Jing to Qi to Shen and the Cult of Eros

[Geof Nanto]

My conscious knowledge is helpful, yes! But it also traps me in words and images that can only ever be partial representations of an ineffable whole.  Shunryu Suzuki wrote in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: “In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.” From my observation this certainly applies to experts on Daoism, Buddhism, Christianity etc., and no less so for devotees of secular philosophies. I for one know the enticing power of such entrapment from personal experience.  

 

One way to gain insight into that which knowledge can only ever hint at is to read accounts of from vastly different traditions. For instance, to my mind, what Daoist Neidan describes as Jing to Qi to Shen has parallels with the passage below from Jung’s The Psychology of the Transference that outlines how what starts out as instinctive sexual energy is transformed and refined as it passes through four stages of growth.  (I particularly like the emotionality of this account. For me, love in all its manifestations continues to be a powerful transformative experience.) It ends with realisation of wisdom so profound that nothing can be said. Hence the silence of sages.

 

 

“If a man's temperament inclines him to a spiritual attitude, even the concrete activity of the instincts will take on a certain symbolical character. This activity is no longer the mere satisfaction of instinctual impulses, for it is now associated with or complicated by ‘meanings’. In the case of purely syndromal instinctive processes, which do not demand concrete realization to the same extent, the symbolical character of their fulfilment is all the more marked. The most vivid examples of these complications are probably to be found in erotic phenomenology. Four stages of eroticism were known in the late classical period: Hawwah (Eve), Helen (of Troy), the Virgin Mary, and Sophia. The series is repeated in Goethe's Faust: in the figures of Gretchen as the personification of a purely instinctual relationship (Eve); Helen as an anima figure; ¹ Mary as the personification of the "heavenly," i.e., Christian or religious, relationship; and the "eternal feminine" as an expression of the alchemical Sapientia.

 

As the nomenclature shows, we are dealing with the [masculine] heterosexual Eros or anima-figure in four stages, and consequently with four stages of the Eros cult. The first stage – Hawwah, Eve, earth—is purely biological; woman is equated with the mother and only represents something to be fertilized. The second stage is still dominated by the sexual Eros, but on an aesthetic and romantic level where woman has already acquired some value as an individual. The third stage raises Eros to the heights of religious devotion and thus spiritualizes him: Hawwah has been replaced by spiritual motherhood. Finally, the fourth stage illustrates something which unexpectedly goes beyond the almost unsurpassable third stage: Sapientia. How can wisdom transcend the most holy and the most pure? – Presumably only by virtue of the truth that the less sometimes means the more. This stage represents a spiritualization of Helen and consequently of Eros as such. That is why Sapientia was regarded as a parallel to the Shulamite in the Song of Songs.”

 

1.  Simon Magus' Helen (Selene) is another excellent example.

[Daemon]

http://www.maureenmurdock.com/articles/articles-the-heroines-journey/

 

I sense that you may also find some utility in this?

 

☮️

[Geof Nanto]

@Daemon

 

Thank you. I had not previously heard of Maureen Murdock. I’ve briefly browsed her website and my initial impression is that I concur with your intuition that I may find some utility in it.  I will explore her work some more later.