Jan Boeckhorst, 1604-1668, Bellerophon Taming Pegasus with the help of Mercury.

A discourse on selfish self-improvement and some New Year's Tips to help aerate your brain.

New Year’s Tip No1.: Read up on your mythology!

Alert:

There is a shortage of imagination (i.e. colour-processing) in the modern mind. We have fogotten how to ride the horse of imagination.

Premise:

Different colours have different dances, a wholesome person has to learn them all. Healing is about adjusting the tone-harmony. Figure out where you stand in relation to the light and the darkness. Clearly plants are great helpers in this work!

New Year’s Tip No.2: Visit gardens!

Claude Monet’s garden, Giverney

Update so far (on our Evolution):

There are a great number of seriously ill people in our midst. One in two is dysfunctional. When It’s not me, it’s you, when it’s not you, it’s me. Or so it goes for more than half the encounters with others in crowded cities (or stifled villages), at least.

Definition of Health:

To heal is to become whole, unified. Health is a balanced state between light and darkness (or high and low in psychiatric terms; but more concretely still, think of man as a polar being with lower-pole and upper-pole disorders, and hysterical and neuraesthenic tendencies respectively.)

Health IS at the heart. (Aside an innate hole in the heart, there is nothing ever wrong at the heart to start off ill health or coronary disease). The heart reflects the influence of soul. This soul must neither bury itself too deeply into the flesh and bone (giving inflamed and cramped conditions) nor leave any part of the body unaerated (this would cause sclerotic, cold and blind spots, perfect sites for foreign invasions).

The body is a temple:

(if usually, nowadays more like a spa resort or a designer flat). Use it, adorn it, lament any damage it incurs, make it a meeting place, a sure spot, but don’t cling to it, or aggrandise its significance either. It is also a cosmic map, with the planets up close and personal in your major organs and the zodiac imprinted from top to toe. It is a weather vane, determing by the influx of sensations the mood about you, and a transimittor of your own spiritual status. We are all our own radio stations.

New Year's Tip No.3.: Read Alain Daniélou: The Hindu Tempel, to feel the cross at which point the heart rests: water and fire meet in horizontal and vertical, in descending-ascending, yin and yang, ida-pingala, That's pretty much the picture for all Kundalini work.

Erotic Statues on Hindu Temples; Travel pictures from Nepal; by Dr. Günther Eichhorn

Become the horseman of your ether waves (imagination):

The radio hasn’t quite died, but few people really listen to it as their main source of information or entertainment. It’s faded into the white-background-noise along with all the other air-traffic. In part, this is because we want to choose exactly what we ingest. (As if we are experts, already, on our digestion!) This is a precarious notion. There is still a need to sup from a communal dish. On his desert island, all by his lonesome self, dear Philoctetes, was forever running wild shooting birds out of the air, which did his foul-smelling foot no good at all....

Mainly we receive a lot of static, or jingles and jangles on repeat. Nobody, seems to go into the art of riding your horse, that is your imaginative-mental body, much, these days. We tend to go on automatic pilot in the safety of our insulated vehicles. We speak through grills, into mics, into space, not face to face. No wonder we hear so few inspiring disc jockeys.

Nicolai Abildgaard, The Wounded Philoctetes, 1775. More on the myth of Philoctetes here
(I appreciate Madeline Miller's love of the myth and her approach, but I hold a diametrically different, more spiritual and less modern-psychological initerpretation of this myth; which is all about the beginning of the individualisation process, and thereby makes Odysseus very much a hero as its frontman, while the older generation (P.), still under the wings of the gods (with clairvoyant faculties instead of intellectual-philosophical ones), must make room for the younger generation, or step up and ground more thoroughly.)

Too many chefs spoil the broth

When anything goes, everything suddenly can leave the building. You will find yourself with your Echo (as Narcissus). Loving yourself is one thing; positive affirmations are tickets to success, but it's also not that straightforward that everybody can be a mental coach. Every individual response to life is valid. Your own experience is unique. Only if that means to you that the highest good is leaving free and running free, you will never have anything in common (generic) with another being.

New Year's Tip No.4.: listen to Eckhart Tolle.

You need to be able to generalise as well as discriminate. Somehow this lack of common purpose is acutely felt and in response we find the media hype to “share” and “contribute” or participate, “join” or sign up. But this is not to create a common ground of like-souls. It does nothing to increase your sense of responsibility towards the other (yes, sometimes you must be courageous [of the heart] and intervene. Intervention is neiter interference or oppression. It is a coming in between, it is a form of taking an interest in the other's state of soul.

To say things in general is not to generalise, either. It's verbal diahoerrea and psychedlic picture shows putting our collective madness on display. It is the epitomy of an I that is lost in a forest of I's. We can see how such a trend (pre-dating computers, which only is the lemon juice held to the flame) could lead to dead-end programming of our minds, throwing out the horse with the old feudal system.

New Year's Tip No.5: Read

The Me-Age comes to a fall

May autism serve as a cautionary tale. One of its main characteristics, shared across the spectrum, is the cognitive impairment to generalise. As a deficiency it takes on grotesque forms, where a patient may get fixated on details in an obsessive, compulsive manner, creating a nasty handicap. It may mean needing a new language that by-passes the subtle nuances of spoken language, by way of pictograms and a very tight contex-dependent syntax to deterime elaborate sets of parameters/ rules for making sense the world. Here the Sensitive sees a raw spirituality (the disincarnate self) flapping at the door like a lost rag, unable to use natural laws to steer by; as well as an oppressive, deadly landscape of morass and volcanic debris, of a mind that has lost its air and life.

At the frontier of autism, that illness that assails our mental capacity for containing soul and taking it to new heights, we learn the direction individualism should not take. It only underpins the dangerous nature of this disorder, how the trend is moving towards “normalisation” of autism, to further inclusion and acceptance with accompanying notions of how we are all somewhere on the spectrum! (Heavens forbid!!). Facilitate, restrict and protect are my devices in the reversal of autism. For the rest, approach with wariness. After all, you never quite can tell who is riding the horse.

Autism is one dead-end of many we are coming up against in the quick-fix frantic momentum of discontent. That’s how far it can go if we extoll individualism as I am one of many, versus the I that is only significant as a part of All.

The new thinking = feeling:

Hate to dump a paradox on you, but if we don’t stop thinking about our self we will lose this self. Thinking is not your nurse in this salvation operation. The more you try to find the right regime, step-by-step, result-based, thinking effectively, efficiently, concretely: it all sounds great, but it all binds you to the head pole, leaving the blood to churn of it's own accord.

How then to pump up the heart and make it our new brain? Less pumping, more observing.
Less following, since it always leads in a straight line off a cliff. But more suspending of judgement, willingness to sacrifice and surrender and trust to go a little of the way with someone else who feels good to you. You don't even have to like them much (train yourself to sever your chains of antipathy and sympathy).

If you stay on trend, even the trends that promise you greater individuality, you’ll all go down as individuals, that’s as good as the news gets. But you’ll hurtle into a churning sea of je ne sais quoi - which may not be the worst news. The worst news is that you'll be in a sea that has no edge to climb on up out from (howz that for prepositions!).

These are the marginal notes on our individualisation process so far, that are a little disconcerting to the Michaelic Team. All our work on this precious good that is I, may as yet still lead to the victory of Light or to that of Darkness, but certainly not the Brotherhood of Man. Black and white thinking leads to the loss of movement that is colour, and thus the loss of soul.

The lion speaks

Any brighter message for this eighth Holy Day? Well, it’s in the sign of Leo, so if ever, today it the day you can take such preponderances on board and make the most of them. A fuzzy post-New Year’s Eve head is only good. By it you will get to know your come-back roar all the better!

New Year's Tip. No. 6.: Don’t just exist: live life!

Spot Kevin!