#141. The Seven Pillars of Coyote

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Blog entries beginning with #101 are not essays but minimally-edited notes and reviews from the files I've collected over the last few decades. I no longer have the time and energy needed to sort out and put together into decent essay-form the many varied ideas in these files, but I would like to share them with all who are interested.

If you have questions and think I might help, you're welcome to send me a note: sam@macspeno.com

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Post #141 is a first attempt, made in 2004, at relating basic ideas about trickster aspects of Sophia with the help of Jung and Eastern thought.

1. INITIATION. Initiation to, and attestation for, endurance (of opposites within) is intrinsic to the trickster worldview and to the sophiological perspective.

As Louis de Montfort says, the Divine Energy "gives us the courage to be creative. It inspires us to do everything, to go everywhere, to try every new thing, to leave nothing unexplored. That we should become all that we can be. That’s what it wants from us!"

And its greatest lesson is that, in that on-going process, we can endure anything. Nothing good will get lost. Its most significant spokesman says, 'Don’t be afraid'."

2. HEALING TRANSFORMATION. Understanding of healing transformation via the union of opposites within is not part of the worldview of static-dualistic religion. It is unconventional, even in Bulgakov's sophiology, and tends to be found only within contemporary psychology and still-radical religious-psychology thinkers. It is thus within the realm of Coyote.

3. UNDERSTANDING and COMMUNICATION. Sophia is defined in the Old Testament as perception and understanding. And a definition of Coyote-consciousness definitely includes awareness of our limitations in understanding things well.

The modern field of hermeneutics knows, as Coyote teaches, that we have to dance around things in order to understand them well.

Louis de Montfort stresses communication as a gift of Eternal Wisdom: "Divine Energy gives meaning to our lives especially by serving us as a mentor and teacher. The wisdom it gives us is a profound understanding of the nature of things and a deep intuitive insight into what life is all about. It also gives us powerful communication and relational skills, so that our hearts can reach out to touch the hearts of others."

A hermeneuticist is by definition a communicator across cultural boundaries. And the (phallic) herm stands at every cross roads.

4. ROOTS. Jung's psychology, Bulgakov's sophiology, and at least some aspects of the dynamic evolutionary worldview of modern science all have the same philosophical roots in those western thinkers, the Germanic Romantics, who first brought Eastern thought to western consciousness.

5. PSYCHE and RELATEDNESS. Jung speaks of psyche and Bulgakov of relatedness as essential aspects of reality; both make use of the same language to say that neither the conscious psyche nor the divine-human inter-relatedness are "derived" in any sense but are fundamental "aspects of being."

6. OUR WORK OF WORKS. Individuation, as the process of becoming who-what we have been called into existence to be, is not a significant aspect of dualistic religion. But in the dynamic worldview-- of Jung, Sophia and Coyote-- growth and development is what life is all about.

Louis de Montfort says of Eternal Wisdom: it "gives us the courage to be creative. It inspires us to do everything, to go everywhere, to try every new thing, to leave nothing unexplored. That we should become all that we can be."

Jung says this is the one really important factor: "the salvation of the world depends on the salvation of the individual soul." And this is of course precisely to what Coyote serves as teacher and guide. And it's also found in Grail legend.

7. ENDS (PURPOSE is MEANING). We have many names for the one same reality: the Tao, how the world works, the cosmic ordering principle, Sophia as God's creative helper-craftsperson, the counselor of the Creator, the angel-guardian of the cosmos, etc.

The point of it all is that there is direction to the evolution of the universe and to what Coyote directs our growth and development: unity-in-diversity: all that can be said of eternal cosmic wisdom can also be said of the wisdom of the body.

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