Reflection Isn't Enough

"...in feeling and desire we tend to realize the importance of something for the soul. Desire is holy, as D.H Lawrence, the romantics, and the Neoplatonists insisted, because it touches and moves the soul. Reflection is never enough."--James Hillman, Pg. 273, A Blue Fire

Problems

"Problems sustain us--maybe that's why they don't go away. What would a life be without them? Completely tranquilized and loveless, too. There is a secret love hiding in each problem...."--James Hillman

Writing A Bit More These Days

And because of that this advice by George Santayana to James Hillman about writing interested me after running across it in my morning reading:

"If you to write it is not necessary to be complete (formal education, knowledge) but be in harmony with yourself, read what interests you."--Pg.160, The Life and Ideas of James Hillman

What Family Is

Thank you to James Hillman for helping me understand what family is instead of what it ought to be.

"The measure of a family's magnanimity is not what it gives to charity but rather its capacity to shelter the shadows of its members." [Pg.199, A Blue Fire]

Melancholy, Madness, and Morning Coffee

For years now I've made it a habit to get out of bed before everyone else does in my house. I sit alone with a book, pencil, notebook and coffee. This morning I found myself sitting at the kitchen table with a black cup of coffee reading this passage out of A Blue Fire.

"We find the senex in our solitary taking account, sorting through, figuring out; alone behind the wheel on the way to work; head under the shower, under the dryer; alone at the kitchen table looking down into black coffee, in bed staring into night--the senex mind tying together the unraveled fringes of the day, making order.

"Here is our melancholy trying to make knowledge, trying to see through. But the truth is that the melancholy is the knowledge: the poison is the antidote. This would be the senex's most destructive insight: our senex order rests on senex madness. Our order is itself madness."[James Hillman, pg. 215, A Blue fire]

I sit here frozen and distant with my cup of coffee...

What To Do, What To Do

A smart insight into depression.

"Dame Melancholy may also appear as the embodiment and vision of depression, where she brings wisdom, as she did to Boethius, who was betrayed and thrown into prison when not yet forty. There his suicidal melancholy conjured the feminine figure of Wisdom, who dictated to him his Consolation of Philosophy. Depression and the awakening of one's genius are inseparable, say the texts. Yet for most of us there is much depression and little genius, little consolation of philosophy, only the melancholic stare--what to do, what to do." -- [James Hillman, Pg.212, A Blue Fire]

My experience with depressions have been plagued with ideas like: You're born with a chemical imbalance. This is just the way your great-grandfather was. What sin have you committed? You've got to get out of this and get yourself together.

Perhaps the consolation of philosophy wipes those away.

What's The Matter, Don't You Wanna Work?

I don't know how many times I've had that question asked of me or have heard it asked of others. It occurred to me this morning, after reading some excerpts out of James Hillman's Blue fire, that it could be the person asking the question perceives work to be a duty. They do not associate work with pleasure but as their ethical duty. They also might not find much pleasure in their own work. Anyway here is the excerpt that set me off on this train of thought:

"We moralize work and make it a problem, forgetting that the hands love to work and that in the hands is the mind. That 'work ethic' idea does more to impede working...it makes it a duty instead of a pleasure. We need to talk of the work instinct, not the work ethic, and instead of putting work with the superego we need to imagine it as an id activity, like a fermentation, something going on instinctively, autonomously, like beer works, like bread works...."--James Hillman, Pg.171, A Blue Fire

Urging Strife

Up to this point in my life the lines below are some of the most important lines I've come across:

"Part of separating and drawing apart is the emotion of hatred. So I shall be speaking with hatred and urging strife, or eris, or polemos, which Heraclitus, the first ancestor of psychology, has said is the father of all."--James Hillman, pg.114, A Blue Fire

Our Form Of Display: Rhetoric

I'm following my fascination with Hillman's work this morning. I like the idea of our speech as a form of display in the animalistic sense.

"I think that the human form of display, in the ethologist's sense of 'display,' is rhetoric. Our ability to sing, speak, tell tales, recite, orate is essential to our lovemaking, boasting, fear-inspiring, territory protecting, surrendering, and offspring-guarding behaviors. Giraffes and tigers have splendid coats; we have splendid speech."--James Hillman, Pg. 295, A Blue Fire

Seeing Through My Practice

"I remember a student of religion telling me about his T.M., his meditation. Somebody in the seminar said, 'What about the political world?' He said, 'That doesn't matter. Computers can run the political world, the whole country, much more efficiently, and that frees us to pursue enlightenment with meditation.' Do you see the complete harmony between central dictatorship, fascism, political callousness, and the self-centeredness of the spiritual point of view? It opened my eyes: I saw the present cults of meditation not so gentle, no so harmless as they like to be, but a vicious bunch of totalitarians. They can't see the individual--which you see only if you look for soul, look with soul. They can't see an individual person, let alone an individual thing."--James Hillman, pg.187, A Blue Fire

I'm going to go after Hillman's definition of soul next. I remember in one of Brad Warner's podcasts he talked about in Buddhist philosophy there is no such thing as a soul. So if I'm understanding it right the soul is a Western idea.

Burning and Baseball Season

I haven't been posting much lately. I suppose if I would have been it would be quotes from either James Hillman's Blue Fire or Revisioning Psychology. I've spent my mornings the past couple of week reading those works. I had a big event in my life happen yesterday: I started my first fire of the burning season in the masonry stove. Two hundred and some odd days and close to four hundred fires until next baseball season. It's come down to burning season and baseball season.

The Gods are Eternal

It's good to hear from a soul doctor that whatever happens with industrial civilization that the gods are eternal:

"For civilizations do eventually decline and perish. Cultures, by existing always in decay, in disorder, may continue beyond the civilizations that seem to hold them. In the shadows of the gods are the very gods themselves, their myths in the midst of what survives because it will not go away."--James Hillman, Pg. 165, A Blue Fire

And, as he says, we're created in their image:

"It may be surprising to associate the diseased with the divine and culture with deformity. We do so want the gods to be pristine, models in marble on Olympus, pure as driven snow. But they are not without their shadows, their afflictions and infirmities. As they are beyond time (athnetos, 'immortal'), so these shadows of disorder that they portray in their myths reappear in those human events that created in their images, we can only do in time what they do in eternity. Their eternal afflictions are our human infirmities."--James Hllman, Pg.164, A Blue Fire

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.

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