ANGEL STORIES for our time - John Woodcock - Bog

Our modern culture is on a deadly trajectory, the endpoint of which is the total elimination of the psyche or soul as a recognizable experience and even as a concept that may be discussed in any way that could matter to our daily lives. This "attack" on the psyche is taking place at the levels of language and body. Many people who personally pay the price of our erasure of soul are often childhood "trauma victims". They have no way to understand their experiences other than the "soul-less" one of "merely" human abuse. But abuse victims sometimes, inexplicably, break through into a realm of love, transforming into artists, teachers, poets, and authors-as mouthpieces for this love. My book is an attempt to account for this phenomenon from the point of view of soul. The transformation into love from within extreme violence to mind and body is pictured by soul to be a tortured process of the descent of angelic love into "matter", as my essays will show.The first essay is a story of the human experience of receiving an angelic descent into material reality. The second essay Angel of a New World shows how this descent appears as a "linguistic event" along with its consequences for our culture, while my essay Surrender shows some of the complexities involved for the human personality as love seeks to enter the human domain. I include my essay on Yunus Emre, the 13th. C. Anatolian love poet to show how at that time, the movement towards love was an upward striving by the human being, away from the ordinary personality, requiring a very different kind of initiation of the human being. Yunus Emre's ascent to love can be contrasted strongly with my last essay, Unancestral Voice, which explores in detail the kind of initiation required by an individual in our time, the time of hardened materialism, when love seeks to descend into the lowest, often most despised aspect of the human being-our personalities.