Let us consider the archetype of the Blue Man and see what light he sheds on healthy manhood. In his spiritual autobiography Play of Consciousness, the great Indian Saint Swami Muktananda describes his experience of the Blue Pearl and the Blue Man in considerable detail. He talks of the “blue light of love” that exists in “everybody’s heart.”
He says: “The Blue Person grants the realization of God with form. He is also called the supreme unmanifest Being…. What I had seen was the Blue Pearl; it was Shiva, the Blue Lord.”
In twelfth century German Hildegard of Bingen also had a vision of a “man in sapphire blue” whom she named as Christ who is present in all things. Christ is “the son of justice having the lightning of burning love and existing with such glory that every creature becomes illuminated by the brightness of his light.” He bends “compassionately in the direction of the poverty of the human race.” We become that Blue Man; we become the compassionate Christ; we become the radiance of God.
In Hildegard’s mandala painting of this vision, the Blue Man is extending his hands outward. This depicts the archetypal gesture for compassion, in which we take the energy of the heart chakra and put it into our hands, put it to work…. We all possess this “man in sapphire blue” within us. It is our capacity for healing. It is the healing power of Christ within us all and outreaching to all.
The Blue Man unleashes untold creativity. When we are in the grip of creativity we are being visited by the Blue Man. We frequently say that creative inspiration hits us “out of the blue,” but typically this is the result of much effort. For instance, Einstein’s great equation on energy and matter (E = MC2) hit him out of the blue while he was getting on a bus. But of course Einstein had already spent years working on this theory without finding the solution.
Blue unites sky and earth and it comes together in us, the marriage of heaven and earth. When we become the Blue Man, we become the compassionate hands of God putting into practice our compassionate hearts.
Matthew Fox, The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine, pp. 153-156, 162, 171
Banner Image: “Miles Davis” by D. Thompson, 1993.
Queries for Contemplation
In prayerful meditation, sit with the following questions: what are the insights that they open within you?
- Consider examples of the visitations of the Blue Man in your life. When are you most creative? When are you busy healing self and others?
- Find where you connect with the archetype of the Blue Man. Meditate on that. Possibly experiment with drawing it as Hildegard did with her mandala.
Recommended Reading
To awaken what Fox calls “the sacred masculine,” he unearths ten metaphors, or archetypes, ranging from the Green Man, an ancient pagan symbol of our fundamental relationship with nature, to the Spiritual Warrior….These timeless archetypes can inspire men to pursue their higher calling to connect to their deepest selves and to reinvent the world.
