Transcript Ace of Hearts

Christian Alchemy
and the
Big Two-Hearted River
1



A two-hearted river.
A river with intuition on one bank
and hopefully, logic on the other.
Where did this two-hearted river flow?
2
It flowed here.
85% complete.
Kind of crazy.
3
4
5

How did it get there?
6

And why should you care?
7


To answer that question I had to answer
this question. Who is my audience ?
Initially and naively, my answer to that
question was: “Everyone, of course!”
8

As I reached the point of putting the final
touches on this presentation, I finally had
to make decisions and clarify what this
process was and is about.
9

This presentation is still for everyone.
Yet practically speaking, the presentation
contains three fundamental premises.
10


Premise #1:
In life, at some basic level, there is ‘much more
going on than meets the eye.’
11




Premise #2:
“There’s a new tribe arising…”
“… A tribe of people drawn together by choice,
not circumstance. A tribe united not by race or
geography or history, …”
“…A tribe that has rejected the old idea of “us
and them” and replaced it with the profound
realization that there is only “us”. A tribe that
knows we are all one.” - How Long is Now,
Tim Freke pg. 7
12


Premise #3:
Carl Jung articulated numerous valuable
and penetrating insights into the
Christian religion and its symbols.
13


There you have it.
If you are even remotely open to these ideas
then please continue.
14

Through this slide show I will attempt to
recreate, as authentically as possible, my
travels. Keep in mind that due to time
and space constraints, much must be left
out.
15

In retrospect, it was as though the
journey had begun on land. Thus…
16
The hike
17


The first 32 years on the trail.
In 24 words or less, no less.
18


Time on the trail.
First, life was very good to me.
Then it was not so good.
Then mostly good and some bad.
Then addiction. Couldn’t stop.
Despair…
19

I found myself on the brink of a cliff,
with nowhere to go and nowhere to
hide. The trail, and my life, it seemed,
were coming to an end.
20

I was dying but couldn’t figure out why.
21


Then surrender.
It was as if I had then stumbled backwards
off the edge of the cliff. Either that or the
rock had given way beneath me. Either way,
the analogy is descriptive as it illustrates
how little conscious, critical intention was
involved in my decisions. I was desperate.
22



Somehow, I landed in something like
a raft.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the
raft must have been moored at the
head waters of a kind of river.
Thus began…
23
The Float Trip
24

A chain of events then unfolded which
helped me to realize…
25


…that I was going to have to change
how I traveled. Life was different. I was
on water now. I needed new skills and
new perceptions. I was beginning a life
in “recovery”.
There would be more struggle. More
growth. I would be: S-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d.
26

A little ways down the river, quite
unexpectedly, I experienced a
tremendously profound moment a speck of a glimpse of the eternal
and my place in it.
27


As transformative as that experience
was, I had not been on the river for
very long.
Again, due to time constraints, I will
need to leave out many details and pick
up the story of the journey at a point
eleven years downstream.
28


I contacted a spiritual mentor, Ray Dykes,
a retired Presbyterian minister who lives
in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
He challenged and supported me in
clarifying my ideas and feelings regarding
what I thought God was and wasn’t.
29

Undoubtedly, many books might suffice,
but after working with this book by Dr.
Dykes, Personal Faith with a Passion - How to
Know What You Really Believe, the water
level began to rise and the current picked
up speed.
30


It was probably an odd place to start but…
…for whatever reason I have long enjoyed
card tricks. I have dozens of gimmicked
cards and card decks at home. So with
the imagery of playing cards packed in
“my backpack”, I started to think along
these lines…
31
ARCHETYPAL “GOD”
ARCHETYPAL “GODDESS”
32
Ace of Hearts
The king and queen made
sense, but an ace seemed
“higher” than both.
An ace is beyond gender.
It implies “one-ness”.
And clearly, the hearts
imply “love”.
33
God of the Old
Testament
This is about as close
to humor as I get in
this presentation.
34
Jack of Hearts
Embarrassingly enough,
because of my “mystical”
experience (the speck of
a glimpse of the eternal
and my place in it) I thought
of myself, at the time, as
being a “jack of hearts”
in the spiritual hierarchy.
35
I came to my senses
and realized that
grandiosity was at
work. I must be way
down at the other end
of the spectrum.
Perhaps a two…
36
Or a three.
37
Three of hearts
as Trinity
The three of hearts,
brought to mind the
idea of the Trinity.
38



I was already heading right into some
very turbulent water. The Trinity is a
huge concept.
The many-tiered Trinity Falls.
This may not have been the only way,
but this is how I navigated through its
chaotic waters.
39

The first tier of Trinity Falls.
40


My father was raised in what was then called
the Christian church, and my mother was
raised in the Methodist church.
I was raised in Ethical Humanism, attended
Unitarian Universalist churches as an adult
and also consider myself a cultural Christian.
I was therefore generally familiar with the
idea of the Trinity. However, this doctrine
was packed way down at the bottom of my
“backpack”. Consequently it did not have
much meaning for me.
41
“Equivalent” terms.
After more reading, I came
across these terms. They
were more “accessible”
concepts for me. I think this
was because…
Creator = Father
Uniter = Son
Revealer = Holy Spirit
42


“Creator” is a more gender neutral
term than Father.
It also seems more expansive and less
human being-like in form and that is
more resonant to me.
43

The term “Uniter” as well, felt more
descriptive of what Christ must have
been or symbolized. There was no
question that a sense of being “united”
with something larger than myself had
occurred.
44


…through my recovery and “mystical”
type experience I had an emotional
and cognitive connection to the term
”revealer”. It felt as if something very
deep had been revealed.
This passage from the play A Long Day’s
Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neal,
beautifully describes this extremely
elusive experience:
45

“I belonged, without past or future, within
peace and unity and a wild joy, within
something greater that my own life, or the
life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you
want to put it that way.” “…Like the veil
of things as they seem drawn back by an
unseen hand. For a second you see - and
seeing the secret are the secret. For a
second there is meaning! Then the hand
lets the veil fall and you are alone lost in
the fog…”
46

That is such powerful writing.
47

The second tier of Trinity Falls…
48


“One-ness”. Symbolized as a point.
Mathematically, a dimensionless
geometric element that exists outside
time and space.
“Two-ness”. As matter comes into
“being” (perhaps like a big bang) it
produces duality. Subject and object.
Thus, separation now exists.
49







Hot
Spirit
Wave
“We”
Female
Un-manifested
Intuition
Cold
Matter
Particle
“Me”
Male
Manifested
Reason
50


“Three-ness”. Simultaneously, out of
this separation is manifested the idea of
the third, or all natures of relationship
between all pairs of separated things.
This could just as well be “the 10,000
things”, or a “multiplicity”.
51

The “third” is then any and all points
along the continuum between any two
extremes.
x
cold
y
hot
52
“Trinity” or “Three-ness”
is therefore also meaningful
as a metaphorically relational
number.
53

The third tier of Trinity Falls. Jesus.
54

Clearly, I have avoided talking specifically
about Jesus.
55




I had spent a great deal of time trying to figure
out what was true about Jesus and what was not.
Even whether or not he was an actual historical
person.
I felt like I had been frantically paddling in circles,
trying to make sense of all of the passionate, yet
tremendously divergent perspectives and
possibilities.
The problem was that these arguments seemed
to require that first and foremost I be an historian
and/or anthropologist.
56

I finally came to a resolution that allowed
me to float further downstream. I will
address that briefly, later in the trip.
57

Other have undoubtedly taken different
routes down Trinity Falls, encountered
more tiers or travelled a different branch
of the river altogether. But I had made it
in one piece and needed to paddle into an
eddy for a minute and take a break.
58




Pause…
Breathe…
That’s long enough!
Here comes more water.
59

I didn’t know it at the time but the
churning waters of the idea of the
Devil, lay straight ahead…
60

I learned that, “Satan, transliterated from
Persian into Hebrew, means ‘the tempter’”.
- Personal Faith with a Passion, Ray Dykes
pg. 135
61


That term, “the tempter”, seemed more
descriptive of my experience and a much
less emotionally loaded term than the
“devil”. Being tempted is what struggling
with an addiction can “feel like”.
I was struggling with powerful internal
forces of desire, ego, resistance and a
hundred kinds of fear.
62

The “devil” again seems to be a
metaphor which describes real drives,
emotions, desires and states of being
deep within our psyche.
63

So clearly, I needed a fourth heart, to
represent the idea of the “devil”. The
heart symbolically could not be red
but had to be dark or black.
64
65

There is however, an oft-repeated phrase in
addiction “circles” in which people describe
themselves as, “grateful recovering alcoholics”.
66

This phrase implies the principle that
acknowledging directly the pain and
consequences of alcoholism, addiction,
“trouble” or suffering in general, opens
up a new way of being in the world. This
had certainly happened to me.
67
3 red + 1 black
with inner red
Therefore, an inner red
heart must lie hidden at
the core of the “shadow”.
Small “consciousness” is
embedded within large
“unconsciousness”.
68

The outline of the river thus began to
look like this…
69

Father
= Creator

Son
= Uniter

Holy Spirit
= Revealer

Devil
= Adversary
Tempter
“Unconsciousness”
Resistance
70



This brought up the idea of “sin”.
I paddled around this intellectually and
culturally difficult term for quite some
time.
For most of my life I had not found the
term to be very useful. So it was very
helpful to learn that “sin” in the Greek
language, was originally an archery term
which meant to “miss the mark”.
71


Sin in this sense seems synonymous with
the Buddhist term “hindrances”.
Like blockages. Or to continue with the
river analogy, our responses to the rocks,
rapids, and logjams etc. that we encounter.
The obstacles in one’s path that can make
the life journey so difficult.
72


“Missing the mark” includes the many
ways our behaviors and thoughts “miss
the mark” and the many ways in which
we are on the receiving end of the poorly
or well-aimed arrows of others.
I want to be careful to not minimize the
term. These obstacles can be unimaginably
challenging.
73


The term “devil” had lead to the term “sin”.
“Sin” had lead to the term “evil”.
74




Like “sin”, I found the term “evil” to be
very problematic.
It is another very “loaded” term.
It’s obviously complicated, but for what it is
worth, I currently perceive “evil” as meaning
something like: actions or non-actions that
are a result of profound “separation”, or
profound “unconsciousness”.
This definition helped me with the following
quote.
75

John Shelby Spong wrote, in Why
Christianity Must Change or Die, ”It is true
that evil is not hard to find in human life,
but it cannot be the defining and ultimate
characteristic of our humanity…
76
…Yet if the Christianity of the future
does not take evil seriously, or if it
cannot adequately explain the origins
or acknowledge the depths of evil, then
it will also not finally be an interpreter
of human life. For evil is surely a part
of our story. But so is human goodness.
I suggest that they are intimately linked.”
77



I am very grateful for having been raised
with a “liberal” religious worldview.
The problem was that “liberal” religion
for all it has given me had not been able
to respond very well to my struggles with
addiction.
Because I had not been able to “think”
(in the sense of a “chain of reasoning”) my
way out of my “broken-ness”, I began to
wonder about the limits of “reason” alone.
78

In her article, To Pray without Apology –
Why Martin Luther King Wasn’t a
Unitarian Universalist, author Rosemary
McNatt quotes Dr. King: “…Liberalism
failed to see that reason by itself is little
more than an instrument to justify man’s
defensive ways of thinking. Reason,
devoid of the purifying power of faith,
can never free itself from distortions
and rationalizations.”
79




Reason is a great thing, but we should not rely
solely on our intellect.
“Rational” can easily become “rationalization”.
“Faith” is a very difficult term. A great deal of
time could be spent discussing whether it is
the best term, in moving forward, to use or not.
Regardless, “reason” seems to need a balancing
complementary principle.
Regardless, quite unintentionally, the artsymbol incorporated a structure based on “4”.
80

Much later, I would learn that that
pattern was a quaternity, a basic or
archetypal structure based on the
number 4. I was quite surprised to
learn that the quaternity often occurs,
according to Jung, in a ratio of: 3 + 1
81
82
XX
XY
83
Quite proud of myself,
I showed “the card” to
a close family member.
She was un-moved.The
symbolism had no meaning
for her. At some level I knew
she was right. More work
would need to be done.
84

So, with the playing card theme having
taken me into a “backwater”, I paddled
to a nearby island.
85








Hearts
1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13 = 91
Clubs
1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13 = 91
Spades
1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13 = 91
Diamonds 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13 = 91
91+91+91+91 = 364 = days in year
364 +2 jokers = 364 + 1 + 1 leap day = 366
52 cards in a deck = 52 weeks in a year
13 cards per suit = 13 lunar months
86

Whereupon I came across this term from
a book by Tim Freke and Peter Gandy…
87
88

The term, The Cross of Light, was the
“bearing” I had been looking for. I felt
certain I knew in which direction the
main channel lay.
89

I had often felt very frustrated by what
I perceived as the divisive nature of
American Christian leadership and
their almost singular ability to avoid
ideas of love, compassion and common
ground.
90


The idea of hearts and light incorporated
with the cross seemed to be a meaningful
way to get to the core of what I thought
Christianity was supposed to be all about.
I briefly toyed with the idea of not using
the cross because it had been “done before”.
I wanted to create something unique.
91

Although no other ideas had come to mind
and it might have been a bit lazy, I am
grateful for the realization that the point
of all of this was not to be “creative” per se,
but to serve some larger purpose. Perhaps
this could help to bridge the gap with those
Christians whom I admired yet often felt
deeply disconnected.
92
How to combine
hearts and cross?
This “scribbling” shows
my initial attempt at
combining the hearts
and the cross.
My daughter and I sat
together as we tried to
figure it out.
93
A cross made
of hearts
It then occurred to me
not to place the hearts
on or around the cross.
The cross needed to be
constructed of the hearts
themselves.
94
95

I needed to “eddy out” for another moment.
96


Ah! A little spring.
I took a closer look.
97

The paired hearts resembled the numeral 8.
98
99
The number 8
as mobius strip
The mobius strip.
100
The number 8
as an analemma
‘8’ is the same shape
that the sun traverses,
as observed from one
given point, over the
course of one year. This
time-lapsed photograph
traces out an analemma.
101
102


Gematria is the ancient practice of assigning
a number value to each letter of the alphabet.
I had it pointed out to me recently that the
Greeks didn’t have numerals, as distinct
from letters, as we have today. They used
letters with an assigned number value.
Numerals haven’t always “just been around”.
Numerals, as such, were a later development.
103



I’d always felt a little uneasy about the
concept of Gematria and thought it a bit
of a stretch. But it recently occurred to me
that we frequently come across this idea.
Roman numerals.
Although not Greek, Roman numerals are
letters!
104

In Greek Gematria, the word Jesus is often
(but not always) rendered as:
IESOUS
105
I
E
S
O
U
S
10 + 8 + 200 + 70 + 400 + 200 = 888
106
107
108


I want to be careful about number and
letter connections because they can get
complicated and a bit far-fetched if one
is not careful.
Although this is not the resolution to the
Jesus-Trinity dilemma that I talked about
earlier, it does resonate as an interesting
and potentially meaningful correspondence.
109



That was a big day.
Time to sleep.
End of Day 1.
110