According to Van Eenwky, archetypes, the very things that feed mythopoeic
consciousness, are essentially the interface between psyche and substance in the
sense that they convert the activity of the brain into an understanding of life events
(1997:38). Even if we accept the relationship, it is not a harmonious one for
according to Sufi philosophy, the human soul harbours within itself a deep anguish,
the anguish of the separate self. This distress drives it towards liberation, the point
where the egoic self no longer experiences itself as separate (Ansari, 1999:11).
Thus, the manifestation, the almost subliminal cry, of the decentred-self in its
longing for and return to elsewhere-place.
The descent into the unconscious is a necessary prelude to the ascent to a
higher form of soul-consciousness. However, access to this higher soul-
consciousness through shamanic or mythopoeic [ literary] consciousness is usually
only granted to those who have experienced a trauma or those who have been
initiated into it, these days either deliberately through intentional design by
themselves or adepts or, as is sometimes the case, when it is experienced as a
schizophrenic episode. Such initiates cannot rest in the mundane. They descend
into the unconscious, in trauma, shamanic ecstasy or mythopoeic revelry, to the
realm beyond subject and object, to Nirvana or elsewhere-place, a place of mystic
union. These forms of initiation have produced both the shaman and the
mythopoeic writer and reader who have the potential and imperative desire to
connect the human realm of ordinary consciousness with the divine or I maginal
Realm and in doing so, preserve the integrity of both the world and the individual.
However, because the I maginal Realm is so highly charged and in some
ways manifested in form similar to aberrant or diseased conditions such as
schizophrenia, it falls to the shaman or mythopoeic writer to modify the powerful
power of this realm. That process occurs through the medium of narrative and
place in one or more of its many guises, for place is now revealed as the medium
between the inner and the outer, it is the inner and the outer, it is the bridge
between the mundane and the holy or transcendent.
(c) The Symbiotic Relationship of Soul and Consciousness
What seems to be emerging now is a concept of consciousness as not so
much a distinct entity but a continuum, more in the sense of a Moebius strip, where
each of the two sides or surfaces (the continuum of consciousness ranging from