Faust–The Pact

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Faust, Robert A. Johnson, Self-actualization, Shadow Work

And thus ensues the most tragic part of the book. Faust makes a pact with Mephistopheles, and making a deal with the Devil can only ever lead to destruction. In Christopher Marlowe’s play, the pact Faust makes leads him to hell.

The pact is simple, really, Faust asks for 24 years of restored youthful vitality. What man does not want to be young again and re-live his youth? While Marlowe’s pact is the 24 years in exchange for Faust’s soul, Goethe changes the pact slightly. Faust’s soul will not be required if he doesn’t grow attached to any part of his unlived youth.

“Unlike Marlowe,” Robert Johnson writes, “Goethe teaches that the unlived life (and who does not have a huge store of unlived life following him around like a reptilian tail?) can be caught up, restored, recovered, and experienced without doing basic damage to one’s inner life.”

Faust can remain spiritually safe if he refrains from any attachment to any of his experiences in the following 24 years. This is a spiritual truth so profound, Johnson says, that it takes years of observation before its full impact can be comprehended.

And so Faust and Mephistopheles, exact opposites, head out on their adventure to begin what becomes the most important lesson in Faust–that both sides of man must be redeemed, self and shadow. True redemption does not come from one side triumphing over the other.

In the beginning, Faust is weak, shy, frightened and inept, and Mephistopheles is ruthless and bold, unhampered by morality or ethics. By the end, Faust has become strong and Mephistopheles has learned to love.

No matter what he experiences in the ensuing adventures from time spent in taverns to the seduction of Gretchen, Faust never finds happiness. And Mephistopheles always replies that he promised only youth and experience, not happiness.

Faust brings about the greatest destruction in his seduction of the innocent and pure Gretchen. She becomes pregnant, which leads to her misery and shame. Her brother challenges Faust to a duel to defend her honor and is killed by Faust. Finally, Gretchen kills herself and her newborn child. This ends Part I of the book.

“There is a terrible lesson to be learned from Part I,” Johnson writes. “It is a chronicle of the hungering of a middle-aged man for the youth he missed. . .There are not enough Adidas shoes, Hawaiian shirts, or exercise machines in the world to fill the middle-aged man’s longing for his lost youth.”

Few misconceptions of modern man cost him so heavily as this tendency toward literalness, he says. And if Goethe understood this is the early 19th century, it is much more urgent for us to understand it today.

“The American ideal of perpetual youthfulness dies very hard in us,” he writes.”We are so materialistic and so enamored of the power of will that we refuse to relinquish what is irretrievably out of our reach.”

Essentially, there is no literal solution to unlived life. Water that has passed under the bridge is gone forever. How do we make conscious the problems of meaningless and loneliness, the results of our unlived lives? Johnson says it’s a painful task, and Goethe addresses this dilemma in Part II.

Next Week: The Horrible Tangle

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Faust–The Black Poodle

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Robert A. Johnson, Self-actualization, Shadow Work

Just as Faust is about to drink the poison and end his suffering, he has a vision of Easter music sung by a heavenly choir. That music is always there, according to Robert Johnson, but it usually takes a great crisis of the ego before we can actually hear it.

The vision is enough to give Faust pause. Forgetting the poison, he leaves his study to join the festival crowd outdoors. He dances with a peasant girl, drinks a stein of beer and become one with the world once again.

“If you can wait just a little longer when you reach the terrible moment of the dark night of the soul,” Johnson writes, “the Easter music will burst forth.”

Unfortunately, this is the point where suicide is actually common, and it is easy to slip into despair or madness. Our culture has lost most of its guidelines for people at this point in their evolution, Johnson says. But Faust can be used to teach us these guidelines.

In the book, the festival is only a momentary reprieve for Faust. Rather than using this new found energy to grow, Faust instead allows his assistant to call him back to work and he returns to the place from which his descent into despair began.

But this time there is one major difference, as Faust and Wagner reenter the study, a stray black poodle follows them in. The poodle is a physical representation of Faust’s shadow.

“We are conditioned,” Johnson says, “to think that a great vision will bring angelic experience, creativity, delight; it does, but its most salient effect is to constellate the shadow! The conscious hope is for angelic things, peace, love, creativity; but it is the shadow that brings the energy to live as a human being. No one can be anything but a partial being, ravaged by doubt and loneliness, unless he had close contact with his shadow. The shadow consists of those aspects of your character that belong to you but that have not been given any conscious place in your life.”

Assimilating one’s shadow is the art of catching up on those facets of life that have not been lived out adequately, he says. In Faust, the black poodle with its energy and paradox, makes redemption possible.

Setting back to work (a regression to his old way of life) on a new translation of the Gospel according to Saint John, Faust finds change beginning when he realizes that it should read “In the beginning was the Act” rather than “the Word.” Having lived a life of words, Faust now opens himself up to a life of action, which brings about a whole new dimension to his life.

The poodle reacts to this change by racing around the room leaving footprints of flame. It disappears behind the stove and reemerges as Mephistopheles.

“When your shadow finally becomes incarnated,” Johnson writes, “there is often a huge influx of energy.” There is a return to vitality. But this is only the beginning. If the change were complete, then Mephistopheles would not have the need to announce himself as “part of the part which was once whole.”

The story is just beginning, and wholeness cannot be accomplished by going back to an earlier stage of consciousness.

“You must go forward from the Garden of Eden,” Johnson writes, “through the painful time of transformation, to the heavenly Jerusalem, which is a symbol for the wholeness of man restored.”

Next Week: Faust–The Pact

Faust–The Shadow

Tags

Robert A. Johnson, Self-actualization, Shadow Work

To recap, because it has been a couple of weeks: Don Quixote, as the simple man, enjoys his secure relationship to life until he realizes, near death, that it has all been a fantasy. Hamlet, the 3-dimensional man, is worried, anxious, driven, and deeply unhappy. As he dies, he realizes that had he faced his problems, his shadows, he might have ended life differently.

Faust, which is basically a thinly disguised autobiography by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, is about the enlightenment of the the three-dimensional man. Hamlet refused to deal with his shadow or the dark side of his life. Faust, on the other hand, chooses to interact with his shadow, in this case represented by Mephistopheles, until they both have been redeemed.

A lá the Book of Job, Faust begins with a wager between God and The Devil. The Devil wishes to divert Faust from “the path that is true and fit.” God maintains that that “Faust will not succumb to your temptations. He will stay true.” The Devil thinks not.

We find Faust, at the beginning of the book, despairing because he has reached the pinnacle of his success, and finds himself alone and his life meaningless.

“Goethe once commented,” Robert A. Johnson writes, “that if a man raises his head to the stars, then the clouds play with his feet. When one’s ‘reality function–the ‘feet-on-the-ground’ ability–is threatened, an encounter with the dark side, Mephistopheles, is the corrective.”

Faust has always feared that he would reach this point, and had kept, in the back of his desk drawer, a vial of poison, to end the pain of loneliness and meaninglessness. Having explored discipline and self-consciousness only to find them a dead end, Johnson says, Faust must make the next step in his evolution.

“This exploration is absolutely essential in one’s evolution,” Johnson writes, “and the man who has not trodden that road is not eligible for the moment of despair that is also the moment of redemption and enlightenment.”

This is the “Dark Night of the Soul,” the experience of the intelligent man who has reached the goal of modern consciousness. Johnson says only the best men reach this point.

“Lesser men take refuge in guilt at their inadequacy, or blame their environment, or find yet another set of windmills to vanquish,” he writes, “anything but face the terror of seeing that three-dimensional consciousness is not bearable, no matter how finely developed it is.”

Once the ego-centered man realizes his failure, he can go on to redeem that failure. A genius might find the process inspirational, Johnson says, but for most of us who reach this point, it is pure torture. But, if you can reach this point, and it doesn’t break your life, you may wrestle with your shadows and find redemption.

Next Week: Faust–The Black Poodle

Nature is Speaking

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Earth, Nature

Between NaNoWriMo and our Diocesan Convention, I stayed incredibly busy this week.  I neither had time to read Transformation nor blog on it. So Faust has been deferred until next week. Meanwhile, I will leave you with this video narrated by Julia Roberts:

The Poisoned Rapier

In his continual inability to actually face the matter of the usurper king, Hamlet decides to get his message across by using a group of masquers who have arrived at the castle. The players portray what has happened in the form of a play,and Claudius is quick to comprehend what Hamlet is doing. He immediately begins to plot his death.

Hamlet’s friend, Laertes, is chosen by the king to kill Hamlet because by this point Hamlet has been instrumental in the death of Laertes’ sister, Ophelia, and his father, Polonius.

What is supposed to be a “friendly” fencing duel becomes a fight to the death with not just a poisoned rapier involved but a tankard of poisoned wine. It isn’t long before Laertes, Claudius, Gertrude and Hamlet are all dead. And all because Hamlet was afraid to face the king to begin with.

But, just a few moments before his death, Johnson says, Hamlet reaches an awareness of a consciousness beyond his neurotic split and indecision when he says:

Our deep plots do pall. And that should learn us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

“Hamlet is the man of nobility and partial consciousness who see a vision of the meaning of life,” Johnson writes. “But he is not strong enough–or complete enough–to bring that vision into focus.”

Caught between vision and practicality, he fails at both. In this, according to Johnson, he is the prototype of so many modern men who see a noble world in their imaginations but don’t have the means to accomplish it.

Faust begins where Hamlet fails, finding a solution to the problem that overwhelmed Hamlet.

Next Week: Faust