: Another aspect of wholeness, upon which particular emphasis is placed in sandplay, is the totality of body and spirit. In its negative aspect the spirit appears as exclusive intellect which has lost all connection to feeling and the body. This lack of connection expresses itself in contempt for feeling as something unclear and in the opinion that the body is primitive and non-spiritual. This attitude, all too frequent in modern man, is often the cause of psychic disorders. (Kalff 1978, p.10)

Thus the ultimate goal of sandplay is that wholeness of ego and self, of body and soul, or psyche and matter which finds its expression through the transformation of energies. This is consistent with Jung, who stated: To solve the problem you must give equal value. We cannot say the side of the spirit is twice as good as the other side, we must bring the pairs of opposites together in an altogether different way, where the rights of the body are just as much recognized as the rights of the spirit. (Jung 1988, p.107)

Synthesis of East and West Professionals living in the milieu of modern technology and science, and under the influence of contemporary psychology, usually feel compelled to find rational explanations for unusual or mysterious forms of healing.

THE VISION

25

However, if we cling to these logical explanations, we lose sight of our ancient roots. It is as though we are being confronted with another pair of opposites created by the very progress we have achieved in modern medicine. The task then is one of reconciling those opposites and finding the balance between the ancients and their wisdom in healing, and new and revolutionary ideas in the field of imagery and healing, illness and health, science and spirituality – recent findings in both traditional and non-traditional approaches to holistic health in the West as well as the East. Kalff brought to her development of analytically oriented sandplay her own involvement and intimate experience with Eastern philosophies. During a period of personal reflection and change, she had an important dream set in Tibet. In the dream she was approached by two monks who gave her a golden rectangular instrument. She was to swing this instrument, and as she did so an opening appeared in the ground which cut through to the other side of the world, the West, where she saw the light of the sun. Emma Jung, who helped interpret the dream, aided Kalff in understanding that through her knowledge of the East she might also serve the West (Seminar at Pajaro Dunes, California, 1987). Kalff often spoke of the many important influences in her life, including the discussions she had had with many spiritual leaders. These included His Holiness (HH) the Dalai Lama, the Zen Buddhist scholar D.T. Suzuki, as well as many notables from Tibetan and Zen Buddhism. She acknowledged Chang Chung-yuan as her first teacher, followed by Master Suzuki (Seminar at Pajaro Dunes, 1987). These personal anecdotes constituted a rich part of her oral teaching, although there is much less reference to them in her written works. Thus Kalff had begun a synthesis of Eastern and Western philosophical traditions which was incorporated into her evolving theory of sandplay and became a significant part of her lectures and workshops. It was here that she discerned the possibility for blending and bridging the ancient wisdom of the East with Western historical and contemporary thought. So for students observing the impact of sandplay on certain responses in the physical body, a close awareness of these traditions is just as important as a familiarity with Jungian thought.

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Indeed because the strength of the West is grounded in its exploration of the material world – in what is “outside” ourselves – it is important that we explore in this process emerging paradigms from contemporary thought which incorporate known aspects of the material world with knowledge carried by those from the East who have had centuries of attunement with the inner sciences. In the 1980s and 1990s an increasing number of dialogues have occurred bringing together scientists and physicians and some of the world’s leading spiritual teachers from both the Eastern and Western traditions. A leading question has been the relationship between the mind and body, or psyche and matter. Jung himself was inclined to think that the unconscious has a material aspect. Speaking of the relationship between psyche and matter from a Jungian perspective, Von Franz comments: The psyche–matter problem has not yet been solved, which is why the basic riddle of alchemy is still not solved … ultimately, the question as to whether and how the unconscious is in some way connected with matter is quite unsettled … we merely make the hypothesis that there is a psyche which manifests in dreams and in involuntary psychological ways which we can study, just as physicists say that there is something like matter, or energy and study that. But we are already beginning to see that certain results are so similar that it is as if we were tunneling from either side toward the center of the same mountain. Though we have not really met yet, it looks as though we are moving towards the same goal and therefore there is the possibility of meeting one day. (Von Franz 1980a, pp.37–40)

Kabat-Zinn has referred to this as a kind of “intrapsychic technology” which has been developing over several thousand years within traditions that had considerable wisdom about the mind–body connection (Moyers 1993, p.116). That is, ancient interventions aimed at healing and renewal have taken many forms within every culture, religion and group of people. Some have taken the guise of hidden rites often intricately woven into sacred ritual, while others have involved visits to healing shrines or religious pilgrimages. The essence of these teachings, however, has consisted of similar processes: a stilling and quieting of both mind and body; a focusing in which the individual can experience both an inner and a transpersonal

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sense of peace and contentment; a state of oneness with the cosmos – all of which we increasingly have come to associate with physical as well as mental well-being. These esoteric teachings are harbored in all of the great spiritual traditions: in Islam with Sufism, in Judaism with the kabbalah, and in Christianity with the great manuscripts on prayer and meditation. At the heart of this essence lies the symbolic process. One of the most urgent needs of our historical epoch is an appreciation of the value of that inner subjective world of the psyche, the inner symbolic life. The historian Arnold Toynbee predicted many years ago that one of the most significant events of the twentieth century would be the coming of Buddhism to the West. And it is Buddhism, and particularly Tibetan and Zen Buddhism, which now confronts Western psychology with its vast exploration of the inner sciences derived from centuries of Buddhistic inquiry dating to many years before the birth of Christ. In the mountainous remoteness of Tibet, monasteries once existed which at one time had over ten thousand resident scholars intent on exploring the inner sciences derived from the richness of the ancient Indian Buddhist philosophy. The blending of Buddhism with Taoism in China and its subsequent Zen development in Japan led to similar explorations, all having their origins in the complexity of Indian Buddhistic thought and experience. This included the knowledge of the self, depth consciousness, and the extraordinary states brought about through these transformative experiences.

The importance of symbols From a Western psychological perspective, Edinger (1973, p.117) has commented that “the symbolic life in some form is a prerequisite for psychic health. Without it the ego is alienated from its suprapersonal source and falls victim to a kind of cosmic anxiety.” The ultimate goal of Kalffian sandplay therapy is a conscious integration of the inner symbolic processes. For as Kalff herself stressed, the archetypes of transformation work through the power of symbolic language. Imagination becomes the clearing in the forest, the light breaking through darkness, the mysterious and sacred place of the soul’s epiphany. And it is through experiencing the strange flora and fauna of our inner life, that which can disturb or

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frighten us or bring us to great love for others and true compassion, that the healing tendencies of the psyche begin to guide our lives. An appreciation for and knowledge of symbolism and the inner symbolic process, as Von Franz (1980a, p.192) has noted, is “a net, so to speak, in which one can at least catch the unspeakable mystery of an immediate experience of the unconscious.” While this undertaking might then lead to a spiritual life with new meaning, Kalff often cautioned about the importance of the physical body: These [sand images] are all archetypal happenings. Something is touched within us and we participate. The images are sometimes more than the Self. They become transpersonal moments … archetypal moments with great numinosity. Something very special happens in these experiences. First, there is the discovery, then the working on it. Then the integration of it. These experiences can lead to the realization of the inner images as precursors to modifications in the external world. The ego cannot exist without the Absolute. It is a feeling of the Universe. However, there can be no spiritual life without the body. When the spirit is autonomous without the body, it is not complete. This integration becomes a spiritualizing of the body. It becomes the means of obtaining the integration. The body becomes the mediator between heaven and earth, between spirit and nature. (Seminar at Zollikon, Switzerland, 1983; italics mine)

There is thus an embodiment in the unity which emerges out of the integrative experience of the sandplay process, as is suggested in Eastern practices. This idea that the physical body becomes an exteriorization of the invisible subtle process of the life of the psyche, or in the Buddhist sense, the mind, is itself a very ancient belief. One can still find living examples of tribal healing such as that practiced by the Native Americans, where sacred rituals performed upon the physical body facilitate symbolic as well as physical healing through bringing about a new harmony of psyche and matter.

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The transformation of energies In all her seminars and lectures, Kalff stressed the importance of the transformation of energies as this process emerged in the sand. She comments on this process as follows: Eventually, the patient may reach the stage we can designate as the expression of wholeness, or in Jungian terminology, the Self. Thus a psychic situation of repose-within-oneself is generated, which often effects a numinous experience and establishes contact with the spiritual. The ego becomes less absolute as the center of the conscious personality by coming to the recognition that it is contained within the Self, which embodies the unity between conscious and unconscious. This experience is the basis for the initial transformation of energies. (Kalff 1978, p.12)

Kalff emphasized that if the energies are blocked, they often become the basis of psychosomatic symptoms. Pointing out that in the process of sandplay, the energies are not suppressed but rather transformed, she indicated that this transformation occurs through intensely experienced and numinous, often religious, images emerging in the sand. These deeply felt and meaningful personal experiences become the basis for a “progression and orderedness” in the transformation of energies which can be witnessed time and again in sandplay processes (Seminar at Zollikon, 1982). Commenting on the aptness of the sandtray to function as a container of energies, Kalff told Weinrib in a personal conversation in 1972: Precisely because the collective unconscious is so vast, there is a need for sensation reality, three dimensions, and the confinement of the box. It provides containment and security. It contains the fantasies. The energies, contained, yet able to move, are more readily transformed. (Weinrib 1983, p.43)

The sandplay process with its container, the tray, begins to resemble the “closed house” of the alchemical vessel offering a new pathway to the individuation process. Each sandplay process, indeed each tray, leads to a unique creativity in each moment, and the closed house, the protected tray, alludes to a secret source of life and to the secret center of the personality.

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In a workshop presentation in California, Kalff commented: It is the numinous or religious quality which is the true basis for the transformation which takes place. I got to this knowledge through not just my patients, but also through Oriental philosophy. It has more of the inner … what we have lost through our own development in the West. It is all an inner process and can take place only through our own experience. Not just personal experience but transpersonal. It widens our love for what is around us. (Seminar at Pajaro Dunes, 1983)

What became increasingly paramount in process work in the sand was what was referred to as “going deeply into the body.” In her remarks to a small group of American members of the International Society for Sandplay Therapists in Sausalito, California, in 1988, Kalff spoke at length on the chakras or energy centers in the body and their integration as an archetypal path. Indicating that we can observe the movement of the body–spirit integration through the chakras, she stressed that we must understand that the spirit is developed through the body and not the intellect.

The aspect of the feminine and the wu-chi diagram Commenting that in Hinduism and Buddhism, it is the feminine which is brought through the chakras leading to the kundalini experience, Kalff then spoke of the ocean and earth elements representing the lowest levels of the chakras and the deepest part of the unconscious. By analogy, water and sand are the elements which may provide for an encounter with the lowest levels in the body and become the means by which we are reconnected to the all-too-often lost feminine quality. Water and earth then provide the foundation or basis for a higher development of consciousness. It is from this most elemental level of water and earth that new growth can proceed, for it is through the feminine that we are able to penetrate to the deeper realms in both psyche and matter. The feminine quality itself is tapped through the earth element, resulting in access to the transcendental. Kalff often commented that there could be “no deep religious experience without the touching of the feminine creative

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quality.” “This begins a transition to a new religiosity,” she explained (Seminar in California, 1979), meaning that in its complete unfolding a new unity could occur between that feminine aspect and the masculine spirit leading to the heart manifestation of compassionate living. Kalff often referred to a diagram that she came across while studying Chinese philosophy which was initially published in her book (Kalff 1980). Bernoulli (1960, pp.321–324) has dated this diagram to the eighth century, although its origins are probably from earlier Taoist sources. Kalff referred to the diagram as “On the Rock” in several of her workshop lectures (1982, 1987), which is attributed to Chou-Tun Yi, a philosopher of the tenth century. As with other significant and ancient ideas from Taoist cosmology and internal alchemy, the original drawing was carved into a rock from which later rubbings were taken which were well known throughout Taoist circles. According to the Taoist scholar Eva Wong (1992), the wu-chi diagram, as it is known in Taoist treatises, is mentioned in the Chronicles of Huashan (Huashan Chi) and was carved on a cliff face in Huashan, the Grand Mountains of the Shensi province in China. It is said that the wu-chi was first revealed to a Taoist hermit known as the sage of the river. Similarly, Chung Li-ch’uan, one of the Eight Immortals, obtained the knowledge of the wu-chi diagram and passed it on to a succession of hermits, one of whom passed the original teachings on to Chen Hsi-i, a Sung dynasty hermit and author of various treatises on Taoist cosmology, divination and internal alchemy. It comes to us therefore from the mists and mountains of ancient China and the wisdom of its sage hermits or wise old men of Taoism in its earliest times. It is later mentioned in the Lao-tzu, which recommends “the return to the wu-chi”, and in the Chuang-tzu one finds the invitation to “enter the Nameless Gate” and “wander in the expanse of the wu-chi” (see Figure 1.1). The wu-chi can be read from the top down or from the bottom to the top. Read from top to bottom, the diagram describes the origin of the universe and all life. Read from the bottom upward, the sequence of transformations through internal alchemy (or what is also referred to as the return to the Tao) are revealed. In a later treatise which combined Confucian and Taoist theories of origin, further revisions were incorpo-

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The primal unity

Wu-chi The undivided

The union of polar opposites

T’ai chi The union of yang and yin

The resultant elements in their reciprocal action

Wu yüu The fivefold circuit: fire, water, earth, wood, metal

The resultant things of heaven and earth

The things with predominant yang principle The things with predominant yin principle

Figure 1.1 The Wu-chi diagram known as “On the Rock”. Sources: Cultivating Stillness: A Taoist Manual for Transforming Body and Mind, translated by Eva Wong. Commentry by Shui-ch’ing Tzu. Boston MA: Shambala. Also in Rudolf Beruoulli (1970) “Spritual Development as Reflected in Alchemy and Related Disciplines.” In Joseph Campbell (ed) Spiritual Disciplines: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks. New York: Princeton/Bollingen.

rated clarifying the process as that of the source of all things. In these revisions the essentially cyclic process of nature is revealed. It is instructive and relevant to clarify that process, for it helps explain more subtle aspects of the philosophical origins of sandplay itself. Implicit are significant parallels with Jungian psychology which bear directly on Kalff’s original ideas about sandplay. According to Taoist thought, the wu-chi or topmost circle is the source of the t’ai chi. From the movement of the t’ai chi comes the creation of yang. When that yang movement reaches its apex, stillness is created, and from that stillness is born yin. In this way movement and stillness follow one another, and from the yin and yang, stillness and movement, comes the force of creation leading to the elements water, fire, wood,

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metal, and earth. From the properties of these five elements and the essence of wu-chi emerges generative energy, forming the creation of ch’ien, the male, and k’un, the female. Out of the union of ch’ien and k’un, male and female, come the ten thousand myriad things from which all existence has its origin. Thus from the topmost circle of primal unity the opposites become separated into their polarities. These pairs of opposites then give rise to the five elements, which become requisites for the manifestation of matter. An essential understanding of this chart is that the ultimate is within ourselves and is divinely given at birth – that is, we are born with the preconscious totality and a rich vastness of potentialities. This spark of the divine causes movement between the yin and yang, producing the elements as well as those energies that result in our unique individual personality. Through the constellation of the self, heaven (the male principle) and earth (the female principle), a new union takes place. This natural path leads ultimately to death as a form of renewal and rebirth, a threshold passage, whether it be lived psychically as the sacrifice of an old attitude, symbolically in dying to our selves, or actual death which contains the anticipation of future developments in the spontaneity of the cosmic order. We thus have an ancient yet living mythology of the world’s genesis as well as the various transformational processes in one’s individual life. If we read from the bottom to the top, the diagram suggests that through the balance of both celestial and earthly forces, as well as through a certain diligence in maintaining balance throughout the fivefold cycle, the attainment of unity is possible. Unity is a function of the balancing and reconciliation of opposites. The circle at the bottom, known as the mysterious gate or valley spirit in Taoist internal alchemy, has a specific location at the lowest chakra in the physical body. As energy ascends throughout the physical body by means of a process involving the breath or ch’i, a continuous transmutation occurs ultimately resulting in spiritual transformation or a Return to the Tao, which is both origin and source. Later developments in Taoism led to further elaborations in both the cyclical movement of the body’s internal energy and in the recovery of our original nature. The meaning in any potential reading of the diagram

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lies in its tracing the process of a natural development. For the Taoist, this development applies not only to humans, as the process becomes embodied physically and spiritually, but also to all of the cosmic and cyclic processes of nature and the universe. Kalff suggested that the “On the Rock” cycles “follow the law of transformation,” the very process through which, in other forms, the underlying philosophical basis of sandplay itself could be comprehended. In a discussion relating to the last circle in the diagram and its importance in relation to the potential for rebirth and renewal as seen within the sand process, she once commented that what is vital in any sandplay process is to experience birth, to develop the richness of our original potentialities, to become consciously aware of our totality, and ultimately to go on to the next level. She then concluded, “This is the correspondence to the other philosophies.”

The path ahead In addition as an exploration of some of the inner sciences of the East, I will explore recent developments in theoretical and quantum physics that lend themselves directly to theoretical aspects of sandplay, specifically in the role of meaning, matter and energy in the transformation process. Those developments depart profoundly from the mechanistic Cartesian understanding of the universe and suggest a new worldview emerging in modern physics. This new paradigm is increasingly characterized by words such as “organic”and “holistic.” The universe is seen as one indivisible dynamic whole whose parts are essentially interrelated and can be understood only as patterns of a larger cosmic unity. This interconnectedness, as physicist Fritjof Capra comments, “which is at the heart of the new paradigm, this sense of belonging, which we understand as the heart of religious experience,” has implications for all aspects of social concern (Capra and Stendl-Rast 1992, p.166). In The Turning Point, Capra speaks of his own experience within the scientific community: Many physicists, brought up, as I was, in a tradition that associates mysticism with things vague, mysterious and highly unscientific, were shocked at having their ideas compared to those of mystics.

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Fortunately, this attitude is now changing. As Eastern thought has begun to interest a significant number of people, and meditation is no longer viewed with ridicule or suspicion, mysticism is being taken seriously even within the scientific community. An increasing number of scientists are aware that mystical thought provides a consistent and relevant philosophical background to the theories of contemporary science, a conception of the world in which the scientific discoveries of men and women can be in perfect harmony with these spiritual aims and religious beliefs. (Capra 1983, pp.66–67)

This becomes the labyrinthine path I will follow in attempting to examine critically the process of integrating psyche and matter as it occurs in sandplay. In doing so, I prefer to remain close to the symbols and images and their background in the rich tapestry of mythological motifs, and to have the reader follow me in using this symbolic language where possible (see Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Kokopelli, Mimbres Pottery The mysterious Kokopelli has been a sacred figure to Native Americans of the southwestern United States for thousands of years, being especially prominent in the Anazasi culture of the “Four Corners” area. Found painted and carved on rock walls and boulders throughout this region, the figure represents a mischievous trickster or the Minstrel,

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spirit of music. Kokopelli is distinguished by his dancing pose, a hunchback and flute. His whimsical nature, charitable deeds, and vital spirit give him a prominent position in Native American mysticism. He is considered a symbol of fertility who brought well-being to the people, assuring success in hunting, planting and growing crops, and human conception. His “hump” was often considered a bag of gifts, a sack carrying the seeds of plants and flowers he would scatter every spring. Kokopelli often displayed a long phallus, symbolizing the fertile seeds of human reproduction. Source: Reproduction in the collection of Joseph Campbell. Courtesy of the Joseph Campbell and Marija Gimbutas Library, Santa Barbara, CA.

chapter 2

SACRED TIME, SACRED SPACE Creating Temenos Whereas we think in periods of years, the unconscious thinks and lives in terms of millennia. C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

We must do what the gods did in the beginning. Satapatha Brahmana VII, 2, 1, 4

Sandplay, with its emphasis on play with no conscious purpose, creates just those conditions whereby the archetypal energies and emerging creative processes of the unconscious are constellated. Like myths, the sandplay process becomes a spontaneous expression of the psyche at a particular moment in time and space. It is a means of understanding the psyche by observing it through the symbolic. Through the use of symbolism, sandplaying creates an opportunity for the material and the spiritual to meet in a sacred and ritualized space–time dimension. As Ryce-Menuhin (1992) notes, sandplay provides a “sustaining ritual” for the purposes of self-realization. The sandplay room, the sandtray itself as container, the concentrated silence and supportive presence of the therapist are conducive to the occurrence and reccurrence of a progression of ritual events, leading to rites of initiation whose final outcome may be deeply healing. This represents a whole new mode of experience, something similar to primitive magic, for it is through symbolic analogy that the unconscious works. By means of this process we make contact with the arche37

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typal psyche. Through the creation of inner archetypal images, outer concrete material forms emerge which possess great power, intensity and meaning. Modern human beings urgently need to re-establish meaningful contact with this primitive layer of the psyche. This does not mean appropriating its primitive effects, but rather adapting the primitive mode of experience that sees life in its organic wholeness. Von Franz (1980a, p.95) has commented that a return to the primitive, self-evident attitude towards life is a prerequisite for the experience of the self. Jung goes further and comments that we must return to our Paleolithic origins. This attitude cannot be found through the conscious mind and with the developed part of the personality. It can be approached only by returning in some way to that primitive human attitude. The question is, of course, how do we reach this psychic geography or landscape? And here we come upon the need for a deep connection to an historical continuity, that is, to the archetypal foundations of the psyche, to our ancestral soul.

Archaic reactualizations of chaos There is a beautiful example of this from ancient Egypt, where the king, when he moved in processions, was followed by his 14 Kas or ancestral souls (Von Franz 1972, p.201). These were statues of figures carried behind him on 14 poles. Many cosmogonic mythologies stress the importance of the ancestors, whether divine, semi-divine or royal powers or personages. The awareness of these supportive figures is essential, for they become guides from the lost and abandoned world of the past. They personify past contributions to our present consciousness in the movement towards future space and time. They serve as bridges in the continuity of history for our modern world individual. For the Navajo people of the American Southwest, the main occasion for the recitation of the cosmogonic myth is in connection with curing and healing. The ceremonies involve the Hatrali, the person being sung over, and the execution of complex designs on sand or sand paintings. Through listening and contemplation, the patient is projected into a kind of primordial time, returning, as it were, to the mythical beginnings of the world. The cosmogonic myth is followed by the myths of origin, that is,

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the mythical beginnings of the ancestors, animals and plants, including the tribe’s culture and later developments. It is significant to note that the medicine man cannot perform a healing ceremony himself until he has had the ceremony performed over him. In the Navajo sand paintings, as originally recorded by Mary Wheelwright, the center of the painting or mandala represents the original place of creation, the central and sacred point of emergence from which, in four progressive upward movements, the people came forth and settled in the fourth world (Klah 1942, p.21). At the initiation rituals or threshold passages of Native American tribal ceremonies, masks are donned in identification with animal or divine ancestral spirits. And by blending with these ancestral spirits through mask and dance, the individual experiences a new strength and courage emanating from these concentrated processes. Here, the important presence of the animal spirits suggests the assimilation not only of the ancestral soul also but of the animals themselves. In this context, then, the basic instincts, which constitute our animal aspect, are of equal importance and become assimilated as ancestral roots. These ceremonials serve as reactualizations of archetypal events. They create in the participants a brief suspension in the flow of time such that the mythic moment and the present moment become coincident. The participant becomes a contemporary of that ancestral past or of creation itself. These ritualized ceremonial experiences bring into consciousness an unknown psychic life that belongs to the remote past. Out of the vast reservoir of the collective unconscious comes the ancestral experiencing of life and the cosmos. These processes are of fundamental importance to sandplay therapists, for what we most frequently observe in the modern cultural context is the absence of ritualized threshold passageways that reactualize profoundly important archetypal events. Whether we are working with children approaching puberty, adolescents struggling to leave the parental home, or men and women at critical junctures in adult life such as childbearing, menopause, loss – in fact, the whole cycle of life, death and rebirth – we find a deprivation or absence of ceremonial ritual to guide and nourish the soul in the search for pathways. Sandplay offers a uniquely creative space in which these sacred ceremonials can be

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recreated and emotionally experienced with subtle and often intense meaning. It offers both psychic and physical support for the significant transitions that are often critically ignored in the modern world or are simply absent. Some examples of these symbolic mythical precedents are helpful in looking at the process of renewal, whether from the collective standpoint or that of the individual psyche, for they instruct us in the critical dimensions of transformation. One such example is to be found in the Karuk culture of northern California and is cited by Eliade: Everything that the Karuk did was enacted because the Ikxareyavs were believed to have set the example in story times. The Ikxareyavs were the people who were in America before the Indians came. Modern Karuks, in a quandary now to render the word, volunteer such translations as “the princes,” “the chiefs,” “the angels” … these Ikxareyavs. Remaining with the Karuk only long enough to state and start all customs, telling them in every instance, “Humans will do the same,” these doings and sayings are still related and quoted in the medicine formulas of the Karuk. (Eliade 1974, p.33)

Similarly, many ceremonials commemorate the end and the beginning of the New Year. These periodic ritual reenactments of the creation express a very deep need to regenerate through the abolition of profane time and the projection into mythical time. Eliade has commented that what is important is that man has felt the need to reproduce the cosmogony in his constructions, whatever be their nature; that this reproduction made him contemporary with the mythical moment of the beginning of the world and that he felt the need of returning to that moment, as often as possible, in order to regenerate himself. (Eliade 1974, p.77)

Among the Karuk, Yurok and Hupa peoples of northern California, ceremonials of the “world renewal” or “world’s restoration” are reenactments of rites first performed by immortals who inhabited the earth in the beginning. Alfred Kroeber and Edward Gifford, among the first to describe these rites, explain that reenactment ceremonials were said to take place in the exact spaces where the original mythical beings performed them (Eliade 1974).

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One of the most significant symbolic rites included in these ceremonies consisted of “putting posts under the world” on the night of the appearance of the new moon, thus suggesting a new beginning of life, that is, the archetype of rebirth. This rite also entails the transformation of time, from profane to mythical, as well as the idea of incorporating transcendent space into the rebirth myth. Endings and beginnings by deluge and fire that periodically regenerate life or bring about a resurrection are often related to new year ceremonials the world over. These mythologies often signify a return to an original chaos that preceded creation. In the following example, it is a return to the primordial darkness which is recreated, the world without light, that chaos that existed before the creative force of fire came into being. The ancient Mayan culture mathematically synchronized the conventional solar year with that of the religious, ceremonial year. The 365-day year was combined with a 260-day cycle to form 52-year cycles. The larger cycle of 52 years always ended on a day called l Malinalli. This was a critical time since it was feared that l Malinalli would mark the end of the world, so great precautions were taken. All fires were extinguished, pottery vessels were broken, and pregnant women were locked in the granaries lest they be turned into wild animals. Chaos reigned. At the end of this dark period, often lasting five days and nights and carefully ritualized by the priests, the priests would march up a hill called the Hill of the Star and wait for a particular star to pass its zenith, indicating that the world would then continue. Only then could light be rekindled atop the pyramid by the high priest and passed on to the waiting collective. The star, the planet Venus, was a celestial sign of the god Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, and its presence (and absence) as an evening as well as a morning star marked critical events in Mayan cosmology. These 52-year cycles, known as the “Knot of Years,” occasioned the destruction and reconstruction or additions made to the temple pyramids throughout Mesoamerica. Later cultures did not have a grasp of the old Mayan calendar’s intricate elaborations, but they continued the conventional year of 18 months of 20 days, with an extra unlucky 5-day period during which everyone stayed indoors and no fires were lit. The Aztecs

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referred to this period as the “empty days” and continued to extinguish all fires. At the end of the period of empty days, a new flame was kindled on the breast of a sacrificial victim on a temple pyramid or sacred hill (Campbell 1974, p.150). These were the days during which dark spirits, the dead themselves, roamed about freely. Only by the torch of the priest on the temple pyramid could fire be rekindled. This was an event symbolized by the rising star, the heart of the god Quetzalcoatl or Kukulkan, whose mythic presence to all who witnessed it prophesied that the sacred fire, that of the life-giving sun, would return. This reactualization of chaos through the ritual extinguishing of fires is, as Eliade has pointed out, an attempt to put an end to existing forms, similar to the archaic deluge myths found throughout the world. The dissolution of these forms, “worn away by the fact of their existence,” creates an emptiness, that is, a space for the birth of a new form emerging out of a new creation. Commenting on the initiation rites, at which the lighting of the new fire is coincident with new year ceremonials, Eliade concludes, this coincidence … is explained both by the presence of the dead (secret and initiatory societies being at the same time representatives of the ancestors) and by the very structure of these ceremonies which always suppose a “death,” a “resurrection,” a “new birth,” a “new man.” (Eliade 1974, p.69)

The moon and the Great Mother Allusions to the moon found in world renewal ceremonials – its phases of appearing, waxing, waning and reappearing after three nights of darkness – provide a powerful archetypal repetition. This disappearance, never final for that period of three nights of darkness, is always followed by the “reborn” crescent of the new moon. An elaboration of this cyclical event can be seen in the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh epic which recounts the Babylonian Great Flood and was itself the prototype of the biblical flood. Here it is divine unpredictability which brings about the deluge rather than sinfulness on the part of humanity as in Genesis. The first line of the tablet reveals the gods’ intent:

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“Now their hearts prompted the great gods to bring a great deluge” (Scharf Kluger 1991, p.186). However, Ea, god of wisdom, then accuses Enlil, god of earth, of destroying humankind without reflection, and being the carrier of wisdom. Ea decides to save one human being, Utnapishtim. Through a ruse he alerts Utnapishtim to “Tear down thy house, build a ship! Abandon thy possessions, seek to save your life! Disregard thy goods, and save thy life” and later, “Cause to go up into the ship the seed of all living creatures” (Scharf Kluger 1991, pp.186–188). Siding for humankind, Ea and his wisdom prevail through his realization that one man should survive, in the same way that Yahweh, who has decided to “blot out man … from the face of the earth” (Genesis 6:7), rescues Noah. In this mission to rescue consciousness out of the unconscious, the ark, itself a crescent form, carries all the seeds of new life across the primal abyss, the cosmic sea. The moon, appearing, disappearing, changing its form and shedding its shadow, with its eternal rhythmic connections to the oceanic ebb and flow of life as well as to the rhythms of the womb, is a celestial sign par excellence of the triumphant power of transformation in its threefold principle of life, death and rebirth. It reveals the nature of the “eternal return,” for the disappearance of the moon is no more final than that of humankind, whether by deluge, fire or other catastrophic events. Nor should it be forgotten that both lunar symbolism and the ark itself carry us to the sea, that primordial formlessness that was the chaos prior to creation. Inscribed on a tablet in an ancient Sumerian cuneiform text of c. 2000 BC is the name of the goddess-mother of the universe, Nammu. Her name is denoted by the ideogram signifying “sea” and she is given praise as the mother who gave birth to Heaven-and-Earth (Campbell 1974, p.77). In this instance, Heaven-and-Earth themselves have not yet been separated. So again, as with the little crescent moon ark, there is a return to a primordial unity from which all life, all forms, emerged in the beginning prior to any differentiation. Speaking of Nut, the great sky goddess of Egypt, Neumann comments: The Great Goddess is the flowing unity of subterranean and celestial primordial water, the sea of heaven on which sail the barks of the

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gods of light, the circular life-generating ocean above and below the earth … she is the ocean of life with its life and death-bringing seasons, and life is her child, a fish eternally swimming inside her, like the stars in the celestial ocean. (Neumann 1963, p.222)

For here, as in so many world mythologies, the Great Mother of life encompasses and is heaven and earth as well as water, both as ocean and as night sky. It is only later, with the separation of the world parents or primordial ancestors, that light, sun and consciousness are born, bringing differentiation out of an original unity. It is vitally important to grasp the totality of this archetypal Great Mother, for it is only later that a more patriarchal Western world relegated the feminine to a lower earthly and chthonic principle. For, as Neumann (1963, p.223) notes, the totality of that Great Mother exceeds such a projection; she unites all the elements – earth, water, air and fire. And whether that source of life is primordial ocean, earth or heaven, these acts of creation occur in darkness. It is for this reason that in sandplay, one of the earliest reconnections or reunifications we would hope to encounter is to that ultimate source, the Great Mother, in the richness of her totality. For in that symbolic attempt to rediscover that original unity, we open ourselves to our own original formlessness out of which our later potentialities may become differentiated. Darkness becomes that archetype of the primordial unconscious, expressed through the night sky, earth, underworld or primeval waters that preceded light or consciousness. And this darkness is the feminine principle of beginning. Darkness is that primeval place of origins prior to the genesis of human consciousness or, metaphorically, the birth of the son of the Great Mother, the light or sun itself. Darkness, as Shepherd (1992, p.55) has noted, is “mystic nothingness, maternal, feminine, germinant, irrational, night, and matter.” I once had a middle-aged man come to sandplay who was in the depths of a profound depression which was expressed through compulsive gambling. He described himself as a “zombie,” and continued, “My emotional body is dead, and when I gamble I forget life. So I go gamble every day so I do not have to live.” In sharing his earliest developmental history, it emerged that tragically his parents had fled to South America from Germany during the Second World War when he was an infant. But

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upon arriving in a new country, the parents learned that the camp in which they had to make their temporary home did not have adequate food, forcing the mother to leave the camp and seek outside employment. The resulting separation of the 12-month-old infant from both his mother and his father left him in the care of an elderly grandfather for several years, after which he was eventually reunified with his mother, who was then pregnant with a second child. Touching the sand for the first time as he shared this, he commented that he felt paralyzed. He then began kneading and pushing the sand. Taking the wet sand in his hands and squeezing it tightly in large handfuls he commented: “I have the feeling that I want to hold it and grasp it and it feels good … I feel it in the stomach like a relief.” He then began sobbing deeply, and it was the sound of a small grieving child. And he continued, I feel the barrier … how do I come out of the desert? I could just scream and scream but I can’t … it is preverbal … this sand is like a darkness, a weight on my hands … to be without this dark weight is to be in my head and I lose all feeling and that is how I have lived. Suddenly the feeling begins to come back in my body … but not yet my soul … I do not give form to it … it is like what the baby does with the tits of the mother … first, it was cold but now it is warm … but I see what happens … I feel more and more energy and the heat goes to my feet … I want to sleep and sleep and yet I want to wake up … there is a soft sadness when I touch it and I have the feeling that I could do this for ages and then go sleep and sleep and then do it again and then sleep again.

And sighing gently, he said, “It is the first time I really understand this … it warms my heart … it is the same feeling I have when I go to India and swim in the warm sea.” After touching and exploring for a full hour in the formlessness of the sand and water, he then went to the shelves and discovering the figure of the Druid priest from the Belgian comics, Asterix, who conjures the powerful brew given to the Celtic warriors before they go into battle with the Romans, placed him in the upper left-hand corner of the sandtray. In this simple and touching image, this despondent man was able to reconnect at the most elemental level with the archetypal feminine, with a

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striking range of somatically experienced sensations, and with a sense of new beginnings and hopefulness. Through his reconnection psychically and somatically to the archetypal mother, a pathway opened for him to a priestly wise old man who could help him confront his own inner conflicts. This original psychic situation of unity with the Mother of All encompasses all opposites and contains the masculine and the feminine as well as all of the elements. Neumann, in commenting on the effort of the patriarchal world to discredit humankind’s origins from a dark source, the Dark Mother, preferring instead more luminous or heavenly origins, concludes: “But nearly all the early and primitive documents trace the origin of the world and of man to the darkness, the Great Round, the Goddess” (Neumann 1963, p.212). A Mayan ritual poem touches upon this: Then he descended while the heavens rubbed against the earth. They moved among the four lights, among the four layers of the stars. The world was not lighted; there was neither day nor night nor moon. Then they perceived that the world was being created. Then creation dawned upon the world.

(Bierhorst 1971, p.3)

The destruction of first creations Earlier I mentioned creation myths that reveal vengeful or unpredictable creators. These mythologies are not limited to the ancient Near East or the Hebrew tradition. Often the creator gods destroy their first creations, believing them to be outright failures. The archetypal idea behind this reveals that these first attempts at creation were too close to the animals, or simply that they were inferior beings. In some cases first creations led to violence and fighting when the balance of the elemental powers became too overwhelming to produce a stable and harmonious union. A powerful example of this is found in the great Aztec Calendar Stone in which the four prehistoric world ages are represented around a

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central mask. These four world periods are identified as: (1) 4-Jaguar, a time of giants living on acorns who are finally devoured by a jaguar; (2) 4-Wind, in which most of humankind is carried away by hurricane winds; (3) 4-Rain, in which Tlaloc, the Rain God, and Quetzalcoatl engage in battle, and the defeated Tlaloc sends a rain of fire which destroys humankind; and (4) 4-Water, the last of the prehistoric ages, in which there is so much rain that the heavens fall and humans are turned into fish (Campbell 1974, p.154). An Aztec ritual poem recounts this same myth with slight variations in “Thus It is Told.” It should be understood that Aztec mythology treats the coming of dawn and light in the fifth age as a separate, unconnected event from the “suns” of the previous eras. Thus it is told, it is said: there have already been four manifestations and this one is the fifth age … The First Sun or age which was founded, its sign was 4-Water, was called the Sun of Water. Then it happened that water carried away everything. The people were turned into fish. Then the second Sun or age was founded. Its sign was 4-Tiger. It was called the Sun of Tiger. Then it happened that the sky was crushed, the Sun did not follow its course. When the Sun arrived at midday, immediately it was night and when it became dark, tigers ate the people … Then the third Sun was founded. Its sign was 4-Rain-of-Fire. It happened then that fire rained down, those who lived there were burned … Its sign was 4-Wind,

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When the fourth Sun was founded. It was called the Sun of Wind. Then everything was carried away by the wind … The fifth Sun, 4-Movement its sign. It is called the Sun of Movement … That was when there was light, when dawn came, The Sun of Movement which now exists. 4-Movement is its sign. This is the fifth Sun which was founded, in it there will be earthquakes, in it there will be hunger.

(Leon-Portilla 1969, pp.35–37)

If one looks closely at these mythological sequences leading to the creation of the present age, each of the gods or guardian powers of the four quarters is defeated by a powerful opposite, whereupon each world age is destroyed by the negative, uncontrolled, destructive aspect of its own element. That is, earth, as Jaguar, swallows all life; air, the breath of life, becomes a devastating hurricane; the life-renewing rain is sent down as a rain of flames; and finally, water, the source of life, becomes a deluge. Each age gained possession of the sun but through incredible tension and struggle, or war of the opposites, succumbed to destructive energies. Following these catastrophes there was need for an entirely new creation. Quetzalcoatl then descended to the underworld and returned with a bag of bones from the lord of death, which he presented to the mother goddess of the universe, the lady of the serpent skirt. She then ground up the bones and poured them into a precious vessel of clay into which Quetzalcoatl bled his member, and while the gods practiced penances, a new people came into being, those of the present age of 4-Movement. Here the god of light is enjoined with the dark earth goddess in creating a union out of which springs new life and a new age. One could say that through this coniunctio the opposites have been transcended, the reconciling symbol being the vessel in which blood, the life renewing force, has been ritually blended with the ancestral bones, that is, bringing

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up from the underworld darkness the wisdom of the dead ancestors. This myth speaks to a process of ritual transcendence. Equally important is the gods’ own recognition of their mistake. Campbell (1974, p.156) quotes from the ancient native text as follows: “For our sake, the gods did penance.” This is reminiscent of the biblical deluge and God’s covenant with Noah. God puts a rainbow in the sky as a reminder to Himself that never again shall He bring a deluge against mankind. Or of Ishtar’s lament when she speaks of the catastrophic effect of the Babylonian deluge: As soon as the great goddess arrived, She lifted up the great jewels which Inu had made according to her wish: “O ye god here present, as surely as I shall not forget the lapis lazuli on my neck, I shall remember these days and shall not forget them ever!”

(Scharf Kluger 1991, p.195)

One can see in these motifs aspects of a primordial preconscious totality that is destroyed for the sake of a further and perhaps more highly developed consciousness. If it is understood that the gods represent a developing or evolving self-image at the collective level of the human personality, then those aspects that are destroyed or not allowed to go on existing are those that appeared earlier in the history of consciousness but had to be sacrificed or destroyed in order to allow for the development of a new living balance. Thus an original unity is destroyed through new perceptions of meaning, leading to higher consciousness not only in humans but in the gods themselves. And the recurrence of these archetypal motifs – the appearance of these mythical beings who enact these energies – has both a healing and a disruptive effect. In this sense, psychic trauma and deprivation are not necessarily unmitigated evils, for in the development of consciousness, separation from that original state of unity unavoidably requires enduring a wound. That psychic wound may serve not only as a psychic defect but also as the gateway to the transpersonal psyche (Edinger 1975, p.58). For suffering and grief, even madness, are intricately related in many cases to psycho-

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logical growth as we can observe in the personal narratives of shamanic initiation or in the archetype of the Wounded Healer itself. Often there do exist certain instinctive resistances to disruptions to the existing order. Gods and humans alike tend to establish a basic harmony or balance, a psychic balance, even if it is a state of relative unconsciousness. To bring about a new order or widening of consciousness, or of the conscious attitude, there must be a relinquishing of the primitive totality, and this necessarily brings about a disruption of the balance within the whole system. These archetypal events are often ritualized as sacrificial acts, for they mythologize for the collective the origins of both human and divine consciousness. They become critical thresholds or initiatic passages in the early forms of the self, destroyed and rebuilt in countless mythological contexts. All over the world, myths of the dismembered, dying, and resurrected gods and goddesses allude to this process of initiatic transformation and renewal through countless historical epochs. The tendency of consciousness to consolidate and maintain a harmonic balance in an effort towards continuity, often at the expense of growth and creativity, is evident in the following myth which affords us a glimpse of the function of the trickster. For what is often necessary is an upheaval of some kind to allow creative contents to break through an oversolidified consciousness. Von Franz recounts this myth from the central Californian Achumavi people: In the beginning there was water everywhere and the sky was clear and cloudless, but suddenly a cloud formed in the sky, condensed and changed into Coyote. Mist welled up and condensed and out of this came Silver Fox. They began to think and by thinking they created a boat so they said let us now settle here and live in this boat as if it were a house. So they drifted about on the water for many years and the boat became old and covered with weeds, and they got a bit bored. So Silver Fox told Coyote to lie down and he obeyed and went to sleep. And while he slept, Silver Fox combed his own hair and with the combings he made a large heap which he rolled in his hands and stretched out and flattened. He then put it on the water, and it spread at once and covered the whole surface. Then Silver Fox thought that here should be a tree, and at once there was one. He did

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the same with the bushes and rocks and then he put stones on the thin crust of the earth so that it should neither rock nor curl if the wind pulled at it and so he made everything right. The boat then gently landed on the edge of this new world and Silver Fox called to Coyote: “Wake up!” And Coyote woke and saw above his head cherries and plums and he heard crickets chirping on the surface of the earth. Immediately he began to devour the cherries and the plums and the crickets. And after awhile, he asked, “Where are we? What is this place?” Silver Fox answered, “I don’t know, we are now here. We landed on this shore.” Naturally, he did know, but he denied having created the world because he did not want Coyote to know that it was his creation. So he said, “What shall we do now? This is solid ground. Let us go onto this earth and dwell here.” And that is what they did. And Silver Fox built a sweat lodge and lived in it. (Von Franz 1972, pp.62–63)

Here we have an amusing polarization as well as the twin creator motif. Silver Fox, the creator god who has become slightly bored and creates everything, and his companion-brother, the trickster god, Coyote, who sleeps through the creation and begins a process of undoing as a counter-function to consciousness. Von Franz comments that these are “co-equal tendencies of the psyche” which are essential in breaking up the consolidation of the collective unconscious, thus allowing for the emergence of creative contents. And both Silver Fox and Coyote emerge simultaneously out of cloud and mist, an allusion to the undifferentiated formlessness “in the beginning,” with particular emphasis on the presence of both at the creation. Twin creators represent a kind of synthesizing of opposites, often bringing together dark and light, destructive and creative, or matter and spirit. In Native American mythology we have Morning and Evening as heroic twins, one the lord of life and of the sunlit earth and the other, whether caught by demons or banished by fate, the companion or lord of the dead. This duality exists in many forms such as Flint and Sapling, earth’s rock and earth’s vegetation, the twin gods of war of the Pueblo peoples, or the morning and evening incarnations of Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl of Aztec mythology. We also have a glimpse in the mythic creation by Silver Fox and Coyote of the archetypal motif of the separa-

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tion of consciousness from its unconscious background, as in the emergence of cloud and mist out of the vastness of an empty sky, while together Silver Fox and Coyote represent the preconscious totality.

Understanding the archetypal motifs In Aion (1959), Jung has demonstrated that the self, like all other archetypes, is not only a static nucleus of the psyche but also a self-renewing system. Thus the self is in a state of constant change or inner flux, tending to shed certain aspects in the process of renewal. Von Franz (1980b, p.86) has commented, “No conscious formulation of an experience of the Self can claim to be absolute over a long period of time – it has to be readapted again and again, so as to keep pace with this changing process.” For this reason, collective rites and rituals invoking the godhead or self for the collective have to be continually reinterpreted. In a living spiritual tradition there are always dangers of the original symbols fading away or losing their power to effect change or renewal, hence the endeavors to rebuild the original conception to prevent ritualistic habit and to translate it into something adapted to the needs of a new historical period. Somewhat the same process takes place within the individual, for a previously felt experience of very great depth may quite simply wear out. As Von Franz notes in Redemption Motifs: The truth of yesterday is no longer the truth of today, and what was once a supporting ideal becomes a worn-out system which prevents further inner development. In such a case the truth of yesterday must be set aside for what is now the truth of one’s own psychic life. (Von Franz 1980b, pp.86–87)

The depths encountered in sandplay suggest descent, and this is often dramatically represented in mythological motifs where a seeker, represented by a hero or heroine, relinquishes worldly power and persona and undertakes a lonely journey entailing painful ordeals and tests of strength and endurance, descending to preconscious levels of inner experience. These initiatic experiences carry the risk of possible failure, which itself is one of the initiatory ordeals that must be endured. These experiences often involve countless repetitions – as in fairy tales in which the protago-

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nist “hits the mark,” unearths the gold or arrives at the moment of creation. Once these fateful journeys are embarked on there is often no turning back to the old and familiar, for one has chosen the path leading to one’s future development. We shall discuss several such journeys in Chapter 3.

Figure 2.1 The threshold: entrance gate, arch and threshold, the Palacio da Pena, Sintra, Portugal

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The figure faces east toward the rising sun and the mountains, plains, rivers and lakes of Portugal with heavily imbued earth–sun–sky symbolism. The threshold passage leads one through the arched gateway to the west and the spaciousness of the open sky and vastness of the sea. The chthonic masculine figure carries symbolism of both tree and horn as well as vine and grapes, while his rootedness in the sea is conveyed by fishlike tails and scales. The window that he shoulders suggests the “inner” and “outer” thresholds as well. The shell imagery conveys the sea and the richness of the vegetative life in the “below” as well as the “above.” Sea and shell imagery are powerful images of the presence and support of the archetypal feminine as source and ground of being. Photograph by the author.

It is important that we familiarize ourselves with threshold themes in the process of separation, descent and return if we are to appreciate their meaning in the context of emerging motifs in the sandplay process. For wherever these themes emerge we will find what Henderson (1967) has called the “eternal archetype of initiation” (see Figure 2.1). Threshold difficulties are also important because they often reveal the inability of the initiate to negotiate certain critical passages. The difficulty here is in bringing contents over from the unconscious to the conscious. We see this difficulty in many myths and fairy tales. An example of this is the fairy tale of the seven brothers who have been bewitched and turned into swans. Through the courage of their devoted sister they are eventually liberated from the curse, but as the seventh brother is transformed back to his human shape he encounters difficulties and returns with a swan wing instead of his arm. We must always remember these difficulties in our sandplay work, for these cautionary tales reveal a certain borderline or danger zone where a real effort is necessary to bring conscious and unconscious together, or metaphorically to move between the boundaries of the known and the unknown. The tale is cautionary in that it suggests somatic or physical involvement in the obstacle. Blockages are equally important, for they may result from dogmatism or rigidity in ego consciousness which does not permit open-mindedness or psychological truthfulness. So the content often becomes constellated in the instincts, bringing with it physical symptoms that affect the body in some way. This is a common occurrence in depth work in the sand and can be quite painful or even dangerous.

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Reaching the inner depths can be a symbolic ascent as well as a going down or descent. This idea is an ancient Sumerian one which visualizes the gods as heavenly energies that pass upward as well as downward. Ever deeper penetration inward then becomes the equivalent of ascending to increasingly higher realms of consciousness. An example of just such complex archetypal symbolism is suggested by mountain or pyramid imagery. The mountain can be the sacred abode of the gods, which would be the self, or it may simply be a higher place from which you can have a broader or more elevated view or perspective. It can also be a place of vision, quest or sacrifice, and in its evolvement as pyramid it becomes womb and tomb, temple or even mystic centre. The mountain can be a symbol of consciousness which rises up as the waters of the unconscious subside, as in the Babylonian Great Flood in which the one human survivor is left on the top of the mountain. But it can also be the symbol of an ascent to a higher level of consciousness. The mountain may also be the site of an encounter with an important animal who guides or possesses us. And, of course, it can be something from early development leading to a later volcanic explosion and emphasizing either a significant emergence of the fire element or profound and dramatic changes in the earth element itself. What I am illustrating here is the development of our ability as sandplay therapists to be quite discriminating in our understanding of the content as well as in discovering the specific context of the archetypal motifs which we encounter. For what is vital is that our understanding of the inherent symbolism of the sand images be based on the time–space content and context of the unique individual creating that image. Similarly we must always be sensitive to the instinctual and to the use of animals, for they often convey many messages not yet ready for conscious assimilation. Shadow aspects can be major obstacles to a genuine manifestation of the self, which may not occur without that confrontation. Animals often play a significant role in bringing the shadow aspects to consciousness by revealing the nature of the feared dark aspect itself. Tigers, panthers, bears, wolves, sharks, whales, bulls, crocodiles, alligators and even skunks can often reveal those instinctual dark aspects that can still seize and possess us with violent affects.

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At other times, animals serve as instinctual guardians and helpers along the seeker’s path. Images of dolphins often emerge as well as those of otters, dogs and birds – indeed all those instinctual energies that suggest a more gentle spirit or domesticated nature, implying greater connectedness to the human sphere of life and experience. The appearance of animals, however, signals change. This emergent imagery is but the beginning of conscious assimilation, for initially images of animals are occurring only at the instinctual level. These inner guides must become concretely realized in human form, or “humanized,” for they may lead to an inner realization of the self as an absolutely concrete realization in one’s everyday life (see Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2 Thunderbird carrying whale with lightning snake and wolf: entrance panels to a chief ’s house, Central Nootka, British Columbia, c. 1850 The struggle between the power of the sky gods and the lower realm of chthonic beings was often mediated and lived through by shamans. These panels allude to the threshold passage of initiation, with all its trials, tortures and risks. Such a passage often restores the primordial condition of the initiate. Source: American Museum of Natural History, New York City.

Threshold images There are many threshold images that have to do with being lost or losing one’s way or trying to find the path home. The labyrinth or maze, the spiral or wave-like patterns of consecutive spirals, or a double helix moving towards the center and out again all illustrate initiatic attempts to be freed from old patterns of consciousness or stereotypes of order. They may allude to confusion and disorientation. Such journeys through new

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landscapes represent the pathways of life, death and the “nether” world, or quite simply, the mysteries of the way. The directionality of these pathways needs to be observed carefully, as do any anticipated encounters. There may be stations along the way, as in the stations of the cross, or the path may be littered with the bones and skeletons of the dead which must be confronted, for the maze or labyrinth, with its connection to the underworld, suggests the dangerous aspect of the unconscious. Losing one’s way symbolically becomes an event through which the soul’s journeying reveals insights and wisdom about the perplexities and perils of life. One may arrive at the mystic inner center where, in the primordial mists of time, one truly experiences for the first time the meaning of “home.” A second set of symbolic images suggesting thresholds is gates and arches. Here the use of the symbols points to several possibilities. First, gates and arches suggest movement in two directions, say from conscious to unconscious or the reverse. One must always be aware of the context in these situations: at what moment in the process do they emerge, and, of course, what is their location in the sandtray. For instance, if we see the torii gate at the far left of the tray and the movement is towards the left, then perhaps we have a significant movement into the uncharted territory of the unconscious. At a later point in the work these same symbols may signal significant changes in the time–space dimension, for they may open to the future itself, thus representing an anticipated later development. There may also be reference to the preparations one must make before entering mazes and labyrinths or passing through arches, gateways or across bridges. Often we see food for the journey, nurturance of some kind, or a guardian animal or wise old man or woman. There may be critical threshold obstacles. Objects may block the path or the way through the passage, or the gateway may be premature, leading nowhere. We may see bridges spread across the entire length of the tray and serving to lengthen the experience of the passage. We may see broken bridges or bridges blocked by dwarves, demons or soldiers. We are alerted that this threshold contains important fears or difficulties which must be respected. Never must we push to cross a threshold; rather we must trust in the inner wisdom of the psyche in its readiness for safe passage. Often

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there is a terrific release of energies following a successful threshold crossing which confirms the transformatively meaningful nature of these inner initiatic experiences. Finally, one may recognize thresholds through dances and games. Frequently there are re-creations of ancient dramas with fire as the centering element, particularly those involving dance and circles. The circle alerts us to a concentration of energy, and generally this is quite powerfully felt. The accompanying dance expresses both feeling and intense movement as well as an evolutionary sense of the process itself. Wheel imagery is also a development signaling important threshold possibilities, for in its revolutions we have allusions both to our daily life and to the natural lifetime contained in the even greater round of cosmic time. Emergence motifs of all kinds signal critical passages, if we can be attentive to the elemental forces involved. They can emerge from the “above” or the “below” – that is, from heaven or a starlit sky, from the darkest cave, or just as frequently from a great burning fire or an upheaval in a turbulent sea.

The process of transformation Earlier I approached the archetypes of transformation at a collective level in terms of archaic creation myths and renewal rites. These archetypal images provide examples of situations, places, ways and means that have all become part of the unconscious a priori historical context of the unconscious as well as a vast realm of archaic wisdom accessible to man through the collective unconscious. As Jung has stressed, these are genuine symbols for which there are no single interpretations “precisely because they are ambiguous, full of half glimpsed meanings, and in the last resort inexhaustible” (1980, par. 80). All myths are valuable to us as sandplay therapists because they provide the archetypal forms for the manifestation of energies within the process of transformation. The forms chosen are simply representative of certain events which on closer scrutiny bear directly on the sandplay process as well as on the relationship of psyche and matter. Essential to this process are two related phenomena.

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The first of these is the transformation of concrete space to sacred space, that is, to a center alluding to emerging origins which is experienced as a sanctuary. This center is often symbolized as a sacred mountain, pyramid, city, temple, cave or garden. It can also symbolically emerge as an axis or axis mundi, as in images of the tree or cross, stairway or pathways of ascent or descent such as in pilgrimages or difficult journeys. Significantly, this sacred center or axis becomes the meeting place of three cosmic regions: heaven, earth and the underworld or hell. It is thus by analogy the meeting place of the four elemental powers: air, fire, water and earth. Herein lies the critical and essential value of what Kalff called the “free and protected space.” Every effort must be made by the sandplay therapist to provide and protect such a temenos, or sanctuary, for it is only in such a containing space or environment that the intensity of these archetypal powers can be experienced safely. The second transformation that occurs is that of space–time dimensions, in which the participant, through his or her actual physical involvement combined with active emotional participation, enters into the mythic moment of creation or beginning. Clearly it is more than space that is being transcended, for in fact we encounter the curious annulment of time itself. One can witness this in first and second trays, in which typically the images deal with actual (time–space related) origins. However, generally by the third tray there is a movement away from these more concrete origins to a transcended space–time dimension. Kalff used to comment that by the third or fourth tray one begins to question the “meaning of life.” In those moments when this mythological situation of beginnings is re-created in the transcended space–time dimension, the participant who is physically and emotionally engaged in the sandplay process often feels the force of energies characterized by a strange and powerful emotional intensity. By his or her connection to these primordial images and the concrete images of these energies made by the hands in the sand, the conscious and unconscious come together as a living process between body and psyche, as an archetypal form of union. At these moments one may have a sense of vague and shifting images at the threshold of consciousness or of a heightened sense, often experienced physically, of the energy field or space changing in the sand. The

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images themselves may become more textured and “alive.” In my own work I have often experienced an increase in body temperature simultaneous with a heightened sense of energy. The meaning is experienced both by the sand image maker as well as by the therapist, for it is seen and experienced by both. This underlying process that is touched upon is clearly outside the normal sense of space and time and leads to the threshold of an awareness of archetypal processes, the realm which, following the medieval theological tradition, Jung (1963, par. 759) referred to as the unus mundus and Corbin (1972, pp.1–19) later designated the mundus imaginalis. More recently, David Bohm, the physicist and former co-worker of Albert Einstein and author of basic texts on quantum physics, using his own terminology, has called this the enfolded or implicate order (Bohm 1980c, pp.172–173). According to Bohm, the dynamic and multidimensional order of the universe has three aspects. The first of these is the explicate or unfolded order of our world of three-dimensional objects in space and time. The second aspect, the implicate or enfolded order is a “ground beyond time”. This ground beyond time is the all-encompassing ground to our entire existence. This implicate order or ground is characterized by Oneness whose essence is carried or distributed throughout the universe. Everything, according to Bohm, is enfolded in everything else, and through its holographic structure each part contains the whole. The relationship between the explicate or unfolded and the implicate and enfolded is described as an “unbroken wholeness in flowing movement” and he adds, “one needs to see reality as a flowing movement, not to see things fixed, but to see them in movement and interconnection” (Bohm 1980c, p.107). The third aspect becomes the source whereby the process of unfolding and enfolding becomes organized, and Bohm has proposed here the “super-implicate order” which by its nature is an extremely subtle and perhaps infinite dimension (Weber 1986, pp.93–94). Some parallels exist here if we return to the process of alchemy, in which the highest goal was the consummation of the mysterium coniunctionis, an outcome which could occur only when the unity of spirit, soul, and body became one with the original unus mundus. Jung, in discussing the work of Gerard Dorn, notes that this union of the whole

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person with the unus mundus was the third and final conjunction which represented the total union of opposites in symbolic form and was considered “the indispensable condition for the healing of all ills” (Jung 1963, par. 676). This “one world,” Jung continues, meant the potential world of the first day of creation, when nothing was yet in actu, i.e. divided into two and many, but was still one. The creation of unity by a magical procedure meant the possibility of effecting a union with the world – not with the world of multiplicity as we see it but with a potential world, the eternal Ground of all empirical being, just as the self is the ground and origin of the individual personality, past, present, and future. (Jung 1963, par. 760)

Whether we approach it from a medieval alchemical tradition, from Jungian psychology, or from a contemporary scientific position, we allude to a process whereby one is momentarily united with the cosmos, or the personal touches upon the transpersonal realm, or as Bohm (1980b, pp.191–192) would say, one opens to a “vast energy sea”. In a sense it is the union of the individual Tao with the universal Tao, or what Jung in discussing the alchemists and their visualizations of the self called a “window into eternity” (Jung 1963, par. 763). Returning to Bohm, we thus have the space–time reality of the explicate order of ordinary consciousness, the everyday world, within which exists a generative matrix of the implicate order which cannot be observed except possibly through episodes of non-ordinary consciousness such as meditation, mystical or subtle body experiences. I believe this is indeed the mysterious context of sandplay itself, for it provides what Kalff once referred to as a “Western form of meditation,” parallel to the mystical, numinous and highly meaningful emotional events created by means of gross and subtle body experiences. The unifying link here is that sandplay springs from a vision of wholeness. Anyone who has experienced sandplay as a process has been deeply touched by a sense of living interconnection and meaning in his or her mind–body being. I have repeatedly stressed here the importance of meaning. It is useful to return once more to Bohm, for in his view of the universe there exist three mutually enfolding aspects: matter, energy and meaning. He describes this process as follows:

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From the point of view of the implicate order, energy and matter are imbued with a certain kind of significance which gives form to their overall activity and to the matter which arises in that activity. The energy of mind and of the material substance of the brain are also imbued with a kind of significance which gives form to their overall activity. So quite generally, energy enfolds matter and meaning, while matter enfolds energy and meaning … but also meaning enfolds both matter and energy … so each of these basic notions enfolds the other two. (Bohm 1987, pp.90–91)

We are therefore looking at a threefold process of flowing movement and interconnection in which “meaning is an inherent and essential part of our overall reality, and is not merely a purely abstract and ethereal quality having its existence only in the mind. Or to put it differently, in human life, quite generally meaning is being” (Bohm 1987, p.93). Reflecting on the sandplay process, we see some vital and fascinating connections. Certainly there is an unfolding and enfolding process, a continuous flowing movement, as the images are formed in the sand. What we witness may in fact be related to Bohm’s play of matter, energy and meaning. What we experience is a continuous dance, a subtle “flowing in” of images as the eyes visually focus upon symbols imbued with meaning and the hands begin to fashion and give shape to an unfolding image of an inner process which touches upon the very ground of being. The energies that are carried by the hands as the images are shaped become enfolded by the body, by matter itself. Simultaneously the inner image imbued with meaning is transformed by the hands into a concrete, external image and in this way becomes part of the unfolded order. That is, it becomes an image of a lived experience in the time–space dimension of the inner as well as the external world. In this context, matter, energy and meaning as we experience their interconnection in the sand process are all part of that process of unbroken wholeness in a continuous, flowing movement which touches on the totality and oneness of existence, the ground of all being. Approaching the mind–matter relationship from this perspective suggests that the mind or psyche and the physical or matter are not separate but rather two aspects of one overall reality.

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This is consistent with the notion of the recurring motion of self-renewal, a process which Jung (1980, par. 26) felt was probably spiral in form and had to do with a slow evolution towards a conscious sense of the self. “The self,” he writes, is not a static quantity or constant form, but is also a dynamic process. The secret of existence may well consist in a continually repeated process of rejuvenation. Psyche cannot be totally different from matter … psyche and matter exist in one and the same world and each partakes of the other. (Jung 1959, pars. 411–413)

Viewed as such, the self both lives in a dynamic process of creation and exists as a center of stillness. As mythic time and present time become coincident and are meaningfully experienced in sacred space through actual physical presence and embodiment in the sandplay process, this transcendental process provides the opportunity for a spontaneous transformation of energies related to creation and beginnings. It is here that one first senses the return to origins in their fullness and their emptiness. This process necessarily entails a mythic return to the primordial darkness and chaos. Symbolically, it is a return to dark matter and the feminine principle of beginning. It is often experienced both as an emptiness and as an end to pre-existing forms, as well as the fullness of the original unity out of which all life emerged. The ritualized context of sandplay becomes the container out of which this rebirth process might occur. It is experienced as both quest and bittersweet homecoming. And whether we are on the road to Eleusis or sitting under the sacred tree, our path is the well-worn path of our ancestors in their search for healing through renewed meaning.

chapter 3

MEETING WITH THE SERPENT The Divine Secret of Renewal Ekam sad viprah bahuda vadanti. The truth is one; the wise call it by many names. Rig Veda

Be as wise as serpents. Matthew 10:16

In beginning the descent to the realm of the matriarchal unconscious and its connection to transformation, it is useful to return to the ancient Near East and in particular to the myth of Gilgamesh, considered to be one of the oldest epics in the world. We will see in its enormous complexity striking parallels with the developmental sandplay process – and indeed with any process which leads in its journeying to deep and fundamental change in the psyche and body. The reader is encouraged therefore to imagine this as an unfolding and enfolding process, much as one witnesses sand images ultimately leading to the flowing movement of creativity and change. The Gilgamesh myth was widespread throughout Babylonia and up into Asia Minor. The oldest Sumerian fragments found in the Mesopotamian cities of Nippur, Kish and Ur date to the fourth millennium BC, and it is thought that the name Gilgamesh was Sumerian, the Sumerians themselves having been the oldest known inhabitants of Mesopotamia. Later fragments were found in excavations at Nineveh in the library of Assurbanipal, the last great Assyrian king, who reigned in the 64

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seventh century BC. This version was written on 12 clay tablets which have been the subject of study for at least two thousand years. I am indebted to Rivkah Scharf Kluger for her illuminating study of the entire epic, but will chiefly be interested in Tablets X and XI and their translations by Heidel, which are those used by Scharf Kluger (1991). The Gilgamesh epic was originally a product of oral tradition and was recited to the people by rhapsodists with countless new developments and transformations. It is also important to note the historical context in which this myth was rendered (for it was during a period of veneration of the Great Mother, Ishtar or Inanna) depending on Sumerian and Babylonian historical periods and geography. It is my intention to explore in depth the latter part of the myth, for the intrinsic meaning is quite revealing in clarifying the relationship between mind and matter. For a sense of continuity and in order to follow the process we will trace the mythic tale as it unfolds on the cuneiform tablets themselves. Earlier on in the mythic sequence, Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu, the animal man, set out on a journey to cut down the blossoming cedar tree, also referred to as the throne of Ishtar, the great goddess, in the cedar forest of the Land of the Dead. In cutting down this great mother tree they also kill Humbaba, the guardian of the gate, referred to in the ancient text as the intestinal man and guardian of Ishtar’s forest. Symbolically, this part of the myth has to do with how Gilgamesh and Enkidu fulfill a ritually symbolic act of breaking free of the mother. Gilgamesh then returns to the city of Ur and puts on clean garments. Ishtar, seeing the beauty of Gilgamesh, attempts to woo him and asks him to join her as her consort. Gilgamesh insults her by recounting her “stinking deeds.” These deeds represent an allusion to the ambiguous qualities of the Great Mother: her devouring nature and the aspects of the underworld evident in her bringing death and destruction to her sons and lovers such as Tammuz and Dumuzi. Ishtar becomes enraged and appeals to her father, Anu, to create and unleash the heavenly Bull of Heaven, symbolic of her own furious wrath and perhaps of the heroes’ bull natures, against the two. In a fierce battle Gilgamesh and Enkidu then slay the Bull of Heaven, tear out his heart, and offer it up to Shamash, the sun god, patron god of Gilgamesh, here

MEETING WITH THE SERPENT: THE DIVINE SECRET OF RENEWAL

“Gilgamesh has come hither, he has become weary, he has exerted himself, What wilt thou give him wherewith he may return to his land?”

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(p. 202)

Utnapishtim decides to reveal a second divine secret to Gilgamesh, and he instructs him: “Gilgamesh, thou hast come hither, thou hast become weary, thou hast exerted thyself, What shall I give thee wherewith thou mayest return to thy land? Gilgamesh, I will reveal unto thee a hidden thing, Namely, a secret of the gods will I tell thee: There is a plant like a thorn … Like a rose its thorns will prick thy hands. If thy hands will obtain that plant, thou wilt find new life.”

(p. 202)

The divine secret, this plant with thorns like those of the rose, promises “new life.” The thorny plant is not intended for immortality but for renewal and regeneration. It is the healing herb or elixir vitae. Gilgamesh ties stones to his feet, dives into the water and gathers the plant (though it pricks his hands) and with great excitement he then starts home. But one night he happens to see a lovely pool of cold water, and stopping there to bathe, A serpent perceived the fragrance of the plant; It came up from the water and snatched the plant, Sloughing its skin on its return.

(p. 203)

In her interpretation of the meaning of the myth, Scharf Kluger points out that the snake, through the shedding of its skin, becomes the symbol of transformation and renewal. And she adds, The possibility of renewal, of rebirth, as a kind of immortality, symbolized by the herb of life, has come near to consciousness, but has been swallowed back by the unconscious. Gilgamesh is not yet ripe, one could say; mankind represented by him is not yet up to getting

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immortality. But through the inner experiences on the journey when searching for immortality he has changed. He must now submit to “the ways of the underworld,” to death. (Scharf Kluger 1991, pp.204–205).

She concludes that he came to know the “secret of the gods” and found the herb of life, and rather than it being a tragic misfortune, it is perhaps a hint that he was not allowed to keep the herb of life, that the unconscious denied it to him because, though it would have meant rejuvenation and prolongation of life, which was the goal of his longing, it would not have meant a change of the inner man, corresponding to the deeper longing for illumination and enlargement of consciousness for which Shamash, the sun god, had chosen him … the two-thirds god submitted to human existence; the one-third man experienced the divine. (Scharf Kluger 1991, pp.206–7)

The pricking of the rose-like plant While this interpretation of the last adventures in the myth helps to illuminate Gilgamesh’s acceptance of death as a part of his human condition, it may also provide a deeper understanding of transformation and renewal within the broader context of psyche and matter as they relate to sandplay. If a myth this old still has meaning, it must have a tremendous degree of coherence with the rest of the universe. Might not the Gilgamesh epic as a mythic form therefore point beyond itself to mysteries of universal import? It is these enrichments of the myth and their fresh meanings which we shall now explore. In Chapter 2, I discussed the use of masks and dance whereby there is a blending with the animal or divine ancestral spirits such that the individual experiences transcendence and new meanings – in short, a transformation of some kind. As has been suggested earlier, the presence of the animal spirits alludes to the assimilation not only of the ancestral soul but also of the animals themselves, that is, the basic instinctual nature of man. Gilgamesh has been on a spiritual search for immortality. In the latter part of the epic he seems to have lost connection to his instinctual nature in his determined efforts to have the secret of the gods. With the death of Enkidu, the heroic quest has faded. In fact, he has become rather

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dogmatic or rigid in his struggles, which might be interpreted as a blockage in the creative unconscious. The appearance of these blockages often indicates that the message needs to be revealed in another way. If we return to the ancient text again there are several potential hints in the message from his ancestor: “Namely, a secret of the gods will I tell thee: There is a plant like a thorn … Like a rose its thorns will prick thy hands. If thy hands will obtain that plant, thou wilt find new life.”

(p. 202)

The wise old indestructible ancestor has redirected Gilgamesh back to the depths of the matriarchal unconscious in the same way that Siduri, the female innkeeper and anima soul guide, helped him earlier on when he was in a dire predicament to find the pathway to Utnapishtim. And Gilgamesh hastily followed these instructions: He tied heavy stones to his feet; They pulled him down into the deep, and he saw the plant. He took the plant, though it pricked his hands. He cut the heavy stones from his feet, And they … threw him to its shore.

(pp.202–203)

The description of heavy stones tied to his feet as he dives into the depths of the sea conveys the effort required for Gilgamesh to penetrate the depths of the unconscious. But he dives deep enough in the watery realm, sees the herb, and successfully grasps the thorny plant. In that process his hands are “pricked,” thereby conveying a sense of generative force or energy at work and signaling new life to come. Pricks or pricking are generally associated with suddenness and are thus akin to surprises, bolts, lightning, and flashes or equally nettles, briars, ants, bees, bites, stings and snakes as well as frogs, kisses, or the pricking arrow in Amor–Cupid–Eros’ always full quiver. Evetts-Secker (1993, p.18) draws an analogy with the axis mundi, the Tree of Knowledge, the arbor philosophical, the Maypole, “The Great Prick” itself, around which rituals of fertility, renewal, were both biologically and spiritually observed and performed. In this there is the honouring of the forces

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of life in their phallic aspects, the awakening spirit within the natural order. In our myth, the thorns have pricked creatively, not destructively. And once pricked, we cannot become unpricked. This prick of the thorn is like a little shock, almost a wholesome jolt to Gilgamesh’s senses. It is through the senses that we are most vulnerable to initiatory pricking. The very prick ensures that a threshold has been crossed, for our consciousness is indelibly marked by it and we are forever changed. The soul is pricked first through the eyes, the “seeing,” and then with the “touching” through the fingers of the hands, both representing activating agents. The eyes, like windows, are a vital threshold between the “inner” and the “outer.” The hands and fingers that are pricked can be the instigators of creative activity or creative inner action, which may result in a new condition of being. The observing eyes convey significance or meaning. The fingers carry the charge of energy from that meaning into matter. Is this not actually what we experience in our initiatory steps into the sand as we cautiously begin to connect with matter? What we experience thereafter as a repeated process becomes a kind of flowing movement. For it is in those first moments – those first movements of eyes seeking significance and meaning, and fingers engaging and transferring that meaning into matter – that we are pricked, and the flowing process of movement is irrevocably activated (see Figure 3.1). So it is the eyes and hands themselves that have activated this process, for as Gilgamesh discovers the meaning of his having secured the thorny rose-like plant, energy is engaged with meaning and matter. This hints at an embodiment as well as a union of opposites, which can lead to a spontaneous transformation of energies. One senses this in his exuberant remarks to the waiting boatman: “Urshanabi, this plant is a wondrous plant, Whereby a man may obtain his former strength. I will take it to Uruk, the enclosure, I will give it to eat … may cut off the plant. Its name is ‘The old man becomes young as the man in his prime.’ I myself will eat it that I may return to my youth.” (p. 203)

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Figure 3.1 Hand, eye, serpents: early woodlands culture, Mid-America, pottery From Joseph Campbell (1974) The Mythic Image. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Here the hand, eye and snakes are firmly knotted together in an essential unity of apprehension in the body–mind totality. Source: Reproduction in the collection of Joseph Campbell. Courtesy of the Joseph Campbell and Marija Gimbutas Library, Santa Barbara, CA.

If we view the wise old ancestor as the archetype of meaning, then we could say that Gilgamesh has been successful, for he is now fulfilling a kind of mythic destiny. He has been directed to the rose-like plant, a thorny situation, which if managed properly leads to the unfolding of renewed feeling, to a transformative experience of rebirth. In its broader

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meaning we sense the possibility of a major cultural shift arising from these new perceptions. So this journey also has to do with the ego and an encounter with the self, perhaps symbolized by the allusion to the rose. The plucking of the rose represents one of the most perilous and yet sublime moments of life. Most often the thorn or prick of challenge must be present in that plucking, for it becomes the path which consciousness follows in awakening us through our living skin or flesh to the realization of the self.

Animal power as conveyor of meaning The wise old man ancestor has pointed out that the secret lies hidden in the darkness of the matriarchal unconscious. One is reminded here of Jonah, a similarly reluctant hero who evaded the call to psychological development by taking a regressive sea journey. God, as avenging pursuer, then fashions a monstrous fish, the whale, which swallows up Jonah. He does not die in this encounter, however, but suffers the heat, fire, and madness of the affects leading ultimately to a rebirth experience. Like certain aspects of Gilgamesh’s journey, he is imprisoned in the belly of the whale and enters into a profound introversion which lasts three days and three nights, during which he calls upon God and finds light in the utter darkness. The whale, who has been like a sheltering womb, then spews him up on land just as Gilgamesh is apparently thrown to shore by an unidentified energy after plucking the plant from the water. With a new connection to the self, Jonah returns to real life and to carrying out God’s command. The voice that spoke to him was none other than an imperative call from the self. These initiatic passages become analogous to the experiencing of the “mighty mysteries” in which one must be willing to sink into the darkness to find the treasure that lies hidden there. It is here that one finds an unexpected vision of the world beyond, and by contacting these primordial images attains the possibility of renewal (Markell 1994). Prior to Gilgamesh’s plunge into the watery realm, the “realm of the mothers,” he is caught in a series of fierce clashes of opposites represented by life and death, the archetypal divine mother and the archetypal

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divine father earlier on in the struggles against Ishtar, and devotion to Shamash, or the struggle of unconscious and conscious forces. He has consciously endured a state of introversion, isolation and emotional separation from life, and now he is being led to an understanding of the inevitability of death in the sense that death is necessary for new life to emerge. But he is being offered a second secret, the secret of renewal itself, if he is up to the challenge. With Gilgamesh’s exuberant speech to Urshanabi after cutting the stones from his feet one detects a certain one-sidedness and vanity. His determination to eat the plant “that I may return to my youth again” reveals that his mind is still set on a concrete fountain-of-youth sort of fantasy. Further, he intends to take it back to Uruk and perhaps pass it out to others in the city enclosure. In the Bible we read that the man who finds the “pearl” or kingdom of heaven hastens to conceal it (Matthew 13: 44–46). Gilgamesh reveals two attitudes that could be deleterious to his own inner experience: the desire to tell the experience to everybody, and the tendency to guard everything for himself. It is far better to hold the numinous experience closely and accept it with genuineness and courage, yet humility, and in so doing to experience a profound transformation of one’s innermost being. So what is involved here is again the attitude of the ego, for in the confrontation with the unconscious the counterpart is the ego. And since the attitude of consciousness has an effect on the encounter with the unconscious, it is only through a process of give and take, a dialogue of sorts between the two, that a genuine revitalization of the ego can take place. What the wise old man has earlier told Gilgamesh about the healing herb is not what Gilgamesh later construes it to mean, so he is still slightly off mark. He has not yet grasped its meaning, in the same way that Jonah failed to grasp the meaning when God’s voice first told him to return to Nineveh. Utnapishtim has simply said, “If thy hands will obtain that plant (though you be pricked!) thou wilt find new life.” So Gilgamesh continues on his journey, grasping the healing plant in a rather covetous way. Mythically, the animal powers come into play. As Jung (1968) has noted, the power of God reveals itself not only in the realm of spirit, but

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also in the fierce animality of nature both within humankind and beyond them. Gilgamesh seems to have confronted an obstacle, a threshold difficulty, in accessing a divine secret, perhaps a key to the transformative process. Von Franz cites a myth with similar parallels from the Achumavi, a Native American people from central California. It illustrates that when there are difficulties in bringing up new and creative contents from the unconscious, the content can come from either the above or the below as alternative means are found for the revelation to break across the threshold. The myth relates that the great god Mennebosh wants to teach his people the knowledge of secret medicine, but he cannot make himself heard by them. So he teaches the fish otter and gives him the secret of the medicine bag, all the secrets of the medicine ritual, and the medicine lodge, and then it becomes the otter who teaches the human being (Von Franz 1972, p.48). Here there is a real blockage which the myth does not clarify except to explain the inability of the people to hear the god’s message. The god therefore teaches an instinct, a water animal, much like the serpent of our present myth, because he cannot get the message across any other way. It is the animal then who conveys the message. The content becomes constellated in the instinctual life, the soma aspect, and in that form it ultimately is brought to collective consciousness. Returning to our epic, which contains the same kind of dramatic confrontation with the animal instincts, Gilgamesh stops one night on his way back to Uruk with the plant, and seeing a pool of cool water he decides to bathe. In a second encounter with water, suggestive of a form of purification necessary for his re-emergence into life, the serpent comes up from below and snatches the plant. In doing so it sloughs off its skin upon returning to the water. These kinds of events occurring from the “above” or the “below” are often quite different in the way they achieve meaning. In sandplay we often see images that come from the “above” such as bursts of illumination, lightning, rays of the sun, birds such as eagles and owls, space ships, awakenings with rather intense emotional feeling. These are often imbued with intense meaning. From the “below” we most often see the serpent or the whale, alligator, crocodile or even the ancient tortoise.

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As Von Franz (1972, p.47) has pointed out, when the revelation has come from the “below,” it is most frequently expressed through physical activity or carried out in physical reality; meaning itself exists within that physical reality which is being expressed. The symbolic meaning enters into consciousness only later. One could say that the assimilation, the symbolic meaning, is enfolded by matter and unfolds as energy, which is then amplified into further meaning through action. That is, our body, our animal side, our matter carries or conveys the meaning in energetic actions which we carry out physically. In that final effort to waken Gilgamesh out of his egoistic concerns, a mystery is revealed: the divine secret, the mighty mystery, is that the body, the animal side of our humanness, carries within itself the creative potential and mystery of the process of the transformation of energy leading to the experiences of renewal and rebirth. The threshold to those mysteries lies in the depths of the matriarchal unconscious, the Great Mother. Neumann comments on this beautifully: modern man … discovers what primordial man experienced through an overpowering intuition; namely, that in the generating and nourishing, protective and transformative, feminine power of the unconscious, a wisdom is at work that is infinitely superior to the wisdom of man’s waking consciousness, and that, as source of vision and symbol, of ritual and law, poetry and vision, intervenes summoned or unsummoned, to save man and give direction to his life. This feminine–maternal wisdom is no abstract, disinterested knowledge, but a wisdom of loving participation … [She] is living and present and near, a godhead that can always be summoned and is always ready to intervene, and not a deity living inaccessible to man in numinous remoteness and alienated seclusion. (Neumann 1963, p.330)

But before embarking on any further amplification, let us consider one projective possibility. As Jung has suggested, we also can have constellated contents as a form of realization coming from the within and the without. When they come from the “without,” these realizations are often projected onto animals as instinctual aspects of ourselves in the form of an outer physical encounter.

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We are reminded again of Jonah with his encounter with the whale or in another mythic tale, The Golden Ass of Apuleius, in which the hero, Lucius, has suffered the torments of the damned after having been transformed into an ass by a witch. His only redemption lies in finding and eating roses. Through his tortuous journey and scurrilous adventures he suffers abuse and torment, leading to angst. He is so worn down that he does not care whether he lives or dies, and he wants finally “to be only himself ” (Von Franz 1992b). He goes to the sea where he wearily falls asleep. Upon waking he sees the moon and begins to pray to the goddess. He then bathes and purifies himself in the sea, plunging his head seven times in the water. Falling asleep again, he has a beautiful visionary dream in which Isis appears before him rising up out of the sea. He describes this vision as follows: First she had a great abundance of hair, flowing and curling, dispersed and scattered about her divine neck; on the crown of her head she bare many garlands interlaced with flowers, and in the middle of her forehead was a plan circlet in fashion of a mirror, or rather resembling the moon by the light that it gave forth; and this was borne up on either side by serpents that seemed to rise from the furrows of the earth. (Von Franz 1992b, p.177)

The goddess speaks to Lucius, revealing that on the following morning he must join the religious procession to honor Isis and, indirectly, through the golden vessel that Isis carries, Osiris, the god of renewal and a symbol of the self, for Lucius will also be honored. In that procession, the priest will carry a large bouquet of roses which the ass must snatch and eat. And she reassures him, “… but above all things beware thou doubt not nor fear of any of those my things as hard and difficult to be brought to pass; for in this same hour that I am come to thee, I am present there also” (Von Franz 1992b, p.185). Lucius does as he has been instructed, leaping out of the crowd as the priest approaches with the roses held in his outstretched hand, and feigning to kiss the hand of the priest, he snatches and eats the roses. Lucius’ words speak to us about that vividly dramatic transformation: I was not deceived of the promise made unto me: for my deform and assy face abated, and first the rugged hair of my body fell off, my

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thick skin waxed soft and tender, my fat belly became thin, the hoofs of my feet changed into toes, my hands were no more feet but returned again to the work of a man that walks upright, my neck grew short, my head and mouth became round, my long ears were made little, my great stony teeth waxed less, like the teeth of men, and my tail, which before cumbered me most, appeared nowhere. Then the people began to marvel, and the religious honored the Goddess for so evident a miracle. (Von Franz 1992b, p.215)

Transformed from his ass form he stands before the priest and crowd as a naked and vulnerable man. The rendering of this account like the mythic tale of Jonah suggests very concrete physical sensations and changes. The priest then summons new linen garments for Lucius and tells him he has been redeemed by the great goddess and must therefore become her servant. Lucius goes on to be initiated first into the Isis mysteries and later to the mysteries of Osiris, his ultimate and true mission. So we can glean from the myth that simultaneous with these encounters with the instincts comes an important inner meaning or realization. What has been constellated from within and without, the meaning, becomes a synchronistic event, and the obstructions or obstacles are miraculously transcended in a tangible physical way. In the sand process we observe this in discovering and experiencing the reconciling symbol, an event with great meaning and feeling, for in this event there is an activation of the transcendent function.

Honoring the feminine In the last episode with Gilgamesh, the healing herb of regeneration has been projected onto the serpent, the divine feminine principle. Until this moment, Gilgamesh has failed to honor the feminine. His earlier exploits have been to destroy, pillage and defy the divine feminine. As Chinen (1993, p.169) has noted, the deep masculine and its achievement as part of the male individuation process or male life cycle demands giving up heroic roles and learning to honor the feminine and becomes humankind’s initiation into the goddess mysteries, for as Chinen (1993, p.169) remarks, “the masculine mysteries are open only to men who have first served the goddess … the deep masculine appears only after men have come to terms with their fear of and fascination for the feminine.”

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At first Gilgamesh sits down and has a good cry, claiming that he has lost his boon to the serpent. The crying and tears here are significant, for often it is through tears and sadness that a further abaissement du niveau mental can occur, thereby allowing an important content of the unconscious to cross over the threshold to consciousness. Indeed it becomes immediately apparent that a major change has taken place within him. This is suggested at several junctures in the myth. Earlier, after the seven loaves task, he is cleansed and dressed in fine new clothes by Urshanabi at the direction of the ancestor father, Utnapishtim: “Take him, Urshanabi, and bring him to the place of washing; Let him wash his long hair clean as snow in water. Let him throw off his pelts and let the sea carry them away, that his fair body may be seen. Let the band around his head be replaced with a new one. Let him be clad in a garment, as clothing for his nakedness. Until he gets to his city, Until he finishes his journey, May his garment not show any sign of age, but may it still be quite new.”

(Scharf Kluger 1991, p. 201)

The rebirth symbolism here is clear. The color white reminds us of the albedo or whitening phase of the alchemical process. Gilgamesh has passed through the nigredo phase of the work, in which there is often an encounter with one’s shadow. During the period between the nigredo and albedo phases he has encountered the world of the vegetative plants and animals, an encounter which is not yet entirely complete. The ritual significance of the process of purification and renewal is reminiscent of Jonah emerging from the mouth of the whale, naked in a fetal position but with a full beard or, in other depictions, being presented with a new robe. In the famous painting by Jan Brueghel (1568–1625), Jonah Rises out of the Whale, Jonah is wearing a red robe alluding to the rubedo, the reddening or blood phase signifying a glorious state of consciousness in which the last trace of blackness has been dissolved and new integration has occurred (Markell 1994.) But Gilgamesh has not yet reached the rubedo or reddening phase, for it is typically during this period that the transcendence of opposites occurs.

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Following the sleep of seven days, the bathing, whitening and new clothes showing no age, there is a hint that the first main goal of the opus has been achieved. But the journey and the process are far from over. This is made clear by Utnapishtim in an allusion to the continuation of Gilgamesh’s journey, thus casting the sleeping task and the seven days in a new light. Perhaps we could say that in order to process the encounter with the ancestors and the profound transmission of their divine secrets, Gilgamesh must first experience a “free and empty mind.” This demands a stilling and quieting of the whole organism. For Gilgamesh, this active and volatile man who has by now become obsessed, such a stilling and quieting can only occur through unconsciousness brought about by sleep. While this may sound infinitely simple, if one is in the grip of a possession such as we find in Gilgamesh it then becomes exceedingly difficult. Utnapishtim has in essence attempted to restore in Gilgamesh an inner quietness by getting him to stop and look more closely at what has caused him such unhappiness. He has had to move closer to the threshold of the unconscious through an incubation period, or what the Greeks called a “sleeping in.” And does not this deep sleep also correspond to the darkness of the cosmic night, to the chaos and formlessness preceding creation? It is perhaps an allusion to the symbolic death necessary for a birthing.

The importance of numbers The sleeping becomes part of the whole spiritual process alluded to by the number seven. Throughout this epic myth we witness gateways and thresholds, a stripping away of persona, personal power, and earthly treasures in the interest of self-knowledge. This represents a sacrificing of the ego in the interests of a higher level of consciousness. The number symbolism deepens our appreciation of the myth as a journey of both initiation and divine import. Seven is divine power within a material form, as for instance in the days of creation. At the heart of creation lies humankind and seven in the cosmic scheme defines the four cardinal points, the above and below, the

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here-ness of physical humankind themselves at a mystical central point at which these paths converge. Mathematically, seven represents the triangle within the square or the union of the three and the four. Three clarifies the purpose of the journey, for three is the threefold principle of life, death and rebirth – indeed change itself – as in psychological transformation. Four alludes to the totality, the wholeness which is both quest and goal of the work as well as matter itself. So we have an indication here of initiation into the spiritual mysteries as well as those affecting matter. We find similar symbolism in the hymn cycle of Inanna, the Great Mother goddess whose historical epoch covers the period c. 3500–500 BC in the ancient Near East. Her names were many: Ishtar, Astarte, Anahita, Ma, Asherah, but she was first known as Inanna, the beloved and revered deity of Sumer. At about the midpoint of the cycle, when her powers have grown as well as her maturity, she decides to visit Enki, god of wisdom. They drink together, and in a drunken moment Enki offers the treasures of his kingdom, the gifts of the ME, the ordering principles of civilization, to Inanna. When Enki, the great shaman god, sobers up and realizes what he has done, his dark nature takes over and he wants his riches back. Inanna manages to outwit him, and with the help of her priestess confidante, Ninshubur, they take the sacred treasures back to Uruk, where the queen offers them to her people. The descent described in the myth is clearly from heaven to earth, bringing with her for the welfare of the people the wisdom of the ordering principles of higher civilizations such as writing, mathematics, astrology, science, temple worship, poetry, music and the arts. But Inanna decides upon a second descent. (I am indebted to Lucia Chambers for her several enlightening presentations at conferences in 1994 on the descent of Inanna and its meanings for contemporary women.) Unlike the first descent, which was from heaven to earth, the second descent, from the earth to the underworld, is a personal journey for spiritual growth. Inanna goes to learn about the Land of the Dead. She is queen of heaven and earth but she does not know the underworld. To enter the spiritual realm of the underworld, Inanna must give up her earthly powers. In fearful anticipation of the journey, she prepares by

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gathering up the seven ME, which are transformed into precious jewels, a crown, her gown and belt – the accoutrements of her power. She believes these will protect her. But she also instructs the loyal Ninshubur to wait for her above, and if she does not return in three days to remind the gods, her father and grandfather. The underworld is ruled by her sister Ereshkigal, who earlier was exiled there by the gods. She is vengeful, full of anger, greed and desperate loneliness. Rather than welcome Inanna, Ereshkigal, enraged by her younger sister’s rich life, instructs the gatekeeper, Neti, to strip Inanna of all her finery and jewels, her identity, her cities and temples. The descent, which begins on earth by Inanna abandoning her seven temples and seven cities, is continued as she descends through seven gates to the underworld. At each of the seven gates Inanna is forced to give up her splendor: first her crown, then the jewels and belt, and finally her elegant robe, until, completely naked, she stands before Ereshkigal. In one frozen glance from Ereshkigal, Inanna is struck dead. Her corpse is hung on a meat hook for three days and three nights. This becomes the initiatic death, the regression into chaos prior to creation. It represents the total disintegration of the personality, or psychic chaos. Symbolically, it does away with temporal existence, sending her back to the primordial condition, the absolute beginning, where she can be “born again.” Initiatic sacrifice and death then signify that a new personality is about to be born. Ninshubur, aware that Inanna has not returned at the end of these three days and three nights, implores help from the gods. Enki, god of wisdom and Inanna’s grandfather, realizes the desperate situation and fears that the civilization of Sumer could regress to its past primitive stages if Inanna is not rescued from the Land of the Dead. He sends messengers with the bread and water of life through which Inanna is reborn. The sacred number seven again heralds the initiatic spiritual journey, for it alludes to the potential for the highest illumination. Three, with its doubling emphasis, represents the totality of the cycle of creation, death and rebirth – that is, of Inanna’s psychological transformation. In addition to the suggestion of great suffering, hanging upside down metaphorically describes having to see things in a new way, a new perspective. We are reminded of Christ on the cross at the center of a triple crucifixion,

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or again of Jonah’s three days and nights in the belly of the whale. There is an old Lapp legend of the shaman who remained for three years in the stomach of a fish to learn the secrets of nature, to decipher the enigma of life, and to learn the future. But he must also remain in the “third curve of the entrails” (Eliade 1980, p. 31). It is here that he will experience the revelation of the sacred wisdom and secret traditions of his tribe. There is an important and dynamic meaning in the presence of the faithful Ninshubur and her being left in the domain of earth to wait, whereby land itself represents the terra firma of consciousness. With Gilgamesh, the witnessing is fulfilled by the boatman, Urshanabi. That witnessing becomes the observing aspect of consciousness, which waits and activates the energies for return if there are difficulties for the one who has had the courage to descend into the dark abyss. For these abandonments of temporal existence may subject one to a certain madness, as is borne out by shamanic tales of initiatic death. When we as therapists accompany those who make these painful and dangerous descents, we become that part of a dyadic relationship which represents the observing consciousness, while the other submits him- or herself to the power of the matriarchal unconscious and the flow of the often turbulent archetypal energies. It is important therefore to think of this process in terms of the cotransference of the twoness of the relationship, out of which the “threeness,” the creative potentiality, emerges. However, observing and witnessing does not imply a passive role. As Bradway (1991, p.29) has elucidated in her innovative discussion of cotransference, “Therapists are participants as well as observers. Use of the [sand] tray may facilitate the observer role but it does not eliminate the participant role.” At the completion of the Gilgamesh epic, Gilgamesh picks himself up from his encounter with the serpent and returns to Uruk with Urshanabi, the living witness of his journey. He is no longer the inflated tyrant obsessed with power and possession. He is rather a proud though chastened man ready to return to life, and in a stunning display of passion he gives honor to Ishtar as the XIth tablet ends: “Urshanabi, climb upon the wall of Uruk and walk about; Inspect the foundation terrace and examine the brickwork, if its brickwork be not of burnt bricks,

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And if the seven wise men did not lay its foundation! One shar is city, one shar orchards, one shar prairie; Then there is the uncultivated land of the temple of Ishtar.”

(p. 205)

Here is the magnificent wall, the enclosure of the temenos, which contains in its essential ordering the principle of the quaternity. That quaternary structure suggests both the ordering principle of consciousness as well as the self (Jung 1978, pars. 159–234). The foundation has been laid by seven spiritual wise men, the bricks themselves allude to the lasting fusion by fire of the transformation or what might be referred to in the alchemical process as the fixatio. Subtly this symbolism and imagery reflect totality and a divine participation.

The symbol of the serpent The prophetic nature of the myth’s first tablet, in which its end is anticipated, is pertinent here, for in sandplay we can observe this same anticipation in first and second sandtray images of prophetic resolution occurring late in the process work. In the opening verses of the myth we have the divine image of what the hero Gilgamesh has become: He who saw everything, of him learn, O my land; He who knew all the lands, him will I praise. … together … wisdom, who everything … He saw secret things and obtained knowledge of hidden things. He brought tidings of the days before the flood He went on a long journey, became weary and worn; He engraved on a table of stone all the travail. He built the wall of Uruk, the enclosure, Of holy Eanna, the sacred storehouse. Behold its outer wall, whose brightness is like that of copper! Yea, look upon its inner wall, which none can equal! Take hold of the threshold, which is from of old! Approach Eanna, the dwelling of Ishtar, Which no later king, no man, can equal!

(pp.21–22)

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Gilgamesh, like Jonah and Lucius, was a reluctant hero who attempted to avoid his destiny, but in that struggle he lived through all the trials, tortures and risks of an initiatory process. His exploits reveal a faulty connection to the archetypal divine feminine. He suffered a tearing wound through the loss of the hairy wild man, Enkidu, which caused deep frustration and despair. This wound was initially a painful defect, but it also served as the gateway to the transpersonal psyche, for Gilgamesh’s journey to the wise old ancestor, the archetype of meaning itself, was profoundly healing. He discovered in the process that he was dealing with a power that transcends the ego and exists separate from it. Herein lies the psychological meaning of initiation into the mysteries, for in his descent into the matriarchal womb, the depths of the unconscious, he experienced a process of transformation and renewal in which the emergent self, the central transpersonal realization, could be related to the conscious, personal and temporal world of the ego. This initiatory process becomes a rite de passage, for as Von Franz (1988, p.182) has commented, “He to whom such a content becomes conscious through experience is forever united with the impersonal center; it is a transforming event which remains unforgettably with the individual.” Gilgamesh had to accept the death-bringing aspect of the feminine principle, but most significantly, the polarity of that feminine archetypal power, the life regenerating feminine principle, has been revealed to him as an aspect of the instinctual life itself. It exists in matter. It is this encounter occurring at the water to which we will now turn, for it leads directly to this vital question: in what form is that dynamic realm we call the unconscious psyche joined with matter? At the pool the serpent slips out of the water and eats the herb of life, sloughing its skin on its return to the water. On the one hand, the serpent represents the power of the unconscious psychic energies in their natural, elemental and undifferentiated state. It therefore symbolizes the untamed instinctual energies of the unconscious itself. By means of symbolic analogy, it carries that part of the dark, unconscious instinctual life that has been with us for millennia, the archaic psyche. One could almost say that it carries the animal-reptilian remnants of an archaic consciousness which existed in matter itself. Our human consciousness at a universal, collective level has grown out of just that archaic stratum.

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Jung, in speaking of the materiality expressed through archaic symbols, comments: The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body and they express its materiality every bit as much as the structure of the perceiving consciousness. The symbol is thus a living body, corpus et anima … The uniqueness of the psyche can never enter wholly into reality, it can only be realized approximately though it still remains the absolute basis of all consciousness. The deeper ‘layers’ of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. ‘Lower down,’ that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body’s materiality, i.e. in chemical substances. Hence ‘at bottom’ the psyche is simply ‘world.’ In this sense I hold Kerenyi to be absolutely right when he says that in the symbol the world itself is speaking. The more archaic and ‘deeper,’ that is the more physiological, the symbol is, the more collective and universal, the more ‘material’ it is. (Jung 1980, par. 291)

The idea of transformation and renewal by means of the serpent exists throughout world mythologies. Contrary to our Western biblical tradition in which evil, uncleanness and corruption are projected onto the serpent, these mythologies associate the serpent with physical and spiritual health and healing. At Olmec sites in the Americas as early as 1200–800 BC, we find the serpent god, the feathered serpent or the green-feather snake, later known as Kukulkan or Quetzalcoatl, who symbolically represented the power to cast off death through resurrection and rebirth. I have previously alluded to the role of this divinity in yet another role as lord of the dawn in a major creation myth. In Hindu mythology there are the nagas, or serpents, who act as mediators between the gods and humans and are often associated with the rainbow. Native American rituals of the southwest feature living snakes being carried in the annual rain dances, thus ensuring abundance through the nourishing rains and return of the vegetation. Over and over again the serpent appears as both demonic and divine, for it is both a chthonic and a spiritual being. It carries both masculine

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and feminine aspects, with its phallic form yet egg-laying and devouring potential, as well as its wet fluidity and the fire of its bite. This paradoxical nature presents itself as a potential “bridging” symbol, that is, a symbol capable of activating the transcendent function and thus reconciling opposites, very much like the symbol of the whale in the Jonah myth (Markell 1994). Jung quotes Hippolytus’ account of the doctrine of the Naassenes, a pagan Gnostic sect, in which it is said that the serpent dwells in all things and creatures, and that all temples were named after her. “Every shrine,” he says, “every initiation, and every mystery is dedicated to the serpent” and “these [Naassenes] say that the serpent is the moist element … and that nothing which exists, whether immortal or mortal, animate or inanimate, could exist without it.” Jung then draws the analogy to the alchemical Mercurius, “who is likewise a kind of water: the ‘divine water,’ the wet, the humidum radicale (radical moisture) and the spirit of life, not only indwelling in all living things but immanent in everything that exists as the world soul” (Jung 1968, pars. 527–528). Elsewhere Jung (1963) suggests that the alchemists themselves knew about the snake “and they said enough to make it clear to their successors that they endeavored by their art to lead that serpentine Nous of the darkness, the serpens mercurialis, through the stages of transformation to the goal of perfection (telemus).” And he concludes: The more or less symbolical or projected integration of the unconscious that went hand in hand with this evidently had so many favorable effects that the alchemists felt encouraged to express a tempered optimism. (Jung 1963, par. 348).

Returning to our myth, we are told that many millennia ago the serpent swallowed up the herb of life, thereby acquiring the secret of the gods, the gift of renewal of life. Scharf Kluger (1991) suggests that the herb of life is another symbolic form of the tree of life. As Jung has noted, the tree grows from below up into the air, has its roots in the earth as if it were part of the earth, and extends roots again into the kingdom of air; and so the spirit of development rises out of the material, animal man and grows into a different region above. Therefore the tree has

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forever been a symbol of spiritual values … like the tree of knowledge in Paradise, or the philosophical tree, the arbor philosophorum, the tree with the immortal fruits. (Jung 1988, par. 1071)

This herbal tree of life, then, is the panacea, the healing herb which becomes the elixir vitae, the quinta essentia. The Babylonian word for the herb of life, samu balati, translates as “medicine of life” (Scharf Kluger 1991, p.203). So in this final union we have the tree of life uniting with the serpent, resulting in a casting off of the old skin. The serpent, carrying as it does our animal-reptilian evolution – that of the body, of matter itself – unites with the tree bearing our spiritual development. One could say that in the assimilation inherent in swallowing up the medicine of life there is a kind of spiritual anticipation of the future. Achtenberg (1985) has commented that it was the Sumerians, and not the ancient Greeks and Romans, who are the parents of Western healing systems, and through their cultural and mythic achievements that legacy was carried on through the Babylonians, Assyrians and Chaldeans, the later peoples of that land. What is referred to as the oldest medical text in existence was found on two clay tablets from the Sumerian period. She cites theories of body function and disease which were then carried via the ancient trade routes to the Phoenicians, Egyptians and Greeks (1985, pp.15–17).

The myth of Asklepius There are indeed some significant parallels that can be drawn from the Sumerian–Babylonian symbolic encounter with the serpent in the mythic mists of ancient Greece around 900 BC and the emergence of Asklepius and the women of his family as well as his sons (Kerenyi 1959; Meier 1963). For to this day the Hippocratic Oath, the ethical code of honor for physicians, is a dedication to this saintly family. It reads: “I swear by Apollo the Physician, by Asklepius, by Hygeia and Panacea and by all the other gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will fulfil according to my ability and judgment this oath and this covenant.” Epione, Asklepius’ wife, became associated with the relief of pain because of the gentle healing touch of her hands. Hygeia represented

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principles of prevention, sanitation and nutrition – in short, prescriptions for healthy living – while Panacea represented the benefits of curing or cure-alls. Legends of Asklepius’ origins have it that Apollo, god of music, harmony, the movement of the sun, and bestower of illness as well as healing, had a love affair with a mortal, Coronis, the crow woman, who became pregnant. Apollo soon left Coronis, expecting her loyalty, but later learned that she had taken a lover from among the white crows whom he sent out to spy on her. His revenge was swift, and after turning the crow from white to black for bringing the bad news, he had Coronis slain and the body put upon a funeral pyre. As the flames began to burn he remembered the unborn baby, swooped down and, ripping open the womb, snatched out the infant Asklepius. He then entrusted the child’s upbringing to the centaur, Chiron, who raised the boy in a pastoral setting close to the animals and earth. Chiron himself was a gifted physician and healer who passed on his wisdom to Asklepius. Adding to the teachings of Chiron, Athene, who recognized the young man’s talents, gave him the gift of the Gorgon’s blood. The Gorgon Medusa was a monstrous feminine being who had snakes for hair and who was so dreadful to gaze upon that a single glance immediately turned one to stone. She had been slain by Perseus with his shield-mirror through the help of Athene and Hermes, and her blood had been kept for years by Athene. The blood which flowed from the left side of her head brought death and that which flowed from the right side brought healing. This quality itself suggests how intricately health and illness are bound up together as well as the paradoxical nature of the unconscious itself which can both wound and heal. Asklepius then set out and became a famous physician, so successful that Hades, in a rage over the depletion of his population in the underworld, complained to Zeus, who killed Asklepius with a single thunderbolt. So great was the outcry and anguish over the loss of this healer that Zeus took mercy, raised Asklepius from the dead and made him an immortal. In this way Asklepius, the human physician, became a divine healer. He was a healer who had been twice resurrected out of darkness, thus suggesting the archetypal Wounded Healer.

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It is apparent that the mortal Asklepius was an influential physician and healer. In the lands of Greece, Italy and Turkey hundreds of asklepia, or temples, were erected which were among the very first holistic treatment centers. Situated typically in areas of great natural beauty and most often near water or springs, they contained theatres, baths, spas, as well as a sacred place of worship. Being in the countryside, they often became associated with pilgrimages or journeys. The most famous reconstructed asklepia exist on the island of Kos, the birthplace of Asklepius, as well as in Epidaurus. Upon arriving at the asklepia, a supplicant was often invited to talk about his dreams, and if these dreams seemed favorable to an invitation to the temple, rites of purification were begun in which a significant process of catharsis or confession occurred along with fasting and ritual bathing in the nearby springs or streams. Thus in addition to putting one’s life in order, it was hoped that a certain spiritual lucidity could be found for the patient’s journey into healing. Following this, one was taken to the abaton, a sparsely furnished room where the patient, alone both day and night, experienced a process of incubation (from the Greek, meaning a “sleeping in”). During this period it was hoped that a dream would come in which the god Asklepius would appear, most often in serpent form. These dreams were shared with the priests or priestesses the following day although the dreams themselves were not interpreted, as it was believed that the experiencing of the images induced healing. The healing source lies within the patients themselves and certain symbolic images can activate the healing moment. The diagnosis and healing also took other forms as the temples developed. After reaching a state of creative introversion brought about by time in the abaton, the patient would be visited by the priests and priestesses dressed as Asklepius and his family during that phase of consciousness just prior to sleep when images drift and flow easily. It should be clear that the patient would have begun to experience an altered state of consciousness as a result of all the rites leading up to this moment. During these twilight moments, Asklepius would appear as a handsome and gentle man or as a child or wise old man who either cured or advised treatments. The god held a rustic staff with a serpent twined about it, as did the women of his family: Epione, Hygeia and Panacea.

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Living animals and birds, such as the dog and goose – as well as snakes – were often part of this retinue, as it was thought that geese had a healing ability and dogs were also a symbol for the god himself. Serpents were trained to lick the eyelids and wounds of patients during healing ceremonies. In a remarkable bas-relief of the fourth century BC from Attica, there is a representation of the dream cure of the temple sleep (Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2 The dream cure of the temple sleep, bas-relief, fourth century BC, Attica The patient is dreaming, while standing beside him is his own vision of himself, as though having just emerged in spirit from his ailing body. Opposite to the dreaming patient is his vision of stepping before the god who touches him on his wounded shoulder, while at the same time on the couch the same shoulder is being licked by a snake, who seems to emerge from the body of the dreamer himself. (Campbell 1974, p.287) Source: Reproduction in the collection of Joseph Campbell. Courtesy of the Joseph Campbell and Marija Gimbutas Library, Santa Barbara, CA.

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The healing process The healing lore of these archetypal themes of renewal has not changed greatly, whether we follow the path of Gilgamesh, Inanna, Jonah, Lucius or Asklepius. For in the quiet of the sandplay process we encounter the journey or pilgrimage, the catharsis, and the owning of one’s own dark aspect. The purification of body and soul, the necessary silence, creative introversion, incubation, and descent to an altered state of consciousness – whether in the sweat lodge of the Indian, the asklepia, or an ancient monastery atop a mountain – create those conditions in which the inner experiences can well up. Through the endurance of darkness, perhaps a confrontation with the dead, the conflagration and conflict of opposites, and the necessary sacrifices and symbolic death, we cross the diverse thresholds. In so doing we undergo a continued deepening that is vital to the emergence of the healing images that bring about energizing experiences of passionate inner meaning. This encapsulates the sandplay process in all its profundity. Significant are the shared symbols, for we have here the serpent, tree, and water symbols within the fabric of healing, leading to physical and spiritual well-being. It is the serpent-power of the instinctual life at the deepest unconscious layer of the psyche, those strangely primitive and vital energies of the archetypal well-springs of life, with which we must make meaningful connection if we are to become whole. These sources are underground, and for this reason our path leads ever downward, linking us to the world of instincts, matter, our body itself. The rustic staff with the serpent twined about it becomes the divinity itself. In commenting on the principle of growth symbolized by the ascending snake, Neumann states: The snake is often – not only in the Biblical story of paradise – the ‘spirit’ of the tree as well as the vessel. The connection between staff and snake, already found in predynastic Egypt, appears in many myths as the often ambiguous but always numinous and divine spirit of a process of growth whose purpose is inaccessible to the intelligence. (Neumann 1963, p.328)

This numinous union of serpent and the herbal tree of life raises the relationship of the transcendent function to healing. As sandplay therapists

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we must always be aware of this critical event, for it may signal significant changes not only in the psychological dimensions of personality but also in the physiological aspects of the body itself. Here, like the ancient Greeks, we must refrain from interpreting the creative flow of the unconscious process, for to do so endangers the flowing unfoldment in the natural self-healing of the psyche. As Edinger (1992, p.61) has commented, that “act of ‘having-been-seen’ has an effect on the unconscious of the patient.” It is wise to remember that in addition to containing a vast storehouse of the wisdom of the past, the unconscious also extends into the future, and in this regard it seems to have a secret knowledge of one’s own life process outside the more narrow limits of linear time. It is this unfathomable wisdom and intelligence which ultimately can lead us to a state of grace. Bradway has elucidated the importance of this natural and spontaneous phenomenon. She writes: The transcendent function is the term that Jung uses for a process through which such opposites are united. The transcendent function mediates between the warring opposites and unites them with a reconciling symbol which is experienced consciously as a new attitude transcending the original divided state of the self. (Bradway 1985, p.2)

She stresses that the sandplay process, with its free and protected space, is conducive to the emergent transcendent moment. That is, it is conducive both to the synchronistic “moment” and to the appearance of the reconciling symbol that enables the synthesis of opposites to proceed. When this “moment” emerges in the work it is akin to Meister Eckhart’s (1957) “Breakthrough,” for it is an awakening in consciousness to the oneness of all things and the totality of the self. It is a conscious return to wholeness; when it is evoked, there occurs a spontaneous transformation of energies which results in new possibilities and new integration. As Shepherd (1992, p. 57) has noted, “It is a transpersonal awareness of the birth of our self into Self ” and stressing its flowing nature she adds, “It is not a one time event but a constant spiralling process in which awareness of union with all increases and enlivens our conscious choices.” Through the therapist’s conscious use of witnessing and “silent incubation,” and a vital and patient “waiting,” there comes a

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stream of healing moments. Meaning is critically important for both the therapist and the creator of the image. Intellectual understanding of the content, sensuous appreciation of the beauty, feeling for the appropriateness of the symbol, or intuitive awe at the symbolic process itself do not bring redemption. It is only through that shared meaning in the happening moment that the creative flow of meaning, energy, and matter emerges and unfolds in spontaneous new directions. These further meanings and enlargements represent a process of enfoldment and unfoldment that intuitively hints at the subtle nature of transformational consciousness. The body, the soma aspect, cannot be separate from the significance or meaning of these experiences. As Bohm has commented: Whatever meanings there may be ‘in our minds,’ these are inseparable from the totality of our somatic structures and therefore from what we are. So what we are depends crucially on the total set of meanings that operates ‘within us.’ Any fundamental change in meaning is a change in being for us. Therefore any transformation of consciousness must be a transformation of meaning. Consciousness is its content – that is its meaning. In a way, we could say that we are the totality of our meanings. (Bohm 1987, pp.92–93)

These healing moments, with their ever-deepening meaning, affect all aspects of our living organism. Healing is of soma significance, a concept elaborated upon by Bohm alluding to the outcome of that flowing movement of meaning, energy and matter. It is to this process that we will now turn in exploring perhaps the most significant development of serpent symbolism, the Kundalini yoga, as well as other examples of wisdom from the East that have profound impact upon physical and spiritual healing and renewal as they are experienced in the process of sandplay.

chapter 4

THE FLOWERING OF THE SERPENT Chakras as an Archetypal Path The symbol speaks for the eternal constancy of the human soul. Dora Kalff, Pajaro Dunes, 1987

Do you like to speak of God with form or without? Ramakrishna’s question to those coming for instruction

The elevation of the serpent’s power and its intricate relation to the feminine healing energies is a leading motif of tantric yoga symbolism, with origins dating back to the Indus civilization, c. 2500–1500 BC. A later flowering of tantric thought occurred at about the beginning of the second century BC and led to fruitful developments around the fourth century AD in the eternal theme of the redemptive wisdom of the serpent. Eliade has defined tantrism as coming from the root word tan meaning to “extend,” “continue,” thus arriving at “unfolding” or “continuous process” (Eliade 1969, pp.200–201). Tantrism would be “what extends knowledge,” and it came to designate the philosophical and religious movement that became assimilated by all the great Indian religions as well as lesser sectarian developments. There is a Buddhist tantrism and a Hindu tantrism, while Jainism and Kashmirian Shivaism accept certain tantric methods and influences. Campbell (1962) has pointed out that this astounding body of physiological, psychological and mythological lore has, in fact, influenced 94

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every significant development of Asian doctrine whether in India, Tibet, China, Korea, Japan or Southeast Asia from the very first centuries of the Christian era. He concludes that not only did the earliest Upanishads anticipate the tantric movement, but also the yogic contribution was an “essentially inward-turned, psychological system of thought, magic, and experience, in which much of what today is known of the unconscious was anticipated and even to a certain extent, along a certain line, surpassed” (Campbell 1962, pp.197–207).

Awakening the kundalini One of the greatest contributions of the tantrists to consciousness-expanding experience is the kundalini yoga. The classic Indian treatise on the kundalini yoga is the Yoga Sutras, Thread of Yoga, by the ancient saint Patanjali. Legend has it that this wise old sage dropped (pata) from his threshold guarding post in heaven in the form of a small snake, falling into the hands of another saint as he was placing his palms together in prayer (anjali) in order to bring to earth the secrets of the yogic path. This sutra (meaning thread), which is a concise handbook summarizing the rudiments of a doctrine or discipline, opens with the words, “Yoga is the intentional stopping of the spontaneous activity of the mind stuff ” (Yogasutras 1.2). Traditional depictions on old scroll paintings, revealing the profound depths of the unconscious, show a gigantic serpent, sesha, meaning “residue,” or born out of what remained after the creation (Mookerjee 1984, p.128). Sesha’s thousand heads expand into a great hood and she forms the couch of Vishnu who reclines on her coils in a trance-sleep. As an archetype of the unconscious itself, Sesha rises out of the primeval waters and, passing through Vishnu’s early manifestations or descents as a fish or tortoise, comes to human beings at the level of the muladhara, the base chakra, called the Root Support, which cannot be bypassed. The Sanskrit adjective kundalin means “coiled up, spiral, or winding” and the addition of the long “i” results in kundalini, a feminine noun signifying “snake.” It is in the lowest center of the body where the kundalini energy, the coiled female serpent, lies in its dormant, slumbering state until awakened. The sleeping or unmanifested kundalini is symbolized in

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scroll paintings by a serpent coiled into three and a half circles and spiraling around a central axis or lingam at the base of the spine. The coiled serpent image thus alludes to the vast potentialities of the creative feminine principle. It is similarly held that this kundalini shakti or cosmic energy is the supreme cosmic force of all life. According to tantric principles, all that exists in the universe also exists in the individual body. Yogic discipline leads to the unfolding of this subtle spiritual force. The quest then, or one’s purpose, is to search for truth within, and in so doing one may discover one’s inner self and realize the basic unfolding reality of the without, that is, the universe. Similarly, the fundamental concept in tantra, as in Jungian psychology, is recognition of polarity, and the union and integration of those polarities is at the core of tantric practice as it is in analytical psychology. This search necessarily involves waking the slumbering coiled female serpent, a serpent goddess of subtle and not gross substance, residing in an energy center, the lowest of five, six or seven (depending on the texts), at the base of the spine. When the kundalini shakti or coiled feminine energy awakens and is ready to unfold, she ascends through all the psychic centers (chakras) or lotuses (padmas) in which all the elements are gathered together along the axis of the spine, to unite above the crown of the head with Shiva, universal or pure consciousness, whose manifest energy she is. Rising from the lowest to the highest chakra, the serpent queen awakens the centers in between, and with each awakening a fundamental transformation takes place in the practitioner. The word yoga provides some idea of the meaning of this process for it comes from a Sanskrit root verb meaning to yoke, unite or join. The uniting or yoking through yogic practice becomes that of consciousness to its source. Thus kundalini shakti is a transforming energy which moves us to wholeness from fragmentation. Jung has commented, “When you succeed in awakening the Kundalini so that it starts to move out of its mere potentiality, you necessarily start a world which is totally different from our world. It is a world of eternity” (1975, p.76). This process of awakening is not unilinear, that is, moving in one direction upward or downward but is characterized by pushes and pulls at every level, if not outright obstacles. Blocks are removed throughout the

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system according to individual differences such as genetic make-up or past history, and this process can be quite uncomfortable both psychically and physically. The British researcher David Tansley (1976) has reported on “radionic” methods of diagnosis that are primarily concerned with subtle force fields and energies in the human body. He has found that chakras can be damaged by traumatic accidents and especially by sudden, dramatic, emotional shocks. These blockages may bring about physical and emotional problems as well as endocrine dysfunction. Similarly, if one has suppressed an inner reaction so that it cannot become conscious, it may then seize a bodily function in a specific chakra and force an expression through it, concretizing the image it wishes to convey. A brief clinical example here may be useful. A woman suffering from severe depressions and physical complaints involving acute and chronic upper respiratory illnesses reached a point in her sandplay process of uncovering considerable suppressed rage. As she approached this stage, her trays all remarkably began to reflect the same sort of symbolism, repetitive motifs which included the crescent moon, the white elephant, a small seated child with her head held down in her arms in an attitude of resignation, and many large swan feathers which arched up and over the scenes. In several images the crescent moon showed up both as a large sculpted archetypal image in the sand and as figures carrying crescent symbolism. These trays were created using the vertical or lengthwise dimension of the sandtray, indicating to me the likelihood that the motifs had to do with specific bodily functions as well as chakra activity, specifically the vissudha, which is related to the air element, conveyed by the many feathers she used. Significantly, the animal symbolism for this chakra is the white elephant. During the period of repeating these motifs, she was able to piece together through dreams and sand images the following developmental experiences. She was the first-born, and at age 2 a younger sister was born. Within several months of the birth of this second child, the mother, for reasons unknown, decided to send both the infant and the pre-3-year-old to the home of a relative in another city. On arriving there, the woman relative decided it was too much to care for the infant as well

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as a toddler, and sent the not-yet-3-year-old to a nursery school. Memories filtered through of this child’s fear of further separation, rage and fierce refusals, all of which were to no avail. She was then returned home about six months later, where she experienced her mother as unavailable and rejecting. Within a year of her return home after her traumatic separation from her mother, she accidentally fell into a canal and nearly drowned, being rescued only at the last moment. Simultaneously, matters were complicated during her childhood by an extremely rigid and authoritarian father towards whom she suffered intense fear. She learned, she said, the only means of resistance, which she expressed through a silent withholding, and by late childhood through running away from home by hiding out in the forest. By age 12 her parents had divorced, and she had experienced the onset of regular sinus and bronchial infections. On her sense of connection to these trays, she commented, It is a very old feeling and very painful. That pain is still there at moments … I feel it in my throat as though I can’t breathe … it is a panicky feeling, and sometimes it is in my stomach. I sometimes wonder if I can ever connect to the world. I made so many walls around myself … that was my only protection. I learned a resistance which left me with power, the wrong kind of power, as I felt no connection between myself and the world. I always have a feeling that I am still very angry. And I feel such a loneliness, such a terrible sadness.

While it is beyond the scope of this discussion to explore the further resolution of this conflict (which took some time), I ought to mention that two important figures emerged as sources of protection during this enactment of the somatic issues. The first was the Kuan-Yin, the archetypal Great Mother of compassion, and the second the Ganesha, or destroyer of obstacles. In this revealing vignette we observe both sudden emotional shocks brought about by early and traumatic separations in the primal relationship with the mother as well as outright trauma to a specific chakra through a near-drowning incident. The conditioned “holding” of the breath later developed into what she described as a “punishing” of her parents through her obstinate refusals and withholding or suppression of feeling. Over a period of many years, these in turn

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developed into a very serious endocrine dysfunction and a quite common “holding in” of the breath. As in Jungian psychology, conscious awareness is created slowly only through an accumulation of all pre-conscious events, which are represented as falling down and coming up movements. Seen in this way, creation itself is an awakening towards consciousness. Similarly, we see the parallels to the tension, or the conflict of opposites, as the movement toward wholeness unfolds. As Jung has commented, “self-knowledge – in the total meaning of the word – is not a one-sided intellectual pastime but a journey through the four continents, where one is exposed to all the dangers of land, sea, air, and fire” (1963, par. 283).

Elemental opposites Let us recall the ancient Chinese concept of cosmic interrelations in the diagram “On the Rock” (see Figure 1.1, p.32). Moving from top to bottom, the primal unity or the undivided gives way to or is transformed into the polarities of yang and yin, the masculine and feminine principles. This pair of opposites, when united, then gives rise to the elements, that which is the prerequisite for the manifestation of matter. These elements, according to a doctrine conceived two thousand years ago by Lui An (Lisu Ngan), overcome, injure or else engender one another much as we saw in Aztec-Mayan creation mythology in Chapter 2. Using the Chinese example, Bernoulli has elucidated as follows: Wood draws its nourishment from the earth, thus transforming earth into an organic cellular tissue, but it is vanquished by fire, that is, it engenders fire. Earth obstructs water by absorbing it, but on the other hand produces metal. Water destroys fire, but at the same time it produces vegetable growth, hence wood. Fire vanquishes metal by melting it, but also produces earth by burning wood to ash. Metal destroys wood, as for example, when man splits wood with an ax; in its molten state it is regarded as a component of the aggregate water, which it thus helps to engender. (Bernoulli 1960, pp.322–323)

Attention is drawn to this transmutation of elements, or “activities” as they are also called in Chinese, for the powerful elemental energies that are involved can be transposed to the processes of the material body. In

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sandplay we are observing a process of the emergence of elements and their oppositional tendencies, which gives rise metaphorically to material changes. While the resolution of opposites may put an end to conflict and bring about wholeness, that final outcome does not repudiate or erase the painful process of finding that resolution, nor does it deny the suffering and agonies experienced along the way in both the inner psychic experience as well as in the physical body. In sandplay practice, I have found that the tension of opposites or polarities is often accompanied by great suffering and serious somatic complaints. In several cases, I have witnessed life-threatening circumstances (which will be amplified at a later point in the actual clinical material). For in that tremendous process of the realization of self there is also a drowning or falling down, an immersion, an emptying, a sacrificing – all those agonies which we are heir to through the mythological contexts I have described as being metaphors for the individual inner psychic experience itself. The critical importance of the guide, teacher, witness or spiritual friend applies to both the sandplay process and yogin practice. In most of the Eastern traditions this is a natural and fundamental part of that process. An imaginative text, The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, by the eleventh-century Tibetan teacher and philosopher Gampopa, describes this beautifully: The similes are that spiritual friends are like a guide when we travel in unknown territory, an escort when we pass through dangerous regions and a ferryman when we cross a great river. As to the first, when we travel guideless in an unknown territory there is the danger of going astray and getting lost. But if we go with a guide then there is no such danger, and without missing a single step we reach the desired place. In the second simile dangerous regions are haunted by thieves and robbers, wild beasts and other noxious animals. When we go there without an escort, there is a danger of losing our body, life or property; but when we have a strong escort we reach the desired place without a loss …

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Finally in the third simile when we cross the great river, if we have boarded a boat without a boatman, we are either drowned or carried away by the current and do not reach the other shore; but if there is a boatman we land safely by his efforts. (Gampopa 1971, pp.31–32)

The sandplay therapist’s own efforts, attitudes, knowledge and conduct thus take on a heightened dimension, for it is through his or her clarity of mind, wisdom and meaningful experience of self that he becomes a temporary model that is increasingly integrated by the seeker – until the moment when the seeker discovers that the model is not only within his own psyche but is none other than his or her own self. This understanding comes from an appreciation of the human soul or psyche’s living in and from relatedness, and it clarifies the truth that one cannot individuate sitting alone atop Mount Annapurna.

Ascending the chakras To return to the kundalini, that inner creative force and energy, the shakti (as distinguished from the external cosmic energy which supports all life) is located in the subtle or etheric body. The yogic scriptures define millions of nadis (meaning “vibration” or “motion”) or subtle channels in the subtle or etheric body through which the vital life force, or prana, flows. The three most important of these are the sushumna, the principal nadi or channel, located in the middle of the spinal column from the base of the spine to the crown of the head. The other two nadis, the ida, or lunar channel, and the pingala, or solar channel, spiral or wind around the outside of the sushamna or central nadi. The imagery evoked here with these three nadis is remarkably similar to the tree-serpent or staff-serpent symbolism of Chapter 3 and in fact recalls the caduceus of Hermes, the guide of souls to rebirth into eternal life. The process of activating or awakening the vast potential of the kundalini psychic energies, the body’s most powerful thermal currents, lies in uniting it with the prana, the vital life force of the breath. There are any number of diverse methods or practices whose intention is to focus attention on that prana so that it is guided in a circulatory movement downward along the two outer channels.

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The task of the yogin is to unite the two currents of psychic energy, the cool, lunar energies of the ida on the left with those of the fiery, solar energies of the pingala on the right, at the location of the sleeping serpent at the base of the spine, where the entry of prana wakens the serpent power from its trance-like sleep. The ascending movement begins as the united lunar and solar energies carry the kundalini serpent on her upward course as she enters the central channel, the sushumna. Thus united, the prana-shakti begins its upward journey. With this passage or uncoiling there is an awakening of the five chakras or centers of subtle energy on the serpent journey to the sahasrara at the crown of the head, the most important center representing Shiva, or universal consciousness. The arrival of the serpent energies in each chakra necessarily also brings energies to the corresponding elements of earth, water, fire, air and ether. As the kundalini energy unites with the prana, it moves though the entire subtle, etheric body as well as the physical system, purifying, cleansing and strengthening the physical body. Kripananda comments: Physical diseases as well as negative mental and emotional qualities are caused by impurities blocking the flow of prana in the nadis. Once the nadis are purified and the prana can run smoothly through the body, the body is rejuvenated and the mind becomes pure. (Kripananda 1984, p.85)

Similarly, attitudes representing “mental tendencies” such as aggression, fearfulness and agitation are transformed, as are latent physical diseases. And quoting from the Sutras, he adds: “One becomes intoxicated with divine feelings and becomes free from anger and other negativities” (Kripananda 1984, p.85). Positive qualities begin to develop such as patience, discipline, self-control, joy and love as the awakened energies begin to transform the inner as well as the outer external life. Significantly, it is felt that kundalini is the source of considerable inspiration and creativity or, as in bhakti yoga, the heart may open and reveal unknown depths of love. With the merging and stabilizing of the serpent energies in the sahasrara, the absolute, one exists in a state of tremendously expanded consciousness. This blissful state of samadhi is also known as siddha, which is self-realization or God-realization. It is experienced as a state of oneness with all life.

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The words of Muktananda express this beautifully: Just as a river, after flowing for a long time, merges in the ocean and becomes the ocean, when Kundalini has finished her work and stabilized in the Sahasrara, you become completely immersed in God. The veil which made you see duality drops away, and you experience the world as a blissful sport of God’s energy. You see the universe as supremely blissful light, undifferentiated from yourself; and you remain unshakable in this awareness. (Muktananda 1984, p.92)

In tantric symbolism Shiva and Shakti thus emerge conjoined. Imagery best completes some of the subtler meanings here in this complex process. Often scroll paintings depict the chakras as wheels or vortices of energy. However, most frequently they are depicted as lotuses. As the serpent kundalini arrives at each chakra, that lotus opens and lifts its flower. As she leaves for a higher chakra, the lotus closes its petals, indicating the activation and assimilation of the energies of that chakra to the kundalini. A further point of subtlety is the number of petals on the imaged lotuses. In the ascension each lotus has an increasing number of petals, symbolizing the rising energies or vibration frequencies. Sanskrit letters written on the petals indicate sound vibrations as well as the intensity of the energy acting as a transformer on each chakra and/or element. The color of each lotus also reflects the resonant energy of the vibration frequency. Various symbolic representations involving numbers, the elements, colors, and vibration, sound and resonance are possible. Tantrism has contributed a major development in sound equations known as mantra yoga. Thus the Sanskrit syllabic sound symbols found on the lotus petals represent a process whereby the very sound of a mantra can arouse energies through the activation of vibration channels. By chanting the basic seed sound syllable, aum, according to the rules of the doctrine, there is both a contraction and intensification of the field of awareness such that the kundalini awakens. Kundalini is, in fact, the origin of primordial sound, and muladhara, the base chakra, has been called the “birth of all sounds.” The sound aum, being the seed sound of all things, is the one sound which is spelled in syllabic form in all possible inflections on the petals of the lotuses of the kundalini images. The awakening of the various

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vibration channels through the repetition of these sound syllables, which change sound and form as the shakti ascends, produces feeling-states that are beneficial to the practitioner. Thus the mantra shakti both awakens and sustains a heightened level of being-awareness. In this mantra process, there is a significant development at the level of the heart chakra, the anahata (in some disciplines it occurs at the visuddha chakra), characterized by the sound syllable om. In its Sanskrit sign it resembles the outline of the dancing Shiva, which signifies that this sound contains the wonder of existence. Importantly, the sound om, being derived from aum, which is called the syllable of the four elements, contains silence, the fourth element, which is before, after, and around all that rises and falls – that is, it is both the universe and the void out of which the universe arises. On the importance of this silence, Krishnamurti has commented: … silence is necessary. When you look at a cloud and the beauty of the light in that cloud, if your mind is chattering, wondering, speculating, verbalizing, it cannot see the beauty of the cloud. The mind must be quiet, and it will be quiet when you have put aside control, authority – all the things which man has put together in order to find truth or enlightenment, things which are the fabrications of man, therefore, caught in time. And to find that which is not of time, which has no measure, which is not nameable, the mind must be completely still. When you see that, then there is clarity in observation and learning, which is the act of intelligence. And in that stillness of mind, there is no time. (Jayakar 1986, p.302)

This being-awareness is a result of attention and is not a chance happening or response. Meditation is an attentive attitude which puts the body into harmony with itself and with the macrocosm. Returning to Krishnamurti, he states: Attention is a flowing from itself, it is moving, never still; it flows, moves, goes on. Attention gets more and more – not more in a comparative sense, but as a river that has behind it a vast volume of water; a tremendous volume of energy, of attention, wave upon wave upon wave, each wave a different movement. Attention is complete harmony. There must be a great volume of energy gathered through

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harmony. It is like the river Ganga. Attention is a movement to eternity. (Jayakar 1986, p.404)

Kalff also often spoke of the tremendous potential for creativity in the discovery of the self, that inner union of opposites, and the intense energies released in this process. Commenting on the numinous experiences that happen in sand images, she continued, There is a tremendous silence when the Self is experienced. When it is deeply experienced there is such a feeling of solidity, of clarity. When this situation appears of inner peace, of emptiness, it is often the beginning of a new development. There is an emptiness which the Buddhists talk of as fullness. Through this emptiness you make space for the transformation. From this void of emptiness starts the creativity. When these energies are activated, it is a joy. (Seminar at Pajaro Dunes, 1987)

The wisdom of emptiness In Tibetan Buddhism there are three principal aspects to enlightenment on the spiritual path. The first of these is renouncing the mind. The second, the enlightened motive or the bodhicitta, is a compassionate concern for the welfare of others. The third aspect, which is at the heart of all Buddhist teachings, is the wisdom of emptiness or sunyata. Essentially, sunyata expresses the unity of opposites, but further, through a gradual process of intuitive wisdom, one comes to see emptiness as the nature of all phenomena and to recognize the principle of limitless potentiality. Inherent in this is the expression of nonduality. As D.T. Suzuki has clarified: Emptiness (shunyata) does not mean relativity, or phenomenality, or nothingness, but rather means the Absolute, or something of a transcendental nature. When Buddhists declare all things to be empty, they are not advocating a nihilistic view; on the contrary an ultimate reality is hinted at, which cannot be subsumed under the categories of logic. With them to proclaim the conditionality of things is to point to the existence of something altogether unconditioned and transcendent of all determination. Shunyata may thus often be most appropriately rendered by the Absolute. (Suzuki 1960, p.29)

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Figure 4.1 Ensô, Torei (1721–92), ink on paper The ensô is an enigmatic one-stroke ink circle. It may be the purest display of the aptitude for quick, appropriate action that marks the awakened mind. The dynamic circle of the ensô stands for many Zen ideas. On the surface, it may represent the full moon, the empty tea cup, the turning wheel, the eye or face of the Buddha or Bodhid-harma, the dragon chasing its tail, and other poetic-visual representations. On a deeper level, the circle may symbolize the emptiness of the void, the endless circle of life, and the fullness of the spirit. Deeper still is the representation of the circle as the moment of enlightenment, the moment when the mind is free enough to simply let the body or spirit create, the moment when the perfection of the circle is committed to the emptiness of the page, and the moment of the chaos that is creation. Source: Stephen Addis (1989) The Art of Zen Paintings and Calligraphy by Japanese Monks 1600–1925. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

As the Zen Master Suzuki-Roshi (1973, p.21) has commented, “If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few” (see Figure 4.1). Execution of an ensô, an enigmatic one-stroke ink circle, may be the purest display of the aptitude for quick, appropriate action that marks the awakened mind as well as the emptiness and unity or fullness.

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To return to the physicist Bohm and his notion of the implicate order or enfolded order, we will find that this provides us with a means of discussing the origin of form, emerging from the formless through the process of unfolding. And equally, he comments: The mind may have a structure similar to the universe and in the underlying movement we call empty space, there is actually a tremendous energy, a movement. The particular forms which appear in the mind may be analogous to the particles, and getting to the ground of mind might be felt as light. (Weber 1986, p.48)

In tantric yoga, this state of being is the first manifestation of a union of the masculine and feminine aspects, a coniunctio of the Shiva shakti, an “unstruck” sound beyond the realm of the senses – silence. In the Upanishads it is said that the Great Self abides in the heart chakra, where portals open to the void. This is depicted by (Ishana Rudra) Shiva who stands above and behind the Shakti holding a trident and drum. From his long curled hair flows the holy Ganges, symbolic of the “cooling and purifying stream of self-knowledge: the knowledge that ‘I am That’ (Aham Brahmasmi, ‘I am Brahman’).” (Johari 1987, p.66). Hinduist imagery often reveals that in the heart chakra, the kundalini shakti – no longer personified as a dark serpentine force – appears for the first time as a beautiful goddess. Dressed in a flowing white sari and representing both virgin and sacred spiritual devotion, the kundalini shakti sits in a lotus position directly in front of Shiva within a triangle pointing upward, suggesting the tendency of shakti energies to move upwards and to carry one into the higher levels of meaning in one’s existence. Tantrists believe that when an individual experiences the realization of consciousness in this chakra, he attains a refined balance in his body and psyche and lives in harmony with the internal and external world. This new awareness and harmony brings with it a perception of divine grace in all existence (Johari 1987, pp.66–68). I am reminded here of the Greek ennoia, a feminine being, which, according to Valentinus, the poet and gnostic teacher, emerges out of deep reflection. Referred to as the “Mother of the All,” she is also called charis and sige meaning grace and silence. In this state of reflective awareness, one does not talk, either outwardly or inwardly, but rather

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remains within that twilight world of half-glimpsed meanings. In his teachings, Valentinus describes how Silence receives, as in a womb, the seed of the ineffable Source, and from this she brings forth all the emanations of divine being, ranged in harmonious pairs of masculine and feminine energies. (Pagels 1979, p.50)

Followers of Valentinus prayed to her both as “Mother” and as “the mystical, eternal Silence”; other gnostic sources added to these aspects of the divine Mother the aspect of Wisdom or Sophia (Pagels 1979, pp.48–70). Similarly, it is here, in the silence and emptiness of the sand process, that the potential seeds of creativity emerge, often symbolically expressed in the sand in the form of the egg or seeds of flowers or trees, such as acorns, pine or fir cones. These archetypal images suggest a preconscious mystery or awareness at a preverbal level of the preconscious totality, the essence and form of which has not yet been manifested or realized. In the image of the egg, which carries the opposites and is a harbinger of the self, there is a need for incubation, a concentration of the energies, non-movement – in short, stillness, silence and reflective warmth – if that psychic wholeness is to move from potentiality to genuine realization. Weinrib (1983), in discussing the energy-releasing potential of sandplay based on the union of opposites, has commented that, Sandplay in itself seems to offer a metaphorical union of the masculine and the feminine in that it combines mind/spirit and body, masculine and feminine elements: the feminine material earth is acted upon by the non-material masculine mind; the masculine idea or abstraction is given concrete feminine expression; consciousness and the unconscious meet concretely. (Weinrib 1983, p.69)

Sandplay thus mediates between opposites such as horizontal and vertical dimensions, the mysterious and the concrete, matter and spirit, conscious and unconscious, in the same manner in which tantric meditation unites the opposites.

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The disciplines of the kundalini yoga In the chakra system each phase of energy is characterized by an element, arranged in ascending order as earth, water, fire, air and ether. In the physical anatomy of the body these centers are identified as follows: muladhara and svadhisthana located around the prostatic plexus, manipura, around the navel, anahata, near the heart, visuddha, behind the throat, and ajna, between the eyebrows. Based on this system of seven, the sahasrara, the seventh, lies above the top of the head. The corresponding animal symbolism of each chakra or element begins with the black elephant at the root chakra. When kundalini then enters the svadhisthana chakra it encounters the makara, a Leviathan-like animal, followed by the ram, the gazelle and the white elephant. At the ajna chakra, the animal symbolism gives way to white light, symbolizing the fully conscious. The most common practices used to heighten attention and evoke the kundalini energies involve concentration through the previously described mantra repetitions, visualization of a circular diagram such as a mandala or yantra, chanting, music and dancing, self-inquiry such as “Who Am I,” or solving a difficult riddle or koan such as in Zen Buddhism. Pranayama, the art and discipline of breath control, plays a major role in hatha yoga and reinforces the power of the meditative practices. Rituals such as nyasa, by which one consciously enters the sacred space, are common, as are mudras, or ritual gestures, which help to intensify concentration and to evoke divine powers. Often visualizations of a specific deity are used in contemplation until an inner likeness of that image is internalized, and in a final process, samadhi, the contemplator and image exist not separately but in complete union. A final discipline used by various yoga schools is known as tapas or Tibetan gtumo, the yoga of heat or fire. Tapas is a psychophysical alchemy of yoga using a self-imposed physical discipline and complete concentration of energies through the breath and resulting in an accumulation of energy-creating psychological heat. Briefly described, it involves the activation of energy in the manipura chakra through a disciplined type of breath control, simultaneous with a visualization of a growing fire at the junction of all three spiritual channels just below the navel.

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Fire, signaling intense feeling as well as cleansing and transformative potential, is itself both the desire and the potential to create. The effort here is to activate and to force open the lower chakras through the heat of symbolic fire so that those energies needed at the higher chakras for spiritual attainment are released. In this way, the fire element of this chakra is turned back upon one’s self in a burning away of obstructions. Significantly, the animal symbolism here is the ram, the symbolic mount of Agni, the old Vedic god of the sacrificial fire. One can see in these descriptions, limited as they are, that the kundalini yoga offers techniques for mythic identification as well as for the transcendence of space and time. Many of these disciplines can be appreciated for their connection to ancient shamanistic practice. Examples are the disciplined regulation of the breath, the use of dance, numerically rhythmic and repetitive sounds, practices of ritual and meditation to bring about inner heat and ecstasy, and the visualization of and identification with animals or divinities. The repetition of these processes anticipates the transformation of elemental energies affecting all aspects of the inner and outer life, including physiological changes and somatic healing. Significantly, in this process of calming the mind or discovering that state of being called the fullness of emptiness, there is actually an experience of being a witness in the body itself. It is here that images of “eyes” in the sandtray process take on special meaning in relation to anticipated changes in the physical body, for they signify that there is a new development in the ability to see from the perspective of the self rather than ego. These “eye” images, often sculpted in the sand, most frequently appear after the constellation of the self, as the process unfolds at the vegetative level of the natural, instinctual life. They indicate that the transformation itself is being perceived by the receptive mind, revealing at the deepest level that the body–mind has been openly and directly present. This in itself is a wordless or preconscious process. I am distinguishing between those demonic heads or faces with their large eyes which are also often sculpted in the sand. These, of course, contain conspicuous eye motifs that appear intensely penetrating, evil, tyrannical or even death-like representations of dark aspects or archetypal contents related to shadow, animus or anima aspects or even auton-

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omous complexes. They may also be embellished with gems of red, black or other colors suggestive of their fiery nature or diabolical powers.

Parallels with the sandplay process Jung’s ideas about active imagination and the nature of transformation are pertinent here. He has commented on that process: You choose a dream or some other fantasy image and concentrate on it by simply catching hold of it and looking at it. You can also use a bad mood as a starting point and then try to find out what sort of fantasy image it will produce, or what image expresses this mood. You then fix this image in the mind by concentrating your attention. Usually it will alter as the mere fact of contemplating it animates it. The activations … reflect the psychic processes in the unconscious background, which appear in the form of images consisting of conscious memory material. In this way, conscious and unconscious are united. (Jung 1963, par. 706)

In examining this inward-turning practice of meditation, the parallels with the sandplay process become strikingly clear. The kundalini yoga or chakras discipline, like sandplay, represents a symbolic theory of the psyche. It is as if we could view the psyche from a fourth dimension not limited by space and time. In this way we are able to discover intuitions about the psyche as a whole from a cosmic standpoint. Subtleties of meaning become amplified as increasingly deeper and more profound levels of experience are explored. To transform something is to move it from one state of energy to another. Transformation in all major systems is a universal creative process. Siler (1990), a scientist and artist, commenting on brain research in Breaking the Mind Barrier: The Art and Science of Neurocosmology, reports: “Cerebreactors indicate that the configuration of energy fields in the brain during instances of intuition differ from the energy fields occurring in moments of reasoning” (Siler 1990, p.136). Commenting on cerebral fusion, the phase of thought in which an idea is experienced through intuition, and cerebral fission, in which an idea is expressed through various processes of reasoning, he concludes that both phases of thought, together with our cultural perceptions, blend to fulfill the broadest

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concepts of creativity, that is, any unconditioned response or unconditioned interpretation of an inner experience. He concludes: we need to continue integrating current imaging techniques that are capable of rendering in real-time both the subtle and abrupt changes in the neurosphere and the outer environment – which includes the physical universe. Simply put: What we say about the brain, we say about the cosmos. The processes of one are an extension of the other. (Siler 1990, pp.168–169)

Like the yogin meditator, those who enter into sandplay experience the process of imaging awake. And we must sink down to that lowest level of dark matter, as Jung has suggested, until we encounter what in Buddhist thought is called the Mother Light, and what in Jungian terminology we might call the spirit of nature or the light of the instincts, the alchemical lumen naturae. This, I believe, is why Kalff referred to sandplay as “a Western form of meditation” (Seminar at Pajaro Dunes, 1983). For sandplay, like kundalini yoga or chakra meditation, is an archetypal path which leads to the transformation of energies through an inward-turning journey which activates the chakras materially and leads to the discovery of the self. And once that great mystery has been encountered, the desire of the heart is to know it more fully and to live it more completely in every aspect of daily life. According to Buddhist explanation, the ultimate creative principle is consciousness. As H.H. Dalai Lama has commented in dialogue with David Bohm: There are different levels of consciousness. What we call innermost subtle consciousness is always there. The continuity of that consciousness is almost like something permanent, like the space-particles. In the field of matter, that is the space-particles; in the field of consciousness, it is the Clear Light … the Clear Light, with its special energy, makes the connection with consciousness. (Dalai Lama 1986, p.237)

To realize the possibility of such an awakening, those embarking on a sandplay process must necessarily enter into a brooding, meditative silence. This silence and withdrawal from outward concerns contains aspects of tapas in the sense that there is a keeping back of the life

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energies, which generates warmth or heat through the meditative concentration of the process itself. This reflection, which literally means to bend back upon one’s self, becomes the inward journey to the possible awakening of the serpent within each one of us in the context of the sandplay transformational process.

Figure 4.2 Krishna as divine child dancing on the head of the serpent, Kaliya, bronze, fourteenth–fifteenth century, Tamilnadu, India The child Krishna is rescuing cows and cowherders from the serpent, who is poisoning the river. The villagers have begged for his help. Having dived into the water, he dances on the head of the gigantic serpent. Each of his steps is a death-dealing blow, but he spares the serpent, who has only been obeying his serpent nature, and the serpent agrees not to bother the villagers. With his hands held in prayerful devotion, the serpent indicates his subservience to the divine child god who dances light as a feather on his head. Source: Reproduction in the collection of Joseph Campbell. Courtesy of the Joseph Campbell and Marija Gimbutas Library, Santa Barbara, CA.

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It is clear from this approach to the psyche that the encounter with the serpent is an essential and indispensable aspect of the process in the realm of matter as well as of spirit, and in descending as well as returning. It is equivalent to the saying of the alchemists, “When you see your matter going black, rejoice: for that is the beginning of the work” (Edinger 1985, p.165). It is also useful to watch for those symbols that might evoke that serpent energy. An example would be the stag. Not only do the stag’s antlers draw light, but also in legend the stag draws the snake from its hole, and by ingesting and assimilating the snake it casts off its antlers in an act of regeneration. Similarly, the eagle can foretell the emergence of the serpent, often in fact bringing about a confrontation between the spiritual and instinctual aspects (see Figure 4.2).

Serpent imagery I have often found in my teaching a certain attitude of unease on the part of Western students toward the appearance of the serpent in initial sandtray images which is clearly a reflection of doctrinal or rigid thinking regarding the serpent in the book of Genesis in the Old Testament. Carlos Suares (1970), in his book, The Cipher of Genesis: The Original Code of the Qabala as Applied to the Scriptures, contributes some interesting insights from the Cabala, the system of esoteric Hebrew theosophy. He comments: The book of Genesis, when read according to custom, appears in the form of a story relating the facts of such people as Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, and so forth, but whose names when read in the light of the cabalistic code reveal that they are abstract (mathematical) formulas of cosmic energy focused in the human psyche. In the original meaning, woman does not issue from a rib of Adam, she is not called Eve in the Garden of Eden, she does not disobey, there is no question of sin, and the woman is not expelled from Eden. (Suares 1970, pp.126–127)

Concerning the serpent, he concludes: In certain traditions his name is Kundalini. He is the resurrection of Aleph, the principle of all that is and all that is not, from its earthly entombment. At the point where the serpent appears, Adam and

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Esha are not wholly there, as if they were just emerging from oblivion. Adam especially is almost entirely asleep. The mission of the serpent is to plunge them into evolution. When Esha (Eve) is questioned concerning this event, she does not reply, as the translations assert, ‘The serpent beguiled me.’ What she says is that the serpent blends his earthly fire with her lost heavenly fire, which comes to life again. That is, she receives the cosmic breath of life. (Suares 1970, p.127)

The chief difference here, of course, is that the serpent has become a masculine rather than feminine principle. We find another parallel in the words of the gnostic Simon Magus, who comments that in each of us is “a dwelling place” and “in each human being dwells an infinite power, the root of the universe. That infinite power exists in two modes: one actual, the other potential. This infinite power exists in a latent condition in everyone” (Pagels 1979, p.135). Indeed, an alternative myth of the Genesis story is suggested in one of the papyrus texts of the Nag Hammadi discovery in Egypt. In The Testimony of Truth, the telling of the story of creation is revealed through the revelations of the serpent itself ! In this telling of the myth by the serpent, the principle of divine wisdom, the serpent convinces Adam and Eve to partake of knowledge while the Lord threatens them with death in his jealous efforts to prevent them from attaining knowledge, and in a rage expels them from the Garden of Eden when they are successful (Pagels 1979, p.xvii). As Moerland (1992) clarifies, the gnostics believed that the serpent was the messenger who came to tell of the true God and to reveal an equally important divine truth. The serpent as messenger of the true God brings the knowledge to humans of their own godlike nature. We can appreciate one of the most basic of Kalffian tenets of sandplay theory, that of the activation of the feminine principle, as we explore the subtle aspects of the awakening serpent, with wisdom unfolding through increasingly subtle transformations at each enfolded level of the process. That is, by means of a new connection to the creative feminine energy, the forces and energies become integrated until they become concentrated into one energy. This energy does not come from the intellect, and in many of her seminars Kalff referred to it as “the inner fire.” It was clear to

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her from her Buddhistic experience that this inner fire leads to the highest level of spirituality, for the powerful current of feminine energy has conjoined with the equally powerful energies of the masculine spirit. She once commented during a 1982 lecture in California: In the Kundalini, when it moves up through the chakras, they say it is like a heavenly tree which unfolds. It is then that the illnesses of the body may disappear. The kundalini is the feminine force. It is the feminine creative quality. It is the cosmic force of the feminine principle which joins with the masculine principle in the upper chakras. Buddhists visualize a glowing thread which rises, moving up through the body which becomes warmer and warmer. From there, it goes to the heart. It is then that masculine and feminine are joined together in the heart. This is the wonderful part of the work. When you get in touch with these energies it puts you at a new level. To go deeply, you can find an aspect which can be the healing quality. This is why it is so important to try to reach the depths … to go into the body.

Significantly, when we reach these somatic depths in sandplay we are most likely to see symbolic images of birds, such as ducks, geese, water cranes and swans, which move between the elements of air, water and earth, for when these appear we know with certainty that we have touched the elements in the lowest levels of the body and further, that an integrative process of considerable significance is developing at a soma level. In a later discussion in Sausalito, California, in 1988, Kalff again discussed chakra theory and its connection to sandplay theory. Reiterating that the earth and water elements are the lowest levels of the chakras, the deepest part of the unconscious, as well as the deepest material levels of the body, she commented: When the depths are reached, what has been hurting is healed. It can no longer hurt. There is a peace at the bottom. It is no longer the struggle. When the person penetrates into these deeper levels, he penetrates into cultures other than his own. When he reaches the neighborhood of the Self, it is the ultimate consciousness and clarity of mind. The symbol of that inner experience is then in the sandtray.

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This is, in effect, a mysterium tremendum, for this numinosity carries intense meaning and energy which “transcends the capacity of the conscious personality to encompass or understand it. The individual is awed, overwhelmed, and yet fascinated” (Edinger 1975, p.34).

Mandalic symbolism These numinous images created in the sand and referred to as manifestations or constellations of the Self most often reflect a mandalic form expressive of a complete union of opposites. I am reminded of a discussion by Alden Josey (1993) in his article “Molecules as Mandalas,” in which he states that in the field of synthetic organic chemistry, the focus of important research since the late 1960s has been on molecules that are mandalic in character. These molecules captivate and fascinate, he says, not only because they challenge the chemist’s technical skills, but also because their mandalic forms “evoke inner feelings of a relationship between conscious life and the psychic center, constellating an experience of the Self ” (Josey 1993, p.100). He adds, however, that although this evocative power is widely felt, its psychological roots and its role in the choice of scientific goals remain unappreciated by scientists. Mandalas appear in an infinite variety of forms and at all times and places, striking a resonance in ego consciousness and linking it with its origin and ground in the inexhaustible depths of the collective unconscious. The greatest of the alchemists as well as the medieval Christian mandalists understood the inner source of this mandalic imagery and its significance for the material transformations of the opus. Weinrib (1983) has amplified on the importance of the mandalic form in sandplay. She comments: Sandplay seems to serve a meditative purpose similar to that of a mandala. It fosters sensitivity to inner images, a condition of relatedness to the inner world. Its concreteness seems to encourage a state of absorption and relaxed concentration; of non-rational awareness … The sand tray acts as a focus of attention that encourages centering. Its physical boundaries, around an enclosed space, keep out distractions. As such, it has a distinctly quieting and focusing

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effect that seems to facilitate penetration into the transpersonal level of the psyche. (Weinrib 1983, p.69)

When such experiences of unconscious transcendent power, scope, and transforming energy occur – whether in yogic meditation, the chemist’s work, or the sandtray – they carry the impulse to translate the contents into a meaningful image which symbolizes that experience. This image is the best expression of an event that is essentially indescribable. Kalff, too, used to stress that these numinous images, which are dream-like, are not yet “there” in reality, and that their appearance often means that the work itself has just begun. For these same images are anticipations of potential experiences in actual life that may require modifications in that external life. In these encounters the unconscious has provided pathways to a knowledge and experience of things which we cannot know rationally and consciously. The unconscious therefore appears to have an intuitive wisdom that transcends the concrete life experience, which Jung has described as “absolute knowledge.” It is absolute in the sense that it is entirely detached from ego consciousness. However, we must always remember that at the heart of this process, its very essence, is meditative reflection. In the language of analytical psychology, the mandala becomes the image carrier to the Self much as it does in meditative practice. Josey comments: The ego experiences itself, often with intense emotion, as approached by a numinous and overwhelming principle. The elements of symbolic image, affect, and experience of the constellation of the Self are joined in a union in which movement between the elements is free and reversible. It is equally clear that the image, once constructed, can serve the same inner process in the reverse way; that is, when the object is seen or made the object of contemplation, it acts symbolically to cause the reappearance in consciousness of the very inner experience that generated it. (Josey 1993, pp.100–101; author’s italics)

In light of the earlier discussion of the importance of eye imagery often formed in sand images, Jung has commented:

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the mandala is indeed an ‘eye,’ the structure of which symbolizes the centre of order in the unconscious … the eye may well stand for consciousness looking into its own background. It sees its own light there, and when this is clear and pure the whole body is filled with light. Under certain conditions consciousness has a purifying effect. (Jung 1980, para. 593)

To encounter these images, it is almost as if the self is looking out at us, and we have a momentary and not to be forgotten encounter with God. In commenting on the unifying effects of the spiritual and instinctual coming together, Kalff has stated, The image is shaped in the sand physically, so that we can say that internal contents find a bodily form. We observe, moreover, that the act of shaping can become a deep, emotionally felt experience if the manifestation of wholeness is achieved, which has the mandala as its most beautiful expression. (Kalff [1978] 199l, p.12)

We must learn to trust the image and to allow it to develop in the security of the free and protected space without recourse to intellectualization. For with these images that emerge from the center there is always something new in the offing, something developing that may bring order and clarity to that which is to come in the external life. We must remind ourselves that there is evidence of an approaching deeper experience when we share these images as witness. For these new developments are born of the security and freedom of the moment and the condition of being truly understood. And each person involved in this process must find and follow his or her own path. Perhaps the most significant union of opposites represented by the mandalic form lies in the synchronistic elements of sandplay. In a conversation between Weinrib and Kalff in 1972, Kalff commented: Sandplay is a synchronistic event in that there is a simultaneous psychophysical phenomenon. The inner image is given physical expression. With each synchronistic event, the next step is born. The synthesis between the psychic and the physical becomes the thesis for the next step in the process. There is a healing synchronistic moment when the inner and outer happen simultaneously; that is, the patient reveals the inner subjective state at the same moment that

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the therapist outside understands it. The synchronous event, in completing a gestalt, in itself makes possible and provides momentum toward the next developmental step. (Weinrib 1983, pp.68–70)

As Kalff commented in one of her last talks in America: “What I have discovered is that when the Self appears, it is actually only the beginning of a new possibility.” For this reason she often reiterated the dangers of interrupting the process at the moment of that manifestation of the self, commenting: I always say that it is a dangerous point at the point of the new life. We have to give it a time to integrate and to see what wants to be expressed. Things that have been hidden and unconscious can be taken up in life. Those who interrupt at this point in the work do not understand the whole process. It has a direction which must be allowed to develop. We must observe very carefully what comes after the constellation for things really begin to change. This is why the process must not stop. It is a dangerous time in the work for it is like a new grass that comes out in the spring and can be easily broken. It is at this moment that we see the animal-vegetative phase of the work, and this signifies that the spiritual is becoming integrated with the natural, instinctual life. (Kalff at Carmel, California, 1989; author’s italics)

Essential wholeness It is at this point, I believe, that we are likely to begin seeing a healing possibility within the body itself, making Kalff ’s metaphor of the “new grass” most meaningful. The spiritualizing of the physical-material realm, as in the joining of the prana-shakti in the lowest levels of the body, makes it possible to alter conditions within the physical body. This is consistent with the idea that there is a continuous healing taking place within ourselves through the very process of becoming consciously aware. That process goes on at increasingly subtle levels as we leave the actual sandplay process; in becoming more conscious, we experience that unfolding of meaning as a healing in itself that affects all aspects of our physical and emotional well-being as well as our environment, far into the future.

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What is suggested is that as meaning – that is, consciousness – enters into matter, it gradually transforms the structure of the field of energies which make up that material form. Just as in yoga, where the upper chakra, that which is beyond our daily life, brings life to all the other chakras, so do these energies in turn, whether through the chakras or the material elements of the sandplay process, bring about physical manifestations of change in all levels of the body. Thus we could say that as this process unfolds with deeper and more subtle meanings, entering into matter and becoming enfolded through fields of energy – that is, becoming enfolded by matter – the psyche, that wholeness which carries absolute meaning or totality, exerts a new ordering process such that the atoms, molecules, neurons, cells and organs begin to obey a new principle or law, as it were, in much the same way that the ego becomes relativized and in service to the self. We must put aside the outdated Cartesian mind–matter duality in which what is actually a wholeness, with an interweaving of mind and matter, becomes fragmented. In a holographic sense, we could say the state of the whole organizes the parts, and similarly that the knowledge of the whole is enfolded in each of the parts. Wholeness is seen as the primary reality, while the parts are secondary in the sense that what they are and what they do can be understood only in relation to the whole. If we perceive the universe as unbroken wholeness in flowing movement, then does it not follow that this same principle operates within all life, including the human organism? In the movements of enfolding and unfolding there is a new and basic order, the enfolded order, or the implicate order (implicate meaning “to enfold” or to fold inward). In this sense everything is folded into everything. This suggests “that the dynamic activity – the internal and the external – which is fundamental to what each part is, is based on its enfoldment of all the rest, including the whole universe.” Bohm explains that each part may unfold others in different degrees and ways, and he concludes, “Therefore enfoldment is not merely superficial or passive but … each part is in a fundamental sense internally related in its basic activities to the whole and to all the other parts” (Bohm 1987, pp.12–13). He suggests that when we look at the relationship between the physical and the mental, we consider a new notion of meaning which he calls

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soma-significance (Bohm 1987, p.72). This notion would have us recognize that “psychosomatic,” a term popularly overused in contemporary psychological thought, is not a useful one in that it introduces a fragmentation between the physical and the mental which does not exist. In effect it causes us to act as if we were dealing with two separate substances. If we accept that there is only one flow in the basic order of enfoldment and unfoldment, and that changes in meaning affect that flow, then it follows that any change of meaning is a change of soma (a physical change), and any change of soma is a change of meaning. We are thus able to free ourselves of the distinctions between matter and psyche, and the essential unity of the two is thereby emphasized. They are, simply stated, two aspects of a single reality. Bohm explains the critical role of meaning in this process as follows: Modern scientific studies indicate that such meanings are carried somatically by further physical, chemical, and electrical processes into the brain and the rest of the nervous system where they are apprehended by ever higher intellectual and emotional levels of meaning. As this takes place these meanings, along with their somatic concomitants, become ever more subtle … The meaning is: rarified, delicate, highly refined, elusive, indefinable, intangible. The subtle may be contrasted with the manifest, which means literally, what can be held in the hand. My proposal then is that reality has two further key aspects, which are closely related to soma and significance, the subtle and the manifest. (Bohm 1987, pp.74–75; author’s italics)

If we recognize a sandtray image as a manifest somatic form, we see that it has considerable significance for the maker of that image. The significance or meaning for the maker is clearly more subtle than the image itself. And that significance can be experienced in yet another somatic form – electrical and chemical activities as well as other activities in the brain and the rest of the nervous system, indeed perhaps at the cellular level, which is even more subtle than the original form or sandplay image that gave rise to it. Now clearly, one may have considerable manifest somatic reactions at one level, while at another level the relatively subtle

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forms of thought may have meanings that can be grasped in ever higher and more subtle somatic processes. At some point this may evolve into a vast totality of meanings in something like a flash of insight. From this perspective, one can see that the content of what is somatic and manifest and what is significant and subtle is always changing. We often are able to experience this process when we review sandtray images. What we see in this review process are ever increasing levels of subtlety as further meanings unfold for both witness and maker of the image. The uncovering or recognition of these further subtleties occurs at the level of significance (meaning and feeling) and most probably at the soma level of experience as well. This discovery of the infinite depth and dimensions of sand images underscores the importance of sandplay’s photographic aspect as well as the importance of sharing of that photography with the seeker him- or herself. Indeed, those further unfoldments of meaning at a later time may serve an important function in that greater period of integration after the actual image-making process is completed. To return to Bohm for further elucidation on this process: As a given meaning is carried into the somatic side, you can see that it continues to develop the original significance. If something means danger, then not only adrenalin, but a whole range of chemical substances will travel through the blood, and according to modern scientific discoveries, these act like ‘messengers’ (carriers of meaning) from the brain to various parts of the body. That is, these chemicals instruct various parts of the body to act in certain ways. In addition there are electrical ‘signals’ – they are not really signals – carried by the nerves, which function in a similar way. And this is a further unfoldment of the original significance into forms that are suitable for ‘instructing’ the body to carry out the implications of what is meant. (Bohm 1987, p.77)

We must therefore visualize this process as a two-way movement in the single flow of energy in which meaning is carried inward and outward between soma and significance as well as between various levels – those that are relatively subtle and those that are relatively manifest. These insights from quantum physics have great value for a deeper understanding of what may be a new order of thinking in our perception of the

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sandtray process concerning the movement of matter, energy, and meaning and its effect on the physical-somatic life as well as on spiritual development. Seen in this way, sandplay therapy itself is an implicate order in which the question of mind and matter is appreciated as two aspects of a single reality. To go one step further, if psyche mirrors matter, then is there not some justification for a heightened possibility of matter mirroring psyche in the sandplay process? As Bohm comments: Now if meaning is an intrinsic part of not only our reality but reality in general, then I would say that a perception of a new meaning constitutes a creative act. As their implications are unfolded, when people take them up, work with them, and so on, the new meanings that have been created make their corresponding contributions to this reality. And these are not only in the aspect of significance but also in the aspect of soma. That is, the situation changes physically as well as mentally … You may say that you need an act of will to change … but I think that when you really see something with great energy, no further act of will is needed. (Bohm 1987, p.94; author’s italics)

Of course we must take into account the blockages or conditionings that interfere in the course of transformation. It is at these points that the deeper, increasingly subtle nuances of meaning are most likely to bring about a transformation of mind (or consciousness) and matter. Here it is important to remember that mind and matter really both change together. For as Bohm comments: the deep change of meaning is a change in the deep material structure of the brain as well, and this unfolds into further changes. The new meaning will produce different thought and therefore possibly an entirely different functioning of the brain. And when the brain comes to a new state, new ideas become possible. But the new meaning is what organizes the new state. The mental and the physical are one. A change in the mental is a change in the physical, and a change in the physical is a change in the mental … This point is critically significant for understanding psychological and social change. Such a meaning, sensed to have a high value, will arouse the energy needed to bring a whole new way of life into being. You see,

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only meaning can arouse energy. (Bohm 1987, pp.94–97; author’s italics)

Looking East In looking beyond physics, Bohm himself has commented that this idea of enfoldment is an ancient one and has been known in the East for many centuries. Kalff, in her experiences in the East, grasped a fundamental process that had to do with this unfolding. For in Eastern meditative practices, the disciples, in confronting the demonic and the divine within themselves, become connected to the totality in its essential facets. But they experience them in only one place – there where they feel them directly, in their own body. That reality of their body becomes reality, pure and simple. In this way we can learn to respect and live at peace with the world of the unconscious, for by evoking the unconscious we can preserve our psychophysical balance both outwardly and inwardly. This can come about, however, only through total and repeated immersion in the process of unfolding and enfolding meaning, such that we are no longer cut off from our inwardness but live in full communion with it. In this regard it is important to note that the unconscious itself remembers only through mythical symbols. And is this not the essence of the journey through the shifting phenomena of the sand process? What is preserved from that process, if we persevere far enough in that transformational world, is that which transcends the mundane and historical and reaches the timeless and symbolic in ourselves, that which is the meaning of our being. Kalff (1972) elaborated some of her significant discoveries in an article, “Experiences with Far Eastern Philosophers.” It is clear that her journey to the East at that time was an intentional effort to clarify for herself what she had already seen as a “striking correspondence” between the unfolding of the self in the sand process and the Taoist diagram by Chou Tun-Yi, the Chinese philosopher (Kalff 1972, p.56). In particular, she could see a relationship between “the emergence of the five basic elements: earth, wood, metal, fire and water, with earth being the ruler of the other elements.” She was particularly concerned at that time about the development of her theory, particularly with the step

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after the constellation of the self, the animal-vegetative level, that period when the inherent potential begins to come alive on the vegetative level of the personality, the somatic aspect. This represents that moment when each of the elements has been constellated in the sand process. She had previously shared sand process images with Erich Neumann, who commented that she was bringing him proof of his theories (Kalff: Seminar at Pajaro Dunes, CA, 1987). Kalff had been impressed by how the number five “almost invariably” appeared in various forms in the unfolding processes, and felt that the combination of the inherent elements and the number five corresponded in some way to the human body. Referring to the ancient text, she notes: We see that all things of the physical universe are derived from a oneness which is the Supreme Ultimate (t’ai-chi), therefore a transcendental principle is at the same time regarded as actually being within all material things.

She came to the realization that humans are the most spiritual of all creatures because they have, a priori, not only the essence of the physical elements in the materiality of the body but also the “metaphysical transcendent Principle of the Supreme Ultimate” (Kalff 1972, p.57). Commenting on the significance of earth, the feminine principle, as the ruler of the five elements, Kalff states: The implication then is that spiritual life must begin in the body, and in everyday life. The body in the East is not regarded as an object, as something distinct from the ego. It is the instrument through which we must experience the totality, the spiritual as well as the physical. (Kalff 1972, p.57)

In discussions with sandplay colleagues in Kyoto, Kalff learned that her Japanese colleagues had found the same developmental stages in their Eastern patients as Kalff had with those in the West, which in turn corresponded to the developmental stages depicted in the Chinese t’ai-chi-tu (wu-chi) diagram. She then concluded: that these stages represent an archetypal, human pattern that transcends Eastern and Western differences; that this pattern consists in a body–mind relationship which is symbolized in the sand pictures by the number five, and that the number five seems to signal the trans-

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formation of physical energy into spiritual experience, and that the body is somehow vital in the achievement of spiritual experience. (Kalff 1972, p. 57)

Kalff ’s dream mentioned in the first chapter becomes more salient as we explore these earlier discoveries. The reader will recall that in the dream she was approached by two monks who gave her a golden rectangular instrument. She was to swing this instrument and, as she did so, an opening appeared in the earth which cut through to the other side of the world, the West, where she saw the light of the sun. Could it be that this opening, this cutting through from East to West through the earth element to the sun and illumination, was an embodiment of her work, which was to consist of revealing the integration of earth, matter and the body within the context of Jungian sandplay therapy by illuminating and conjoining Eastern and Western wisdom? Is there a hint of the transcendent function in the golden rectangle, a reconciling symbol, uniting East and West, spirit and body, in a concrete process whose beginnings emerge in sand, the earth element itself ? The fact that there were two monks carrying the golden rectangle certainly suggests being at the threshold of an important and perhaps sacred revelation. Kalff then went on to participate in this process herself in the Japanese Soto Zen tradition at Eiheiji, the temple of Eternal Peace, founded by Dogen Zenji in AD 1244, where she encountered the meditative practice of the contemplation of the void. She was again quite impressed by the equal importance given to both body and mind in meditation, citing for example Dogen’s saying, “Clean the mind and clean the physical life in calm rhythm” (Kalff 1972, p.61) as well as other Zen pathways to spiritual–physical harmony and union. From this extremely meaningful experience Kalff then traveled to the Himalayan foothills in India, where she met with HH Dalai Lama, his tutors and several lamas. Here she felt that perhaps the Tibetans were “living Buddhism in its purest form,” for she found that this pathway included not only meditation and physical discipline, but also an integration of this process into every aspect of daily life. It was here that she also began to integrate the Tibetan teachings of the mandalic structure (Demchog Kilkor Mandala) as it relates to the elements and their transformations, leading to the “Five Wisdoms.” Similarly she was instructed in

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the Tibetan meditative practice whereby through the development of a “one-pointedness of mind” and with the help of the Five Forces one could reach a state of perfect equanimity leading to samatha, or quietude, characterized by an experience of ecstasy in both mind and body (Kalff 1972, pp.66–67). I have included these important anecdotal experiences from just one of Kalff ’s trips to the Far East, for they provide the student of sandplay with an historical understanding of the “bridging” that Kalff accomplished in enriching her sandplay theory. The natural outcome of that bridging was an integration of some of the richest aspects of ancient Eastern and Western traditions relating to body–mind healing. In this sense, sandplay theory and practice began to acquire a transpersonal character. What Kalff experienced was that becoming conscious, that is, the engaging of meaning with matter and energy, was a form of enlightenment. As one becomes conscious one experiences more freedom. What she learned in the East was the essential teaching of Buddhism in terms of the meaning it gave to one’s efforts to experience complete consciousness, that is, complete freedom. More importantly, Kalff ’s formative experiences and intuitions provide a further bridge to understanding the later integration in sandplay theory that took place concerning the spiritualizing of the body, the embodiment process, as well as the integration and union of opposites through the transformation of energies based on the elements. It is for this reason that I have also elaborated the chakra theory of transformation which became a foundation stone in Kalffian sandplay theory, unearthing and incorporating as it does the profound significance of the feminine principle in that embodiment process. For as Kalff herself clarified in a 1982 Pajaro Dunes lecture, “The feminine quality is tapped through the earth element. There is then access to the transcendental. There is no deep religious experience without the touching of the feminine. It is a transition to a new religiosity.” As Weinrib has pointed out, Kalff had begun to see the feminine as a source of creativity and meaning. Weinrib describes Kalff ’s discovery in the following: In her practice she saw that in the sand something activated by the mind brought forth a concrete creation which in the intuitive way of

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women brought forth insight, wisdom and numinous experience. Relativization of the ego via encounter with the Self was experienced as numinous and was expressed in unmistakably religious symbols. In her practice she also saw that access to the spirit was achieved by women through reaching the profoundest levels of their feminine beings, and by men through their relationship to the feminine within themselves. This relationship, paradoxically, reinforced men’s masculine sense of themselves because they felt more secure and whole. (Weinrib 1983, p.40)

Kalff had realized that working in the sand or earth was in itself a feminine activity. In a conversation between Weinrib and Kalff in 1973, Kalff commented: Digging with our hands we are actively working in the earth, digging out the energies of the feminine … This feminine activity may give immediate access to the deepest transcendental stratum. Reactivation of the feminine may be a way to reactivate the spirit. Centuries of neglect of feminine reality has led to the dessication of spirit; rigidity and dogma. Our deepest religious impulses have been thwarted. (Weinrib 1983, p.41)

That awakening for Kalff may also have come from an Eastern source, for she comments about her decision to visit the Far East: I have found that an astonishing number of symbols have been constellated in the sand pictures, which call for Buddhistic interpretation, such as the elephant, especially the white elephant, the sword, the eight-spoked wheel of Buddha, the Lotus flower, and the Kannon – the goddess of compassion. The appearance of Kannon, the archetypal all-embracing mother, has proved to be of decisive significance in the process leading to the manifestation of the Self, both with children and adults. It was to understand the meaning of the number five as well as [these] other Buddhist symbols that I made my journey to the Far East. (Kalff 1972, p.56)

It is for this reason that in the early images of the sandplay process we must watch for those developments that signify the awakening of the feminine aspect. These often appear in the form of the serpent, or other reptiles and amphibians at the lower levels of the instinctual life. It is

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important to follow the various transformations of that principle, which ultimately lead to the emergence of the archetype of the divine feminine in all of her varied and most beautiful manifestations. At some point in the work this divine feminine, in the form of the goddess, most often anticipates and heralds the divine birth of the self through a later union of that feminine principle with its masculine counterpart. For when we experience the reconciliation of the opposites, the coniunctio, there is an anticipation, often revealed in the image of the divine birth. As Kalff (1980, p.107) explained, gaining access to the instinctual sphere corresponds to a rebirth. These awakenings or stirrings emerge most often with images of the Great Mother and reveal a gradual movement to the center of the tray. It is here, in this central place, that the deepest meaning is experienced, most frequently in silence. The image itself emanates a considerable radiance and beauty for both men and women alike. It is what we might call the beginning of a healing through the archetype. As in Eastern philosophy, it is like an intuitive flash of returning to Oneness. The merit of these aspects of sandplay is that they unearth that which is timeless in us, in a form appropriate to our space and time, so that we can comprehend it and live by it. It is no more than a symbolic means of giving physical form, and thereby meaning, to our being. I should like to close this chapter with the words of the sage Chuang-Tzu, who is thought to have lived about a century later then Lao-tzu, for they lead us coherently to the ancient concept of the Tao, the Way, with its majestic cycles of change flowing out of the ceaseless play of the yin and the yang and the continuous ever-flowing dance of the wu-hsing, the five elements or activities. Chuang-Tzu’s works communicate a sense of the bliss that arises out of that communion in silence and stillness in which we discover the precious jewel within our own hearts. The essence of the Perfect Way is deep and darkly shrouded; its extreme is mysterious and hushed in silence. Let there be no seeing, no hearing; enfold the spirit in quietude and the body will right itself … When the eye does not see, the ear does not hear and the mind does not know, your spirit will protect your body and your body enjoy long life. Be cautious of what is within; block off what is without, for much knowledge is harmful. Then I will lead you above

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the Great Brilliance, to the source of the perfect Yang; I will guide you through the Dark and Mysterious Gate to the source of the perfect Yin … You have only to take care and guard your own body; then other things will themselves grow sturdy. (Blofeld 1978, p.49)

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chapter 5

ORIGINS AND SOURCE Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahun. (The fates guide the willing, the unwilling they drag.) Seneca, Epistola

There is nothing so much in all the universe like God as silence. Meister Eckhart

Images from Taoist paintings are far better than language at conveying the idea that the cosmos is formed of spirit. The Tao itself is seen as unending movement and unceasing change from moment to moment. The void is hinted at by ethereal clouds, mists, vast expanses of the sea, waterfalls cascading musically in a remote glen. Mountains appear cloudlike out of coral mists. Tree trunks and rocks seem imbued with a mysterious nature, and nature itself emanates a vibrant energy. Taoist artists often left their work unfinished, to be completed by the eye of intuition so that one might be touched by the flow of this cosmic energy. The wu-chi teachings from the ancient cliff drawing, discussed earlier, allude to a generative spirit which in its essence led to the origin and creation of the yin–yang. These teachings emerged many centuries earlier than the I Ching, The Book of Changes, and actually formed the foundation for the latter. This same doctrine gave rise to the wu-hsing doctrine, the Taoist science of the five elements or activities and their transformations, which I have amplified earlier in the context of Kalff ’s intuitions. Campbell (1962) has pointed out that no one has actually been able to establish the origin of the mythological notion of the five elements, although he has postulated that someday they may be discovered in the

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ancient tablets of Sumer or Akkad. He recognizes a reflection of them, however, in the Taittiriya Upanishad (2, 1), c. 600 BC: From the Self (atman) space arose; From space, wind; From wind, fire; From fire, water; From water, earth; And from the earth, herbs, food …

(Campbell 1962, p.431)

The three treasures The classic statement of the Chinese philosophy of the Tao, however, is the Tao Te Ching, “the Book (ching) of the Power (te) of the Way (Tao).” As Waley (1949, p.32) states, tao te, then, is “the latent power (te) of the Way, the order, of the universe (tao),” which the Quietist finds within, as well as without, since it is the “Mother of all things”. In the words of Lao-tzu, the legendary sage who put down the words of the Tao Te Ching, we find: “The Universe had a prior cause, which may be called the Mother. Know the Mother that you may know the Child; know the Child that you may grasp the Mother.” These two aspects metaphorically represent the world of form and the emptiness or void. They are aspects of the One. Continuing in the Tao Te Ching, we read: I do not know its name, so I call it Tao. If you insist on a description, I may call it vast, active, moving in great cycles … ‘Nothingness’ is the name for it prior to the universe’s birth. ‘Being’ is the name for it as the Mother of the Myriad Objects. Therefore, when you seek to comprehend its mystery, it is seen as unending void; when you seek to behold its content, you see that it is being.

Again, in the words of Lao-tzu, “The Tao gave birth to One, the One to Two, the Two to Three, the Three to all the myriad objects which carry the yin and embrace the yang harmoniously intermingled” (Tao Te Ching, 42). Tao thus gives birth to the One in which are contained the passive feminine and active masculine principles, the yin and yang, or the Two. These Two in intermingling then produced the Three, or the Three

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treasures from which come all the myriad objects. We have a glimpse here of the absolute or the ultimate inherited by the Taoists from the ancients themselves. It expresses the very idea that everything is imbued with the wholeness of that absolute which modern physics has now begun to explore and appreciate. So when we ask ourselves if matter can also mirror the psyche, we find an answer in the early Chinese Taoists. When they wanted to understand their inner psychological processes, they simply observed what was happening around them physically, and that observation was regarded as a mirror of those inner psychic processes. We see this process with the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, which is not just a system of thought or a universal philosophy but rather a mirror of the great Tao itself. Based on complex mathematical symmetry, it is a unique world philosophy in that it sees change as a living force based on the union of opposites. To work with the I Ching is to become aware of changes within oneself as they are occurring in synchronistic and flowing movement. The three treasures, the three substances or energies, are of tremendous importance in Taoist yoga. They are: ching or essence, ch’i or vitality and shen or spirit. The basic premise is that within the human body, as within the macrocosm (heaven and earth), there exist three treasures – essence, vitality and spirit – and that by means of a physical-alchemical process within the body these treasures are transmuted into a pure spirit. This ancient process can allude to self-cultivation as an internal process (leading to long life or immortality) as well as to the goal of the external process, or ancient Taoist alchemy, which involves finding the concrete elixir for that achievement. In the ancient texts, however, there is always the notion of returning to something called the “original”. The three treasures are also referred to as the three rivers, streams or humors. The meditative efforts involved in yogic practice aim at guiding and uniting these three, for out of this union arises the immortal person, or as in later Buddhism, the “diamond body.” The reader can surmise that although there are indeed Indian influences evident in Taoist practices, Taoist and later Buddhistic yoga differ appreciably from the Indian. Blofeld explains this alchemical process (whether used for spiritual development or the alchemical transmutation of base metals into gold) as follows:

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Essence, vitality, and spirit continually interact. The sequence of their interaction in nature leads from void to form, from the universal to the particular, from the subtle to the gross. A sage is one who knows how to reverse this sequence, proceed backwards from gross to subtle, and thus regain original perfection for the substance or non-substance worked upon. [There is] an exact parallel between the transformation of body and mind into pure spirit and that of the base metals into that pure element, gold. (Blofeld 1978, p.116)

There is a passage from the Book of the Golden Elixir which clarifies the nature of the internal alchemy in yogic practice as follows: With the transmutation of ching (essence) into ch’i (vitality), the first barrier is passed and perfect stillness of body supervenes. With the transmutation of ch’i (vitality) into shen (spirit), the middle barrier is passed and perfect stillness of heart supervenes. With the transmutation of shen into void, the final barrier is passed and mind and Mind are unified. Thus is the elixir perfected and immortality attained. This is the true significance of all that has ever been written or spoken about the sacred practice of cultivating and nourishing ching, ch’i and shen; it has nothing to do with compounding an actual pill. (Blofeld 1978, p.133)

One must appreciate that the term “immortal” is used as the Taoist equivalent of a sage of considerable virtue and transcendent wisdom who is so in harmony with the Way as to be beyond the vicissitudes of life. In fact, the Chinese ideogram for immortal also connotes “mountain man.” To become immortal, to be with the “always-so” or “forever present,” was to touch upon eternity, that eternity becoming a state of mind–body being.

The Way to self-cultivation A person choosing the Way to self-cultivation, however, had to be taught how to develop the full potentialities of mind and body in order to achieve a spiritual transformation that was sometimes sudden, sometimes gradual, later known to the Buddhists as Enlightenment. This transformation, expressed in Taoist terms, is brought about by refining and transforming essence, vitality, and spirit into yang-spirit which, uniting with

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the cosmic yang-spirit, results in a being inspired with an intuitive understanding of the Way. Folk legends and parables such as myths and fairy tales convey both the Taoist attitude and the deep and penetrating love of nature. They are indeed colorful portraits for poets and painters. I would like to share two of these many tales to spark the reader’s imagination. Both address the Taoist emphasis (as well as that of the later Ch’an – Zen – Buddhism with its Chinese origins grounded in Taoism) on the pre-conscious self-awareness of totality, often in the form of vague insights or partially glimpsed total awareness of the meaning of things. These flashes of insight often owe none of their power to meaning at the level of conceptual thought. Like images created time and again in the sandtray, they become part of the means whereby deep intuitive experiences of the mysteries of self, nature, and the universe are aroused symbolically. This emphasis on direct apprehension of experience through both the physical eyes and the inner eye of contemplation is of immense psychological significance and bears directly on the intuitive meanings aroused in contemplative and imaginative sandplaying. To many Westerners this process of almost mystical perception as a means of arriving at truth is so unfamiliar that it is quite often discredited. In the early years of sandplay therapy it aroused considerable professional skepticism, for in its ability to connect to preconceptual aspects and experiences of being, Kalffian sandplay challenged the more traditional and rationalistic systems of psychotherapy. The inner state of quietude and presence brought about by sandplaying, like contemplation, bears directly on a kind of “immediate knowledge” which transcends the ordinary state of mind and is generally accompanied by strong feeling. It opens the pathways to what is alluded to in Jung’s concept of “absolute knowledge,” that is, access at a profoundly deep level to a wisdom accessible to all of us which transcends the duality of psyche and matter. In these moments during which the flow of inner and outer events converge just as we are openly and directly present in our mind–body being, we are most likely to experience sporadic synchronistic events. In developing his concept of synchronicity, Jung in fact drew considerable inspiration from discoveries in the field of theoretical physics as

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well as from those discoveries emerging from his study of Chinese philosophy and the implications of tao and the I Ching. But let us turn now to our two tales which allude to just this process.

Isles of the Blessed Hsu was one of those who had turned his back upon the world for merely trivial reasons – disappointment in love. With a beginning so inauspicious, it was not to be expected that he would easily become immortal. He was happy to leave the scene of what he imagined to be a tragic loss. Taking up his abode on Mount T’ai, famed for the panorama of clouds that come sweeping in from the Eastern Sea at dawn, he visited the dwellings of recluse after recluse, importuning them for instruction in the Way. The only sage who proved willing to receive a disciple of such poor caliber kept him hard at work from dawn till dusk gathering fuel upon the sparsely wooded slopes or performing similarly arduous labors in return for very little teaching. As for the true immortals who dwell upon that mountain, easily recognizable by their shining eyes, carefree expressions, unwrinkled faces and a swift, easy gait that gave them the appearance of deer skimming over the rock-strewn alpine slopes, though they did not flee at his approach, their courteous manner cooled when they learnt how trivial his reason for desiring to cultivate the Way. Sadly Hsu departed thence to seek out the profounder solitude of the rocky hills girdling the coast where in ancient times the Emperor Wu had gone searching for the secret of the golden elixir. Here he encountered a sage who welcomed him as an assistant. Behind his dwelling was a lofty cave furnished with cauldrons, tripods, receptacles and stores of liquids, powders, chopped up roots, leaves, bark, gums, minerals and so forth. During the second year of Hsu’s apprenticeship, this sage climbed a neighboring hill and vanished, leaving behind a pair of shoes as a sign that a search for his bodily remains would be fruitless and a paper making over all the contents of the cave to his disciple. In the cave was found a book of instructions for compounding a golden pill and another detailing the method of transmuting base metals

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into gold. Either one of those would have proved a welcome legacy were it not that the names and quantities of certain vital ingredients had been omitted lest the instructions fall into unworthy hands. Such pills as poor Hsu managed to produce caused giddiness and sometimes fever accompanied by sensations of icy chill. Having nearly destroyed himself by consuming what he took to be a perfected golden pill, Hsu greeted the dawn one day by kneeling with his face towards the pearly cloud-screen that veils the Isles of Bliss from mortal eyes and crying into the wind that came up from the mist-curtained ocean: “Dog-flesh immortals selfishly immersed in the rapture of carefree spontaneous existence, I declare you to be detestable deceivers. If your hearts are not made of bronze, I demand as a gift one of the peaches of immeasurable longevity. Having labored long and faithfully for other dwellers in seclusion, I deserve more than a trifle of consideration. Remain silent and I shall know that you and your peaches and your golden pills are but idle dreams fit for laughter. For the sake of your own reputation, you had better accede to my reasonable request.” As he spoke, the sky darkened. The clear blue was blotted out by dense banks of cloud. Thunder rolled and raindrops the size of crab-apples came drifting down as an earnest of a threatening storm. Aghast at his own temerity, he made to rise, but a heavy hand descended on his shoulder and, looming over him, stood a burly recluse of menacing mien and piercing gaze. “Blockhead! Turtle’s egg! Who gave you permission to create a disturbance? Had the wind carried your words over there, do you suppose you would be alive now or have an instant more to live? Get up and follow me!” The stranger led off in such haste that Hsu stubbed his toes and twice fell headlong in his efforts to keep up. Presently a sudden turn in the path revealed an altogether unexpected sight. Upon a small upland plateau enclosed by walls of rock stood a group of palatial buildings with elegantly convoluted roofs glistening with porcelain tiles of emerald green. Set in the magenta-colored walls was a pair of handsomely lacquered gates, and the whole place had an air of splendor more suited to the capital than to this wild and lonely

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place. From within came the sound of ritual music – the high-pitched song of flutes, the throbbing of a drum and the pure chimes of jade tablets hanging from silken strings. Half swooning with fear, Hsu was taken past the gateway and led to an inner chamber, where he fell to his knees before a very old man with cheeks as ruddy as peaches, a snowy beard falling to his waist and eyes like pools of light. Having listened to the burly fellow’s report of Hsu’s conduct, this venerable sage remarked: “It seems to me, young man, that you were in something of a passion. What did you hope to gain by such unseemly conduct? As a follower of the Way, you should know better.” While Hsu related his sad story, the sage stroked his beard reflectively. At the end, he said: “The peaches of immortality are not given for the asking. Who ever heard of such a thing? They are so carefully guarded that if I myself wanted one, I should either have to steal it or pay a heavy bribe to one of the celestial gardeners. Even then, its absence would be noticed and there would be a fine old uproar in the courts of heaven. You must have read the ‘Record of a Journey to the West’ and remember how it was when Monkey set about stealing some. “As to your laboratory, had you not the sense to realize that the ingredients of the golden pill of immortality are all inside you? Don’t try getting at them with a knife, you rash creature, or there will be little left of you to benefit from the experiment. The only effective furnace is the one you carry behind your navel and the only safe receptacle for the completed pill lies within your skull a few hair’s breadths from the crown.” Then did the sage instruct him in the secret alchemy, teaching him how best to use his own endowments of essence, vitality, and spirit. Thanking him humbly, Hsu begged to know whom he had the honour of addressing. “Well,” replied the sage, “I seldom reveal my name to people. If I did, most likely I should be taken for a liar. I don’t mind telling you, though, that I was on a visit to the Islands of the Blessed, attending

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the birthday festival of the Dragon King of the Eastern Ocean, when you so ill-advisedly shouted defiance of the beings there. If I had not come back in time to give you a warning, things might have gone ill with you sooner or later.” After walking out from the lovely precincts, Hsu turned back to have a last look. Not altogether with astonishment, he perceived that they had vanished. Wind stirred the grasses of the highland plateau. The only beings in sight were sea birds. Returning to his cave for a store of food and other necessities, he moved to a smaller cave overlooking the sea. Every day, he interrupted his yogic practice only for long enough to gaze towards P’eng Lai Shan and give thanks for the kindly response to his passionate yearning. Within a year, he had perfected the golden elixir without resource to external aids. Waking from a deep sleep during the night upon his attainment, he went to scoop some cold rice from the pot to make congee for his breakfast. On raising the lid he saw, resting upon the congealed mass of rice left over from the day before, a luscious peach ripened to the point of perfection. It seemed, as it were, to be begging to be eaten! (Blofeld 1978, pp.79–82)

In this motif we have both the unconscious man in his preconscious totality as well as the spiritually reborn man who again reaches this totality, but in a conscious way through specific meditative practices. Matter and psyche, or material reality and spiritual apprehension become One, glimpsed as a peach of immortality sitting in yesterday’s pot of congealed rice, the eating of which becomes the assimilation and synthesis of such a union of opposites, heaven and earth. The path leading through this transformation, illumination, and rebirth to mature, transcendent wisdom is designated as hsiu shen, “cultivation of the person” or individuality, or what we would elsewhere designate as the individuation process. The word “shen” really means “body,” and it stands for the whole of the person. In this sense “my body” means “I” (Rousselle 1960, p.84). According to Taoist thought, one can achieve enlightenment or illumination only if the profoundest forces are awakened in the whole person. Both body and soul undergo transformation, the process being

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physical as well as spiritual, for the body itself must provide the vital force through which the spiritual man is born. Here again we come upon one of Kalff’s most fundamental teachings. Thus from this perspective the Taoist image of chi’i, which sees psychic and physical energy as one, is an energy concept that we in the West are now beginning to approach again with seriousness and in some ways at a more sophisticated level for its role in physical healing and in comprehending aspects of the universe. This energy form would be the same as the “prana” of India and Tibet. Indeed, in the West we are now hearing about psychokinesis as well as “therapeutic touch,” a healing method which can be employed without touching or even at some distance from the patient. Gary Zukav’s (1987) The Dancing Wu-li Masters and Fritjof Capra’s (1975) The Tao of Physics suggest that a growing number of physicists are exploring these dimensions of energy. A second tale alludes to our “original nature.”

The Lesson of the White Mist In the reign of the Emperor Shen Tsung (1573–1620), a scholar surnamed Fan, who was a native of I Pin, so distinguished himself in the public examinations that he received a succession of high appointments in various parts of the Empire. No matter where he went, his duties brought him into contact with the evils of society – greed, avarice, lust, vanity, cruelty, and oppression. Having taken leave of absence in order to spend the period of mourning for his deceased father in his native town, he decided not to return to official life but to retire to the solitude of the mountains and cultivate the Way. In the vicinity of Mount Omei he acquired a small hut where, during inclement weather, he shut himself up with his books and devoted hours a day to meditation. A nearby stream trickling amidst moss-encrusted rocks and clumps of fern provided him with clear, sweet water; for food he had brought a few sacks of rice and one or two jars of oil, to which slender resources he added the bounty of the forest – silver tree-fungus, bamboo shoots and all sorts of delicious, nourishing plants. In fine weather, he rose early to enjoy the panorama of floating clouds richly tinged with coral, pink or

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crimson and edged with gold, then wandered amidst peaks and valleys searching for the medicinal herbs and tidbits for his table, often sleeping out beneath the stars. Within three years, his heart had become attuned to the more ordinary mysteries of nature; yet the Tao eluded him. “I see it is there. I behold its transformations, its giving and its taking; but, shadowy and elusive, how is it to be grasped?” Though known to his few neighbors as a skillful healer and accomplished immortal, to himself he was a wanderer who left the world of dust in vain. One day he had a visitor who, though dressed coarsely like a peasant, had the sage yet youthful aspect of a true immortal. Broaching a jar of good wine he had left untouched since the day of his arrival, Fan listened to his guest with veneration. Said the visitor: “I have the honour to be your nearest neighbor, being the genie of the stream running behind your distinguished dwelling. May I venture to inquire how it happens that a scholar of such high attainment as your good self has failed to find the starting-point of the Way, especially as it lies right in front of your nose?” Then, pitying Fan’s confusion and wishing to put him at his ease, the genie added: “It is a sign, sir, of your lofty intelligence. There are recluses in plenty who persuade themselves they have found the Way, but who would be hard put to it to substantiate that claim. Look for it not in the radiant clouds of dawn and sunset, nor in the brilliance pouring down from cloudless skies during early autumn. Seek it in the mists that shroud the valleys at which, hitherto, you have scarcely condescended to glance.” With these words, the genie made him a handsome bow and departed. Thenceforward our scholar spent his mornings seated upon a knoll gazing down at the white mist swirling in the lower valleys. No spiritual illumination followed, but he persevered. Another three years went by. The woodsmen round about, seeing him sit for hours as still as the rock beneath him, blessed heaven’s benignity in sending an immortal to dwell among them. Timely weather was attributed to his virtue; untimely weather was presumed to have been at least mitigated thereby; Fan himself knew otherwise. Then came a day when he hastened joyfully to where the stream bubbled

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out from an underground cavern and called upon the genie, who straightways appeared clad in a summer robe of brocaded gauze worn over garments of fine silk. “No need to tell me!” boomed the genie in a voice like muted thunder. “You have found the Way! May I venture to inquire how you did so?” “Ha-ha-ha!” laughed Fan. “Why did you not tell me sooner? I did not find but suddenly realized that I have never lost the Way. Those crimson dawn clouds, that shining noonday light, the procession of the seasons, the waxing and waning of the moon – these are not majestic functions or auspicious symbols of what lies behind. They are the Tao. To be born, to breathe, to eat, to drink, to walk, to sit, to wake, to sleep, to live, to die – to do this is to tread the Way. When you know how to take what comes along, not bothering with thoughts of joy and sorrow, wearing a quilted or unlined robe not because it is the fashion but because nature prompts the change, gathering pine seeds or mushrooms not for the taste but because hunger must be stayed, never stirring hand or foot to do more than passing need requires, letting yourself be borne along without a thought or wishing something to be other than it is – then you are one with the valley mists, the floating clouds. You have attained the Way, taking birth as an immortal. Wasting years on seeking what was never lost really is a joke.” The cavern before which they were standing now echoed and re-echoed with their laughter. Then the genie composed his features. The skirts of his brocaded robe and the ribbons of his silk gauze hat streaming in the breeze, he bowed his head to the earth nine times, as to an emperor, crying joyfully: “At last, at last, I have met my master!” (Blofeld 1978, pp.77–79)

In this tale, the Taoist presupposes that psychic and physical nature, that is, outer and inner nature, or cosmic nature as a whole, constitute an ultimate unity of meaning with which the questioner is confronted in his quietist contemplation. Through a sudden flash of insight he has a synchronistic illumination. He discovers that which has never been lost! That is, his own body–mind nature of being. He is directed to this by the admonition of a genie who draws his attention back to the mythic “mists

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of the Valley” where, during a process of three years of contemplation (the threefold aspect of transformation), he undergoes illumination, becoming conscious of that preconscious totality. That process inevitably leads back to the feminine principle, for as we read in the Tao Te Ching (6): The Valley Spirit never dies. It is named the Mysterious Female. And the Doorway of the Mysterious Female Is the base from which Heaven and Earth Spring. It is there within us all the while; Draw upon it as you will, it never runs dry.

(trans. Waley 1949, p.149)

It is equally clear that stillness and silence combined with living in a state of perfect spontaneity are the essential stepping stones to that discovery, as in this poem by Lu Yen which blends both Taoist and Buddhist thought: But were I asked how best To cultivate the Way, I’d say: “Just till the mind And tend the body well.” To those who know the secret, “There’s not a single thing” They learn to give things up And simply practice stillness.

(Blofeld 1978, pp.62–63)

Genuine inner stillness is associated with the inner light which permeates the meditative practice, as Confucius’ adage suggests: “Look into the closed room, the empty chamber where brightness is born! Fortune and blessing gather where there is stillness.” While deeply interested in Tibetan Buddhism and the sacred art of the mandala, C.G. Jung similarly used light as a metaphor for enlightenment or a highly evolved state of consciousness. Jung compared the process of individuation with becoming light. The full moon and the sun similarly represent this light or clarification:

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The central mystical experience of enlightenment is aptly symbolized by Light in most of the numerous forms of mysticism … Many initiation ceremonies stage a return to the womb of rebirth. Rebirth symbolism simply describes the union of opposites – conscious and unconscious – by means of concretistic analogies. Underlying all rebirth symbolism is the transcendent function. Since this function results in an increase of consciousness, the new condition carries more insight, which is symbolized by more light. (Evans-Wentz 1968, pp.xiii–xiv)

However, as Rousselle has pointed out, the ultimate goal of this necessary process of self-discipline is that one is concerned with one’s self only until an inner unity, a true individual, has emerged out of the union of polarities. “But then,” he concludes, “this communio naturarum serves to integrate man with the social community and make him one with the tao of the cosmos” (Rousselle 1960, p.85). The Japanese Zen Master Takuan has commented, “From this absolute emptiness comes the most wondrous unfoldment of doing” (Herrigel 1953, p.104).

The ox and the man The Ten Ox-herding pictures illustrate the progression of one’s physical (creature) and spiritual life by means of images of a man and an ox, or bull, or in Japanese, an Ushi. (The cow or ox, of course, is a sacred animal in India.) D.T. Suzuki has given several commentaries on the Ox-herding pictures, likening them to the “awakening of a new consciousness” (1960, pp.127–144; 1964, p.200). However, as Suzuki points out, this process may better be regarded as the steps or progressions in the training of the man as much as the animal (see Figures 5.1 to 5.10).

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Figure 5.1 Searching for the Ox The beast has never gone astray, and what is the use of searching for him? The reason the oxherd is not on intimate terms with him is that the oxherd himself has violated his own inmost nature. The beast is lost, for the oxherd has himself been led out of the way through his deluding senses. His home is receding gather away from him, and byways and crossways are ever confused. Desire for gain and fear of loss burn like fire; ideas of right and wrong spring up like a phalnx. Alone in the wilderness, lost in the jungle, the boy is searching, searching! The swelling waters, the faraway mountains, and the unending path; Exhausted and in despair, he knows not where to go, He only hears the evening cicades singing in the maple woods.

Figure 5.3 Seeing the Ox The boy finds the way by the sound he hears; he sees thereby into the origin of things, and all senses are in harmonious order. In all his activities, it is manifestly present. It is like the salt in water and the glue in color. [It is there though not distinguishable as an individual entity.] When the eye is properly directed, he will find that it is no other than himself. On a yonder branch perches a nightingale cheerfully singing; The sun is warm, and a soothing breeze blows, on the bank the willows are green; The ox is there all by himself, nowhere is he to hide himself; The splendid head decorated with stately horns – what painter can reproduce him?

Figure 5.2 Seeing the Traces By the aid of the sûtres and by inquiring into the doctrines, he has come to understand something, he has found the traces. He now knows that vessels, however varied, are all of gold, and that the objective world is a reflection of the Self. Yet, he is unable to distinguish what is food from what is not, his mind is still confused as to truth and falsehood. As he has not yet entered the gate, he is provisionally said to have noticed the traces. By the stream and under the trees, scattered are the traces of the lost; The sweet-scented grasses are growing thick – did he find the way? However remote over the hills and faraway the beast may wander, His nose reaches the heavens and none can conceal it.

Figure 5.4 Catching the Ox Long lost in the wilderness, the boy has at last found the ox and his hands are on him. But, owing to the overwhelming pressure of the outside world, the ox is hard to keep under control. He constantly longs for the old sweet-scented field. The wild nature is still unruly, and altogether refuses to be broken. If the oxherd wishes to see the ox completely in harmony with himself, he has surely to use the whip freely. With the energy of his whole being, the boy has at last taken hold of the ox: But how wild his will, how ungovernable his power! At times he struts up a plateau, When lo! he is lost again in a misty unpenetrable mountain pass.

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Figure 5.5 Herding the Ox When a thought moves, another follows, and then another – an endless train of thought is thus awakened. Through enlightenment all this turns into truth; but falsehood asserts itself when confusion prevails. Things oppress us not because of an objective world, but because of a self-deceiving mind. Do not let the nose string loose, hold it tight, and allow no vacillation. The boy is not to separate himself with his whip and tether, Lest the animal should wander away into a world of defilements; When the ox is properly tended to, he will grow pure and docile; Without a chain, nothing binding, he will by himself follow the oxherd

Figure 5.7 The Ox Forgotten, Leaving the Man Alone The dharmas are one and the ox is symbolic. When you know that what you need is not the snare or set net but the hare or fish, it is like gold separated form the dross, it is like the moon rising out of the clouds. The one ray of light serene and penetrating shines even before days of creation. Riding on the animal, he is at last back in his home, Where lo! the ox is no more; the man alone sits serenely. Though the red sun is high up in the sky, he is still quietly dreaming, Under a straw-thatched roof are his whip and rope idly lying.

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Figure 5.6 Coming Home on the Ox’s back The struggle is over; the man is no ore concerned with gain and loss. He hums a rustic tune of the woodman, he sings simple songs of the village boy. Saddling himself on the ox’s back, his eyes are fixed on things not of the earth, earthy. Even if he is called, he will not turn his head; however enticed, he will no more be kept back. Riding on the animal, he leisurely wends his way home: Enveloped in the evening mist, how tunefully the flute vanishes away! Singing a ditty, beating time, his heart is filled with a joy indescribable! That he is now one of those who know. Need it be told?

Figure 5.8 The Ox and the Man Both Gone Out of Sight All confusion is set aside, and serenity alone prevails; even the idea of holiness does not obtain. He does not linger about where the Buddha is, and as to where there is no Buddha he speedily passes by. When there exists no form of dualism even a thousand-eyed one fails to detect a loophole. A holiness before which birds offer flowers is but a farce. All is empty – the whip, the rope, the man, and the ox: Who can ever survey the vastness of heaven? Over the furnace burning ablaze, not a flake of snow can fall: When this state of things obtains, manifest is the spirit of the ancient master.

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Figure 5.9 Returning to the Origin, Back to the Source From the very beginning, pure and immaculate, the man has never been affected by defilement. He watches the growth of things, while himself abiding in the immovable serenity of nonassertion. He does not identify himself with the mãyã-like transformations [that are going on about him], nor has he any use of himself [which is artificiality]. The waters are blue, the mountains are green; sitting alone, he observes things undergoing changes. To return to the Origin, to be back at the Source – already a false step this! Far better it is to stay at home, blind and dead, and without much ado; Sitting in the hut, he takes no cognizance of things outside, Behold the streams flowing – whither nobody knows; and the flowers vividly red – for whom are they?

Figure 5.10 Entering the City with Bliss-bestowing Hands His thatched cottage gate is closed, and even the wisest know him not. No glimpses of his inner life are to be caught; for he goes on his own way without following the steps of the ancient sages. Carrying a gourd he goes out into the market, leaning against a staff he come home. He is found in company with winebibbers and butcher, he and they are all converted to Buddhas. Bare-chested and barefoot, he comes out into the market place; Daubed with mud and ashes, how broadly he smiles! There is no need for the miraculous power of the gods. For he touches, and lo! the dead trees are in full bloom.

Figures 5.1–5.10 Ten Ox-herding pictures by Kaku-An, including the artist’s poems and introductory remarks There are at least five other famous illustrations of this allegory; each with their commentaries in rhyme and prose, in the Zen traditions (Lin-chi and Cao Dong – Japanese: Rinzai and Soto). They also have their equivalent in the elephant training pictures of Tibetan Buddhism, as well as the horse training pictures of Taoism. Nevertheless, this metaphor was already particularly well developed in these two Zen schools from the seventh century. The essential point is that one doesn’t obtain enlightenment by pursuing it elsewhere, but by discovering it within oneself. Source: Daisetz T. Suzuki (1964) “The Awakening of a New Consciousness in Zen.” In J. Campbell (ed) Man and Transformation: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks. Bollingen XXX,5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

There is an allusion to just this process in the words of Meister Eckhart: A man shall become truly poor and as free from his creature will as he was when he was born. And I say to you, by the eternal truth, that so long as ye desire to fulfill the will of God, and have any desire

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after eternity and God; so long are ye not truly poor. He alone hath true spiritual poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing, desires nothing. (Eckhart 1957 p.78)

Jung himself in reflecting on his own development commented: The art of letting things happen, action through inaction, letting go of oneself as told by Meister Eckhart, became for me the key that opens the door to the way. We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this is an art of which most people know nothing. Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, never leaving the psychic process to grow in peace. (Evans-Wentz 1968, p.18)

The author of the Ten Ox-herding pictures is said to have been the Zen Master Kaku-an Shi-en (Kuo-an Shih-yuan) of the Sung dynasty, belonging to the Rinzai school. Kaku-an Shi-en wrote both the poems and introductory words belonging to these pictures. However, he was not alone in attempting to capture through images the stages of Zen discipline.

The Ten Oxherding Pictures, II.

Figure 5.12 Discipline Begun

Figure 5.11 Undisciplined

I am in possession of a straw rope, and I pass it through his nose, For once he makes a frantic attempt to run away, but he is severely whipped and whipped; The beast resists the training with all the power there is in a nature wild and ungoverned, But the rustic oxherd never relaxes his pulling tether and ever-ready whip.

With his horns fiercely projected in the air the beast snorts, Madly running over the mountain paths, farther and farther he goes astray! A dark cloud is spread across the entrance of the valley, And who knows how much of the fine fresh herb is trampled under his wild hoofs!

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Figure 5.13 In Harness

Figure 5.14 Faced Round

Gradually getting into harness the beast is now content to be led by the nose, Crossing the stream, walking along the mountain path, he follows every step of the leader; The leader holds the rope tightly in his hand never letting it go, All day long he is on the alert almost unconscious of what fatigue is.

After long days of training the result beings to tell and the beast is faced round, A nature so wild and ungoverned is finally broken, he has become gentler; But the tender has not yet given him his full confidence, He still keeps his straw rope with which the ox is now tied to a tree.

Figure 5.15 Tamed Under the green willow tree and by the ancient mountain stream, The ox is set at liberty to pursue his own pleasures; At the eventide when grey mist descents on the pasture, The boy wends his homeward way with the animal quietly following.

Figure 5.16 Unimpeded On the verdant field the beast contentedly lies idling his time away, No whip is needed now, nor any kind of restraint; The boy too sits leisurely under the pine tree. Playing a tune of peace, overflowing with joy.

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Figure 5.17 Laissez Faire The spring stream in the evening sun flows languidly along the willow-lined bank, In the hazy atmosphere the meadow grass is seen growing thick; When hungry he grazes, when thirsty he quaffs, as time sweetly slides, While the boy on the rock dozes for hours not noticing anything that goes on about him.

Figure 5.19 The Solitary Moon Nowhere is the beast, and the oxherd is master of his time, He is a solitary cloud wafting lightly along the mountain peaks; Clapping his hands he sings joyfully in the moon-light, But remember a last wall is still left barring his homeward walk.

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Figure 5.18 All Forgotten The beast all in white now is surrounded by the white clouds, The man is perfectly at his ease and care-free, so is his companion The white clouds penetrated by the moon-light case their white shadows below, The white clouds and the bright moon-light – each following its course of movement.

Figure 5.20 Both Vanished Both the man and the animal have disappeared, no traces are left, The bright moon-light is empty and shadowless with all the ten-thousand objects in it; If anyone should ask the meaning of this, Behold the lilies of the field and its fresh sweet-scented verdure.

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Figure 5.11–5.20 Ten Ox-herding pictures II, artist unknown, China, c. fifteenth century, poems by Pu-Ming There are at least five other famous illustrations of this allegory; each with their commentaries in rhyme and prose, in the Zen traditions (Lin-chi and Cao Dong - Japanese: Rinzai and Soto). They also have their equivalent in the elephant training pictures of Tibetan Buddhism, as well as the horse training pictures of Taoism. Nevertheless, this metaphor was already particularly well developed in these two Zen schools from the seventh century. The essential point is that one doesn’t obtain enlightenment by pursuing it elsewhere, but by discovering it within oneself. Source: Daisetz T. Suzuki (1960) Manual of Zen Buddhism. New York: Grove Press.

There are several other renditions of the progression of the ox and the man, the earliest belonging to the fifteenth century and attributed to Seikyo (Ching-chu), who was probably a contemporary of Kaku-an. In this set there were only five pictures. In several of these the man’s management of the ox undergoes change as does the ox or ushi, which goes through a whitening process leading ultimately to the images showing the disappearance of both man and ox, as represented by an empty circle (not shown). Another series by Jitoku Ki (Tzu-t Hui) contained six images which then went beyond this stage of absolute emptiness. In China another series was in vogue that was similar in many respects to the Seikyo and Jitoku series but consisted of ten images in which both man and ox experience considerable change. The man’s management of the ox alters while in the ox a whitening process occurs (see Figures 5.11 to 5.20). One could infer from this that the necessary changes that occur on the path to enlightenment and to the compassionate Bodhisattva state of being have two aspects. That is, changes necessarily occur in both man and beast, or mind and matter – the instinctual life. Kaku-an, in observing the work of his predecessor, Seikyo, felt that the empty circle at the end of the progression in the Seikyo series might be misleading by suggesting that emptiness was all-important or final. This led Kaku-an to alter his work, and in a later series the final image depicts the individual’s re-emergence in both the community and the natural world as a vital and energetically engaged kind of Bodhisattva figure. One can glimpse in this contemplative practice aspects of what has been explored in several other ancient practices, namely the threefold mystical path of transformation through processes of purification, illumination, and union. However, at each step of this process what is suggested

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is an underlying and necessary discipline. The latter might best fall within the idea of the “relativization of the ego” in Kalffian sandplay theory.

Return to the source The idea of returning to the “original” runs as a gentle stream throughout Taoist writings. Even at the highest level of understanding, the notion of that return to the source conveys a meaning quite beyond the ability of language to express it, for in Taoism it is called the “Nameless.” Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi (1973, pp.93–94) has likened it to a waterfall in which at the top of the falls the countless drops of water separate out of the one whole river and plunge slowly down the falls uniting at the bottom in one great pool of energy in its original oneness. Blofeld, himself struggling to put this into words, turned to those of the Taoist Master Tseng: And yet it does not capture the whole. Since the Tao is all and nothing lies outside it, since its multiplicity and unity are identical, when a finite being sheds the illusion of separate existence, he is not lost in the Tao. By casting off his imaginary limitations, he becomes immeasurable. Plunge the finite, into the infinite and, though only one remains, the finite far from being diminished, takes on the stature of infinity. Such perception will bring you face to face with the true secret cherished by all the accomplished sages. The mind of one who returns to the Source thereby becomes the Source. Your own mind is destined to become the universe itself. (Blofeld 1978, pp.163–164; author’s italics)

It is in this metaphoric imagery that we begin to see the historical merging of Taoism and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism. After Buddhism had thrived on Chinese soil for many centuries, despite repeated suppressions, two phenomena emerged. The first was a popular Taoist folk religion that incorporated Buddhism, and the second was the Far Eastern sect known as Ch’an or Ch’an-an (Japanese Zen; from the Sanskrit term dhyana meaning to contemplate or meditate), whereby clearly Taoist thought and feeling were recast in imported Buddhist terms (Campbell 1962, pp.440-441). Indeed, the Ch’an (Zen) Masters are as much the heirs of early Taoism as of Indian Buddhism. Their teaching derives

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greatly from Lao-Tzu and Chuang-Tzu and follows closely the Taoist cultivation of the Way. Ch’an (Zen), also known as the sect of silence and most successful in surviving the upheavals and book burnings of Chinese history prior to its transmigration and emergence in Japan, developed the doctrine that Enlightenment is to be attained in the Here and Now, which clearly mirrored the Taoist doctrine of attaining immortality or eternity as a kind of presence, a state of mind–body being, of being present in the moment. It was in the peaceful mountain monastery of the Yellow Plum that one of the greatest of the Ch’an Buddhist teachers, Hui-neng, the sixth and last patriarch of his sect, had realized the synthesis of Taoist and Indian Buddhistic spirituality. The story of this journey is important, for it leads us most directly to the fundamental teachings of Zen Buddhism, which have important corollaries for sandplay theory and practice. Hui-neng (637–712 AD) came from Hsin-chou in the South of China. His father had died when he was young. He had supported his mother by selling wood. One day when standing before the door of a house, he heard a man within reciting the Diamond Sutra. The young woodseller, then being inspired, departed from his mother, and walking for about a month, he reached the monastery of the Yellow Plum, where the patriarch, Hung-jen, who was there with some five hundred monks, received him. Hung-jen then said, “Where do you come from and what do you want?” Hui-neng answered, “I am a farmer from Hsin-chou and I want to be a Buddha,” whereupon Hung-jen responded, “Southerners have no Buddha-nature.” Hui-neng then replied, “Well, there may indeed be Southerners and Northerners, but as far as Buddha-nature goes, how can you find in it distinctions of this kind?” The patriarch, pleased, sent him to the kitchen, to become the rice-pounder of the brotherhood, and when he had been there about eight months, the time came for the old patriarch to pass on the symbolic begging bowl and robe to a successor. The monks in competition were to summarize their concepts of the Law in verse on the wall of the meditation hall. And the one who wrote the best poem proved to be – as all had expected – a certain learned student, Shen-hsiu (d.706 AD) That verse is as follows:

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“This body is the Bodhi Tree, The mind, a mirror bright. Take care to wipe them always clean, Lest dust on them alight.” However, the kitchen boy, a mere illiterate layman, had the verse read to him by a friend that night and bade him write the following beside it: “There never was a Bodhi-Tree, Nor any mirror bright. Since nothing at the root exists, On what should what dust alight?” Discovered by the monks in the morning, this anonymous challenge set the monastery astir, and the patriarch, in a great show of wrath, took his slipper and erased it. But the next night he summoned the kitchen boy to his room, bestowed on him the begging bowl and robe, and in secret sent him off, to hide till the time should be ripe for him to appear. And there would be from that time no more handing on of bowl and robe; for with the insight of this layman the function of the monastic life had been surpassed … The news of Hui-neng’s flight came out, and when he was overtaken at a mountain pass, he laid the robe on a rock and said to Ming, one of those who had arrived, “Here is the symbol of our faith. It is not to be gained by force. Take it if you wish.” But when the other sought to lift it, he found it heavy as a mountain. He fell on his face: “I come,” he said, “for the faith; not for the robe.” And the Sixth Patriarch said to him: “If the faith is what you want, give up desiring. Do not think of good and evil. Find your own original face, right now, the face that was yours before you were born.” Ming said: “Besides the hidden meaning of these words, is there any further secret to be known?” The Sixth Patriarch replied: “In what I have said there is no hidden sense. Look within. Find your own true face that was antecedent to

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the world. The only secret is inside yourself.” (D.T. Suzuki 1953, pp.203–206, 208–209)

Perfect spontaneity This rather circuitous route by way of parable offers fundamental teachings with direct relevance to the underlying pathways in sandplay theory and practice. What can we derive from these lessons speaking to us across the centuries? I have spoken at length about silence and stillness. But there is one essential addition, that perfect spontaneity, which in Zen came to represent the “just-so-ness” at the heart of the teachings and which is alluded to several times in the above legend of Hui-neng. For as Taoism and Zen Buddhism coalesced, what emerged in practice (if obstructions could be transcended) was the tzu-jan, that is, the self-so or “just-so-ness” which becomes manifest in the same way that tathagatha, the one “thus come,” could be realized in fundamental Buddhism. Kalff ’s concept of a “free and protected space” conveyed not only stillness and silence but also the inherent potentialities of perfect spontaneity emerging out of the freedom of sacred space. It is quite true that Kalff was vitally inspired by the teachings of the great Zen master, Daisetz T. Suzuki. As Suzuki has commented, There is something divine in being spontaneous and being not at all hampered by human conventionalities and their artificial sophisticated hypocrisies. There is something direct and fresh in this not being restrained by anything human, which suggests a divine freedom and creativity. (Suzuki 1953, p.172)

As sandplay therapists we are hard pressed to convey in language the depth of meaning implicit in Kalff ’s stress on that “free and protected space,” for I believe that here that perfect spontaneity finds its truest expression in creating the ultimate potential for discovering and living that “just-so-ness” in our daily lives. That state of mind–body being cannot be put easily into words, for it conveys an inner intuitive action quite beyond ordinary conceptual thought. As Kalff (1980, p.136) explained, “For all true freedom, thus also for the freedom tzu-jan, that of development, the sense of feeling sheltered is a prerequisite”. As has been emphasized in Chapter 4, it is in the repeated

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immersion in that free and protected (sheltered) space – that stillness, silence, and perfect spontaneity, repeatedly occurring in a progressive and ritualistic process in the sandplay room and in the container itself, the sandtray with its moving elements – that one discovers in one’s self what could be understood as precisely Tao, or inwardly and outwardly expressed spontaneity of nature and being, of the mind–body presence. It is therefore the most fundamental aspect of the sandplay process itself. For it is through this process that one’s nature recovers its own true spontaneity. This is often not a sudden enlightenment but a gradual evolution on one’s own path to completion. The ultimate goal of a sandplay process, as Kalff often reiterated, was to find meaning in our daily lives, and the most valuable consideration was whether life will impart that meaning for us personally. The work in the sand process can bring about this realization of the self through the unity of opposites and the powerful integration that occurs through that process, whether we call it spirit and matter, or mind and body. Thus may we find our way back to the meaning of life. The healing part of the psyche takes over and guides. And to become whole is to be able to live fully, with meaning, even as we face the inevitable aspects of ageing or disease. This stress in sandplay theory on the good life on earth, that is, a life of meaning as well as respect for both bodily and spiritual health, the underlying importance of living in harmony with nature and all its rhythms, and the emphasis on simplicity, naturalness, peace of mind, and a living out of the compassionate heart speak directly to us from a perspective of genuine freedom and meaning. Close to the end of her life, a significant change took place in Kalff ’s teaching. While earlier on there had been an emphasis on traditional Jungian terminology, in her later years Kalff seemed more free and at ease about sharing a remarkable integration that had taken place, the most personal expression of which was Kalff ’s own integration of her Eastern and Western life experiences. She shared some of these experiences during a workshop in Carmel, California, in 1989. However, it is clear that this synthesis had begun to emerge many years earlier and became more manifest in her Pajaro Dunes lectures in California, the Zollikon seminars, and at a presentation delivered to the International

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Transpersonal Conference in Santa Rosa, California, entitled “Beyond the Shadow” (1988). In the last talk Kalff was to give in America before her death, she had been discussing the deep levels that can be penetrated through the sand process, thereby revealing glimpses of the path one must follow in order to live a full and meaningful life. She continued: As soon as we enter into the unconscious, we may allow it to happen. We may have indications but not realize them. To change our own darkness, we have to be conscious of our darkness, of unknown things, of confusion. When we really reach the depths, beyond the Shadow, there we find an incredible and beautiful situation which shows the Totality in the personality without throwing a shadow. What Jung calls the Self. Without any exception, we all have within ourselves and from our origins, this original self. I once had a three-year-old child who said to me, ‘Do tell me about God. I begin to forget!’ … The Self is actually at a point of beginning integration. Jungian psychology and individuation was to be for the second part of life. But what I have discovered is that when the Self appears, it is actually the beginning of a new possibility for anyone. I talk about the Preliminary Self at birth. The preliminary self is a prefiguration of the Totality. Through our culture we deviate from this original path. In the sand we penetrate very deeply and find this Original Self. It is a long journey. The process needs a great deal of inner perseverance. After this Original Self, you must be able to live it completely in life. But we can go astray and be lost. When we find it again it is an absolute renewal of the personality. It is a new attitude. It is finding the feminine that was lost. The feminine qualities have been so neglected in the last centuries. The acceptance of the feminine has been missing. In the sand it is a working together of the mind, body, and spirit. It then becomes in its final integration a new union between the masculine and the feminine. In the silence, the beauty, the concentration, we can feel that it is very important. Suddenly it is very strong. There is a stillness and nothing moves. After this, there is a movement out of this space. There is also great sadness contained in this process. We are never at the end of the

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path of becoming more conscious. Every moment may contain that sadness. I think it is this loss of the Original Self that we feel. We must never forget what was at the beginning of the story. It is a transition to a new religiosity. It is vital that we (as sandplay therapists) understand with our intuitive understanding what is happening for many times it cannot be grasped with language. There are moments of complete freedom in the process where the person feels understood completely. Our secret for life and for pure happiness is to get in touch with this … the Original Self given us by birth. This arrival at the Original Self is only the beginning. It is the moment when the new life begins and it is the basis on which we can build that new life. In this sense it is only the beginning.

The primal face In an address entitled “The Awakening of a New Consciousness in Zen,” presented at the Eranos conference in 1954, D.T. Suzuki (1964) spoke of an awakening that can be compared to the rediscovery or excavation of a long-lost treasure. In each one of us there is a longing, whether it is in the Christian longing for the kingdom of heaven, the Buddhistic longing for emancipation or freedom, or the Indian understanding of longing as a wish to discover the True Self. It is experienced both as something we have lost and something we have experienced or known before. In the Gospel of Thomas, a gnostic text found in Nag Hammadi, Jesus’ disciples constantly demand to know the location of this kingdom of heaven of which he spoke. Cautioning them about seeing it as a concrete place or future event, He said to them: “What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it.” Yet his disciples continued in their lack of understanding: “When will the Kingdom come?” And Jesus responded: It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying, ‘Here it is’ or ‘There it is.’ Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.

And then in a remarkable revelation Jesus described the kingdom as a transformed state of consciousness found only through self-discovery. The text continues:

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Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, ‘Those infants being suckled are like those who enter the Kingdom.’ They said to him, ‘Shall we, then, as children, enter the Kingdom?’ Jesus said to them, ‘When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same … then you will enter [the Kingdom].’ (Pagels 1979, pp.128–129)

And in another teaching from the same text, ‘Recognize what is before your eyes, and what is hidden will be revealed to you’ (p. 126). Suzuki suggests that the way to understanding this common insecurity of lostness or longing is the “inward” way in which the mind turns inward to catch the moving process of things or in “taking things as they are, in catching them in their isness or suchness” (D.T. Suzuki 1964, p.180). The inward way is then contrasted with the outward way which leads to “doing,” “thinking,” “deciding,” “choosing,” all of which are but expressions of confusion about freedom. This essential spontaneity of “isness” has vanished in the more outward way of the intellect, where we often finds ourselves “too engrossed in the business of ‘knowing,’ which started when we left the garden of ‘innocence’” (p. 185). The awakening of a new consciousness is none other than the feeling of perfect security which emerges in the securing of freedom. Suzuki clarifies this discovery as follows: The awakening of a new consciousness is therefore the finding ourselves back in our original abode where we lived even before our birth. This experience of homecoming and therefore of the feeling of perfect security … is in fact being restored to one’s original abode … I am always where I was born and I can never be anywhere else. It is only my imagination or illusion that I was led to believe that I was not in it. To become conscious of this fact is to awaken a new consciousness so called. There is nothing “new” in this, it is only the recovery of what I thought I had lost; in the meantime I have been in possession of it; I have been in it, I have been carrying it all the time; no, I am it and it is I. (D.T. Suzuki 1964, pp.185–186)

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In this sense the idea in Zen of the restoration or re-cognition of the “original” or primal face, that which we have even prior to our birth, is the face of “innocence” which we had before we left “our Father’s mansion” in the Christian sense. As Suzuki (1964, p.188) notes, the awakening of a new consciousness is also the awakening of faith, and “the awakening of faith is the creating of a new universe with infinite possibilities … it is not God who gives us faith, but faith that gives us God. Have faith and it will create God. Faith is God coming to his own knowledge.” I am reminded here of the words of Father Bede Griffiths, the contemporary Christian mystic and theologian. On faith, he has commented: Faith is simply a preliminary stage for knowledge, knowledge in the deep sense of jnana. In fact, faith in the strict tradition is an illumination of the mind. It’s an opening of the mind to the transcendent reality, but like a seed it’s just an opening, a beginning, and faith has to grow into experience. (Weber 1986, p.173)

The Zen way of awakening or seeing into the nature of things through an inward turning path is none other than human consciousness becoming acquainted with itself. It is not that a new consciousness rises out of the unconscious, but that consciousness itself turns into itself. This is the homecoming. This is seeing one’s own primal face which one has even before one’s birth. As Suzuki explains, The “Unconscious,” which has been lying quietly in consciousness itself, now raises its head and announces its presence through consciousness. This is God’s pronouncing his name to Moses. This is the birth of Christ in each of our souls. This is Christ rising from death. (D.T. Suzuki 1964, p.196)

And he concludes that in Zen’s way of viewing things, “Zen would not object to the possibility of an ‘unconscious conscious’ or a ‘conscious unconscious’ – therefore, not the aw akening of a new consciousness but consciousness coming to its own unconscious” (p.197).

Sandtray symbols of return There is a certain continuity among the symbols that reflect this return or discovery of the original or the source itself. An important symbol, the

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Figure 5.21 Smiling frog, Sengai (1750–1838), ink on paper Source: Stephen Addis (1989) The Art of Zen Paintings and Calligraphy by Japanese Monks 1600–1925. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

frog, certainly comes to mind. The frog represents a preliminary situation that can be changed, as seen in the tadpole’s early existence as a little fish and the later solitary existence of the young adult frog prior to its long migration back to its origins. Unlike the most cold-blooded creatures, the amphibian frog hatches from an egg that is fertilized externally by the male. In the space of a very short time, the herbivore tadpole makes a transition from a fully aquatic creature with gills to a terrestrial carnivore with lungs – an astonishing metamorphosis which restructures its internal organs and external form and leads to an ability to move between the elements. One of those is the air element, as we can see in the many varieties of tree frogs and of course in the glorious chorus of croaking songs at the water’s edge, whatever the species (see Figure 5.21). More importantly, the frog often symbolizes the strong desire for change. As spring approaches, the frog’s urge to return to the water becomes irresistible. Crawling up out of the dark mud, the whole popula-

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tion of frogs begin to move – quite suddenly, as if by a prearranged signal. Hopping along their path they can actually cover about 10 miles a day! Traveling mostly at night to avoid predators, the frog will usually return to the place of its birth. Of course it experiences extreme hazards on its path, but those who survive, exhausted and slim, meet at ponds, pools or ditches and noisily greet their cousin travelers. The relative similarity between the structure of the frog and the human body makes it a fitting symbol of the unconscious attempts to come to realization through consciousness, and in that process to undergo a total metamorphosis. In the East the frog is depicted sitting on the lotus leaf, thereby being quite near the Self. Indeed in some Buddhist art the frog symbolizes the Buddha seated on his lotus, smiling contentedly. If one is fortunate enough to have the mythical garuda bird in one’s collection, this too becomes a fitting symbol. The garuda chick is born fully grown, with all its wing feathers fully developed inside the egg, but it cannot fly before it hatches. Only when the shell cracks open can it burst out and soar up into the sky. This beautiful mythological image symbolizes our primordial nature, which is already originally complete and perfect. Salmon and carp are notable for their annual return to their origins despite hardship and great distances. They therefore allude to both source and wisdom, as well as to considerable perseverance in reaching these goals. Water cranes and geese have an instinctual time clock that fills the sky with waves of birds setting out on treks that can cover as many as 12,000 miles in fall and springtime. With uncanny and remarkable accuracy these magnificent birds find their way back to their birth origins. The turtle, of which Bradway (1994) has spoken so eloquently, similarly conveys separation, journeying and return. Many beautiful Taoist paintings and scrolls metaphorically capture the beauty of this instinctual knowledge of origins, original nature and return. The mercurial fox may also put in an appearance here, for it represents a pure spirit of nature. But though the fox can serve as a guide to nature’s subtler ways, it may represent no more than a beginning, acting only as a kind of mercurial spirit of wisdom for the inner transformative potential. I emphasize the presence of animals, for like the koan of the Ten Ox-herding pictures which stresses both humans and creatures, we are in

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the process of integrating our ancestral as well as our animal or creature instinctual life. When these creatures appear in sand images, they may be harbingers of homecoming. If the animals, fish and birds do not appear as images then we may not have access to that “absolute knowledge” of the unconscious of which Jung speaks and which provides an ancestral continuity. It is through such symbolic expressions that we know we are truly in contact with the instinctual basis of our total aspect and not operating out of a purely ego-based endeavor. Wells, springs, fountains, rivers and waterfalls all allude to origins and source in the sand tray images. Landscapes themselves evoke powerful imagery of our transcendent origins, for there are psychic geographies that constellate for us an inner mood, archetypally expressing our original home. These may be also be suggested by the familiarity of a solitary wind-sculpted tree, a massive archaic stone, a mountain, an island sanctuary or an Alpine river plunging down the slopes with its source springing mysteriously from underground high amongst the crags. In no way do these exhaust the possibilities, and the reader is invited to summon up images out of his or her own direct apprehension of origins and source.

Adaptation to the collective There is one final correspondence with Zen teaching, the koan of the Ten Ox-herding pictures, and that final phase of sandplay process which finds its parallel in Kalffian theory and its connection to the work of Erich Neumann. That is, sandplay process in its final outcome should lead to that “adaptation to the collective” in one’s daily life. This was stressed by Kalff over and over again. In establishing that oneness with the original self, with its accompanying relativization of the ego, there is released in each one of us a unique and creative energy. We know from sandplay theory that as centering and the constellation of the self develop, a considerable amount of physical and psychological energy is released. Quite simply, through such a union of opposites there occurs a feeling of well-being, of rebirth, of harmonic balance that produces a ripple effect into the field around us.

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Our re-cognition or re-union with that secret source of life has an immediate effect upon the whole of life. The self becomes a moving center of energy imbued with meaning and matter. In its real and manifest reflection in matter, then, action and reaction are constantly in accord with that self. One can say that the self has become real only when it is expressed in one’s mind–body being in space and time, that is, in the unfolding and enfolding of meaning, matter, and energy within the flowing movement that is realized through our actions in the space–time dimension of our everyday lives. It is at this moment that we begin to live that perfect spontaneity of which I have spoken. How close to Zen this is! Or for that matter, how close to the wandering Taoist, speaking to that perfect spontaneity in Taoism and Zen in which thinking and acting are one. For what we have learned is how to separate ourselves from collective entanglements in our daily personal life, and further, how to separate ourselves within from what is ordinary and not oneself. In a way, what we have experienced of the freedom of protected outward space becomes reflected in a kind of free, sheltered, and sacred space within ourselves. Naturally – and this must be emphasized – this spontaneity can be lost time and again because it is very difficult to sustain for long periods of time. I am reminded here of lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet”: beyond the energy of [the] possessed and conscious intellect [one] is capable of a new energy by abandonment to the nature of things … As a traveler who has lost his way throws his reins on his horse’s neck and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. (Emerson 1983)

Finding our way back takes on a growing familiarity, for these are pathways that we have experienced before and the divine animal has come to know them well. If this spontaneity is to become a vital force in our daily lives it must remain dynamically alive each moment in an inward way – that is, we must be in constant connection with it, expressing it, and knowing what it is. Living in this manner demands an inner ordering process as well as an attentiveness that has its roots in discipline.

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This kind of living may also demand modifications in the external life. There is need for psychological truthfulness, and from this follows a body–mind openness and a kind of sensitivity, softness, or open vulnerability to one’s own life experiences. In this openness we create, moment by moment, the possibility of life coming to us spontaneously. Sogyal Rinpoche captures the essence of this process: Stand by a stream and mingle your mind with its rushing; become one with its ceaseless sound. Sit by a waterfall and let its healing laughter purify your spirit. Walk on a beach and take the sea wind full and sweet against your face … Everything can be used as an invitation to meditation. A smile, a face in the subway, the sight of a small flower growing in the crack of a cement pavement, a fall of rich cloth in a shop window, the way the sun lights up flower pots on a window sill. Be alert for any sign of beauty or grace. Offer up every joy, be awake at all moments, to “the news that is always arriving out of silence.” (Rinpoche 1992, p.81; stanza of poetry from Rilke’s “Duino Elegies”)

A striking illustration of that return to sacred space and timelessness is provided by an image in the sand created by a woman doing the last sandtray in a series that concluded her process at that time (Markell 1987). At the center of the sand image was a circle with 4 lines at each of the cardinal points, 16 in all. Inside a pool was sculpted the yang–yin. A second outer circle of shells formed the zia. These two images, yang–yin and zia, were then contained by a larger circle of shells. In the very upper left corner was a tiny treasure chest of gems in which was also placed a tiny golden ship and an equally tiny golden crown. The woman commented about the many changes within herself, a slight fear of a recently acquired ability to take initiative for herself as she moved outward into life. And she concluded, “I feel now the eternal movement, the flux of the yang–yin. But around it I have put the zia. When I feel unsafe, I can step inside the center of it as the Indians do and I will be protected.” Here she had used the ancient Chinese symbol, the yang–yin or dual distribution of forces, combining the active, masculine principle and the passive feminine principle, each half including an arc cut out of the opposing half to suggest that every mode must contain within it the germ

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of its antithesis. The zia she had sculpted has its origins in Hopi mythology and religion. It is a circle often found carved in the ground along trails and paths in the vast desert-like mountains of New Mexico and Colorado. It has 4 lines at each of the cardinal points for the winds, the elements, the directions. These multiply to 16 as in Oriental mandalas, and the number symbolism alludes to a further 16 sacred spiritual values. When a traveller comes across such an image in the sand or earth in the American Southwest, it is common to step inside it, to rest within its quiet center. One often finds the zia adorned with flowers or with offerings placed beside it. As with the yang–yin, it alludes to the mystic centre, the source, where there is protection yet freedom, no restlessness, no impulse, no suffering. It is the container of the All. It is a restoration to union and harmony and is suggestive of Tibetan mandalas, the squaring of the circle, the mystic longing for supreme integration, the whole connected to ordered externality. In the saying of the Navajo, one then “walks in beauty.” Contained in this numinous image was the coniunctio of East and West. When these psychic events are contained in the duality or twoness of relationship, that process of “withness” becomes a shared act which moves both participants toward greater consciousness. The threeness which emerges out of that process becomes the creatively transcendent condition leading to a new quantum of consciousness. It is a shared experience of presence without expectation. This experience is often so powerful and transformational that it can cause a paradigm shift in our awareness, for it accepts Being as the foundation of existence rather than doing. It opens us to nonlinear connectedness and transpersonal meaning. The experience also confirms that the psyche is not absolutely bound to our space–time categories of linear rationality. This fits with the many testimonies of Eastern and Western mystics that in certain states of ecstasy, time and space are transcended with a simultaneous and often intensified psychic awareness. Sandplaying connects us with the same reality that speaks through the fading hieroglyphics of other ages. Through the shifting, changing images in the sand we are, as it were, on an archaeological dig, searching

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for significant revelations from our ancestral and animal origins. Through these revelations of process we can give name and form to the intangible reality within us, and out of these revelations the reality of our soul can manifest itself in our own unique historical moment. These discoveries then enhance the future development of the archetypal psyche. Joel Ryce-Menuhin (1992, p.106) has commented that sandplay “stands alone for its inspiration towards, and alignment with, archetypal and personal projections of a differentiation that is outstanding among the projective therapies”. I have mentioned the frog as harbinger. In the movement towards the activation of the transcendent function there are often frequent occurrences of synchronistic events. Von Franz (1992a, p.236) has commented that the greatest leaps in humankind’s discoveries, whether in the sciences, medicine, or the arts, have probably occurred through just such synchronistic “happening information[s].” Sandplay, as developed by Kalff, appears to be just that kind of “leap-frog” phenomenon in the therapeutic field of psychology, for it offers the opportunity for leap-frog progressions in the individual’s own unique potentiality for personal creativity arising through and out of perfect spontaneity and freedom. Importantly, it leap-frogs two worldviews which are fundamentally complementary, that of the East and the West. This brings to mind a dream Kalff had at the time of Jung’s death which is recounted by Montecchi and Navone (1989). In the dream Jung had invited Kalff for a dinner. In the middle of the table lay an enormous mountain of rice. Jung pointed to the mountain of rice and commented that she must go across the mountain to explore the Orient further. The earth and fertility symbolism here combined with the meal itself suggests the remarkable integrative process that Kalff was to experience in her later journeys throughout the East, which she assimilated in her theories of sandplay. Father Bede Griffiths has commented that the Christian world today must discover the Oriental worldview and he concludes: “Only now are we really encountering Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, the whole oriental culture, and that I feel is the work of the next thousand years” (Weber 1986, p.165).

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Edinger, like Capra, Grof, Wilber and many, many others, speaks of the creation of the new myth emerging from our own epoch which may counteract the mythlessness and lack of spiritual relatedness in modern Western culture. This paradigmatic shift suggests that no authentic consciousness achieved by the individual is lost, but rather one serves as a carrier of consciousness or an incarnate vessel of transpersonal meaning, and thereby becomes a participant in cosmic creation (Edinger 1984, pp.22–33). He describes a dream told to him by a Jungian analyst in which a temple of vast dimensions was in the process of being built. As far as the analyst could see – ahead, behind, right and left – there were incredible numbers of people building gigantic pillars. He, too, was building a pillar. The whole building process was just beginning, but the foundation was already there, the rest of the building was starting to go up, and he and many others were working on it. When told this dream, Jung commented: Yes, you know, that is the temple we all build on. We don’t know the people because, believe me, they build in India and China and in Russia and all over the world. That is the new religion. You know how long it will take until it is built? … about six hundred years. (From Zeller’s (1975) “The Task of the Analyst,” quoted in Edinger 1984, p.11)

The task of the builders or carriers, then, is the creation of consciousness, which may serve as a coniunctio that is only partially visible from a distance but is of inestimable value to the collective archetypal psyche. For as Jung has commented on the task of the psychotherapist: He is not just working for this particular patient … but for himself as well and his own soul, and in so doing he is perhaps laying an infinitesimal grain in the scales of humanity’s soul. Small and invisible as this contribution may be, it is yet an opus magnum. (Jung 1966, par. 449)

It may well be that only by the re-discovery of our original nature will the great temple of the future reach completion. A Taoist poet comments:

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The mind of man searches outward all day. The further it reaches, The more it opposes itself. Only those who look inward Can censor their passions, And cease their thoughts. Being able to cease their thoughts, Their minds become tranquil. To tranquilize their mind is to nourish one’s spirit. To nourish the spirit is to return to Nature.

(Chang Chung-yuan 1963, p.168)

We shall now explore sandplay’s central differentiating process: the ordering process itself that occurs in the sand and its potential relationship to the subtle or etheric body and the healing process.

chapter 6

ORDERING RHYTHMS The Play of Subtle Energy Somewhere behind these molecules there is something still more subtle which we call mathematics, which rules all that. David Bohm, “Mathematics: The Scientist’s Mystic Crystal” (from Weber 1986)

Coyote was there, but Coyote was asleep. That Coyote was asleep and that Coyote was dreaming. When that Coyote dreams, anything can happen. I can tell you that! Native American

In Kalff ’s ([1978] 1991, p.10) words, “Symbols with numinous or religious content therefore speak to an inner spiritual order that can be the basis for a healthy development of the ego, which creates the link to the external world.” As we have seen there can be no spiritual life without the body, for if the spirit is kept autonomous, without the inclusion of the instinctual life – the body – it is not complete. In the example of the zia, the traveler places the whole body within the orderedness of the sacred circle and thereby restores harmony to both spirit and body. Von Franz has clarified this ordering principle of the unconscious, the spirit, as follows: The spirit can be defined as that element which appears in the psyche as a manifestation of order, and which might also appear in matter in the same way … We can observe in the psyche an activity which creates order and therefore assume that something is the source of this activity; that something is what we call spirit. Matter in 171

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the human being would then be the body, and the spirit aspect of the human being would be the sum of the archetypes, because the archetypes, according to our view, are those unknown elements which manifest as creating order in the psychic realm. (Von Franz 1980b, p.49; author’s italics)

The importance of numbers … Jung thought that when the constellated archetype is stripped of all attributes such as color, size and consistency, what remains is its number, that being the most primitive or primordial aspect of the psyche. Through this primordial manifestation there then exists some relationship between number and the activated archetypal image. Number, therefore, is the most basic element of order in the human mind and is simply defined as an archetype of order that has become conscious (Jung 1978, par. 870). Number thereby becomes a dynamic, psychophysical ordering principle of that element which Jung called “spirit” or the activated archetype. It has material as well as psychic properties which are observable as an ordering principle in the world around us. The Einstein–Minkowski model of the world, for instance, is four- dimensional. Similarly, Buddhism speaks of the four world systems involved in the formation and the continuance of the one world system, the destruction of that system followed by a state of emptiness after which the process again repeats itself. DNA itself functions through a fourfold structure of four amino acid compounds. As Osterman has noted, these constitute an alphabet by means of which matter communicates with matter. In combination with sugar, ribose (which holds the compounds in the double helix form), they make a long, threadlike compound, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), which is present in the central portion, the nucleus, of every living cell – of amoeba, flower, or man. (Osterman 1968, p.18; author’s italics)

Here we could as easily substitute “number” for “alphabet.” Numbers would seem to point to a background of reality in which psyche and matter are no longer distinguishable, or that realm, the unus mundus, whereby we apprehend the transcendent. For Bohm, this would

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represent the source-ground of all existence. Synchronistic events point towards just such a unitary aspect of existence which transcends our conscious grasp and through which Jung conjectured that matter and spirit, inner and outer, are no longer separate. This aspect is experienced as a transcendent oneness which can only be expressed through a diversity of symbols. It also led Jung to suggest that one and the same ordering principle underlies both living matter and the human psyche. In relation to that realm wherein psyche and matter are no longer differentiated, he says, “I always come upon the enigma of the natural number. I have a distinct feeling that Number is the key to the mystery, since it is just as much discovered as it is invented. It is quantity as well as meaning” (Jung 1976, pp.398f; author’s italics). Elsewhere Jung comments: Remarkably enough, the psychic images of wholeness which are spontaneously produced by the unconscious, the symbols of the self in mandala form, also have a mathematical structure. They are as a rule quaternities (or their multiples). These structures not only express order, they also create it. That is why they generally appear in times of psychic disorientation in order to compensate a chaotic state or as formulations of numinous experiences. It must be emphasized yet again that they are not inventions of the conscious mind but are spontaneous products of the unconscious, as has been sufficiently shown by experience. (Jung 1978, par. 870; author’s italics)

We have already alluded to the quaternary structure of the self and of consciousness as well as to the threefold process of change and transformation itself. Quaternary and trinary structures seem to be intricately related to ordering rhythms, whether in mandalic forms, ancient zodiacal forms, divination such as the I Ching, and more recently in scientific discoveries in the field of physics and concerning DNA and RNA codes. I had an interesting dream shortly after having embarked on the writing of this book which revealed to me aspects of the archetype of number that would become important in my reflections on sandplay theory. In the dream I stood in the beautiful Ryuanji Temple Gardens in Kyoto, Japan, a place I had visited several years earlier and where I had spent time sitting in contemplation with many other visitors. However, in

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the dream context I became aware that instead of the 15 rocks placed spatially in the textured sand of the garden there were actually only 12. I then began moving the 12 rocks around (which in the dream state was not a difficult task as they were rather easy to lift and move about). The formations I created consisted of 3s and 4s! Each time I composed a new order for the 12 rocks I had a wonderful feeling of harmonic balance as well as joy. This dream presented me with my own koan for the next several months, for it seemed to point me in the direction of an inner ordering that possessed a certain play of rhythms and movement based on the archetypes of the 3 and the 4. In addition, I felt there was more to this ordering than the commonly interpreted play of opposites, as in thinking and feeling. What became increasingly clear to me over time was that the dream not only had very deep meaning for me in the composition and movement of the rocks themselves, but also had quantity. The dream context itself occurred within a sacred temple garden whose rectangular shape very much resembled a magnificent sandtray, with beautiful white sand textured by raking and an ever-so-subtle vegetative growth of mosses and ferns. Contemplation of the dream set in motion an integrative process in which I began to discover in my own intuitive way that number presents itself as an objective elemental property (the rocks) which orders both psyche and matter, as Jung had suggested, for both were intricately related to the dream content and its meaning. The experienced sandplay therapist has an appreciation of the importance of natural numbers in the sand images as there is movement towards wholeness and completion. We see this particularly in relation to groupings of 3, 4 and 12, whether expressed by jewels, shells, rocks, flowers or pieces of gold and silver. I am not suggesting that these are the only significant numerical grouping, as other groupings or images appear that are similar to what Kalff noted with the number 5 and its relationship to the emergence of the elements and to the embodiment process in the sand. Similarly, we often see such spontaneous groupings develop quite early in a sandplay process. These images, experienced as very meaningful, lend themselves to an initial ordering process which becomes quite

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developed at a later point in the work as genuine creative centering begins to emerge. Edinger (1973), who felt that the threefold rhythm of the developmental process needs greater attention, has described the nature of the archetype of the trinity or threefoldness and the archetype of the quaternity or fourfoldness as two essentially different aspects of the psyche. In so doing, he explains that totality may symbolically be expressed as much by 3 as by 4. Therefore, quaternity or mandalic imagery, with its emphasis on containing aspects and structural wholeness, provides the psyche with a stabilizing aspect. It also suggests the grounded and static eternal. Wholeness or totality, however, is a temporary state, since individuation itself is never complete. Therefore at some point we would expect to be subjected to the threefold rhythm of trinitarian symbolism as a part of our life process, for quaternity gives rise to a new starting point, so to speak, from which a further synthesis can proceed. The number 3 both resolves the essential conflict of twoness and represents the totality of the cycle of growth, development and change, that is, conflict and resolution or movement, activity and dynamic change. Since development suggests time and movement, 3 alludes to a process of realization of temporal events. We often find that when dealing with these emerging developmental events there is a tendency of the psyche towards organization into just such threefold patterns. This occurs repeatedly in sandplay in those motifs suggestive of certain rites de passage involving generation, sacrifice or death, and rebirth. Similarly, syntheses of these aspects are further developed later on in the sand process with oscillations or movements involving the archetypal configurations of 3 and 4. A significant symbolism at this juncture might be the pyramid, which begins to unite the temporal aspects with the eternal, bridging as it does the three and four, the relative and the absolute. For as Edinger (1973, p.193) has commented, “The trinity archetype seems to symbolize individuation as a process, while the quaternity symbolizes its goal or completed state.” In observing the archetypal significance of the number phenomenon in the sand, it is quite clear that there exists within the image-maker a mysterious and unconscious awareness of the numbers and what they

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express symbolically as a group. There is, in fact, a capacity to see groupings directly through the unconscious without the need to count discursively, for in the sandplay process one rarely encounters any conscious counting as such. Such number awareness, in fact, would correspond to an awareness on the part of the image-maker of the completeness of a group without any conscious need to verify that completeness. In fact, there is an even more mysterious tendency to exclude the “trespasser” numbers such as 11 or 13, for they indeed trespass on the natural feeling of totality and completion achieved, say, by the number 12. As Von Franz (1992a, p.199) has noted, the set of natural numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.) were for the Pythagoreans “ungenerated, ever-existing, divine formative powers which produced and ordered the whole universe.” Indeed the Pythagoreans saw the basic elements of the universe as mathematical forms, a notion which is now of similar importance in quantum physics. Numbers and mythological images were intricately connected in Pythagorean thought. In a previous chapter I alluded to the Mayan, Aztec and Native American motifs and to the Babylonian gods, with their connection to specific calendric and cyclic dates and to numbers themselves, thereby indicating the relationship between number and archetypal image or motif, specifically in regard to sacred space and time. These number-based symbolic and mythological motifs became the basis for change in the existing space–time order, whether in pyramid and temple building or in other significant cultural and mythological events. The key message here in these mythologies is that fundamental changes indeed took place in relation to meaningfully ordered processes based on specific number configurations. Another form, which was influenced by the gnostics and had considerable influence during the Middle Ages, was the sapientia dei. This feminine, creative spirit associated with the wisdom of God was also equated with a certain mathematical order in creation and in the entire world cosmos. It also had to do with the whole of humankind and was arithmetically derived and based on numerical relations. The origins of this “feeling” or Eros-aspect of the Divinity, influenced by Gnosticism, are to be found in the late Old Testament, particularly in the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, the Psalms and Proverbs. The discovery of the ancient papyrus texts at Nag Hammadi in upper Egypt

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revealed a remarkable text entitled “Thunder, Perfect (Whole) Mind,” a long and beautiful poem spoken in the voice of a feminine divine power who represents this primordial unity of the universe (Robinson 1984; Baring and Cashford 1991). This long text may contain fragments of an even earlier Mesopotamian temple incantation on which are based many of the later poetic images of Sophia in the Old Testament. Its feminine voice speaks with the powerful spirit of wisdom and feeling with which Inanna of Sumer or Isis of Egypt once spoke. The poem begins: “I was sent forth from [the] power, and I have come to those who reflect upon me, and I have been found among those who seek after me. Look upon me, you who reflect upon me, and you hearers, hear me, You who are waiting for me, take me to yourselves. And do not banish me from your sight …” and later: “I am the silence that is incomprehensible, and the idea whose remembrance is frequent. I am the voice whose sound is manifold and the word whose appearance is multiple. I am the utterance of my name …”

(Robinson 1984, p.27l)

Von Franz (1992a, p.196) has commented that the later medieval sapientia dei as a preliminary mathematical model of the world in the mind of God represents an attempt at understanding acausal orderedness. Similarly the early Chinese Taoists’ theory of numbers was based on certain numerical orderings or matrices which they believed to be cosmic patterns. These mirroring patterns consisting of number symbolisms of the Oneness were revealed in two separate instances: one to the culture hero Yu by the god of the Yellow River in the form of a tortoise and known as the Lo-shou model, and the other in the Ho-t’ou, which appeared spontaneously on the back of a dragon-horse. These two models were used extensively for divinatory purposes and were early evidence of the phenomenon of synchronicity. The two models, the tortoise and the dragon-horse, also became the underlying basis for the formulation of the hexagrams for the

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I Ching. They illustrate the direct revelation of numbers from unconscious sources as well as the influence of cultural and mythological precedents on symbolical expressions. In investigating the reports of mathematicians, Von Franz, who has explored number and time for the psychological sciences more extensively than any other Jungian, has commented: numbers and complex numerical arrangements can ‘reveal’ themselves directly out of the unconscious psyche. In this light, number is not only ‘enacted’ by an act of consciousness but is something found in nature. It is a dynamic structure, or more precisely, a rhythm configuration of energy that appears isomorphically in the psychic and physical domains of reality … I would suggest that we go even one step further and say that number is a quantity and an active specific qualitative manifestation of the unus mundus. (Von Franz 1992a, pp.53–54)

… and time One of the major questions for sandplay theorists is the ability of sandplay as a projective therapy to bring about profound transformational change in a relatively short period of time. Number in sandplay theory has been vastly ignored in the literature and has perhaps been underestimated in its mysterious ability to draw one more quickly toward the higher energy center, the self. Here again we see through the intensified inner state of the archetypes a deepening process of meaning, energy, and matter in a process of unfolding. Indeed, in sandplay process this movement seems to be accelerated. If we accept that numbers are common movement patterns of psychophysical energy which are by nature both quantity and meaning, then perhaps these spontaneously occurring phenomena, arising out of the unconscious in sandtray images, act to bring about natural, ordering rhythms in the unconscious. And the repetition and revelation of the process results in a consciously heightened possibility of the emergence of the archetype of the self. For as Von Franz has noted, numbers are a manifestation of the energy of the unus mundus. By experiencing that energy, we have access to that “absolute knowledge” of the unconscious

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as well as to acausally ordered and synchronistic events. However, it is not just the experience of the self which occurs but a continuing integrative process of that experience. This, too, seems accelerated and in its final outcome does often lead to an externalized reordering of one’s entire life process.

Numinous images Jung suggested that from an empirical point of view synchronistic events occur only inconsistently, sporadically and arbitrarily. For these events to take place there needs to exist an “excited archetypal situation” in the observer (Von Franz 1992a, p.197; see also p.237). This excited state happens over and over again in the sandplay process as archetypal arrangements begin to emerge and move through us or become visible along with intense feeling imbued with meaning. And it is critical that we recognize the meaning of these images, for they are living experiences which touch the heart. We refer to these images as numinous. For the ancients a numen was typically regarded as a “sign” from the divine, for the word numinosum comes from the Latin verb nuere meaning “to nod” or “to give a sign.” In ancient times these signs were considered to be in the nature of divine messages. Numinous images in the sand seem to act as an illumination steeped with great clarity and yet to be preconceptual in nature. They are the manifestation of a creative act, imbued with great meaning and arising out of an archetypal context which intensifies the energy flow. These images arise rather like a “play of the archetypes” or rhythmic movements of energy, often experienced as wave-like, which suggest themselves out of a complex and mysterious order. The theory is that perhaps number, as their most basic element which is expressed through sandplay’s psychophysical energies, serves as the bridge between psyche and matter. This conjunction leads to an equilibrium throughout the mind–body being (see Figure 6.1). Such a theory accords with Jung’s idea that number is the joint ordering principle between psyche and matter, for number appears to unite both order and meaning into recognizable patterns or constellations. It is when these constellations occur that we experience

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Figure 6.1 The Kalachakra, a typical multi-armed deity Cultivating a physical self-image with such arms and legs is a subliminal method of awakening the sensitivity of the central nervous system. Note the ordering rhythms, flowing movement and number symbolism. Further frequencies would be created by color and harmonic resonances. Source: Daniel Goleman and Robert A.F. Thurman (eds) (1991) Mindscience: An East–West Dialogue. Proceedings of a symposium sponsored by the Mind/Body Medical Institute of Harvard Medical School with New England Deaconess Hospital and Tibet House New York. Boston, MA: Wisdom.

synchronistic events or “meaningful coincidences,” and what has been previously alluded to as a “happening information” (Von Franz 1992a, p.57). For in these events, the inner meaning, the absolute knowledge, and the real event have all come together. Jung himself in his work on synchronicity saw these events as “acts of creation in time,” thus alluding to a “creatio continua,” which suggests that creation is continually in progress in all of nature (Jung 1978, par. 965). Underlying this is the notion of completion, with energy and ordering rhythms moving towards that completion throughout the psychic as well

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as the natural world. Scientific findings in the natural sciences confirm that in nature there is a tendency and movement towards completion that is expressed through just such mathematical patterns. Form and content become interwoven, and in that process one comes in contact with tremendous depths of subtlety of matter and mind, or of nature and completion through life and death processes. This supports my suggestion that there may well be a significant rhythmic ordering process, or wave-like ordering rhythms, which emerge out of the sandplaying image process. This psychophysical energy, which emerges repeatedly in sand images, has as its basic and elemental aspect a mathematical coherency that may facilitate mind–body healing. Weinrib got rather close to this in her comments on the sand process: Perhaps the concentration of attention and the activation of the imaginative creative faculties within the free and protected space generates or frees enough libido (psychic energy) to loosen the grip of the complexes relatively quickly, as though the healing process were activated through exercise of the imagination. (Weinrib 1983, p.82)

While this seems quite true, it does not go far enough in exploring the importance of the rhythmic patterns, fluctuations and the ordering process itself and its deep connection to the subtle nuances of meaning, which then serve to bridge psyche and matter and to become enacted and experienced in the space–time dimension of the transcendent, or that which facilitates a transition from one attitude to another. Plato alludes to this process when he says, “Behold the form and enter into union with it.” In this sense in the sand images we become or are active participants in the numinosum. We are the numinosum. Jung felt that in view of the magical importance of number, one should study the individuality and quality of the natural numbers 1 to 4, and two years before his death he passed on a little piece of paper with just those numbers on it to Von Franz (1992a, p.165). Both Jung and Von Franz felt that this task had not yet been completed. Von Franz has felt that the solution may involve a critical union of the psychological sciences with the natural sciences through mathematics, and in particular, quantum physics and the study of matter, space, and time. She has commented:

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My attempt to penetrate into the fundamental problems of mathematics has until now been nearly entirely ignored. However, I am convinced that the next steps of creative scientific thinking will go further in this direction – it is in this direction that the “temporal play” of the archetypes points. (Von Franz 1992a, p.199).

The physicist Fritjof Capra speaks of self-renewal, the breaking down and building up of structures in continual cycles, as an essential aspect of all living organisms: Rhythmic patterns – fluctuations, oscillations, vibrations, and waves – play a central role in the dynamics of self-organization. At the same time, the notion of rhythmic patterns constitutes an important link to the mystics. The idea of fluctuations as the basis of order was introduced into modern science very recently by Prigogine, but it is found in Eastern spiritual traditions. In particular, it is the very basis of the I Ching and of the entire tradition of Taoism. Because the Taoist sages recognized the importance of fluctuations in their observations of the living world, they also emphasized the opposite but complementary tendencies that seem to be an essential aspect of life. (Capra 1984, p.142)

The importance of rhythmic patterns in visual perception has been explored by Pribram (1984) in connection with his holographic model of the brain. His suggestion is that the eye responds to patterns in much the same way as the ear responds to patterns in terms of frequencies and resonances. Thus responsiveness by the eye is as much a matter of “harmonics” (or numeric patterning) as that of the ear (Pribram 1984, p.171). He has extended the metaphor of the hologram through the suggestion that holonomy – the way the whole is contained in each of its parts – may be a universal property of nature. The importance of this holonomic reality is that it indeed constitutes the enfolded or implicate order put forward by Bohm. Pribram (1984) makes clear that “synchronicities” characterize the operations occurring in this domain in which there is no here, no there. But “this holonomic order is not empty; it is a boundariless plenum filling and flowing.” And he adds: Discovery of these characteristics of the holonomic order in physics and in the brain sciences has intrigued mystics and scholars steeped

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in the esoteric traditions of East and West: for is not this just what they have been experiencing all along? (Pribram 1984, pp.178–179)

During the creating of sandplay images, we similarly witness these fluctuating waves and rhythms in the emergence of the opposites, the play or tensions of those opposites, and their eventual reconciliation. Studying the manifestation of sandplay images whose number and ordering rhythms carry symbolic value may lead us to further insights concerning the regularity of synchronistic and transcendental experiences, which may be the basis for the physical or soma aspect of sandplay’s healing potential. Here we come closest to the subtle embodied experience. I have found that these events occur with far more regularity than meets the eye or than we can yet comprehend intellectually or express verbally. They often possess a profound subtlety, and we see only what is manifest although we may intuitively grasp and understand at a deeper level. Indeed these more subtle aspects can often be quite beyond words and should remain so. If we ignore the stirrings of these intuitions then, of course, they are lost to us until we have re-established meaningful content and context through the archetypal pathways; in short, through a renewed meaningful connection to subtle inner processes through symbolic images. As Jung himself noted: I must again stress the possibility that the relation between body and soul may yet be understood as a synchronistic one. Should this conjecture ever be proved, my present view that synchronicity is a relatively rare phenomenon would have to be corrected. (Jung 1978, p.500, cf. note 70)

Meaning and consciousness The essential feature of conscious awareness is meaning. As Bohm (1987, p.102) has noted, “The content of what one is consciously aware of is meaning. And that meaning is active. The activity of consciousness is determined by its meaning.” Therefore, we could say that consciousness, both in the features that we experience and in its activity, is meaning. Without meaning there is no consciousness. The greater the depths of meaning the greater the consciousness. This goes beyond the kind of

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intellectualized or rationalized meanings which we might later project upon that activity. From this it is clear that meaning is capable of indefinite expansion to ever deeper levels of subtlety as well as comprehensiveness; that is, moving or movement from the explicate and unfolded toward the implicate and enfolded. Meaning is therefore never complete or fixed. In fact, what is suggested is that being unlimited, there is a potentially infinite degree of inwardness and subtlety in our mental or mind processes. And while the transcendent cannot be put to thought, cannot be grasped by the intellect, we can have direct perceptions of great intensity. From that energy comes creativity, or what we call “flashes of insights.” We can see here the dovetailing of these ideas with the Buddhist description of mind, whereby mind and mental events do not entail the assumption that every cognitive event has to become conscious, for in fact unconscious levels of mind are also described. HH Dalai Lama has clarified some of the misconceptions in the West in the following comments delivered at the Harvard Mind Science Symposium: There is an assumption in the West that when Buddhism describes the existence of consciousness, or mind, it is referring to a substantial entity independent of the body, but this is a misunderstanding. In Buddhism, mind cannot be understood in isolation from the body. It is a very complex network of interrelated mental events. The reason why Buddhists do not accept the existence of an independent I, self, or eternal soul abiding in the body is because they conceive mind not so much as a substantial entity independent of the body but rather as a dynamic, ever-present process very intimately connected to and related with the physiological states of the body. (Dalai Lama 1991b, pp.33–34)

In these active and interrelated subtle processes, the levels of meaning enfold each other. Remembering that there is no separation between the mental and the physical in this context, the action brought about by meaning is carried on in the soma or physical aspect. The meaning of the soma then encounters a further level of subtlety, and our consequent actions reflect these new meanings. This was experienced any number of times in the myth of Gilgamesh. It is also reflected in the koan of the Ten

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Ox-herding (Figures 5.1 to 5.10, pp.146–148) pictures. Thus our intentions or purpose flow out of the meaning, and through these actions the meaning undergoes further changes. If someone images something of great meaning in the sandtray, energy arises. And the increased energy caused by the connection between soma and significance and the continuous flow between them enables a movement to ever deeper levels of meaning, which in turn causes an intensification of energy. It is important to remember that these are still three aspects (matter, meaning, and energy) of one flow. We distinguish them only for purposes of discussion in order to show the relationships, but we do not assume that they are distinct and separate. Sometimes we get stuck in a rut with the old meanings, which actually become obstacles to new meanings and to outwardly expressed attitudes. These might be thought of as old patterns, conditionings or old attitudes which have not been reflected upon seriously. One sees this often with memories or dreams that have become limited in scope and subtlety in their associative or imaginal content. These limitations may be surmounted through fresh perceptions of new meaning, rather akin to the active search for the reconciling symbol and the transcendent function. Such fresh perceptions will ultimately lead to a movement in which there is a constant unfoldment of more comprehensive and subtler meanings. We can witness this process in seminars that focus on the flow of sandplay processes through the visual sand images themselves, e.g. slide presentations. The depth and subtlety of meaning that is repeatedly reviewed during such sessions can be quite surprising. Similarly, it may be only by repeated review that we as students begin to grasp sandplay’s soma-significant and sigma-somatic aspects. There were many times at Kalff ’s seminars when participants collectively experienced feelings of awe and a deepening mysterious and shared sense of the sacredness of the work as windows seemed to open to the psychic and physical healing revealed in the images. Too much talk or interpretation of images often dispelled the power of these unconscious “knowings.” Kalff herself was always cautiously sensitive to the subtle nuances of meaning opening to her audiences, and rarely did she allow their intrinsic feeling value and meaning to be subjected to intellectual dispersion. As a teacher she hoped

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that her students would grasp the subtleties at an intuitive level without subjecting that apprehended experiencing to language and the intellect. Concerning the actual impact on the body, we must reflect on the actions that have arisen through and out of increasingly deeper meanings, which in turn flow into further extensions of inward sigma-somatic and soma-significant activities. We go to ever more subtle levels, and it is as if we were looking at ourselves more and more deeply. We experience this frequently in the sand process as that process unfolds with successive images and becomes enfolded in the mind–body being. The content of what is somatic and manifest and what is significant and subtle in the sandtray images is always changing. Every meaning at a certain level can actively affect soma at a more manifest level, while the meaning of each somatic experience is grasped at more and more subtle levels of awareness. As these are enfolded you could say that meaning has a terrific impact on the extension and actualizing of structure. While there may be a lack of clarity in our intentions or even a failure or inability to grasp meanings, if we are open to these discrepancies so that we allow the structure to change, then there will be a corresponding unfoldment of new meanings that can affect matter itself. Thus sandplay imaging creates a vital connection between the subtle body and subtle-mattered energy and bodily somatic processes. This may heighten the potential for transcendence, that which brings us to an experience of unity after the often paralyzing conflict or tensions of the opposites. While sandplay therapists have known of the existence of this vital connection, we only now are beginning to grapple with the processes suggested by its functioning. We can see, however, that with the emergence of an excited or intensive constellation of archetypal images a process is activated whereby meaningful inner and outer events begin to coincide in a synchronistic fashion. The bridge between these inner and outer events seems to lie in the awareness of a realized similarity of meaning evolving out of a rhythmic ordering process and imbued with energizing potential which necessarily involves somatic as well as psychic processes. Herein lies the value of myth, for myth carries significant numbers of archetypal images through which we can intuit the feeling aspect and then move closer to meaning at an individual and personal level. As Jung

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(1976, p.495) has noted, we do not create meaning, nor is it caused by archetypal images; rather the latent meaning becomes visible or realized. What we have directly apprehended is a minute particle from “the vast energy sea” around us. This indeed is the mythopoetic basis of mind as well as the sandplay imaging process itself. When these experiences occur, it is extremely difficult to determine whether they are of the body or the psyche. It is clear that the meaning emerges from the flowing movements within the wholeness of our mind–body being, and imagination itself seems to rise from this realm. This intermediate realm can lead us to a direct apprehension of subtle body experience and thence to its central, ordering structure, the coniunctio. By working through the subtle mind–body being, we open ourselves to the possibility of transformation and strengthening, not only of psychic structure but of a firmer mind–body unity as well. This is as true for those who suffer from actual physical disease as it is for those who are simply processing more subtle transformational aspects of change.

The subtle body: ancient and recent theory This was, of course, the great contribution of the alchemists, for their grasp of the creative and visionary use of spiritual imagination was the same as that which emerged in the East through prana, yogic meditation and the complexities of the chakras, based as they are on the subtle body. The Western development of these ideas, as well as those of the earliest alchemists in the first centuries after the birth of Christ, had their roots in Egyptian ideas of creating an eternal body through preservation and mummification by chemical means. Through such a process one might become one with the Ba-soul, which was both one’s own eternal aspect and the oneness of the universe. One not only merged with Osiris but also became Osiris through the careful processes of the preservation and mummification of the body and subsequent mysterious rituals involving the liberation of the soul. The symbolisms of the Ba-soul were the star or often the bird as revealed in the Pyramid texts. Recently there has been much speculation concerning a “star” religion dating to as early as 2650 BC (in contrast to the solar-Ra rebirth mythology). Specific rituals carried out in the great

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pyramid at Giza linked or made possible the passage of the Ba-soul through the two southern “air” shafts from the chamber of the king and the queen to the constellation of Orion, more specifically Orion’s belt, Orion being Osiris in Egyptian astrology. The nearby Sirius, which followed Osiris in the night sky, was Isis and was known to the Egyptians as “Sothis.” There is now significant evidence that the two great pyramids and the third smaller pyramid (slightly off-alignment with the other two, which is also true of the actual constellation of the three stars in the Orion belt, the third star being smaller and not in alignment with the two larger stars) were constructed with amazing mathematical and astronomical precision by mathematician priests and architects to orient those three pyramids with the celestial star constellation Osiris (Orion) and with the constellation of the goddess Isis (Sothis-Sirius), which rose behind Osiris in the night sky (Bauval and Gilbert 1994). Thus the tunnel from the king’s chamber was aligned with that of Osiris-Orion and that of the queen’s chamber was aligned with Isis-Sirius. This orientation could thus represent to the ancient Egyptians an incarnation of Osiris-Isis on both the earthly and the celestial levels, placing Giza at the heart of the collective sacred life. The star soul, stellar connotations, stellar rebirth and their later relationship to the etheric or subtle body are significant here, for the star imagery can be found scattered throughout later developments in alchemical literature, as we shall see. In Western antiquity it was the Pythagoreans, Orphics and Platonists who taught that the soul possessed a kind of radiating subtle body, and that by freeing it from coarse matter one might mingle with etheric beings, the gods. The later Neoplatonists, following Plato’s description of a “brightness” or brightening of the soul in this process, developed the idea of a body of light, that is, a higher immortal subtle body. The work of the Hermetics and early alchemists was aimed at the transformation and regeneration of the spirit of the subtle body. Much of this wisdom was lost in Europe with the growing influence of the early Christian church. However, much was preserved in centers of Arabic culture and mysticism, the most notable of which were the teachings of the mystic Ibn ’Arabi (Corbin 1972). His writings, which described the process of creative imagination, were transmitted back to the West by the Islamic

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physician and alchemist Ibn Sina, also known as Avicenna, around the tenth century. In his writings, which were translated into Latin in about AD 1150, Avicenna proposed a doctrine of imaginatio which led to magical-creative processes whereby the soul might influence matter. His symbol consisted of an eagle flying high in the air from whose body falls a chain attached to a toad creeping along the earth, suggesting that one cannot leave one’s creature nature too far behind in the process of becoming spiritually conscious. The symbol also reminds us that the movement of one affects the other (Jung 1988, vol. 2: par. 967). The later works of Paracelsus, and especially Dorn, are reviewed in both Jung’s works and those of Von Franz and contain a thorough survey of the alchemists’ astute awareness of the subtle body as well as the three stages of the coniunctio leading to a kind of “glorified body” (Von Franz 1979, p.81). This idea, which of course was already well known in the East in yogic texts as the “diamond body,” occurs in the West chiefly in the work of the alchemists and their concern with the union of spirit with body. However, it was in his seminars on Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra that Jung developed his own ideas on the subtle body. Indeed, he comments that the subtle body is one of the most important aspects of “primitive psychology.” The key issue for Jung, however, was whether or not it could be made comprehensible since it is beyond ordinary thought. On this he comments: You see, the subtle body – assuming there is such a thing – necessarily must be beyond space and time. Every real body fills space because it consists of matter, while the subtle body is said not to consist of matter, or it is matter which is so exceedingly subtle that it cannot be perceived. So it must be a body which does not fill space, a matter which is beyond space, and therefore it would be in no time … the subtle body is a transcendental concept which cannot be expressed in terms of our language or our philosophical views, because they are all inside the categories of time and space. (Jung 1988, p.443)

He questions whether the subtle body might be identical with the “diamond body” of Buddhistic yogic practice and then comments:

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the subtle body is located in the center – the psyche – between body and spirit – and consists of both. So in that respect one can say the concept of the diamond body is really identical with the subtle body. Naturally, the subtle body is a primitive formulation and the diamond body is the expression for a finished product of the same nature … the subtle body is an important contribution to the diamond body, the final finished product. (Jung 1988, pp.444–446)

However, Jung’s concern for being scientific keeps him wary and therefore appropriately distanced from both primitive psychology and mysticism. This hesitation may also have been a reflection of the bounds of his own Western cultural unconscious or spatial–temporal cultural and intellectual heritage, as it is for the rest of us. He is far more comfortable relegating the subtle body to the “somatic unconscious,” that part of the unconscious which becomes “more and more identical with the functioning of the body and which becomes darker and darker and ends in the utter darkness of matter” (Jung 1988, p.44l). If we reflect on that underlying process which is outside time and space and has strong connections with the transpersonal and timeless, that connection to the unus mundus or the implicate order of Bohm, then it is clear that we are dealing with acausally ordered and synchronistic events. That experience of union through the subtle body–mind being becomes one in which there is a rhythmically alternating movement, wave-like in nature, of the conjoining and separation of opposites, simultaneous with a sense of oneness of existence. That is, the meaningful coherence of being-as-whole expresses the “just-so-ness” at the heart of transcendental experience. What we have discovered or apprehended is an already existent and regular arrangement or “orderedness” which until that moment was unknown to us at the conscious level. As early as 1950, C.A. Meier actually suggested to Jung that the connection of the psyche with the body might be a regular synchronistic phenomenon involving a subtle body. Meier’s later writings on psychosomatic theory, covering many years, testify to a firm belief in an acausal and synchronistic approach to the understanding of “psychosomatic phenomena” rather than a causalistic approach stressing the psychogenesis of ensuing symptomatology (Meier 1984). Jung, however, remained skeptical, preferring instead a theory of the interaction between

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the two, although he did concede, as I have noted, that the relation between “body and soul” might later be discovered to be a synchronistic one, therefore necessitating the revision of synchronicity theory. Arnold Mindell has explored the embodiment process of psychic imagery in his several books on the “Dreambody” and more recently on shamanic imagery (Mindell 1982, 1985, 1993). Indeed, Jungians have recently begun considerable reflection on the subtle body and the embodiment process, as seen in the work of Chodorow, Woodman, Perera and others. Schwartz-Salant (1986), exploring Jung’s idea that projections transmitted through the medium of the subtle body can manifest through physical and psychic effects from one person to another, has elaborated on this imaginally perceived process as it becomes manifest in the twoness of the analytic relationship. Samuels (1985) suggests that what is constellated in the analysis is a two-person or shared mundus imaginalis equivalent to the unus mundus or the implicate order of Bohm. Amman (1991), in Healing and Transformation in Sandplay, is unwavering in her position regarding the significance of the subtle body in sandplay. She quotes a significant citation from Jung on the essence of imagination and its connection to the theoria and operatio of the alchemical opus based on a saying of the alchemist, Ruland, “Imagination is the star in the man, the celestial or supercelestial body.” It is useful to quote Jung’s comments on this directly: This … throws a quite special light on the fantasy processes connected with the opus … We have to conceive of these processes … as something corporeal, a “subtle body,” semi-spiritual in nature. The imaginatio, or the act of imagining, was thus a physical activity, that could be fitted into the cycle of material changes, that brought these about and was brought about by them in turn … Imagination is therefore a concentrated extract of the life forces, both physical and psychic … But just because of this intermingling of the physical and psychic, it always remains an obscure point whether the ultimate transformations in the alchemical process are to be sought more in the material or more in the spiritual realm. Actually … there was no “either-or” for that age, but there did exist an intermediate realm between mind and matter, i.e. a psychic realm of subtle bodies whose

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characteristic it is to manifest themselves in a mental as well as a material form. (Jung 1968, par. 394)

Amman then continues: This definition of the imagination as a “concentrated extract of the life forces, both physical and psychic” and the idea of an intermediate realm, a kind of subtle body between mind and matter are suitable when applied to sandplay as well. For me there is no question: not only during the times of the alchemists but today as well this intermediate realm between the psychic and the corporeal world still exists. I would simply not know how to define the phenomenon of sandplay otherwise. It arises out of the mind of the analysand and out of the psyche that dwells within matter. (Amman 1991, pp.35–36)

Drawing on Celtic thought, which maintained no fundamental division between the psychic and the material world, both being forms of appearance and attributable to the same energy, Amman explores the Celtic belief in a third world existing between the “white” world in which the opposites are not yet divided (world of the primordial images or the archetypes) and the concrete world (the world of objects in which energy has become form). The third realm, which lies between the white world and the concrete world, the Celts called the “watery” or “river” world. Here lies the world of subtle mattered energy which is in a constant state of creative flux, and “in this world we find the landscape of the soul where the outer and the inner are one, the world of the imagination and the subtle bodies of the alchemist” (Amman 1991, pp.40–41). From this, Amman concludes: Through the power of the imagination we can transform the as yet unimaginable primordial images (because they are unformed energy) into a piece of concrete world creation. But we can also abstract, by virtue of imagination, our experience and life events and contribute to the shaping of the primordial images. In this process of the transformation of the energies by the imagination a decisive role is played by the morally responsible attitude of the individual. It is for this reason that the Celts did not think in terms of absolute Good

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or Evil. For them the vital thing was responsibility in action. (Amman 1991, p.41)

One might say that there has been something in the contemporary Western mind or cultural unconscious that has distrusted the experience and meaning of the subtle body as the underlying movement of energy in that essential unity of psyche and matter, of acausal and synchronistic events. This idea of the subtle body, whose connection lies in the imaginal world, is really quite ancient, with deep roots in the East as well as in the mystical, meditative and alchemical practices of the West. One can only conjecture that contemporary efforts by physicists as well as Jungians to grapple with these complexities represents a synchronistic moment culturally and historically in which the body is assuming its rightful place as vessel of incarnation. For indeed we in the West are only now confronting a long conceptual tradition that has taught us to separate body and psyche, which is an essential unity, and to ignore the meaning of subtle body and subtle mattered energy at play in that realm of being. Worse, we carry attitudes of ambivalence toward the body through our Christian heritage, and indeed we still must deal with many traces of a tradition that links the body to Satan. The current paradigmatic shift that we are experiencing culturally is therefore primitive and elementary on the one hand and new and original on the other – in short, an “always-there.” It will require new meanings, subtler depths of exploration, and a giving way to old patterns and conditionings while we nourish the tiny tip of fresh green sprouting at a cultural and personal level. If we can surrender ourselves to the imaginal processes, with their roots in the vast reservoir of primordial images, these mind–body experiences may give rise to new meanings or fresh perceptions that broaden or encompass the old meanings. Through the constellation of the subtle body, intensified energy makes possible a corresponding contribution to this reality in the enfolding and unfolding process of embodiment. The problems of our Western culture lie in a failure of meaning. Any transformation of consciousness, whether at a personal or cultural level, can only come about through a transformation of meaning. This is what the Celts understood as responsibility in action, as did the Taoists and early Chan (Zen) Buddhists. For in the deepest sense it is the soma which

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carries out that enfolded transformed meaning, collectively through responsible action, in the same manner suggested by the progression in the Zen Ox-herding images. The significance of star imagery has faded for us in our contemporary culture, with its well-lighted cities that obscure the night sky and busy people who have little time or interest in stargazing or stellar soul migrations. Apart from star imagery, what other symbols might speak to us of the play of energies I have described? If I were to name a symbol that speaks to the subtle embodiment of energy and that therefore might allude to the engagement of the subtle body in a meaningful manner in sandplay imaging, it might be dolphins. Indeed dolphins carry an intensely joyous, indeed bright flashy energy which carries significant meaning for both adults and children, for dolphins create in those who discover them in the sand images a magical and healing flow of movement and energy. One could say they communicate the “music of the spheres,” and one often finds them on the ornately illustrated pages of ancient manuscripts adjacent to the calligraphic music of Gregorian chant, or frolicking in the frescoes found in the Queen’s chambers at the Palace of Knossos along with the blue monkeys. This gentle, warm-blooded animal was known to have carried the gods in antiquity. And like the turtle, the dolphin was a “rescuer,” for it was known to guide those lost and struggling in the sea back to shore. Indeed, in the evolutionary and physical development of dolphins over several hundred million years they have moved back and forth from sea to land and from land to sea several times. So one could say that the dolphin has the ability to move between realms, taking breath from one world but living in another, whether in the soul’s transmigrations, between the subtle-mattered worlds of the unconscious and conscious, or the intermediary world of psyche and matter. Dolphins recall the “river” or “watery” world of the Celts to which they are so comfortably attuned and in their connection to the etheric and subtle-mattered energies that are in a state of constant and creative flux. I have often found in my work on the whale imagery and the incredible journeying of that process through darkness and fire to the emergence of new life, that dolphins were the harbingers of return and served as guides

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and companions to the whale, sometimes throughout the journey, until the initiate was safely ashore (Markell 1994). If indeed there is a regular relationship of synchronicity in the mind–body being, then that place where the two join or come together is best described as the “subtle body,” or simply as a background for reality in which psyche and matter are no longer clearly distinguishable. It presents itself as an intermediary imaginal realm. Synchronistic events or apprehensions appear to provide the meeting point or bridge whereby something happens both materially and psychically. In these “coincidences” a new unity is created by their common meaning. When we apprehend these moments, we experience them as an atmosphere or mood that is “outside” time and space or is characterized by a complete relativity of space–time. Apparently these moments manifest themselves rather frequently. We can get glimpses of them through images that are manifested both in psychic and material forms and are then expressed through a blending of these forms into one essential unified whole, that is, a meaningful symbolic form. It is something that appears suddenly without conscious intent, rather as a piece of knowledge from an archetypal realm which has not been conscious to the ego. As therapists, these images touch something deeply resonant within ourselves. We may find that there is no language to describe them, and that they can be comprehended only by our immediate presence in an apprehensional state of being. It really is quite beyond our ability to encompass these images, and at best we can only get hints based on our own intuitive feeling. We may find later that we have touched upon a realm outside time, deeply and with intense feeling. We may let the tray image stand awhile or find ourselves standing in a quite private way of being with the substance of the image. We are touched by the simplicity and materiality of the central image as well as its essential unity. In a sense this mirroring of the therapist would corroborate Schwartz-Salant’s suggestion that projections transmitted through the medium of the subtle body can manifest through physical and psychic effects from one person to another. Images of this kind are often devoid of miniatures. The sand is simply sculpted. Often this sculpture may be a marine creature such as a turtle,

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seal, otter, dolphin or great fish, or the image may simply be that of a mounded central form. This central image may appear to “swim” or float in a watery environment or in the fullness of the sea itself. There is often a sense of emptiness or profoundly open space to these images. One might conjecture that the images seem to come from that same intermediary imaginal realm, where the contradictions of matter and psyche have ceased to exist and relativized unity can be felt or intuited. These are moments outside time and space. In these mental and material imaginal forms a vital connection between the subtle body, subtle-mattered energy, and bodily somatic processes has occurred. Entering this domain often leads to activation of the transcendent function, a fundamental aspect of the embodiment experience as well as the healing process itself. We shall now explore actual material manifestations in sand images when the psychophysical energies encounter obstacles in such a way that meaning becomes obscured or lost in the archaic body storehouse.

chapter 7

LOON AND FISH The Emergent Integration of Opposites I saw that in its depths there are enclosed, Bound up with love in one eternal book, The scattered leaves of all the universe – Substance, and accidents, and their relations, As though together fused in such a way That what I speak of is a single light. Dante’s vision of Eternal Light, The Divine Comedy

After our exploration of the more etheric aspects of the body, it seems fitting to explore the body proper, that is, its concrete material aspects. Merleau-Ponty (1962), an existential philosopher, has described beautifully what the body represents experientially: As complex, body is a unique structure of experience, the experience of material being. As complex, body carries history. The pastness of experience is carried into the present through the body, or, through the body the present remains in the past. The ambiguity of being in the world in both the past and the present simultaneously is taken up by the body … it is the ground for experience, the darkness upon which experience is inscribed, the flesh of the world that inscribes upon the world. The body is what makes space, what makes world … it is our opening onto the world … our rising toward the world

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… Body is the woven fabric of existence … the mirror of being. (Merleau-Ponty 1962, pp.84–92)

The work of the nervous system Research confirms that what is novel and fascinating actually heightens brain activity. In the day treatment center that I once organized for very young severely disturbed children we had a Jungian analyst as a consultant who used to urge our staff, as they attended our small group of children at play, to be alert to any “interesting spectacles” which might be used to maximize the imagination and thereby the physical and emotional engagement of the severely withdrawn or autistic children. This process of activation is a very important, though still generally unappreciated, precondition for all forms of creative psychotherapy and mind–body healing experiences. It is an approach that focuses on effective means for facilitating communication within the mind–body being while placing the healing process itself within the domain of the patient, seeker, or initiate. We saw in Chapter 6 the powerful process set in motion by sandplay’s activation of archetypes, or the “excited archetypal situation” in which psychophysical energy is intensified as meaning emerges. And we know that these images emerge from the right hemisphere of the cortex. It is here in the four lobes – the frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital – that the storage and retrieval of images occurs. These preverbal images and, more generally, the body image, have similarly been linked to the emotions and therefore to the autonomic nervous system, which is generally thought to be responsible for the maintenance of the body’s internal environment. Achtenberg (1985) notes that this system is supported by a vast network of neural connections between the right hemisphere and the limbic system. The limbic area of the brain itself actually constitutes one-third of the frontal area and is implicated in feelings of joy and pleasure, depression, pain, fear, anger, and violence, as well as sexual behavior, all of which involve the autonomic nervous system. (I refer the reader to The Color Atlas of Human Anatomy, edited by Vannini and Pogliani, for an excellent graphic presentation of the body. A deeper understanding of the body and its systems and functions is mandatory for the serious sandplay student.)

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The nervous system is divided into two major components: the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system. The central nervous system is subdivided into its two major components, the brain and the spinal cord. The peripheral nervous system itself comprises two systems: the somatic nervous system and the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system further divides into two more systems: the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. As we have seen, the autonomic nervous system is more responsible for internal maintenance while the somatic nervous system is involved in reacting to the external world. The sympathetic and parasympathetic take over when action is needed and restore balance or homeostasis when it is required, although there is considerable overlap between the two. Two further important components of the brain are the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland. Achtenberg (1985) notes that the hypothalamus is closely related to neural areas where conscious thought processing occurs and images are formed, as well as serving to regulate sleeping, eating, body rhythms, temperature and sexual function. It also affects heart rate, respiration, blood chemistry and glandular activity, and is of integral importance in the regulation of the immune system (Achtenberg 1985, p.127). The pituitary gland has neural and chemical connections to the hypothalamus. It is through these pathways that the hypothalamus is able to alter the hormonal systems of the body, affecting not only the glands such as the ovaries, testes, adrenals, thyroid and parathyroid, but also every organ, tissue and cell throughout the body. Prolonged stress can lead to massive changes that go far beyond immune system activity to every gland affected by the pituitary. These changes can trigger every conceivable disease involving the immune system including cancer, infection and autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis (Achtenberg 1985, p.130). The importance of acquiring some rudimentary knowledge of these body systems and their implication for healing through the sandplay process was brought home to me some years ago in my own sandplay practice. A woman came to me suffering from a rather long-term depression following a bitter and acrimonious divorce and ongoing stress related to struggles over the legal and physical custody of the couple’s

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only child. Her sense of worth was extremely low and she expressed terribly negative feelings in relation to body image. In short, she revealed a long history of the “ugly duckling.” What immediately unfolded in the sand process was that despite being a young woman she had failed to menstruate for several years and had suffered chronic urinary tract infections necessitating long-term use of antibiotics. The symptomatic and somatic expressions of her complex and interrelated difficulties, and their connection to her general sense of worth and self-love, were quite overwhelming and a considerable challenge for us both. Many of these issues were initially reflected in the images themselves and often through “body trays” or trays in which aspects of the body were reflected. After careful scrutiny as well as medical referral, coordination, differential diagnosis and eventual treatment by the local university hospital, we learned that there had been a pituitary gland malfunction affecting the thyroid. As explained above, this in turn involved the hypothalamus, the already mentioned thyroid, the ovaries and ultimately the immune system. In short, her problems demanded at least some understanding of the endocrine system as well as its relationship to the immune system. What was fascinating about this set of circumstances was that within four months of sandplay involvement the woman’s menstrual cycle was restored prior to the completion of medical treatment! I noted earlier that in the creating of a sand image a harmonization takes place that brings the imager’s mental representations into direct relationship with the pattern of energies and current in which the mind–body is immersed. It is equally clear that the female cycle in particular is based on specific rhythmic patterns. In this example there may have been a significant rhythmic ordering process or wave-like ordering rhythms that emerged from her sandplaying-image process and led to a correction within the body itself, such that the rhythmic flow of the menstrual cycle could begin again. As I have suggested, the psychophysical energy that emerges repeatedly in sand images, with its ordering configurations, has as its basic aspect a mathematical coherency that may facilitate mind–body healing. In this case, however, new meanings had to emerge so that the configurations could exercise an effect upon the somatic aspect. During the four

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months of image-making a significant development occurred specifically in relation to the feminine aspect. Images emerged in which all the aspects of the feminine were gathered together, often in circles, figures of children as well as women. We saw positive aspects of the feminine emerging with increasingly subtle meanings. In several images, the divine feminine aspect became a central adorational image which was revealed initially through the appearance of the dark Earth Mother and shifted later to Kuan Yin and Tara, suggesting a new compassionate attitude. Here we could witness the connection between soma and significance and the continuous flow between the two. The increased psychophysical energy seems to enable a movement to ever deeper levels of meaning in relation to the patient’s own inner feminine aspect, releasing her from the ugly duckling past. In such a way does the flow of meaning, matter, and energy begin to bring about specific changes in the mind–body being. It can be extremely difficult to distinguish whether these experiences are of the body or the psyche, for they are all aspects of one flow. To return to our brief review of the body, the left hemisphere exerts control over the musculoskeletal system, although the right hemisphere is capable of the same control if images or “thought pictures” are sent to the appropriate muscles. Achtenberg has noted that the verbal, language-oriented and logical functions of the left hemisphere are one step removed from the autonomic processes and limbic system. She proposes that “messages have to undergo translation by the right hemisphere into nonverbal, or imagerial, terminology before they can be understood by the involuntary or autonomic nervous system”(Achtenberg 1985, p.122). This would indeed suggest that the involvement of the right hemisphere of the brain and its storehouse of imagery are mandatory components of the healing process, for it is this imagery that is the medium of communication between consciousness and the internal environment of our bodies. These nonverbal images involved in processing also tend to be more nonlinear and nonanalytic than those of the left hemisphere. For imagery to be processed into logical thought it must be accessed by the left hemisphere.

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Achtenberg notes: The images so intimately connected with physiology, and with health and disease, are preverbal, or are without a language base, except what is available from the connections with the left, or speech, hemisphere. If those connections were to be severed, and the left hemisphere destroyed or made nonaccessible, untranslated images would continue to affect emotions and alter physiology, but without intellectual interpretation. (Achtenberg 1985, p.123; italics mine). She concludes: The evidence for the neuroanatomical bridge between image and cells, mind and body exists. It is solid and can be viewed when the brain tissue is put under a microscope … The point is, the body/mind responds as a unit. No thought, no emotion, is without biochemical, electrochemical activity; and the activity leaves no cell untouched. (Achtenberg 1985, p.127)

For an excellent comprehensive discussion of imagery in physical healing, see E.L. Rossi’s (1993) The Psychobiology of Mind–body Healing. Note in particular the review of research involving “mind modulation” of innate immunity, acquired immunity, and psychoimmunology and the “mind-gene connection”. The latter explores many recent breakthroughs (in research including those of Pert et al. (1985), Besedovsky and Del Rey (1991) and Glaser and Kiecolt-Glaser (1991), relative to the existence of communication via the neuropeptides (the so-called “messenger molecules”) between the central, autonomic, endocrine and neuropeptide systems, and the receptors of the immune system.

Neuropeptides at work The reader may wonder how this discussion of Western contemporary medical research fits with the subtle body and subtle-mattered energies, or indeed the significance of rhythmic ordering processes and the flow of meaning, matter and energy. It is useful, therefore, to review comments by Pert (1993), a neuroscientist, who was successful in identifying the process by which the brain produces endogenous morphines or “endorphins” which later were also identified as “peptide” molecules. This was followed by the “astounding revelation” that these endorphins

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and other chemicals were found not just in the brain but in the immune system, the endocrine system and throughout the body, suggesting what Pert (1993, p.178) called a “psychosomatic communication network” through which information flows. These molecules, she notes, which are released from one place, they’re diffusing all over your body, and they’re tickling the receptors that are on the surface of every cell of your body … everything in your body is being run by these messenger molecules, many of which are peptides, but what I’m saying is we’ve actually found the material manifestation of emotions in these peptides and their receptors. These receptors floating around on the surface of the cells put out their little antennae and receive what’s coming in. There’s actually a physical attachment process between the peptide and the receptor. And once that binding process occurs, the receptor, which is a big, complicated molecule, wiggles and changes in such a way that things start to happen. Ions start pouring in, and other changes happen, and eventually the brain receptors perceive what’s happening as emotions … they’re the bridge between the mental and the physical or the physical and the mental. It’s either way. (Pert 1993, pp.177–179)

Pert then makes an astounding statement that coincides with my own thinking. She clarifies the neuropeptides as follows: I call them neuropeptides … but that’s a silly word … one way to think of the neuropeptides is that they direct energy. You can’t do everything at every moment. Sometimes the energy needs to go toward digesting food. At other times more blood needs to flow through your spleen. If you’ve been challenged with a bug that can cause a fever, then you’ve got to put more energy into your spleen and less energy into digesting your food … If you accept the premise that the mind is not just in the brain but that the mind is part of a communication network throughout the brain and body, then you can start to see how physiology can affect mental functioning … in real life the brain and the immune system use so many of the same molecules to communicate with each other that we’re beginning to see that perhaps the brain is not simply ‘up here’ [above the neck], connected by nerves to the rest of the body. It’s a much more dynamic process … [in fact] it gets

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weirder than that. The message doesn’t literally have to go from the brain into the body. It can happen almost spontaneously … I feel that the person who will figure this out is going to be a physicist, because clearly there’s another form of energy that we have not yet understood … there are many phenomena that we can’t explain without going into energy … this understanding will require bringing in a realm we don’t understand at all yet. We’re going to have to bring in that extra-energy realm, the realm of spirit and soul that Descartes kicked out of Western scientific thought. (Pert 1993, pp.181–186)

Recalling Bohm’s (1987) comments, we find ourselves in a situation in which meaning is carried into the soma by energy (the so-called “messengers”), that is, energy which is the carrier of meaning. These chemicals or peptides instruct various parts of the body just as electrical “signals” are carried by the nerves. This activity represents an unfoldment of significance in “forms” which are suitable for alerting the body or instructing the body to carry out the implications of what is meant. Most importantly, it does not have to be “known” at a cognitive level or processed by the left hemisphere of the brain for the body to carry out the intent. This suggests the realm I discussed earlier having to do with wisdom or “absolute knowledge.” Your body “knows” what to do, and this knowing transcends conscious thought. Sandplay, by its access to right hemispheric activity (imaging and meaning) through somatic processes as well as through the fundamental relevance of delayed interpretation, review, or cognitive processing, temporarily bypasses left hemispheric involvement and supports a process of energic somatic responsiveness!

Accessing the meaning of the ghosts We have seen how Jung’s view of the participation mystique suggests a realm that is transpersonal and collective and relates to the whole history of humankind, including the animals (Jung 1984). We all have access to that instinctive animal wisdom through our mind–body being, the body-self, in which our every sound, gesture, silence or motion expresses itself through our senses, body, breath, and movements. Indeed, this notion, on the basis of the neuropeptides, suggests an energic intercellular flow of energy or “communication” throughout the brain and body which carries an incredible wisdom. This knowing by the body is virtually impossible

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to articulate, for it is an invisible energic flow of considerable integrity and precision, mirroring the form patterns within the repertoire of the image domain of the preverbal or preconceptual body–mind being. Sandplay accesses this domain rather rapidly through its engagement of the mind–body being at a somatic level. In our review of the serpent or kundalini yogic practices we encountered the same centuries-old concept of the psychophysical energies, those subtle body or subtle-mattered energies at play in matter which can exert an influence on the very cells of our body. It is our language itself which has prevented us in the West from being able to conceptualize this fundamental process until quite recently. Only now are we beginning to appreciate that the mind and the body are but two manifestations of the same process of a single unitary wholeness in the mind–body being. It is quite clear that the underlying pathway in the serpent or kundalinic meditative process is imagerial, whether in the form of sound, ritual gesture, forms (mandalic or deity manifestations), colors, resonances or numbering rhythms. Whether we name the activating energy “prana” and “chi” or “messenger molecules,” “electric signals” or “frequencies,” we are struggling to find a kind of material language expressive of form to describe an intangible process by which subtle-mattered energy becomes imbued with meaning and affects matter, bringing about bodily changes. These changes appear to occur at the cellular level. Pribram (1984) has suggested that the brain operates much like a hologram and that it stores image information “redundantly.” He further elaborates that the transmission, storage and reception of imagerial content may occur at the junction between the neurons, the synaptic cleft. Thus patterns, forms or frequencies that are activated at these neural junctures can trigger a fully formed imagerial perception, as in the mention of a word that triggers the memory of a poem, a few notes of music that lead one to recall a long-forgotten event or the harmonic wholeness of the entire composition itself, the color of leaves or a smell that brings back the vivid memory of an event or person from many years earlier. He describes this process as one based on “frequencies” which can be described by mathematical, quantal and other terminologies. What makes it a revelation is that the storage process itself has no specific space–time dimension, suggesting that the information is everywhere at

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once throughout the body. The now accepted existence of the neuropeptide system and its energic distribution and flow throughout the body opens up possibilities for a wide range of new approaches to healing. Pribram’s (1976) notion of “redundant storage” at the neural junctures corresponds to the metaphor of the body as a vast storehouse of archaic and primal experiences as well as specific personal life experiences at a somatic level, the pastness and presentness of the body storehouse. He comments that “images and feelings are ghosts – but they are ghosts who inhabit my own and my patients’ subjective worlds. They are our constant companions and I want to explain them” (Pribram 1976, p.100). To access the meaning of these ghosts one must have an image of some sort, and if these images are viewed in the holographic manner then one can appreciate their powerful influence on physical function. In Pribram’s view, the image, the behavior, and the physiological corollaries are a unified expression of the same phenomenon. Thus the pastness of all experience dramatically flows into the present through the body and can be accessed if sufficient imagerial opportunities exist. This suggests considerable subtlety in the energic transformational process whereby these events acquire meaning, whether through the collective unconscious, the cultural unconscious, or the personal unconscious processes. The inclusion of the psychophysiological processes of the somatic aspect of healing lends itself to a paradigmatic shift whereby the body ultimately becomes a link to the self, thereby restoring its lost sacrality in Western culture. However, that paradigmatic shift must also take place within the Western medical profession itself as Weil has pointed out in the following: It seems most strange that the practice of the so-called healing art should have such little faith in healing. What are the roots of medical pessimism? One that I identify is the lopsided nature of medical education which focuses almost exclusively on disease and its treatment rather than on health and its maintenance. The pre-clinical portion of the medical curriculum is “top heavy” with detached information about disease processes. Here the word

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“healing” is used rarely, if ever; the term “healing system” not at all. (Weil 1995, p.65)

Sandplay offers an opportunity to connect to preconceptual or preverbal aspects and experiences of our mind–body being. It quite naturally activates the archaic memory storehouse of the somatic, conveying energy, meaning, and movement to a process of healing in matter. We have seen the significance in sandplay of the observing eyes that convey meaning and the fingers and hands that carry the charge of energy from that meaning into matter in a process which we thereafter experience repeatedly as a flowing movement. For it is in those first moments and movements of eyes as they find significance and meaning, and fingers as they engage and transfer that meaning into matter, that we are pricked – and that flowing process of movement is irrevocably activated throughout the body. What one frequently encounters are processes which in their natural form and expression bring about a movement increasingly involutional in their spatial-temporal dimension. Often these processes ultimately lead back to the birth process itself or a womb-like image, which ultimately lends itself to a symbolic rebirth. Chodorow’s (1989) early work on movement and dance demonstrates that body movement and dance can similarly serve as a direct means of accessing earliest primal experiences somatically. She cites four sources relating to different aspects of the psyche including movements from the personal unconscious, the cultural unconscious, the primordial unconscious and the ego–self axis. In this immediate, natural way, by the activation of imagerial content, form can be given to the unconscious through somatic activity. Such a directly apprehended physical expression enables a “re-memberment,” a “re-enactment” and a “re-integration” of the earliest preverbal relationships and complexes that were constellated in infancy. These complexes, traumas or wounds are of a preverbal, presymbolic nature and are less often touched by verbal treatment. As we know from actual sandplay experience, the image is shaped in the sand physically, so that we can say that internal contents find a bodily form. Ryce-Menuhin (1992, p.104) has noted that the earth quality of sand pulls the psyche towards body expression. We know from our experience with children in sandplay that any cerebral interpretation not only

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is unnecessary but also can violate the sanctuary of the free and protected space as well as the inner creative psychic process itself. These experiences in sand imaging represent a conscious realization of unconscious contents while bypassing cognitive and verbal processing. The images are formed by a shaping and psychophysical experiencing of image contents, often of a primal nature, through direct apprehension and attentive presence. As Neumann (1990) has pointed out, the ego is continually evolving in the world as it develops into the self, and in its relation to the unconscious it undergoes continual transformation based on archetypal patterns. These transformations occur unconsciously and spontaneously, given the proper activating circumstances. In Kalffian sandplay, those activating circumstances exist within the free and protected space where the original matriarchal uroboric state can be recreated and apprehended experientially by the mind–body being. This process is particularly evident in children. Children who have had multiple traumas quite early in life often disclose a concretization or “forms” in the sand that express those earliest wounding or terrorizing experiences. These may be revealed by specifically concrete images of hospital experiences, abuse or neglectful and deprivational conditions in the primal relationship, accidents, molestation or in many cases insult or trauma at an intrauterine level. One is actually led by the child’s images into developmental aspects that may even convey the age of a specific trauma or insult. In my experience, some of these images convey prenatal experience and birth trauma. Some clinical examples are pertinent here. An adolescent came to me suffering from depression during his last year in a prestigious and rather high pressure secondary school. Although an excellent student, he feared that he could not complete the school year as he often felt quite incapable of even attending school, and he therefore feared failing his qualifying examinations at the end of the term. His physical symptoms were expressed through chronic asthma and allergies. He suffered sleep disturbance and had deep and intense feelings of unhappiness, adding, “I can’t even cry.” In a first tray he preferred dry sand and worked vertically in the tray which often reflects body concerns or body images. In the center of the tray he sculpted a small island in a womb-shaped outer container whose exit was a channel waterway moving to the

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bottom wall of the tray. This waterway was blocked by moss, lichen and bits of debris. On the small central island stood the towering black figure of Osiris facing the blocked channel. Beyond him was a large bridge connecting to land and the upper reaches of the tray. Below Osiris at the edge of the island was a tiny boat on shore. Opposite Osiris was an 18-inch snake, the largest in my collection. He commented about this tray that the channel waterway was “polluted with filthy water”. He wondered with me why it was polluted. He said, “It feels like me in the middle [Osiris] but why this black one. Wasn’t he resurrected like Jesus?” He then revealed in this first session that when he was 6 or 7 years old he began to believe that his parents were “not truly mine, that they were out to kill me.” He could not share these thoughts with anyone, and it became “something I lived with inside myself. I never showed my feelings.” These fears became so extreme that he kept a white stuffed animal on his bed so if he were attacked “the blood would be on it so people would know what happened … that I had been killed.” These fears later generalized even further into a fear of being killed by falling trees or boat and water accidents as well as bridge phobias when away from home. At around 9 years he finally shared his fear with his parents. When he returned for his second visit, he again constructed an image using wet sand for the first time and placing Osiris in the upper right now separated by a large channel of water from a smaller upwardly coiled snake on the left. In the lower left he placed a large lighted candle near a house. Nearby was a small elephant and the still shorebound boat. His comments are salient: He [Osiris] is me. It has given me a headache. But it was suppressed and now it can come out. The candle has something to do with safety. The snake is just sitting there waiting for me to do the wrong thing. It will eat me or kill me or strangle me. The snake is laughing at me, making fun of me. It’s tempting to go to the snake … I’m not sure … but I’m looking for something … something is missing and I’m looking for it. The little elephant is walking in the footprints of the big elephants … animals are coming to the house. But me, I’m on the other side [Osiris] just staring at the whole lot and I want to get to the house, to that safe place. Maybe I must do it by swimming [across the channel].

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He then became silent and thoughtful, and after several moments of silence came a profound memory. At the age of 4 he spontaneously told his parents he had nearly strangled when he was born as the umbilical cord had become “stuck” around his neck. As he now spoke he began to cry quietly. And he told me the following story of his birth, which was the same memory that had surfaced when he was 4, although now it was elaborated by information given to him by his parents at the age of 12. During the mother’s labor it was noted that the baby’s heartbeat was diminishing. The baby’s position in the womb was feet down rather than head down, and repeated efforts were then made to turn the baby in the womb, all of which failed. The decision was finally made based on the urgency of the situation to create a surgical incision in the mother, and as the infant emerged the umbilical cord was indeed wrapped around his throat. Had that condition gone on any longer he would not have survived his traumatic entry into earthly life. Of this experience he commented, “I had to fight my way out and I nearly died, I knew this … but later the memory faded.” We see here the complex and deepening meaning of the Osiris image for this young man, whose dismemberment and death led to the search for “re-memberment” and resurrection, resulting in the rhythmic flow and return of vegetative life. While it is not the intent here to follow the process to its conclusion, this young man did go through a powerful rebirth experience following a highly sacrificial drama in his tenth tray in which a baby was placed in a centrally located cauldron surrounded by sacrificial vessels and three lighted candles. An old man is seen leaving the central drama. In the following tray, Osiris stands on the point of a triangle directly in front of the young man as he sat at the tray. Before Osiris is a wide channel of open flowing water through which a small sailboat moves toward the sea. No polluted or blocked waterways obstruct the little boat as it sails out into the vast expanse of the open sea. On either side of the channel are festive mariachis and other musicians as well as the Green Tara, the goddess of compassionate feeling, and a lucky god of prosperity. He, of course, did well with his examinations and later entered higher education in the arts. His depression and physical symptoms, including the asthma, were significantly improved.

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This clinical example takes one back to the actual birth trauma, a condition in the birth canal itself reflecting the biological fury of the not-yet-born whose survival is threatened by suffocation. The somatic processes available in the sand and water provided a form and sanctuary for a re-memberment and rebirthing rich with meaning. The crisis which brought this young man to sandplay indeed suggested a renewed death–rebirth struggle as he was within six months of completing one developmental phase and moving on to his next task in life. It also tracks the flow of the lost meaning of that critical first life event in both the body and the encroaching fears and phobias which absorb its meaning in the actual course of a person’s life both outwardly and inwardly. As we know, allergies and asthma are often an outlet for suppressed emotions. They make the body hot and uncomfortable and make breathing extremely difficult. They are quite often symptomatic of much deeper and earlier trauma which a well-meaning parent may simply not perceive as troublesome. Near the completion of his series, this young man commented, I’m getting closer to opening my eyes and looking … when I was a child I had all these fears and then there was this whole birth thing. But now I realize I had a big fear of emotions … and then eventually, I began to fear I couldn’t protect myself, or my girlfriend or I wouldn’t be able to control myself and would do something murderous like break someone’s neck. I am now able to face reality without all that fear. I face the unknown and unfamiliar but something new is going to happen. It’s like a new life that is coming.

Completing a tray in which Osiris now stood on a mountain with a view of a lighted candle and within in a circle of animals, he commented that Osiris with his animals was a guide for him to the future – that Osiris was attracted to the light. In such a clinical situation the work of Grof on the perinatal matrices and the influences that shape personal consciousness from prenatal life through birth is quite instructive. In what Grof (1993) refers to as the basic perinatal matrices (BPMs), this young man was caught in the death–rebirth struggle, the encounter with death and the struggle to be born. Significantly, light and lighted candles figured heavily in his sand images, as in his third image of a lotus emerging from the mud and into

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the light, carrying with it the mysterious key to his own destiny. Metaphorically, the struggling not-yet-born must find its way out of darkness and into the light of the world. As Kalff once remarked, sandplay process can and does reach a space similar to Grof’s work with breath and birth processes (Seminar at Pajaro Dunes, 1987). I am not suggesting, of course, that this process does not occur with adults, for indeed it does. The “tracking” process simply lends itself more easily to observing children’s developmental issues and crises by reason of the youthfulness of the body storehouse and the availability of a thorough developmental history, preferably from the natural mother herself. These histories are often completely lacking in the case of adopted or foster children, and the therapist must piece together that history from an intuitive understanding of the images and symbolic content of the child’s process itself. Such a history, reconstructed by means of the shared intuitive and symbolic understanding of the therapist and the child, is often finely tuned and accurate, although it cannot be confirmed through written reports provided by outside agencies or by foster or adoptive parents because of the absence of bona fide histories. I once saw a 9-year-old girl who was suffering from some adjustment problems in school characterized by restlessness, distractibility and considerable anxiety. As a result there was some concern that she might need to repeat a grade in primary school. She came from an extremely caring family, but as in most life courses carried old wounds and fears. In her second sandtray she created an image of a cemetery in the upper left of the tray through which a gigantic snake moved toward the lower left quadrant. In the cemetery were three skeletons, three ghosts and a cat, beside which stood a shovel. Nearby were several witches, a large spider web with a black spider, and some temple ruins. On the far right she created a forest which contained a beautiful golden cathedral and some small animals and frogs who were near no water source. She then lighted nine candles in a line protecting this beautiful sanctuary. Near the center of the tray she placed a large lighted candle standing beside a waterwell. While completing the tray she accidentally burnt her fingers very slightly several times, requiring my attentive caring and ministrations.

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She commented on her tray, “They [the witches] are waking the dead and the ghosts and goblins are out to haunt but they must get back to the graveyard by midnight!” On the day she made this sand image, she brought with her a very old and tattered but beloved dress from when she was 5 years old and commented that she wanted to be a “baby” and somehow she managed to wiggle into that small dress before making her sand image. It is well known in sandplay theory that the conflict or conflicts are often revealed within the first several trays of a process. I had in a way been presented in this second tray, as had she, with the ghosts and goblins of her developmental past. She had experienced with this image the powerful awakenings of the serpent energy that had swept through that past. The shovel at hand indicated her willingness to dig them up. And, of course, the negative aspect of the Great Mother, the black spider, overshadowed her graveyard. The cat, with its witch association, was clear, for indeed the cat is a significant companion of the fierce aspect of the Great Mother mythologically, but it puzzled me as it was a sleeping cat. And she placed it not with the witch but with the skeletons and ghosts, which therefore numbered seven altogether in the cemetery proper. In this image she had experienced the tension of opposites through the proximity of fire and the water of the well, and I felt that fire and water would be powerful elemental forces in her process that would need reconciliation. The fire element itself was both fascinating and frightening to her. And it was clear that the lack of other water sources in the tray, resulting from her avoidance of water, gave the fire element an intensity that could be dangerous. Even the little frogs were without water. However, I felt the strength of the sanctuary with her wall of nine candles which she had created for her 9-year-old self as a line of defense against the powers of the cemetery and the reflections of the Terrible Mother. I wondered about this child’s fears and anxieties and their origins, and intuitively I sensed that many of them were primal and existed at a preconceptual level. Reviewing the child’s developmental history with the mother did corroborate old issues. The mother was in graduate school when the child was born, and at 2 months the child experienced a major separation in the primal relationship and was placed in surrogate care for most of the day.

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When the child was 6 months of age a sudden flood enveloped the family home and the infant was carried out of the home in the arms of her father, who had to make his way through knee-high water to a waiting rescue boat. On a cross-country air flight when she was 2 years of age she suddenly became critically ill with a 105-degree fever, during which she lost both her vision and her ability to walk. Emergency hospitalization led to a diagnosis of viral meningitis, possibly related to exposure to an air conditioner in the home of friends. A sibling was born shortly after the family had moved yet again during her third year. By the end of her first year in school the family had undergone multiple moves and everything “went to hell” in the words of her mother. So the digging went on! I still could not understand that sleeping cat in the cemetery – until one day quite late in the process when the child built a comfortable nest for a tiny cat in her sand image and then haltingly began to tell me she had poisoned the family cat when she was younger. Sometime during her fifth year the family bathroom was being retiled and the tile grout had been left next to the cat’s water bowl. She had found this crystalline grouting to be “shiny and pretty” and had sprinkled it into the cat’s water, from which the cat did indeed die. How terrible this confession was for her, and even worse the burden of that image in her little storehouse, the cemetery itself with its sleeping cat and her own little body storehouse. And how meaningful it became that she brought the dress from her fifth year. This child’s earliest experiences spoke to a number of events that had constellated the negative aspect of the Great Mother. Indeed, through her critical illness she had confronted the darkest aspect of that constellation, death itself. This was later borne out by a series of trays in which every particle of sand was removed and the trays were flooded with water. The initial flooded water trays were of the “polluted ocean,” and Terrible Mother images of octopus, shipwrecks with submerged skeletons, and other devouring symbols inhabited these waters. These “floods” recapitulated a profound experience dating from six months of age when the home itself had been flooded, necessitating bodily rescue by her father. In later trays these contaminated waters gave way to waters that families and children could float on in boats, or to bridges built out over the water for people on benches to sit on and contemplate. In two trays

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near the end of her process she created first an underwater temple with jewels (using the same temple as in that second image) and money scattered about in the water, revealing the new energies available to her in the unconscious realm, as well as an emerging underwater sanctuary of great beauty. In a final tray, in which the sand had been entirely removed, she created a beautiful solitary island grotto with a waterfall coursing down to the sea. This tray was then linked to a second tray by a large bridge to earth and a paradisiac landscape of home and family. In this way the balance of the water element was restored, with its link to land and consciousness. Near her beautiful island grotto waterfall were her little frogs of the second tray with mother frog sitting on a lily pad. In the same session in which she created the lovely grotto and waterfall, she went to a table after completing her sand image and began a miniature drawing of a preadolescent girl in bright colors. At the time she was approaching her tenth birthday. She then took scissors and cut out this image in the shape and size of an actual egg. So contained in this egg-shaped vessel was the birth of her newly formed nascent ego. (Often we observe the same phenomenon in the sand images with the use of a concrete figure emerging after the constellation of the self, which represents a self figure and which appears repeatedly in the sand images up to the conclusion of the process. This latter process is similar to the early phase of a sandplay series which, as I have noted, appears involutional in its nature. But in this final aspect of the sand process the spatial–temporal dimension is often futuristically oriented and on follow-up can be found to have been quite prophetic.) So in this way this child was able to recover from events in her young life over which she had had no control and in which her well-meaning parents, too, often had had no control. The fiery nature of her anxiety and restless agitation, which had been carried and expressed somatically, had disappeared. She was once more in harmonic balance with her inner and outer life as well as in her mind–body being. Shortly after her waterfall tray, she became interested in creating a rock grotto and pond in the family’s garden. One of the most remarkable experiences with this child occurred when we had concluded the process work. She wanted to see the slides of her images and share them with her mother, which I agreed to several

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months later. When the image of that second tray with its graveyard of ghosts, skeletons and cat came up, she suddenly sat very straight and began to name all those events that had been so hurtful and terrifying to her in the past. As she spoke she actually named seven critical events including the flood, her critical illness and the death of the cat, all of which occurred during her first five years of life. And in this experience a beautiful process of healing between mother and daughter also could be felt.

Other aspects of process work This material also presents different aspects of process work with which the sandplay therapist must be familiar. For as Jung himself has noted, there may be quite some fascination with the esoteric symbolism of the coniunctio, but there are other vital aspects of that mysterium and its process that cannot be ignored. The symbolism of death in all of its aspects, the grave and cemetery, the disintegration or dismemberment of the body as in skeletons and body parts, the ghosts which “have to get back to the graveyard by midnight” in darkness, and the nature of sacrifice itself are pertinent here. They represent an exchange of energy, and often that energy is not experienced until some time after the sacrifice or death of an old aspect. It may well be that we often do not entirely understand a death or grave or indeed a sacrificial scene in a sand image when it first appears, but we must remain highly attuned to its context and to its content and meaning for the image-maker him- or herself. Ultimately that process will clarify itself within the consciousness of the image-maker and eventually lead to some externalized form of that expression. Further, as Weinrib (1983, p.44) has pointed out, the willingness of the patient to forgo interpretation of sand pictures and to keep the inner alchemical process sealed is just such a sacrifice. As Jung (1980) noted, the development in process work usually shows an enantiodromian structure, like the text of the I Ching, and so it presents rhythmic alternations of negative and positive, loss and gain, dark and light. As we know from the experiences of sandplay, there is a wealth of symbols which vary enormously from case to case. Although everything is experienced in image form as a part of a symbolic process

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through the elements, the miniatures, or archetypal forms, it is, as Jung (1980, pp.38–39) has commented, “by no means a question of fictitious dangers but of very real risks upon which the fate of a whole life may depend.”

Figure 7.1 Loon and fish, Jackson Beardy, Ojibway Indian The loon here represents the spiritual aspect of the psyche, while the fish suggests the instinctual life. The tension between two opposites – spirit and matter, consciousness and unconsciousness – indicated by the broad diagonal split is then drawn together by the wavy lines (four in number), radiating out from a central core, the self. Note the number frequencies and resonating energies. In its original, color would provide a further dynamic. Source: Canadian Native Prints, Vancouver, British Columbia (1973). Marie Louise Von Franz (1980) Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and Psychology. Toronto: Inner City Books.

The illustrative material also speaks to the fact that these processes involve a descent to a realm often both unnamable and unspeakable, for its roots lie in the archaic darkness of the matriarchal level of consciousness. In this realm body and psyche are identical (see Figure 7.1). The work at this level in sandplay involves the deepest affects and is inevitably connected to preverbal, infantile processes including preconceptual somatic processes. The sandplay therapist must be willing to wait while

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there is as yet no image in the other’s awareness and where instinct, affect, and sensory perception begin to coalesce, first through body sensation and visual apprehension (which may often be intensified as memory or image begin to emerge from the shifting, changing forms within the sand). Beyond silence, affirmative mirroring attention as well as touch are beneficial in the holding process of often painful affects. What may be dangerous in the imagery must be contained with caring vigilance. For the 9-year-old girl, the fire was so hot that she actually burned herself several times. At another point in her work she built a large fire in the tray which, had I not thought to protect the bottom of the tray with an aluminum plate, would surely have burned the wood, demonstrating the intensity of heat that can damage the container itself. But I sensed she needed this fire as a physical expression of a bodily experience, perhaps the actual fever itself which had crippled her and threatened her life at a very early age. Similarly, water was another dangerous element that necessitated a flexibility on the part of the therapist in allowing freedom to explore without anxiety. With some youngsters, where the fire element has become so imbued with affects, it is necessary to take them outdoors and provide a large garbage can lid in which the dangerous contents can surface and be expressed through fire setting. Only then can they return to the sandtray and move back to more symbolic and smaller, safer fires.

Problems in the imaging process In the sand processes of adults who have experienced an ambivalent, deprived or absent primal connection to the natural mother or have undergone a serious split that demonstrates a profound lack of integration, their initial experiences in the sand often involve sculpting processes without the use of miniatures. It is likely that working in the sand without miniatures could be the necessary contact with the body in its earliest phases. Some persons can handle only dry sand and begin by making finger tracings without much effort at truly engaging in the earth element, let alone the use of water. Kalff felt that the patient who uses only dry sand does not have such an intimate connection with the earth, which neces-

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sarily relates to the body, and that dry sand may also be an indication of difficulties with colitis or intestinal diseases as well as asthma. She once commented that at the beginning of the sand process such persons have a difficult time in relating to their own bodies, but when they freely begin to use water with the sand or wet sand the healing process has been activated (Seminar at Pajaro Dunes, 1983). A next step may consist of simply allowing the sand to filter through the fingers and hands. Often the blue water of the tray is not “discovered” for some time. The trays may look disorganized, with areas of the sand left unattended and scattered. This often reflects considerable depression without affective connection. If we review a series of such images, we may begin to get a sense of a progression through somatic or body trays ultimately leading to the emergence of a small face or head. Or the work may consist of only rudimentary head-like circles. Facial expressions on these images are often either absent or flat and non-expressive until later in the work, when they begin to take on more expression as well as replications of the sense organs such as eyes, ears, nose and mouth. It is as though the senses and attunement to feelings both within and outside the body are very slowly being re-awakened. During the early part of such processes the image-maker often claims not to know what the image is or dismisses the image as without meaning, quickly returning to a conscious level involving concrete problems with their spouse or externalization of their conflicts. For the sandplay therapist without much experience, there may often be a feeling that “nothing is happening,” for in fact both the therapist and the image-maker may feel that these initial trays have little meaning. They may even feel that sandplay is not “working” since the images appear so primitive and unformed. The therapist may also unconsciously wish the image-maker to take up the use of the miniatures themselves. Every effort on the part of the sandplay therapist must be in the direction of supporting these initial efforts at discovering and exploring symbolic meaning through the archetypal pathways available and suitable to the image-maker at that moment in their spatial–temporal being. For these processes demonstrate the frailty or absence of the inner connection to the self due to very early and very profound disruptions in the develop-

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mental epochs of the primal relationship. And if the disruption has been severe, there is then a corresponding faulty ego development. Usually there will be a moment when the water element appears and becomes incorporated with the earth element, whether initially through the uncovering of the blue of the tray, through the appearance of a miniature water vessel or through the tentative discovery of the actual water pitcher next to the therapist’s tray. (Sometimes this occurs accidentally when the therapist’s available sandtray happens to be doused with water.) When this next phase occurs, the process begins to move along rather dramatically, acquiring depth, with the patient undergoing a simultaneous intensification of feeling and insight into the meaning of the images as well as a sense of pleasure with the water–earth elements. Dreams become more important and are “remembered.” We must always remember that water and earth are the most elemental level from which new growth can emerge and through which we may eventually find access to the transcendental. The images themselves become well formed with a new element of depth to them, and indeed access to a deeper level of the unconscious has now become obvious. It is at this point in the process that one could say the image-making process develops a tripartite quality involving the image itself which is visual, the somatic component or body feelings brought about by the engagement of the body through the fingers and hands, and the meaning. Significantly, what may first emerge as a new development during this phase is an image which speaks more directly to the archetypal and matriarchal feminine, whether by actual use of the miniatures or through sculpting, indicating the establishment of a reconnection. As Kalff often stressed, gaining access to the instinctual sphere corresponds to a rebirth. We must realize that just as our own birth requires a natural mother, so our own symbolic rebirth must in some way express a connection to a spiritual mother. In those cases where miniatures are used (rather than sculpting) by persons who have suffered profound psychic wounds and carry deep conditionings and fears in their somatic storehouse, similar analogies present themselves. Trays are often flat, the sand is rarely moved about, water is avoided for some time, and the miniatures tend to be chosen from

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those that are “wooden,” lacking both clear sense organs and feeling expressions or functions, such as the Fisher-Price repertoire. In such cases the images may initially be repetitious. They may appear chaotic, without apparent intent, or repetitively concrete, e.g. “this is a park” or “this is my living room with the TV.” The same lack of spontaneous affective connection may emerge along with an apparent lack of meaning as to the image itself. In some cases this may provoke an avoidance of the sandtray or a feeling of helplessness in its presence. We do soon discover in practice that some people have a poorly developed symbolizing function due to early damage or wounds stemming from an unsatisfactory or absent primal relationship with the mother. They tend to grasp only what is referentially concrete. If you explore dreams, they have either no reality for them or only a concretistic one, or they insist they do not dream at all and are quite surprised when after several sessions of sandplay the dreams begin surfacing on a regular basis. When the person is cut off from his or her instinctual life and has difficulty symbolizing, the psyche tends to transmit its message by concretizing it into somatic complaints whether by headaches, sleeplessness, agitation, hyperventilation, panic attacks, stomach problems and actual physical illness. Ultimately, this may lead to very grave physical disease. With its focus on symbolic meaning through images, sandplay provides the potential for the development of this suppressed or lost symbolical inner life as well as for locating those body systems which carry the blocked meanings or intents. It is extremely useful therefore to be attentive to any issues involving somatic complaints from the very onset of the sandplay process. Similarly, subtle changes in these conditions need to be tracked carefully throughout the work. At appropriate points in the process body work itself may be indicated such as shiatsu, massage, dance and movement, and indeed many persons indicate a desire for this rather spontaneously at some point in their process work. This would suggest a need for some understanding of the concept alexithymia, which literally means without words or feelings. In most analytic literature persons who have this inability often appear to have “psychosomatic” manifestations and histories. It has been suggested that the underlying process is one in which images are experienced but remain

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without meaning and therefore are not acted upon. The feelings through lack of expression become diverted to various body systems leading to quite serious somatic issues such as rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, asthma, or skin disorders such as neurodermatitis. There are two differing views on this condition. The first holds that it is a structural or genetic defect in the cortical and limbic-hypothalmic areas. The processing of associative connections between the cortex and the limbic system responsible for feeling is disrupted, and pathways seem to be rerouted through the hypothalamus to the autonomic, endocrine, and immune systems. A more psychodynamic explanation is based on the probable suppression, repression, or denial of right hemispheric experience, that is, the image-producing hemisphere of the brain. Without this right hemispheric experience, the left hemisphere cannot process the experience through language and thus words. While we may see both conditions in our practice – patients with neurologic and other brain and central nervous system dysfunctions as well as those who simply have a poorly developed, impaired or lost symbolic processing ability – it is clear in both cases that the accessing and flow of energy and meaning have been short-circuited or blocked such that the body itself becomes the processor. Indeed current research itself suggests that processing and storage is a normal psychophysiological process to which we all have access with varying levels of ease of accessibility through the movement, flow and interchange of somatic and symbolic representations and processes. The critical cutting edge appears to be the enhancement of the symbolic process, which necessarily must be an experience in images and of images. The latter may need careful nurturing and encouragement in its development. The current literature on alexithymia suggests that such patients have little variation in affect, experience an absence or impairment of symbolization, report few dreams or fantasies, and have difficulty in the expression of feeling. Kast (1992), McDougall (1989) and others do not feel that these so-called “psychosomatic” patients lack the capacity for symbol formation but in fact may have difficulty in the expression of feeling, for in fact these people may be intensely emotional. McDougall (1989, p.94) has suggested that her psychosomatic patients did not suffer from an inability to express their emotions, but rather exhibited an inability to

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contain and reflect on an excess of affective experience. Jacoby (1986, p.110) has asked what can be done, using the analytically oriented approach, for those people who either experience “a split between body and spirit” or who “cannot develop their symbolizing function” to get in touch with their bodies, that is, with the psychic experience of bodily impulses, feelings and sensations. Those suffering psychosomatic distress may produce archetypal images and therefore do reveal a capacity for symbolization, but they appear to remain emotionally distanced from that imagery. With these individuals the upsurge of affect reaches the threshold of the “zone of meaning,” appears to short-circuit it and to discharge itself into the body or bodily organs. The body becomes the last bulwark against reconnecting affectively and achieving integration. Fordham’s (1987) theory is relevant here, for it accepts the primal self as a psychosomatic unity from the very beginning of life, through which the child’s ego and bodily growth will unfold by means of the dynamic processes of deintegrative–reintegrative dynamisms promoted by archetypal activity within the dyadic mother–infant relationship. In a steady rhythmic interplay, the infant, through deintegration of the self or through initial separations from wholeness, comes into connection with its internal and external environment. This deintegrative unfolding of the primary psychosomatic self breaks up an original wholeness while allowing external object relations to form. The deintegrative experiences are then reintegrated in a process of retreat and assimilation within. The rhythmic alteration of this process brings about the slow development of the ego, in which bodily sensations are differentiated from mental representations. Note that here again we encounter the suggestion of rhythmic ordering processes, which ultimately lend themselves to the development of self. When the mother meets the archetypal expectations in a satisfying way, the changing process creates the conditions for the development of mental representations or symbolic images. In the deintegrative process she becomes the container for the interplay of opposites whereby they can be experienced safely by the infant. However, through impairment of this process or breakdown in care by the mother the infant may need to develop early defenses for its psychic survival, which later hinder ego development and the critical

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capacity for symbolization. Thus for symbolization to develop, for bodily experiences to become differentiated from their symbolic representations, the earliest life experience requires containment within a dyadic relationship wherein the mother can provide the infant with meaning for its affective archetypal experiences. Sidoli (1993), basing her theory on the work of Fordham (1987), has hypothesized that in such cases the primitive affects brought about by certain experiences in infancy were not attributed any psychic meaning by the mother. That is to say, the mother had not been able to process the excess affective contents for her infant because she was either emotionally disturbed or absent, whether physically or emotionally. She concludes, therefore, that such patients do produce archetypal images, but they are disaffected, as in the case of alexithymia. In a sense those who suffer this impairment become emotionally detached observers of the images in an attempt to defend themselves against feeling the horror, fear or despair evoked by the archetypal image in relation to their own personal life experiences. They may often in fact view their creations as simply artistically expressive. The archetypal and primitive contents have been split off from what might otherwise be seen as a rather well-developed personality (Sidoli 1993, pp.175–176). Splitting, unlike deintegrative experiences (which are a normal part of development), in this sense becomes structural, and in the case of so-called “psychosomatic manifestations” the split becomes one between the body and the spirit, that is, a lack of meaningful integration of the polarities of the archetype. In this way the inner emotional memories and fears, indeed the meanings themselves, often with considerable affective charge, become lost in the archaic somatic memory storehouse of the body. These individuals are prone to somatic vulnerabilities and the possibility of somatic eruptions. In this condition the ambiguity of the body, being in both the past and the present simultaneously, is taken up by the body in the very ground of experience and can cause considerable discomfort as well as profound illness. Marion Woodman (1982) began her body workshops out of an awareness of just such splitting between the somatic and the spiritual. She has commented: “where the split between body and spirit is so deep that the instincts are damaged, the psyche may be producing the healing

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images but the instinctual energy cannot connect to the image” (1982, p.86). Her body workshops offer the conditions for reconstructive experiential and affective means of reintegrating the bodily elements. The healing process, therefore, involves a reconciliation of this split in much the same manner as the integrative process described by Fordham (1987). She has concluded that the “dialogue with the body” is therefore crucial to any understanding, for body feeling plays a decisive role in the healing process. In sandplay it is indeed rare to meet anyone incapable of symbolizing and creating images. What is probably most common is the inability to project and connect meaning to the images at a verbal, conceptual level. However, like body workshops, the sand bypasses left hemispheric processing by obviating the immediate need for conceptual thought and rational explanations through its lack of intellectual ruminations and delayed interpretation. In this way sandplay creates ideal conditions for the development of the impaired or lost symbolic imaging process of the right hemisphere of the brain through which, as considerable research now points, bodily healing becomes activated. The body itself thus becomes less of a containing object of pain, distress, and fear. When apprehended as the vessel of incarnation, respect and care for the body, its messages, needs, and comforts becomes an individuating necessity. Sand process, occurring as it does in a dyadic relationship, re-creates similar conditions for the deintegrative–reintegrative experiences of the self, which become imbued with meaning through the presence of the other and the mirroring-witnessing-containing process inherent in that relationship. More importantly, as that emotional relatedness develops, there is access at a nonverbal, preconceptual level through sandplay processes to the transcendent function, whereby the reconciling symbol(s) can emerge, thereby creating the conditions for the reconciliation of opposites. The meaning of that apprehended experience itself becomes the bridge between the mental and the physical. As the first glimpses of meaning are apprehended by the body–mind being through the sand images, there is a deepening of energy. A new connection can be felt which may start only as a trickle and, gathering momentum, may eventually become a stream and perhaps later a waterfall. So the energy necessary for the meaning is there, and it slowly

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becomes freer, perhaps with more force behind it. The attention demanded by sand imaging, the necessity to be here in the moment, causes fundamental changes to occur. This attention takes on an increasingly caring aspect in regard to what is happening inside and outside the body. It does not need to be nameable, explainable, knowable. It is not yet readily available to rational, conceptual thought. Similarly the process of the immediacy of being needs no rational thought. By “letting it be,” required of both therapist and image-maker, the inner process develops into a spacious field of awareness. Being present with that attention and energy in a repetitive way causes a deepening in the levels of subtlety in which past, present, and future no longer exist. The flow of meaning gathers energy, and we become more sensitive to what is going on in our bodies by simply bringing our presence and attention to the moment, to the absorbed process of sorting through and discovering our images and having the freedom and sanctuary for meanings to be apprehended. For in the observing process of image-making we bring attention and therefore meaning to that image. It is at this moment that past, present, and future begin to become intertwined. When we encounter this newness of apprehension, the weaver or spinner often emerges from the sand, as does the white snake or colors such as blue or green, images indicating that the process of blending and integration is occurring. While certain moments in the process may bring painful affects, memories, terrors, sacrifices and symbolic deaths representing that part of the past that must die, the new meanings which accrue from these “re-memberings” and dramas provide the energy and movement by which we discover the transcendent in ourselves. This has also been my experience when dealing with those who suffer severe illness and actual anticipated death. For the sand process does not let us down in the discovery of our own reconciling and healing symbolic images. This leads to the integration of the bodily elements, sandplay’s unique ability to provide the essential dialogue with the body. Such a process of gathering and letting-be opens us to a more spacious field of awareness of others, that of the compassionate heart active in our daily lives. For compassion is inseparable from wisdom, and this speaks to the enlightened consciousness.

chapter 8

THE MANIFESTATION OF THE COMPASSIONATE HEART You see, there are plenty of secrets – only a few fools, morbid intellects, think we have solved all the riddles; anybody with even the smallest amount of imagination knows that the world is a great enigma, and psychology is one of the foremost enigma. And you can touch one with your hands in this question of the subtle body. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes on the seminar given in 1934–1939 by C.G. Jung

It is hard for people to think meaning is on the material side. But experience shows that it touches both sides. It is the bridge between the mental and the physical. David Bohm, “Matter as a Meaning Field” in Weber (1986) Dialogues with Scientists and Sages

We are entirely capable of touching the ultimate dimension. When we touch one thing with deep awareness, we touch everything. Touching the present moment, we realize that the present is made of the past and is creating the future. Thich Nhat Hanh, from Living Buddha, Living Christ

There is a relevant story told by Chuang Tzu. One day Confucius and some of his students were walking by a turbulent river which swept through rocks, rapids and over a magnificently high waterfall. The water was so swift that no fish or other water creature could swim in it. Confucius suddenly saw an old man dive into the water. He was playing in the raging currents and suddenly went under. Supposing that the man was in some kind of trouble and intended to end his life, Confucius sent his students running downstream to try to save the old man. But after he 227

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had gone a couple of hundred paces, the old man beached safely on the bank and stood up unharmed, the water streaming from his hair. Singing a song, he then strolled along the embankment. The students brought him to Confucius, who asked him how on earth he had managed to survive in the torrents among the rocks. He answered, “I go under with the swirls and come out with the eddies, following along the way the water goes and never thinking about myself. That’s how I can stay afloat” (Chuang Tzu 1968, pp.204–205). In another rendition he is said to have explained that he knew how to go in with the descending vortex and come out with the ascending one. He was, of course, a wise old man of the Tao.

The unbroken process of change Like Taoist art, sandplay processing is a seamless web of unbroken movement and change. It is characterized by vibrations, undulations, waves, patterns, and frequencies of ripples on a moving stream, river or sea. When we photograph these images we may believe we have caught a particular form, but at a deeper level these images are never permanent. Like moving clouds or the crest of waves, the concrete shapes and expressions last only long enough in a general form for us as observers to consider them as units in a flowing process of time and change and to briefly grasp their ever deepening subtle meanings. We do not jump from state to state as is suggested by the forms and progression of the trays (or the photographs and slides of those forms). With strong winds, clouds change rapidly. Similarly, with slow winds, the mountains and earth change their shape continuously but very slowly. Some of these changes can be caught for an instant “outside,” while some remain more invisible “inside” matter itself. This inner geography has the same subtleties as the outer one. In a sense what we are experiencing is a more subtle example of the process suggested by the wu-chi diagram (Figure 1.1, p.32), in which movement and stillness follow one another. When movement reaches its extreme, stillness follows. In the Taoist sense, yin and yang, stillness and movement, form the forceful energy of creation. This same process occurs for the person creating and apprehending an image in the sand. There is

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an energy and movement that just as suddenly is “complete” and the maker exclaims “it’s finished now … ” followed by a stillness in which he is simply “being” with that form. That apprehended process is the underlying and undulating form of transformation throughout sandplay. While we might like to be able to jump into the descending vortex and rise up with the ascending one without danger and with complete ease, that is possible only for the sage or the adept who has spent many years practicing his art. It is much more likely that we common mortals must experience the undulations and wave-like patterns of descent and ascent in their rhythmic play of opposites through movement and stillness. Indeed we are in an ocean of untapped and unmanifested energy. The matter that we call our “body” is a small wave which has become manifested in the larger ground of existence. At another level we therefore imaginatively experience two processes, the first being that of cyclic patterns of process, and the second, the linear threads and motifs of one’s unique life process on a temporal level. That endless dialectic in vibration and wave pattern of energic movement is what weaves the web of the individual life in the larger ground of existence. Intuitively we may realize that no process ever repeats itself exactly. In the same way the shapes and forms that give expression to a sand process never repeat themselves. It is like the stones and rocks one finds at the river or seaside. Some may have shapes and holes or hollows carved out by the water whose forms can never be repeated. Some of these may convey hidden meanings to us, hard to grasp yet eternal. Each one has its own unique outward and perhaps internal markings, and when we return it to the bed of its existence its essence continues changing in a process that is unceasing and perpetual in its own life history.

Internal geography A sandplay image is therefore a projection of time and of complex process, not of static conceptual shape. It is rich with the complexities of suggestion and hints at layers of meaning, many of which may not be obvious at first or even second glance. Indeed many of these hidden

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meanings may not surface for years, for often the material forms and their meanings arising out of a sand process are not expressed in linear time or integrated into the external life for years after they are psychically available in the sandplay imaging. These representations to be realized later in time are more impalpable but no less essential. In this sense, sand imaging and the mythology of one’s life that develops from the contours of the sand and water become a subtle blending of the actual, the magical, the symbolic and the anticipatory. The body, like the cosmos itself, is in perpetual change. To create a sand image itself is a harmonizing act which brings the imager’s mental representations into direct relationship with the pattern of energies and current in which his or her mind–body is immersed. It takes some time for imagers to align their senses, the vital media, through which they can become attuned to the waves, currents and energy sources. Silence and stillness lie at the heart of this process, for they lead us back to our original nature. To return to our original nature is an awakening to an intuition that is grounded in the body. This inward intuition can be quite valuable to healing and health, for these are the energies and currents that flow throughout the psychophysical system. These expressions are as much prompted by momentary intuition as by an inner spirit, and they come from a vast repertoire of forms associated with subtle-mattered energy that flows throughout the soma and can be mapped in the same manner as those currents of subtle energy flowing throughout landscapes, with their trees, rocks, hills, mountains, rivers or seas. These momentary glimpses are what I would call the internal geography of sandplay, which can often be revealed to us through the sand images (see Figures 8.1 and 8.2). Some examples illustrative of that inner geography and its more beneficent influence are pertinent. In the first, a woman created a tray at the vertical end which was suggestive of a “body” tray and which initially looked like a very large vessel with four chambers. As she stood looking at it she simply commented that it looked like a heart, “a very large heart,” she added, “with four chambers.” Two weeks later another heart was created, this time inside what appeared to be the chest cavity. I felt intuitively that this repetition was significant, and I asked if she might have some thoughts about the heart. She then recalled that six

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Figure 8.1 and Figure 8.2 Hand, feet, head and skull: an embodiment Sand image done by 55-year-old Dutch woman whose entire life was a period of intense and rapid change, the catalyst being the termination of a long-term marriage. In making the sandtray, she first placed her hands in the sand, then took off her shoes and pressed her feet in the sand firmly. Similarly she then tied her hair back and pressed her head and face in the sand. She commented: “I feel so wonderful with this image … something so ancient, so much deep … I wanted to ‘look through, to look into’ … it is the inside, my brains, the skull, the teeth, the bones … it’s me and all of us … it is the inside of us all!” (Note left foot, which contains actual stones from mesas and cliffs of Southwest America, while left hand contains spiral ammonite millions of years old.)

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weeks before, while I had been away for a long period of time, she had been out walking with a friend and had suddenly had a spasm in the chest which lasted some pain-filled 25 minutes before abating. Her attitude toward this event was such that she simply forced herself to “keep going until the pain disappeared.” She suddenly recalled that in childhood she had actually been diagnosed as having a heart murmur. A further rumination revealed that some two years earlier, and within several months of the death of her mother, she had had a similar period of spasms. At that time, cardiovascular examinations revealed a quite enlarged heart, but she was encouraged by her doctor “not to worry.” The synchronistic aspect of all of these connections seemed to have found expression just when I had separated from her creating a symbolic repetition of an earlier event. This had in turn awakened aspects of unresolved grief related to the death of her mother, which may have triggered a psychophysical repetition of symptomatology involving the heart. This led to a deeper understanding of earlier developmental factors that had been casually passed over in the initial history she had provided. It triggered a memory of a major separation at the age of 3, when she was sent away by her mother for six months to another family member. That earlier panic and dread had remained unnamed like a silent event in the somatic memory. We often find in such situations that some persons exhibit an alarmingly careless attitude towards themselves as well as towards their own inner child aspect. Often where the memories have been stored unnamed and silent, those persons remain totally oblivious to what is happening while the bodily organ takes over and expresses the meaning of the psychic pain. In the case of this woman, the meaning and significance was then deepened even further by her sudden realization that these incidents were suggestive both of her denial and suppression of critical bodily events and of a conscious awareness of problems related to chronic fatigue and depression. A third image was created shortly afterward which was again a chest-like cavity with a normal heart. While she was creating this image, she spontaneously commented, “I am making big changes in my

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lifestyle!” She further commented that she did not know what the image was but it was “unfinished.” Over time, these flowing reflections brought on powerful attitudinal changes leading to spontaneous involvement in Qi Gong, shiatsu and other means of bodily relaxation. Later on, these attitudinal shifts brought about the realization that she might have to make a physical move from a home that was intolerably noisy, where she suffered frequent sleep disturbances leading to chronic fatigue. In such a way the many-layered meanings of her own inner geography began to integrate her past, present and future history, a future the two of us could not yet glimpse. A second illustration is that of a man who was in the midst of divorce, and during a period of profound instability had become so enraged at a colleague at his workplace that he had been fired. These events all coalesced shortly after he had begun his sand process. Significantly he had recounted several dreams relating to fire in which either huge boilers were overheating and on the verge of explosion or wood stoves were so fired they glowed. I encouraged him at this point to attempt some painting at home, and he began bringing paintings to his sessions. On this occasion he brought with him a painting of a far-off ship on the distant horizon of the sea. The three masts of the ship were being engulfed by flames. In the foreground of the painting was a large green spiral out of which emerged a Celtic cross contained in a triple circle. My own reflection on this was that of the phenomenon of St Elmo’s fire in which a bright light is seen on the water by sailors during a severe storm at sea, often taken as a prophecy that the worst is yet to come. St Elmo himself died at sea during a severe storm but promised the sailors as he was dying that he would show himself in some form if they were destined to survive disasters at sea. This image also occurs in Moby Dick as Ahab sets out in the final denouement in his struggle with the white whale. It appears as an eerie image of a ship with its three masts burning, with three additional tapering white flames on each of the masts. Edinger (1975) explains that this image evokes the noumenon of the divine fire of the Holy Spirit. At a certain point in one’s psychic development this image may serve as a unifying event, bringing together the separated aspects of the personality

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and creating a flow of communication among them as well as with the central core. The Celtic cross emerging from the spiral in the painting seemed to allude to the greater journey of the patient’s own individuation process from which was emerging a glimpse of a calm and unifying creative center in the form of the triple encircled cross. I sensed this young man’s intense suffering in this image and knew that to reach this calm center we must pass through that fire. He then created a very simple sand image by sculpting with the sand and water. It appeared to be a bent column or rod anchored in the earth at the bottom of the tray and moving up through the center of the tray directly in front of where he sat. On each side of the column were two small round spheres totaling four in number. Quite spontaneously he commented that he was having terrible back pain during the week and was still suffering from it. He then finished the tray and commented that he had no idea what it was. As he sat in stillness with this tray he was suddenly overcome with emotion and sobbed uncontrollably. He then shared memories which were breaking across the threshold into consciousness. These memories indeed involved both his back and fire. His father had been in the military and believed in the value of corporal punishment in training and disciplining children. When he felt his son had transgressed in some way he took the boy to the basement of the home which also served as a boiler room for the furnace. In a rather small space the father carried out his brutal discipline by beating the boy on the back with a belt. If the boy attempted to dodge or escape the blows to his back, he stood the danger of being burned by the furnace, which in fact often happened. He commented that he still had a few burn scars on his back from those childhood events. We did not at that moment discuss the tray further. But later, as I stood in front of it, the image seemed to convey an injury to the spinal cord with its several vertebrae. It was here in the archaic body storehouse that the intense dread and fear of physical pain and fire had been stored and contained for many years, including all that goes with chronic back difficulties. We spent quite some time together on these memories and fears. And as the meanings deepened in their rippling subtleties this man was able eventually to work with his own suppressed rage, which had so recently become explosive and projected into other life situations and

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persons, with a corresponding improvement in his back condition. The Celtic cross had also foretold an emerging spirituality in deep connection with his own roots and origins. It is always important in sandplay imaging to be aware of what energy sources are being touched. In addition, the content and meaning of these images must always be understood within the specific contextual moment – that is, the present moment bounded by the past and opening to the future. Often the overtones of meaning can be discovered only by degrees. Significant polarities emerge as there is movement and change toward harmonization. Often color polarities become important, for they suggest dialectic significance or oscillations between opposites without which there can be no movement in time and change. One often finds paired colors such as red and blue, black and gold, gold and silver, or blue and green. Some examples provided by train imagery come to mind. In all three of the following examples, critical life and death polarities emerged. Of significance in two of the three examples was the pairing of green and black, represented by the frogs, turtles and train symbolism. While their contextual meanings differed, at a deeper level they all suggested aspects of the turbulent universe as well as an ultimate tranquillity, that is, aspects of the death and life process. These powerful opposites must be contained by the sandplay therapist without giving in to the urge to rush in with solutions or “to do something.” The first was an image created by a 10-year-old boy. Ten days before the creation of the tray, his two older brothers had been involved in a head-on collision while driving home near a freeway entrance. The oldest brother, who had been driving, had escaped with minor injuries, while the second brother, of whom the boy was especially fond, lay in a coma in intensive care with multiple head and neck injuries. A decision had just been taken to perform brain surgery. There was grave concern that he would not survive. The 10-year-old had not been told the gravity of the situation, although he knew his brother was in intensive care. The boy’s sand image revealed an oval train track with a train speeding along its way. At closer observation, it could be seen that the little caboose had come loose from its coupling with the rest of the train, leaving it to careen along the track. Behind the caboose were two frogs on

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the track and three more frogs were grouped near the track. Above the frogs was the sweeping man with a broom and a Spartan warrior. Three green turtles enter the scene from the upper left-hand corner. The number two is repeated throughout the tray, suggesting a push toward resolution from the tension of opposites. The train, of course, can be a energic force of incredible aggression and speed brought about by means of the element of fire and heat, both of which are at the very heart of transformation. In this sense then we have a special kind of situation in which the elements are in a state of being condensed into other essences such as vapor or steam. So what was being expressed may have been a labile or extremely volatile situation. The train also conveys journeying, and its many meanings involve departures, arrivals and separations in life over which one often has little control. In contrast with the intense heat it carries, its metallic form can also imply a cold nature, suggesting the cold swiftness of its propelling energic expression. The subtle aspect here could be the chilling and ruthless turn of events by which the critically injured brother had been brought to the brink of death by an act of fate. The sweeper, often a prefiguration of death, suggests that this indeed was the case, and this meaning is quite apparent in the field of the unconscious of the 10-year-old who made the sand image. As in the courage of the warrior, he was certainly also expressing a certain courage to confront the gravity of the situation. The boy was able to talk about his fear and worry for his brother. The task for the therapist in this situation was the containment of such powerful opposites, life and death. The frogs spoke to me of creation and resurrection, as in ancient Egyptian mythology. In addition, there were five children in the family and there were five frogs in total at and on the track. They were all grouped where the caboose had come loose. The two frogs on the track perhaps represented the big brother and little brother in some aspect of the helpful instinctual life and the will to achieve transformation of which I have spoken earlier. The turtles were also positive harbingers, for while they imply abandonment and separation, they also can be supportive rescuers, as noted by Bradway (1994). Turtle imagery in this boy’s process was indeed a significant and evolving symbolism, for later it led the way through a process

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of transformation to the Ninja warriors and his own male development as well as to a spiritual awakening, for in fact the original Ninjas themselves were poet-monks deeply dedicated to spiritual endeavors. The second example was an image created by a woman in the last month of pregnancy. She had come to sandplay in her second month of pregnancy after a tumultuous separation from her husband leading to eventual and quite bitter divorce proceedings. She expressed anxiety that she would lose the baby by reason of her emotional lability and alternating periods of rage and depression. Further, she felt that these negative energies and emotions were not harmonious for the new life she carried within her. I concurred with her, for indeed her behavior was tempestuous and unpredictable. By the latter part of both her pregnancy and her sand process she was again in a state of inner balance and harmony and looked forward with hope and eagerness to the birth of her baby. During the last month of her pregnancy, she too created the same oval track with the speeding train. As she stood completing the image, she suddenly exclaimed, “Uh oh, I’m having contractions and I think my water has burst!” The two of us flew out the door to my car and sped to the hospital, which was only minutes away, where a number of hours later, to her great joy, her perfectly formed and healthy baby was delivered. This illustrative material does suggest that the therapist had to intervene in an active way, but such intervention is quite an exception to the more common attitude of trusting that the psyche will find its own solutions. When I returned to my office and more carefully observed the image in the tray, I discovered that here, too, the little caboose had come loose from the train, perhaps through her sudden jarring awareness of the onset of contractions and water. Similarly, there was a little frog sitting behind the caboose on the track! However, in this tray there was no sweeper but rather two very beautiful and majestic trees. I felt the incredible energies and tensions of that moment prior to birthing and new life. Sandplay process and the containing aspects of our relationship together had provided the context, freedom, protection and sanctuary for the baby’s safe separation from the womb and emergence into a harmonious world. In that sense, I had become part of her own psyche’s search for a greater solution in having a healthy baby born safely.

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The third train image was created by a woman who had been repeatedly molested by her brother between the ages of 5 and 15. When she reached puberty she tried to inform her mother, but no intervention or protection occurred and the molestation ceased only when the brother left for military service. The sand image revealed a deep crevice opening which developed into a tunnel in a mound. A train speeds along on a track into the mouth of the tunnel. The engine itself has entered the tunnel. On the top of the mound above the tunnel opening is a child’s bed turned on its side with a small dog and a delicate white rabbit inside with pillows and comforter. Nearby is a clay vessel and a basket of flowers. The child herself is not there. This tray led to a full amnestic lifting, with affective recall of the pain and angst of the actual molestation at the age of 5. Perhaps the train conveyed the penetration of the body by a forceful masculine energy. Indeed the tunnel-cave sculpting was remarkably similar to the feminine anatomy. The missing-child aspect was suggestive of the dissociation many women experience as a part of such a painful violation of their bodies. The helpful masculine and feminine instinctual aspects of the dog and the white rabbit were a motif which recurred throughout her sand process to its conclusion. The white rabbit motif, which I have often observed as an important motif in the work of women, brings to mind a story Kalff often told. In a test of motivation, Buddha said to the Moon, “Go see what they can give us for food.” The Moon came to the brown rabbit who had cooked a nice supper but only for himself; he went to the black rabbit who said he did not have enough to share; he went to the white rabbit who had nothing at all to eat. He was busy meditating, but he interrupted himself and asked the Moon, “Do you like meat?” and he suddenly threw himself into the fire to offer his own sacrifice and died in the process. The Moon then went to the Buddha, who asked what the Moon would like, and the Moon replied, “ I want the white rabbit with me.” That is why the white rabbit now sits in the lap of the Buddha on the moon (Swamy and Swamy, 1918, p.118). There is another story about the white rabbit going to Paradise and bodily transcending earthly existence. In this story all the animals were called by the Buddha to choose their own paradise, but the white rabbit

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was too busy with his work to do so. The Buddha, who was pleased by the white rabbit’s serious endeavors and perseverance, then gave him the special choice of paradise with his own natural earthly body. The white rabbit thus became the only animal who transcended with the body. In the Christian world this act of transcendence is referred to as the animula or the Ascension of Maria. The animula is the act of elevation of the feminine presence to heavenly status by official pronouncement of Pope Pius XII in 1950. The assumptio mariae, as it is known, expresses the idea of a very sublime earthly or feminine aspect, which Mary brought up to heaven. Mary became the only mortal being to be united with her body immediately after her death, a thing which happens to other mortals only on the day of judgment according to Catholic doctrine. As Jung noted in Nietzche’s Zarathustra: Notes on the seminars given in 1934–1939 by C.G. Jung While we all unite with our bodies – of course the subtle body not the gross body, but containing a reasonable amount of physical atoms – Mary had that chance of being the only one to be united with her body immediately after her death and so she carried up the earth principle. (Jung 1988, p.1081)

In her sandplay process, this woman, whose feminine had been wounded at such a young age, developed a new and vital spiritual aspect through a deeply felt reconnection to her own divine inner feminine nature. Mere acceptance of the belief that divinity lies within is a far cry from intuitively experiencing its truth; yet, until that apprehension dawns, nothing of lasting value has been gained.

Symbolization and healing The internal geography that emerges in sandplay, whose somatic aspect often features the revelation of stored memories of pain, grief, loss or rage, reveals landscapes that frequently are unspeakable. The meaning is dramatized by the body, often in a repetitive manner, until new meanings can develop. Somatic eruptions are therefore very likely to occur during the sand process. Acknowledgment, expression and containment of these often dramatic and negative affects, which are released by accessing the

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archaic body storehouse through symbolic images, often result in a decreased severity of bodily symptoms. It is equally essential to healing that these meanings triggering energic expression in the soma be retrieved and released. Often it is valuable to name the unnamed feelings. However, the key to building the bridge over the mind–body divide lies in the dynamics of the transcendent function and the quest for the reconciling symbol. The pathway to this mysterious process of bridging lies in symbolization. That symbolization process is enhanced through repetition, which creates both the necessary movement and stillness – the dialectical process – through which transformation becomes apprehended by the mind–body in a rhythmically ordering process. Kalff used to stress that with each centering that occurred, thus with each union, there was a slow and steady gathering of strength whose final outcome was a strong foundation for the nascent personality. In this way the split between image and affect can be healed as well as the split between psyche and soma. The soma aspect becomes less vulnerable, and a sense of vitality emerges from the flowing energy, which is then carried outward by the mind–body being into the person’s life. In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke speaks of the vital necessity simply to “be” with these images: Some of these changes cause many to lose all perspective. And, as with the man on the pinnacle of the mountain, unusual imaginings emerge and strange sensations arise that seem to grow beyond everything endurable. But it is necessary that we experience that also. We must accept our existence to the greatest extent possible; everything, the unprecedented also, needs to be accepted. That is basically the only case of courage required of us: to be courageous in the face of the strangest, the most whimsical and unexplainable thing we could encounter. (Rilke 1992, p.79)

As Weinrib has pointed out, Kalff began to believe that the material elements of sandplay acted as a kind of a metaphor for the body. She found confirmation for this hypothesis when patients who were physically ill unconsciously made pictorial representations in the sand of diseased organs whose

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shape they did not know; or there would be some representation of the location in the body where the organ was situated. (Weinrib 1983, p.40)

Kalff most often made slide presentations in which these ideas were confirmed. This aspect of sandplaying may bring with it eruptions of profound discomfort in the body. In these periods of psychic and somatic distress, there can also be considerable danger to which we must be carefully attuned and attentive. The following relevant event occurred just prior to my leaving for an international conference. A woman had come to me in the greatest of despair. Although highly educated and intelligent she had become homeless, having left her husband and two young children several years earlier. She had left the state where her family lived, hoping to find employment, but had been unsuccessful and had slipped ever more deeply into a darkening depression. At the same time she experienced an increase in bodily complaints and symptomatology, including bronchial and sinus infections as well as asthma, which had developed in childhood. Her hope was that she could re-establish a home and share physical and legal custody of her two children. She was keenly aware of the damaging aspects of her abandonment of her children but felt no other course had been available to her. She had heard of sandplay and thought perhaps she might find her way to “reconnecting to life.” Since she had no income I worked out a pro bono arrangement whereby once employed she might later be able to contribute to her process work with me. Her early history was an intensely painful one. Her mother had been a catatonic schizophrenic who was in and out of hospitals and institutions in a series of separations from the child from birth to the age of 5. She felt that her mother loved her, and during those times when she was home she recalled her mother’s tenderness but always in a “dark room” or “a dark mist-like” atmosphere. When the woman was 5 years old, the mother suddenly died of a pulmonary aneurysm during a visit home from the hospital and while the child was present. Her father then married the mother’s sister, who expressed a highly ambivalent attitude toward this child throughout the rest of her childhood.

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During the early course of the sand process I was keenly aware of the soma aspects. These were expressed through an agitated anxiety, which bespoke the terrific inner dread and archaic fears that lay like a secret in her innermost being, unnamed, unknown, dimly apprehended on occasion. These fears were covered over by a veneer of rather obsessive-compulsive behaviors which barely contained her insecurity and doubt. While I had done considerable preparation for my leave-taking sensing her vulnerability to separation, loss and abandonment, she became progressively more ill during the several weeks before my departure. On the day of our last visit before my impending month’s absence, I heard her enter the waiting room and shortly after heard her cough. The sound had a hollow rasp to it. Something of the deeply intuitive spoke to me in that moment, considering the apparent severity of her cough. As soon as she came into the room she produced a sandtray. When I moved to a position in front of the tray it finally hit me: the image was that of a central column with finger-traced branches moving out from it to the right and the left. On each of these “branches” she had placed brilliant red seeds. Towards the top of the tray the uppermost portion of the column was filled with a wall of red and white flowers, with several small stones buried beneath them. What I apprehended in viewing the tray was the extreme precariousness of her life, for the image appeared both as tree and as a chest cavity, with the lungs and bronchia illuminated with these intense red seed nodules. But at the throat level the image was totally blocked. It was as if she were suffocating for breath, for life itself. I inquired if she would be willing to see a doctor that afternoon as I was extremely concerned for her. I explained that the sound of her cough worried me. I knew we had only two more days before I left town. I did not interpret the tray, for I felt it might further aggravate her physical and psychic fragility. She responded immediately and said she would telephone me that evening. She contacted me later in the day to report that the doctor had placed her in the hospital and immediate surgery was being scheduled. On examination he had found a probable tumor at the back of the throat which was almost totally blocking the air passage to the lungs. She was

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told that had she waited any longer she might not have survived more than a day or two. Surgery was performed successfully and the tumour, most fortunately, was benign. I telephoned her several times during my leave. The manner in which I had intervened built a further bridge in our relationship, strengthening and enriching it. In this way the two of us passed through a major life–death crisis together. The contours of this crisis contained bits of flotsam from old events, woven together in their customary inexorable way, including the pulmonary crisis of her mother, the life–death struggle, abandonment and separation, all carried to the surface by the meanings inherent in the intense struggle within her body to find expression and relief. And to have those meanings acknowledged by a caring other was a profound healing in itself. While this woman’s process was a lengthy one given the severity of the early trauma and loss as well as the enormous external obstacles of homelessness and unemployment, she did indeed reach a point where she obtained an important job in her professional field and created a home for herself and her children, sharing responsibilities with the father. Throughout the latter part of her sand process there was significant improvement in all aspects of her health. Issues of sexuality and intimacy are equally pertinent and are often revealed through explicitly anatomical images in the sand. A woman came to me with questions about her marriage. She found that she most often avoided sexual contact with her husband and feared for the stability of the relationship. She described her relationship to him as friendly, compassionate and loving, “all the things I missed as a child.” Her early history revealed that she had been molested by a gardener at the age of 5 by being forced to perform an act of oral sex in a dark shed. She later learned that her mother had found out about it and had done “absolutely nothing at all.” She had no one to share this terrible experience with and commented that her mother’s indifference made her feel even more rejected and unworthy. She was later raped at the age of 17. She described her mother as cold, and as a child she was rarely physically touched, held or nurtured. She commented that she enjoyed becoming ill, since that was the only time she received genuine caring from her mother. While her mother found sex repulsive, she had

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numerous sexual liaisons. She described her father as an alcoholic and “womanizer” who eventually abandoned the family. She felt that she grew up trying to please or appease adults in order to be loved. Her devaluation of her own feminine nature was so intense that anything having to do with her body “I cover, hide, and feel it’s bad.” At the time of her fourth visit she had suffered a rather serious skin eruption. The preceding tray image had been in dry sand, with many wild animals moving toward a small pool into which she poured water. She commented that all the animals were “thirsty.” A significant development here was the emergence of mother–child imagery symbolized by an elephant with several young ones. A central figure was a black panther, which bespoke a very dark and potentially violent feminine aspect. Animals of this kind often signal a potential “possession” or perhaps episodes of intensive and often negative affects. I felt the eruption of the skin and the image of the “thirsty” animals were significantly related to a basic deprivation during her earliest years involving the safe experience of being held and touched in the arms of the mother, physically and emotionally, whereby the first boundaries between the inner and outer world begin to develop. In this sense the skin becomes the organ of contact between those worlds, evolving into a sense of boundaries between self and others and into a sense of the container, that which holds the self together. In that sense then the emergence of the mother–child unity in its animal aspect was an extremely important development in the unfolding of our relationship, for it indicated a new element of containment and maternal caring. The recurring motif of violation of boundaries and containment is a common one for women who have been molested. In addition, some studies on skin disorders have suggested that on the surface one may present a pleasant and responsible facade beneath which lies an underlying rage and bitterness that often is expressed through aggression. The dark aspect of that feminine aggression suggested by the black panther was revealed as she shared the following with me. She admitted she had done some “strange things” in the past several years. Haltingly, she revealed that she and a woman friend with some regularity had driven to a nearby large city where they frequented working-class dance club

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bars. During these outings, they flirted and “picked up” young men. While she did not allow the men to have intercourse, these experiences were sexually highly charged as well as extremely dangerous. She commented that she did not reveal these outings to her husband but was often irresistibly drawn back to them. One evening several months earlier, she and the woman friend had brought three of the men home and she found herself trapped in a bathroom with two of them, both of whom fondled her with considerable sexual expectation. It was after this incident that she realized the gravity of her behavior and began to ask herself, “What am I doing?” Her recognition of the self-destructiveness of this behavior had been a catalyst to seeking therapy. The initial work with this woman involved the reconnection to her own feminine aspect, devalued and lost during her earliest years. Women who have experienced these primal wounds to their feminine nature suffer intense feelings of aloneness and alienation as well as shame and guilt, particularly in regard to their own bodies. They have a deep sense of betrayal, not simply by the masculine but, more importantly, in the failure or absence of protection and nurturance by the mother. This betrayal is experienced as an inferiority in the feminine, a serious weakness which becomes part of the personal shadow. It is experienced as those aspects of the body and personality which are unacceptable and depreciated by the conscious ego. This wound, occurring as it does in the feminine, also represents the repressive attitude which has split the original wholeness of the psyche. At a certain point in the sand process, psychological growth cannot proceed until this conscious attitude of judgment and condemnation of the feminine has been transformed (Markell 1994). In the months ahead I witnessed the intense struggle at a deeply instinctual level as further revelations came with amnestic recall. She began to live through, with feeling, the painful affects of her tormented memories, both of further sexual experiences in childhood and adolescence and of the rage towards her mother for her physical and emotional absence. She once commented that her mother never felt she was “right” and it had been “preached” into her not to recognize her own inner voice. She could now begin to experience her own feminine intuition as an inner guide.

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Midway through her process she created a striking image built from the vertical end of the tray. A large rock grotto cave was constructed at the top of the tray. An entrance pathway was formed, in the center of which stood a lantern. Fences, which had figured frequently in her work and had originally signified the beginnings of boundaries as well as protection, were now converted into a “sluice” by being laid on their flat side leading from the cave. Near the opening to the cave she placed the first run of fences on a spinning wheel, which conveyed the sense of moving water. In the very center of the tray were a shovel and wheelbarrow as well as a box containing many tools. At the lower end of the tray was a bulldozer with a large pile of small stones of all colors and shapes. Some of these smaller stones were volcanic. She commented that the cave was still not safe because of the shoring, but “they are working it and pulling out the dangerous parts. It is hard work and dangerous. I admire the miners who can do this kind of work.” There was a long pause and she tearfully said, “I have carried so much for so long without facing it. I want the second part of my life to be different.” This powerful image was a scene of reconstruction, tunneling, hard work, and bringing the principle of light to a dark vagina-like cave. I sensed that the work here was indeed going on in the lowest chakra of the body and for this woman in the actual physical and anatomical aspects of her feminine sexuality. Where fences had once guarded and protected they now formed a flow of water to the lowest part of the tray, where she sat physically. The waters were now flowing and abundant, coming from deep within the earth source. The spinning wheel, a feminine symbol of blending and weaving, spoke to the incredible integration that was occurring which was effecting somatic events. The powerful tools, bulldozer, reference to miners, and fire of the lantern indicated an active and positive masculine presence in the work. The earlier vestiges of volcanic fire could now be moved about and used in the reconstructive effort. This powerful body tray indicated major changes occurring in the soma itself. Two weeks later she created a tray with a large blue woman dancer at its very heart. Nearby was a table with a star mirror through which the dancer could catch her own reflection. She recalled that she loved to

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dance as a child and commented, “It takes my breath away it is so beautiful. It is like a joy which is bursting inside of you! The others [images] could make you feel good but not like this … this is a moment and it’s ever changing.” Her comments reflected her inner sense of freedom and joy in this touching reflection of her own inner feminine nature. She then added that she had initiated sex with her husband, something quite impossible for her in the past, and it had been wonderful. She concluded, I think of him now not only as my good friend but as a lovemate. I haven’t felt that for twelve years. I used sex as a vendetta for my own bitterness and revenge and a way to control. Now I can be a woman and not a child. I stayed a child and never came into the woman. Now I am doing it and she [the dancer] is dancing around in freedom. It’s natural and spontaneous and something I found so hard. Now it is something I really want to do. It is just easier to be me … how blessed it is to be me!

As a concluding note, it is important to mention the large granite and marblized rocks used in that powerful image, for these same rocks were used throughout the rest of her process to its conclusion. Sometimes we have a tendency to ignore rocks and their subtler meanings. In shamanic tradition, all the elements – fire, stony earth, water and vaporous air – entered into ritual healing and were felt to bring new birth to life. Often when stones were used, a direct and medicinal power was ascribed to them as symbols of Being, enduring, immovable, and steadfast, as a dwelling place of the All. In an earlier chapter I spoke of the Tree of Life and its symbolism of nurturing vegetative and procreative life with its cyclic return in the richness of renewal. The abiding rock, or what we call in the West “the Rock of Ages,” in turn suggests the rock that creatively holds the steadfast center of the world, or that which can endure through all things. For it also suggests refuge and consolation in a time of turmoil and angst. World mythologies are replete with rituals performed around the pillar, thunderstones, the stone anointed with oil every day at Delphi, stones from heaven as in the Ben-ben stone of Egyptian mythology, the power of flint and quartz and their ability to carry the fire-spirit out of darkness, the medicinal value of the heated stones of the sweat-lodge, and

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various fetish forms of stone found in the kivas of the ancient pueblos in the American Southwest. In the Navajo myth of the creation of the sun, Ahsonnutli attempted to intensify the power of the charms by which she was endeavoring to generate light by dipping a crystal in pollen. With this she marked the eyes and mouth on turquoise and white shell beads, and then she formed a circle around them with crystal. For the first time, the reign of night was broken (Alexander 1953). All this suggests a magical and mystical power inherent in the transformation of energies and forces, which in turn are elemental forces emanating from mineral earth and from the vegetative aspect of life. In this sense the essential character of the very stone of earth, the rock, is as significant as the tree in sand images. These clinical examples, limited as they are, provide experiences in which the touching of the past through the present moment can offer considerable creative potential to the emergence of the future outcome throughout the mind–body being. Bohm has succinctly commented on these converging aspects in his article “Creativity: The Signature of Nature”: the point is that we must give the past its due. The past is intrinsically neither good nor bad. But it is necessary. We must have some form – we can’t live entirely in the implicate order … The past must be ready to die when it no longer fits, but it tends to hold on, and that is the trouble. But the past itself, if properly addressed is useful enough. You see, the past can also have a part in creativity. If you had absolute creativity – absolute novelty with no past – then nothing would ever exist because it would all vanish at the very moment of creation. Nothing could last if everything were entirely new. Therefore, it is a dialectical movement which requires both sides, creativity and stability, the creative present and the relatively fixed past. (Bohm in Weber 1986, pp.94–95)

Incorporating the new In no way do these clinical examples convey all the ways in which the soma manifestations occur in sandplay. Many of these manifestations have been documented elsewhere, such as the “chakra” trays or body

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centers and many further examples of explicit body work occurring most often in the use of vertical tray images. Nor can I encompass the limitless proportions of the sandplay experience. Knowledge and intellectual understanding of this process cannot begin to convey the profound learning at the heart of the individual experience, the “being-with” of process. For these reasons I must stress, as Kalff herself did, the vital necessity of a direct apprehensional experience of sandplay as a means of comprehending its profound power to affect the mind–body being. In this sense, sandplay becomes the imaginative language by which meaning can effectively re-enter the body and re-orient the affective and emotional elements of psychic and somatic distress, which can in turn effect new meanings leading to one’s future destiny. The long forsaken body is reclaimed and becomes the chalice of creativity. This process is most likened to a creative resynthesis of one’s own inner psychological and physiological complexities. The meanings in these apprehensions are obviously quite subtle. However, this does not suggest or imply that somebody, having comprehended a meaning, “chooses” to act or not to act. The meaning itself acts, immediately, with a subtle effect upon the whole of life. What patients often experience is that they are in a sense “guided,” without conscious intent or by “willing” these emerging events in the outward life. One could even add that they often do not have much “say” about it, for these new developments of a most subtle nature may indeed bypass the rational, linear aspects of the left brain and occur more appropriately as a genuine living experience of the symbolic life. We often find these changes reflected in a kind of order and simplicity, which become valued in life and which suggest a connection to a fundamental transpersonal and transcendental unity – perhaps simply the beauty of the universe – something beyond all that we can describe in common language. This would suggest that the self has begun to manifest in space and time. The symbolic manifestation or the symbols of that self have arisen in the depths of the body, in patients’ materiality as they encounter it in the earth and water of the sand process. The expressions and meanings arising from that materiality are as critically important as the perceiving consciousness. And we as sandplay therapists must often serve as the cartographers of a subtle inner landscape and geography linked to the

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Figure 8.3 Stillness and movement: sand image of the Zia and yin-yang Made by 45-year-old American woman to conclude a sand series. Here in a beautiful mandalic image East and West are united through the Zia of Hopi mythology and the yin and yang of early Taoist China. A southwestern traveller encountering the Zia on a trail can bodily “step in” to the centre or stillpoint and experience the silence and stillness of the mystic centre. The antithesis suggested by the yin-yang brings eternal movement and flux into play. Further subtleties are suggested by radiating lines and containing shells. A tiny boat is adjacent to the treasure chest, alluding perhaps to the infinitesimal passage of the individual (linear) life in the midst of cosmic rhythms (cyclic process).

emergence of that new and often spiritual dimension in life (see Figure 8.3). In addition, we do not become something at a certain moment and afterwards return to our former way of living. These transformational apprehensions have an immediate effect upon the whole of life. The self has become real and manifest in its own flowing movements and our actions are increasingly in accord with that self. In its final outcome, this touches the lives of others in a rippling out. What we may have lost in terms of the mystery of the shaman’s power to heal, both collectively and individually, we have surely gained in the accumulating richness of our blending of the wisdom of the ancients with the new meanings and value of symbolic imagery emerging from con-

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temporary scientific knowledge. And we cannot deny the creative mystery that is an intrinsic aspect of healing, nor its power to affect us at an elemental level of our being, that is, in the very materiality of our being. That is the mystery of the creativity of nature, with its millions upon millions of species of flowers, insects, birds, animals and plants. It is the life breath which is in all things and of which our human energy is but one facet of a larger work of creation. Imagination in the creative sense simply becomes our attempt to express deep insights about our own nature as well as that surrounding mysterious and creative nature which is the ground of our existence. The world itself means nothing unless we can follow the spiral of its creation, a thread that leads through time to a reality lying beyond time, and discover that the more vibrant and moving that sense of the whole is within us, the more we become capable of expressing it as individuals in our own daily lives, within our own cultural context, and with a not inconsiderable impact upon those around us. This suggests a further and extremely subtle mirroring process whose conclusion is that we live life openly and transparently with one another in community and in relationship. Through that mind–body being we must reflect one another – be the mirrors for one another – if we are to truly have an impact upon our time and culture. And when obstacles arise, we firmly insist on examining them, dialoguing with them, observing how they work on us. All else falls away in the face of this greater responsibility to one another as human beings. That is the manifestation of the truly compassionate heart. For through this mirroring we apprehend a process of sustained creativity between human beings that can affect the movement, manifestation, or form reflecting our historical time. Sandplaying is simply a form by which these mirroring processes, with their rippling subtleties, can occur and deepen, bringing about a transparency in relationship. Through this relationship we can touch an unknown dimension both within ourselves and within life itself. Rilke beautifully speaks of the subtle nature of this flowing process while also capturing through metaphor the physical dimensions of that inner apprehended event: The fear of the unexplainable impoverished not only the existence of the individual, but also caused the relationship of one person to

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another to be limited. It is as though fear has caused something to be lifted out of the riverbed of limitless possibilities to a fallow stretch of shore where nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that causes the unspeakably monotonous and unrenewed human condition to repeat itself again and again. It is the aversion to anything new, any unpredictable experience, which is believed to be untenable … perhaps we could endure our griefs with even greater trust than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unfamiliar. Our feelings become mute in timid shyness. Everything in us steps back; a silence ensues, and the something new, known to no one, stands in the center and is silent … we are alone with the strange thing that has stepped into our presence … we stand in the midst of a transition … And this is the reason the sadness passes: the something new within us, the thing that has joined us, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer there either – it is already in our blood. And we do not find out what it was. One could easily make us believe that nothing has happened; and yet we have been changed, as a house is changed when a guest has entered it. We cannot say who came; we shall perhaps never know. But many signals affirm that the future has stepped into us in such a way as to change itself into us, and that long before it manifests itself outwardly … the more it is absorbed into us, the more certain we are to secure it, and the more certain it is to become our personal destiny. When it “happens” at a later time – when it becomes obvious to others – then we feel an intimate kinship with it … (and) our evolvement will gradually go in that direction: nothing strange shall befall us, but rather that which has already for a long time belonged to us … … Only he who can expect anything, who does not exclude even the mysterious, will have a relationship to life greater than just being alive. (Rilke 1992, pp.78–82)

These changes, profound, exciting, new, creating one’s divine destiny, must and do enter into one’s somatic storehouse, the vessel of incarnation, and in so doing often induce profound healing throughout the psychophysical being. Indeed, this has to be one of the first discoveries

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Kalff made when she visited the East, for it was there that she and her Eastern colleagues concluded from their observations that the incorporation of the mind–body and the stages by which it achieves an expression of unity represented an archetypal, human pattern that transcends Eastern and Western differences. This inner equilibrium that she experienced in the Buddhistic tradition was grounded in the body and in the totality of nature (Kalff 1972). The ultimate approach to reality is through an intense and direct apprehension of it. That ultimate reality is and will always remain mysterious. These sudden direct perceptions require a very intense and unusual passion which carries a high energy throughout the mind–body being. When that energy emerges out of and in connection with meaning, creativity is spontaneous and free. Sandplaying provides the step-by-step integrative process whereby one appreciates that ability to touch upon the ultimate and thereby, the creative in one’s self. It opens one to a regenerating potential, a mysterium in a mysterium from one’s very nature of being. Paradoxically, it brings together the absolutely mundane with the spiritual dimensions of life, both being aspects of one overall reality. Like both the ancient and the contemporary mystics, we can come into contact with tremendous depths in the subtlety of matter and mind. Increasing levels of understanding in physiology, biochemistry and quantum physics suggest that there can be no clear division between mental and physical disease or well-being. Mental and physical or mind and body are false dichotomies peculiar to Western culture. Similarly, it is to be hoped that the imaginativeness of the East can compensate for the matter-of-factness of the West with its emphasis on the material aspects of life and the deterioration of moral and spiritual values. From the East we slowly begin to appreciate that if you do not distinguish between mind and matter, then it becomes conceivable that you can enter into the unified reality of mind-and-matter. It is what the Upanishads call “nearer the nearest.” This becomes the essence of our moment-to- moment living, when we open ourselves to the direct apprehension of the richness of life in all its joy, spontaneity, and creativity. I shall close with the poetic words of the great Iglulik (Eskimo) shaman, Aua, speaking of his own self-discovery, for the beauty of metaphor speaks to the transformational process inherent in sandplaying

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itself. The profoundly spiritual condition that has opened within us in that process represents all the individual awakenings into the all-embracing cosmos that is already known to those who have found the essential unity: Then I sought solitude, and here I soon became very melancholy. I would sometimes fall to weeping, and feel unhappy without knowing why. Then, for no reason, all would suddenly be changed and I felt a great, inexplicable joy, a joy so powerful that I could not restrain it, but had to break into song, a mighty song, with only room for the one word: joy, joy! And I had to use the full strength of my voice. And then in the midst of such a fit of mysterious and overwhelming delight I became a shaman, not knowing myself how it came about. But I was a shaman. I could see and hear in a totally different way. I had gained my quamaneq, my enlightenment, the shaman-light of brain and body, and this in such a manner that it was not only I who could see through the darkness of life, but that same light also shone out from me, imperceptible to human beings, but visible to all the spirits of earth, and sky and sea, and these now came to me and became my helping spirits. (Halifax 1982, p.118)

In bringing two worldviews together, views which are separated in time by some two thousand years, Kalffian sandplay with its integration of Jungian psychology and Eastern Buddhistic tradition points us in a direction of a wisdom that is universal. With an entirely fresh and spontaneous approach, it adds to that Western development the element of compassion, for compassion in Buddhistic philosophy is inseparable from wisdom and the enlightened state of mind. This was the gift of Dora Kalff, who shared the belief that the greatest solution for the turmoil of our contemporary Western culture, indeed the search for harmony in the world, lies in the discovery of the compassionate heart, that ability to live ethically with a sense of universal responsibility and love for one another. She likened this discovery of the compassionate state of being, which could be touched directly through the earth and water – the silence of sandplay itself – to the opening of a flower or to a loving spirit that becomes manifest within our hearts. The legacy of Kalff ’s lifework is now left to those of us around the world who have been touched by her extraordinary vision, wisdom, and love.

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For those who have taken that journey and entered into that mysterium I close with the words of an ancient sage and poet: The wide pool expands like a mirror, The heavenly light and cloud shadows play upon it. How does such clarity occur? It is because it contains the living stream from the Fountain.

(Chu Hsi in Chung-yuan 1963, p.170)

Note An earlier and briefer version of this chapter was published in the Journal of Sandplay Therapy, Vol.VI, 1, 1997, pp.41–62. (This journal is published by Sandplay Therapists of America and is affiliated with the International Society of Sandplay Therapists.)

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Subject index abandonment 242 abaton 89 Abel 114 above, images from 74 absolute knowledge 118, 136, 164, 178, 204 Achumavi people 50, 74 Adam 114–15 adaptation to the collective 164–70 adolescents 39, 208 agitation 215, 221 Agni 110 Ahsonnutli 248 Aion (Jung) 52 air 59 ajna 109 Akkad 133 albedo phase of alchemy 78 alchemy 60, 134–5, 187, 191 Aleph 114 alexithymia 221–4 Algarve, Portugal 19 allergies 208, 211 All Forgotten 151 alphabet 172 America(s) 40, 85, 120, 158 Southwest 167, 231, 248 Amor 69 anahata 104, 109 Anahita 80 Anazasi culture 35 ancestral souls 38–9 ancient Egypt 38, 43, 87, 91, 115, 176, 177, 187–8, 236, 247 ancient Greece 87, 92 animal(s) 55–6 imagery 55–6 power of, as conveyor of meaning 72–7 spirits 39 thirsty 244 animula 239 anjali 95 “Answer to Job” (Jung) 20 Anu 65–6 anxiety 212, 215, 242 Apollo 87–8 arbor philosophical 69 archaic reactualizations of chaos 38–42 archetypal motifs, understanding 52–6

archetypal path, chakras as 94–131 Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, The (Jung) 37 archetypes collective psyche 38 of events 39 of transformation 14, 27 ark 43 art, Taoist 228 ascending the chakras 101–5 Ascension of Maria 239 Asherah 80 asklepia 89 Asklepius, myth of 87–90, 91 aspect of feminine and wu-chi diagram 30–4 Asia Minor 64 assumptio mariae 239 Assurbanipal, King of Assyria 64–5 Assyrians 87 Astarte 80 Asterix 45 asthma 208, 210, 211, 222 Athene 88 attention 104–5, 226 Attica 90 autonomic nervous system 198, 199 awakening 112 kundalini 95–9 of new consciousness 145 “Awakening of a New Consciousness in Zen, The” (Suzuki) 159 awareness 17 axis 59 axis mundi 69 Aztec(s) 41–2 Calendar Stone 46–7 mythology 47–52, 99, 176 babies 237 Babylonian period/teachings 16, 64, 87, 176 Great Flood 42, 49, 55, 66 basic perinatal matrices (BPMs) 211 Ba-soul 187–8 being-awareness 104 ‘being-with’ of process 249 beginning of the world 40 below, images from 74–5 Ben-ben stone 247 bhakti yoga 102, 114 Bible 42, 43, 49, 64, 73, 114, 176 birth processes 212, 237 trauma 211 black panther 244 black spider 212–13 blockages 54

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bodhicitta 105 Bodhid-harma 106 Bodhisattva 152 body carries potential to transform energy leading to renewal/rebirth 75 dialogue with 225 importance of 28 as mediator between nature and spirit 18 –mind nature of being 143 openness 166 and soul, transformation 140–1 spiritualizing of 128 what it represents experientially 197–8 as whole person 140 Book of Changes see I Ching, The Book of Changes Book of the Golden Elixir 135 Both Vanished 151 Brahman 107 brain dysfunction 222 as hologram 205 Breaking the Mind Barrier: The Art and Science of Neurocosmology (Siler) 111 breakthrough 92 breath 110, 212 bridges 57 bridging 128 Buddha 106, 129, 163, 238–9 Buddhism 12, 27, 28, 30, 112, 116, 127, 129, 134, 135, 144, 153, 156, 159, 163, 168, 184, 189, 253 adoption by the West 27, 254 and tantrism 94 builders 169 bull 145 Bull of Heaven 65 Cabala 114 Cain 114 California 30, 31, 40, 50, 74, 116, 157 Carmel, CA 157 carriers 169 cat 212–14, 216 Catching the Ox (Kaku-An) 146 Catholicism 239 cave 246 sacred 59 Celtic beliefs 192 Celtic cross 233–5 Celts 45, 192, 193, 194 central nervous system dysfunctions 222

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Central Nootka, British Columbia 56 ceremonial year 41 chakras 30 as archetypal path 94131 Chaldeans 87 Ch’an 153–4 Buddhism see Zen Buddhism change 18 frog as symbol of 162–3 unbroken process of 228–9 chaos 41, 43, 81 archaic reactualizations of 38–42 charis 107 ch’i 33, 134, 135, 141 ch’ien 33 Child 133 childbearing 39 children 39, 208, 212–16, 218, 241 China 27, 31, 95, 99, 152, 153–4 Chinese philosophy 31, 133–4, 136–7, 166, 177, 250 ching 134, 135 Chiron 88 Christ, Jesus 27, 81, 15961, 187 Christianity 27, 159, 161, 167, 188, 193, 239 Chronicles of Huashan (Huashan Chi) 31 Chuang-Tzu 31 Cipher of Genesis: The Original Code of the Qabala as Applied to the Scriptures (Suares) 114 city, sacred 59 clinical examples 97–8, 208–16, 233–8, 241–8 closed house 29 coinciding of mythic and present moment 39 collective adaptation to 164–70 consciousness 12, 39 color polarities 235 Colorado 167 Color Atlas of Human Anatomy (Vannini and Pogliani) 198 Coming Home on the Ox’s back (Kaku-An) 147 compassion 28, 105, 129, 226 compassionate heart, manifestation of 227–55 completion 180–1 Confucianism 31, 168 Confucius 144, 227–8 confusion 56 coniunctio 189 conscious and unconscious, unity between 29 consciousness universal 102 and meaning 183–7

container of energies, sandtray as 29 out of which rebirth process may occur 63 containment 29, 225, 244 content and context of archetypal motifs 55 Coronis 88 corporal punishment 234 cosmic sea 43 cosmogonic myth 38 cough 242 covenant 49 cow 145 coyote 15, 171 Coyote 50–1 creatio continua 180 creation destruction of first 46–52 myths 39, 41, 58 symbols 236 creative surge 18 “Creativity: The Signature of Nature” (Bohm) 248 creator god 51 crucifixion 81 crystals 248 Cupid 69 curing 38 dance(s) 39, 58, 110, 221 Dancing Wu-Li Masters, The (Zukav) 141 dark matter, return to 63 Dark Mother 46 darkness 44, 91 of matriarchal unconsciousness 72 death 33, 39, 81, 216 Waters of Death 66 deintegrative experiences 223–4 Delphi 247 deluge 41–3, 49 Demchog Kilkor Mandala 127 depression 97, 208–10, 219, 232, 237, 241 descent 54 destruction of first creations 46–52 dhyana 153 Dialogues with Scientists and Sages 13 dialogue with body 225 diamond body 134, 189 Discipline Begun 149 disciplines of kundalini yoga 109–11 disease 221 disorientation 56 Divine Comedy, The (Dante) 197 divine secret of renewal 64–93 divorce 233, 237 DNA 172 dolphins 194

double helix 56 dragon-horse 177 Dreambody 191 Dream cure of the temple sleep (bas-relief, 4th c. BC, Attica) 90 dreams 25, 90, 97, 127, 168, 169, 173–4, 220, 233 drowning, near- 98 Druids 45 dry sand 218–19, 244 Dumuzi 65 dyadic mother–infant relationship 223, 225 Ea 43 eagle 114, 189 Eanna 83 earth element 30, 59, 220 as female principle 33 Earth Mother 201 East looking 125–31 and West, synthesis of 13, 21, 24–7, 253 Ecclesiastes 176 ecstasy 110 Eden 114 egg 108, 215 ego consciousness 54, 73, 117 relativization of 153 and self, wholeness of 24 Egypt(ians) 38, 43, 87, 91, 115, 176, 177, 187–8, 236, 247 Eiheiji, temple of Eternal Peace elemental opposites 99–101 elements 30 elixir vitae 67, 87 embodiment 28 process 128 emergence 39, 58, 125, 237 emergent integration of opposites 196–226 emptiness 17 wisdom of 105–8 ‘empty days’ 42 Ending of Time, The (Bohm and Krishnamurti) 16 endings 41 endocrine system 200 endorphins 202 energies freeing of 225–6 transformation of 17, 29–30 energy fields in brain and in cosmos 111–12 matter and meaning 61–2 play of subtle 171–96 enfolded (implicate) order 60, 107, 121

SUBJECT INDEX enfoldment 121, 125 Engadina 19 Enki 80, 81 Enkidu 65–6, 84 Enlightenment 105, 135, 154, 254 Enlil 43 ennoia 107 ensô 106 Ensô (Torei, ink on paper) 106 Entering the City with Bliss-bestowing Hands (Kaku-An)148 Epidaurus 89 Epione 87, 89 epiphany of soul 27 Eranos Conference (1954) 158 Ereshkigal 81 Eros 69, 176 Esha 115 esoteric teachings 27 essence 134, 135 essential wholeness 120–5 eternal archetypes of initiation 54 eternal return 43 Europe 23, 188 Eve 114–15 excited archetypal situations 179, 198 “Experiences with Far Eastern Philosophers” (Kalff ) 125 explicate (unfolded) order 60 eye images 110, 118–19 Faced Round 150 fairy tales 52, 54, 136 fatigue 232 feet 231 female principle/aspect death and 84 earth as 33, 126 honoring 77–9 and mathematical order in creation 176 and sandplay 115 and wu-chi diagram 30–4 fences 246 fertility 36 fire 41, 58, 218, 233–4, 246, 247 divine 233 element 32, 59 inner 115–16 ritual extinguishing of 42 in yoga 109–10 first creations, destruction of 46–52 fish and loon 217 five 126, 174 fivefold circuit 32, 33 Five Forces 128 Five Wisdoms 127 Flint 51, 247

flowering process 251–2 of serpent 94–131 flood biblical 41–3, 49 modern 214 folk legends 136 forest of imagination, entering 14, 15 fountain 164, 255 four 80, 174 ‘Four Corners’ area 35 fourfoldness 175 fourfold structure of DNA 172 Four-Jaguar 47, 48 Four-Movement 48 Four-Rain 47 fourth world 39 Four-Water 47 Four-Wind 47 fox 163 free and protected space 59, 119, 156–7 free creative play 18 frequencies 205 frog symbolism 162–3, 212, 213, 215, 235–6 games 58 Gampopa 100–1 Ganesha 98 Ganges 107 garden, sacred 59 Garden of Eden 114–15 garuda bird 162 geese 163 genesis 33, 41 Genesis 42, 43, 114–15 geography, internal 229–39 Germany 44 ghosts accessing the meaning of 204–16 images and feelings as 206 Gilgamesh myth 16, 42, 64–75, 77–9, 82–4, 91, 184 Giza 188 Gnostics 86, 176 goblins 213 godhead 52 Golden Ass of Apuleius, The 76 golden rectangle 127 Gorgon Medusa 88 Gospel of Thomas (Nag Hammadi) 159 grace 107 Great Flood 42 Great Mother 65, 80, 98, 130, 213, 214 and moon 42–6 Great Prick 69–70 Great Self 107 Greece 89 Greek(s) 87, 92, 107

265 Green Tara 210 Gregorian chant 194 grief 49, 232 ground beyond time 60 gtumo 109 Hades 88 Hand, eye, serpents: early woodlands culture (pottery) 71 Hand, feet, head and skull: an embodiment (sand image by Dutch woman) 231 harmonics 182 Harvard Mind Science Symposium 184 hatha yoga 109 Hatrali 38 headaches 221 healing 26, 38 ceremony 39 process 91–3 of psyche 28 through renewed meaning 63 and symbolization 239–48 Healing and Transformation in Sandplay (Amman) 191 heart chakra 107 manifestation of compassionate 227–55 problems 232 Heaven-and-Earth 43 heaven as male principle 33 Hebrew theosophy 114 herb of life 67–8 herbal tree of life 87 Herding the Ox (Kaku-An) 147 Hermes 88 hexagrams 177 Hill of the Star 41 Himalayas 127 Hinduism 30, 107, 168 mythology 85 and tantrism 94 Hippocratic Oath 87 holding in of breath 98–9 holism 33 holonomy 182 Holy Spirit 233 home 57 honoring the feminine 77–9 Hopi mythology 167, 250 Ho-t’ou 177 hsiu shen 140 Huashan, Grand Mountains of Shensi province, China 31 human body and number five 126 human suffering, nature of 16 Humbaba 65 humidum radicale 86 Hupa people 40 Hygeia 87–8, 89

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hyperventilation 221 hypothalamus 199 I Ching, The Book of Changes 132, 134, 137, 173, 178, 216 ida 101–2 Ikxareyavs 40 illness 221 illumination 81 images from above and below 74–5 imaginatio 189 imagination 251 as clearing in forest 27 entering forest of 14, 15 and subtle body 191–2 imaging process, problems in 218–26 immortal 135 immune system 200 implicate (enfolded) order 60, 107 importance of numbers 79–83 incorporating the new 248–55 India 95, 113, 127, 141, 145 Indian Buddhism 27, 153–4, 159 infant–mother relationship 223 In Harness 150 initiation eternal archetypes of 54 rites 37, 39, 42 shamanic 50 injuries 235 Innana myth 16, 65, 80–1, 91, 177 inner fire 115–16 inner geography 19 inner symbolic process 27–8 integration of earth, matter and body 127 interconnectedness 34 internal geography 229–39 International Society for Sandplay Therapists, Sausalito, CA 30 International Transpersonal Conference, Santa Rosa, CA 157–8 intestinal man 65 intimacy 243 intrapsychic technology 26 Ishtar 49, 65–6, 73, 80, 82–3 Isis 76, 177, 188 Islam 27 Isles of the Blessed 137–40 Italy 89 Jainism 94 Japan(ese) 23, 27, 95, 127, 145, 154 Jewel Ornament of Liberation, The (Gampopa) 100 jnana 161

Jonah 72, 76–7, 82, 84, 91 Jonah Rises out of the Whale (Brueghel) 78 journeying 236 Judaism 27 Jungian depth psychology 22, 25, 96, 99, 112, 157, 254 Jungian sandplay 23–4, 32, 127 kabbalah 27 Kalachakra, a typical multi-armed deity 180 Kalffian sandplay therapy 17, 20, 32, 136, 153, 164 and synthesis of Eastern and Western traditions 25 Kaliya 113 Kannon 129 Karuk culture 40 Kashmirian Shivaism 94 Kingdom of Heaven 160 pearl as 73 Kish 64 Knossos, Palace of 194 “Knot of Years” 41 knowledge 161 koans 145–53, 164, 174, 184–5 Kokopelli (American Indian trickster figure) 14, 35–6 Mimbres pottery 35 Korea 95 Kos 89 Krishna 113 Krishna as divine child dancing on the head of the serpent, Kaliya (bronze, 14th–15th c., Tamilnadu, India) 113 Kuan-Yin 98, 201 Kukulkan 42, 85 k’un 33 kundalini awakening 95–9 experience 30 as feminine force 116 serpent as 114 yoga 93, 95–6 disciplines of 109–11 parallels with sandplay process 111–14 labyrinth 56, 57 Laissez Faire 151 Land of the Dead 65, 80–1 landscapes 19, 164 Lao-tzu 31 leap-frog phenomenon, sandplay as 168 Lesson of the White Mist, The 141–3 Letters to a Young Poet (Rilke) 240 life–death crisis 243 –rebirth cycle 39 light 145

lingam 96 Living Buddha, Living Christ (Thich Nhat Hanh) 227 l Malinalli 41 Loon and Fish (Jackson Beardy, Obijway Indian) 217 Lo-Shou model 177 losing one’s way 57 loss 39, 242, 243 lost mysteries 24 lotuses 96, 103, 129 Lucius 76–7, 84, 91 lungs 242 Ma 80 macrocosm 134 madness 49 magic 20, 37 male and female, union of 33 male principle, heaven as 33 mandala(s) 39, 117, 144, 167 mandalic symbolism 117–20 manifest and subtle 122 manifestation of order, spirit as 171 manipura 109 masculine spirit 31 mask 39 massage 221 materialism 20, 21 matriarchal unconsciousness, darkness of 72 mathematical order in creation 176 mathematics 181–2 “Mathematics: The Scientist’s Mystic Crystal” (Bohm) 171 Matthew 64, 73 matter energy and meaning 61–2 and mind as two aspects of one overall reality 62 “Matter as a Meaning Field” (Bohm) 227 Maya calendar 41 culture and mythology 46, 99, 176 Maypole 69 maze 56, 57 ME 80–1 meaning 122–5, 220, 225, 239–40, 249 animal power as conveyor of 72–7 is being 62 and consciousness 183–7 of the ghosts, accessing 204–16 healing through renewed 63 matter and energy 61–2 meaningful coincidences 180 medicine of life 87

SUBJECT INDEX medicine man 39 meditation 110–12, 187 meditative reflection 118 meeting with serpent 64–93 Mennebosh 74 menopause 39 menstruation problems 200 Mercurius 86 Mesoamerica 42 Mesopotamian myths 12, 64, 177 metal element 32 metaphor, beauty of 253–4 mind –body being 205, 251 and body, relationship between 12, 25 –gene connection 202 and matter as two aspects of one overall reality 62 modulation 202 Minstrel 35 mirroring 19, 225, 251 Moby Dick (Melville) 233 Modern Man in Search of a Soul (Jung) 23 molecules 117 “Molecules as Mandalas” (Josey) 117 molestation 238, 243 moon and Buddha 238 and Great Mother 42–6 Morning and Evening as heroic twins 51 mother 133, 220 –child imagery 244 –infant relationship 223, 225 Mother Light 112 mountain imagery 55 man 135 sacred 59 movement 221 and stillness 228–9 mudras 109 muladhara 95, 103, 109 mummification 187 mundus imaginalis 60 music of the spheres 194 mysteries 57 mysterious gate 33 mysterium coniunctionis 60, 216 mystic inner centre 57 mythic moment coinciding with present moment 39 myth(s) 15, 37, 46, 54, 136, 186 of Asklepius 87–90 mythologems 18 Naassenes 86 nadis 101–2 nagas 85

Nag Hammadi, upper Egypt 115, 159, 176 Nameless 153 Nameless Gate 31 Nammu 43 Native Americans 28, 35, 36, 40, 51, 74, 171, 176 initiation rituals 39, 85 natural number 173 nature 19 and spirit, body as mediator between 18 Navajo people of American Southwest 38, 167, 248 sand paintings 38–9 near-drowning 98 Neoplatonists 188 Nepal 14 nervous system, work of 198–202 Neti 81 Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Jung) 227, 239 Ninjas 237 neuropeptides at work 202–4 new grass 120 New Mexico 167 new paradigm 34 New Year ceremonials 40 nigredo phase of alchemy 78 Nineveh 64, 73 Ninshubur 80, 83 Nippur 64 Noah 43, 49 non-duality 12, 13, 24 non-verbal, symbolic level of sandplay therapy 11 North Sea 19 numbers, importance of 79–83, 172–8 numen 179 numinous experiences 105 numinous images 179–83 Nut (Great Goddess of Sky) 43–4 nyasa 109 obsessive-compulsive behaviors 242 ocean element 30 Old Testament 114, 176, 177 Olmec 85 om 104 oneness with cosmos 27, 60 one-pointedness of mind 128 one world 61 “On the Rock” diagram 31, 32–4 openness 166 opposites elemental 99–101 union of 24, 33, 48, 105 ordering rhythms 171–96 Oriental mandalas 167 original nature, our 141–3

267 Original Self 158–9 origin(s) myths of 38–9 return to 153–6 and source 132–70 Isles of the Blessed 137–40 The Lesson of the White Mist 141–3 Orion 188 Orphics 188 Osiris 76–7, 187, 209–11 ox and the man, the 145–53 Ox and the Man Both Gone Out of Sight, The (Kaku-An) 147 Ox Forgotten, Leaving the Man Alone, The (Kaku-An) 147 Ox-herding pictures see Ten Ox-herding pictures padmas 96 Pajaro Dunes lectures (Kalff ), CA 157 Palacio da Pena, Sintra, Portugal 53 Paleolithic era 38 Panacea 87, 88, 89 panic attacks 221 parables 136 paradigm shift 169, 193 Paradise 87, 91 parasympathetic nervous system 199 participation mystique 204 pata 95 path ahead 34–6 pearl as kingdom of heaven 73 Perfect Way 130 peripheral nervous system 199 Perseus 88 Phoenicians 87 physical disease 221 physics 17 pilgrimages 26 pingala 101–2 pituitary gland 199 Platonists 188 play of subtle energy 171–96 “Poet, The” (Emerson) 165 polarities 235 Portugal 19, 53–4 possession 244 prana 101–2, 141, 187 prana-shakti 102, 120 pranayama 109 prayer 95 pregnancy 237 preservation 187 pricking of rose-like plant 68–72 primal face 159–61 primitive magic 37 primitive psychology 189 process 18, 58, 59, 61, 91 ‘being-with’ of 249

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imaging, problems in 218–26 other aspects of process work 216–18 of transformation 58–63, 229 progression and orderedness 29 Proverbs 176 Psalms 176 psyche and matter, integrating 19, 20, 24, 25, 28, 35 spiritual aspects of 217 psychic development 233 psychic trauma 49 psychic wounds 49, 220–1, 232, 245 Psychobiology of Mind–body Healing (Rossi) 202 psychoid level 11 psychological growth 49–50 psychological truthfulness 166 psychokinesis 141 psychophysical energy 119, 178 psychosomatic communication network 203 psychosomatic symptoms 29, 221–2, 224 puberty 39 Pueblo people 51 putting posts under the world 41 pyramid(s) 188 imagery 55 sacred 59 texts 187 Pythagoreans 176, 188

Redemption Motifs (Von Franz) 52 redundant storage 206 relativization of ego 153 relaxation 233 “re-memberment” 210, 226 renewal see rebirth and renewal renouncing the mind 105 repetition 110 restlessness 212 resurrection 210, 236 retreat, mental 13–16 return 54 to dark matter and beginning 63 sandtray symbols of 161–4 to the source 153–6 Returning to the Origin, Back to the Source (Kaku-An) 148 Return to the Tao 33 re-union with secret source of life 165 rheumatoid arthritis 222 Rig Veda 64 right hemisphere of cortex 198, 222 ritual events 37 ritual transcendence 49 rivers 164 Rock of Ages 247 rocks 247–8 Root Support 95 rose-like plant, pricking of 68–72 rubedo phase of alchemy 78 Ryuanji Temple Gardens, Kyoto, Japan 173

Qi Gong 233 quantum physics 12, 18, 181 quartz 247 quaternary structure of self 173 quaternity 175 Quetzalcoatl 41, 42, 47, 48, 51, 85 quietude 128, 136 quinta essential 87

sacred time, sacred space 37–63 return to 166 sahasrara 102, 109 St Elmo’s fire 233 salmon and carp 163 samadhi 102, 109 samatha 128 samu balati 87 sanctuary 59 sand element 30 sand paintings 38 sandplay room 37 sandplay therapy 11–12, 17, 20, 23, 34, 37, 54 and adaptation to the collective 164 analytically orientated 25 clinical examples 97–8, 208–16, 233–8, 241–8 as container out of which rebirth process may occur 63 and darkness 91 depth work 54 dolphins and 194 dry sand 218–19

radionic diagnosis 97 rage 237, 244 rainbow 49 Rain God 47 Ratnasara, The 23 reactualizations of chaos, archaic 38–42 rebirth and renewal 33, 39, 41, 58, 81, 220 body carries potential to transform energy leading to 75 divine secret of 64–93 sandplay as container allowing 63 through serpent 85 reconstruction 246

excited archetypal situations 179, 198 and female principle 115, 130 as feminine activity 129 and five 126 fluctuating waves and rhythms 183 free and protected space 156–7 harmonization of mind and body 200 as healing in matter 207 images from above and below 74–5 as implicate order 124 integrating psyche and matter 19, 20, 24, 25, 28, 35 integration of earth, matter and body 127 integrative experience of 28 internal geography of 229–39 as leap-frog phenomenon 168 mandalic form 11718 material elements as metaphor for body 240–1 and meaning 185–7 and matter and energy 61–2 and mirroring 251 and number 174, 178 numinous images in 179 ordering process 181 parallels with kundalini yoga 111–14 and perfect spontaneity 156–7 problems in imaging process 218–26 process 18, 58, 59, 61, 91, 229 and resolution of opposites 100, 108 for sacred ceremonials 39–40 as sustaining ritual for self-ritualization 37 and symbolizing problems 225 synchronistic elements of 119–20, 183 and time 178–9 and transcendence 91–2, 226 and transformation of energies 24, 29–30, 113, 229 as unbroken process of change 228–9 and vision of wholeness 61

SUBJECT INDEX sandtray as container of energies 29, 37 image as manifest somatic form 122 location in 57 movement 23 symbols of return 161–4 Sanskrit 95, 96, 103–4, 153 sapientia dei 176, 177 Sapling 51 Satan 193 Satapatha Brahmana 37 Sausalito, CA 30, 116 schizophrenia 241 scientific technology 21 Scorpion people 66 Searching for the Ox (Kaku-An) 146 Second World War 44 securing of freedom 160 Seeing the Ox (Kaku-An) 146 Seeing the Traces (Kaku-An) 146 self 29, 119, 158 -cultivation, the Way to 135–45 deintegrative-reintegrative experiences of 225 -destructiveness 245 -discipline 145 -knowledge 99 -realization 27, 102 -renewal 182 as shaman 11 Sandplay: A Psychotherapeutic Approach to the Psyche (Kalff ) 23 Sandplay: Mirror of a Child’s Psyche (Kalff ) 23 separation 54, 213, 223, 232, 237, 241, 242 serpent flowering of 94–131 imagery 114–17 symbol of 83–7, 91 Sesha 95 seven 79–80, 81 sexuality 243–7 Shadow 158 Shakti 103, 107 shaman 82, 250, 254 self as 11 Shamash 65, 73 shen 134, 135, 140 shiatsu 221, 233 Shiva 102–3, 107 Shivaism 94 siddha 102 Siduri 69 sige 107 silence 17, 37, 107–8, 218 silent incubation 92 Silver Fox 50–1 Sirius 188

skeletons 212–14, 216 skin disorders 222, 244 sleep disturbances 208, 221, 233 sleeping 79 Smiling frog (Sengai, ink on paper) 162 solar year 41 Solitary Moon, The 151 Solomon, Book of 176 soma-significance 122, 201 somatic component 220 somatic processes 122–3 somatic unconscious 190 Sophia 108, 177 Soto Zen tradition 127 soul epiphany of 27 transmigration 194 source and origins 132–70 return to 153–6 South America 44 Southeast Asia 95 southern Atlantic 19 space sacred 37–63 –time dimensions, transformation of 59 spider 212–13 spinning wheel 246 spiral 56 spirit 134, 171–2 and nature, body as mediator between 18 spiritualizing of body 128 splitting 234–5 spontaneity, perfect 156–9, 165 springs 164 star imagery 194 stations 57 stillness and movement 228–9 Stillness and movement (sand image of Zia and yin-yang) 250 stomach problems 221 storytelling 23 subtle body: ancient and recent theory 187–96 subtle energy and manifest 122 play of 171–96 suffering 49 suffocation 242 Sufism 27 Sumer 80–1, 133, 177 Sumerian period/teachings 16, 43, 55, 64, 65, 87 sun 42 Sung dynasty 31, 149 sunyata 105 super-implicate order 60 sushumna 101–2 Sutras 102 svadhisthana 109 Swiss Alps 18

269 symbolic process 27 symbolism 28, 37 mandalic 117–20 symbolization and healing 239–48 problems 223–4 symbols 57, 171, 194 importance of 27–8 of materiality 85 of return, sandtray 161–4 of serpent 83–7 sympathetic nervous system 199 synchronicity 136, 180, 182, 183, 191, 195 synchronistic elements of sandplay 119–20, 183 synthesis of East and West 24–7 t’ai chi 32, 126 t’ai chi-tu diagram 126 Taittiriya Upanishad 133 Tamed 150 Tamilnadu, India 113 Tammuz 65 tantric yoga/tantrism 94–5, 103, 107 Tao 31, 133, 137, 157, 228 union of individual Tao with universal Tao 61 Taoism 12, 18, 27, 31–2, 132–6, 141, 143, 144, 153–4, 156, 163, 165, 168, 169, 177, 193, 228, 250 Tao of Physics (Capra) 141 tao te 133 Tao Te Ching 133, 144 tapas 109, 112 Tara 201 tathagatha 156 Temenos, creating 37–63 temple pyramids 41 sacred 59 Ten Ox-herding pictures 145–53, 164, 184–5, 194 I (Kaku-An) 145–8 II (artist unknown) 149–52 Terrible Mother 213, 214 Testimony of Truth, The 115 Tezcatlipoca 51 therapeutic touch 141 therapists 37, 195 thirsty animals 244 three 80, 81, 133, 174 threefoldness 175 threeness 82 three treasures 133–5 threshold images 54, 56–8 Thunderbird carrying whale with lightning snake and wolf 56 “Thunder, Perfect (Whole) Mind” 177 “Thus It Is Told” 47–8

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Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche) 189 Tibet 25, 27, 95, 109, 141 Tibetan Buddhism 27, 105, 127–8, 144, 148 Tibetan mandalas 167 time importance of 178–9 sacred 37–63 Tlaloc 47 tortoise 177 totality of body and spirit 24 train symbolism 235–8 transcendence 239 ritual 49 and sandplay 91–2, 226 transcendent moment 92 transcendent state of non-duality 12, 13 over space and time 17 transformation apprehensions of 250 archetypes of 14, 27, 58 and blockages or conditionings 124 body carries potential to transform energy leading to renewal/rebirth 75 of concrete space to sacred space 59 law of 34 process of 18, 58–63 of energies 17, 29–30 in sandplay 24, 29–30, 113, 229 through serpent 85 transmutation of elements 99–100 transparency in relationship 251 transpersonal psyche 49 trauma 243 psychic 49 treasures, three 133–5 Tree of Knowledge 68 Tree of Life 86–7, 247 tribal healing 28, 39 trickster 50 trickster god 51 trinary structures 173 trinity 175 True Self 159 Turkey 89 Turning Point, The (Capra) 34–5 turtle symbolism 163, 235–7 twelve 174, 176 Two 133 twoness 82 tzu-jan 156 ulcerative colitis 222 ultimate reality 253 unbroken process of change 228–9

unconscious(ness) connection between body and psyche 11, 25 and consciousness 161 darkness of matriarchal 72, 217 overcoming 66 works through symbolic analogy 37 underworld 80–1 Undisciplined 149 undulations 228–9 unfolded (explicate) order 60 unfoldment 122 Unimpeded 150 union of individual Tao with universal Tao 61 of opposites 24, 33, 48, 105 United States 23, 35 unity 33 universal consciousness 102 unus mundus 60–1, 171, 178, 190 Upanishads 95, 107, 253 Ur 64, 65 Urshanabi 73, 78, 82 Uruk 73, 74, 82, 83 Ushi 145 Utnapishtim 16, 43, 66–7, 69, 73, 78–9 valley of mind 15 spirit 33 vast energy sea 61 Vedic culture 110 Venus 41 vibrations 228 Virgin Mary 239 Vishnu 95 vision, the 23–36 vissudha 97, 104, 109 vitality 134, 135 water 30, 32, 59, 214–15, 218, 246 divine 86 problems with 218–20 water cranes 163 waterfalls 164, 215 Waters of Death 66 waves 228 Way to self-cultivation, the 135–45, 153 wells 164 West see East and West 24–7 Western psychology 27 wheel imagery 58, 246 spinning 246 white rabbit 238–9 wholeness 29

wilderness forest of imagination 14–15 window into eternity 61 winds 228 wisdom of emptiness 105–8 wise old ancestor as archetype of meaning 71 and darkness of matriarchal unconsciousness 72 witches 212–13 withness 167 witnessing 92, 225 wood element 32 Wounded Healer 50, 88 wu-chi diagram and aspect of feminine 30–4, 126, 132, 228 wu-hsing 130, 132 wu yüu 32 yang spirit 135–6 and yin, union of 32, 33, 99, 130–1, 132, 133, 166–7, 228, 250 Yellow Plum monastery 154 Yellow River 177 yoga 135 see also, bhakti yogo; hatha yoga; kundalini yoga Yoga Sutras, Thread of Yoga (Patanjali) 95 yogic meditation 187 Yorok people 40 Yu 177 Zen Buddhism 25, 27, 106, 109, 127, 136, 148, 149, 153–4, 156, 161, 164–5, 193–4 Zeus 88 Zia 166–7, 171, 250 Zollikon seminars (Kalff ) 157 Zuni 15

Name index Achtenberg, J. 87, 198, 199, 201-2 Addis, S. 106, 162 Alexander, H.B. 248 Amman, R. 191–3 Aua 253–4 Avicenna 189 Baring, A. 177 Bauval, R. 188 Bernoulli, R. 31, 32, 99 Besedovsky, H.O. 202 Bierhorst, J. 46 Blofeld, J. 18, 131, 134–5, 140, 143, 144, 153 Bohm, D. 13, 16, 18, 60, 61, 62, 93, 112, 121–5, 171, 172, 182–3, 191, 204, 227, 248 Bradway, K. 8, 82, 92, 163, 236 Brueghel, J. 78 Campbell, J, 32, 42, 43, 47, 49, 71, 90, 94, 95, 113, 132–3, 148, 153 Capra, F. 34–5, 141, 169, 182 Cashford, J. 177 Chambers, L. 80 Chen Hsi-I Chinen, A.B. 77 Chodorow, J. 191. 207 Chou-Tun Yi 31, 125 Chuang-Tzu 130, 154, 227, 228 Chu His 255 Chung Li’ch’uan 31 Chung-yuan, C. 25, 170, 255 Corbin, H. 60, 188 Corner, D. 8 Cunningham, L. 8, 11–12 Dalai Lama 25, 112, 127, 184 Dante 197 Dean, L. 8 Del Rey, A. 202 Descartes, R. 204 Dogen Zenji 127 Dorn, G. 60, 189 Eckhart, M. 92, 132, 148–9 Edinger, E.F. 27, 49, 92, 114, 117, 169, 175, 233 Einstein, A. 60, 172 Eliade, M. 40, 42, 82, 94 Embden, J. van 8 Emerson, R.W. 165

Evans-Wentz, W.Y. 145, 149 Evetts-Secker, J. 69 Fairbrother, N. 8 Fordham, M. 223, 224 Forest-Flier, N. 8 Friedman, H. 8, 23 Gampopa 100–1 Gifford, E. 40 Gilbert, A. 188 Glaser, R. 202 Goleman, D. 180 Griffiths, Father B. 161, 168 Grof, S. 169, 211–12 Halifax, J. 254 Heidel, A. 65 Henderson, J.L. 54 Herrigel, E. 145 Hui-neng 154, 155, 156 Hung-jen 154 Jacoby, M. 223 Jayakar, P. 104–5 Jitoku Ki (Tzu-t Hui) 152 Johari, H. 107 Josey, A. 117, 118 Jung, C.G. 15, 20, 23, 24, 26, 29, 37, 52, 58, 60, 61, 63, 73, 75, 83, 85–7, 96, 99, 111, 112, 118–19, 136, 144, 149, 158, 168, 169, 172–4, 178–81, 183, 186, 189–92, 204, 216, 217, 227, 239 Jung, E. 25 Kabat-Zinn, J. 26 Kaku-An Shi-en (Kuo-an Shih-yuan) 148, 149, 152 Kalff, D.M. 8, 11–14, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23–5, 27–32, 34, 59, 61, 94 105, 112, 115–16, 118–20, 125–30, 132, 136, 141, 153, 156–8, 164, 168, 171, 174, 185, 208, 212, 218, 220, 238, 240–1, 249, 253, 254 Kast, V. 222 Kerenyi, C. 87 Kiecolt-Glaser, J. 202 Klah, H. 39 Kripananda, S. 102 Krishnamurti, J. 16, 104 Kroeber, A. 40 Lao-tzu 130, 133, 154 Leon-Portilla, M. 48 Lui An (Lisu Ngan) 99 Lu Yen 144 McDougall, J. 222 Magus, S. 115

271

Markell, M.J. 72, 78, 86, 166, 195, 245 Meier, C.A. 87, 190 Merleau-Ponty, M. 197–8 Mindell, A. 191 Ming 155 Minkowski, H. 172 Mitchell, R. 23 Moerland, B. 115 Montecchi, F. 168 Mookerjee, A. 95 Moyers, B. 26 Muktananda, S. 103 Navone, A. 168 Neumann, E. 43, 44, 46, 75, 91, 126, 164, 208 Nietzsche, F.W. 189, 227, 239 Osterman, E. 172 Pagels, E. 108, 115, 160 Paracelsus 189 Patanjali 95 Perera, S. 191 Pert, C. 202–4 Pius XII, Pope 239 Plato 181 Pogliani, G. 198 Pribram, K. 182, 205–6 Pu-Ming 152 Ramakrishna 94 Rilke, R.M. 166, 240, 251–2 Rinpoche, S. 166 Robinson, J.M. 177 Rossi, E.L. 202 Rouselle, E. 140, 145 Ruland 191 Ryce-Menuhin, J. 37, 168, 207 Samuels, A. 191 Scharf Kluger, R. 43, 49, 65, 67, 68, 78, 86, 87 Schwartz-Salant, N. 191, 195 Seccho (Hsueh-t’ou) 20 Seikyo (Ching-chu) 152 Seneca 132 Shen-hsiu 154 Shen Tsung, Emperor 141 Shepherd, S.T. 44, 92 Shui-ch’ing Tzu 32 Sidoli, M. 224 Signell, K. 8 Siler, T. 111, 112 Stendl-Rast, D. 34 Suares, C. 114, 115 Suzuki, D.T. 21, 25, 105, 145, 148, 152, 156, 159, 160–1 Suzuki-Roshi, S. 106 153 Swamy, C. 238 Swamy, N. 238 Takuan 145

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Tansley, D. 97 Thich Nhat Hanh 227 Thurman, R.A.F. 180 Tolkein, J.R.R. 20 Toynbee, A. 27 Tseng 153 Valentinus 107–8 Vannini, V. 198 Von Franz, M.L. 26, 28, 38, 50, 51, 52, 74, 75, 76, 77, 84, 168, 171–2, 176–82, 189, 217 Waley, A. 133, 144 Weber, R. 13, 107, 161, 168, 171, 227, 248 Weil, A. 207 Weinrib, E. 29, 108, 117–20, 128, 129, 181, 216, 240–1 Wilber, K 169 Wong, E. 31, 32 Woodman, M. 191, 224 Yengo (Yuan-wu) 201 Zeller, M. 169 Zukav, G. 141