Below is the prologue to my new book, still in progress.
Oprah & Sophia?
January 1, 2011
Something that could be best described as an energy shift is beginning to arise from the depths of the heart of humanity. Examples of this shift abound everywhere. Witness the following. Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code weaves a mystery based on that earthy redhead Mary Magdalene having created a bloodline with Jesus. The film The Black Swan portrays a ballerina’s struggle to embrace the repressed qualities expressed in the image of the black swan. Spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle teaches us of the importance of shifting our focus from doing to being. The best-selling book The Shack depicts God as an earth-mother in the form of a large, wise and deeply loving black woman. The empress of the talk show genre, Oprah Winfrey, has just this very day launched her own television network. What is the deeper energy shift of which the above are but mere waves and ripples?
Over five decades ago, the famous Swiss psychiatrist, C. G. Jung, predicted that there would be a reemergence of the ancient images of the archetypal feminine in the new millennium. Jung saw this as an expression of what he called “the self-regulating nature of the psyche” which applies to both the individual or collective psyche. In my master’s thesis Mandala Symbolism in 19th Century American Romantic Literature, I described how archetypal images arise in the art and literature of an age. As in the dreams of individuals, these images emerge from the collective unconscious in an effort to make up for what is lacking in the collective consciousness or world view of that age.
This shift to the feminine is taking place after 2000 years of Western Culture being dominated by patriarchal, masculine values. These values are epitomized by an emphasis on doing and having rather than on simply being. The advances in technology reflect what the heroic effort to do and to acquire can do to improve the quality of life. So much has been done to develop new and better things. However, with the archetypal feminine, come the values of emotional intelligence, intuition, the wisdom of the body, and the heart. These values arise to bring balance after centuries of a one-sided emphasis on the head, the intellect, and reason.
Sophia, the Creek goddess of wisdom, leads the pantheon of divine feminine figures. You might say that my love affair with Sophia began in college when I felt a tingling up my spine the very moment the professor told us that philosophy meant love of Sophia (wisdom). Thus began a pursuit of wisdom that has remained a lifelong endeavor. I also felt that same tingling when I learned of the centrality of Sophia from a recorded presentation on the long-repressed dark, positive feminine by Jungian analyst, Dr. Karlyn Ward. The presentation was aptly named Anchored in the Heart. The dark feminine refers both to divine feminine figures who have been kept in the dark over the centuries and to the feminine values and qualities they embody and symbolize.
Sophia has remained hidden in plain sight. For example, almost no reference is made to the diminutive female figure in Michelangelo’s Creation series on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The figure is Sophia, and she is held to God’s side as a bride by one of God’s massive arms. With His other arm, God reaches out to touch Adam’s finger.
Sophia is associated with the color black, and with the ancient images of the Black Madonna. Wisdom was associated with black because wisdom is often hidden in the dark depths within each one of us.
One afternoon, I was reflecting on Sophia and then a question arose. Who is the most powerful feminine presence of our time? Oprah. Clearly, she embodies all that is associated with the archetypal dark feminine. She is a dark-skinned woman who has been dispensing daily doses of wisdom for decades. The steady stream of experts she has hosted on her show have provided information to help us heal our lives and relationships. Now, with her own television network, Oprah has achieved a kind of omnipresence—an appropriate quality for a modern-day representative of Sophia.
In conducting interviews, Oprah embodies the compassionate, empathic presence of an archetypal earth-mother. Oprah appeared at a time in human history when our lives and relationships were, and still are, in desperate need of the feminine values of compassion, wisdom, and emotional intelligence.
What is being described applies equally to males and females. Just because a woman is in a female body does not mean she is in touch with her heart and the other positive qualities found in the archetypal feminine. She may be driven by the values of our male-dominated society thereby denying all that her deeper feminine nature offers. She may, in effect, behave as if she were a very driven, type a task-oriented man.
In his book The Essential Mystics, Andrew Harvey directs our attention to what we all, men or women, need for the next conscious step in human evolution.
"For the human race to have a chance to survive…there has to be a fusion between our masculine and feminine energies…between our innermost mystical awareness and our political, technological and economic choices. Only such a fusion and sacred marriage can produce in us the necessary clarity, knowledge and force of active love necessary to preserve the world."
What follows is the story of how my quest for healing my eyes led me, a typical action-oriented American male, a product of Western Civilization, into unfamiliar territory. What I encountered was totally unexpected but, in retrospect, made perfect sense. It is the story of my descent into the dark depths of my heart where I found the eternal feminine hidden behind a wall of fiercely masculine attitudes.
The journey in this book begins where the journey initiated in The Space Between Stars leaves off. From there, you will accompany me on both my inward and outward travels. You will go with me and see what I saw on my visits to the healer-medium Joao de Deus (John of God) at the Casa de Dom Inacio de Loyola (the house of St. Ignatius of Loyola) the healing center located in the village of Abadiania, Brazil. Shortly after my arrival at the Casa (the abbreviated way that most staff and visitors affectionately refer to the healing center), I was confronted by visions dating back to the Crusades. All the eye-opening experiences I had on my quest for restored vision will be revealed to you and, hopefully, help you attain true vision which is something other than simply seeing 20/20. . . .
Once again, as I mentioned in the preface, it is to see as the still small voice whispered to me when I was with the Maya: “When you can see with total love and no fear, your vision will become clear.” For more than a decade, it has been my quest to see as God sees with total love and no fear. This seemingly lofty goal has been the guiding torch I bear, lighting my way through the thorny thickets of the dark-forest night of my damaged vision to the dawn of a new day of seeing everything clearly.
