It was an extraordinary moment of reverie that I snapped out of with a pang of nostalgia, because I realized I have long since lost that stone.Only later it occurred to me that on a subconscious level I had internalized the stones essence. Without my awareness, the stone had bestowed upon me the magical pan psychic healing power of its nature. Moreover, I realized that the quest for the philosopher’s stone is a metaphor for the everyday challenge to consciously activate the magical transformative powers of the Spirit.
The Sacred Art of Alchemy
Excerpt:
Jung makes the important point that "The real nature of matter was unknown to the alchemist. In as much as he tried to explore it he projected the unconscious into the darkness of matter in order to illuminate it. In order to explain the mystery of matter he projected yet another mystery - his own psychic background - into what was to be explained." The alchemists' experiences with matter were revealing to them their own mind. Jung continues, "I am, therefore, inclined to suppose that the real root of alchemy is to be sought less in philosophical doctrines than in the projections of individual investigators.... while working on his chemical experiments the operator had certain psychic experiences which appeared to him as the particular behavior of the chemical process. Since it was a question of projection, he was naturally unconscious of the fact that the experience had nothing to do with matter itself (that is, with matter as we know it today). He experienced his projection as a property of matter, but what he was in reality experiencing was his own unconscious...Such projections repeat themselves whenever man tried to explore an empty darkness and involuntarily fills it with living form." To put it simply, the alchemists had unconsciously stumbled onto and were participating in the divine secret which has now become understood in quantum physics (albeit in different terms), that what we are experiencing right now as matter is inseparable from our own mind.
In exploring their unconscious through the material world, the alchemists were potentially waking themselves up to the dreamlike nature of reality. In becoming lucid in the dream of life, they were realizing how they could transform the world by transforming themselves. We are all potential alchemists-in-training to the extent we are consciously participating in giving creative expression to our experience of the unconscious. When enough of us become accomplished in the sacred art of alchemy, we can connect and "conspire to co-inspire" each other, I imagine, to activate our collective genius and create real magic, changing the world in the process. As the alchemist Gerhard Dorn proclaims, "Transform yourselves into living philosophical stones!"
SACRED STONES
At the most basic level, stone is the fabric of the Earth and as such is a symbol of the everlasting. The anthropomorphic view of the world sees stones and rock as the bones of mother Earth. They are the fundamental structure that supports all other aspects of physical existence and contains traces of earlier earthly life forms. This is the outer reflection of our inner fabric, for the bones inside our bodies determine the human physical form. They are the components of the physical body that endure the longest after the spirit has departed. Within the human psyche stone symbolises the eternal substance of existence, at a level deeper than the ego consciousness. When we touch a stone we commune with this eternal substance, and we feel that the virtues present in the stone are transferred to us. Traditionally stones are receptacles for spirit, which can be attracted if correct procedures are adopted. The ancient philosophers, among them Lamblichus, Porphyry, and Proilus, stated that gods and demons, when attracted to stone images through rituals, take up residence in them, using them as media for their manifestations.
Celtic Sacred Landscapes. Nigel Pennick. P39
Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia. Stephan Harding. Pg20
For most non-Western cultures, such experiences of the living qualities of nature are a source of direct, reliable knowledge. For them, nature is truly alive, and every entity within it is endowered with agency, intelligence, and wisdom; qualities which in the West, when they are recognised at all, have commonly been referred to as 'soul'. For traditional cultures, rocks are considered to be the elders of the Earth; they are the keepers of the oldest memories and are sought out for their tranquil, wise council. High mountains are abodes of powerful beings and are climbed only at the risk of gravely offending their more-than-human inhabitants. Forests are living entities, and must be consulted before a hunt by the shamans of the tribe, who have direct, intuitive connection with the great being of the forest. The American philosopher and cultural ecologist David Abram makes the point that many traditional people knew their natural surroundings as so intensely alive and intelligent, as so sensitive to one's presence, that one had to be careful not to offend or insult the very land itself. Thus, most indigenous cultures have known the Earth to be alive - a vast sentient presence honoured as a nuturing and sometimes harsh mother. For such peoples, even the ground underfoot was a repository of devine power and intelligence.
These non-Western peoples espoused an animistic perspective, believing that the whole of nature is, in the profound words of 'geologian' Father Thomas Berry, "a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects". Animism has traditionally been considered backward and lacking in objective validity by western scholars, but today philosophers, psychologist and scientists in our culture are beginning to realize that animistic peoples, far from being 'primitive', have been living a reality which holds many important insights for our own relationships with each other and with the Earth. One such insight is that animistic perception is archetypal, ancient, and primordial; that the human organism is inherantly predisposed to seeing nature as alive and full of soul, and that we repress this fundamental mode of perception at the expense of our health, and that of the natural world.
James Hillman, a close student of Jung and the founder of Archetypal Psychology, suggests that animism is not, as is often believed, a projection of human feelings onto inanimate matter; but that the things of the word project onto us their own 'ideas and demands', that indeed any phenomenon has the capacity to come alive and to deeply inform us through our interaction with it, as long as we are free of an overly objectifying attitude. Hillman points to the danger of identifying interiority with only human subjective experience; a gaping construction site, for example, or a clear-cut mountainside, may communicate the genuine, objective suffering of the Earth, and one's sensing of this is not merely a dream-like symbol of some inner process which relates only to one's own private inner self.
