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I’m reading The Crack in the Cosmic Egg: New Constructs of Mind and Reality by Joseph Pearce. Aside from the absolute fact that you must read this book, it’s about metanoia—the Greek word for a “fundamental transformation of mind.” It’s also described elsewhere as a new way of loving. It’s the potent potential in one of your Pluto transits or a Scorpio placement throughout your life.
There are so many similarities between this total reality conversion and erotic energy—Pluto’s domain. I’m beginning to think they are one and the same. In Eros and Chaos: The Sacred Mysteries and Dark Shadows of Love, Veronica Goodchild says, “Jung speaks of Eros as the divine origin of higher consciousness.” Pearce says metanoia is the way “all genuine education” takes place. James Hillman, in The Myth of Analysis, says Eros is an essential component of real learning, and teaching.
A higher consciousness and a reorientation to reality (this word originally meant how we relate to things) come from a willingness to rebel against the conscious self/mind. Pearce says a reorientation to reality happens in off-guard moments after conscious thought has been steeped in serious experiential involvement with, for example, a new identity-based focal point. The mind synthesizes into something “larger, and more perfect than the original.” This sounds a lot like the Jungian concept of the Self. It also sounds a lot like Eros potentiating a breakthrough from the shadow to conscious reality.
The author highlights again and again: the moment of truth happens when the “logical processes have been suspended.” The emergent of an emotional and exceptional personal will toward a new reality concretizes when you least expect it to but, only after conscious devotion and a moment of insight meet commitment to living the new despite the tension its light creates in your conscious worldview’s dark.
It’s as if some erotic charge is necessary to begin the journey but the real transformation happens months (if not years) later. This is when the reality changing illumined quality of time threatens the conscious identity to the point of two choices: no thanks! OR feeling strong enough to let it dismantle Saturnian identity structures you’re deeply committed to. Nobody said it was going to be easy. Eros finds ease to be a muted opaque value, at best.
I once read, “The erotic is the pulse of God.” The quickening of this pulse feels overwhelming because it is meant to overwhelm existing identities into submission to a greater truth, a more whole personhood, the Self. If it knocked, we’d never answer the door.
It finds us when the conscious mind has spent enough time saturated in the materials of the transformation to greet the AHA! with an open hand. Some folks spend a lifetime in this process and don’t get too far. Some go through these reality adjustments on a daily basis. Most are somewhere in the middle, one hopes.
Pearce says, “The illumination-answer happens only to a mind that has been deeply immersed in the proper materials for its genesis and has passionately asked the question for a prolonged period.” This reminds me of Rilke’s poetic suggestions to live the questions until one day you find yourself living the answers which reminds me that Freud said he’d only discovered what the poets already knew. It’s also Goodchild’s description of Eros who “personifies that broad realm of experience in which rational understanding finds scarcely anything it is able to grasp.”
I love the crossroads where various fields intersect because they feel most like home, to me. On some level, we all know that everything is everything and one piece of wisdom is mirrored in other fields but there is so much to celebrate when multiple perspectives amplify each other.
Seems that true change is not available to the logical mind though the mind we have is logical and needs to find itself devoted to an important question if it is going to reach a moment of spontaneous release for the sake of metanoia. Transformation is ultimately ineffable. This is part of its spooky reputation.
Folx who lead with a cognitive process called introverted intuition are said to be in a space of watching their mind form patterns of patterns of patterns until insight is born seemingly out of nowhere. Jung would say that this cognitive function is perception via the unconscious. (In MBTI language, these are the INFJs and INTJs.) As an introverted intuitive, this quote from Pearce is one that gave language to my own way of processing the world. No small thing. “What is discovered by man is never the ‘universal’ or cosmic ‘truth.’ Rather, the process by which the mind brings about a ‘discovery’ is itself the ‘universal.’” He goes on to say, “Perhaps the mind itself, contains within its labyrinthine corridors of a kind of memory of its own structure.” This is for all my introverted intuitives. Let me know if it resonated for you, too.
If you’re wondering where Ni, introverted intuition, falls in your temperament, look up the MBTI cognitive stack for your temperament. Please remember too that this typology was initially devised by Jung to describe the ways in which we’re one sided. Jung’s initial work was in this vein before it became less of a starting point and more of a permanent descriptor via the Myers-Briggs.
The quote also delivers something surprising. Insights are not by nature the “ultimate” truth. The process of insighting is. This gives space between you and everything you think is absolutely true based on previous insights. It helps new mental syntheses to take shape.
My way through having a preferred intuitive process with a Scorpio dominant chart has been to identify with a higher truth. I was born to let go of identities and it’s the way forward for me but, I think it’s helpful to anyone on a path toward their authenticity. Commit to what stands the test of time, something like love. Then, you won’t catch yourself attached to what is anti-love for the sake of a shadowy understanding of authenticity. Identifying with love makes it easier to let go and to recognize when a “transformation of mind” is essential to your deepest pleasure and joy. Goodchild calls it, “that illumined consciousness that is never far from its dark origins in instinctual chaos.” I call it erotic love.
love you,
Nairy
P.S. To find and live into the erotic in your natal chart, get Eros, Always.