A few years ago at a seafood restaurant on Seattle’s waterfront a friend asked if I knew anything about the Biblical story of Jonah and the Whale. Foolishly, I answered yes, and I did this for several reasons: I’ve been listening a lot to Terence McKenna’s talks on psychedelic drugs and I had a case of gastritis and wasn’t feeling well. I felt lethargic. Fact is, I knew nothing about Jonah and the Whale other than the dude getting swallowed and spending a significant amount of time in the whale’s belly. So I put my upset stomach and psychedelic lore together in a bowl of ignorance and said yes. I was ready to become a grouper and enucleate. Here’s my take: it’s a story about transformation and ego dissolution. I said this with woozy assurance, although there was nothing faintly Biblical or ichthyological about it. It was something I intuited and tossed out into the summer sun like a frozen salmon at Pike Place Market. My friend, who refrained from further comment, went on to make a movie based (partly) on his fascination with marine organisms called Fish Have No Psychiatrists: A Day With Andrei Codrescu.
I think of Codrescu as a sturgeon. Why a sturgeon? Codrescu (his name sounds like a species of fish) is from Romania, and 70% of Romanian aquaculture caviar destined for export came from wild sturgeons in 2019. The Roman poet Ovid called sturgeons “the noble fish” and Aristotle praised their medicinal values. Wild sturgeon is a rare delicacy, and can live in both salt and fresh water. Their solemnity is a ruse. They’re actually quite droll. They’ve been residents of Planet Earth for some 80 million years. Anything that old is bound to enjoy a wry and venerable perspective on life. How can you not? Just having fins is a cause for celebration. Fish may have no need of psychiatrists, but psychiatrists are fond of putting aquariums in their waiting rooms.
I
couldn’t get Jonah off my mind. I continued to give that story a lot of
thought. I felt swallowed by it. Once I solved the enigma, I could be vomited
up. I could walk again the sunshine, a gleaming specimen of humility and generosity
of spirit.
The Book of Jonah is surprisingly short. There’s very
little detail, which makes the plot a little enigmatic. Basically, the story
goes like this: God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh and “cry against it; for their
wickedness is come up before me.” But Jonah bails and makes his way to Joppa
where he boards a ship headed to Tarshish. God puts a mighty tempest in the
sea, “so that the ship was like to be broken.” All the sailors are freaking out
and throwing wares overboard to lighten the ship. Jonah, however, goes below to
take a nap. The shipmaster goes below and gives Jonah a shake and says hey, what
the fuck dude? Any chance you can get in touch with your God and see about
ending this storm before we all drown? Jonah rubs his eyes and goes on deck.
The crew, meanwhile, decides to cast lots to see which
of them is the cause of the tempest. Which is a bit silly, since Jonah already
told them he took passage on this ship to flee from the presence of the Lord. That’s
a pretty big clue. Jonah asks them to toss him into the sea. I have to say,
that’s a pretty selfless gesture. They don’t do it at first, and try rowing to
land, but it’s futile. The sea is too rough. Jonah gets tossed overboard.
Meanwhile, the “Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.” So Jonah,
thrashing in open water, gets swallowed by a great fish (ostensibly a whale),
and “was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” As soon as
Jonah promises to make good on his vow to God, the great fish vomits Jonah upon
dry land.
Not many words are devoted to the ordeal of surviving
three days and three nights in the belly of a great fish, but the language is
powerful in the graceful simplicity of its evocations. Jonah cries “out of the
belly of hell,” the waters compassed him about “even to the soul,” the depths
enveloped him, the weeds wrapped about his head, he “went down to the bottoms
of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about [him] forever.” I’m not
sure what is meant by weeds getting wrapped around his head, but it definitely sounds
like something that might happen in the belly of a whale. Seaweed, maybe, somewhat
freshly swallowed. Nor am I sure about “earth with her bars.” I doubt they’re
roadhouses. The context would suggest some form of restraint, something stark
and immutable. One thing the King James Bible is really good at doing is
demonstrating how less is more.
It seems obvious that the time spent in the belly of
the whale was purifying and transformative. My conception of a whale’s stomach
involves hydrochloric acid and mucus and does not lend itself to allegory. I’m
certain that’s not the kind of transformation the authors of Jonah and the
Whale had in mind. The belly in the bible is expansive in its mythology, not
its science. It bears many of the characteristics of what is called “the dark
night of the soul” in Christian mysticism.
Anyone who’s suffered clinical depression will have a
pretty good idea as to what the “dark night of the soul” is like. What’s like
to be cut off from the world. What it’s like to be trapped. To be at the mercy
of powerful, mystifying forces. To be surrounded by the crushing weight of a
stubborn will that is not your own, but that is somehow a reflection of you, in
the convoluted bowels of a monstrous misconception.
Eckhart Tolle reveals that he emerged from depression
when he realized it was his ego that was suffering, not his being, his
presence, what he calls his “I am-ness.” His depression lifted when he realized
that he was not
the unhappy story of his self, or the negativity of his thoughts. Thoughts are not who you are. “No,” he says, “I
am I. I am consciousness. I am presence.” My hunch about ego-dissolution proves
apt.
“Impotence, blankness,
solitude, are the epithets by which those immersed in this dark fire of
purification describe their pains,” writes Evelyn Underhill in her book Mysticism.
Writing of Madam Guyon, a French Christian advocating Quietism, at the time a
heretical advocacy, who was imprisoned from 1695 to 1703 after publishing A
Short and Very Easy Method of Prayer, “As her consciousness of God was
gradually extinguished, a mental and moral chaos seems to have invaded Madame
Guyon and accompanied the more spiritual miseries of her state.” She then
quotes Madame Guyon’s own personal description: “So soon as I perceived the
happiness of any state, or its beauty, or the necessity of a virtue, it seemed
to me that I fell incessantly into the contrary vice: as if this perception,
which though very rapid was always accompanied by love, were only given to me
that I might experience its opposite.”
Underhill goes on to say
“This world as well as the next seemed leagued against her. Loss of health and
friendship, domestic vexations, increased and kept pace with her interior
griefs. Self-control and power of attention were diminished. She seemed
stupefied and important, unable to follow or understand even the services of
the Church, incapable of all prayer and all good works; perpetually attracted
by those world things which she had renounced, yet quickly wearied by them. The
neat edifice of her first mystic life was in ruins, the state of consciousness
which accompanied it was disintegrated, but nothing arose to take its place.”
It is in this infernal athanor
that the transmutation of baser metals into gold occurs, a process more
mystical than metallurgical which the alchemists termed Chrysopoeia. Gold represented
the perfection of all matter on any level, including that of the mind, spirit,
and soul; alternatively, prima materia, or first matter, required for
the alchemical magnum opus and the creation of the philosopher’s stone, is the foundation
of being, but not its catalyst. The spark of divinity that precipitates change and
lifts us into higher states of being is a ligament to language, the churn of
words in that ocean in our heads that lifts us out of the miasmic suck of
emotional pain. The parallel with the The Book of Jonah and the transmutation
of a preoccupied and tortured self into a new state of consciousness does not
seem all that farfetched, or fishy. “Parallel with the mental oscillations,
upheavals and readjustments,” writes Underhill, “through which an unstable
psycho-physical type moves to new centres of consciousness, run the spiritual
oscillations of a striving and ascending spiritual type.”
If the universe has
meaning, you’re the one imagining it. Meaning is membranous. Sensations are
permeations of larger energies connecting us to the universe. Schools of fish
move in the blue currents of the ocean near the surface where light penetrates
in nimble deviation, mercurial conversions of elegant spontaneity that are pure
expressions of primal impulse. And joy, no doubt. Wild animal joy.
Our current age has
fallen under the spell of technocratic solutions, a delusional, one-sided dance
of pixels and graphs which narrow the spectrum of perceptual experience, and impose
constraints of logic and linear algebra that obscure and disenchant the Wesen
of being. Wesen, a German word, not only means essence, but also
presence - an enduring of presence - meaning it is active, not static. You
cannot market Wesen; it’s a matter of qualia, not quantity. It exists in
the swells of the Pacific, the murmur and hiss of foam over sand. The silence
in the void 35,000 feet down. We get glimpses of non-linear aesthetic experience
in the undulations of a fin, or the relationship
between the amount of fertilizer and the growth rate of a plant, the pollination
of a garden, or the melodies of Mozart’s pet starling, which were converted to concertos.
It has become
increasingly difficult to access alternative modes of awareness, so
aggressively has the scientific and technological juggernaut of the past
decades dominated the human experience and zombified generations of people. But
– given a little enthusiasm (from Greek enthousiazein, meaning
to be inspired or possessed by a god) – it can be done. There are aids, innovative pulsations of art and poetry,
adrenalin-inducing activities like rock climbing, cave diving, and wingsuit
flying, the fathomless stillness of meditation, botanical arrays of psychedelic
opportunity that help break habitual patterns and give the mind space to grow. “And
when we do that,” Terence McKenna enthusiastically shared,
and lift our eyes to the real, living, spiritually empowered realities that exist in nature, in society, in our lover, in ourselves, then you see the peacock’s tail, the coda di pavone, is a transcendental object at the end of time. An enormous, unspeakable something that beckons across the historical landscape, that casts an enormous shadow that reaches clear back to the earliest moments of the universe. That we have always been in the grip of that iridescent, strange attractor. It has propelled our poetry, our art. Our best moments have always been when a tiny scintilla—another good alchemical word—a tiny spark of that alchemical completion burned for a moment in our mind, in our life, in our perception.
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