Seeing The Light

Yesterday I mentioned enlightenment. And the reason why I'm bringing it up again this morning is that I'm thinking about a quote. Again it comes from James Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology:

"Finally, psychological learning or psychologizing seems to represent the soul's desire for light, like the moth for the flame. The psyche wants to find itself by seeing through; even more, it loves to be enlightened by seeing through itself, as if the very act of seeing-through clarified and made the soul transparent--as if psychologizing with ideas were itself an archetypal therapy, enlightening, illuminating. The soul seems to suffer when its inward eye is occluded, a victim of overwhelming events. This suggests that all ways of enlightening soul--mystical and meditative, Socratic and dialectic, Oriental and disciplined, psychotherapeutic, and even the Cartesian longing for clear and distinct ideas--arise from the psyche's need for vision."[Pg.123]

There is a few reasons why I'm interested in this quote. First of all, I use to think enlightenment was an escapist fantasy to some degree. We are facing all of these problems in the real physical world(global warming, child abuse, poverty, wars)and there is a part of me that fantasizes about enlightenment. But what I'm hearing Hillman say is that the soul desires it. Secondly, most teachers of eastern disciplines talk about how thinking will not get us out of this mess were in as a culture. I'm hearing Hillman say again and again that clear thinking is essential. He's going against eastern philosophy and following our western tradition. Like he mentioned at the beginning of his book, were in the western psyche whether we like it or not. Why look to the east to solve our western problems? He says look to the south of our western tradition and think about the Renaissance that started in Italy. Lastly, he mentions in the quote the psyche needs vision. If you've read any of Daniel Quinn's work he talks a lot about vision. Not laws, not moralities, not meditation, not programs, but vision. This is probably one of the reasons why I'm starting to see DQ's work as a psychological text to some degree.

Well, that's it for this morning. It's not much. All I'm attempting to do is lay out why some of these quotes resonate with me. I consider these authors my mentors.

The Hades Perspective

"The richness of Hades-Pluto psychologically refers to the wealth that is discovered through recognizing the interior deeps of the imgagination. For the underworld was mythologically conceived as a place where there are only psychic images. From the Hades perspective we are our images. The imaginal perspective assumes priority over the natural organic perspective." [Pg. 207, Revisioning Psychology]

Stunned...

This excerpt about knocked me off my chair this morning: "Philosophy, from Plato and his Neoplatonic followers (especially Plotinus) and from Hegel and his neo-Hegelians, also supports this idea. Its tradition is that even if psyche refers to an individual soul here and now lived by a human being, it always refers equally to a universal principle, a world soul or objective psyche distinct from its individuality in humans. However, of these notions, psyche and human, psyche is the more embracing, for there is nothing of man that soul does not contain, affect, influence, or define. Soul enters into all of man and is in everything human. Human existence is psychological before it is anything else--economic, social, religious, physical. In terms of logical priority, all realities (physical, social, religious) are inferred from psychic images or fantasy presentations to a psyche. In terms of empirical priority, before we are born into a physical body or a social world, the fantasy of child-to-come is a psychic reality, influencing the 'nature' of the subsequent events. But the statement that soul enters into everything human cannot be reversed. Human does not enter into all of soul, nor is everything psycholgical human. Man exists in the midst of psyche; it is not the other way around. Therefore, soul is not confined by man. The soul has inhuman reaches. That the soul is experienced as my 'own' and 'within' refers to the privacy and interiority of psychic life. It does not imply a literal ownership or interiority. The sense of 'in-ness' refers neither to location nor to physical containment. It is not a spatial idea, but an imaginal metaphor for the soul's nonvisible and nonliteral inherence, the imaginal psychic quality within all events. Man can never be large enough to possess his psychic organs; he can be reflect their activities." [Pg. 173, Re-Visioning Psychology]

More Quotes From RP

A few quotes that I wrote down out of James Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology this morning. "Where problems call for will power, fantasies evoke the power of imagination."[James Hillman, Pg.135] "Ritual brings together action and idea into an enactment."[James Hillman, Pg.137] "He [The poet] sees events through and through even when the participants see only the surface. And often when the participants sense only that a divine had is touching them the poet is able to name the god concerned and knows the secret of his purpose." [W.F. Otto, The Homeric Gods] "....the essence of consciousness is fantasy images."[James Hillman, Pg.140]

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

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.

Vallejo Quote

Thanks to a Facebook friend for this quote:

"Heaven and happiness do not exist. That’s your parents’ way to justify the crime of having brought you into this world. What exists is reality, the tough reality, this slaughterhouse we’ve come to die in, if not to kill and to eat the animals, our fellow creatures. Therefore, do not reproduce, do not repeat the crimes committed against you, do not give back the same, evil paid with evil, as imposing life is the ultimate crime. Do not disturb the unborn, let them be in the peace of nothingness, anyway we’ll all eventually go back there, so why beat around the bush?" -Fernando Vallejo

A.E's Aphorism

Reading through some old notebooks that are full of quotes and notes from books I've read in the past. Wrote this down back February of 2010: "A man becomes the image of the thing he hates."--A.E's aphorism, Pg. 361, The Myth of the Machine Vol.ll

Chilling.