Tree of Learning: Yesod Sketch

Wiring Beneath the Floorboards

Yesod: sphere of regenerative foundations situated on the unifying middle pillar where dreams, sexuality, animal instincts, and feminine-lunar energies cycle repetitiously and become embraced

Opening

To explore the hidden foundations lying below immediate perception, the “wiring beneath the floorboards” in the words of Terrence ‘the rambling bard’ Mckenna, is what yesod is all about. By appreciating cyclical patterns, shifting dreamscapes, sexual ecstasy, art from archetypal realms, and ethological insight, we can begin to navigate the cornicopeia of connections that network the foundations of our daily existence.
    
The psyche has been likened to an iceberg poking above surface water, with the insignificant tiny tip being our typical mode of awareness (short term memory, motor skills etc.) and the mountainous structure extending into the watery abyss below being our personal and collective unconscious. This mountain of unexplored structures can be uncovered and carried to the surface, so a more integrated reality tunnel can emerge.
 
Heedless plummet's to the deep abyss of psyche without previous experience's (dream interpretations, steady contemplation) or adequate provisions (trust, intention) can be fatal because the extreme pressure collapses our ability to breath. Despite the risks, it still seems preferable to a dull dehydrated death on the surface. 

Exploring

In the enigmatic opening lines of his magnum opus Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce writes of a "commodius vicus of recirculation". This simple line sets up a major theme, that of cycles that regenerate themselves. Everything from musical fugue's to the earth’s crust reanimates itself through dissolution, re-iteration, and a synthesizing integration. Our psychic iceberg’s regenerate themselves when foundational structures fracture, float to the surface, and become re-integrated into the insignificant tip.

The ocean as psyche metaphor works well because tides are modulated by la luna, the physical moon. This floating orb of deep mythical importance completes one life cycle, a synodic month, every 29.53 days. The barely visible outline of a new moon becomes sketched in by the waxing crescent and gibbous stages until it shines with full luminosity for a brief moment, and then it becomes erased by the waning gibbous and crescent stages until it re-arrives at a barely visible outline.

This celestial cinema only appears at night, when the surface flesh of Earth's body is cloaked by darkness. This is the perfect time for exploring what is normally hidden. It's during night that amorphous dreams skirt behind our closed eyes, briefly presenting ambiguous forms of the subconscious; it's during night that all the disfigures demons of horror films appear and disappear, taunting us with the knowledge that all is not under conscious control; and it's during night that the chthonic id expresses itself beneath domes of artificial light, releasing a slew of drunken belligerence, lustful fucking, and dominator politics (stabbings, fights, and robberies). 

Dreams

Freud famously called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious" but often limited his interpretation to a personal unconscious, a realm inhabited by sexual desires and power fetishes too taboo for the conscious mind. Carl Jung builds upon this foundation and expands it by nesting the personal unconscious inside a larger collective unconscious inhabited by archetypal imagery pertaining to themes beyond sex and power. Folks in the trans-personal school of psychology expand it even further, nesting the personal and collective unconscious inside a sort of cosmic-spiritual unconscious inhabited by karmic residue and entities alluded to in mystical traditions the world over. Even if disagreement arises as to how dreams should be interpreted, most agree that they're dense with potential meaning.

As the curved geometry behind our thin eyelids becomes overlaid with internal movies, we look inward (quite literally) to non-linear scenes crafted from an amalgam of memories, fantasies, and sense impressions. These visual puns encode messages with multiple meanings, but often dissolve into the background noise of the subconscious before we can grasp them. To try and remedy this, a variety of recording methods have been used to try and bring this material to conscious awareness. Jung's active imagination  works to open up a dialogue between the ego and the unconscious by transcribing the fleeting material into narrative's and artistic expression's. 
 
Horrors

A lack of control is what irks the ego about unconscious material, it won't conform to the dictates of conscious manipulation --- it appears and dissolves according to its own rhythm. This theme is explored thoroughly by horror films; in dark-moody atmosphere's, "enemies" are pulled toward committing heinous acts without conscious control. Perfectly normal humans shape-shift into scavenging werewolves beneath the full moon, robotic zombie's scour urban and rural areas seeking new victims, and blood-sucking vampires prey on beautiful women. Often it's an abnormality in their physical nature, mirroring an abnormality in their psychological nature, that motivates their violence (killing, rape, pillaging). These stories help us to understand the dangers of keeping subconscious material and automatic behaviors "in the dark". 

Ethological Interlude 

Humans are gesture-makers. Young and old, male and female, we all seek to establish relationships (with ourselves and others) by encoding messages inside gestures and signals. These are communicated, meaning they must be understood by both the sender and the receiver --- no one-way monologues! Through posture, chemical secretions, voice, movement, and environmental manipulation, we can find sexual partners, establish pack hierarchies, and protect ourselves from attack...or attack others. For a more in-depth look, flip through Desmond Morris' book Manwatching.

Immortality Attempts: aka Sexual Reproduction

All living organisms, from microscopic sea creatures to land-bound Elk, create new versions of themselves through sexual or asexual reproduction for the purpose of birthing new life lineages. During the pre-mating courtship, horny males and fertile females announce their readiness by arranging scents, smells, movement's, and voice into attractive displays. If all works out, it leads to the mixing of genetic material through mating. Sperm meets egg (“hey egg.. hi sperm”) and a newborn creation appears some time later. Post-mating, some creatures simply leave, while others stay together to form monogamous or polygamous families that raise young, eat, and sleep in a home territory.

 

Finding Your Spot: aka Pecking Orders

To designate roles and relationships in a social situation, creatures often play games of dominance and submission. The outcomes can change frequently -- whenever an alpha position is threatened --- so dominance only stays as long as you can garner obedience from others. To some degree, stratifying individuals into distinct alpha and omega roles is necessary for creating a stable social structure that will protect the proliferation of a species genetic code. In human societies, role-creation becomes a bit more complex. Insult Signals (high-class head tilt, mockery, phallic middle finger "up yours"), Status Displays (money, jewelry, cars), Submissive Behaviors (obedience, making yourself small), and a whole slew of subtle threats, acquiescence's, and comraderie tactic help when finding your spot.

Death Tactics: aka Defending and Attacking

Conflict seems inevitable in social contexts, but it doesn't always lead to fights. The purpose of the conflict determines the tactics to be used --- is it a hierarchical struggle? is it to impress a mate? is it to punish a broken taboo? Often threat poses (loud noises, making yourself big) that intimidate and instill the fear of harm is enough to assert dominance, without the need to actually fight. The submissive one shows obedience by making hirself smaller, often in a physical manner by crouching, pleading, or bowing to kiss toes and hands.

Not all gestures are for social situations. When alone, we still stroke our chin or play with our lips to bring about biochemical releases similar in nature to those released when we were breastfeeding babies; we crave comfort and safety. Some behaviors are instinctual while others become learned and integrated to such a degree that they are done unconsciously. A simultaneous dose of trust and skepticism should accompany these automatic behaviors for they ease cognitive overload but can trap us inside unhealthy and repetitive role playing. 

Integrating

So after peering beneath the floorboards to watch the primal networks of reality-making, what is found needs to be integrated into conscious awareness. The surrealists, with their interest in dream imagery and non-western art, sought to express a more pure and unmediated primal force by celebrating sexuality, ambiguity, and mystery. Through techniques of automatic writing, chance games, and letting go of the muse, these change-agents brought up subconscious material and presented it to the conscious light. 

Working under a more spiritual bend, tantra is a practice that seeks to use the energetic resevoir of the human libido to imprint unitive states of consciousness. Integrated modes of being rise to the forefront during sex rituals involving a female, mythically linked with Goddesses and the principle of feminine-creativity, and a male, mythically linked with Gods and the principle of seminal activation, unifying together, most beautifully expressed in the yab yum position above. Tantric philosophy views the body and the cosmos as the same functional system, so it uses iconographic worship, mantra, yantra, and sex-rituals in order to allow for a body-cosmic experience to emerge. A unified wholeness is what they seek.

“That which you have within you will save you

If you bring it forth from yourself”
    
--- Gospel of Thomas