ordinary egoistic consciousness and journey to the realm of the collective
unconscious, the same world visited by the shaman, the world of the Gnostic exiled
divine spark. That world is not an imaginary world nor is it an aspect of an
aberrant psyche; it is rather another level of consciousness, a transpersonal level,
the I maginal Realm.
Thus, mythopoeic literary consciousness for both the writer and reader
might be seen not only as a spur to psycho-spiritual evolution and higher states of
consciousness but also as the shamanising of modern humanity and the sanctifying
of place, permitting humanity to live in two worlds at once; the physical and the
I maginal and thereby making all places a temenos, liberated to live in mythic time,
no longer incarcerated in the prison of chronological-cause and effect time and
nominal place. I f soul is embedded in place then it is time for a spiritual
morphology and together with Henry Corbin, we might well ask of place:
Who is it or to whom does it correspond, for example, who is the
Earth, who are the waters, the plants, the mountains? The
answer to these questions causes an I mage to appear and this
I mage invariably corresponds to the presence of a certain state
(Corbin, 1977:4)
What we now must examine is the nature of consciousness and MLC and
also consider the relationship between these states and psyche or soul.
~ ~ ~