Another poem from Inner Journeys: Explorations of the Soul
… this one from the Epilogue. It’s called the Hanged Man.
Above me a point
Below me its reflection in matter
The sun and the moon to either side
I am the centre of a circle
Hanging in space
Here there is no motion
All is timeless and harmony
The centre of a circle but wait
I am slowly rotating
Hanging in space
I have become one
With the all that is and is not
At the centre of the circle of life
Soon I will be upside down
Hanging in space
As the Hanged Man I gain new perspective
The above is now my below
And the below my above
Hanging in space
“As the Hanged Man I gain new perspective
The above is now my below
And the below my above”
That’s the way I look at the hanged man also.. His gravitational pull is towards heaven now, and away from earth. That’s why he seems upside down to us. But if we were in Heaven, he would look the right way up!
But much like all fools, are persecuted for being a Man of the Heavens, if that makes any sense.
Let’s say, then, that there is a world beyond the psychological unconscious described by Jung, and we could call it the world of existence, or even the world of no-thingness, or, like we have, the world of the metaphysical unconscious. This world, if we speak about it in a Western vocabulary, is about the inner nature, or forms of things, and how they relate to existence, itself. It is about the spiritual soul and its deepest structures, and the deepest center of the soul, which is the mystery of existence. We can imagine that two advance parties of explorers set out exploring this world from opposite directions, and after centuries of exploration are just beginning to get the first faint hints that they are not alone in these explorations. But they still can’t believe that someone else could explore the same world and come up with conclusions that sound, at the surface, at least, so different.