Boiling Cauldron

In my twenties the image of a boiling cauldron was for some reason was a significant image for me. I don't remember where it came from. It was a recurring image  for a number of years while I was living in San Jose. I took it to be a usable metaphor for what was happening inwardly for me, on all levels of Being.

Those were also the days my initiation in to sex. Sue brought out of me what previous contact with other women did not uncover, passion, real inner fire, sex as a baptism into fire. That "cold fish" problem  I had with Shela simply went away with Sue. After that the boiling cauldron image faded away. There were other images that I trotted after for a while, all like stars-guides for a short spell. Though the image was gone, I had a sense that some progress on inner harmony had been made.

The Inferno was dissociation of personality that was not pathological. It was no doubt an extreme state, a swing from a pole to the Dark Side, I began to have second sight in the new found darkness. I became the eyes in darkness. My "bizarre infirmaries" got confounded with  a new mystical reach. Sickness and insight were two strands I have never been able to disentangle. The inferno was alternately a dark secret and embarrassing nervous breakdown. I kept it under wraps for years.

James Hillman says that the soul is perspective not a substance. It is a mode of consciousness that recognizes that all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical. Jung said Images are Psyche. Sounds a bit like Nothingness in Zen. What is are images not dependent on a ground for existence. Blake once said, "Spirits are organized men."

John Keats said the world is "the vale of soul-making" We create our own souls through the medium of this world. This is salvation. "I think it is a grander system of salvation than the Christian Religion." I have felt for years that inner work is soul-making. My creativity is my vehicle to do it, my "Ring of Power;" it plugs me into Anima Mundi, the world soul. The Inferno was the one of the luminosities that abide in the psyche which ignited the process of soul-making.