Dark Night of the Soul : Cirkus ~ Entry of the Chameleons

Entry of the Chameleons

- chapter index -
pg. 1 - Lizard
pg. 2 - Cirkus | pg. 3 - Megaphonium Fanfare
pg. 4 - 'Worship!' Cried the Clown | pg. 5 - Entry of the Chameleons
pg. 6 - Indoor Games | pg. 7 - Happy Family
pg. 8 - Lady of the Dancing Water

- page index -
Pandemonium Seesaw | Pluto

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The Entry of the Chameleons represents the understanding that nothing in the physical world is what it seems. Nothing is permanent, including our thoughts, beliefs, customs and personas. Like the chameleon, we are ever-changing.

"Who is the worshipper essentially? Merely a mask, a vehicle, for the energy of life. Our person is, as the word itself indicates, no more than a per-sona, that through which we sound or speak, a living mask. Our innermost and final reality is the sacred bios that it conceals, the vitality that inwardly animates us. All the forms and distinctions of the phenomenal world are simply masks. The same Dionysos underlies them all. The difficulty is that man has become so accustomed to his mask that he has forgotten that is all it is. Yet a mask that is never removed becomes a face, a false face, though its falsehood is unknown even to its wearer. To see through it rather than with it we must somehow separate from or 'stand outside' it."

Dionysos: The Masks of Madness
by Robert Luyster
Parabola
(20:4 - Eros)
winter 1995

"Elephants forgot, force-fed on stale chalk,
Ate the floors of their cages."

An elephant "never forgets" and yet the elephants of the Cirkus have forgotten their training. Unable to gather sufficient spiritual nourishment from words and writings ("stale chalk") these particular members of the Cirkus have been forced to eat the floors (destroy the foundations) of their paradigmatic cages.

In Christian belief, the new covenant "is not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life."( 2nd Corinthians 3:6) The "letter" is the "letter of the law", the mechanistic, literal observance of a system of beliefs such as the law of Moses, written in ink and "engraven in stones". (2nd Corinthians 3:3, 7)

"The kingdom (of heaven) requires a morality which is not founded on rules and regulations imposed from outside, but on self-knowledge. This self-knowledge can be achieved through inner confrontation. The inner confrontation occurs when we confront the person within us for whom the Law is necessary. It would not be necessary to have a Law forbidding murder, adultery, stealing, coveting, and slander if there was not a part of our personality which might do exactly these things. The scribes and Pharisees seek to avert the danger of this inner "shadow" by following rules which prohibit these things. But the higher morality requires confronting the shadowy one within us who has made the rules necessary in the first place."

- John Sanford
The Kingdom Within:
The Inner Meaning of Jesus' Sayings

"Strongmen lost their hair, paybox collapsed and
Lions sharpened their teeth.
Gloves raced round the ring, stallions stampeded"

As "gloves" represent concealment, cloaking, illusion, the protagonists ability to see "gloves" tells us that he has become aware of the illusory nature of what he is experiencing.
Strongmen who, like Samson, have lost their hair are no longer strong. In the circus, "lions" are supposed to have their teeth filed down and "stallions" are expected to be well-trained and orderly. Without a paybox (payoff), the learned behavior of Cirkus members is not reinforced. Society reinforces behavior by paying off the ego.

"Ego is a need; it is a social need, it is a social by-product. The society means all that is around you - not you, but all that is around you. All, minus you, is the society. And everybody reflects. You will go to school and the teacher will reflect who you are. You will be in friendship with other children and they will reflect who you are. By and by, everybody is adding to your ego, and everybody is trying to modify it in such a way that you don't become a problem to the society.

They are not concerned with you.

They are concerned with the society.

Through the ego the society is controlling you. You have to behave in a certain way, because only then does the society appreciate you. You have to walk in a certain way; you have to laugh in a certain way; you have to follow certain manners, a morality, a code. Only then will the society appreciate you, and if it doesn't, your ego will be shaken. And when the ego is shaken, you don't know where you are, who you are.

The ego is not individual. Ego is a social phenomenon - it is society, its not you. But it gives you a function in the society, a hierarchy in the society. And if you remain satisfied with it, you will miss the whole opportunity of finding the self.

Have you ever noticed that all types of miseries enter through the ego? It cannot make you blissful; it can only make you miserable.

Ego is hell.

Whenever you suffer, just try to watch and analyze, and you will find, somewhere the ego is the cause of it. And the ego goes on finding causes to suffer."

- From Beyond the Frontier of the Mind
by Osho

"...man as we encounter him is an automaton. His thoughts, feelings, and deeds are little more than mechanical reactions to external and internal stimuli. He cannot do anything. In and around him, everything happens without the participation of his own authentic consciousness. But human beings are ignorant of this state of affairs because of the pervasive influence of culture and education, which engrave in them the illusion of autonomous conscious selves. In short, man is asleep. There is no authentic I am in his presence, but only an egoism which masquerades as the authentic self."

- G.I. Gurdjieff and his School
by Jacob Needleman

The "Cirkus tamers" represent society and Sensation is again revealed as "the greatest obstacle to Intuition, the psychological function overshadowed by external sense perceptions.

Cirkus is notably different from the inaugural songs on album's one and two. In Twenty First Century Schizoid Man the narrator realized that "nothing he's got he really needs" and in Pictures of A City, he saw how people (including himself) are spiritually blind, enslaved by cravings and instincts. But there is no rebellion in either song. The characters are all trapped by circumstances and play out their roles. The activities depicted in Cirkus reflect the narrator's unwillingness to settle for the roles society has chosen for him. The final verse demonstrates his ability, like that of a chameleon, to change.

"Dionysus was given to a bewildering series of mutations and transformations. Again echoing shamanism, with its traditions of shape-shifting, Dionysus variously appeared as a girl, a man, a woman, a lion, a bull, and a panther. He was also an occasional cross-dresser, and was the god of the theatre, masks and illusion. Use of psychedelics inevitably reveals the role-playing nature of identity, and the story of Dionysus shows that we may take advantage of this shifting quality of the masks we wear to the world. The metamorphic god persistently used his transformations to conquer foes and work his way out of difficult situations."

- Dionysus Risen
atomjack

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"Pandemonium seesaw . . ."

"The wild spirit of the dreadful, which mocks all laws and institutions, reveals itself in the pandemonium and deathly silence which accompany the approaching and imminent god. The pandemonium is a genuine symbol of religious ecstasy, overpowering all natural and habitual sense perceptions. The Dreadful suddenly springs into being. And, at its greatest intensity, it is as if the insane din were in reality the profoundest of silences."

- Treading the Winepress: Part 2
The Epiphany of Miraculous Dread
by Chris King

The "seesaw" tells us, again, that the narrator has transcended duality ("pandemonium" is only half of a duality, a point on the continuum of change).

"Libra can be regarded as the sign in which the first vision of the spiritual path is glimpsed and is identified as the ultimate goal of the disciple. The path is the 'razor-edged path between pairs of opposites'."

- D. K. Foundation
Djwhal Khul

The "seesaw" also tells us that Cirkus belongs to the constellation of Libra.

"In ancient times, when Leo and Virgo were still considered as one sign, Libra was the fulcrum, the literal point of balance in the wheel of the zodiac. Thus Libra provides a kind of seesaw experience, bewildering to one who seeks to be entirely human; it will create impediments and urges that drive such a person towards the higher. The aspirant will find within much that draws him/her towards old habits, as the expression of life is refined. In Egyptian mythology the gods weigh the heart of the deceased against the weight of a feather. If the heart outweighs the feather the life must seek to be reborn on Earth. Libra is often called the 'place of judgement', for here the sheep are separated from the goats."

- D. K. Foundation
Djwhal Khul

The "seesaw" is also present in the arrangement of Cirkus.
Following the line "lest the mirror stops turning" (in the middle of the composition) there is a quiet interlude...

"Still centre of the piece, and perhaps the fulcrum on which the structure balances. Idea of social chaos reflected in the metaphor of the circus, also reflected by the musical structure. On either side of of this quiet section are 114 bars, followed by 111 bars excluding the senza misura climax at the very end. The piece may then be regarded as being bipartite; like a huge musical see-saw or swing.
'Cirkus' provides an example of a symmetrical structure, together with interesting connections between the small-scale motivic material and the large-scale harmony. It could be that the musical material supports the lyrics in an entirely appropriate way by heightening the metaphor of the Circus by a kind of musical see-saw, or swing, conveyed by structure and motive."

- Andrew Keeling's Diary (DGM)

Cirkus, like The Devil's Triangle, is an aural representation of the Yin Yang mandala.

The compositional equilibrium/symmetry/balance of Cirkus refers back to the previous album where the narrator found a balance between the extremes of approach/avoidance, expansion/contraction, eros and thanatos, yin and yang. The still point at the center of the pendulum. The Devil's Triangle represents the experience of balancing and Cirkus (lyrically & musically) expresses the insight that has come in the wake of this experience.
The music also conveys a strong sense of being propelled along by events or drawn in, as if, by gravity (which sums up the experience of living in the material world). The protagonist is drawn in one end ("pushed" into the sea of maya) and repelled out the other end ("ran for the door"), This "see saw" quality (up/down, push/pull, in one end/out the other) is reflected in the song's arrangement and illustrates the cyclic nature of life, the Cyclic Law.

"This Law--St. Paul's b�te noir---- is that cosmic impulsion which draws all spiritual entities down from the heights into the coils of matter in incarnation. It was the descent and mooring of the soul "to the ruinous bonds of the body" that brought the spirit of man under the dominion of What St. Paul calls "the law" of Fate, Karma and Necessity. This, too, was "the bondage in Egypt"" of the Old Testament. It is the ever-revolving Wheel of Birth and Death, the Cyclic Law, the Cycle of Necessity, the Great Dragon.

In the Hindu, Egyptian and Greek Mystery rites the ceremony of indicating the soul's pilgrimage round the Cycle of Necessity was performed over what was called the "Snake's Hole," and the "Inevitable Circle."

- The Lost Light
An Interpretation of Ancient Scriptures
by Alvin Boyd Kuhn

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The first two albums represented, respectively, Zeus and Poseidon.
The appearance of the Cycle of Necessity tells us that the third album, Lizard, takes place in the realm of Pluto (Hades), the underworld.

"He (Pluto/Hades) is Lord of the Cycle of Generation and the Cycle of Necessity."

- The Orphic Pantheon

"Pluto denotes cosmic forces which demand broad, deep-seated changes. When the need for such change is not recognized, however, Pluto will forcibly enact it in ways which are often experienced as terrifying to the ego, with its limited field of consciousness and merely personal range of experience and concern. It was in this sense that the religious scholar Rudolf Otto conceived of God as a terrifying and fascinating force, which he called mysterium tremendum [Pluto/Hades] et fascinans [Neptune/Poseidon]. Because Pluto corresponds to elemental forces comprising a broader range, potency and power than the ego, their proximity to ordinary ego-consciousness is often experienced as life-threatening, fracturing or overwhelming.

When Plutonian energies are not feared, however, but "worked through" by means of the conscientious cooperation of the ego-consciousness, then the transformation of consciousness itself -- the ultimate goal of Pluto, as manifested on the human plane -- may occur."

- Pluto and Astrology

"Pluto symbolizes a process of death and renewal. By implication, whatever Pluto aspects by hard angle is fodder for transformation. Pluto tends to abduct this function into the underworld and render it dark and forbidding. The dark lord symbolizes what scares us, and whatever scares us has power. It scares us because it is strange, and it has power because we cannot control it; thus we fear it might violate our boundaries and destroy us. Jung called this dreaded entity of the unconscious the shadow, for it symbolizes that part of the psyche the person cannot see.

Because one cannot assimilate the shadow and stay the same, it is associated with death. To integrate the feared thing is to die"

- The Mountain Astrologer: Scorpio Issue

"I ran for the door, ringmaster shouted,
"All the fun of the Cirkus!"

The Fate of the Animals by Franz Marc

At the end of Cirkus the narrator runs for the door, in effect, demonstrating again his unwillingness to be caught up in the world of appearances.

"For the enlightened person, everything that is going on is a circus. There is no need for him to purchase a ticket - his problem is how to get out of the circus! He does not want to go to the movie, he wants to get out!"

- More Gold Nuggets by Osho Rajneesh

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