The Importance of Psychology

Still reading and copying down some important quotes (Atleast to me anyway) out of James Hillman's Blue Fire.

"...the soul wants to learn psychology, wants thoughtful formulations of itself, and that this is a mode of its healing."-- James Hillman, Pg. 84, A Blue Fire

Now I have a better understanding of why I like to read psychology. It isn't a part of me that just wants to be and sound smart.

"Imagination and its development is perhaps a religious problem, because imagination becomes real only through belief. As theology tells us, belief is an act of faith, or its faith itself as a primary investment of energy in something which makes that something real."-- James Hillman, Pg.84, A Blue Fire

We have faith in our industrial civilization.

"Attention is the cardinal psychological virtue. On it depen perhaps the toehr cardinal virtues, for there can hardly be faith nor hope nor love for anything unless it first recieves attention."-- James Hillman, Pg. 85, A Blue Fire

Krishnamurti and Paul Rezendes would agree.

Finding Parallels

I knew I should've named this blog Understanding Ishmael. I'm reading A Blue Fire and of course I'm finding parallels between Hillman's psychology and Daniel Quinn's thinking.

"Where the daimones are alive polytheism, pantheism, animism, and even religion do not appear."--James Hillman, Pg. 42, A Blue Fire

"But to return to your original question, I have to say the faculty of belief has completely atrophied in me. It strikes me as foolish to believe in things that may not exist -- or to deny the existence of things that may exist. Nonetheless, I've peopled my own personal universe with gods who have a care for all living things. I don't pray to these gods or build shrines to them or expect favors from them or perform rituals for them. Nor do I expect other people to 'believe' in these gods or to people their own universes with them."--Daniel Quinn, Pg. 51, If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways

Perhaps the daimones are alive for anyone that can write something close to the above paragraph.

"As I have spelled out in several later writings, psychological polytheism is concerned less with worship than with attitudes, with the way we see things and place them. Gods, for psychology, are neither believed in nor addressed directly. They are rather adejectival than substantive; the polytheistic experience finds existence qualified with archetypal presence and recognizes faces of the gods in these qualifications. Only when these qualities are literalized, set apart as substances, that is, become theologized, do we have to imagine them through the category of belief."--James Hillman, Pg.42, A Blue Fire


"Being a Martian anthropologist, I have to pull back from your question, have to take off the blinders you're asking me to wear. Believing in things that may not exist--or disbelieving in things that MAY exist--is a peculiarity of your culture, not a universal human activity. Because it's universal among you, you assume it's universal among humans in general."--Daniel Quinn, Pg.49, If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways

The daimones are not alive in our culture.

Daniel Quinn Quote Saturday

"It's easy to pick out the people who belong to "our" culture. If you go somewhere--anywhere in the world--where the food is under lock and key, you'll know you're among people of our culture. They may differ wildly in relatively superficial matters--in the way they dress, in their marriage customs, in the holidays they observe, and so on. But when it comes to the most fundamental thing of all, getting the food they need to stay alive, they're all alike. In these places, the food is all owned by someone, and if you want some, you'll have to buy it. This is expected in these places; the people of our culture know no other way."--Daniel Quinn, Pg. 5, Beyond Civilization

More Thoughts

This ties in with my last two posts. Our style of capitalsim is based on this idea: man was made to conquer and rule the world. In other words, human beings are the apex of evolution. Reality is showing us that this is not so. That's why it feels like the world is coming to an end.

The End Days

"These days it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."--Fredric Jameson

Ain't that the truth...

A Brief Visit

Stopped by my Grandpa and Grandma's yesterday. I was treated to some of Grandma's homeade cookies and got to hear about the Apocalypse, The Mayan Calendar, Jewish money power, the way doctors used to be, local politics, how there are too many robins and rabbits, how well agricultural Round Up works, why there are so many children drowning this past year, etc.

It was a nice visit. I'm thankful they live as close as they do.

1992 Interview with James Hillman and Micheal Ventura

This interview was done a few weeks before I graduated from high school back in 1992. If I remember right grunge music was really taking off right about that time. A few years after Kurt Cobain killed himself.

"Many teenagers are living in a community of horror. And living in a community of highly destructive alien forces that they don't know much about. And to put all of those into their own fantasy is not the answer, these are communal figures, they're like ancestoral voices. If they were on another island in another time, in another tribe, in another society they would be regarded as demonic inhabitants of the village."--James Hillman from the interview

Quinn Quote Saturday

"Homo magister [Man the ruler of the world] was ultimately forced to overcome his repugnance to the idea that the earth is not the astronomical center of the universe. To get on with his mastery of the world, he was forced to deal with this repellent idea, forced to build a totally new astronomy based on it. If he hadn't, he would have made a fool of himself on the way to the moon.
"But he has not yet been forced to deal meaningfully with the fact that HIS story, the story of man ruler of the world, represents only a half of one percent of the whole story of man.
"He hasn't built a totally new understanding of the story based on that fact. He doesn't want to.
"But if he doesn't, he's going to make an even worse fool of himself than just getting lost on the way to the moon.
"He's going to become extinct.[Daniel Quinn, Pg. 16, The Book of the Damned]

The Most Annoying Question

The most annoying question anyone has ever asked me since I joined our economic system is: What, don't you want to work?

Loss of Soul

"Anthropoligists describe a condition among 'primitive' peoples called 'loss of soul.' In this condition a man is out of himself, unable to find either the outer connection between humans or the inner connection to himself. He is unable to take part in his society, its rituals, and traditions. They are dead to him, he to them. His connection to family, totem, nature, is gone. Until he regains his soul he is not a true human. He is 'not there.' It is as if he had never been initiated, been given a name, come into real being. His soul may not only be lost; it may also be possessed, bewitched, ill, transposed into an object, animal, place, or another person. Without this soul, he has lost the sense of belonging and the sense of being in communion with the powers and the gods. They no longer reach him; he cannot pray, nor sacrifice, nor dance. His personal myth and his connection to the larger myth of his people, as raison d'etre, is lost. Yet he is not sick with disease, nor is he out of his mind. He has simply lost his soul. He may even die. We become lonely. Other relevant parallels with ourselves today need not be spelled out."

Later on he goes on to say:

"I believe with Jung that each of us is 'modern man in search of soul.'"--James Hillman, Pg. 18, A Blue Fire

Quinn Quote Saturday

"That's it, Jared. That's where the REAL gods of the universe write what they write. Your God writes in words. The gods I'm talking about write in galaxies and star systems and planets and oceans and forests and whales and birds and gnats."--Daniel Quinn, Pg.135, The Story of B

Getting Older

I never thought it would come to this. I look forward to reading who is in the circuit court section of the newspaper and looking at the rain gauge after a storm.

I can tell Fall is around the corner. The Little League baseball has come to an end, all of the cabbage has been harvested and turned into saurkraut, and Daniel and I have started working on our stick bows.

Boys And Girls Being Pals

Here is something to think about when it comes to keeping adolescent boys and girls together in school:

"Therefore we should keep boys and girls apart, that they are pure and virgin within themselves. On mixing with one another, in becoming familiar, in being 'pals,' they lose their own female and male integrity. And they lose the treasure of the future, the vital sex polarity, the dynamic magic of life. For the magic and the dynamism rests on OTHERNESS.
"For actual sex is a vital polarity. And a polarity which rouses into action, as we know, at puberty."--D.H. Lawrence

Perhaps this is one reason out of many why our marriages fall apart so quickly. The relationship loses its passion, depth and overall vitality because there isn't much OTHERNESS.

Sinking Ship

Off to carry mail for the United States Postal Service today. There are rumors within the system that we will see 5 day delivery by this time next year. No one really knows for sure. A guy I work with summed it up this way: "It's one big slow sinking ship. Start looking for a lifeboat."

If I would have had my wits about me at the time I would've said you have just described our whole civilization.

Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires

"Socialism never took rook in America because the poor there see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."--John Steinbeck

Older Men's Responsibilities

Copied this down from an interview that Robert Bly did on New Dimensions radio back in the mid-eighties.

"Most of the [older] males in our culture are not leading spiritual lives, they're making money or doing something else. And that means they have nothing to nourish the young males with. And then oftentimes the young males are forced to lead the spiritual life the older males didn't."--Robert Bly

Quinn Quote Saturday

"Despite all the indicators of misery we live with--the ever growing incidence of social disintegration, drug addiction, crime, suicide, mental illness, child and spousal abuse and abandonment, racism, violence against women, and so on--most people in our culture are thoroughly convinced that our way of life simply cannot be bettered by any means whatever. Adopting anything different would therefore have to be a comedown, an act of sacrifice."--Daniel Quinn, Pg.86, Beyond Civilization

Been Busy

The past week has been full of postal work, family responsibilities, and listening to old radio stories on New Dimensions radio. The stories I've listened to were with Robert Bly, Coleman Barks, James Hillman, Thomas Moore, and Charles Tart. There is so much good stuff there. If you're interested in conversations on philosophy, spirit, soul,and creativity I recommend checking it out.

This morning I was poking around over at The Un-Game website and found this quote by leadership guru Tom Peters:

"Any closely held value, no matter how well concealed, even from yourself, inevitably prompts action that's consistent with it."--Tom Peters

I'm sure I've written this down somewhere else, but there is a level of truth in it where I think it needs to see the light of day again.