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Thought of the Week Archives
August 1998
August 3, 1998
The true mandala is always an inner image, which is gradually built
up through (active) imagination, at such times when psychic equilibrium
is disturbed or when a thought cannot be found and must be sought for,
because it is not contained in holy doctrine.
Carl Jung
Essay: "Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy"
August 10
The ground [background] sensations that we try to avoid are such things
as disorder, emptiness, non-pleasure, boredom, monotony, anxiety, darkness,
and death. In terms of most value systems, these are meaningless. But
myth...is a complex of images which give significance to life as a whole.
[Myth] dramatizes the order/disorder of the world in such a way as to
make disorder relative to order, to give the villain his part and the
Devil his due. To reject the wisdom of myth we should therefore have to
abandon the whole philosophy of relativity--to assert that space has no
properties, that environment is a meaningless idea, and that wholes and
fields are no more than empty concepts.
- Alan Watts
- The Two Hands of God
Comment
It is only against the ground (background) of the villian that we can
see the qualities of the hero. The figure of Hamlet becomes who he is
because he is contrasted with Claudius, Laertes, Gertrude and Horatio.
Figure and ground are inseparable. One gives life to and defines the other.
August 17
Wholeness in quantum physics even includes the experimental apparatus
by which measurements are made. Beyond this, it includes the entire context
of the experiment: the laboratory, the experimenters themselves, and so
on. Quantum physicist David Bohm has observed, "Ultimately, the entire
universe (with all its particles, including those constituting human beings,
their laboratories, observing instruments, etc.) has to be understood
as a single undivided whole, in which analysis into separately and independently
existent parts has no fundamental status." [Bohm quote from Wholeness
and the implicate order, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 189]
- Allan Combs and Mark Holland
- Synchronicity: Science, Myth and the Trickster
Comment:
Bohm's observation echoes the beliefs of most eastern philosophies.
More importantly, in the context of the hero's journey, it implies that
our journeys, as individual as they may seem, are really just one activity
of the whole system of life. This would also support the concept of synchronistic
help coming to those who have accepted the call and stepped over the threshold.
August 24
Initially, in life's spiritual journey, we do not realize our identity
with the nature of things, that we and the universe are one and interpenetrate
each other at all times. Creation teachings ('myths") and explanations
concerning the nature of life and thought in Tibetan and Navajo philosophy
guide the neophyte into the crucial understanding that all life shares
the essential elements of vital energy...Knowing that all living, feeling,
and thinking beings share in this life force imbues Navajos and Tibetans
with a sense of connection, compassion, and responsibility to all species
and beings, including one another. As such, they do not view their world
as a field of material resources to be extracted and analyzed. Rather
their realms between earth and sky are sacred arenas, populated by a vast
array of sentient beings...This realm is a sacred world touched lightly
by the Tibetans and Navajos, not due to ignorance but out of respect for
their deep connection with its form and essence.
- Peter Gold
- Navajo & Tibetan Sacred Wisdom: The Circle of
the Spirit
August 31
...the first step to the knowledge of the highest divine symbol
of the wonder and mystery of life is in the recognition of the monstrous
nature of life and its glory in that character: the realization that this
is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who
think--and their name is legion--that they know how the universe could
have been better than it is, how it would have been had they created it,
without pain, without sorrow, without time, without life, are unfit for
illumination. Or those who think--as do many--"Let me first correct society,
then get around to myself" are barred from even the outer gate of the
mansion of God's peace. All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable;
and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world,
what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can
do who has not himself learned how to live in it in the joyful sorrow
and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is.
- Joseph Campbell
Myths to Live By
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