Thinking it’s time to get focused on stirring things up a bit over here in the garage. I have installed Vlingo on my BlackBerry and can now post here by speaking while I’m driving. It’s even possible to extend at the same message so that recording can happen in segments.
*** Composed with Vlingo for BlackBerry. http://www.vlingo.com/voice
“The Vision Serpent was also a symbol of rebirth in Mayan mythology, fueling some cross-Atlantic cultural contexts favored in pseudoarchaeology. The Vision Serpent goes back to earlier Maya conceptions, and lies at the center of the world as the Mayans conceived it. “It is in the center axis atop the World Tree. Essentially the World Tree and the Vision Serpent, representing the king, created the center axis which communicates between the spiritual and the earthly worlds or planes. It is through ritual that the king could bring the center axis into existence in the temples and create a doorway to the spiritual world, and with it power”. (Schele and Friedel, 1990: 68)
Serpent (symbolism) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
serpent as re-birth symbol was a little piece of the mystery that helped make a dream image just click into place….
this symbol has crept alot into my conscious in the last years…When I went to Egypt in 2004, I was able to integrate the fuller meanings. I think I have been living the whole death rebirth archetype in my life. My mother survived an airplaine accident. My father has had several brushed with death, as well as I…I have taken all the symbolisms in my family and the rebirth to create my own living story..I am so fascinated by it…hence the name of my blog…resurrect…how something that has died…can be revitalized.
Glad to hear about your renewed commitment to digital publishing…
One of the great features of the new blackberry for worpress app is that you can take and post an image while posting, which really extends and aids a live blogging practice. Here I’m trying to do just this while editing the photo to post as I want.
presto! now we are cooking…
Hey Richard, how is this different from emailing a post? Is it just the photo taking functionality?
The WP app for Blackberry allows you to edit posts pages and comments as well. It’s pretty cool.
You just prompted me to search out the iPhone equivalent and…umm…I found one. Who knew? Will be testing it soon. Thanks for the push – definitely a nice option to have in the toolbox.
Not sure yet how to postition or resize the photos…but user interface is pretty smooth. If your a blackberry and a WP user, this app is a no brainer. Just joined the user forum so I can add my experiences to its development. I love that aspect of new media…
So excited about the wordpress for blackberry software, just hd to throw up this test post…and note, it inserts photos on the fly…wow!
As many are recapturing (or attempting to recapture) the magic of Woodstock this weekend in our neck of the woods, I’m wondering what collective event was formative in the story of your life?
I’m not sure I really had a Woodstock moment like the half a million that gathered in Bethel, NY. My world and my story has always been shaped by more niche experiences…
I can’t get past the idea that we really have not grasped the shear volume of information that is being generated on a daily basis, and we have an even fainter grasp of what to do with it…or how to dance with it might be a better analogy…I gave an example at ccseed earlier…
Dragon
This constellation of a person’s past, in the form of the furniture through their life, represents a legendary creature of mythology and fairy tales. What is interesting to me is how this is very much like the way archetypes appear to our consciousness by way of various pieces in our lives that have been collected along the way.
I agree, the archetypes tend to inhabit, embody even, the most comonplace details that get piled into the warehouse of our experiences….
Yes, true enough, and I like it. It is rare to see someone communicate through lawn furniture.
In the midst of my travels out West, I came across a character at the laundrymat last night that so reminded me of others that have intersected my life. He was a man about fifty, traveling alone “for three months” (which makes him an academic; his long grey hair tied up in a bandanna, and his energy poured into his laptop where he was feverishly tagging some of the 5000 photos he’s taken. As he explained with an ironic twist, “I’ve got a lot of screen savers out of this trip.” He could clearly continue on the vector he was riding till the end of time. He was enthralled with impossible task of capturing the West.
So getting West, and by West I mean that expanse that runs from the Mississippi to the foot hills of the Sierra Nevada’s (not sure why yet, but the Pacific Coast is something all together different), I’m struck by how the skin of those ut in these vast distances becomes leathery from the wind and sun, and how collectively they carry more of the earth in the face than the ego…they live OUTside.
Having lived on the West Coast, in the Mid-Atlantic and now (if only a short while longer) in Colorado, I can say that there absolutely is a tangible difference. In the people, yes, but mostly in the place. Colorado, Utah, Wyoming. These places just feel so much different than anywhere else I’ve lived. Maybe it’s their vastness, and the fact that they don’t tend to be covered in trees. They’re open, and exposed, and enormous.
I think their shear scale makes people (certainly me) feel more connected to the earth. That may seem strange at first blush…why wouldn’t one feel less connected, less significant, in the midst of such enormity? I don’t know. All I can say is that being in these places, and seeing what a miniscule role I play in the unfolding of life in so many forms all around me, makes me feel significant. If I weren’t, there’d be no point of me being here. Certainly there’s nothing I can add or subtract that would even register on the radar of the Rocky Mtns. I’m not vital to their existence.
So in their midst, the question arises…why am I here? I don’t have an answer. At least not THE answer. But having lived here, I nonetheless believe there is one. And a good one at that.
The West Coast offers a contrast that will undoubtedly challenge me in the near future. It’s difficult in Orange County CA to leave the presence that which is man-made. Comparisons are made based on other people rather than the natural world. Earth and ego battle just as gallantly, but on the West Coast, I think Ego is winning. And the standard against which that battle is measured is altogether different.
Hey Jeb,
As I often say, posing the question seems to have more value than crafting the answer. The answers seem to want to find us.
Come out, come out, wherever you are… (answers, that is)
I found this in the North, the Arctic – vastness, openness ,the feeling of connectedness and endless possibility. Inhabiting these spaces makes me feel humble. Feeling that way gave me space to think, change, grow, learn and dream.
I miss it – everyday. A city gal, although I love it – I am not.
Some sage advice from Jung as I read while flying over the Great Plains on my journey to Yellowstone:
“Contact with wild nature, whether it be man, animal, jungle or swollen river, requires tact, foresight, and politeness. Rhinoceroses and buffaloes do not like surprises.” Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, pg.297, note 162.
It’s a pretty simple equation I’m about to share and I do help you will make it clear if you think I’m off the mark. But it strikes me that playfulness equates to fascination, and our adult defensiveness toward play can be seen as a result of our unwillingness to “let go” into the object of our attention…
Play is our reality. Play open ups new possibilities and allows us to notice what the world offers us with soft focus and ease. I too love the image of C.G. Jung creating channels for water to flow through with a stick. He embodied play in those moments.
We had a gathering this weekend to celebrate Jung’s birthday in Princeton, Canada with readings of his work, dance, hiking, swimming, and sharing meals. We stopped on our way home to walk through a rain forest ripe with musky smells and dampness. There we reveled in the smallness of the plants below and the heights of the elder trees surrounding us. Stopping even for a few moments guided our playful reverie.
My granddaughter turned 9 this weekend. She and Jung share the same birthday and the human legacy of play and reverie in nature. We think of ourselves as large when in fact we a very small compared to the great beauty that surrounds us. In play and stillness we can find true gems. Happy Birthday Carl and Jessica.
Thanks for the great story Mary Alice. It’s great that you celebrated the twin birthdays that way.
Jung always walked the walk when it came to play. As an elderly man he could still sit for hours at the lake side where he built his retreat and play with a stick in the sandy shore, creating small rivulets for the water to travel. Only if play is a priority will such an attitude manage to block out the multitude of competing things that constantly grab for our attention. Two recent posts on play…
Over at Catskill Cottage Seed (http://ccseed.com) I’m pondering how to approach yes and no as ying and yang instead of as right and wrong. How often is no right, and yes wrong? And how do we tie our choices to the promptings of our higher purpose instead of the whims of the moment?
Every so often its good to bring up a problem with terminology. In common usage, to be self-centered means egocentric. Yet Jungian terminology recognizes the archetype of the Self, which speaks to the wholeness of the psyche, both in the conscious and the unconscious aspects. A life directed toward or lived in relationship to this archetype, which sometimes manifests in the imagery of the mandala, other times as the god-image, is the antithesis of self-centeredness/ego-centrism…
So, perhaps the need is to move from self-centeredness to being centered on the Self.
Something I wanted to share: my son and I make charcoal each winter in our outdoor wood furnace, which we then use for cooking in the summer.
Pretty easy process. Put cut sticks into a sealed container. We use small garbage cans. Place into the sustained fire for about 12 hours, the remove and let cool completely (otherwise the charcoal has a tendency to re-ignite).
OK, so that’s the extent of my literal Alchemy.
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…of course, each lump of black stuff is a great embodiment for the prima material
That which has withstood the pressure and heat. Love this–great symbolism from everyday life. Thanks.
Thinking how is it that we can and need to distinguish Jung’s understanding of synchronicity as meaningful coincidence, from magical thinking. What criteria would you use to distinguish the difference? I’d point out as a starting point that magical thinking tends to try and have the ego influence events…whereas with synchronicity, the ego is drawing connections between the unfolding event and itself…therefore synchronicity as an experience does not derive from the will to power.
ego is a good distinction .. and maybe a sort of “spatial” consideration, in that synchronicity happens to me, is something i witness after the fact, whereas “magical thinking” is something i do, a projection outwards …
as aside, the term “magical thinking” seems to me to be most used derisively by “scientists” about things outside their methodology .. negative connotations .. is that how you are using it?
No, not using as a negative. I tend to think of magical thinking as associated to intentionality. I do notice many when discussing synchronicity seeming to approach it through such a lens that in my experience misses the mark.
From my reading this morning:
The Gloria Mundi says: “The salt of the earth is the soul.” This pregnant sentence contains within it the whole ambiguity of alchemy. On the one hand the soul is the “aqua permanens, at once the transformer and the transformed, the nature which conquers nature. On the other hand it is the human soul imprisoned in the body as the anima mundi is in matter, and this soul undergoes the same transformation by death and purification, and finally by glorification, as the lapis.”
and later:
“The soul is therefore not an earthly but a transcendental thing…” Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, par. 321
My sense is that the stumbling block surrounding the objective psyche comes down to having the eyes to see the transcendence…
Beautifully done Richard.
Learning to see is the most difficult part, or maybe it is unlearning what we are taught.
Best wishes
Anita
I think it’s both, simultaneously…
Pondering the challenge of experiencing the archetypes without identifying with them. This delicate and difficult problem of handling powers and energies that vastly extend beyond the limits of the ego without falling into the trap of an inflation is a tricky business.
A “how to” problem where each needs to write ones own manual. I’ve got plenty of thoughts on what not to do…perhaps focusing on the “do not do” is useful here, for the “to do” needs to remain open to the creative surprise…
In the “Mysterium Coniunctionis” (CW XIV) the following quote leapt out at me as in a recent dream I found myself driving in the opposite direction of a cross country trip I took a decade ago. Jung writes: “But he has to go back along the way he came, for Mercurius is not found in the region of the sun, but at the point from which he originally started.” (CW XIV, Par. 298)
Walking through the Red Sea, the trust needed to attain deliverence, no small feat…
Walking through the Red Sea, the trust needed to attain deliverence, no small feat…
Ryan suggested opening up a dialogue revolving around Jung “Mysterium,” the last major work that he spent a decade writing that basically explores the psychological process whereby the opposites find union…It turns out we are both reading it currently…
Thanks for doing this, Richard. I will attempt to write a synopsis, key quote and/or application as I go through. Currently I am reading about Sal, the Red Sea to be more specific. I will add feedback on this on another post on this thread.
Those of you that aren’t already following me on Twitter (@RyanSenator) or FriendFeed (rsenator) where, amongst other things, I am Tweeting highlights as I go through Mysterium Coniunctionis, and perhaps beyond.
Cool…Just walked through the Red Sea section myself…I’ll circle back and gather some of my thoughts abt that wall of water to my left and to my right…
It’s an interesting thing to explore the difference between Jung’s rigorous mode that appears throughout the collected works, and his more informal mode, which we get a hint at when we read the seminars that his students transcribed…perhaps rigor and informalitly are the wrong distinctions. It may simply be the difference between a conversational mode in person compared to the writer’s tone that manifests throughout his major works. None the less, the seminars, including the “Seminar on Dream Analysis” is a great way to enter his opus because we catch in these works the personality of the man. The same can be said of the video clip that can be found by scrolling below.
It’s interesting that colors can be approached as chords and that the musical analogy fits exactly to the color theory, even so that minor and major chords can be rendered. At our home we discuss color all the time and I’m now leaning toward testing the musical and color analogy to the ideas Jung shares concerning color symbolism.
The basic ideas: red is raw instinct…yellow : consciousness …. blue : spirit… violet : instinctual image, or the archetype.
Blanca Stella Mejia 4:33 pm on August 27, 2009 Permalink |
That is really cool! I want to try it.