The Medieval Mind

Bride of Frankenstein (1/10) Movie CLIP - Pretorius Shows Henry His Experiments

 

Dr. Pretorius

[toasting with Henry] 

To a new World of Gods and Monsters. Ha, ha. 

The Creation of Life is enthralling, distinctly enthralling, is it not? 

My experiments did not turn out quite like yours Henry. 

But Science, like love, has her little surprises - as you shall see. 

There is a pleasing variety about my exhibits. 

My first experiment was so lovely that we made her A Queen. 

Charming, don't you think? 

Then of course, we had to have A King. 

Now, he's so madly in love with her that we have to segregate them....

My next production looked so disapprovingly at the other two that they made him An Archbishop...

The next one is The Very Devil - very bizarre, this little chap. 

There's a certain resemblance to me, don't you think? 

Or do I flatter myself? 

I took a great deal of pains with him. 

Sometimes I have wondered whether life wouldn't be much more amusing if we were all devils, and no nonsense about angels and being good.

The Medieval Mind

In the Middle Ages, the work of alchemy was to produce Gold from base metals.  

There were charlatans trying to make actual Gold, but the best alchemists were  those working with The Gold  of The Spirit.  

Alchemy comes from a time when the medieval mind was at its highest flowering.

In Medieval times, people did not divide Reality into Inner and Outer or even acknowledge a difference between the two.

For them, inside and outside were the  same.

To accomplish all that we have today, we’ve had to split the world in two.

We couldn’t be this competitive with a Medieval Mind.

But the price we pay for our  accomplishments is Loneliness and an Inability to Love.

When We’re In Love, We ARE  Our Beloved.

I spent many years trying to help people differentiate between inner  and outer: 

 

You are you, and I am I. 

Your husband is your husband. 

We have not yet  completed the transition to The Modern Mind. 

Many psychological problems are a  failure to differentiate between out there and in here.  

 
According to the teachings of India, The External World is 'maya', illusion.

It is  considered illusory because it is actually WITHIN, not out there.

We see only the “ten  thousand things” that we project.

LIKE SLENDERMAN

Or Count Dracula

Or, IT.

In ancient China, Lao Tzu dreamed of a butterfly,  and for the rest of his life he didn’t know whether he had dreamed the butterfly or  the butterfly had dreamed him.  

 

In the West, gold is the symbol of the Self, while in the East, the symbol of our  inner divinity is The Diamond.

In their interior meanings, they are the same, but the  images are different. Diamonds are the hardest matter on earth—unearthly, celestial, and impersonal.

Gold is much softer, a matter of relationship, the Self as related. I think we’re lucky to have gold to cope with.    

The Glow in Your Eyes    

When we see that we have given our spiritual gold to someone to hold for us, there  are several ways we might respond. We could go to him or her and say, “The mean-  ing of my life has suddenly appeared in the glow in your eyes. May I tell you about  it?” This is another way of saying, “I have given you my inner gold. Will you carry it  for me for a while?” 

But we rarely say and do things that directly. 

Instead, we stand  across the room, turn our back on him, and feel totally frightened, stumbling and carrying on in odd ways. We meet at the coffee pot during the morning break at  work and banter with each other, speaking all kinds of nonsense. We joke and  laugh, and an animated play goes on. Then, when we head back to work, we feel  energized and brightened for the day. It was not the coffee. It was the exchange of  inner, alchemical gold.  The exchange of gold is a mysterious process. It is our gold, but it’s too heavy  for us, so we need someone else to carry it for a time. That person becomes synonymous with meaning. We follow him with an eagle eye wherever he goes. His  smile can raise us to heavenly heights, his frown will hurl us to hellish depths, so  great is the power of meaning.  





At age forty-five or fifty, when you have raised your children and become  accomplished in your work, suddenly you fall into a hole. The more sensitive and  intelligent you are, the deeper the hole might be. A guide in the form of Virgil may  come and list all the things in your life that have gone wrong. These are the nine  levels of Hell. 

 

Your guide, your intelligence, will disillusion you. “ Abandon hope,  all ye who enter here” is a classical beginning to what Jung called the “ individation process,” or the spiritualization of a man. If I could rewrite that sign, it  would say, “Give up all expectations and presently held concepts.”  

 

The job of your intelligence is to catalog Hell for you, to tell you all the things  that don’t work. If your integrity is sufficient, if you go forward, Beatrice will come  in the form of a radiant vision of hope and the feminine to take you the rest of the  way and gently deposit you in Heaven. 

 

This will be one of the most profound experiences of your life.  

 

Modern men and women have forgotten how to take this journey. Even with the  best of motives— trying to find that vision of life that will nourish us and give  meaning to the progression of our days on earth—we do crazy things. We let our  marriage go to pieces and marry someone else, hoping to find the visionary feminine in her. We would do well to learn from Dante. 

 

Most important is to remember  that Virgil, the one who helps us discern what is wrong, and Beatrice, the heavenly  guide, are both interior figures and that this is an interior journey. It has its exterior  dimension. If you are an artist, a poet, a healer, a teacher, or a mystic, you will pro-  duce outer, tangible results of your journey. But the journey is essentially inner.  This is the most important thing to learn.  You will never find a Beatrice to marry, because she is in your imagination, your  art, and your prayers. When you seek her in an interior way, she will come in an in-  stant. But you must be humble enough to ask your feminine side for these rare  qualities of tenderness and beauty, receptivity and love. Without doing so, it can be  difficult to become truly whole. Even if you experience her as a real woman who  has entered your life, the grace that has descended upon you is your inner awak-  ening, catalyzed by this wonderful experience. It is not the other. It is in you.  

Salvation

There are legends and predictions throughout the world of the once and future  king, someone who has brought about a golden age and promises to come back in  the future to restore it. Arthur, the great and noble king who brought England together in the sense we know it now, is one. It is said that Arthur didn’t die at the  end of his reign, but was transported to the isle of Avalon, a place of healing, and  that he offered, when needed, to come back. The magician Merlin, the introverted,  inward-turned aspect of the Arthurian story, also said, as he was leaving, “I will  come back to you again.” 

 

In Mexico, just before his death, the god-king Quetzalcoatl promised to come back if he was needed.  According to Indian mythology, an avatar is sent to the earth every thousand  years and at other times when there are special difficulties. Buddha was one. In  India today, there are rumors that a new avatar has been born who, when he comes  to maturity, will step forth to be the new savior. If we take this literally, we might be  disappointed. They come and they go. But in an interior sense, it’s a real possi-  bility. A point of intersection between our time-bound world and eternity exists for  us, and that’s salvation. I’m fascinated by this promise of a return—the once and  future king. It’s a glorious promise that can give us hope.    

 

Literalism Is Idolatry

 

The British philosopher Owen Barfield said something that reverberates in my  mind every day. He said, “ Literalism is idolatry.” If you take the inner world literally  into our time-space world, you lose it.  Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I was in love with the Church and  devoted to it.

But as I grew older, I became critical and wouldn’t have anything to  do with it. Later, I read a medieval text that made Christianity real for me again. It  said that Christ is constantly being conceived, constantly being born in his stable,  constantly confounding the elders, constantly being tried by Judas, constantly  being crucified, constantly resurrecting, and, most wonderful of all, constantly in
his Second Coming.  

The doctrine of the Second Coming of Christ is, for Christians, the greatest  telling of the story of the once and future king. Early Christians said that on the  eighth day after his Resurrection, Christ will come and usher the world into the  millennium, when time will end, strife and suffering will stop, and the Kingdom of  Heaven will be at hand. Taken literally, this story doesn’t touch me very much. It’s  too abstract, too far out of reach. If we wait for this literally, we’ll wait till dooms-  day.  But when we take this story out of literalism and into the interior world, which  has no time and no space, we have an immediate, living fact. If we take the full  story of Christianity inwardly as a timeless fact, these possibilities are available for  us to touch as soon as we are ready, or perhaps even as soon as we choose.

The  Second Coming of Christ is not just available to us. It is beating on our doors.  

Sabbath

It was expected that Christ would return within the octave, eight days, and put an  end to the cyclic nature of life. The eighth day is Sunday, and so Christians cele-  brate Sunday as their holy day. When we celebrate on Sunday, we celebrate the  ushering into the kingdom, and we relocate ourselves outside of time and in eter-  nity. Since it’s the eighth day of the week, the expectation was that there was only  going to be one of them. If we want to be logical, we could say that it didn’t work,  because Monday turns up. But symbolically, in the depths of our unconscious,  there is only one day of the Second Coming of Christ. There is only one Mass and  one day of worship. It is not a process. Christianity puts an end to process and to  the cyclic nature of man’s sojourn on earth.  According to Jewish custom, the Sabbath is on the seventh day. There are seven  days followed by the first day again. This is the myth of eternal return. Mircea Eli-  ade points out that more people on earth believe in the cyclical nature of time than  in the linear nature of time. Sabbath, Saturn, andSaturdayare all associated with the  number seven. Seventh-Day Adventists celebrate the Sabbath on Saturday. Seven is  the symbol of cycle.  If you deal with numbers in your dreams or in mythology, you’ll get lost if you  take them literally. Numbers have their own symbolism, and at this level of com-  prehension they are about quality, not quantity. A delightful Chinese story illustrates this. 

 

The Chinese army was in a desperate, beleaguered situation, and so the  general met with his advisors to decide what to do. Should they retreat and save  what they could, or make a desperate effort and try to break out? They stayed up all  night discussing the pros and the cons, and at dawn they took a vote. Six said re-  treat, and four wanted to fight it out. So they fought, because four is so much bet-  ter a number than six. This is a non-literal way of thinking. Of course they won. The  story wouldn’t have survived if they hadn’t.    The Heavenly Jerusalem    Envision the Second Coming of Christ as an inner reality that takes place on the  eighth day of the week. Eight is a symbol of infinity, as you can see when you turn  the numeral eight (8) on its side. A baptismal font has eight sides to indicate that  when a child is baptized, he’s initiated into the eight-sided consciousness, eternity.  On this symbolic level, there is nothing past the number eight. You’ve annihilated  the cyclic nature and completed life.  A Brahman friend in India told me, “ Robert, you know all about wrnycC— the  Indian concept that the world is illusory, a construct. “Let me tell you about ma-  hamaya” Mahameans great. “ Mahamaya is the ultimate reality. It means looking at  maya with intelligence.” Looking at illusion in a fresh way is the heavenly  Jerusalem. This is not a promise, but a fact, right now. If you can jump out of time,  which we are capable of doing, we can see any given moment as eternity. We don’t  have to travel anywhere or even to wait in line. This is not a new fact. It’s a fresh  way of looking.  As mentioned, the Second Coming of Christ is available to us as individuals when we are ready, or perhaps even when we choose. This is the Christian way of  speaking about enlightenment, heightened consciousness, the experience that relo-  cates your spiritual center of gravity. We are not bound to history. The Second  Coming of Christ is available to us as individuals, and it will wait for us until we are  able to remain steady in its presence.  This intersection of levels happens to people more than we might realize. They  don’t understand the structure of it, so they just walk off and leave it. But saint-  hood is more common than we think.    The Church and the Mass.    

In the medieval world there was a proverb that the Mass, the communion service, a  point in which we shift from time-bound to eternal consciousness, is the interim  carrier of Christ. 

Mass can happen only once, but it can also happen again and  again. 

The Church was touching on a non-literal fact and teaching it in the abstruse  symbolism of the Second Coming of Christ. If you have the kind of mind that can  think non-literally, there are jewels like this throughout Christianity.  The Church was also said to be the interim carrier of Christ— from his resurrection until his Second Coming eight days later. It was said that Christ is like the  sun, and the Church is like the moon. When the sun is farthest from the moon, the  moon is full. 

 

When Christ is farthest from the Church, the Church is at its greatest  power. When the sun and moon are closest together, the moon has no light at all.  As the Second Coming of Christ approaches, the Church will have fulfilled its duty  and can disband. There is no Church or Mass in Heaven, because they are interim  carriers of the nature of Christ. Christ is present in Heaven, so interim carriers are  not needed.  Many traditions posit that there are two truths: absolute and relative. In Christianity these are expressed as eternity, which is neither spatial nor temporal, and  the Church, which is the human dimension. We need both— the Church as the interim carrier and the insight into a higher order of things.  

Cultural Yearning

As a culture, we hunger for the Second Coming of Christ. A new kind of conscious-  ness is stirring. People sense this. Some call it the New Age— leaving the Age of  Pisces, symbolized by two fishes, and entering the Age of Aquarius, symbolized by  the water bearer, a man with a jug on his shoulders pouring out water. If we take  Aquarius back to his Greek roots, we get Ganymede, who was abducted from earth  by Zeus and appointed his cupbearer. He poured the wine at heavenly celebrations.  This means more to me than Aquarius. The one who fills the cup with wine is a  predecessor of Dionysus and a forerunner of Christ, and is the ruler of the age to  come, with similar expectations to the Second Coming of Christ.  The hippie movement was a somewhat naïve attempt at the Second Coming, a  group of people who wanted something new, the wine of life, exhilaration, motivated by the archetype of the Second Coming of Christ. The drug culture is another  manifestation— although of an extremely poor quality— of the demand for the  Second Coming of Christ, for the ecstatic experience and the cessation of time-  and-space-bound consciousness. When someone comes to me with a drug problem, I can often touch him by saying, “ What you’re doing is right. Your expectations and demands are valid. But you’re doing it in the wrong way.”  Discontent, chaos, and caution-to-the-wind seem to be endemic worldwide. I  think it is the stirring of the Second Coming of Christ. But it needs intelligence be-  hind it. This timeless quality needs time. We’re going to blunder for a while before  a new consciousness, a new grail castle, a new peak experience will find its solidity.  

 

If the Second Coming is always available, why is the world in such a mess? The  best that we are capable of can turn into the worst if we get it on the wrong level.  Some of the world’s worst messes, like Hitlerism, were fueled and motivated by a  sublime archetypal energy. These things can misfire badly. Perhaps they need to  misfire until they are mature enough for their sublime aspects to be realized.  

 

There is great danger that the archetype of the Second Coming of Christ, or the  Once and Future ing, can erupt in a negative form again. Nazism is an example within living memory. There is nothing that human beings cannot literalize into  trouble. Literalism knows no end, and literalism is the death of insight. But that  sublime archetypal structure is always available in its true, interior way, for anyone  who chooses to touch it and is capable of touching it. Sometimes the point of con-  tact becomes accessible only in our deepest, darkest moments.    

Balancing Heaven and Earth    

St. Teresa of Avila was consumed by ecstasy at unpredictable moments. She often  found herself caught in a rapture for minutes at a time, sometimes longer. 

 

But  someone observed that she was never enraptured while she was cooking her breakfast. If she were, she might burn it. 

 

Eternity can dovetail into our practical lives. It’s  possible for us to manage the toast and the rapture.  

 

We need poets to rescue us from the awful contradictions we get into. 

 

Speech  is literal and rational and cannot easily contain the depths of the mystery. For that  we need symbols and symbolic language. 

 

During Mass — a great symbol of the  intersection of time and eternity — we are liberated from space and time. 

 

But after  Mass, we need to go home and cook our breakfast. We can discover within our-  selves the capacity to sustain both the presence of the divine and the holiness of  daily life. 

The two are, in fact, one.  

 [TARDIS]

(Punch cards litter the floor. The Doctor stops pacing and kicks at a pile of them.)

DOCTOR: 

It's no good, K9.

K9: 

Master?

DOCTOR: 

Listen. I'm going to have to go to the rebels for help. 

But will they help, I ask myself.

K9: 

Probability of indigenous dissident group rendering effective assistance, very low.

DOCTOR: 

Shush. I'm thinking. 

I've got to make a very impressive entrance. 

Something that'll win them over entirely. 

Got it! 

Right, K9, we need a slight spatial movement and no temporary displacement. 

Very tricky, these short hops.

K9: 

Information, master.

DOCTOR: 

What is it?

K9: 

The relative smallness of E-space should render fractional increments more stable.

DOCTOR: 

But of course. 

Good boy, K9.

[Rebel's cave]

VEROS: 

We can't let Ivo and the villagers attack alone. 

They'll be slaughtered!

KALMAR: 

Will it help if we're slaughtered with them, just as we're winning back the old knowledge? 

I refuse to throw it all away.

VEROS: 

Ivo was right, then. 

You do prefer these toys to human life.

KALMAR: 

Because they are the slow secret of victory. 

Why do you think they are so afraid of Science?

VEROS: 

The Doctor was A Scientist. 

Like all the rest, he vanished in the Tower.

(The TARDIS materialises and The Doctor comes out.)

DOCTOR: 

Halt! Don't move. 

Look, I'm awfully sorry to drop in on you like this, 

but we do have a bit of a crisis on our hands.

MOTHER SUPERIOR: 

We face Danger, we face Evil, which stands at the

gate of our most holy sanctuary.

God is with us, as we know.

God's Love is Eternal.

This we know too.

Tonight, in our most deadly hour do we think our God will remember us?

Will he reach down and save us from Death's Shadow?

NO.

No, He will not.

Where in Our World is God to be found?

In our prayer?

No.

In our song?

No.

In our Suffering, in our Endurance?

No.

Faith is Not a Transaction.

You do not barter with The Infinite --

You ALIGN With It.

So, then, where do we find Our God?

Sisters, I will tell you.

When you stand in the deepest pit, alone, without hope or help, and yet still know Right from Wrong...

When there is only darkness and despair and yet you feel humming in your blood, the difference between good and

bad...

When you are beyond rescue or reward or judgment...

And you STILL look evil in the

face and say, 

"No!

"This far but no further.”

"No!"

Whose voice is that who is with you in that darkness?

Whose voice keeps you to the path?

Darkness and evil may seem compelling to us all, and I believe it is because,

in THEIR presence, we can FEEL God in our hearts.

No, He will not reach down to Save Us.

We will RISE to meet him.

Let us pray.

PRAYS SOFTLY

MOTHER SUPERIOR: 

Ahem. Ahem.

BLADE SLICES

DRACULA :

She was clearing her throat.

NUNS GASP AND QUIVER

I think it's fine now.

Oh, ladies, who's next? Boo!