Tag Archives: psychology

July 14, 2012 · 5:11 pm

… imagination …

From its fountain, the psyche pours compositions of light and darkness, images shaping the natural elements that engender our sensual experiences. Countless composite images trickle through our mind. Do we pause to ponder which to let pass, like dry leaves floating down the river, and which to absorb deeply into our heart – and give life to?

The images we energise are re-envisioned and re-told through our perception. Nature spirits, archetypes, monsters and fairies, heroes and villains, deities, gods, devils and angels, the dark unknown – mankind’s entire mythical landscapes are encapsulated by the imagination and affect our everyday life.

Through this phenomenological process we discovered language, numbers and geometry, tools that potentially enable us to re-create nature. Some scientists maintain that matter constitutes the real and all phenomena derived from nature’s building blocks is not real. But deep inside we know … our search for the world we intimately desire attracts to us enlightened scripts. Through trial and error we learn to apply these scripts, and, for better or worse, we make our worlds real. Worlds within worlds are born from the imagination.

The young in heart have a natural curiosity to play and explore what lies beyond the horizon, literally and metaphorically, with a keen drive to discover facets of their soul reflected in all matter, experiencing matter not as dead, but as vibrantly alive and animated.

Consider the present demand for SF or its playful sister, fantasy, or magic realism. These genres overlap, they deal with the human condition, the desire for a home, in the widest sense – be it for another planet, an island, a heaven, a yesterday, a tomorrow, or the grail of now. To achieve the latent desire for the ineffable, a writer, any artist, becomes a deep-sea-diver of the psyche, and, on coming up for air, re-arranges the booty found there. Some of my favourite writers are R Heinlein, C S Lewis, R Bradbury, I Asimov, M Atwood, Garcia Marquez. Jorge Luis Borges, Doris Lessing and Ursula Le Guin …

It’s time to re-discover the bridge between the two hemispheres of our brains and balance the outlook of our material societies, value reverie, art and fresh perspectives, engage in play, song, dance and storytelling.

Time to embrace unstructured activities, which sidestep reason’s often pre-conceived observations, the epistemological obstacle, as Gaston Bachelard calls it, the grid of unconscious mental patterns that block seeing through our deeply personal and grounded experience, through the heart.

I’ll never forget the visit during the 70s, instigated through a Sufi friend, to a small Trappist community in the vicinity of Washington DC. The handful of monks rotated duties in house and gardens, interspersed with reading time in their fabulous library. Each one of them also enjoyed an annual 40-days-silent-retreat in one of the huts sprinkled over the many-hectare-estate. My then partner and I were privileged to listen to some of the monks sharing their vastly different cosmologies, psychologies and spiritualities. What struck me was that each monk had a vastly different idea about God, including one admitting that he thought God was man-made and no less real for that. What a stimulating place to be, where you are respected for the envisioning of your world.

‘The imagination is not a state; it is human existence itself.’ – William Blake

‘In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch.’ – C G Jung, 1934

‘If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses.’ – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Relevant links:

Re: CS Lewis http://users.etown.edu/d/DOWNINDC/dungeon.htm

Gaston Bachelard http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Gaston_Bachelard

The World Within, C G Jung video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6MHRHKd4Ps&feature=related

For those with a metaphysical interest in the imagination, here is an article of mine: https://courseofmirrors.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/science-of-the-heart.pdf

Excerpt … The mystic aims to raise sensory data to a higher level. This happens via the visionary imagination, the ‘presence of the heart’, and it happens precisely in that intermediate world where material beings take form and where material beings dissolve again to become subtle bodies. This intermediate world exists not at the other end of the universe, but right here with us, between each of our breaths. This is how the presence of the heart affects, how ideals, in whatever way we conceive of our Ideal, become realised. What we give being to in this intermediate sphere inevitably appears and becomes endowed with an outward reality. This is so, even when it is visible only to the inner eye, the eye of the heart, just beyond what can be perceived by the senses.

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The rose image: detail of ‘The virgin of the unfading rose,’ eighteen century.

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Tagged as Blake, Carl Gustav Jung, circular and linear time, cosmology, dreams, fantasy, Heart, Ibn Arabi, imagination, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, magic realism, metaphors, mind, nature, numbers and geometry, pattern, phenomenon, photography, psyche, psychology, real, science, senses, SF, spirituality, Sufi, Trappist Monks, young people, your unique frequency

May 14, 2011 · 10:01 am

… on awareness …

Magic or what? According to the Hindus everything is food, including sounds and visual vibrations – all kinds of impressions: stories, architectural proportions, union of forms and colours, harmonics and rhythms, dissonance, conflict and all the ideas with which we come in contact. All this, absorbed mechanically and mostly without awareness throughout the day, has made up our being and continues to do so, unless we wake up to this process and adjust our rituals.

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Psychological laws: excerpt from ‘The Act of Will’ by Roberto Assagioli M.D.

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1 Images or mental pictures and ideas tend to produce the physical conditions and the external acts that correspond to them. Every image has in itself a motor element.

2 Attitudes, movements, and actions tend to evoke corresponding images and ideas; these, in turn evoke or intensify corresponding emotions and feelings.

3 Ideas and images tend to awaken emotions and feelings that correspond to them.

4 Emotions and impressions tend to awaken and intensify ideas and images that correspond to or are associated with them.

5 Needs, urges, drives and desires tend to arouse corresponding images, ideas and emotions.

6 Attention, interest, affirmation, and repetitions reinforce the ideas, images and psychological formations on which they are centred.

7 Repetition of actions intensifies the urge to further reiteration and renders their execution easier and better, until they come to be performed unconsciously.

8 All the various functions, and their manifold combinations in complexes and sub-personalities, adopt means of achieving their aims without our awareness, and independently of, and even against, our conscious will.

9 Urges, drives, desires and emotions tend to and demand to be expressed.

10 The psychological energies can find expression: 1. directly, through discharge and catharsis, 2. indirectly, through symbolic action, 3. through a process of transmutation.

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After carefully contemplating these laws you will draw your own conclusions.

Here some practical examples: Having experienced Feldenkreis work, and practices deriving from it – after doing a gentle physical exercise and repeating it in my imagination only, with eyes closed, the same physical reactions happen in my body. This explains why active imagination can affect mind and body at a deep level and change physical symptoms as well as states of mind.

When I hit my toe, elbow or head on an object, I repeat the exact contact and, in my imagination, send the impact back. There remains hardly any pain and the usual swelling is mild or does not occur at all.

Therapeutically, if a tense or hurtful part of the body is listened to and allowed a voice, the result can be instantaneous, much like when you lower yourself at eye-level to a toddler who has a tantrum, and do nothing else but acknowledge the rage, surprise, surprise, the tantrum stops.

What seems like magic, is actually simple and applies both ways: physical activity influences mood and mind, active imagination influences mood and body. Many of our modern-day ailments derive from people not being able to listen to their bodies and/or not being able to use their imagination in a constructive way.

Reading and, even more deeply, writing, are indirect symbolic expressions of psychological energy, which explains the incredible power of stories 🙂

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March 25, 2011 · 11:15 pm

Dear Shadow

You hold the luminous night in our hearts,

Though your task is belied around the globe,

Lest our false face is revealed by your truth.

All ill and wars we blame on your aberrant ways.

Unjustly, since you play the hidden tune,

The one to waken us between each dawn

And dusk to our timeless deeper knowing.

Yet calling you evil comforts our pride,

Since we can see your dark shape over there,

We need not respond to our self-made pain,

Sleeper, you snuff out candles in the dark,

Yet shrink in shame when light defines your shape.

‘Fake,’ shouts every single child in the land,

Asking us why man has no love for man.

Who wants to know? When I mention your undercover existence, most people pretend not to understand what I’m talking about. I become the troublemaker who transgresses unwritten rules of conduct. Your face appears here and there around me. When I don’t recognise you we clash inside, and you press your talk through me.

You represent the blind spot, the patch of darkness that contradicts conventions and stains ideals. I would confine you to the dusty ground of my sleepy mind. Yet disowned, you lurk behind my back and act through me like a parasite. Please darken my view. I had rather face your unsavoury challenges than act out your strident orders.

Forgetting is an acquired skill, in service to coherence and meaning. I like things to stay the same. I like to be liked, which is fine as long as I stay in the shade of the collective shadow. Society sanctions those who stay in the shade. They are predictable, loyal to the party, pay their taxes and won’t make a fuss. And you, dear shadow, seem safely contained, locked away.

That’s what we have prisons for.

Only when my coherence is threatened do I look over my shoulder. Only when I step into my deeper truth do I cause a disturbance, and in that light of truth, you, my dear shadow, take shape. Then I have to acknowledge your existence and bring a clear mirror to this luminous dark that is you in me.

Like I remember a day – in a rush to get some copying done, my mind already on the road, the telephone rang. The call was annoying and could not be dealt with in that instance.

I arrived at the copy shop expecting efficiency – it being the kind of day when minutes counted. The woman serving was new, unfamiliar with procedures. She moved slow, pausing, seemingly overwhelmed with the technical complexity of the machine. I asked, ‘How long will it be?’ Wrong question – the woman succumbed to a catatonic state. The task was beyond her. ‘Can’t you get some help?’ I asked. Wrong question – her thoughts knotted. This moment requires patience, I thought to myself, patience for what seemed an eternity. My truth spat on patience. ‘Forget it! I must be on my way.’ And the sting in the tail, ‘Best look for another job, you obviously don’t like this one.’

Furious, I clutched my papers and left. Back in the street, my behaviour caused me concern. My frustration led back to the telephone call from earlier on – I had shouldered it along. Despite this insight, I did not return to the shop and apologize. Another truth – the woman resisted her work. My inferior ‘I’ had delivered a verdict. So be it.

Truth often jumps free through contradiction – imperfection, disharmony. But where to deposit the accumulated energies that tie our heart? How many places are there for people to safely unclench built up anger and honour their conflict inside? Make that inner war meaningful instead of defending an outworn right? Bless my true friends – one of them advised, ‘Being right does not make you potent – responding does.’ Another friend said, ‘We are not made to agree with each other, we are made to create beauty.’ Ah!

What I deny in me, I meet in others – the fearful, the stubborn, the frivolous, the envious and devious, the demanding, the controlling, the calculating, the needy, the critical, the judgemental, the revengeful and sarcastic, the plain stupid, and not to forget – the perfect, the clever, the bright, the wise, the lucky one born with a golden spoon. The list goes on, endlessly, including all I cannot accept in myself. Yet editing my feelings and thoughts to please the noble ideal is the worst of self-tortures. Ah!

Your formidable opponent, my dear shadow, is material rationalism, and the newest craze, political correctness. You have a sharp eye. You anticipate the madness reaching its summit when people will have neither names nor narratives, when only numbers, facts and statistics will be considered fail-proof to inspections. Efficiency and targets are the vogue, nothing messy to obstruct progress. But please, dear shadow, should your patience ever be strained by my forgetting, don’t act the fanatic anarchist through me. They play foul and unforgiving war-games, lacking all humour. Better you embarrass me in person than pour your outrage into the collective through me.

Remind me to listen to your uncomfortable messages. I’ll acknowledge your discontent. I need you in my life as a filter to catch my smugness. Not all the time! So what do you think? Should I give my ego a break? Its desires are forever unfulfilled – always lacking, always searching for something other, better, craving attention. It has childish wants but needs a little kindness in these difficult times, and gentle persuasion to see beyond its small world.

I’ll remember your purpose, my dear shadow, and I invite you to also remember – the fiery love-affair – waiting in each breath, the warmth leaping from every languid gesture, the sudden spark through the eye of a deepening smile. A smile so old and so young, nothing can contain its meaning. The grasp of a reaching hand so firm and so tender, only by simulating water can we fathom its mystery. And a dawn so expectant, every creature perks its ears with bliss and halts all doings. A love stirring the imagination, where the wind shapes a cloud just so – or the moonlight silhouettes eternal players in trees – the sleeping giant, the grinning troll, the child, whirling, the astonished angel, malleable to our fancy. A love that illuminates seeing, feather-light in its desire to dance just where it finds itself in the universe. A love nothing can resist, yet nothingness enfolds it in its boundless existence …

But let me not be carried away, I respect your teaching, dear shadow. Let me befriend you, even so I mostly don’t agree with you. Let me never forget the sacred purpose of my physical existence in the orbit of the sun. Without you I would only be fluff on the coat of real human beings.

Ashen – 2009