BOUNDARIES OF THE SOUL

it is by definition unconscious and so encountered indirectly, is cast like a shadowy
template across the collective consciousness. As it actualises in the reality of the life
of the individual, it attracts specific content from both the personal unconscious and
consciousness in addition to culturally specific minutiae. Although the general
experience of the place-elsewhere-place continuum may be objectively
indistinguishable, the individual encounter with it is highly metaphorical, indeed
mythopoeic.
Whilst individual psychic content may translate the encounter, nevertheless
the essential form of place manifestations along the continuum remains archetypal
since it is fashioned by the collective unconscious. Also, the continuum comprises a
system of correspondences, between microcosm and macrocosm, inner and outer,
material and immaterial. This is analogous to the movement between the literal and
the metaphorical to a point where the two combine to produce an authentic
experience of place, to reveal place as it truly is.
To return to Matheson, I believe that what he proposes is that the
elsewhere-places we inhabit imaginally are aspects of the I maginal Realm of which
Henry Corbin wrote, and are essentially the only reality after death and, perhaps, in
life as well. Considering that the Vedic worldview espouses that the sensual world
is really only an imaginary one substantiates such a notion. This is not to say that
the sensate world is worthless, unfounded and untrue. I t does suggest, however,
that it is rather a contingent world; its very existence dependent on the power of
the imagination (Mahony, 1998:209). Maya, after all, means artistic creation, and
the Yogavisistha teaches us that the illusion of art (including the art of literature) is
of the same nature as the illusion of life.
This complements the paradigm that I proposed earlier in this dissertation;
that consciousness is not so much a discrete section of the psyche but more a
continuum, one rather like a Mobius strip. The soul reveals chimera-like aspects of
itself that accord with different states of consciousness particularly MLC. I f we
accept that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing
and thus in continuous contact with one another (Jung, CW 8, par. 418); or, as
Jung put it; at bottom psyche is simply the world (CW 9,I , par. 291; cf. CW 10, par.
13), this presents a number of possibilities:
(i) That the place-elsewhere-place continuum, too, adheres to this same Mobius
strip-like structuring modality, paralleling shifting states of consciousness.