"The eye of the heart that ‘sees’ is also the eye of death that sees through visible presentations to an invisible core. When Michelangelo sculpted portraits of his contemporaries or of the figures of religion and myth, he attempted to see what he called the immagine del cuor, the heart’s image, “a prefiguration” of what he was sculpting, as if the chisel that cut the rock followed the eye that penetrated his subject to the heart. The portrait aimed to reveal the inner soul of what he was carving." (Hillman, Soul's Code, p146)
Trauma: Art of Transcendence When Fate Becomes Inspiration by Iona Miller, (c)2018
Subjective exploration of felt sense is experienced as art therapy.Art as healing gets what is inside outside in a creative form of expression that relieves anxiety with the concentration or focus of the flow state and the escape or dissociation from problematic internal images and sensations through embodiment and transcendence.
Inner world of trauma https://books.google.com/books?id=ygFcE9_JmcIC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Detail from Leonardo da Vinci's A Deluge, c1517-18. Photograph: Corbis. Leonardo da Vinci – The Deluge Drawings (c1517-8) Text - Sociology, Religion and Grace, by Arpad Szakolczai https://books.google.com/books?id=pEh_AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA142&lpg=PA142&dq=,1460s+flood,+florence&source=bl&ots=JICoDiRrSx&sig=at2JiL_N32zn58F9SafQAjA4Kw0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjYqNOl5bbeAhUtTt8KHZVtBr0Q6AEwFXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=%2C1460s%20flood%2C%20florence&f=false
Leonardo da Vinci(1452-1519)
Water is the driving force of all nature. Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo was fascinated by the power of water as a natural force to be exploited and feared in its chaotic forms. He saw ravaging floods in Renaissance Italy during his years of puberty. Leonardo moved to Florence around the Arno flood of 1466 was when he was 14.
His vulnerable personal potential confronted his existential situation making an indelible imprint. In his later years, he retrieved memories of catastrophic flooding to concentrate his pessimistic forebodings in a series of drawings of "deluges," and hydraulic engineering.
As was the case in his youth, all people, armies, cities, horses, trees and even mountains are helpless before the unleashed fury of storm and flood. Cataclysmic storms were one of his favorite subjects during the last decade of his life. Leonardo’s water studies—vortices, floods, cloud formation—are in the Codex Leicester.
After the Deluge demonstrates the practical imagination applied to the archetypal ecology of water. Leonardo da Vinci’s "deluge" drawings of catastrophic floods remind us that the flood of his teens led to a lifelong study of all its aspects -- the fluidity, rising, contamination, and disappearance of water.
The writer Dante Alighieri, another Florentine, once referred to the Arno River as, “the cursed and unlucky ditch.” At some 150 miles long, the river is the largest in Italy’s Tuscany region, where Florence is located. Another disaster occurred in 1966 when the Arno flooded the city.
Inscriptions on walls throughout Florence mark the water levels of other historic floods, such as those in 1177, 1333, 1557 and 1740. When the Arno overflowed its banks, floodwaters swept through the streets and into thousands of shops, homes and other buildings until the river crested entering Florence.
In the 18th century, engineer Ferdinando Morozzi dal Colle compiled a list of all the floods registered from the year 1177 to 1761. He recorded 54 floods in 600 years: Once every 24 years there was a ‘medium’ flood, every 26 years a ‘big’ flood, and every 100 years an ‘extraordinary’ flood.
When the water withdrew, widespread devastation was left -- flood-related human deaths, chaos, and mayhem. The streets were littered with the corpses of animals, rotting food and raw sewage. Water and mud ravaged everything, a watery, muddy contaminated mess. Did this experience continue unconsciously flooding him with anxiety, tension, and dread? Is this why he revisited the deluge motif so many times?
Leonardo believed that nature was a dynamic force cycling between regeneration and chaos.
Notes for a book about water, c. 1500 A book of driving back armies by the force of a flood made by releasing waters. A book showing how the waters safely bring down timber cut in the mountains. A book of raising large bridges higher simply by the swelling of the waters. A book of the mountains that would stand forth and become land if our hemisphere were to be uncovered by the water. A book of the earth carried down by the waters to fill up the great abyss of the seas. A book of the formation of hills of sand or gravel at great depths in water. A book of the leveling of waters by various means. A book of guiding rivers that occupy too much ground. A book of parting rivers into several branches and making them fordable. A book of the origin of rivers that flow from the high tops of mountains. A book of controlling rivers so that the little beginnings of mischief caused by them may not increase. https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/conversations/pliny-elder-leonardo-da-vinci
The incredible use of ruined structures in visions of hell by early Renaissance artist Hieronymus Bosch (c.1450–1516). It's likely that in 1463, at the age of 13, Bosch witnessed a catastrophic fire in his hometown in which 4,000 houses were destroyed. What better inspiration for images of hell's eternal damnations than this terror of an adolescent boy seeing into the fiery abyss of cruelty and the uncontrollable nature of disaster?
In 1463, 4,000 houses in the town were destroyed by a catastrophic fire, which the then (approximately) 13-year-old Bosch presumably witnessed. Is this conflagration with mighty smoke plumes billowing and burning people, homes, animals, and vegetation how Bosch came to characterize fire in his works as truly diabolical?
Even today, those in devastating fires say, “It was like the gates of hell.” Bosch had literally experienced the raging Inferno, not only abominable flames and choking smoke but the exhaustion and desolation of those grieving the loss of loved ones, their homes, and perhaps their sanity.
He became a popular painter in his lifetime and often received commissions from abroad. In 1488 he joined the highly respected Brotherhood of Our Lady, an arch-conservative religious group. Bosch mastered a whole genre by merging the realism of Flemish painting with fantastic allegories of the human condition. He introduced character and moral differentiation into the realm of realistic depiction.
"Leonardo Da Vinci Self Portrait Young."
Portrait of Bosch, artist unknown (c. 1585)
NATURE ALIVE Self-Regulating After Trauma
The history of art is one adventure with many heroes, but Leonardo da Vinci and Hieronymus Bosch are among the greatest in innovation and genius. Their works resounded and resonated up and down the spine of the Renaissance.
Both master painters shared devastating experiences at the onset of puberty as well as their own personal issues and circumstances, grief and resilience. This was an in-between time, a liminal time, a rite of passage between a world they knew, and one not yet emerged. They stepped onto psyche's stage and the drama intensified into catharsis.
This central experience informed and motivated them in the artistic journey. We cannot really explain why we find beauty in ruins and are attracted in some way to them. We still have a certain reverence for the fragmented beauty of ruins. This is the attraction of decay, of the broken and battered, the razed, of vine-covered reclamation by nature. We wonder and are bewildered at the part that has gone missing.
They are terrible in their awesomeness, whether they are the ancient desiccation or modern desolation of contemporary life and culture, whether we dig them out of the earth or view them on the evening news. They demonstrate the power of time and nature over all of humanity, over each and every one of us, personally and collectively.
Natural disaster, errant necessity, was a chaotic attractor in the early lives of both artists -- a trifecta of trauma, puberty, and genius. Initiation by fire and water, psychic pain, is the difference between a tempered and untempered soul.
Plato suggested that each soul (psyche) is given a unique daimon before birth, which chooses a pattern that we live as embodied individuals. Jung was blunt: "In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted."
Although forgotten at birth, the guiding daimon remembers the destiny of the soul: “therefore the daimon is the carrier of your destiny” (Hillman, Soul's Code, p. 8). The ancient Greeks saw the daemonic as divine. We are called into this world and our purpose by the daimon. The transcendent is so close, so simple, so ordinary, and specific to particular events, activities, and images -- confrontation with mortality and intimations of immortality.
We can align by understanding that 'gifts' of character, talents, catastrophes, accidents, illnesses, and all maladies serve to fulfill that soulful call. Genius has preternatural knowledge of future life. It appears not only through elements “inside” the self, the passions, the blood, but also “outside” the self, in wind, rain, fire, animals. Simultaneity is the principle of the creative core.
Our worldview, theory of perception,and concept of the universe depends on the knowledge we have of the process of perceiving it. A dialogue between conscious reason and the unconscious irrational happens within an artist's interiority, the internal image that is emerging in response to the world of which you are a part. Image becomes part of the visual reality. The sublime likes to hide itself, while beauty likes to manifest. With genius, one can occasionally surprise life itself.
The unconscious lends itself to the language of chaos, opening to the cosmic elements.Transhuman power is typical of chaos and the attractor dimension. The interaction of fields, and the formation of a vortex of energy, the attractor, represents the beginning of our consciousness structure, and constraints in navigating our environment.
The vortex is a focal point or eddy in the vast ocean of consciousness, in the individual stream of consciousness. It is an icon of the Flow State, from which creativity emerges.This process culminates in the formation of separate identity, the ego; it can also heal. Chaos is self-organizing, self-iterating, and self-generating. It is an evolutionary force.
The tendency of new forms emerging from chaos is toward a higher degree of adaptation, hence evolution. This "recycling" of consciousness leads to a self-referential vortex. Chaotic systems revolve around nexus points, known as strange attractors, because of their unpredictable quality. Rather than being "point-like," they are more like vortices within vortices, a metaphor of turbulent flow.
An attractor is a piece of space -- in this case sacred or liminal space where one is rendered down to the bone with initiatory wounds, ritual wounding, dismembering and reassembly. It isn't actually a place, buta new way of looking at things -- a fusion of memories, the imaginal, and actual occurrences. Such an irrational living thing is unknowable.
Rather than matter and space, perhaps the instant in configuration space, state space, or phase space is the true object and frame of the universe -- all the possible states a physical system can be in. But, there are regions in configuration space that we cannot take on because of obstacles.Configuration space is a way of visualizing the state of an entire system in a higher-dimensional space.
The act of finding out, a coalescence of insights,is the lesson, including commitment to a sacred work. It invests one with a function or status, a timeless awareness, finite attention, and a certain subtlety and finesse even in gestural movement -- the structured tension of symbolic idioms. The state space is a set of possible transformations that could be applied.
Sacred space only exists in the context of initiation, deep structural change, and transformation. Whatever enters it has a substantial force applied to it.The superposition of historical moments can result in a self-referential structure. The transcendent function mediates between the conscious and unconscious. All initiations have transformative ordeals, an encounter with the numinous, involving willingness, not just will.
These are moments where we create and enter sacred space. It is essential to embody our essence. Oscillations in our anxiety guide us through the opposites toward reconciliation, even compromise. The soul spans from wound to scar, from turbulent dissociation to transcendence. In A Blue Fire, James Hillman says:
"A soul is said to be "troubled," "old," "disembodied," "immortal," "lost," "innocent," "inspired." ... The soul has been imaged as...given by God and thus divine, as conscience, as a multiplicity and as a unity in diversity, as a harmony, as a fluid, as fire, as dynamic energy, and so on...the search for the soul leads always into the "depths."
Perhaps for Bosch it was a miracle of personal salvation, a hierophany, a revelatory landscape that brings the sacred to light, to take delight in. Jung said, "The meaning of events is the way of salvation that you create." (The Red Book, p. 239)
Jung also said, "if you change, the countenance of the world alters." (p. 273) It may have been like the experience of committing oneself to the fire and becoming it, then as the random flickering of the flames and torrid heat, disintegrating into pure energy.
Each therapeutic image contains a fractal-like representation of past, present, and future. The transformation of imagery reflects in creativity; transformation of beliefs, thoughts, feelings, values, attitudes and behavior. It reorganizes as repertoire expansion, an aesthetic infusion of depth and feeling, and repetition of core themes.
"Every body placed in the luminous air spreads out in circles and fills the surrounding space with infinite likenesses of itself and appears all in all." "The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.” (Leonardo da Vinci)
Chaos includes phenomena such as attractors, bifurcations, fractals, catastrophes, and self-organization. Criticality is a tipping point or fine line between order and total chaos. Can we find some order within that chaos, a new definition of self and humanness managing issues and crises?
An attractor is an organizing principle, an inherent shape or state of affairs to which a phenomenon will always return as it evolves even through bifurcation (Murphy, 1996). The underlying order in a chaotic system may constrain the erratic behavior and serve as a regulating force on the system.
Emergence potentially incorporates issues and crises in future developments. Disconnecting from the old processes emerges from chaotic events qualitatively changing our state of being at the intersection of stability and instability -- the creative principle of simultaneity, concurrence of events. The new order insures adaptation and survival, capable of organismic evolution and self determination, striving for creativity over control.
Confronting Chaos
Disasters, from fierce conflagration to chaos, churn up the relationship between humans and the environment, devastating the relevant variables of our lives. Life, fate, and death simply are. Trauma happens when chaos, turbulence, and psyche intersect a lifepath -- a terror to innocence.
Traum is dream in German, suggesting a fugue-like condition, a dramatic episode.The word 'trauma' comes from the Greek for 'wound'.Disaster is like a tumultuous, resonant dream-fugue, a calling to a fate that is already there, specially needed for whatever is.
The beginning of the humanist tradition was the realization that mythic themes originate in the human reality of the collective unconscious. Hillman suggests soul has a context amplified by, "mind, spirit, heart, life, warmth, humanness, personality, individuality, intentionality, essence, innermost purpose, emotion, quality, virtue, morality, sin, wisdom, death, God."
The Sublime manifests intensity, silence, emptiness, absurdity, even violence; the Beautiful is harmony and order. Psyche conjoins the path and place of soul with imaginal presence, the presence of the image.
Imagination changes the situation of the psyche. The world gets to us through the imaginal function, sense perception, seeing, noticing, reacting -- an enlarged space where we can be more of ourselves. Myth is cosmic history but history is ordinary reality.
Chaos theory has the notion of the 'butterfly effect,' sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and in human systems the butterfly is the symbol of psyche. Small differences in initial states eventually compound to produce markedly different end states later on in time, and the bifurcations of 'roads not taken.' Things remain dormant in the unconscious until provoked.
Psyche is an image-maker, veiled in the reflection of images. A self-revelatory imaginal force generates imagery and a way of "seeing through" events from the literal to the concealed metaphor or overlooked presence. Image embodies metaphor; the unknown is knowable through images, even puzzle pictures.
Psyche expresses the language of soul. (Hillman) "Vision means a series of releases, nature asserting itself, not cataclysmically in the last analysis, but in the way things grow—by breaking through the pod of the seed and coming forth into manifestation." (M.P. Hall)
Metaphors function internally like mini-myths or personal fables, mythologizing perceptions, feelings, and existence into mythic enactments. Using“as-if ” fictions to transform reality intomythic consciousness links psyche and environment together. The path of the psyche is a bridge to the irrational, left in its recovery of meaning. Consequences are the effects of past states we inherit that continue to constitute the present moment.
In the presence of two or more meanings in a single image or event we discover the enigmatic nature of personified archetypes, such as ambiguous nature,elementals, anima mundi, or the daimon. Such inconceivable confrontations deepen a person, opening an abyss in the psyche.
The threat of nonbeing grasps the mind, producing "ontological shock" in which the negative side of the mystery of being — its abysmal element is experienced. An imaginal state is imposed and superposed on consciousness with real consequences. Trauma is paradoxical with the power to destroy, transform and resurrect.
Ontological shock is the state of being forced to question one's worldview, requiring a complete reconfiguration, a change of identity, of both self and the world. Ontological shock prompts increases in resilience, sensemaking and emotional flooding. We re-interpret our values in new ontologies. We have to decide what patterns constitute pain or pleasure, and what patterns constitute oneself, including an ethical framework.
After a deep crisis we go through the psychological task of reconstructing a set of preferences according the new world view. Exposure to such elemental catastrophes permanently impressed these masters with sweeping images of death. Primal raging chaos ravaged their home terrain, pregnant with inherent significance which stretched before them.
Alchemical Trauma
Amid their paints and dyes, they experienced the archetypal Nigredo and Solutio of the Renaissance, a moral problem and a psychic solution, the dark night and revelation. Suffering is educative, even if demoralizing. Death is always there, the medieval immanence of judgement. It is the unknown we fear most.
The field is the archetype of process. The metaphor is that fire and water also drastically affect air and earth as well as one another. The central symbol of process is creation, destruction, and renewal. Soul transforms events into inherently meaningful experience, the archetypal world breaking through into manifestation.
One landscape on June 13, 1463, 's-Hertogenbosch, was black and ashen, with fields of glowering embers, scorched earth and ruins, echoing the fires of damnation. There were putrefying canals in Bosch's town in those days. The burning town reappears not only as visions of hell but at the peak of his powers in 'The Temptation of St. Anthony.' He paints the lives of his contemporaries as solemn, with misery and imminent calamity wailing aloud.
The other hometown was likewise ruined and battered by a turbulent deluge -- torrents of unexpected snowmelt, with deadly fury, gouging, pummeling, and scouring everything in its path -- a symbol of unfathomable nature. The blasted space might feel like a void but is also the tangible ground of possibility, or a more fluid identity.
Nature also shows that after devastation comes rebirth and new growth to help restore and recreate ourselves, transforming how we see the world. We can only enter our own mysteries. Nigredo is death, and Solutio brings rebirth. Mental constructs dissolve with bodies here.
Natural disasters are part of the archaeology of the collective. Such collective devastation mirrors the chaos of the adolescent passage. The ego learns what part of the personality comes from itself and which parts from the larger unity of the Self or daimon. Imagining the world animates it and returns it to soul for exploration and innovation.
In Jungian psychology, the prima materia is the original undifferentiated condition of ordinary consciousness, primeval darkness which is really unconsciousness -- subjective awareness.The prima materia awaits the symbolic transmutation of the dark formlessness.
The old self must dissolve, the neurosis must be liquified and reduced to the primal condition, a flowing state of consciousness, "liquification" of consciousness. Only a purging fire will turn this darkness white. In alchemy, the union of fire and air produces sulphur or soul, while water and earth are the salt of body or matter -- and both feed Mercurius.
Like a struck flint, flashes of insight ignite the inner fire which leads to searing visions of the truth of our reality and channel our burning desire toward further transformation that brings clarity. Transformation results from deepening within the flow of psychic imagery. Destructuring transformative processes can dissolve them, increasing the sense of flow.
The raw psychic contents (prima materia) become cooked (ultima materia). The prima materia is a dual-natured spirit made volatile by fire. This autonomous spirit is the power of the unconscious psyche, freed through an act of conscious intervention produced from two opposing principles of fire and water. Entering the turbulent flow of the stream of consciousness, we can ride its currents back to the Source, pure unconditioned cosmic consciousness.
The universal solvent is not ordinary water, but "philosophical" water, the water of life, aqua permanens, aqua mercurialis. It is also the panacea, "elixir vitae," "tincture," or universal medicine. To periodically dip into these healing waters has a tonic, rejuvenating effect which pervades all aspects of being, like a soothing balm.
This divine water signifies the return of The Feminine, a reflective consciousness with inner awareness and archetypal spiritual perceptions. As a liquid symbol of the Self, it can be experienced in many ways. It has been described as innocuously as the "stream of consciousness," and poetically as the "Heart of the River of Created Forms."
Solutio, as a state of consciousness, unites the powers of above and below, transpersonal and personal. It is the integration of the higher spiritual powers with personal experience that embodies the healing dynamic. The alchemical solution to this problem of primordial, raw experience is to "cook" it into a reflective consciousness.
"All substances are part of my own consciousness. This consciousness is vacuous, unborn, and unceasing. Thus meditating, allow the mind to rest in the uncreated state. Like the pouring of water into water, the mind should be allowed its own easy mental posture in its natural, unmodified condition, clear and vibrant." (Leary, Metzner, Alpert; The Psychedelic Experience)
Chaotic images contain the entire pandemonium of images, much like the alchemical prima materia, raw psychic material and emergent assemblage. They carry an echoing resonance -- a sense of fate, necessity, and limitation.
A visionary experience is also an ontological shock.Art allows us to escape from our unconscious immersion in the environment, embodiment of apparitional presence, the transposition of space-time boundaries and the apparition of an interfaced being (Ascott).
Jung claimed in Psychology and Literature that, "The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him." And in The Spirit in Man, "…a “creative process ... consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work by giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life."
Marshall McLuhan added that, "The artist is engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only one living in the present."Some images wait a long time for a response to their reality, immediacy, and presence. Images and symbols accompany us throughout our soul journey. The soul of things coalesces with our own in our imaginative recognition of the world.
Soul means attentiveness, including to the mutual accompaniment of one's genius, a psychospiritual reality and prescient guide. This psychic phenomenon stands beside us, witnessing, advocating, and joining us in the dialogue of imaginative exploration. The soul guide, soul's ministrations through crisis, the responsive assistance of our psychic ecology, opens us to restorative healing and transformative action.
Plato and the Greeks called it "daimon," the Romans "genius," the Christians "guardian angel." Today we use the terms heart, spirit, and soul. It became part of the artists' struggle with the angel, their respective daimons, their genius, vocation, and fate. Vocation is the call to our authentic being. As Bulwer Lytton puts it, "Genius does what it must. Talent does what it can."
In The Soul's Code, James Hillman says, “A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away.” His "acorn theory" is the idea that our lives are formed by a particular image, just as the oak's destiny is contained in the tiny acorn. The acorn theory expresses that unique something that we carry into the world.
The numinous remains a place of potential danger. The scene of culture and human life was totally swept away instantly replaced by wilderness and wasteland. They responded by devising artistic protections against this divine and terrible inspiration with images and metaphors. Art plays a role in visualization, processing, & symbolic penetration.
Gone was the adolescent struggle to impose an ambivalence- and conflict-free romantic vision or idealism on reality and their hopes and fears for the future. Suffering is central to the human experience, a way soul becomes conscious of itself. Who knows how often these traumas reappeared in their dreams and nightmares?
Dreams, like art, show our conflicts and model psychic actuality as an inscape of personified images. of Horror, anxiety, grief, and despair may have prompted attempts to order it or redeem their lost innocence through their works and beliefs. Psyche has the ability to create in any aspect of behavior or experience, informing, deforming or afflicting our perspective or a longing for something transcendent.
The liminal state of the threshold is an in-between zone where we pass from one sphere or one way of being to another. Inside and outside, sacred and profane, psyche and matter, conscious and unconscious, are among the significant "regions" that the threshold both divides and brings together at its borders.
Life’s thresholds include the grief of death and the trepidation of the unknown. Our choices, including trauma or transcendence, thus depend on the total significance of the moment. It is this whole significance that gives rise to the over-all intention, which we sense as a feeling of being ready to respond in a certain way.
Jung described it: "The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness."
"The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle." (The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, 1930)
Archetypal Energies
“Eccentric and secret genius that he was, Bosch not only moved the heart, but scandalized it into full awareness. The sinister and monstrous things that he brought forth are the hidden creatures of our inward self-love: he externalizes the ugliness within, and so his misshapen demons have an effect beyond curiosity. We feel a hateful kinship with them. The Ship of Fools is not about other people. It is about us.” --Wendy Beckett, The Story of Painting
They confronted the numinosity and autonomy of wild nature and the raw psyche -- archetypal awe. The 'spirit' of such elements as fire and water is their spirit - the overwhelming power of their presence, symbolic richness, and its realization. The over-all structure of meaning that is grasped in every experience. It shows in their works as self-effulgence.
Numinosity, an invisible presence that alters consciousness, is the relationship between the individual and other people, places, and things. Jung called metaphors of divine or numinous experiences "the transcendent function." Intense experiences of nature's fury can be initiatory in character.
Any mysterious or sacred reality must be engaged, lived, breathed -- experienced in all its beauty, sorrow, and joy. Numinosity is another kind of light, a quality of light that infuses the powerful and dangerous divine -- a spiritual light that can be healing or destructive. This light passed through the lens of their unconscious like a camera obscura, illuminating their future.
Jung suggested that a traumatized person in that dramatic moment when we sense the divine can turn that experience into paranoia or something frightening and demonic. A healthy response to the gripping affective state creates distance from a dark numinous trigger, thus converting the whole experience into a positive.
Art is one way to process such encounters. Art that isn't product-driven begins with sensing and engaging images. Images are an autonomous part of the realm of psychic reality seeking to be consciously witnessed and engaged as the experience of numinosity.
Bosch stressed the numinous as divine salvation, grace, or liberation. Leonardo stressed salvation or liberation through one's own efforts toward the eternal that lies within us, a spiritual realm pervading the visible world. The 'rules' that artists follow in their work protect the individuality and integrity of the image, letting it speak for itself through all the details and context.
In a confrontation with living fire or living water, the soul tries to restore itself to harmony. In this instance, the love between the artist and his materials embodies soul through an imaginal approach known with the heart and body. They worked their perspective by giving substance to soul and soul to substance. Great works of art are fundamentally transformative.
Elemental Trauma
Bosch's ravaging fire of 1463 in the Netherlands and Leonardo's devastating flood of 1466 in Italy must have unconsciously, at least, confronted each with the threat of re-experiencing unbearable pain. Trauma penetrates all phases of exploration, including the narrative identity, future orientation, achievement motivation, body image, acting out, psychic structure formation, and mediational capacities of the developing child.
Elemental trauma is extreme -- a personal apocalypse and catalyst for revelation. A great and sudden traumatic event destroys the ego and former self-image, undeniably revealing our small place in the greater scheme of things. A traumatizing situation tests us with fragmentation -- a threat to our existence that nullifies the ego and opens spiritual potential.
Shock and or trauma leave us feeling dissociated in a state of disconnected limbo.Inner states, feelings or states of mind are key to each psyche and illuminate the hidden dimensions. They come out in dreams, vision, and art and don't require interpretation.
Artists are awake and alive to their dreams, but the insights have to be brought into the body, including authentic artistic gestures. Adaptive attention-shuttling mechanisms include creative expression, self-dialogue, and self-reflection. Leonardo's mirrored reflections extended to his reversed writing, which some say indicated dyslexia.
He wrote his notes in reverse, mirror image. Coping mechanisms help some learn to objectively parent and subjectively soothe themselves. Despite trauma, they can grow up to be emotionally strong and healthy adults. Recognizing his potential as an artist, Leonardo's father sent him to apprentice at the age of 14 or 15 with sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio of Florence.
Bosch was born around 1450 into a family of painters. Their house most likely burned down in 1463, when fire razed most of the medieval city because they moved when he was 12. These strong impressions as a teenager are suggested as an inspiration for Bosch’s vivid depictions of hellfire.
The innocence had died when each witnessed such devastation, transmuting their existential, aesthetic, and felt sense of being. The unnamed dread is dissolution of self. Such agonies at a crucial developmental stage of predictable crisis are even more magnified when the self-image is already in flux. The trauma response is introjected, internalized, perhaps even denied -- the dark self and its horrifying inner world. Alternatively, it can be transformed.
Beliefs & Approach
Beliefs and superstitions dominated the western medieval world. Visionary artists evoked images with visionary foresight or intuition, but an artist of conscious imagination compulsively illustrates an idea according to how they imagine it should appear.
Arguably, Leonardo was a Deist. His writings suggest he based his beliefs on reason. and poked fun at silly religious beliefs and practices. He relied on experimental knowledge of nature, not the pronouncements or philosophy of the ancients. But he concluded or at least professed that God exists, but behaved more like a humanist.
As an artist and scientist he,"adopted an empirical approach to every thought, opinion, and action and accepted no truth unless verified or verifiable, whether related to natural phenomena, human behavior, or social activities" (Marco Rosci). http://www.deism.com/davinci.htm
Bosch was religious, with faith-based goals and methods, probably believed in the evils of witchcraft, and the devil's campaign to torment and vanquish mankind. He accepted that his neo-Gothic art reflected the orthodox religious belief systems of his age.
His was a hand-me-down apocalyptic vision although he rendered it with high-fidelity and detail-drenched symbolic narratives of the dance between heaven and hell. Though adopted, he made the vision his own and engaged it in his own style. His visions are fully of dream constructions and personal iconography.
The fantasies of his middle years were turbulent and distorted. Peace only came in his later days. Bosch expressed himself in symbols and allegories of alchemy and mysticism. Motifs include delirium, magical transformations of demons and men, and mankind assaulted by magic, psychopathic features, and the devil. He obsessed on fears of metamorphosis, absorption, penetration and teratogeny.
"[T]hey appear to express the constant uncertainty of man's purpose and the insecurity of his tenure in a world he occupies, unwelcome and an intruder. Bosch makes visible unconscious fears deeply rooted in man's spiritual inheritance. His fantasies are credible because of the artist's accurate observation, and by using common dream mechanisms he portrayed convincingly a world inhabited by creatures who embody persistent collective fears. They convey strongly the impression that Bosch actually witnessed the terrible scenes he painted, and believed implicitly in their message." (RE Hemphill)
Hemphill describes his personality as essentially paranoid, schizoid, and depressed. "He was withdrawn and inward-looking, unaware of the warmth of love, unmoved by human pleasures and disappointments, unconcerned with children. He was introspective, engrossed with mystical philosophy and magic, he was almost certainly an alchemist, he believed implicitly in was a doubtful Christian." http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/003591576505800224
Creativity & Felt Sense
Creativity is part of psyche's self-regulatory activity. Psyche's self-care system is analogous to the body's immune system. It allows us to integrated complex symbolic experiences. Art is one operational way of pursuing the unity of mind and body. Those whonaturally access their inner experience beyond the cognitive mindcan transmute deeply personal energy and pain into the universal, sometimes with genius.
Felt sense is not an emotion, but a holistic image that helps us gauge experience. What can it reveal about trauma's inner world, the post-traumatic world where disaster keeps happening? Trauma and the transpersonal merge in unconscious fantasies and images are projected as archetypal events. It helps us deal with the uncontrollable nature of death.
Adaptive Value
Trauma leaves us overwhelmed, bereft, paralyzed, with no way out of heartbreaking feelings. Our devastation mirrors the landscape of the wasteland. Such experiences unravel the connective tissue that holds reality together. Unconscious fantasy gives inner meaning to the trauma victim of life-shattering events. Implicit meaning is direct, not interpreted nor narrative.
The mind's searching eye seeksvia simulation.The tragedy is recreated in a controlled way. Art can vary in clarity and intensity and as a result our perceptions can shift. Simulated realities engage us by symbolically informing us how to get from one place to another. Perception of new meaning constitutes a creative act. Creativity is a combination of drive and flow, a holistic experience where action and awareness merge.
If the art is healing, the art does as much to create the artist as they do to create the art. Art is a flow state. Imagination flows through us, welling up from our core as a flow state, We become completely involved in an activity for its own sake, an immersive state and dialogue between the canvas and psyche.
Flow
Flow enables genius. It emerges from clear goals, immediate feedback, and a balance of skill and challenge. What is flowing is psyche. This flow of soul creates coherence and resonance, the zone of genius.
“Flow, by definition, implies a growth principle. One of the conditions of flow is a balance between the demands of the task and the individual’s skill level. Usually, this means that the work should be somewhat challenging. Flow is rewarding and motivates people to engage in the activity again and again and to seek increasing levels of challenge, thereby improving their skills and abilities.” (Irena O’Brien)
More importantly, in the context of trauma, it is the zone of resilience, adaptability. Resilience helps us bounce back or recover our spirit, energy, and harmonious way of being. Psychological resilience is what heals us from traumatic stress. Artistic expression facilitates it and is the basis of art therapy.
The world can come to us in devastating and frightful ways. Then we are called upon to reach deep within ourselves, listen to what emerges from inside, and find our resilience -- the ability to bounce back and press on.
Instead of actively trying to avoid chaos, we embrace it and dive into its very depths for the renewal it promises. We must look at the face of insecurity; it is always there but sometimes it just explodes, personally and/or collectively.
Resilience is a function or quality of our consciousness and conscious participation in the universal flow state, whose essence is pure undifferentiated chaos. It is more fundamental than either energy or matter, psyche or soma. It is the groundstate from which all forms, order, and self-organization arises.
A horizontally integrative experience, resilience is an implied state of being rather than any concretely definable "thing." This resilient "state" represents the cohesive and stabilizing elemental matrix of a unifying life force made up of many underlying processes, as well as a quality or state of being.
An emotional participation unblocks the flow of psychic energy, relaying the overall experience. Flow means being fully focused, energized, and engaged.When we become completely involved in an activity for its own sake, the ego falls away. Time flies. Every gesture, action, movement, and thought follows spontaneously from the previous one. Art arches over the present connecting past and future.
After unbearable trauma, the psyche tries to heal itself of dread and control uncertainty to redeem itself. Its numinous power appears through the daimon which includes the dissociative defenses of the psyche against unbearable pain and psychic anxiety, but it is not a method of controlling reality in defiance of one’s own experience. It opens the traumatized psyche to vistas of primordial, mythological, and religious iconography.
Flow implies a flowing state of consciousness, “liquification” of consciousness, a return to the womb for rebirth, a baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness. It facilitates feedback via creative regression: de-structuring, or destratification by immersion in the flow of psychic imagery through identification with more and more primal forms or patterns–a psychedelic, expanded state of the scope of imagination.
Art offers us the opportunity to make sense of our reality. It engages a metaphorical language for describing the flowing dynamics of the chaotic process of psychological transformation. The elemental forces are the most primordial -- fire, water, air, and earth.
When the human mind gets stuck on a problem it can’t solve, it starts adding noise to past solutions until it eventually hits on something that might work. This is a form of exploratory divination with new insights that accesses a particular part of the mind. Lucid mental associations lurk quietly underneath our understanding of reality.
There is beauty in the rhythms of nature and our nature. Aesthetic response is an essential emotional aspect that lends flow and harmony to the process of balance, rhythm and synthesis of immediate perception. That flow is lyrical, epic and dramatic. Aesthetic signification is one thing, but the deep emotional impact of aesthetic arrest -- being suspended for a thrilling radiant moment in the eternal -- stops us in our tracks in a moment of realization.
We dissolve in the mysterious ground of being, the sublime wellspring of creativity. The mind goes still as primal awareness expands into wholeness. Something without physical form shines forth from the hidden world in that very moment.
These luminous experiences, true works of art, drive us onward. We are struck with divine inspiration and the passion to see it through to completion. Sensuous cognition of beauty is a revelation, an astonishment that captivates our rapt attention.
Aesthetic arrest blows apart the illusory differences between the sacred and the profane. We are inspired in the “a-ha” moment, utterly dissolved in the momentary ego-death that tears asunder illusory nature. This aesthetic experience is an act of surrender that is an epiphany. It makes us gasp for air and sparks a cascade of pleasure.
The Flow State is a place of such singular focus and connection with the environment. We become a part of the truth we seek at the paradox of participation. The alchemist and artist lives at this paradox. The greening of the wasteland restores artistic expression -- the paradoxical cosmic conjunction (coniunctio) of opposites.
We are directly connected to beauty and wholeness. We know what it means to exist rooted in the mysterious creative ground of being. As artists we are myth-makers, dreaming the alchemical dream onward. Myth is transparent to transcendent process in the Now-Here. In sublimatio we reach escape velocity. In aesthetic arrest, the phenomenal field disappears as we come to our own Zero Point.
The oneness of existence transcends our conscious comprehension, insisting on a comprehensive symbol. In a moment of synchronicity, it is the vehicle of transcendence. When we have been overwhelmed by ten thousand outer things, we can make them one through the image of the One Mind. The paradoxical shift is orchestrated by psychophysical being.
Our perceptions are embodied in the moment of synchrony. Forces at our perceptual edge tend to merge, to meld. When we see order in the configuration we call it synchronicity because it changes our perspective. We give it more 'weight' than ordinary experience as it feels uncanny. Sometimes we anchor onto it as a milestone that utterly changed us, like a bubble that pops revealing another dimension of being -- understanding without words.
As Hesse suggests in The Glass Bead Game, that everything is actually all-meaningful: "that every symbol and combination of symbol led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge."
“A man’s character is his destiny.” But what does this mean? A host of alternative translations render “daimon” in that statement as “genius,” “fate,” “calling,” etc.
“Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling.
For us, divine nature expresses as a mind-world correspondence system or principle.We work toward certain goals in certain worlds with the relevant means. Subject to real-world space and time constraints, we mythologize our lives to help us adapt. Symbols reside in and naturally transform our declarative, procedural and episodic memory systems.We are immortalized in memory.
"The meaning of events is the way of salvation that you create. The meaning of events comes from the possibility of life in this world that you create. It is the mastery of this world and the assertion of your soul in this world." ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 239.
The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.
It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors” ― James Hillman
“...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.” ―James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling
EMBRACING THE DAIMON: Voice of the Higher Presence by Iona Miller
The ancient Greeks believed that our character or genius was a daimon [Latin daemon] or divine spirit who oversaw our experiences with mortality -- dispenser of our fate -- our personal yet transcendent god. The root of daimon, from the Indo-European, is to “deal out.”
Daimon is character and character is destiny, the individual, immortal and potentially divine part of ourselves. Each unique image acts as a personal daimon, the force of fate. We care for our soul by allowing that force to move through us constantly and to have expression. Sometimes we may seem possessed by it.
In the Hellenistic ruler cult that began with Alexander the Great, it was not the ruler, but his guiding daemon that was venerated. In the Archaic or early Classical period, the daimon had been democratized and internalized for each person, whom it served to guide, motivate, and inspire, as one possessed of such good spirits. Similarly, the first-century Roman imperial cult began by venerating the genius or numen of Augustus, a distinction that blurred in time.
All old trees had their daimon or tree numen, and the World Tree is no exception. This is the ancestral or family daimon -- the secret voice of family memories. The tree is the wise or knowing diamon at the same time because they are different categories of existence -- secular and sacred in phase co-existence, (an influence perceptible by mind if not by the senses). Active in many contexts, sometimes the daimon appears in the form of Asklepios the healer, whose staff is entwined with the serpent.
When we are 'called', we are called by our daimon. If we ignore that call we may wither away or live half a life. To answer that call is essentially a shamanic initiation that opens relations with the Otherworld -- equilibrium of conscious and unconscious. If we are fortunate the daimon informs our creativity and death with some nobility.
We were infused with the value of our potential. Creativity has frequently been treated as a form of self-expression or a way of understanding or coping with life that is intimately connected with personal dignity, expression of one's inner being, self-actualization, and the like (e.g., Maslow, 1973; May, 1976; Rogers, 1961). Moustakis (1977) summarized the individualistic approach to creativity by seeing it as the pathway to living your own life your own way.
This plant is an inner, spiritual growth, the development of a tree of life and knowledge which played a great role in alchemy....In general it is advisable to watch these inner developments and not let them slip back into the unconscious, lest they get stuck in the physiological sphere, or rather in the realm of the [psychoid] unconscious which merges with the body, where they give rise to pathological formations which a wise man carefully avoids. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 607-608)
Jung called compulsions the greatest mystery of human behavior. The heterogeneous character of the daimon is confirmed by the description of its body as an “alien garment.” As trickster, it urges us toward the deathless mental aspects of compulsions.
The daimon can incite 'oblivion-seeking' in the person -- the escapism and oblivion of addiction and altered states. It seduces the ego into oblivion and anesthetizes it. The incarnate daimon is also the physical principle of love. There is the flesh and blood reality, the character, the daimonic element within and the lived history of the human person, which is a deep mystery.
‘Fate’ is distinguished from ‘fatalism’, ‘telos’ is distinguished from ‘teleology’, and ‘accidents’ and ‘necessity’ are all explanations of how individuals may be guided but not determined by daimonic influence. We must be free to choose to grow into the daimonic image, or to ignore this, or to try to forge another identity, or to find what there is for us to find: the stars do not determine human life, they simply guide.
James Hillman's acorn theory says that the "daimon" selects the egg and the sperm, that their union results from our necessity, not the other way around. This has huge implications. Soul, calling, or image, it guides our unique path. The daimon guides us down into the form of our calling -- in terms of a soul’s descent rather than a developmental ascent from nature and nurture.
Cost of Personal Satisfactions
Sometimes, however the "daimon" asks a great deal from you. You feel as if you've never done enough. You've never written enough, played enough, or fought enough, whatever it is. There is always more because it is like an unquenchable urge. It costs what you might call your normalcy. (Hillman)
"A child defends its daimon's dignity. That's why even a frail child at a 'tender' age refuses to submit to what it feels is unfair and untrue and reacts so savagely to abusive misperecptions. The idea of childhood abuse needs to be expanded beyond the sexual kind--which is so vicious not principally because it is sexual, but because it abuses the dignity at the core of personality, that acorn of myth."[Hillman, Pg.27 The Soul's Code.]
"The acorn theory proposes, and I will bring evidence for the claim that you and I and every single person is born with a defining image. Individuality resides in a formal cause--to use old philosophical language going back to Aristotle. We each embody our own idea, in the language of Plato and Plotinus. And this form, this idea, this image does not tolerate too much straying. The theory also attributes to this innate image an angelic or daimonic intention, as if it were a spark of consciousness; and, moreover, holds that it has our interest at heart because it chose us for its reasons." [James Hillman, Pg. 12, The Soul's Code]
Hillman suggests that the daimon explains the impossible marriages, quick conceptions, and sudden desertions that form the stories of so many of our parents. He goes further to point out the poverty of seeing our mothers and fathers as, literally, mom and dad, when nature could be our mother, books our father - whatever connects us to the world and teaches us. Quoting Alfred North Whitehead, who said that ‘religion is world loyalty’, Hillman says that we must believe in the world’s ability to provide for us and lovingly reveal to us its mysteries.
The Soul’s Code shows how the daimon will assert itself in love, giving rise to obsessions and torments of romantic agony that defy the logic of evolutionary biology.
Fate, Fortune, & Chance
Every person had their spirit or guardian angel, an occult power mediating the celestial and terrestrial realms. It appears 'replete with knowledge' and the power of Presence, perhaps even an audible voice. In popular thought, such daimones were credited with conveying supernatural powers and abilities to humans, resulting in increased physical or intellectual prowess for special occasions. They could also effect changes in human moods and temperaments, and their accompanying actions.
The daimon is our invisible and irrational spiritual guide or self, and our character -- a divine mediating power that impels our action and drives or mediates our destiny. It is what makes us unique in relation to the world. This inborn immortal factor embodies our innate talents, inherent gifts, and positive or negative natural tendencies -- and a way to honor the individuality of soul.
This supreme form of soul is our constant companion and source of inspiration -- like the Latin genii, our genius. This "genius" (from the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, making the daimon the voice of the generative process in us. It can be a personification of the transcendent function, experienced in dreams and in our acts of doing and becoming. The gifted child tends to be blessed with some sort of self-remembrance. Jung notes, "A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon." (pp. 356-357)
The daimon is also our suffering, emotional disorder, and more, but could also heal, and promote health, happiness, resilience, perseverance, and harmony. The vitality of the inner universe is mobilized in happiness, misery, regret. The daimon can inform even a painful death with some poetry and grace. Suffering can be produced by painful states of mind such as hatred, envy, alienation, scapegoating, cruelty, and loneliness. The daimon can also bring altruism, empathy, compassion, concern, care, consolation, and pity. It brings understand of the beauty, compassion, and the foundation of wisdom...perhaps even the psychobiological transformations of epigenetics, changing our responses to life experiences.
Regardless of the nature of the genes we inherit from our parents, dynamic change at this level allows us almost unlimited influence on our fate. Beyond "biology a destiny" is “self-directed biological transformation,” but under the daimon, not the ego. the disruptive and transformative reality of the individuation process, the uncanny otherness of the unconscious.
In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman discusses Plato’s Er myth—that the soul is given a daimon (inner attendant spirit or inspiring force) at birth, which is the carrier of one’s destiny. We may forget our daimon, but it doesn’t forget us.
The daimon has our interest at heart, guiding providence; it motivates, protects, invents, has prescience, and persists. The daimon can be a force of deviance and oddity, especially when it is opposed or neglected. Hillman enumerates various signs of daimonic feelings: restlessness of heart, impatience, dissatisfaction, and yearning. He notes that the daimon wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition—especially by you.
The daimonic can be both creative and destructive. We get the notion of demonic possession from the destructive workings of these forces; this is also where the notion of “evil genius” comes from. Many artists are haunted by their daimons, showing that our wounds made us who we are and that living creatively with them is key. We can learn to use this inextinguishable heat to forge works and the self.
Genius and vocation are inborn characteristics of human nature; there is no authoritative voice, only multiple readings.
The essence of it means we carry our fate within us. Our fulfillment is expressing and living out the true self, also called self-actualization and self-realization.
Plato and the Greeks called it "daimon," the Romans "genius," the Christians "guardian angel." Today we use the terms heart, spirit, and soul.
Picasso said, quoting Rimbaud "JE EST ' un autre" (I is another). But if " I " are another, how do I know this " other " that I live? This alterity was his madness, his daemon that in Spanish is called "duende". It's that madness that imposed the great artist his vision, possedendolo and allowing them to express the soul in his works. This is duende's says Federico Carcia Lorca's "Mystery and excitement", Is "the spirit of the earth".
Duende sounds dark and these are "the mystery, the roots that sink in the limbo that we all know, that we all, but where it comes from what is substantial in the art"... " the duende hurts, and in the healing of this wound that never heals the unusual, the invented of human work. The Duende loves the edge, the wound and is close to the places where the shapes are melt in a desire to exceed their expressions visible ". The Duende we might even say he loves the edges of the wounds, it lives on the borders, and know deeply the wound...
“Present in body and absent in spirit, he lies back on the couch, shamed by his own daimon for the potentials in his soul that will not be subdued. He feels himself inwardly subversive, imagining in his passivity extremes of aggression and desire that must be suppressed. Solution: more work, more money, more drink, more weight, more things.” (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
“For the daimon surprises. It crosses my intentions with its interventions, sometimes with a little twinge of hesitation, sometimes with a quick crush on someone or something. These surprises feel small and irrational; you can brush them aside; yet they also convey a sense of importance, which can make you say afterward: “Fate.””(The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
Yet even if we find our personal calling we have the freedom to choose to follow it or ignore it. If we choose to ignore it we can be sure our “inner voice” won’t go away. It will be there whether we are aware of its presence or not, pushing us in the direction of our destiny until our final hours: “A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away.”(The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
It will be good for your humility if you can accept the gifts of your unconscious guide that dwells in yourself, and it is good for your pride to humiliate itself to such an extent that you can accept what you receive. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 459
“Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this “something” as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.”(The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
“For Napoleon Bonaparte it was his “star” that he always felt in ascendance when he made the right move. For Socrates, it was his daimon, a voice that he heard…which inevitably spoke to him in the negative—telling him what to avoid. For Goethe, he also called it a daimon—a kind of spirit that dwelled within him and compelled him to fulfill his destiny. In more modern times, Albert Einstein talked of a kind of inner voice that shaped the direction of his speculations. All of these are variations on what Leonardo da Vinci experienced with his own sense of fate.” (Mastery, Robert Greene)
“Among his various possible beings each man always finds one which is his genuine and authentic being. The voice which calls him to that authentic being is what we call “vocation.” But the majority of men devote themselves to silencing that voice of the vocation and refusing to hear it. They manage to make a noise within themselves…to distract their own attention in order not to hear it; and they defraud themselves by substituting for their genuine selves a false course of life.” (Jose Ortega Y Gasset)
“Present in body and absent in spirit, he lies back on the couch, shamed by his own daimon for the potentials in his soul that will not be subdued. He feels himself inwardly subversive, imagining in his passivity extremes of aggression and desire that must be suppressed. Solution: more work, more money, more drink, more weight, more things.” (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
“Among his various possible beings each man always finds one which is his genuine and authentic being. The voice which calls him to that authentic being is what we call “vocation.” But the majority of men devote themselves to silencing that voice of the vocation and refusing to hear it. They manage to make a noise within themselves…to distract their own attention in order not to hear it; and they defraud themselves by substituting for their genuine selves a false course of life.” (Jose Ortega Y Gasset)
"The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure--be it a daemon, a human being, or a process--that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. . . . In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history. . . ." (Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry" (CW 15: §127)
(c)2018; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller
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