Articles #iNANNA

INANNA Primordial Creation When history begins to speak, it speaks as a Tree, represented as the progenitor of the human race. The very first written story from Sumeria -- the world's oldest poetry -- is a creation story about Inanna and the sacred Tree of Life -- a World Tree with instinctual DNA knowledge living in it. This Tree of Life is the first legend and the link between the transcendental and phenomenal worlds. Our kinship bonds and genealogical ancestry are expressed through the sacred tree archetype. Joseph Campbell (1965) said Inanna was the Tree herself, the "cosmic tree of life and death" (p. 64). She is the ineffable totality of what is -- the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge which are one and the same as the Tree of Truth. Jung reminds us, "In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us. And where do we make contact with this old man in us? In our dreams." (Psychological Reflections, 76). Vision Tree The tree is our vegetative self, involuntary action and life in the body. Such experiences are closely related to death, which is a permanent resident of the psyche. The creatures that live in the tree, including the serpent, are our instincts. Your body is your subconscious mind. Mind and body are the same because mind is distributed. We are all interdependent. The problem is we have isolated ourselves from each other, from animals, plants, and the inorganic ground of cosmos. We have forgotten our origins and embody a myth of loneliness. Our emotional and intuitive mind naturally engages with and is interactive with nature. Mindell (1982) likens the dreambody ("subtle body") to a tree. Half is above the ground and can be described medically or biologically as the 'real' body and half is below ground as roots we can sense when we focus our attention on subtle signals in psychophysical reality. Dreambody appears in body images, rituals, and physical therapies. Jung is very clear that, "...there is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them." (CW 8, Pages 399-403). The root is a deeper, universal description of matter, symptoms, and experiential realms where experiences are a matter of life and death. It's the hidden dimension, the "dark matter" of our existence. Mindell says, "The trunk of the tree is a dream symbol that bridges the world between deep sentient experiences and symbols." We can amplify that somatic process by combining instincts, dreams (or trance), and images. The connection depends on unfolding subtle sensations of psyche-matter interactions of psychophysical reality. Somatic rhythms include pulsation, form, flow, construction and deconstruction, and oscillating polarities. All of our cells are intelligent entities. The autonomic system is loaded with all kinds of receptors modulated by peptides stored in the spine all the way down. They can be emotionally expressed through movement and body-centered work. There are receptors for chemical messengers on every cell of the body, and this is where memories are stored. Memory is how much the receptors have been stimulated or not. All the history is there. Emotions are universal. They arise at the cellular level from molecular information -- the remote smart key that fits the subconscious lock.