|
An Eastern Perspective
|
| White Medicine Flower |
The Cycle of Destruction and Liberation
Cry
of the Hawk For Her Beloved, A Woman's Healing Journey to Higher Consciousness, is an allegory of the spiritual movement
to pierce the veil of ignorance to attain union with the oversoul, universal or cosmic consciousness. The intuitional experience
of the truth of existence
arises
from the dissolution or negation of the limiting and finite world of names and forms (prakriti)
when the ego-mind no longer identifies with the body or the material world. Through spiritual practice the mind, which projects
the existence of the material world, withdraws from the world of objects, names, and forms and focuses with double consciousness
on the transcendent, nondual unity, or oneness, underlying the
apparent world of diversity or form, and only pure awareness, or consciousness expanded into infinity
(satchitananda), remains.
The
heroine's journey is a metaphor for the purification of
the unconscious, portrayed in dream imagery from her youthful, romantic yearnings to her aspiration for Self-realization toward
the book's ending where she envisions her identity through feminine
archetypes. Through traditional prayer and devotional practices in the indigenous purification lodge, or
inipi, the vision quest and other yogic
and indigenous austerities of fasting and meditation, her mind and senses are gradually withdrawn from ordinary reality to
prepare for the transcendent state
(turiya). As the negative physical,
emotional, and mental states
of loss and grief in her own encounters with pain and death are further refined, she
transcends the waking, dream, and deep sleep states, renouncing her own life as an illusory dream in the astral plane.
The
heroine's pain and suffering in ordinary reality are requisite for her evolution from a personal identity to a universal soul,
as she stands
immersed in the sea at the threshold of the causal plane in the book's ending. Her prayer of purity for an end to aggression
and individual and collective disharmony that are based on ignorance is symbolic of the expansion of her heart, which prepares
her for the state of bliss she experiences at the end of her journey.
As the feminine personification of the
bodhisattva,
Manjusri, she holds the sword of discriminative wisdom and the flower of compassion, for she has now negated her own experience
of pain by sublimating her personal history to an archetypal or soul identity. She is no longer Teri, with a particular cultural
and national identity; nor is she an individualized soul, or
jiva, Tera. Her sustained evolutionary journey of purification has led her to the causal identity of Uma, a universal
receptacle of Light and Wisdom, available as a healing archetype and a symbol of personal empowerment and freedom. She is
fully awakened and aware of the soul's Immortality as the Mother of Souls and the consort of Divine Bliss - the unification
of Shiva and Shakti. She has achieved liberation by dying to life while yet alive, participating in creation while renouncing
the apparent world.
|
