deepSTREAMS

Today, I shall introduce you to some of the basic ideas of bi-logic -- Matte-Blanco’s theory of thinking, feeling, and being -- within the context of women’s mystical poetry across centuries, religions, and cultures. I believe the poetry of these women is illuminated by bi-logic, and I shall use their poetry to demonstrate some of its basic concepts.

Why women mystic poets? Mysticism and poetry, like dreams, bear a close relation to the unconscious. In general, mystics seek union with God, and they find God within and without the self. The work of women mystics, of course, reflects something of women’s experience, both homely [1] and profound – something captured by Roman Catholics when they refer to nuns as brides of Christ. As these women speak simply and directly about wisdom discovered within the self in the intimate presence of God, the “‘joy of the One”’ takes the particular shape of the relationship between the Lord and his beloved. Indeed, in some of this poetry -- including the Bible’s “Song of Songs” and the work of Indian bhakti (devotional) poets -- we also “find the seeker and God portrayed as lover and Beloved in language that is openly erotic. Each of the two kinds of experience of union serves to illumine and enlarge our understanding of the other” (Hirschfield, 1994:, p. 22). If Marguerite Porete were writing to a human lover, she could not express greater passion:

Intense emotion and the juxtaposition between unity and the particularities of life are preoccupying themes of Ignacio Matte-Blanco, a Chilean psychoanalyst. About forty years ago he advanced a new theory called bi-logic, referring to the two logics of conscious and unconscious thinking. Over the course of about twenty years, he came to realize that what he was proposing went far beyond a theory of unconscious logic to a more general theory of human nature, as he reflected in the title of his second book, Thinking, Feeling, and Being. Like the women I’m discussing, he recognized a force that encompasses both emptiness and form, one that we may look for outside ourselves but can find within. Dakini Lion-Face, a Tantric Buddhist from the end of the 1st millennium, expresses it this way:

The core of Matte-Blanco’s new paradigm is the marriage of infinity and symmetry in the unrepressed unconscious; that is, the vast amount of what is “known” but doesn’t enter consciousness because consciousness requires differentiations and order, not because it is repressed. Christopher Bollas gives the unrepressed unconscious the more resonant name: the Unthought Known, but it might also be referred to by the title of a book about mysticism, The Cloud of Unknowing. These brides of Christ, Shiva, Krishna, God, Jahweh, and Buddha embrace the terms of such a marriage of infinities.

While Matte-Blanco grounds his ideas in logic and mathematical set theory, the ideas themselves are fairly simple. One of the main governing principles of unconscious logic is what Matte-Blanco terms symmetry, which refers to a logical relation in which the terms being discussed are interchangeable. In contrast, ordinary conscious logic is rooted in asymmetry, which differentiates the terms, sees them as individually distinctive. Reversing ‘”I am standing on the floor”’ to ‘”the floor is standing on me’” sounds like something from madness, dreams, or a surreal movie. In ordinary logic, the phrase ‘”I am in San Francisco’” cannot be reversed to ‘”San Francisco is in me’” and still make sense. If you know I am speaking emotionally, however, ‘”San Francisco is in me’” does make sense. We can see there is an intimate relation between emotion and unconscious thinking. In fact, Matte-Blanco points out that the differences between emotion and the unconscious, if they exist, have not yet been articulated, so unconscious logic can also be thought of as emotional thinking, and I shall sometimes use the compound verb thinking-feeling.

Symmetrical thinking pervades the writing of mystics. Catherine of Siena (14th century) concludes Prayer 20 with the lines:

The symmetry of this image works in conscious as well as unconscious logic, since we can see that sea water is to fish as the air is to us: something that is within us and something that we are in.

The language of the mystics -- and of poetry and dreams – gains much of its potency, however, from surprising symmetries. Emily Dickinson (19th century) (19th century) is a master of such mysterious regions of the spirit.

She is indeed the Prince of Mines! This poem has a simple almost metronomic meter, but the gaps and condensations --– and visually, those dashes --– beget the air of a breathless union. Out of something as common as looking up at the night sky she creates magic. Spurning worldly grandeur (saying, in effect, who needs diamonds when she has a crown of stars), she reveals herself as consort to the Lord of Lords. The image of God pelting rubies would be ludicrous with a lesser writer, but she can pull even that off with a lot of help from symmetrical dashings of her mind.

One of the significant advantages of bi-logical theory is the concept of the stratified bi-logical structure: a recognition that all of us are always operating simultaneously on various mental strata -- from the more asymmetrical conscious stratum through increasingly deep and symmetrical unconscious strata.[2] We perceive a gingko leaf on the ground. At the same time on a deeper level, its fanned shape triggers associations classifying it with something that is emotionally related (such as a production of The Mikado with a gingko embroidered kimono). , aAnd on a still deeper level, we experience it as identical to all dead and living things. Perhaps one night Dickinson looked up and identified the Big Dipper, thought how the bright stars sparkled like diamonds, and felt strangely awed with an external-internal sense of ecstatic pleasure – registering the experience across bi-logical strata.

Symmetrization is the common process of treating as identical two things that are different in conscious thinking. This can happen on the basis of a single characteristic, such as color or sparkle, so a group of stars in the night sky strikes the psyche as my Lord’s diadem. A religious leader’s resonant deep voice may penetrate, intimating the divine. When symmetrization takes place, the individual objects treated as identical acquire all the characteristics and potentialities of that classification, and to the greatest degree. The Finn Edith Soedergran imagines the lowly frog with his being split into two:

Symmetrization is thus a process that forms a psychological basis for spiritual power, as it is implicated in characteristics of both the unrepressed unconscious and mystical experience.

God, emptiness, fullness, self are all identical to Lal Ded, a 14th century Hindu princess who abandoned everything to become a wanderer worshiping Shiva:

Mahadeviyakka, a 12th century disciple of Shiva and the path of Oneness, states a common theme of these mystical poets: the complete sufficiency of her experience of the oneness of self and the divine.

Like anyone seeking to put symmetrical experience into the precision of language (where emotion and unity are curtailed by differentiations) Mahadeviyakka and other women mystics come to the point where they revolt against the inability of any language to hold the uncontainable, inexpressible core.[3]

Trying to convey boundless emotional experience, these women discover a technique that confounds the demarcations of “rational” language: they rely on contradiction and paradox. Refusing what is measured, they zoom in on the coexistence of contraries, again depending on a process that is characteristic of the unconscious. Matte-Blanco even states that the defining difference between conscious and unconscious logic is how they each uses contradiction. I think one can say that within unconscious symmetrical logic, contradiction becomes paradox, since the unconscious simultaneously allows both a statement and its opposite. Mystics like Mahadeviyakka show profoundly spiritual experience may be best illuminated symmetrically, as identities, contraries, and paradoxes.

Life begins. (Nelly Sachs, 20th century, Jewish. In Hirschfield, 1994:, p. 218.)

One of the common paradoxical (and symmetrical) pairings in both the unconscious and mysticism is nothingness <-> everythingness.

God comes upon me. (Mechtild of Magdeburg, 13th century. In Hirschfield, 1994,: p. 94)

Mystics seek emptiness, with its potential for agonizing aloneness and even terrifying obliteration of the self. This nothingness can be discovered to be the fount of being, belonging, an embodied creative self.

Mystics discover the light of God by confronting the darkness within, letting go of the passing show of ordinary life, engaging “the dark night of the soul”. One abandons --- which in the deeper unconscious is the same as: is abandoned by --- the ordinary compasses of life. The only way out is through. Marion Milner, a British psychoanalyst who wrote about her ongoing search for the divine, expresses this beautifully: “Out of the held emptiness (my italics) comes a movement, a gesture, a reaching out to the world again” (1987:, p. 177, my italics).

You have probably already noticed an idea inherent in emotional thinking-feeling: infinity, boundlessness, the loss of delimiting boundaries, a sense of unity, a nothingness that is the same as everythingness. In the deep unconscious, something is the same as its opposite, and (even deeper) is the same as everything else. To key into deep experience is to apprehend infinity. Emotional and spiritual power surge from the deep unrepressed unconscious. There is only the indivisible --– that infinitely potent force of symmetry avalanching the dividing fences of consciousness and thus creating identities where there were individuals. “I am You.” “My life is Your gesture.” The “You” is the immanent God that inheres – is in here – in everything.

In the deeper unconscious, two individual things (feelings, ideas, people) become identical if they have even one point of similarity. Two things that share the characteristic of something sparkling – star, diamond diadem – become identical. At that moment (Dickinson’s “a Diadem to fit a Dome – continual upon Me –““) the self becomes part of the same symmetrical category as Emperor and Lord God Almighty. In this way “I” becomes continual with the firmament; she is consort and one with God. In a symmetrical relation of identity with something that on conscious strata is ordinarily delimited from it, the symmetrized object chains with increasingly broad groupings of identities and infinite degrees of emotion. It becomes infinitely penetrating, without any protective limit. It becomes one with the eternal flowing light of God. It becomes infinitely dangerous, subsumed into an all-encompassing dread.[4] It absorbs into primary love.

Mirabai (16th century) is the most renowned woman poet of India; her songs are recited from memory by Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus of various castes (Schelling, 1998). A favorite of Gandhi’s, she is a revolutionary figure in the popular culture, a subversive figure abjuring the strictures of tradition. In poetry that blazes with spirit and intellect, she proclaims the ecstasy <-> agony of seeking her quicksilver god, the Lord Krishna whom she calls Shyam, the Dark One.[5] The sheer recklessness of her devotion is shocking: she regarded Krishna as her true husband and refused her duties as wife to the crown prince of Mewar (and then as his widow) to the point where her in-laws tried to murder her. She is possessed.

With a startling image, she calls to those capable of understanding these dark passions: “When it rains/ Does anyone drink from the gutter?” She blazes the erotic nature of the union: “Shyam, the ocean of pleasure/ Has come into me” and “Wet with Shyam’s love”. Hooked into a tantalizing lover, she can never achieve peace.

The poetry reveals a shearing strain, as longing for the irresistible unfaithful lover and passion “shift into the other with the blurring speed of a hummingbird’s wings” (Hirschfield:, 1994, p. 131). The infinity of union “Wherever I go/ His sweet form is laughing inside me” is followed only a few lines later by the infinity of despair “Unless she sees her dark lover/ how can Mira/ endure her own body?” (Schelling, 1997:, p. 53). Image after image unfolds from her (exceedingly) unrepressed unconscious, powered by her masterful use of rhetorical devices springing from it.

Hirschfield gleanms from such despairing passion a paradoxical symmetrical solution: “longing becomes in itself the sign of the Beloved’s presence….(I)t may be that it is through our vulnerability itself that the always-present sacred can make itself known” (Hirschfield, 1994:, pp. 131-2). She quotes Nelly Sachs:

I can’t speak of the women mystics without referring to joy. Mirabai is only one example of a tradition proclaiming God as her lover, averring that it is only through a love that tidal waves all distinctions (self, conventions, the bounds of a normal life) that one can find the Lord. Mechtild of Magdeburg exclaims:

Finally, there is another concept woven through everything I’ve said, a concept so essential to Matte-Blanco that one can say it is alpha and omega, a sine qua non of his theory: the fundamental antinomy of being and world. He defines antinomy as “the incompatibility between two assertions which can claim equal rights to be true” (1988:, p. 70). Matte-Blanco believes he is talking about something more than two logics, conscious and unconscious. The two logics comprising the whole of bi-logic reflect different aspects of thinking, feeling, and being. The same reality is simultaneously treated as formed of parts (thus divisible or heterogeneous) and as one and indivisible. Symmetrical logic discovers and shows us the indivisible, homogeneous mode of being, while asymmetrical logic reveals the divisible, heterogeneous mode. Matte-Blanco (1988) affirms that

there is in the very structure of humans a fundamental antinomy resulting from the co-presence of the two modes of being which are incompatible with one another and, in spite of this, exist and appear together in the same subject. This is incomprehensible to our normal thinking. They appear together yet remain incompatible and never fuse to form a wider unitary concept which comprises both (Matte-Blanco, 1988:(pp. 70-1).

I know of no more beautiful expression of thise fundamental antinomy than a letter written by the 13th century Flemish mystic, Hadewijch of Antwerp:

May God make known to you, dear child, who he is and how he treats his servants…how he consumes them within himself. From the depths of his wisdom, he shall teach you what he is and with what wonderful sweetness the one lover lives in the other and so permeates the other that they do not know themselves from each other. But they possess each other in mutual delight, mouth in mouth, heart in heart, body in body, soul in soul, while a single divine nature flows through them both and they both become one through each other, yet remaining always themselves [my italics] (translated by Oliver Davies and quoted inIn Hirshfield, 1994, :pp. 99-100, my italics).

In this essay, I have shown the following bi-logical concepts through the poetry of 14 women mystics [6]: symmetry, asymmetry, symmetrization, the unrepressed unconscious, the stratified bi-logical structure, the fundamental antinomy, and the relation among emotion, infinity, and the unconscious. I would like to end with a poem that embodies these abstract ideas, evocative with the imagery of symmetry and rich with asymmetrical distinctions of craftsmanship. It was written in the 8th century by Yeshe Tsogyel, the “foremost woman in the history of Tibetan Buddhism” (in Hirshfield, 1994:, p. 46).

(Presented at the conference “God and the Unconscious in the Light of Matte-Blanco’s Bi-logic”, San Francisco, October 28, 2000)

Bollas, Christopher. (1987) The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bomford, Rodney. (2000) “Religious truth in the light of bi-logic”. Paper presented at the conference “God and the Unconscious in the Llight of Matte-Blanco’s Bbi-logic”. San Francisco, October 28, 2000.

______________. The Symmetry of God. (1999) London: Free Association Books: London, 1999.

Hirshfield, Jane (editorEd.). (1994) Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women. Edited byNew York: Harper: NY.1994.

Martz, Louis L. (1963) The Meditative Poem. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.: Garden City, NY. 1963.

Matte-Blanco, Ignacio. (1988) Thinking, Feeling, and Being. London: Routledge.: London

Milner, Marion. (1987) Eternity’s Sunrise. London: Virago Press.: London, 1987.

Schelling, Andrew. (1998) For Love of the Dark One: Songs of Mirabai. Prescott, AZ: Hohm Press.

Wolters, Clifton (Translator). (1978) The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works. New York: Viking Press. : Prescott, AZ. 1998.

[1] Teresa of Avila affirms “the Lord walks among pots and pans” (Hirschfield, 1994: 144).

[2] As humans we have two eyes. Matte-Blanco uses a metaphor that reminds us of the ever-present stratified bi-logical structure: the human psychical template also has two eyes, one that views reality from the more asymmetrical strata and one from the deeper symmetrical strata.

[3] Reminding me of Frost’s assertion that poetry is what gets lost in translation.

[4] Grotstein (1997) sees Matte-Blanco’s introduction of the notion of infinity as a paradigm shift within psychoanalysis, placing infinity as the source of primary anxieties.

[5] This form of Krishna is the elusive adolescent flute-player: “an irresistible figure – mysterious, unreliable, ravishing the heart with his youthful beauty, devastating it with infidelity” (Schelling, 1998: xxi).

[6] Yeshe Tsogyel, Dakini Lion-Face, Mahadeviyakka, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, Hadewijch of Antwerp Hadewijch II, Catherine of Siena, Lal Ded, Mirabai, Emily Dickinson, Nelly Sachs, Edith Soedergran, and Marina Tsvetaeva. They come from diverse spiritual traditions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism), nations (Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Russia, Tibet, and the United States), and eras (they span between the eighth and twentieth centuries).