As this book goes to press, we are witnessing much speculation on the
meaning and methods of millennial consciousness. We move daily between glasnost and
claustrophobia. Current affairs seem more mythic than real, and many of us,whether
we are nations or individuals, are coming to see our lives as variations on the theme of
the Hero with a Thousand Faces. We are haunted by a call to a larger life.
"It's Time to Wake Up Now!" If we refuse this call, we are beset by
a nausea of self-disgust and trivialization. Reluctantly agreeing to the call, we
find unusual and unexpected allies between and within ourselves, new arenas of brain, mind
and feeling. When we cross the threshold into the realm of the internal, amplified
power, we are rewoven for higher life and deeper journey.
Then it begins: the road of trails, a dreamscape of challenges
wherein we meet our shadows. We face the goblins and monsters of our old betrayals
and self-doubts. As we go through the initiations and dyings we encounter the fact
and necessity of death in life as our constant companion and discover that our renewal is
always at hand. Then, if we allow the deeper journeying to take its course, we meet
the Beloved of the soul and we are no longer alone. We return to the world of the
ordinary bearing the extraordinary, the companion of extended reality, ready and willing
to renew the wasteland of the everyday with the findings of the external world within.
We are citizens of two worlds, and celebrate the fact that we
inhabit a reality larger than our aspirations and more complex than all our dreams.
The traditional journeys of the hero and heroine have always seemed to us exclusive and
aristocratic - out of reach. But we live in a time of planetary consciousness and
unfoldment where we are beginning to realize that we are all travellers on a heroic
journey. The personal particulars of our own lives reflect and realize the universal
of great life and great story. Everyone is a traveller. Everyone is a godseed.
We have moved beyond heroics. We are coming Home.
Is it any wonder then that many are coming to experience a
significantly different order of personal reality than the one known in the past?
Many people live through something like five to ten times the amount of
"experience" of their ancestors of two hundred years ago. But many have
been psychologically wounded in ways that their ancestors, living in fixed realities and
given social structures, could have neither imagined nor even sustained. It takes
strong healing forms to minister to this much experience and this much wounding. It
takes wisdom to devise a variety of healing experiences that can speak to the depths and
intensities that modern folk contain.
In Inner Journeys, Jay Earley has done this with
richness and elegance, addressing the plenum of human possibility. Never avoiding
the pathos, always present to the shadows that arise, he plays the role of a goodly
Hermes, guide to the mysteries of the depths, the one who takes us back to our holy
sources and shows us how to avail ourselves of the healing gifts that await us there.
With remarkably fine and lucid instruction and guidance, he creates an environment
that the reader can enter and there discover a path to the possible human. Drawing
upon and often improving my work, he facilitates the discovery of sensory, psychological,
symbolic and spiritual capacities within the self.
Empowerment, that much needed quality, is raised to a high art in
Earley's work. He shows how the human heart can go to the lengths of god. With
skillful means, he takes us into our polyphrenic self - our many different, creative
selves - the potential key to humanity's extended health and longevity. Most
importantly, he evokes the relationship between person and planet, between personal and
social transformation, psychological and spiritual development.
Inner Journeys is a new kind of ministry. It
speaks deeply to the fact that given the multiplication of novelty, variety and quantity
of experience in present day living, we are simply not the same people that we were
before. Indeed, there appears to be occurring a collective reorientation in the
global mind, what I have referred to as the rising of the depths occasioned by the coming
of planetary consciousness. With leaky margins and diaphanous membrane between
cultures and economies, shared natural resources and shared pollution, migrating
populations and cross-cultural styles, this new consciousness has been hastened by the
emergence of our own inner realities, the bleed-through from our own geophsychic realms.
Earley's work demonstrates in the most practical and yet luminous manner that
everything is reciprocal: the growing world psyche is the occasion for the growing of more
developed psyches in our own brain/mind systems.
We and the world are flowering simultaneously. As the earth
is becoming for many sacred once again, we are moving toward becoming the gods for whom
once we yearned. But even the gods themselves must outgrow - in pattern and in
principle - the archaic strata of previous ages before a new day, a good day, a god day,
can dawn. Inner Journeys is a guide for godding.