I had a great deal of fun with this chapter of Ghost in the Cloud. Angelina’s sojourn is an adventure through myth, folk tales, fairy tales, legends, and religious beliefs. My advice to anyone who listens is to believe nothing you hear, and yet believe everything. Fairy tales are real, as far as I’m concerned. They are lies too. I am not even trying to be accurate about the stories—when I retell them I change them, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. What I’m really trying to do is work something out. The whole thing is a search, an exercise in finding patterns in all the myths and stories—an idea that all these things—all these stories, beliefs, and myths stem from “collective dreaming.” I get the idea—kind of, sort of—from Karl Jung. Dreams flow from our subconscious. Myths, folk tales, fairy tales are like dreams that flow from our collective subconscious (Freud and Jung may have actually said “collective unconscious” but I prefer saying “collective subconscious” “sub” implying things just under the surface of consciousness—things that hide from our conscious state, but a with little teasing, and training we can tap into insightful things about ourselves by bobbing down and pulling things up and out of that subconscious)
The trick to enlightenment is to understand that reality is in the human mind. Sure we have science. We have empiricism. We have these relatively novel ideas that the universe is composed of concrete laws and forces that form reality. We have people who believe there is an objective reality out there. But the truth is that this reality—the physical part of reality I mean— is registered by the senses, but interpreted in faulty human brains. We place a lot of faith in our perception through the senses. But perceptions can be tricked. No two people perceive things exactly the same. The horrible and wonderful thing about is that we need each other to find the elusive Truth.
The problem of Truth is that it doesn’t sit in a temple waiting for Indiana Jones to come and find it. Truth is on the move. It doesn’t stay put. Truth is a magical white stag. It appears then vanishes and we have to track it. It seems to be leading us to something—perhaps to Avalon, perhaps to Shangri-La, perhaps to heaven or Eden, perhaps to Nirvana. Christians say that Truth is a person. “I am the Truth”. But somehow it never registers with very many of them that that means that truth is not a fundamental principal. They keep going back to the patristic writers, the bible, the law, the canon, back to rules and writings as if truth was a quantifiable hammer to bang over the heads of other people asking them to conform to a right way to live. I see no truth in these acts of brutality to people. It is social control, not truth, because if Truth is a person, it is mysterious—knowable but unknowable. It is a relationship. Persons are not static. Persons grow, change, and surprise us.
But I am rambling. The Baba Yaga stories are a lot of fun. In some stories, she is more of a wild woman, but in most stories she has a taste for children—eating them that is, so as a witch she is sociopathic and not a nice. A witch in many Native American cultures is a person who has lost their center and their imbalances tend to create imbalances in others—they end up living lives that go all wrong and dark. They become crazy and sociopathic. In Islam, a witch is also sociopathic. A witch is someone who makes deals with dark jinn and, in time, they are corrupted by the jinn. They may become possessed by the jinn. The Baba Yaga stories are told and loved all over Europe, mostly Eastern Europe and Slavonic countries. I ran across a really good blog on Baba Yaga if you would like to read further: ttp://babayagawassilissa.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.htmlhttp://babayagawassilissa.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html
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