Home to Ego, Blood, and Spirit

THE DARK AND TERRIBLE VORTEX

In Apprehensions the poet describes four stages of consciousness which correspond to four evolutionary stages of the human being:

Apprehensions¹

There is this white wall, above which the sky creates itself---
Infinite, green, utterly untouchable.
Angels swim in it, and the stars, in indifference also.
They are my medium.
The sun dissolves on this wall, bleeding its lights.

A gray wall now, clawed and bloody.
Is there no way out of the mind?
Steps at my back spiral into a well.
There are no trees or birds in this world,
There is only sourness.

This red wall winces continually :
A red fist, opening and closing,
Two gray, papery bags---
This is what I am made of , this and a terror
Of being wheeled off under crosses and a rain of pietas.

On a black wall, unidentifiable birds
Swivel their heads and cry.

There is no talk of immortality among these!
Cold blanks approach us :
They move in a hurry.

In the white consciousness, the human's ability to live in sense perceptions (sentient soul) coincides with a natural clairvoyance. Here the poet holds discourse with spiritual beings; however the sun ego dissolves and the poet has a limited awareness of self. The poet is highly creative in this state of consciousness but is soon confronted by the deadening of reason and intellect.

The encroachment of dead intellect gives rise to the gray consciousness. Here the poet longs for the natural ease of the white consciousness (see The Eye Mote). This dead rationalism lacks the formative life force and all forward movement is like an endless maze. Any step back leads to the black well of the black state of consciousness where the black "ravens" of ego death (Asuras) wait to tear the soul asunder.

The red consciousness lives in the world of rhythmic feeling where sympathy and antipathy alternate. This wincing is the negative of the cosmic heart rhythms.

The black consciousness is a result of the ego being torn apart, bit by bit, by asuric negative spirits of personality. As the the ego struggles to grow and develop consciousness of the spiritual world of archetypes and living thoughts, dark material thoughts, like the black ravens of dispersion, begin to seize portions of the ego and drive the self into animal darkness. This is an evolutionary force that is counter to the spiritual development of humanity.

Rudolph Steiner in his lecture The Deed of Christ and the Opposing Spiritual Powers described the powers that attacked Sylvia Plath:

".....these Asuric Spirits will prompt what has been seized hold of by them, namely the very core of man's being, the consciousness soul together with the ‘I’, to unite with earthly materiality. Fragment after fragment will be torn out of the ‘I’, and in the same measure in which the Asuric Spirits establish themselves in the consciousness soul, man must leave parts of his existence behind on the earth. What thus becomes the prey of the Asuric powers will be irretrievably lost. Not that the whole man need become their victim — but parts of his spirit will be torn away by the Asuric powers.

These Asuric powers are heralded to-day by the prevailing tendency to live wholly in the material world and to be oblivious of the realty of spiritual beings and spiritual worlds. True, the Asuric powers corrupt man to-day in a way that is more theoretical than actual. To-day they deceive him by various means into thinking that his ‘I’ is a product of the physical world only; they lead him to a kind of theoretic materialism. But as time goes on — and the premonitory signs of this are the dissolute, sensuous passions that are becoming increasingly prevalent on earth — they will blind man's vision of the spiritual Beings and spiritual Powers. Man will know nothing nor desire to know anything of a spiritual world. More and more he will not only teach that the highest moral ideals of humanity are merely sublimations of animal impulses, that human thinking is but a transformation of a faculty also possessed by the animals, that man is akin to the animal in respect of his form and moreover in his whole being descends from the animal — but he will take this view in all earnestness and order his life in accordance with it. "

Anthroposophical Analysis of Apprehensions

Ego, Blood, and Spirit

"Cut"

NEWSylvia Plath, Bees, and Egyptian Initiation NEW

Home to Ego, Blood, and Spirit

Garment Imagery | Tree Imagery| Doppelgangers

Sitemeter Copyright (c)2000 by Sitemeter.com