Children, Celebrities and Madness

More on the theme of children and learning with a little depth psychology thrown in there:

"We educate our children to make a good living rather than to become thinking persons, and often we honor as celebrities those who have not made a genuine contribution to society but who mirror our own madness."-Thomas Moore, pg. 97, Original Self

I remember Thomas Moore saying in a talk that I have downloaded that people locked away in insane asylums are living our madness for us.

An Insight into Manhood

This morning I ran across one of the best insights into being a son, grandson, and father that a guy could ask for, and that you will rarely hear mentioned in our innocent American culture. The Tallensi of Ghana say: "Your son is your rival." This also explains why my neighbor has a bumper sticker on the bug shield of his work truck that reads: "I hate [Insert his son's name here]." Talk about being transparent.

Listening To The Dead and Adulthood

"It is an adult perception to understand that the world belongs primarily to the dead, and we only rent it from them for a little while. They created it, they wrote its literature and it songs, and they are deeply invested in how children are treated, because the children are the ones who will keep it going. The idea that each of us has the right to change everything is a deep insult to them."--Robert Bly, pg. 238, The Sibling Society.

"The work is [Carl] Jung's 'Book of the Dead.' His descent into the underworld, in which there's an attempt to find the way of relating to the dead. He comes to the realization that unless we come to terms with the dead we simply cannot live, and that our life is dependent on finding answers to their unanswered questions." Sonu Shamdasani, pg. 1, Lament of the Dead

No Mommy, Daddy, Me

Ever since hearing James Hillman mention in one of his talks that when he did therapy he always tried to make sure his patients talked about their grandparents instead of their parents, I have been fascinated. He said one thing that this did is help move the patient's mind away from so-called concrete events and into fantasy and imagination which is basically all it is anyway. In other words, what I'm hearing him say is our behaviors, habits, and emotions are fantasy based. Here is what he has to say in the Lament of the Dead. If I understand it right this was the final project he was working on before he died.

J.H:"When I was doing therapy, back in another period of history, I always tried to escape the parents, which was the story that the person always wanted to tell me--what their mother did and what their father did. You notice Jung hasn't a lot to say about them anywhere in the Red Book."

Sonu Shamdasani: "There's no 'Mommy, Daddy, me,' as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would put it."

J.H: "But to go and ask people about their grandparents and their great-grandparents and imagining all their great-grandparents sitting down at a table. That would be eight people. Could they eat the same food? Could they talk the same language? Could they even sit with each other? But the ancestors in the book--see the reason being that it shows the enormous complexities in human nature and the incompatibilities in human nature. And the fact that your actual parents whom you think cause everything are actually the result of those tremendous incompatibilities themselves. It frees them up too." --Pg. 3, Lament of the Dead

Writing Down Dreams

This past week or so I've found myself writing down my dreams first thing in the morning. I've been writing in a journal for years now and have never written down my dreams. One thing that I've learned so far is how fast I forget them before I write them down. It seems like I should have my notebook next to the bed so when I wake up in the middle of the night I can get it all down on paper before it slips into nothingness. Ironically, I ran across this quote in the James Hillman autobiography this morning:

"We may also understand our resistance to dreaming as a resistance in our 'natural' nature to Hades. We 'can't remember' go vague, forget to jot it down, or scribble it beyond deciphering, and excuse ourselves by pointing to the obvious slipperiness of dreams. Yet if each dream is a step into the underworld, the remembering a dream is a recollection of death and opens a frightening crevice under our feet."--James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld.

Yes, indeed Mr. Hillman, they're definitely slippery.

On another note someone the other day had mentioned that when I get done reading Hillman they've got something more immediate for me to read. It was a book about the role religion and Rockefeller money played in colonizing Indians in the early part of the 20th century. At the time I wish I would've asked, what can be more immediate than the souls immanence in a culture that shows very little concern for the soul?

Vico and Universali Fantastici

"The basic layer of mind is poetic, mythic, expressed by universali fantastici, which I translate as acrchetypal patterns of imagination."--James Hillman, Pg.7-8, A Terrible Love of War

Not Innocence But Beauty

Once and awhile, as a father, I'm able to remember this.

"Not its innocence makes the child's psyche so susceptible to corruption of its desire, but its attachment to beauty. Eating disorders, media addiction, hyperactivity and victimization by exploiters are based in the child's native desire for beauty in this world comparable to the richness of its fantasy in the unconscious soul."--James Hillman, pg. xv, Inscapes of the Child's World