Non-linear Nesting Orders in Myth and Ritual
Introduction
At the beginning of this sub-series, which immediately followed our analysis of the Enneagram as a triple mandala, we found ourselves in precisely the same position as the man in the joke. Although on the one hand we were hesitant to take our 'Path of Realization' metaphors too literally, on the other hand we were reluctant to forgo the one ingredient without which we could not expect to be able to whip up a batch of Trungpa's sumptuous sky-blue pancakes - real 'eggs'. 1
In 'The 'Self' as Hyperbody - Nested Realities and the 'Fourth Dimension'', we attempted to address this dilemma by borrowing a strategy from science and invoking the notion of nested realities. This permitted us to postulate the presence of 'hyperbodies' that exist at levels of reality that are normally just outside of the range of ordinary human experience but are nevertheless
capable of influencing events within it.
In this way, we could treat the 'Self', and the 'Qualities' that are its
imputed features, as 'real' but not necessarily 'material'. We could, in other words, treat the Self and its Qualities respectively as 'spiritual bodies' and 'spiritual attributes', existing in a wider, more fully-dimensioned reality. In one of the 'Three Path-of-Realization Tales' that we analyzed in the paper that followed the one on hyperbodies, we noticed how, by the end of the story the main character seemed to have become somehow able to step out of the tale and into the reality in which WE, as readers of the tale, reside.
In the present paper we are going to take a closer look at the technical features
that certain stories possess which make this kind of magic possible. We shall
do this from two parallel perspectives - one provided by Mary Doniger O'Flaherty in her (1984) work on Indian myth, and the other by Terence Turner, an anthropologist
who constructed a 'theory of tropes (figures of speech)' that he uses for
the purpose of cultural analysis (1991).
The issue that precipitated Turner's interest in these matters is similar
to the problem that the 'Path of Realization' metaphors raises for us
as Westerners, as mentioned above. He was concerned with the way in which the Bororo people seemed to insist on the LITERAL truth of their well-known assertion, 'We are parrots'. And he was interested in understanding why this statement seemed to resist a hundred years worth of extensive anthropological exegesis. Turner was not satisfied with the view to which anthropologists, lacking any better explanation, seem to
inevitably revert - that the insistence on the literal truth of the statement simply 'embod[ies] the intractable resistance of the savage mind to our own culture's standards of rationality'. 1a
Mary Doniger O'Flaherty, the Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, had similar concerns in mind.
But, in contrast to Turner, she tended to see the cup (or shall we say the
egg basket) as half full. 'The Hindus', she says, referring to the joke about the man who believed himself to be a chicken, 'get some very real eggs from their metaphysical illusions'. But not without transcending themselves in a way that can be difficult to comprehend, and even more difficult to describe.
Like Turner, O'Flaherty wants to explain how you get real eggs from metaphorical chickens. But instead of embarking on an analysis of tropes and the function they play, she examines the dramatic STRUCTURE of the storylines in Indian myth. Interestingly, the two paths converge - both lead to a deeper understanding of the features and functions possessed by the special kind of organization that we
have called 'liminocentric'.
And wouldn't it be ironic if, after all is said and done, it turned out to be
the Western scientist who takes his imaginary eggs MOST seriously, MOST literally? The activity of science requires a kind of 'transcendence' similar to what the Bororo dancers and Indian storytellers seek to achieve by virtue of their semantic machinations, according to both Turner AND O'Flaherty.
As Thomas Kuhn has demonstrated, for scientists to break out of one paradigm and
into another requires the same kind of self-awareness and bootstraps shift of
perspective that is required for a dreamer to realize that he is dreaming in
order to wake up. It requires a leap. (Mary Doniger O'Flaherty, In Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities, 1984, University of Chicago Press, page 195)
In her book O'Flaherty maintains that 'bootstrap-lifting is precisely what the Indian mystics are trying to do with their paradoxical stories...' 2. And in a very methodical manner, which we can only hope to summarize here - she shows us how they accomplish this - through the kind of non-linear, looped STRUCTURING of their storylines that we have called 'liminocentric organization'. As we have shown, it is precisely this kind of organization that characterizes that other product of the Indian imagination that has proven so interesting to depth psychologists in the twentieth century, and to us in this paper - the mandala.
If we are right, it is also the key structural feature characterizing human consciousness itself, which helps not only to explain self-consciousness (the capacity of consciousness for self-referential looping), but also how human beings can be
self-organizing entities who participate in 'co-creating' their own worlds.
Most importantly, it begins to explain how individuals affect self-change.
We might call the 'bootstrap' image that O'Flaherty employs the 'root metaphor'
in her theory. Interestingly, it is one amongst a very special class of metaphors dealing with goals that are, paradoxically, impossible to achieve. It is,
indeed, one that is closely associated to a family of PARADOXES to which belongs the critical 25th riddle in the KING AND THE CORPSE, which stood behind the metaphor of the 'hidden jewel' - the notion of a 'being who is his own parent'.
The archetypal image associated with this family of metaphors is that of the
uroboros - the snake which, by eating its own tail (or impregnating itself, or giving birth to itself), is wrapped around into a circle of perpetual motion. The product of such a reflexive union is, of course, the 'being who is his/her own father/mother'. The 'bootstrap' metaphor is a variation of the uroboros motif that seems to emphasize the element of HUMAN FRAILTY.
Whereas Trungpa's blue pancake falls from above, like the Cakravartin's wheel,
as the sky miraculously solidifies; the 'stone of saturn' hovers ominously above the mountain; Dali's Christ hangs magnificently on a hypercube suspended in midair; and the Wizard of Oz's head floats in the air above his throne - here, in the
bootstrap image, we have a somewhat pathetic variation on the same theme. For while one can lift OTHER objects by pulling upward on them, it would ordinarily be
considered physically impossible to life one's self this way; only a fool would try to levitate himself by pulling upward on his own bootstraps.
Or a wise man, perhaps, who is prepared to take advantage of the liminocentric structurings of reality. The bootstrap image is, after all, like the others,
an image of self-transendence - and is all the more poignant an example
of it when juxtaposed with the picture of an ordinary man or woman using nothing more than his/her own hands to lift his/her own body off the ground. In this image the mundane is brought into stark contrast with the supernatural.
Interestingly, it is one that is intimately connected conceptually to the notion of self-initiated MOVEMENT (which, amongst other things, implies 'freedom'), and perpetual motion (a machine that can perpetuate is own motion, provide its own source of energy, fuel itself) - the POSSIBILITY of which scientists have seriously
pursued for centuries.
At some level, the image prompts us to ask if it is really possible that there are forms of human endeavor in which we become literally rise above ourselves. Can we reach into a higher-dimensional space and bring back from it something 'real'?
Might 'mythic storytelling' and 'ritual' constitute such forms of endeavor?
If so, we might suspect that the tools that are essential in these process - the 'tropes' (or 'figures of speech') without which myth and ritual could not exist - would be somehow capable of tapping into the liminocentric organization of consciousness in order to achieve this goal of transcendence. How, precisely?
In the work of at least one contemporary anthropologist, Terence Turner, the trope called 'synecdoche' is taken to be the 'master trope' responsible for 'orchestrating' the complex relationships between 'metaphor' and 'metonymy' that characterize ritual action and myth. He says,
The structure that Turner describes is 'self-similar', in that the pattern the
whole displays is like (or identical to) to the pattern displayed by its parts.
It is thus, by definition, a 'fractal' design and closely related to
structures displaying what we have called 'liminocentric organization'.
For when the top and bottom levels of a multi-level heirarchical structure are not only self-similar but identical (and thus indistiguishable), that structure in effect 'wraps back around on itself' in a way that qualifies as 'liminocentrically organized'. When hierarchy is conceived as composed of a series of contexts, one nested within the other, a liminocentrically structured hierarchy will be one in which the innermost level is identical to the outermost. The structure reflexively
links up with itself by turning itself inside-out, as it were.
The capacity to 'turn itself inside-out' is what enables the human being to psychologically 'bootstrap lift', to transcend itself. And this is achieved, technically speaking, through the instrument of 'synecdoche', which is the
liminocentric structure of consciousness reflected in language.
Section One - Trope-a-dope - Bottom, in Shakespeare's 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Using the terms 'metaphor', 'metonymy', and 'synecdoche', we can respectively bring into relief different ASPECTS of the relationship underwriting the 'semantic magic' that characteristically takes place in myth and ritual. The chart below identifies the (psychological) foundation on which each figure of speech relies.
Metaphor - x is like y. Using a metaphor, we say, 'Jack's a turkey'. In our mind he's LIKE a turkey. The two are, with respect at least to certain intents and purpose, indistinguishable. So we can substitute 'turkey' for 'Jack', and when asked, 'What's Jack?' we could reply, 'A turkey'. Metonymy - x is close to y. Using metonymy as a figure of speech, we can say, 'He chases skirts' and mean by that sentence that he chases women. Similarly, George Harrison's old guitar is worth a lot of money. Not merely because it gently weeps, but because he used it and sang about its weeping; it was close to him. It STANDS for him in a way that touches people deeply. If we were to get close to it by owning it, it would be the same as getting close to HIM. We'd feel like we were in his presence. In the same way, the 'Shroud of Turin' is considered sacred because Jesus was presumably wrapped in it, and certain 'mantras' are considered powerful because by repeating them highly enlightened beings have somehow invested them with their power. Synecdoche - x is part of y. Touching a lock of John Lennon's hair, the tooth of the Buddha, or the bones of a famous saint, is the same as making contact with that individual. Or when one airplane pilot (part) drops a bomb on a bridge in Yugoslavia, we say 'NATO (whole) is bombing the Serbs'. Metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche can be combined in complex ways, according to Turner, with very interesting results. On top of metonymy (The bird can fly, because it has feathers. So if we take its feathers, we can fly), we superimpose metaphor (Flight is the same as 'transcendence', so possessing the feather will enable us to transcend ourselves). This is how feathers become SYMBOLS of transcendence. But sometimes they are also more than mere symbols. This happens when we believe the object to have become, as a result of this semantic process, somehow literally IMBUED with 'transcendence' - as a result, perhaps, of the 'projection of control' (as Turner would have it) that we exercise, in participating in this myth/ritual, over the mythic/ritual process itself! The feather becomes, as it were, an attribute of a transcending power, and that power can be metonymically assimilated by the acquisition of the attribute.
Synecdoche in Poetic Construction The 'POETIC FUNCTION', according to Turner, also has 'a profound affinity with synecdoche'. Poetic construction utilizes the same patterns of relationship as does myth and ritual - The poetic function, again to follow Jakobson's formula, ... has a profound affinity with synecdoche. To paraphrase Jaobson's notion of poetic construction in tropic terms, it consists in a 'play of tropes' similar to that identified in the ethnographic examples [mentioned below]: the basic move consists in the transformation of a metonymic combination into a metaphoric equivalence, followed (in more complex poetic or ritual forms such as those discussed) by a further transformation of the metaphoric relation thus established into a metonymic consistuent of a higher-level totality. This use of the same pattern of relations in alternating tropic modes to construct higher levels of coherence or integration is the essence of poetic construction.
As an ethnographic example of 'tropic play', Turner takes the activities of Bororo and Kayapo dancers -
When the metaphorical associations of transcendence and form-creating power of the feathered costumes, songs, and movements of the Bororo and Kayapo dancers are ritually employed to effect the transformation and re-creation of social relations, the result is a dynamic synecdoche, in which the ritual acts and costumes become parts of a whole which they create in their own image. The whole is created in the image of its part. God (and/or 'society' - what Teilhard de Chardin used to call the 'noosphere') is created in the human being's image, so that (s)he can fully participate, for the first time, in his/her own divine nature. Without projecting a greater whole, and participating in it, the part would never come to know its 'transcendent' essence. Transcendence knows itself only through the act of transcending; and only through pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps do we become, paradoxically, who we most fully are. Furthermore, in doing this, we construct 'meaning', and this takes place 'through the shift in perspective accomplished by the metaphoric identification, as metonymically contiguous parts of a more powerfully integrated totality brought into being by ritual action and 'spiritual' power'. 3 Lest we begin to think that this type of activity occurs only in the 'religious' domain, or is exclusively the domain of peoples who are gullible, superstitious, or primitive, we might consider the following point made by Turner. 'Paradoxically', he says -
... these cultural metaphors of magical transubstantiation have more in common, from both a functional and a structural standpoint, with the metaphorical components of structures of scientific theory analyzed by Bicchieri than with the rhetorical figures of speech and stylistic ornamentations which normally serve as type cases in literary and anthropological discussions of tropes. In both the scientific and the cultural cases ... metaphor and its corollary tropic constructs in the play of tropes serve, not as ornaments for precoded denotative meanings expressed elsewhere by transparent referential constructions, but as the central building blocks in the construction of a meaningful world. (156) The point about science is one that we shall return to later this year, in a paper entitled 'Taking the Mandala Literally - Chaos Science, the Mandala, and the Enneagram'. What concerns us here is the manner in which the Enneagram might be said to use tropic interplay to create central building blocks in the construction of a meaningful personality theory. Borrowing a phrase from other anthropologists, lets call what Turner refers to as 'metaphors and their corollary tropic constructs' in the above passage 'root metaphors'. We suspect - on the basis of Turner's analysis AND the understanding that we've come to in this series with regard to the mandalic nature of the Enneagram - that if individuals, as representatives of particular EnneaTypes, are to be conceived as capable of 'transcending' their Type, it is most likely to be on the basis of a tropic interplay similar to the one described by Turner. What, then, we might ask, is the root-metaphor that is associated with each EnneaType? We presume that what will be accomplished by identifying those nine 'root-metaphors' will be similar to what is accomplished when the tropic interplay is utilized for the 'construction of a meaningful world' in any given culture , as Turner explains it in the following passage -
What is accomplished through the play of tropes in both the Central Brazilian and the Nuer instances is that what would be irresolvable ambiguities, antinomies, or contradictions at their own level of definition are resolved through their embedding in more encompassing, higher-level structures. This process of hierarchical embedding becomes itself the icon and essential referent of the qualities of transcendence and power that it defines. The construction of the 'supersynecdoche' that constitutes at once the framework and the instrument of this embedding process thus generates a final tropic dimension, albeit one accessible only to the critical analyst or actor: irony. For the critical consciousness, the normal actor's awareness of the reflexive relation between the superhuman powers of 'spirit' or ritual action, which are thought to be indexed by the synecdochic construct, and the human creation or ritual re-creation of that construct is the fundamental irony on which the whole system depends. (page 156) Through 'tropic play', in other words, certain intrapsychic contradictions will be resolved. But not without having introduced into the system a certain element of 'irony' (ie, the 'use of words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning). This can only be accomplished through a STRUCTURE that is 'reflexive' (bent backward, onto itself) - what we have called liminocentric organization - which manifests in language as 'synecdoche'. The 'liminal', anomalous elements - which we usually relegate to the periphery of consciousness - will be invited into the 'center' of the personality, as the focus of attention. In doing this it is as if 'contradiction' is forced inward, but also heirarchically 'upward' - to a higher level of semantic organization - 'irony' in the process. This is similar to saying, as we did in a previous paper, that at the heart of the root-metaphors around which 'meaning' is constellated for each EnneaType, will lie paradox (and spiritual 'mystery'). As a general example of this principle we saw how, at the core of the central metaphor in THE KING AND THE CORPSE lies a particular family of paradoxes dealing with self-generation or 'bootstrap pulling' - paradoxes that seem to display what Turner might call 'ironic reflexiveness'. We loop back on ourselves (ironically becoming something else in the process) - or, conversely - we become something else, only to discover, ironically, that this makes us more fully what we originally are. Synecdochal Attempts to Reconcile Similarity and Difference According to Turner, it is 'synecdoche' that provides the overall structure within which the CONSTRUCTION of meaning takes place. The 'interdependence of metaphoric and metonymic relations', he says, occurs 'within the encompassing structure of synechdoche.' 4 This is because the synecdochal relationship has the power to integrate while SIMULTANEOUSLY separating - The synecdochic structure of the ritual process is the essential framework for maintaining the simultaneous separation and integration of the two orders - nature (as the order of araras [ie, parrots]) and society (as the order of humans) - upon which the meaning and efficacy of the process depends. (page 149) Incommensurables are integrated, but only by appealing (via synecdochal figures of speech) to a structuring process which can identify the whole with the part (at levels of organization that are DISTANT from each other) while permitting 'apparent differences' to be displayed between levels that are closer in proximity to each other, levels that occupy the intermediary zone between the two extremes. This is the strategy that we saw being used in the mandala, when conceived as a liminocentrically structured whole with the innermost center wrapping back around on the outermost periphery. If nature were self-similar at ALL levels the world would be a dull, repetitious affair. Or if it were different at all levels of organization, without a recursive feature, it would branch out always irreversibly in new directions, without the possibility of returning back to itself. There would be no accomodation for feedback or feedforward loops. But when self-similar only at the extremes, while apparently different at intermediary levels, 'similarity' and 'difference' are held in creative tension. They overlap, and we can begin to MIX categories and speak even of the 'similarity of differences' and the 'differences between similarities'. Like Turner, Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty appeals to the manner in which myth is STRUCTURED in order to explain how we get real eggs out of metaphoric chickens, and transcend ourselves in the process. And like Turner, her work leads inexorably to an exploration of a special KIND of structure that is identical to what we mean by 'liminocentric organization.' To her work we turn in the following section.
Section Two - Beating a Dead Egg
According to O'Flaherty, there is a 'nesting of levels of discourse'
which is characteristic of Indian myth. In this respect, the manner in which the audience is built into the Hindu tale that we explored in the last paper,
the 'King and the Corpse', is not at all unique. In fact, it is probably
CHARACTERISTIC of the genre.
Indian myths are commonly constructed as a series of 'receding frames',
according to O'Flaherty - tales within tales within dreams within tales, in a seemingly infinite progression of nested storylines. Upon close inspection
of this features of Indian myth we come to '... see that the structure
is not linear, but concentric' and that 'the story is not a cumulative tale but a nested tale.' 5
And we also see that characters WITHIN an 'inner tale' in Indian stories
frequently turn out to be 'real' at a higher contextual level of the storyline than the one in which they first appear. Sometimes they step right out of the tale, into the reader's world. The Indian story is, as O'Flaherty succinctly puts it, '... a river whose fish keep jumping out', 6 and in this image we are offered yet another variant of the 'hidden jewel' motif.
Sometimes, the fictional characters that escape the story to join the reader in his/her reality ultimately bypass the reader and achieve an even higher level in the hierarchy, becoming the individual responsible for having dreamt up the reader's reality in the first place. We saw how, in the KING AND THE CORPSE, there were intimations that this type of relationship could exist between the King and the
reader of the tale.
Furthermore, the structure of the Indian mythical STORYLINE is isomorphic to
the organizational form of Indian COSMOLOGY, in the same way in which, as we've seen, the Buddhist mandala and Buddhist cosmology share the same form.
The Buddhist mandala, to which we have devoted much attention in this series,
Its outermost ring of mountains, called 'World-not-World', is a 'a paradox that allows us to stop drawing circles', according to O'Flaherty. Paradoxes abound
at the periphery of such systems, she points out. They may be of a visual or verbal sort, and sometimes 'they involve a peculiar twist or strange loop', as
does this one.
For it is a universe that is organized like a 'mobius-strip' 8, O'Flaherty explains,
and thus 'instead of piling [nested contexts] up in a line, it piles them up in a rope that snakes back on itself'. 9
This nesting of contexts in a non-linear fashion which loops back on itself is what we have previously called 'liminocentric organization'. It is most appropriate that the entire configuration depicted in the diagram is closed within a sphere - which is precisely how one one might choose to depict a liminocentric 'reality',
as a space that is warped so drastically as to wrap back on itself, creating a finite domain that does not permit one to exit from it.
With its three-dimensional shape, concentric circles, and vertical levels, the diagram is not unlike the 'torus' (donut shaped figure) which, in an earlier paper, we took as the shape capable of most aptly representing the liminocentric structure of both the mandala and consciousness itself.
This looped nesting of contexts comprises either a door to transcendence and
liberation ('nirvana') or a 'vicious circle' 10 ('samsara').
This, of course, is like the extraordinary set of nested Chinese boxes that we
In this myth the story starts with a monk. In his meditation the monk dreams of
a man (Jivatva), who falls asleep and dreams a Brahmin who dreams a prince who dreams a king who dreams a celestial woman ... and so forth and so on. Until we finally arrive at an imagined goose who dies while thinking of the swan of Brahma, and thus becomes that swan in the next life. The swan then sees Rudra, and thinks with certainty, 'I am Rudra'. Rudra eventually realizes that all of these beings are his own previous rebirths. So he goes to the monastery where the monk is sleeping, and 'joins his mind' to the monk's.
'This story is a highly sophisticated variant of a much loved Indo-European folk motif', O'Flaherty adds, 'which includes the story of Chicken-Licken
(who told Henny-Penny who told Foxy-Loxy ... that the sky was falling'. 11
This is a noteworthy observation in light of the series of images (starting with
Trungpa's - the sky turning into a big blue pancake and falling on
one's head) which, as we have seen, are connected to 'Path of Realization'
teachings that emphasize the EMBODIMENT of 'emptiness'/enlightened mind.
Such storylines force us, according to O'Flaherty, to
And we are led inexorably to the conclusion that
O'Flaherty, in a way that parallels our analysis of the KING AND THE CORPSE, associates this kind of structural organization with 'riddles about people who are the parents of their own parents'. 12 It is a structural form that allows for a situation in which people can conjure up objects to which they can later attribute PRIORITY - so that the objects can, further down the line, be imagined to have conjured THEM up. This seems to be the prerequisite for what we might call 'ordinary' or 'semantic' magic - the creation of a projection that is so real that we feel we can actually pull ourselves up by hanging onto it. We call this kind of conjuring act as 'ordinary' because it happens all the time in science - every branch of science has its
ridiculous notions, which, when nevertheless taken literally, turn out useful in the
material world - 'imaginary numbers', for example.
In Indian logic, 'unreal' courses of action are indeed a prerequisite for
successful outcomes -
This situation is reminiscent of the main figure in Kurusawa's film, 'KAGAMUSHA'.
In that tale an indigent thief, who happens to bear an uncanny resemblence to the
emperor, is forced to pose as him after the royal figure is assassinated.
He indeed turns out to be an exemplary ruler - to some extent by virtue
of the fact that circumstances require that he suppress his personal desires,
and because he knows that he is a mere impostor who possesses no royal
qualities. All goes well until his success at ruling inflates his ego and
he begins to believe in his own royal nature. His downfall comes (quite literally) when he begins to realize that he IS an emperor, and quite a good one,
which prompts him to attempt to ride his predecessor's horse. But he is thrown from
it almost as soon as he mounts it, signalling to all of the others present
that he is not in fact the emperor whom they thought he was. Within minutes he is left standing in the rain, outside the gates to the royal compound, wearing the same tattered clothes that were his at the beginning of the story. Once again he is
a social outcast, all but invisible to everyone who passes.
The main character in this story fails at precisely the point at which
the king in the KING AND CORPSE succeeds. He is incapable of sacrificing
the Ego, and willing himself beyond it. He who cannot incorporate liminality
into the center of his personality, as its core, is doomed to have it forcefully thrust upon him in the end. Rather than embrace the paradox that was his life,
and acting out the role of a ruler who does not 'really' rule, the character in KAGAMUSHA strove, unsuccessfully, to overcome the ambiguity in his role.
'Spiritual Qualities' must be distinguished from ego-based traits, and conceived of as rooted, fundamentally, in 'myster'. The 'invisible' center must remain invisible. And the 'Qualities' must remain unnamed, except in an indirect fashion
(that utilizes 'paradox').
The 'thief' in KAGAMUSHA can 'steal' the identity of the Emperor, as it were,
and is capable of doing the 'impossible' because, as O'Flaherty suggests, he realizes that as a result of NOT being an emperor he is free to rule. Only when he really 'becomes' the emperor (and takes this identity as 'real') does he, paradoxically, lose the capacity to rule, and the role associated with it.
The situation here is similar to what occurs in lucid dreams, which
is what makes lucid dreaming a good training ground for learning how to
transcend one's self. Only by realizing the unreality of the dream
(ie, that it IS a dream), while nonetheless remaining WITHIN it, is the dreamer
capable of turning the dream 'lucid' and experiencing it from a
'transcendent' perspective.
Lucid Dreams and looped nested-realities
In describing the strange predicament that the looped nested-realities characterize Indian myth put the figures who inhabit them in, O'Flaherty uses the dream state
as a comparison#160;-
This idea of a kind of action that emerges OUT of paradox is a very Eastern notion - tantamount to a 'doing by not-doing' that is a favorite
topic in Taoist texts. It is this sense of 'action' that we must try to capture in our descriptions of each enneagram type. We should strive to see the paradox or riddle,
the 'root metaphor', on which each type is built, and around which its 'meaning'
can be constellated - a framework or paradigm unique to that type, with its own set of issues and strategies, etc. For only in this way do we begin to
glimpse the 'treasure hard to attain', which sits, and has always sat,
at the center of each personality configuration, like the eye of a
great storm that we call 'life'.
And this brings us, full-circle, back to the three paths (Renunciation, Transformation, Realization). As O'Flaherty puts it -
1. Colin Wilson tells of a northern Siberian legend in which
'the spirits of SHAMANS are born in a larch tree, in nests of
varying sizes, and a large bird like an eagle lays iron eggs which
turn into SHAMANS.' This curious image brings together the image of the
iron wheel of the cakravartin, which falls unexpectedly from the sky,
with the image of a 'real' egg coming from a metaphorical chicken. It is
fitting that the shaman, who presumably possesses the KIND of consciousness
that reconciles the opposites, should be born from such an egg.
(quotation from The Occult#160;-
A History, Colin Wilson, 1971, Barnes and Noble, page 148)
1a. Terence Turner, " 'We are Parrots', 'Twins are Birds': Play of
Tropes as Operational Structure", in Beyond Metaphor#160;- the Theory
of Tropes in Anthropology, edited by James W. Fernandez, 1991,
Stanford University Press, page 121.
2. Mary Doniger O'Flaherty, Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities, 1984, University of Chicago Press, page 201 3. Turner, page 155 4. Turner, page 152 5. O'Flaherty, page 243 6. O'Flaherty, page 131 7. O'Flaherty, page 204
8. O'Flaherty, page 241 9. O'Flaherty, page 211 10. O'Flaherty, page 243
11. O'Flaherty, page 209
12. O'Flaherty, 255
13. Bottom, as the dreamer of the dream, stands OUTSIDE of it,
at the next higher 'level' of reality, and is thus ABSENT from the dream
(in a way that intimates how our realities, as human beings, may be
said to be absent our presences - ie, egoless). It is thus 'without
Bottom'. But the dream is not thereby lacking - it is full, complete - indeed, fathomless. It is thus 'without bottom'.
Here, by the way, we have a good example of one phrase ('without bottom')
simultaneously having the three levels of meaning about which we previously
spoke - 1) literal (without the character named 'Bottom'), 2) figurative
(a bottomless dream - ie, without ground), and 2) transcendent (unfathomly
profound).
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