UNDERWORLD Part 2

"To be, is to be present, but being present

in itself is a sort of luminous self-concealing,

concealing itself behind the being that it

illuminates."

-Daniel Dahlstrom explaining Heidegger's thoughts

on hiddenness and truth.

My posts on the Underworld will probably mutate over time as my understanding of it mutates. Because the Underworld is hidden by its very nature. And yet it is of a whole fabric with the rest of the world: in fact there is no hard and fast line between world and underworld. I see the edges of the Underworld all the time. I sometimes think I am merging into it. The one seeing is the one seen is the one unseen, a Möbius strip.

One of the demons of our age, and in fact it has been a demon of our age for millennia, is the idea that truth is hard and clear and shiny and you can latch onto that and not have to worry about the rest, but every truth we hold casts countless shadows, the things not seen, the things purposely denied perhaps. Truths buried when we wrested our shiny new truth out of the ground of Hiddenness. We are not merely disconnected from this ground, this real Being as it is, but we positively blind ourselves to it so that we can no longer see that it is there at all. We only look at our shiny conceptual baubles. We look, but we do not see anymore. 

Part of this is the nature of truth itself, as Heidegger pointed out. Truth pushes contrast, puts a contrast between the truth and the thing itself. As long as you have some clue that you are doing that, it is not in itself problematic. The problem is when we stop viewing truth as "unhiddenness," bringing something to the foreground, and start viewing truth as "correctness of viewpoint." In other words, we forget and deny the process by which we got that truth and the ground of hiddenness from whence it came. The difference is the difference between, "look, that thing has revealed itself in the world" and "look, this is a true thing in my head." In the one case, the World itself is primary: in the other, concepts in human minds are primary. 

The process is a process of disconnection from the world and everything in it, and also from each other. We can see a parallel with the idea of the Shadow in Jungian psychology. Really in many ways it is the same thing. The 'truth' is the man as he presents himself to himself. The hidden is the Shadow, the truth he denies to uphold that image. You could have a field day just applying this part of Jungian psychology to our world today, but the real trick is that it applies most in the areas which you are likely the least aware of.

And in some ways, to embrace the Shadow in yourself, you have to embrace the Shadow that your closing of vision has put on the way you view the World. You are part of the World Itself.

We can see early roots of these sorts of problems in the way ancient peoples regarded the Underworld in their mythology. Originally, the Underworld was regarded as hugely important, part of the very bone and sinew of how the world works. Over time, especially after Christianity took hold of it but even before, it became an abode of evil. Forgetting completely that decay and growth, life and death, are two sides of the same coin. You objectify your truth as Truth, you objectify your shadow as lies, evil. This objectivity however lies nowhere except in the human noggin. Being itself, this wonderful strange dynamic existence we are part of, is the beginning and end of truth in any meaningful sense and much of that is not up for grabs and it won't fit in your head. You are a part of, and not knowing it. It's the Möbius strip thing I was talking about: I am conscious and unconscious, seer and seen and unseen, dead and alive, the whole of my own reality is hidden as much as it is shown but this hiddenness itself is intrinsic to me too. 

The Underworld is the ocean beneath your feet that you do not see. It is the hidden that forms the manifest. It is the uncarved block of wood before you do anything with it. It is the dreams of the past that haunt the future. It is the dead that gives life to the living. Because these things are to some extent inscrutable, sometimes the best you can do is describe snapshots. Really, although I can describe human myopia pretty well, I cannot describe the Underworld, to the extent that I know it, very well at all. It is intrinsically not susceptible to literal translation, it's hidden by the nature of being Underworld.

Have you ever pondered, I mean really pondered, the alchemy that is happening between plant and soil? Think about it. The soil usually isn't usually made up mostly of ground-up rocks, it's made of the dead. Dead plants, dead animals, dead bacteria. Plants actually can't make use of this all that well, but bacteria can, and they eat these dead things and they themselves die and that presents the plant with easily digestible nutrients. And then the plant goes on to do what with it? Make miracles. Apple trees making apples from the bones of the dead world, water, and pure sunshine. What a miraculous alchemy this is, and death is absolutely of a whole with it. Death is intrinsic to life, it's not just a bum deal tacked onto the end of it. You live now because of death. Plants live and keep us all alive through it. Death is life. There is no separation. There is no separation between World and Underworld. There may be aspects of the Underworld that are totally incomprehensible to you, or me, but nevertheless it is part of you.

Look. Break down the barriers in your head, and see the wonders.