The Importance of Not Seeing too Directly into the Beauty of the Soul

I introduced my lucid dream about the veiled women to raise the question, Why the veiling of their presumed beauty? The first wore a dark mask, the second a blue fabric veil. It reminds me of Robert Johnson's analysis of the myth of Tristan and Isolde in his book We. Johnson argues that the relationship with the anima (or animus) should remain "chaste" and not eroticized. As you may recall, Tristan's fate all turns on whether he will have sex with Isolde the Fair, King Mark's queen. Well, they do, and all hell breaks loose. Until then, the relationship is magical and potent; but afterward war breaks out and Tristan's future is dark.

If the relationship to the inner self becomes eroticized and exploited, then the image of the soul is projected onto the world, and becomes identified with a real person. This is a burdemsome, impossible mission for the carrier of the projection, and she/he will surely fail in living out that expectation. Johnson says that by maintining a chaste relationship with the inner self, and by having a sexual relationship with a "real" person (Isolde the White), the Tristan within us lives out a balanced life in which his soulfulness gets expressed in creativity, feeling, imagination, and the like.

I have found that in my deepest lucid dreams, my feelings for the characters (who are, sometim, esperhaps actual souls) are hard to describe: they are so deep, so timeless. Holding the woman in the black mask gave me a feeling of having "come home." But it was not my home, at least for now. By not being able to see her, some degree of mystery remained, and a necessary distance was preserved. Johnson might say that I was fortunate not to see the face, for I may have overly personalized that moment. The lucid dream in all of its intensity and felt reality could have effectively fixated me on the image of her face. That connection with the soul, while being perhaps the "best thing we have," may also be the rocks upon which our ship goes to ground. In the Odyseus, Ulysses wants to hear the song of the sirens, but he is wise enough to have his men tie him to the mast of the ship. Without that grounding, the relationship with the anima can overwhelm the ego and find its expression in the external world, to our detriment. So it is grace itself that inserts a certain obliqueness into the relationship with the inner self, in order to keep our attention oriented to the real world, and committed to real relationships that can afford us what we need in this world of form and necessary compromise. If Tristan could only have been content with Isolde the White, his wife, it would have been a near-perfect world, but the vision of the anima lured him into thinking it could be a perfect world, and that is always an ill-fated belief.