An approach
Engaging the Imaginal
We are not struggling with ways to become superhuman (Heroic Journey), but with the ways in which we can become more fully human in a deeply connected more-than-human world. This Journey is represented by the Major Arcana sequence of the Tarot, beginning with the Fool. The journey of life is not always about growth. Rather than a Hero’s Journey, it is (more wisely) known as the Fool’s Journey: the pilgrim soul making its rather more humble way through life. The human journey itself--collectively as well as individually--is unknown, difficult, and improbable.
We step between the worlds and fall into the magic, mystery and wisdom of the unconscious. There are many kinds of archetypal journeys, soulful innerworld journeys, visionary journeys. We can enter the inner drama as a participant. Freedom needs to be internalized as an inner freedom from “demand” itself… that comes when you’re free from those compulsions to have and to own and to be someone.
We step between the worlds and fall into the magic, mystery and wisdom of the unconscious. There are many kinds of archetypal journeys, soulful innerworld journeys, visionary journeys. We can enter the inner drama as a participant. Freedom needs to be internalized as an inner freedom from “demand” itself… that comes when you’re free from those compulsions to have and to own and to be someone.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies that apprehend,
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt;
The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them into shapes, and gives the airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
--William Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene 1.
"...the idea of psychotherapy grounded in philosophy is different from the idea of psychotherapy grounded in healing, medicine, shamanism."
--James Hillman, We've Had A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy
"...by “soul” I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image and fantasy—that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical,...that unknown component, which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, has religious concern [deriving from its special relation with death]" (Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. xvi).
"Soul is the living thing in man, that which lives of itself and causes life.
Therefore God breathed into Adam a living breath, that he might live. With her cunning play of illusions the soul lures into life the inertness of matter that does not want to live. She makes us believe incredible things, that life may be lived. She is full of snares and traps, in order that man should fall, should reach the earth, entangle himself there, and stay caught, so that life should be lived. . . .But to have soul is the whole venture of life, for soul is a life-giving daemon who plays his elfin game above and below human existence..." ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27
Such shaping fantasies that apprehend,
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt;
The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them into shapes, and gives the airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
--William Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene 1.
"...the idea of psychotherapy grounded in philosophy is different from the idea of psychotherapy grounded in healing, medicine, shamanism."
--James Hillman, We've Had A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy
"...by “soul” I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image and fantasy—that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical,...that unknown component, which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, has religious concern [deriving from its special relation with death]" (Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. xvi).
"Soul is the living thing in man, that which lives of itself and causes life.
Therefore God breathed into Adam a living breath, that he might live. With her cunning play of illusions the soul lures into life the inertness of matter that does not want to live. She makes us believe incredible things, that life may be lived. She is full of snares and traps, in order that man should fall, should reach the earth, entangle himself there, and stay caught, so that life should be lived. . . .But to have soul is the whole venture of life, for soul is a life-giving daemon who plays his elfin game above and below human existence..." ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27
REFLECTIONS
OUR BUTTERFLY NATURE
A Depth, Creative, Imagistic, Aesthetic, Phenomenological, Transgenerational, & Non-Directive Experiential Therapeutic Approach
(Metaphorical, Archetypal, Imaginal, Philosophical)
by Iona Miller, 2018
Depth Psychology includes the psychic realities of all phenomena, emphasizing what honors psyche in the world, including the imaginal, the ancestral, and the psychophysical.
OUR BUTTERFLY NATURE
A Depth, Creative, Imagistic, Aesthetic, Phenomenological, Transgenerational, & Non-Directive Experiential Therapeutic Approach
(Metaphorical, Archetypal, Imaginal, Philosophical)
by Iona Miller, 2018
Depth Psychology includes the psychic realities of all phenomena, emphasizing what honors psyche in the world, including the imaginal, the ancestral, and the psychophysical.
"DREAM OF THE BUTTERFLY"
Learning Through Imaginal Experience
“… our life is less the resultants of pressures and forces than the enactment
of mythical scenarios.” (Hillman, 1976, p.22)
Soul craves a relationship between light and darkness with its personal and collective destiny. The solution for coping with that destiny is carried on the wings of suffering, affliction, and disappointment through anticipation and reflection, psycho-spiritual deepening and healing.
Much of psychic life remains hidden as in the initial stages of any myth. This includes secret thoughts, feelings, fears, criticisms, anticipations, etc. A psychological initiation occurs when we are suddenly forced to "go within" ourselves and discover or "own" the subconscious processes operating there. Gradually, we begin to recognize that relationship involves chronic "wounding and healing."
Psyche generates itself by producing spontaneously arising images. We wait and listen for clear observation, wisdom, spirit-sense with a mythic sensibility. Psyche is a previously unrecognized deep and natural internal resource. Collective psyche is Anima mundi -- the universal paradigm for the destiny of the human soul -- fate, nature, destiny, necessity, chance.
Myth is a way of gaining access to the secrets of the psyche, the ancient source of vision and meaning in the world of dream, myth, and archetype. Ancient myths, metaphysics, and folk-tales still have a strong hold on our imaginations because their motifs and structure correspond to the archetypal structure of the human mind. But rather than asking 'what myth we are living,' we become aware of multiple mythic voices. An interactive culture of true mythic voices inform us.
The Great Work included gaining self-knowledge and uniting with the larger universe. The way we imagine things creates the very reality within which we have to live. That reality is porous to the imagination of hyperbolic possibilities for representational assemblage. At the edge of the collective unconscious is the boundary of the known universe.
Outside of that boundary lies all there is -- the plenum, void, or God. The plenum contains all of existence in potential. It is our cradle of being, the matrix of the phenomenal world as an entangled level of fundamental information and energy.
Psyche is the plenum, the panoply or pandaemonium of psychic imagery, a soul-guide, a mediatrix of consciousness between the personal and collective. Engagement implies committment, rather than simple participation. She balances the actualities of daily life with the demands of the Beyond.
The realm of the psyche is immeasurably great and filled with living reality. At its brink lies the secret of matter and of spirit. Jung developed what might be called a Dialogical Gnosis -- a Way of Knowing informed by the wisdom of the Collective Unconscious, the plenum of inherent knowledge.
Matter arises from the plenum/void of the virtual vacuum potential, from particle-antiparticle annihilation, from the virtual photon fluctuation in the underlying plenum once poetically called the Dirac Sea or quantum foam. Patterns arise, interact, endure, and disintegrate. The void undergirds the ambient background fluctuation.
The plenum/void is a wellspring of unconditioned consciousness, of self-arising creativity. The void is not devoid, just indiscernible. "Emptiness" is an integral aspect of mind/matter, beyond the mystic veil of observability.
The individual psyche is separated from the collective unconscious by a porous boundary; thus, it is separate from, but one with, universal experience. The physical world unravels to reveal what is in our thoughts and dreams. There is an asymmetrical structure to our mortal relationship with the collective unconscious and the porosity of the boundary between psyche and ego.
Through porosity, psyche itself is communicating sacred manifestation. Psyche is porous to imagery; religion is porous to ultimacy. Porosity to the imagination is the defining characteristic of myth, mirroring the porosity of our bodies to other living things.
Myth mirrors the soul as the most deeply personal experiences mirror the transpersonal.
The thin line between fantasy and reality is constantly rendered porous or permeable. We breathe in the mythic atmosphere of the world itself alive, and full of magic. Myths are, by nature, both untrue and true.
A porous boundary deconstructs real/unreal oppositions, suggesting indeterminacy and ambivalence at a metaphorical, but also at a natural, elementary level. We become porous to influences larger than ourselves, variation of intensity, porosity.
The border remains porous, but is sometimes far more difficult and dangerous to cross than ever before when we insert ourselves into these imaginal networks. The intensity of feelings and imagery can strain the boundary between conscious and unconscious.
That porous relationship can exaggerate preconscious experience to near psychosis. The more uncanny the material, the more we have to question the boundaries of “consciousness,” the limits of “subjective experience,” and the neural basis for “meaning-making” and “self-awareness.”
We need to not persist in unconsciousness or remaining identical with the unconscious elements. We abide in the matrix of psych's pervasive essence -- the capacity to fulfill our destinies. The autotelic impulse is described as "having a purpose in and not apart from itself." This flow-state mirrors the underground stream of deep unconscious emergence, the confluence of intersubjective and archetypal fields.
We learn to think and behave more adaptively and wisely with focus, persistence, curiosity, concern, willingness, openness, immersion, commitment, and transparency. Every gut reaction, impulse, drive, taste, smell, sound, thought, and observation can anchor the imaginal if we take the time, focus, and effort to experience it.
The autotelic personality craves the self-directed flow state with simple experience that naturally dissolves self-centeredness as the main goal of a fully-immersed life. Alan Watts noted, “This is the real secret of life– to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290003191_Autotelic_Personality
The Ancient Greek word “daimon,” meant “spirit” or “soul.” Just as our personal daimon, if heeded, guides our individual destiny, so the World Daimon guides the destiny of the Anima Mundi. The World Soul, in turn, metamorphoses to heed the call of her Guide, just as we metamorphose in heeding the call of our daimon.
Creative Mystery
Our fatedness is reflected in the landscape of the world, the psychic depths of the world.
Yeats believed that the Great Memory was 'the mind of Nature herself,' and that Anima Mundi could be evoked by symbols. The world also has a soul, a destiny that plays itself out in everyday events, the creative mystery of seeing through the world. The movement of the world soul expresses transition.
Anima Mundi is NowHere…the very spirit of life, the ethereal angel of our destiny, the animated archetypal ground and individually the radiant subtle body. More than just the life-spirit, the sacred field body is a natural force, the cosmic energic principle of primordial Consciousness, implicate order – the essence of being and sacred embodiment.
Anima Mundi is not an archetype, but an archetypal way of seeing -- seeing through the world. Looking at our lives metaphorically or mythologically funds life with both poetic beauty and imaginal meaning. We can embrace the fullness of human experience while remaining firmly grounded in body and earth.
World, psyche, and spirit impose illusory forms of reality that must be understood and discriminated for us to know ourselves. We can discover and discern the illusions, and associated transient natures, on all levels of reality.
Depth is the hidden, invisible dimension of authenticity, liminality, ambiguity, interiority, ancestry, instinctuality, and initiatory wisdom. It bridges the animal imagination, the storied imagination, the religious imagination, and the rational mind through image and expression. Uncontrollable experiences come in the form of dreams, visions, impulses, and sickness.
Imagination is an innate, archetypal capacity, a cosmological force expressing subtle life, the functional interplay of our capacities. Mythic imagination reveals the nature at our core and the humanity throughout nature, reflecting the elemental nature of the ancestral soul and imaginative environment. Unrecognized elemental forms are realities lost to experience.
We can watch our own hypnagogic processes shift among modalities. Typical imagery includes whispy lights, multi-dimensional geometric objects, or a sudden image like a stranger’s face, nusic, strange noises, voices and rushing sounds, bizarre physical sensations, OOBE's, or “invisible presence.”
Imagination ennobles real life beyond its ordinary capacities, hard to attain and difficult to comprehend. Everything banished from the ordinary world is there. Ego, ontology, substantiality are dissolved. Literalisms of self and divisions between it and things dissolve into the psychic reality of imagination experienced in immediacy.
Mythic porosity supports looking beyond seeing and shatters absolute truths about reality. Image as phenomena facilitates the shift from "material" to general symbolization, in images, affects, tendencies, intentions, and complexes that reflect the structure of the psyche. Personality complexes influence perception.
Mythic consciousness is a sensitivity to the elemental realm. It is a dynamic characterization of matter and our relationship to it. The folk soul imagines ethereal spirits and nature interwoven throughout life. Imagination braids myth into the ordinary to try to explain it as meaning and phenomenal fact.
Psyche entangles imaginal exchange across reality boundaries -- literal, historical, symbolic, metaphorical, cosmological, allegorical, mystical or spiritual, and anatomical. Psyche is not about ultimates, but multivalence, a plenum or fullness of meaning seen in the paradoxical light of the unseen, reimagining temporal existence through life-long rootedness.
In Hells and Holy Ghost, David L. Miller says, "Sensing the deep imagery lurking in life's history, and then understanding the history with imagination is the function of the descent...It is not that "my life is hell," but rather that "hell (hell's imaginal function) is my life."
Depth connects us back to the past, forward to the future, downward to the human and moral sense, and upwards to the ultimate spiritual or heavenly. This framework of orientation touches on all senses at once, including moral and spiritual sense (religious or ecstatic elevation, mystical feeling).
Our journey is through literal to mystical meaning. This convergence moves toward universal symbolic meaning, ecstatic feeling, and spiritual elevation. They express the spiritual tendency to form more and more universal symbols that reinforce ethical values.
Only anagogical vision sees all things as instances of participation in God, fragmentary disclosures of divine glory. That dissociative vector as a tyrannical ideal, proceeds from a non-molecular body to transcendence of any physical body in immortality.
But psychological soul requires body, not perfection, and extends into the pathological and grotesque, not just light bodies. Soul wants full realization of body with all it's frailties of flesh and blood. Spirit's vision is the antithesis of soul, highly conscious of both ultimate reality and the deficiency of a sinful, evil-inflicted world.
When something ancient comes back in a new era that creation is a redemption or resolution because the whole context has changed. In The Red Book, Jung claims, "The task is to give birth to what is old in a new time." (Ch. Xx, "The way of the cross", Study, PP. 271-272). History want to know 'what really happened,' but myth wants to illuminate multivalent, hidden dynamics with no final version of truth.
In the transformative perspective, mythic reality is rich, ambiguous, archetypal, cosmological, and polyvalent -- a never-ending renewal. Myth helps us create endings and re-create beginnings -- a constant state of becoming. We connect with these realities through perceptual moments of the mythical coordinates of the reflective soul.
Mixing such worlds is by its very nature 'transgressive.' Dreams may reveal transgressive acts. Revealing what has been kept hidden is a transgressive act. Transgression becomes regression. Sometimes there is momentary transgression, with a temptation to return to the known path. We succumb and neglect the pilgrimage of the soul.
Is it an attempt to return to a cosmological "zero point"? Utopianism becomes the omnipotent denial of finitude. Eschatology re-emerges as the desire to reach the Absolute all at once at the limits of being.
Transgression is a courageous act representing a disruptive and necessary energy of the psyche. Transgression, for purposes of the individuation process, will be effective only in conformity with the soul, legitimized by the soul. It can not be just an egocentric whim. If aspects of the collective psyche remain unexamined, a collective malaise or herd mentality will result.
Redemption simply implies the acceptance of an imperative necessity of transgression and sacrifice and all its consequences, because there is something within us that governs this whole process.
The aphorism "Know thyself" (Oracle of Delphi) invites us to dive into this process of transgressing, sacrificing and surrendering which is sometimes harrowing, dangerous, but liberating. Stories are ways we transmit information we don't yet understand.
Liminality is a creative potential. Liminality, a non-traditional sacred context, represents an undifferentiated and unprecedented, limitless symbolic freedom or potency where anything can happen. More than a transition state, liminality is an innate 'holiness,' an state of timelessness that parallels our ordinary awareness.
Liminality itself is the primary, fundamental, underlying reality. Illusory, transitory one-sidedness (liminoid) deepens into the soulful perspective of the descent. Our connection to the depths is through world interiority, not the interior of the world.
Breaking free from a maternal unconscious we seek a level of freedom that transcends our own frontiers. This hubris against the unconscious psychic source of its own nourishment is disruptive. Inner turmoil leads to pandemonium and ego-death until we forge new archetypal configurations with the collective unconscious. The truth we act out isn't necessarily the same as the truth that tells us what the world is made of.
Paradoxically, to reconnect with our origins we must shed the shackles of the past, break free from the herd, and transcend what prevents every other ordinary person from realizing true fulfillment. We become 'unhistorical' in the deepest sense when estranged from the bounds of tradition. As Jung notes, "the sin of being unhistorical is a Promethean transgression required for the attainment of higher consciousness." (CW10.152)
If preconditions for individuation are transgression; sacrifice; and redemption, it is necessary to break with some absolute truths which are breathed from birth (or before), Non-reflective rules are collective.
Passive self-reflection can be the beginning of the transgression movement that reflects the soul. We leave our comfort zone, accepted collectively, and embark on a journey to something unseen which can bring encounters and / or clashes with totally unknown aspects of psyche.
We must sacrifice our mediocrity to even see the possibility of a unique existence, or possibility to live our mission. It may require the sacrifice of "loss" of job, stability, relationships, health, change of city, country, etc. The meaningless life unconnected with personal myth breaks down.
Virtual Metaphor
The paradoxical combination of two realities in one phenomenon seems inconceivable for a modern mentality. The notion of virtuality or a prototype of life has returned in a new form. The term virtus was a deep relationship between different levels of reality in the hierarchy of being, or as the ratio of the potential to the actual. We model our reality on inferences.
Moment to moment perception facilitates the integration of sensory experience, which presents and updates our representation of the external environment. The top-down process of understanding meaning entails the possible emergence of self-consciousness with the help of an inner proto-language, generated as a symbolic, imaginal forerunner of language processing.
The virtuality of psyche prefers engagement to disengagement. Soul, like a virtual body, becomes the point of view that looks beyond the imaginal horizon. The soul is united to the body as its form, so, it is impossible for it to be united by means of another body.
Thomas Aquinas refers to the elemental 'virtual' presence of the soul and the coexistence of the hierarchy of souls (Aquinas 2001, 106). Multiple ontological realities are not reducible one into another, so we have the idea of multi-reality. As soon as virtuality involves the avatar, which involves an act of conscious self-presentation, the complex paradoxes of virtuality multiply. The avatar is the pivot point where the psyche of psyche-ology introduces critical issues that go beyond sense perception, visual accuracy, sensory feedback, and the other issues.
The unrelenting outpouring of psychic images situates our immediate experience. Images emerge from the timeless, spaceless, undifferentiated world. Psychic reality includes the rich layering of our inner perception and response to the outer world and the sensations they might induce.
If soul-making, not mere aesthetics, product or flexibility is our goal, writing or authentic movement, for example, can be a contemplative process. The journey never ends, but spirals as we enter back into the journey, eternal return. We must plunge into the Mystery to distinguish empty space from Presence.
Self Image
Our narrative is self-conscious elaboration, focused on stories from loss of innocence to the acquisition of knowledge. We traverse the unconscious in order to renew ourselves at the single source of all creative power. Phenomenal existence is a never-ending process of annihilation and recreation at every moment. The perpetual disclosure of Being reveals its archetypal essence.
Spirituality that is disembodied requires a splitting, a dis-identification, dissociation and re-identification that denies psychophysical reality. How spiritual can dissociation be, and who does that serve, if not the group over the individual?
Transcendence is not a state to be achieved; we cannot leave behind the material, personal nature of our lives. Disembodied spirituality is inhuman, ignoring our inner partner. Personal growth is not an industry, about which nothing is personal.
Suppression of instincts and sexuality frequently leads to a dysfunctional relationship with these archaic aspects. Soul and body are exiled. We are more than disembodied minds. We cannot mistake even the descriptively true for the literal or metaphysical conclusions, or personalistic contexts. We disembody the soul at our own peril.
Wild Blue Yonder
Our spiritual and psychic nature enliven us. Jung suggests the caelum is the Philosopher's Stone, and the anima mundi in matter. Caelum is the wild blue yonder, the vault of heaven, the Zodiac, even the God image. The far edges of experience correlates with uncanny spaces, the abyss, and the sky that is the breath of life.
“Embodiment: is that not what is meant by macrocosm and microcosm together, a unus mundus? If embodiment is presaged already in the “blues” that sing of sadness and pull the soul down into the body’s longings and mournings, then the caelum expands skyward, the senses awakened to the presence of the whole wide world. . .. Blue initiates “the birth of the aesthetic sense.” ‘ (Hillman, Alchemical Psychology)
If the soul, realm of imagination, binds together physical and spiritual, if the body is exiled, the soul is lost. Loss of soul is loss of meaning, loss of the sacramental dimension. Soul experiences pathos and suffering through imagination, passion, fantasy and reflection.
Meister Eckhart claimed, "There is no such thing as a spiritual journey. If there were a spiritual journey, it would be only a quarter inch long, though many miles deep. You do not have to go away outside yourself to come into real conversation with your soul and with the mysteries of the spiritual world. The eternal is at home --within you."
Psyche conjoins the relative worlds of the spiritual and physical. It expresses in the form of living images suggesting a plenum of nuance. Each image is intersubjective, only one component of broader polyvalent metaphors. They are embedded in larger and more comprehensive metaphors with many different significances.
'Imagery' itself is a polyvalent term. Meaning is determined by the context of their use. Symbolism is evocative, even confused, allusive and sometimes elusive, so open to a range of metaphors, interpretations, and literalisms. Staying with the image as given, we avoid getting bogged down in concepts, interpretations, and elaborations, even thought such metaphysics are also informed by psyche.
Polyvalent symbols have more than one meaning, evoked associations, and moods. They provide a polyvalent matrix for the fluid, ambiguous, idiosyncratic and personal. What lies behind; what is the level of existence behind this consciousness of the sacred life force?
Soul is an engulfing interactive dimension of experiencing life and ourselves, including isolated or juxtaposed fragments of imagery. It evokes depth, value, relatedness, heart, and personal substance while clarifying ethical core values that inform and shape who we are.
Polyvalent Aesthetic Field
We may wander restlessly through labyrinths of images so polyvalent and ambiguous that they remain mute. The idea of the new is always ambiguous. We navigate a polychronic realm through polyvalent meanings, where time is seen as cyclical, punctuality is unimportant and interruptions are acceptable.
The crucial issue is emergent behavior, systems that are complex structures evolving unpredictably from an initial set of simple elements. Connectivity and compacting of information are fundamental aspects of life. Inside and outside, the spontaneous creation of order is present all around us, and transcends a mere increase in the degree of behavioral complexity.
Like connected patterns in nature including self-organization, emergent behavior does not depend on individual parts, but on their relationships to one another. This functional response cannot be predicted by examination of individual parts, only by understanding the parts and their relationships, including undesirable behavior.
Our working paths are linear, multilinear, and nonlinear ways to traverse the inner world of feedback loops and forking paths. We explore, sometime randomly passing over and circulating among the same points over and over. We are constantly reminded of inaccessible strategies and disregarded paths not taken, voices not heard.
It is possible to explore, get lost, and discover secret paths -- superficial or incomplete chains of signifiers and idiosyncratic paths. The parallel universes of imagination includes maze-like multicursoral models, non-linear polycentric narratives, multidirectional mappings, and multiple genres. The phenomenal experience of our narratives and dialogues supersedes the hermeneutics.
Our approach starts with imagination, a psychoactive anima mode of reflecting. Reflection gives shape to the imaginal. The reflective model describes how emotional responses contribute to generating polyvalent meanings. Imagination is the place of metamorphosis for Psyche. Ideas are transformed into images, images give body to ideas, text meets context in an excess, a strangeness, a mystery.
Aesthetics is itself polyvalent and fundamental. Aesthetics help us structure experiences in formal perceptual ways and provide interpretive tools, at times constructing meaning. Reflective orientation is important for aesthetic experience because it connects and unites the diverse contextual relations and the polyvalent meanings into a aesthetic coherence.
Through imagination we can approach its multidimensional, immeasurably complex, and polyvalent fragments. We apprehend a more complicated sense of the polyvalent currents, trends, and tensions underway in these contexts.
Field of Being
Our tending returns psychic reality to the world. Anima mundi is biologically and psychologically enacted as image, pattern, metaphor, and narrative (Lewin). Speech, rhythm, and emotion emerge as polyphonic invocational voices, gestures and music in our rites of passage. Each note has a psychological and emotional progression to the psyche, each step is complete in itself.
We circumambulate, moving around the archetypal image over and over again. In each polyvalent moment, the holy spot or image is at the very center of life and so is the main focus of our existence. We no longer suppress our issues and potential but allow them to 'matter.'
Inner images are polyvalent. The creative voices and wisdom of the unconscious weave together story, personal experience, moods, ideas, instincts, and characters. Psyche's truth is polyvalent. It moves in a variety of directions and cannot be reduced to a single formulation.
Psyche represents multiple potentials, perspectives, and relationships at once -- a pluralistic conception of interactional identity. The psychic interface is the middle ground where ideas, images and emotions meet. Psyche is the first archetypal principle, the immediacy of creative fantasy, interacting narratives, and meaning.
The character of Psyche colors both the morphology and the thinking bias of images. The archetypal energies are completely vital and this cosmological vitality is pervasive and unceasingly unfolding as our self within the world. Polyvalent meaning structures translated to symbols originating in archetypal potential -- the potential infinity of symbol meaning.
In Homeric times, psyche meant vitality, creative life force, elan vital. Vitality permeates our experience, not as a cognitive or affective reaction, but as dynamic felt sense of unfolding vitality. The vitality of the field of awareness is as multidimensional as the field itself. This luminous human awareness pulsates and resonates with the lucidity within all phenomena.
Jung switched the focus of self-exploration to inner experience, towards the wisdom and knowledge of our individual inner life. These are the things that dreams are made of, pure nature itself, expressing simultaneously in multiple dimensions of embodied awareness. Concepts of mortality and immortality collapse into one another.
The embodiment of awakened awareness resonates with and within Being itself. Such gnosis is an existential and foundational experience, rooted in a felt-sense of subtle energies. Being as psyche intertwines being as soma, somatic actualities of embodied awareness.
Psyche as a cosmic principle is a sacred bridge between inner and outer dimensions, reflecting our own entangled identity with nonlocal, timeless, spaceless ground. Psyche is its own phenomenal world, the totality of all psychic processes, both conscious and unconscious.
We have within our own embodiment the symbolic power of the archetypal dimension of timeless awareness and time simultaneously. This symbolic dimension of human awareness is the realm of archetypal knowingness. We experience the natures of the archetypal configurations that are intrinsic and innate within their own embodiment and within their own circumstances.
It animates matter giving rise to the world from the abysmal unconscious to the self-recursive, ouroboric realm of the soul’s inquiry. Archetypal images have a subliminal richness of unfathomable nature and consilience of inexhaustible insights.
Psyche is a pregnant darkness of open-ended potentials. All-embracing psyche cooks raw forces in the collective unconscious into living history and events. In its numinosity, we are all ultimately identical with the divine source of creation itself, the cosmic creative principle.
But without direct experience of primordial awareness, a luminous spacious awareness, it remains a concept or nondual aspiration -- even a spiritual fantasy of enlightenment in the self-arising awareness field, the ground beyond awareness of awareness.
Jung suggested we only know matter by perceiving psychic images, in the psychological, not parapsychological manner. Psyche is the creative essence of humanity. The materializing universe emanates from and dissolves back into the radiant overflow of self-revealing psyche.
Even metaphysical assertions arise from the omnipresent fantasies of the psyche, but it is the condition of all metaphysical realities. It's a psychic fact that people believe things that are irrational or reductive ideas. Jung is firm that there is no other reality but psyche, which mediates spirit and matter through immediate experience.
This living reality, as the densest darkness, contains the secret of matter and spirit. Living body and living psyche equate with the living world, reflecting the whole cosmos (world-whole), transcendent to and beyond all phenomenal form. Psyche focuses the analogy between nature and humanity. Nature and psyche can be explored simultaneously through our own archaic nature.
Ervin Laszlo suggests his 'akashic paradigm' is the "realization that there is a deep dimension in the universe that generates and interconnects all things in the world. This gives us a new, encompassing concept of cosmos and consciousness, fresh meaning for our life, and reliable guidance for creating our future. Recognizing that our “coherence” – connection with our interior and exterior world – is the key to our health and viability."
Interiority may be both the source of all of our difficulties, but also their creative solution. Jung discovered the autonomous dimension of psyche with its images as the source of interiority of the imaginal realm, human experiences, and time-anomalous phenomena.
Images, ideas, and beliefs are mediated by the unconscious and impact our unconscious construction of a narrative of self-identity to answer the perennial questions of Who, What, and Why we are here, and When and Where we come from and might be going.
This feeds into our worldview -- our metaphysics for viewing self, others, and cosmos -- a more or less unconscious attitude toward life and the world. A world view is a set of presuppositions (or assumptions) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously) about the basic makeup of our world. Everyone has a world view, whether they can explain it or not. It's our attempt at a comprehensive interpretation.
A worldview is the set of beliefs about fundamental aspects of Reality that ground and influence all our perceiving, thinking, knowing, and doing.
One's worldview is also referred to as one's philosophy, philosophy of life, mindset, outlook on life, formula for life, ideology, faith, or even religion. The elements of one's worldview, the beliefs about certain aspects of Reality, are our
- epistemology: beliefs about the nature and sources of knowledge;
- metaphysics: beliefs about the ultimate nature of Reality;
- cosmology: beliefs about the origins and nature of the universe, life, and Mankind;
- teleology: beliefs about the meaning and purpose of the universe, its inanimate elements, and its inhabitants;
- theology: beliefs about the existence and nature of God;
- anthropology: beliefs about the nature and purpose of Man in general and, oneself in particular;
- axiology: beliefs about the nature of value, what is good and bad, what is right and wrong.
Our worldview is the set of beliefs about fundamental aspects of Reality that ground and influence all your perceiving, thinking, knowing, and doing. Your worldview consists of your epistemology, your metaphysics, your cosmology, your teleology, your theology, your anthropology, and your axiology.
We each have our own worldview and agenda which sets priorities in its point of view. The depth worldview unities spirit, psyche and matter. Exposure to a more convincing or comprehensive worldview can wash away the solid ground from under one's feet.
Psyche orchestrates coherent, complex, intelligible patterns of meaning and improvisational creativity, shaped by the multilevel unconscious tuning, caused by unresolved conflicts in the deeper unconscious layers.
Meaning is not an entity, not a creed, a doctrine, a worldview, also not something like the fairytale treasure hard to attain. It is not semantic, not a content. Meaning, where it exists, is first of all an implicit or a priori fact of existence.
Meaning can never be the answer to a question. It is, conversely, an unquestioned and unquestionable certainty that predates any possible questioning. It is the groundedness of existence, a sense of embeddedness in life, of containment in the world, esse in anima. Our perception and cognition cannot see beyond the psyche.
Psychic reality means to be in soul, through embodiment (soma) or enlivenment (psyche)--perceiving images viscerally and mentally. Acknowledgement of this force is recognition of the archetypal nature of reality, and the archetypal reality of nature, and our own nature. She is a way of reclaiming the divinity of body, matter, and world.
This resurrection of the soul of the world means a raising of consciousness of created things, the world's psychic reality. Metaphor gives us a polycentric, polyvalent perspective.
The archetypal realm expresses as mythological metaphor, but there is no single expression, meaning, or metaphor. Physical reality becomes psychic, and psyche becomes real--it "matters." The difference between soul and external things no longer matters. A coherent living symbol is an essential unconscious factor.
Inner and outer world are both real and in fact One World, a field of imagistic intelligibility. The world becomes transparent and we "see through" the sacred depths, not with subjective analysis but because transparency emerges with vision itself.
Image, metaphor and symbol bridge the abyss between matter and spirit, shallow surface and deadly darkness. In Conscious Femininity (p. 54), Marion Woodman describes metaphor as a refinement of "the raw energy patterns of the unconscious into forms that can be assimilated into consciousness."
Images are the subtle net that unites symbols, subtle bodies in the anima mundi. They are integrated with feeling, mind and imagination. We can see soul in all natural objects. We can notice our fantasies constantly conditioning our experience of reality. Knowledge of spirit doesn't come from ideas, even revelations, but through a reflective process. We see with imaginative eyes.
Turning and Turning Within the Widening Gyre
James Hillman contended we are foremost image makers, whose psychic substance consists of images. We are essentially imaginal beings, existing in imagination in an ensouled world. Psyche is polytheistic, but in the sense of diversity, not theology.
This approach follows the autonomy of the psyche. Conscious personality engages its provocative, ambiguous, and enigmatic unconscious counterpart, rooted in the permanent ambiguity of metaphors. As an Oracle, psyche speaks for itself. We answer with true commitment and relentless devotion to soul.
Looking at the image from all sides, we draw a metaphorical magic circle of sacred repetition that contains the meaning of the image without any assumptions. We get a much wider sense of the phenomena. We open to alternate perspectives as we de-center from fixed egoic perspectives.
However, the expansion of the soul is experienced as inflation of the ego -- ego superficiality with no concept of psychological 'digestion' or integration. It is both a psychological and spiritual phenomenon related to the shadow. This inflation or distancing creates a greater disconnect from the spirit/body.
It is dangerous to identify with either the highest or lowest aspects of our psyche. Negative inflation means to be over—identified with too great an absorption in the deeper self. This blocks rather than facilitates the transformative process. Supporting such allegations with metaphysical claims is another dodge.
"I also showed that to annex the deeper layers of the unconscious, which I have called the collective unconscious, produces an extension of the personality leading to the state of inflation." (Jung 1953, 7:243 )
"In introjection, he gets involved in a ridiculous self-deification, or else a moral self-laceration. The mistake he makes in both cases comes from attributing to a person the contents of the collective unconscious. In this way he makes himself or his partner either god or devil. ... It causes exaggeration, a puffed-up attitude (inflation), loss of free will, delusion, and enthusiasm in good and evil alike'' (Jung 1953, 7:110).
We circumambulate our issues from different points of view at different stages of life. We encircle or encompass the psyche's emergent material in an inclusive widening spiral, pushing our boundaries, hoping the 'spirit of this world will heal and rise.' 'Vast are the shadows, That straddle and strafe, And struggle in the darkness, Troubling my eyes.'
Things Fall Apart; the Center Cannot Hold
Hillman deconstructed Jung's metaphysics and psychologico-philosophical pre-conceptions about psyche. In this de-centered approach all images are treated equally and not transformed into other fantasies or theories. They may be personified but not by structural notions. It is psyche itself that personifies and mythologizes to make images. Soul formulates itself in an irrational, mythic manner.
The polycentric pandemonium of images is not hierarchic, nor structured, nor concepts in disguise. Imagery is part of human nature and precondition of all knowledge. Imagination has been called the basis of human self-consciousness, speaking, memory, dreaming, writing etc. Imagery enlarges subjective consciousness. No art, science or culture would be possible without it.
Our fundamental approach to the basic forces of the human psyche is learning through experience with the imaginal realm, whether it is spontaneous, self-directed, or experiential therapy. Transitions may include rites of passage, pilgrimage, rituals, initiations, symbols, dream journeys, and connectedness to the environment.
Using imagination we grasp a truer, more meaningful reality given by soul. We attend to the overtones and undertones of the moment that lead us deeper into the image. Soul is our breadth and depth, the light of the animated body, the flow of divine energy. The essence of soul is connectedness which thrives on relationship and reflexive awareness, our inner psychodrama.
Hillman points out that we can remember, associating backward and downward into the forgotten and repressed. And in psychic reality we find a multiplicity of answers to all major, archetypal, sorts of questions--relative answers. Reality entangles various perspectives. All our ways of seeing are imaginal.
Each archetypal perspective has its way of self-knowing. Archetypal encounters find expression in all aspects of life, in the imaginal realm between the subjective and objective. A sense of soul as the middle ground of reality emerges with cultivation of plural, multifaceted imagination.
We wait to see if it reveals its significance. We don't have to work on the image if we simply allow the image to work on us. The autonomous unfolding of images is unconstrained by attempts to structure or direct the imaginal experience, the holy stream of common life.
This approach has to do with keeping soul and spirit "distinct but conjoined," in a combination of solar and lunar consciousness. It is the alchemical marriage of masculine and feminine principles, which represent all polarities, including the ideal and material. Basically, the transcendent and infinite divine (spirit/abstract/ideal above) is referred to as 'he', while the nurturing immanent or indwelling sacred (matter/concrete below) is called 'she.'
Solar consciousness is bright, analytical, logical; lunar consciousness is dark, diffuse, relational. Their alchemical combination is a sort of "illumined lunacy," according to Hillman. Thus, the "fuzzy" domain is revealed as the realm of imagination between the spiritual heights and psychobiological depths--that limbo, or twilight zone, between heaven and hell. This imaginal perspective is neither real nor unreal, in the conventional sense.
Psyche is lunar -- a lunar light, an imaginal psychobiology, visible in trance, expressive arts, and creativity. More, self-organizing psyche is a subtle background of immensely complex behavior (a network that lies beneath space) against which everything in the material universe becomes perceptible. Like entanglement within a network of bonds, once we interact interact locally, we are correlated forever, even nonlocally.
This cosmic memory field shows us glimpses of infinite possibilities beyond the veil of our limited perceptions, in other incredibly complex realities above and below reality as-we-know. Moving beyond avoidance and denial, we can engage with our own spontaneously arising material by receptivity to the unconscious imagery and encouraging dialogue.
Thus, we complete the circuit between heaven and Earth, to bring forth the divine 'gold' within ourselves. We have 'a foot in both worlds.' Inner life is mercurial, a complex psychic layer-cake of inner planes of transcendent experience where quantum leaps of consciousness are possible and messages are exchanged with the Great Unknown.
Perception of what is real and what is not dims and vanishes in a whirlwind of synchronicities. Imagination is reality. We understand the world we live in, or think we live in, is illusory, a construct of our own perceptual apparatus, preconceived beliefs, emotional investments, and a malleable interpretation of our brains. The soul guide initiates the transformation process.
Transcendence & Immanence
Personal transformation brings unconscious material into consciousness, expresses the attached emotions, and releases the trauma. Transformation initiates a remedial, regressive phase of emotional healing. It continues in the psychospiritual realm, deconditioning normality and restoring wholeness that incorporates the shadow and the luminous in a rejuvenated self.
Natural trance can be used to facilitate transcendence. The transcendent function is Jung's name for our inner self-healing impulse. Joseph Campbell claimed, "To experience your eternity through the vicissitudes of your mortality, that's the total goal" (1982, p.142).
Spiritual practice contains two paradoxically-related impulses to ascend (transcendence) and descend (immanence). We can access transcendent through ascent realities or ground and transfigure our human nature in descent. Integrating the two allows an embodied spirituality to emerge.
Heraclitus famously declared that the road up and the road down is one and the same. He also said, “You could not discover the limits of the soul (psyche) , even if you traveled every road to do so; such is the depth (bathum) of its meaning (logos)” (Hillman, RV xi)
Likewise, psychologically there are 'solar' paths of ascent, creativity, and transcendence. 'Lunar' somatic-centered healing modes of descent use trance, and expressive arts. Many transitional experiences are described by Jung and others from alchemy, which to the marriage or merger of solar and lunar impulses. Transitions can be incremental or abrupt, ecstatic or traumatic.
Consciousness seeks universal mind, while the body seeks the sacred depths of materiality. Both are paths that consolidate our identity (a consistent sense of presence; authenticity), uniting us with universal forces greater than ourselves -- cosmos.
'Lunar' psychologies are rooted in archetypal and phenomenological approaches, including somatic and gestalt therapies, and some existential perspectives. This embodied perspective grounds spirituality, emphasizes depth over height, immersion in life, using pain, symptoms, limitation, depression, ecstasy, history, and memory. It facilitates the therapeutic process in grounded experience and emergence of immense latent power.
We are frequently in trance states during our daily lives, we do not label them that way, nor do we acknowledge them. Most of us spend our lives in automatically programmed trance states, such as driving on auto-pilot, anger trances, love trances, fear trances.
Trances induced by memories of places, phobia trances, archetypal trances, subpersonality trances, social roles, etc. bind our creative energy. Reactions are spontaneous trance states when they happen to us. Blocked imagery is one of the most common problems in depth work.
Self-hypnosis is a natural process. It catalyzes pre-verbal and pre-conscious levels, transpersonal and psychospiritual experiences. Permissive rather than authoritarian, it “primes the pump” for the flow of unconscious imagery. Experience arises when physical sensation meets psychic imagination.
Seeing the world aesthetically and holistically means we accept infirmity, deformity, impairment, painful symptoms, disability, and abnormality as intrinsic to the human condition. The body's own hidden language gives physical form to psychological realities through relaxed responsiveness and interaction with complexes. Split-off or dissociated aspects of self are isolated by state-dependent amnesias or trances.
We can explore what is difficult about feeling anxiety, pain, or fear. Revivifying state-dependent memories reiterates experiences that created their own trance states. Implicit and somatic memory arise in the prenatal state. They are unconscious but raw behavioral, emotional, perceptual and somatosensory forms of memory, experienced as felt-sense non-verbal sensations or behavioral impulses.
It is possible that through dissociation, a person may attempt to heal in a self-organizing way, but the transformative process gets “stuck” at fragmentation. It then recreates itself through the dynamics of “infinite nesting” and “self-iteration.”
Core psychological patterns reinforce themselves by filtering sensory information about the world and self. They automatically organize the rest of experience to support that basic pattern. Existentially, we either embrace or resist life with self-sabotage that thwarts our potential for Self and Soul.
Rather than struggling, suppressing and rejecting our defects with self-loathing and recriminations, it provides a way to revision them as gifts with their own voices and healing wisdom. It deepens us into life and self-compassion without losing ourselves in overwhelming intense feeling or emotional burnout.
Lunar epiphanies are an equally valuable way of fantasizing the world and cosmos, as well as ourselves. Wider than solar consciousness, this lunar mode is capable of accepting, giving, receiving, incorporating, returning, and distributing its effects as renewal and regeneration. It is the potential to be actualized and embodied in all our fullness and flaws in our most grounded, uncontrived responses to life with our body's autonomy and instinct in the unhabituated ebb and flow of the constant sea of change.
Humanity and the cosmos share the same creation mythos, which describes our ultimate return. We both spring from the dark, formless chaos. Death reverses that creation. Poesis is the making of soul through imagination and metaphor. Like electromagnetism, psyche is an archetypal field, an invisible yet primordial matrix.
Imagination, an unseen but vital realm, precedes perception. The image is irreducible. Our reaction to the stimulus of life is unique -- the living processes of the soul, the deepest most profound part of us. Soul inseparably connects the traumatic and divine. Psyche is a plurality of principles, imaginal multiplicity.
Emergent images are spontaneous, autonomous; they multiply and interpenetrate. Coherent phenomena appear out of and disappear back into psyche. Soul remains ambiguous, elusive, and can be difficult to know with the ordinary mind. The very absence of our imaginal past and future, an invisible but vital realm, frames our present where we feel their impact.
We speak of the 'return of the soul to the world,' when, in fact, it never left, but was repressed and ignored amidst the voluminous flow of our stream of consciousness. Soul flight is a response to trauma. Soul that can travel to forget, by-pass, or diminish awareness can also travel to remember, to re-collect itself, 'there and back again.'
If the journey initially seems heroic, the voluntary surrender of identity emerges as counterpoint grounded in presence, love, joy, peace, and empathy, and diminished fear. What we surrender is ambivalence, avoidance, and rigid control. The shallow identity is immersed in the depths of the vast creative source deep within.
Return is more the reiteration and returning of our soul to our awareness. If we notice her in cyclic and repetitive events, we realize it was our own disconnection, dissociation, disaffection, and ignorance of our dreams and images that kept her at bay.
Intuition, creativity, and mindful consciousness, self-observation and self-regulation are revived. The same dissociation and repetitive behaviors can also function hypnotically to allow us to engage another healing reality. Hypnotherapy effectively by-passes the conscious, critical mind and promotes flow of imagery. Hillman suggests we “can never grasp it [psyche] apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light” (Hillman, 1975).
Mirrors have been studied by cognitive psychology in order to understand self-recognition, self-identity, and self-consciousness. Moreover, the relevance of mirrors in spirituality, magic and arts may also suggest that mirrors can be symbols of unconscious contents. Jung investigated mirrors in relation to the unconscious, particularly in Psychology and Alchemy.
Images funnel into the black hole of the unconscious from the vast expanse, while others spew out like a singularity -- a geyser of forms emerging from an undifferentiated packed density. Traditional spirituality usually recognizes what we can called an Upper, Lower, and Middle unconscious.
Upper (mystical, spiritual peak experiences) and Lower (primal wounds and transpersonal shadow) realms are paradoxically transpersonal, while the Middle is personal and individual. Without actually 'going anywhere', soul, too, metaphorically appears and vanishes, either ascending into the transcendent heights 'over the rainbow', or descending into the chaotic darkness and immanent depths of invisibility 'beneath the earth'.
Ours is a balancing act: "Balance is important. Expanding into the lower but not the higher leads one to become psychologically healthy but not spiritually fulfilled (a nontranscending
self-actualizer), and expanding into the higher but not the lower leads one to become a psychologically unhealthy spiritual seeker (the spiritual by-pass). To complete the psychical tour, there exists also a Middle Unconscious, consisting of contents that are unconscious but not defensively repressed and therefore accessible in our normal functioning. Expanding this Middle Unconscious is to open ourselves to the conscious experience of who we really are, disidentifying with the limited range of identities and becoming mindfully aware of our truly expansive real Self." (Hartman, Zimberoff)
The re-enchantment of the world reanimates our vitality and engagement. Psyche links to the past and the dead, our ancestors, and echoing ancient themes common to us all. The lost soul is found within; the mysterious inner world comes into play, into lived relationship with conscious awareness, deepening and grounding consciousness at more primordial levels.
Through illumined senses we can see through the nature of apparent reality for ourselves, if we but try. Things become transparent, shine and speak. Signs echo within us. Then we develop our own philosophy, apart from consensus. When it comes to questions of speculation on the unknown, we can either accept what others have said, or look for ourselves.
We find a new relationship to the divine within matter, within creation, within our body. There is no soul without body. Each object or body is also an imaginal image. The ethereal essence pervades and is diffused throughout nature. It embraces and energizes all life in the cosmos.
When we redeem our relationship, we find her divine light everywhere, a numinosum of wisdom and knowledge that informs our lives and art based on imagination. She is the creative force of inner vision, the world of Mystery.
Imagistic Approach
The ancient Greek philosopher Thales declared, "the whole world is full of gods." The Renaissance revived the idea that the whole world or cosmos has soul. This is the root metaphor of archetypal psychology.
"If we could reoriginate psychology at its Western source in Florence, a way might open again toward a meta-psychology that is a cosmology, a poetic vision of the cosmos which fulfills the soul's need for placing itself in the vast scheme of things.” –James Hillman, Anima Mundi
Theories of meaning and metaphor form an aesthetic basis for aesthetic universals. An archetypal approach explores the aesthetic of expansion, possibility, and depth. The symbolic approach is generalized and conventional, rather than imaginal and novel, particular and peculiar.
Archetypal imagination is also congruent with the metaphoric roots of mythological thinking and symbolic cognition. Hillman distinguished between symbolic and imagistic approaches, where archetypal included 'the field of aesthetics in the broadest sense'. The sublime relates to both religion and aesthetics. Soul mediates between mind and body, idea and matter, actualities and the Beyond.
Psyche is the self-sustaining imaginal substrate of consciousness, a sensed presence. Inner images are the soul's substance. They arise from primordial reality as self-generating and self-revealing psychic life and knowledge of the soul. Our only immediate knowledge is psychic existence. Images are specific, concrete particularizations.
The soul experiences spiritual journeys of descent from and return to the imaginal world. For example, loss pulls us down into the soul of things, the Anima Mundi, world psyche, the imaginal sense of cosmos as psyche. We can lose innocence, trust, spontaneity, courage, and self-esteem. They are sacrificed, stolen, or abandoned in traumatic moments, leaving an immense void -- fear, loneliness, unworthiness, pain, abandonment, and spiritual isolation.
From a mythological perspective, trauma is perceived as a descent of the soul, a dropping or falling down. We can fall apart in grief, shame, betrayal, crushing trauma, orgasmic delirium, or spiritual experience. Descent can be experienced as a sudden violent attack which pulls us down or an agonizing loss of soul too overwhelming for consciousness to contain.
Image bridges the conscious and unconscious situation at the moment. Even soul itself is a fantasy image, for Hillman. The luminous consciousness of the worked on soul arises, revealing the essence of being and sacred embodiment, the images within nature, the secret heart of nature.
Reflection is a metaphor for the mind-mirror -- the interiority of perception and its illusion of projected exteriority through dream, image, and fantasy. Interior domains include naturalism's aesthetics, intersubjectivity, and consciousness (Zimmerman).
Naturalism allows for the emergence of properties like consciousness, values and aesthetics. The unity of nature has aesthetic and existential implications. A depth aesthetic rests on the emergence of the archetypal in all creativity. Sacred 'nature' is an encompassing reality that has no other referent. Nature is all that there is: nature is whatever is as it is.
Our aesthetic reflex is our guide in soul-making -- the imaginative parts of our nature. Aesthetic perception is a catalyst for metaphor. The proximity and availability of our aesthetic response to phenomena is the source of soul-making, witnessing “that immediate thing as image, its smile, a joy, a joy that makes ‘forever’” (Hillman, J. (1992). The thought of the heart and the soul of the world. Spring Pub., p. 49)
Consciousness is continually being imagined (imaged, in-formed) by metaphors. Archetypal states of consciousness frame individual response with comprehensible aesthetic patterns. Imagination is invoked to behold the metaphor that lies beyond literal ‘reality’. We engagea new, equally valid and ‘real’ experience of life rich with significance. Archetypal psychology is “the development of a sense of soul…and the method of therapy is the cultivation of imagination” (Hillman, 1983, p. 15).
Apprehension of meaning includes noticing which archetypes are activated when viewing or engaging with art. Archetypes are the components of the deepest level of knowledge for cognition, the collective unconsciousness, which defines the basic structure of the life-world. Non-active attentiveness to images prevents us from entanglement in materiality of the image.
Experience of the world with archetypal symbols is a new form of aesthetics. A non-critical depth aesthetic rests on the manifestation of the archetypal in all forms of creativity, especially related to the spiritual and religious. The framework of symbolic interactionism, phenomenology of perception and archetypes, suggests that symbols translate information from the physical world to human experience.
Archetypes are the universal knowledge of cognition that generates the background of human experience (the life-world). We experience the world with symbols, and archetypes relate the deepest level of human experience. We do not directly react to the ontological-existing reality, but respond to our understanding of this reality. Each action, object, or event has its own self-revealing meaning.
Archetypal symbols carry implicit meanings and the psychological approach to the archetype is as metaphor. Symbol cueing may facilitate memory and subsequent recall of meaning words associated with symbols. Archetypes provide vitality to art and can be accessed by viewers through attention to bodily responses and emotional awareness enhanced by imagination. Images should not be reduced to mere feelings. The metaphorical becomes meaningful when we experience the image from the inside, when it takes us into the imaginal.
Spirit chases ultimates, unity, and identity, but soul is about dreams, fantasy, images. In the aesthetic domain, imagination overcomes disciplinary, mythic and individual boundaries. A metaphor is a voluntary misassignment of a label, but it is also more than that. In metaphorical reference, a symbol, linguistic or not, is made to refer to something not belonging to the realm normally correlated to the symbol’s schema, rearrangements in a field of reference and affect. Images are part of the realm of experiential psychic reality and do not need interpretation. Fantasy is related to body by image and instinct.
For Hillman, 'the primary, and irreducible, language of...archetypal patterns is the metaphorical discourse of myths' (1983, p. 2). Metaphorical or mythic truth no less a form of truth than literal truth -- autonomous informing powers. Indeed, the literal and the metaphorical in a sense lie on the same continuum. Literal denotation, metaphorical denotation, as well as exemplification and expression, can all contribute to the construction of a world of experience -- a way of seeing the world.
https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/213128/file-2133485071-pdf/docs/Journal_9-1_Soul_Migrations.pdf?t=1420502489674
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262637369_Jung_and_Hypnotherapy
mirrors - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4219253/
astro - https://books.google.com/books?id=hNrt71H_MlYC&pg=PA48&lpg=PA48&dq=lunar+consciousness,+hillman&source=bl&ots=jw_DBZrO1L&sig=qJ1LmibKO6hV7C8BKE4cqs_thf8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiVq8DVnojaAhUJu1MKHYyiCC4Q6AEIUzAD#v=onepage&q=lunar%20consciousness%2C%20hillman&f=false
abstracts - https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/2009602875_Diane_Zimberoff
https://books.google.com/books?id=8l-JnRCv-dsC&pg=PA226&lpg=PA226&dq=%22esse+in+anima,+hillman&source=bl&ots=LGWNR84p-3&sig=KL6NZFDxawiIReVptg6FgedOOsU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjXse2G7JDaAhXPyVMKHWSaAD04ChDoAQg9MAM#v=onepage&q=%22esse%20in%20anima%2C%20hillman&f=false
https://www.academia.edu/33723166/Forms_of_Vitality_within_Embodied_Awareness_A_Phenomenology_of_Invocation?auto=download&campaign=weekly_digest
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/41547202_What_Does_it_Mean_to_Live_a_Fully_Embodied_Spiritual_Life
James Hillman contended we are foremost image makers, whose psychic substance consists of images. We are essentially imaginal beings, existing in imagination in an ensouled world. Psyche is polytheistic, but in the sense of diversity, not theology.
This approach follows the autonomy of the psyche. Conscious personality engages its provocative, ambiguous, and enigmatic unconscious counterpart, rooted in the permanent ambiguity of metaphors. As an Oracle, psyche speaks for itself. We answer with true commitment and relentless devotion to soul.
Looking at the image from all sides, we draw a metaphorical magic circle of sacred repetition that contains the meaning of the image without any assumptions. We get a much wider sense of the phenomena. We open to alternate perspectives as we de-center from fixed egoic perspectives.
However, the expansion of the soul is experienced as inflation of the ego -- ego superficiality with no concept of psychological 'digestion' or integration. It is both a psychological and spiritual phenomenon related to the shadow. This inflation or distancing creates a greater disconnect from the spirit/body.
It is dangerous to identify with either the highest or lowest aspects of our psyche. Negative inflation means to be over—identified with too great an absorption in the deeper self. This blocks rather than facilitates the transformative process. Supporting such allegations with metaphysical claims is another dodge.
"I also showed that to annex the deeper layers of the unconscious, which I have called the collective unconscious, produces an extension of the personality leading to the state of inflation." (Jung 1953, 7:243 )
"In introjection, he gets involved in a ridiculous self-deification, or else a moral self-laceration. The mistake he makes in both cases comes from attributing to a person the contents of the collective unconscious. In this way he makes himself or his partner either god or devil. ... It causes exaggeration, a puffed-up attitude (inflation), loss of free will, delusion, and enthusiasm in good and evil alike'' (Jung 1953, 7:110).
We circumambulate our issues from different points of view at different stages of life. We encircle or encompass the psyche's emergent material in an inclusive widening spiral, pushing our boundaries, hoping the 'spirit of this world will heal and rise.' 'Vast are the shadows, That straddle and strafe, And struggle in the darkness, Troubling my eyes.'
Things Fall Apart; the Center Cannot Hold
Hillman deconstructed Jung's metaphysics and psychologico-philosophical pre-conceptions about psyche. In this de-centered approach all images are treated equally and not transformed into other fantasies or theories. They may be personified but not by structural notions. It is psyche itself that personifies and mythologizes to make images. Soul formulates itself in an irrational, mythic manner.
The polycentric pandemonium of images is not hierarchic, nor structured, nor concepts in disguise. Imagery is part of human nature and precondition of all knowledge. Imagination has been called the basis of human self-consciousness, speaking, memory, dreaming, writing etc. Imagery enlarges subjective consciousness. No art, science or culture would be possible without it.
Our fundamental approach to the basic forces of the human psyche is learning through experience with the imaginal realm, whether it is spontaneous, self-directed, or experiential therapy. Transitions may include rites of passage, pilgrimage, rituals, initiations, symbols, dream journeys, and connectedness to the environment.
Using imagination we grasp a truer, more meaningful reality given by soul. We attend to the overtones and undertones of the moment that lead us deeper into the image. Soul is our breadth and depth, the light of the animated body, the flow of divine energy. The essence of soul is connectedness which thrives on relationship and reflexive awareness, our inner psychodrama.
Hillman points out that we can remember, associating backward and downward into the forgotten and repressed. And in psychic reality we find a multiplicity of answers to all major, archetypal, sorts of questions--relative answers. Reality entangles various perspectives. All our ways of seeing are imaginal.
Each archetypal perspective has its way of self-knowing. Archetypal encounters find expression in all aspects of life, in the imaginal realm between the subjective and objective. A sense of soul as the middle ground of reality emerges with cultivation of plural, multifaceted imagination.
We wait to see if it reveals its significance. We don't have to work on the image if we simply allow the image to work on us. The autonomous unfolding of images is unconstrained by attempts to structure or direct the imaginal experience, the holy stream of common life.
This approach has to do with keeping soul and spirit "distinct but conjoined," in a combination of solar and lunar consciousness. It is the alchemical marriage of masculine and feminine principles, which represent all polarities, including the ideal and material. Basically, the transcendent and infinite divine (spirit/abstract/ideal above) is referred to as 'he', while the nurturing immanent or indwelling sacred (matter/concrete below) is called 'she.'
Solar consciousness is bright, analytical, logical; lunar consciousness is dark, diffuse, relational. Their alchemical combination is a sort of "illumined lunacy," according to Hillman. Thus, the "fuzzy" domain is revealed as the realm of imagination between the spiritual heights and psychobiological depths--that limbo, or twilight zone, between heaven and hell. This imaginal perspective is neither real nor unreal, in the conventional sense.
Psyche is lunar -- a lunar light, an imaginal psychobiology, visible in trance, expressive arts, and creativity. More, self-organizing psyche is a subtle background of immensely complex behavior (a network that lies beneath space) against which everything in the material universe becomes perceptible. Like entanglement within a network of bonds, once we interact interact locally, we are correlated forever, even nonlocally.
This cosmic memory field shows us glimpses of infinite possibilities beyond the veil of our limited perceptions, in other incredibly complex realities above and below reality as-we-know. Moving beyond avoidance and denial, we can engage with our own spontaneously arising material by receptivity to the unconscious imagery and encouraging dialogue.
Thus, we complete the circuit between heaven and Earth, to bring forth the divine 'gold' within ourselves. We have 'a foot in both worlds.' Inner life is mercurial, a complex psychic layer-cake of inner planes of transcendent experience where quantum leaps of consciousness are possible and messages are exchanged with the Great Unknown.
Perception of what is real and what is not dims and vanishes in a whirlwind of synchronicities. Imagination is reality. We understand the world we live in, or think we live in, is illusory, a construct of our own perceptual apparatus, preconceived beliefs, emotional investments, and a malleable interpretation of our brains. The soul guide initiates the transformation process.
Transcendence & Immanence
Personal transformation brings unconscious material into consciousness, expresses the attached emotions, and releases the trauma. Transformation initiates a remedial, regressive phase of emotional healing. It continues in the psychospiritual realm, deconditioning normality and restoring wholeness that incorporates the shadow and the luminous in a rejuvenated self.
Natural trance can be used to facilitate transcendence. The transcendent function is Jung's name for our inner self-healing impulse. Joseph Campbell claimed, "To experience your eternity through the vicissitudes of your mortality, that's the total goal" (1982, p.142).
Spiritual practice contains two paradoxically-related impulses to ascend (transcendence) and descend (immanence). We can access transcendent through ascent realities or ground and transfigure our human nature in descent. Integrating the two allows an embodied spirituality to emerge.
Heraclitus famously declared that the road up and the road down is one and the same. He also said, “You could not discover the limits of the soul (psyche) , even if you traveled every road to do so; such is the depth (bathum) of its meaning (logos)” (Hillman, RV xi)
Likewise, psychologically there are 'solar' paths of ascent, creativity, and transcendence. 'Lunar' somatic-centered healing modes of descent use trance, and expressive arts. Many transitional experiences are described by Jung and others from alchemy, which to the marriage or merger of solar and lunar impulses. Transitions can be incremental or abrupt, ecstatic or traumatic.
Consciousness seeks universal mind, while the body seeks the sacred depths of materiality. Both are paths that consolidate our identity (a consistent sense of presence; authenticity), uniting us with universal forces greater than ourselves -- cosmos.
'Lunar' psychologies are rooted in archetypal and phenomenological approaches, including somatic and gestalt therapies, and some existential perspectives. This embodied perspective grounds spirituality, emphasizes depth over height, immersion in life, using pain, symptoms, limitation, depression, ecstasy, history, and memory. It facilitates the therapeutic process in grounded experience and emergence of immense latent power.
We are frequently in trance states during our daily lives, we do not label them that way, nor do we acknowledge them. Most of us spend our lives in automatically programmed trance states, such as driving on auto-pilot, anger trances, love trances, fear trances.
Trances induced by memories of places, phobia trances, archetypal trances, subpersonality trances, social roles, etc. bind our creative energy. Reactions are spontaneous trance states when they happen to us. Blocked imagery is one of the most common problems in depth work.
Self-hypnosis is a natural process. It catalyzes pre-verbal and pre-conscious levels, transpersonal and psychospiritual experiences. Permissive rather than authoritarian, it “primes the pump” for the flow of unconscious imagery. Experience arises when physical sensation meets psychic imagination.
Seeing the world aesthetically and holistically means we accept infirmity, deformity, impairment, painful symptoms, disability, and abnormality as intrinsic to the human condition. The body's own hidden language gives physical form to psychological realities through relaxed responsiveness and interaction with complexes. Split-off or dissociated aspects of self are isolated by state-dependent amnesias or trances.
We can explore what is difficult about feeling anxiety, pain, or fear. Revivifying state-dependent memories reiterates experiences that created their own trance states. Implicit and somatic memory arise in the prenatal state. They are unconscious but raw behavioral, emotional, perceptual and somatosensory forms of memory, experienced as felt-sense non-verbal sensations or behavioral impulses.
It is possible that through dissociation, a person may attempt to heal in a self-organizing way, but the transformative process gets “stuck” at fragmentation. It then recreates itself through the dynamics of “infinite nesting” and “self-iteration.”
Core psychological patterns reinforce themselves by filtering sensory information about the world and self. They automatically organize the rest of experience to support that basic pattern. Existentially, we either embrace or resist life with self-sabotage that thwarts our potential for Self and Soul.
Rather than struggling, suppressing and rejecting our defects with self-loathing and recriminations, it provides a way to revision them as gifts with their own voices and healing wisdom. It deepens us into life and self-compassion without losing ourselves in overwhelming intense feeling or emotional burnout.
Lunar epiphanies are an equally valuable way of fantasizing the world and cosmos, as well as ourselves. Wider than solar consciousness, this lunar mode is capable of accepting, giving, receiving, incorporating, returning, and distributing its effects as renewal and regeneration. It is the potential to be actualized and embodied in all our fullness and flaws in our most grounded, uncontrived responses to life with our body's autonomy and instinct in the unhabituated ebb and flow of the constant sea of change.
Humanity and the cosmos share the same creation mythos, which describes our ultimate return. We both spring from the dark, formless chaos. Death reverses that creation. Poesis is the making of soul through imagination and metaphor. Like electromagnetism, psyche is an archetypal field, an invisible yet primordial matrix.
Imagination, an unseen but vital realm, precedes perception. The image is irreducible. Our reaction to the stimulus of life is unique -- the living processes of the soul, the deepest most profound part of us. Soul inseparably connects the traumatic and divine. Psyche is a plurality of principles, imaginal multiplicity.
Emergent images are spontaneous, autonomous; they multiply and interpenetrate. Coherent phenomena appear out of and disappear back into psyche. Soul remains ambiguous, elusive, and can be difficult to know with the ordinary mind. The very absence of our imaginal past and future, an invisible but vital realm, frames our present where we feel their impact.
We speak of the 'return of the soul to the world,' when, in fact, it never left, but was repressed and ignored amidst the voluminous flow of our stream of consciousness. Soul flight is a response to trauma. Soul that can travel to forget, by-pass, or diminish awareness can also travel to remember, to re-collect itself, 'there and back again.'
If the journey initially seems heroic, the voluntary surrender of identity emerges as counterpoint grounded in presence, love, joy, peace, and empathy, and diminished fear. What we surrender is ambivalence, avoidance, and rigid control. The shallow identity is immersed in the depths of the vast creative source deep within.
Return is more the reiteration and returning of our soul to our awareness. If we notice her in cyclic and repetitive events, we realize it was our own disconnection, dissociation, disaffection, and ignorance of our dreams and images that kept her at bay.
Intuition, creativity, and mindful consciousness, self-observation and self-regulation are revived. The same dissociation and repetitive behaviors can also function hypnotically to allow us to engage another healing reality. Hypnotherapy effectively by-passes the conscious, critical mind and promotes flow of imagery. Hillman suggests we “can never grasp it [psyche] apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light” (Hillman, 1975).
Mirrors have been studied by cognitive psychology in order to understand self-recognition, self-identity, and self-consciousness. Moreover, the relevance of mirrors in spirituality, magic and arts may also suggest that mirrors can be symbols of unconscious contents. Jung investigated mirrors in relation to the unconscious, particularly in Psychology and Alchemy.
Images funnel into the black hole of the unconscious from the vast expanse, while others spew out like a singularity -- a geyser of forms emerging from an undifferentiated packed density. Traditional spirituality usually recognizes what we can called an Upper, Lower, and Middle unconscious.
Upper (mystical, spiritual peak experiences) and Lower (primal wounds and transpersonal shadow) realms are paradoxically transpersonal, while the Middle is personal and individual. Without actually 'going anywhere', soul, too, metaphorically appears and vanishes, either ascending into the transcendent heights 'over the rainbow', or descending into the chaotic darkness and immanent depths of invisibility 'beneath the earth'.
Ours is a balancing act: "Balance is important. Expanding into the lower but not the higher leads one to become psychologically healthy but not spiritually fulfilled (a nontranscending
self-actualizer), and expanding into the higher but not the lower leads one to become a psychologically unhealthy spiritual seeker (the spiritual by-pass). To complete the psychical tour, there exists also a Middle Unconscious, consisting of contents that are unconscious but not defensively repressed and therefore accessible in our normal functioning. Expanding this Middle Unconscious is to open ourselves to the conscious experience of who we really are, disidentifying with the limited range of identities and becoming mindfully aware of our truly expansive real Self." (Hartman, Zimberoff)
The re-enchantment of the world reanimates our vitality and engagement. Psyche links to the past and the dead, our ancestors, and echoing ancient themes common to us all. The lost soul is found within; the mysterious inner world comes into play, into lived relationship with conscious awareness, deepening and grounding consciousness at more primordial levels.
Through illumined senses we can see through the nature of apparent reality for ourselves, if we but try. Things become transparent, shine and speak. Signs echo within us. Then we develop our own philosophy, apart from consensus. When it comes to questions of speculation on the unknown, we can either accept what others have said, or look for ourselves.
We find a new relationship to the divine within matter, within creation, within our body. There is no soul without body. Each object or body is also an imaginal image. The ethereal essence pervades and is diffused throughout nature. It embraces and energizes all life in the cosmos.
When we redeem our relationship, we find her divine light everywhere, a numinosum of wisdom and knowledge that informs our lives and art based on imagination. She is the creative force of inner vision, the world of Mystery.
Imagistic Approach
The ancient Greek philosopher Thales declared, "the whole world is full of gods." The Renaissance revived the idea that the whole world or cosmos has soul. This is the root metaphor of archetypal psychology.
"If we could reoriginate psychology at its Western source in Florence, a way might open again toward a meta-psychology that is a cosmology, a poetic vision of the cosmos which fulfills the soul's need for placing itself in the vast scheme of things.” –James Hillman, Anima Mundi
Theories of meaning and metaphor form an aesthetic basis for aesthetic universals. An archetypal approach explores the aesthetic of expansion, possibility, and depth. The symbolic approach is generalized and conventional, rather than imaginal and novel, particular and peculiar.
Archetypal imagination is also congruent with the metaphoric roots of mythological thinking and symbolic cognition. Hillman distinguished between symbolic and imagistic approaches, where archetypal included 'the field of aesthetics in the broadest sense'. The sublime relates to both religion and aesthetics. Soul mediates between mind and body, idea and matter, actualities and the Beyond.
Psyche is the self-sustaining imaginal substrate of consciousness, a sensed presence. Inner images are the soul's substance. They arise from primordial reality as self-generating and self-revealing psychic life and knowledge of the soul. Our only immediate knowledge is psychic existence. Images are specific, concrete particularizations.
The soul experiences spiritual journeys of descent from and return to the imaginal world. For example, loss pulls us down into the soul of things, the Anima Mundi, world psyche, the imaginal sense of cosmos as psyche. We can lose innocence, trust, spontaneity, courage, and self-esteem. They are sacrificed, stolen, or abandoned in traumatic moments, leaving an immense void -- fear, loneliness, unworthiness, pain, abandonment, and spiritual isolation.
From a mythological perspective, trauma is perceived as a descent of the soul, a dropping or falling down. We can fall apart in grief, shame, betrayal, crushing trauma, orgasmic delirium, or spiritual experience. Descent can be experienced as a sudden violent attack which pulls us down or an agonizing loss of soul too overwhelming for consciousness to contain.
Image bridges the conscious and unconscious situation at the moment. Even soul itself is a fantasy image, for Hillman. The luminous consciousness of the worked on soul arises, revealing the essence of being and sacred embodiment, the images within nature, the secret heart of nature.
Reflection is a metaphor for the mind-mirror -- the interiority of perception and its illusion of projected exteriority through dream, image, and fantasy. Interior domains include naturalism's aesthetics, intersubjectivity, and consciousness (Zimmerman).
Naturalism allows for the emergence of properties like consciousness, values and aesthetics. The unity of nature has aesthetic and existential implications. A depth aesthetic rests on the emergence of the archetypal in all creativity. Sacred 'nature' is an encompassing reality that has no other referent. Nature is all that there is: nature is whatever is as it is.
Our aesthetic reflex is our guide in soul-making -- the imaginative parts of our nature. Aesthetic perception is a catalyst for metaphor. The proximity and availability of our aesthetic response to phenomena is the source of soul-making, witnessing “that immediate thing as image, its smile, a joy, a joy that makes ‘forever’” (Hillman, J. (1992). The thought of the heart and the soul of the world. Spring Pub., p. 49)
Consciousness is continually being imagined (imaged, in-formed) by metaphors. Archetypal states of consciousness frame individual response with comprehensible aesthetic patterns. Imagination is invoked to behold the metaphor that lies beyond literal ‘reality’. We engagea new, equally valid and ‘real’ experience of life rich with significance. Archetypal psychology is “the development of a sense of soul…and the method of therapy is the cultivation of imagination” (Hillman, 1983, p. 15).
Apprehension of meaning includes noticing which archetypes are activated when viewing or engaging with art. Archetypes are the components of the deepest level of knowledge for cognition, the collective unconsciousness, which defines the basic structure of the life-world. Non-active attentiveness to images prevents us from entanglement in materiality of the image.
Experience of the world with archetypal symbols is a new form of aesthetics. A non-critical depth aesthetic rests on the manifestation of the archetypal in all forms of creativity, especially related to the spiritual and religious. The framework of symbolic interactionism, phenomenology of perception and archetypes, suggests that symbols translate information from the physical world to human experience.
Archetypes are the universal knowledge of cognition that generates the background of human experience (the life-world). We experience the world with symbols, and archetypes relate the deepest level of human experience. We do not directly react to the ontological-existing reality, but respond to our understanding of this reality. Each action, object, or event has its own self-revealing meaning.
Archetypal symbols carry implicit meanings and the psychological approach to the archetype is as metaphor. Symbol cueing may facilitate memory and subsequent recall of meaning words associated with symbols. Archetypes provide vitality to art and can be accessed by viewers through attention to bodily responses and emotional awareness enhanced by imagination. Images should not be reduced to mere feelings. The metaphorical becomes meaningful when we experience the image from the inside, when it takes us into the imaginal.
Spirit chases ultimates, unity, and identity, but soul is about dreams, fantasy, images. In the aesthetic domain, imagination overcomes disciplinary, mythic and individual boundaries. A metaphor is a voluntary misassignment of a label, but it is also more than that. In metaphorical reference, a symbol, linguistic or not, is made to refer to something not belonging to the realm normally correlated to the symbol’s schema, rearrangements in a field of reference and affect. Images are part of the realm of experiential psychic reality and do not need interpretation. Fantasy is related to body by image and instinct.
For Hillman, 'the primary, and irreducible, language of...archetypal patterns is the metaphorical discourse of myths' (1983, p. 2). Metaphorical or mythic truth no less a form of truth than literal truth -- autonomous informing powers. Indeed, the literal and the metaphorical in a sense lie on the same continuum. Literal denotation, metaphorical denotation, as well as exemplification and expression, can all contribute to the construction of a world of experience -- a way of seeing the world.
https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/213128/file-2133485071-pdf/docs/Journal_9-1_Soul_Migrations.pdf?t=1420502489674
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262637369_Jung_and_Hypnotherapy
mirrors - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4219253/
astro - https://books.google.com/books?id=hNrt71H_MlYC&pg=PA48&lpg=PA48&dq=lunar+consciousness,+hillman&source=bl&ots=jw_DBZrO1L&sig=qJ1LmibKO6hV7C8BKE4cqs_thf8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiVq8DVnojaAhUJu1MKHYyiCC4Q6AEIUzAD#v=onepage&q=lunar%20consciousness%2C%20hillman&f=false
abstracts - https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/2009602875_Diane_Zimberoff
https://books.google.com/books?id=8l-JnRCv-dsC&pg=PA226&lpg=PA226&dq=%22esse+in+anima,+hillman&source=bl&ots=LGWNR84p-3&sig=KL6NZFDxawiIReVptg6FgedOOsU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjXse2G7JDaAhXPyVMKHWSaAD04ChDoAQg9MAM#v=onepage&q=%22esse%20in%20anima%2C%20hillman&f=false
https://www.academia.edu/33723166/Forms_of_Vitality_within_Embodied_Awareness_A_Phenomenology_of_Invocation?auto=download&campaign=weekly_digest
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/41547202_What_Does_it_Mean_to_Live_a_Fully_Embodied_Spiritual_Life
OUR BUTTERFLY NATURE
A Depth, Creative, Imagistic, Aesthetic, Phenomenological, &
Non-Directive Experiential Therapeutic Approach
(Metaphorical, Archetypal, Imaginal, Philosophical)
by Iona Miller, 2018
Looking at our lives metaphorically or mythologically funds life with both poetic beauty and imaginal meaning. Using imagination we grasp a truer, more meaningful reality given by soul. Soul is our breadth and depth, the light of the animated body, the flow of divine energy. The essence of soul is connectedness which thrives on relationship and reflexive awareness.
Humanity and the cosmos share the same creation mythos, which describes our ultimate return. We both spring from the dark, formless chaos. Death reverses that creation. Poesis is the making of soul through imagination and metaphor. Like electromagnetism, psyche is an archetypal field, an invisible yet primordial matrix.
Imagination, an unseen but vital realm, precedes perception. The image is irreducible. Our reaction to the stimulus of life is unique -- the living processes of the soul, the deepest most profound part of us. Soul inseparably connects the traumatic and divine. Psyche is a plurality of principles, imaginal multiplicity.
Emergent images are spontaneous, autonomous; they multiply and interpenetrate. Coherent phenomena appear out of and disappear back into psyche. Soul remains ambiguous, elusive, and can be difficult to know with the ordinary mind. The very absence of our imaginal past and future, an invisible but vital realm, frames our present where we feel their impact.
We speak of the 'return of the soul to the world,' when, in fact, it never left, but was repressed and ignored amidst the voluminous flow of our stream of consciousness. Soul flight is a response to trauma. Soul that can travel to forget, by-pass, or diminish awareness can also travel to remember, to re-collect itself.
If the journey initially seems heroic, the voluntary surrender of identity emerges as counterpoint grounded in presence, love, joy, peace, and empathy, and diminished fear. The shallow identity is immersed in the depths of the vast creative source deep within.
Return is more the reiteration and returning of our soul to our awareness. If we notice her in cyclic and repetitive events, we realize it was our own disconnection, dissociation, disaffection, and ignorance of our dreams and images that kept her at bay.
Intuition, creativity, and mindful consciousness, self-observation and self-regulation are revived. The same dissociation and repetitive behaviors can also function hypnotically to allow us to engage another healing reality. Hillman suggests we “can never grasp it apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light” (Hillman, 1975).
Images funnel into the black hole of the unconscious from the vast expanse, while others spew out like a singularity -- a geyser of forms emerging from an undifferentiated packed density. Traditional spirituality usually recognizes what we can called an Upper, Lower, and Middle unconscious.
Upper (mystical, spiritual peak experiences) and Lower (primal wounds and transpersonal shadow) realms are paradoxically transpersonal, while the Middle is personal and individual. Without actually 'going anywhere', soul, too, metaphorically appears and vanishes, either ascending into the transcendent heights 'over the rainbow', or descending into the chaotic darkness and immanent depths of invisibility 'beneath the earth'.
Ours is a balancing act: "Balance is important. Expanding into the lower but not the higher leads one to become psychologically healthy but not spiritually fulfilled (a nontranscending
self-actualizer), and expanding into the higher but not the lower leads one to become a psychologically unhealthy spiritual seeker (the spiritual by-pass). To complete the psychical tour, there exists also a Middle Unconscious, consisting of contents that are unconscious but not defensively repressed and therefore accessible in our normal functioning. Expanding this Middle Unconscious is to open ourselves to the conscious experience of who we really are, disidentifying with the limited range of identities and becoming mindfully aware of our truly expansive real Self." (Hartman, Zimberoff)
The re-enchantment of the world reanimates our vitality and engagement. Psyche links to the past and the dead, our ancestors, and echoing ancient themes common to us all. The lost soul is found within; the mysterious inner world comes into play, into lived relationship with conscious awareness, deepening and grounding consciousness at more primordial levels.
Through illumined senses we can see through the nature of apparent reality for ourselves, if we but try. Things become transparent, shine and speak. Signs echo within us. Then we develop our own philosophy, apart from consensus. When it comes to questions of speculation on the unknown, we can either accept what others have said, or look for ourselves.
We find a new relationship to the divine within matter, within creation, within our body. There is no soul without body. Each object or body is also an imaginal image. The ethereal essence pervades and is diffused throughout nature. It embraces and energizes all life in the cosmos.
When we redeem our relationship, we find her divine light everywhere, a numinosum of wisdom and knowledge that informs our lives and art based on imagination. She is the creative force of inner vision, the world of Mystery.
Imagistic Approach
The ancient Greek philosopher Thales declared, "the whole world is full of gods." The Renaissance revived the idea that the whole world or cosmos has soul. This is the root metaphor of archetypal psychology.
"If we could reoriginate psychology at its Western source in Florence, a way might open again toward a meta-psychology that is a cosmology, a poetic vision of the cosmos which fulfills the soul's need for placing itself in the vast scheme of things.” –James Hillman, Anima Mundi
Theories of meaning and metaphor form an aesthetic basis for aesthetic universals. An archetypal approach explores the aesthetic of expansion, possibility, and depth. The symbolic approach is generalized and conventional, rather than imaginal and novel, particular and peculiar.
Archetypal imagination is also congruent with the metaphoric roots of mythological thinking and symbolic cognition. Hillman distinguished between symbolic and imagistic approaches, where archetypal included 'the field of aesthetics in the broadest sense'. The sublime relates to both religion and aesthetics. Soul mediates between mind and body, idea and matter, actualities and the Beyond.
Psyche is the self-sustaining imaginal substrate of consciousness, a sensed presence. Inner images are the soul's substance. They arise from primordial reality as self-generating and self-revealing psychic life and knowledge of the soul. Our only immediate knowledge is psychic existence. Images are specific, concrete particularizations.
The soul experiences spiritual journeys of descent from and return to the imaginal world. For example, loss pulls us down into the soul of things, the Anima Mundi, world psyche, the imaginal sense of cosmos as psyche. We can lose innocence, trust, spontaneity, courage, and self-esteem. They are sacrificed, stolen, or abandoned in traumatic moments, leaving an immense void -- fear, loneliness, unworthiness, pain, abandonment, and spiritual isolation.
From a mythological perspective, trauma is perceived as a descent of the soul, a dropping or falling down. We can fall apart in grief, shame, betrayal, crushing trauma, orgasmic delirium, or spiritual experience. Descent can be experienced as a sudden violent attack which pulls us down or an agonizing loss of soul too overwhelming for consciousness to contain.
Image bridges the conscious and unconscious situation at the moment. Even soul itself is a fantasy image, for Hillman. The luminous consciousness of the worked on soul arises, revealing the essence of being and sacred embodiment, the images within nature, the secret heart of nature.
Reflection is a metaphor for the mind-mirror -- the interiority of perception and its illusion of projected exteriority through dream, image, and fantasy. Interior domains include naturalism's aesthetics, intersubjectivity, and consciousness (Zimmerman).
Naturalism allows for the emergence of properties like consciousness, values and aesthetics. The unity of nature has aesthetic and existential implications. A depth aesthetic rests on the emergence of the archetypal in all creativity. Sacred 'nature' is an encompassing reality that has no other referent. Nature is all that there is: nature is whatever is as it is.
Our aesthetic reflex is our guide in soul-making -- the imaginative parts of our nature. Aesthetic perception is a catalyst for metaphor. The proximity and availability of our aesthetic response to phenomena is the source of soul-making, witnessing “that immediate thing as image, its smile, a joy, a joy that makes ‘forever’” (Hillman, J. (1992). The thought of the heart and the soul of the world. Spring Pub., p. 49)
Consciousness is continually being imagined (imaged, in-formed) by metaphors. Archetypal states of consciousness frame individual response with comprehensible aesthetic patterns. Imagination is invoked to behold the metaphor that lies beyond literal ‘reality’. We engagea new, equally valid and ‘real’ experience of life rich with significance. Archetypal psychology is “the development of a sense of soul…and the method of therapy is the cultivation of imagination” (Hillman, 1983, p. 15).
Apprehension of meaning includes noticing which archetypes are activated when viewing or engaging with art. Archetypes are the components of the deepest level of knowledge for cognition, the collective unconsciousness, which defines the basic structure of the life-world. Non-active attentiveness to images prevents us from entanglement in materiality of the image.
Experience of the world with archetypal symbols is a new form of aesthetics. A non-critical depth aesthetic rests on the manifestation of the archetypal in all forms of creativity, especially related to the spiritual and religious. The framework of symbolic interactionism, phenomenology of perception and archetypes, suggests that symbols translate information from the physical world to human experience.
Archetypes are the universal knowledge of cognition that generates the background of human experience (the life-world). We experience the world with symbols, and archetypes relate the deepest level of human experience. We do not directly react to the ontological-existing reality, but respond to our understanding of this reality. Each action, object, or event has its own self-revealing meaning.
Archetypal symbols carry implicit meanings and the psychological approach to the archetype is as metaphor. Symbol cueing may facilitate memory and subsequent recall of meaning words associated with symbols. Archetypes provide vitality to art and can be accessed by viewers through attention to bodily responses and emotional awareness enhanced by imagination. Images should not be reduced to mere feelings. The metaphorical becomes meaningful when we experience the image from the inside, when it takes us into the imaginal.
Spirit chases ultimates, unity, and identity, but soul is about dreams, fantasy, images. In the aesthetic domain, imagination overcomes disciplinary, mythic and individual boundaries. A metaphor is a voluntary misassignment of a label, but it is also more than that. In metaphorical reference, a symbol, linguistic or not, is made to refer to something not belonging to the realm normally correlated to the symbol’s schema, rearrangements in a field of reference and affect. Images are part of the realm of experiential psychic reality and do not need interpretation. Fantasy is related to body by image and instinct.
For Hillman, 'the primary, and irreducible, language of...archetypal patterns is the metaphorical discourse of myths' (1983, p. 2). Metaphorical or mythic truth no less a form of truth than literal truth -- autonomous informing powers. Indeed, the literal and the metaphorical in a sense lie on the same continuum. Literal denotation, metaphorical denotation, as well as exemplification and expression, can all contribute to the construction of a world of experience -- a way of seeing the world.
https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/213128/file-2133485071-pdf/docs/Journal_9-1_Soul_Migrations.pdf?t=1420502489674
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262637369_Jung_and_Hypnotherapy
"Once upon a time, I Chuang-tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. . .Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now butterfly dreaming I am a man."
The butterfly is the universal symbol for Psyche, for soul. Like a butterfly struggling to get out of the chrysalis, each of us is struggling to emerge from the undifferentiated into the individuated, the spontaneous image-making of the soul exploring imagination.
Also, like the butterfly, identity is emergent. Self-generation is rejuvenation to keep self-reproducing. We experience the muse, daemon, or 'angels' of creativity in their divine autonomy. The symbol joins us with the wildness of the universe.
How often works of creative genius arrive in consciousness almost fully formed. Every person had their spirit or guardian angel. Every person has their “seed-self”, “guiding force”, or acorn of character from birth.
Plato suggested we are each born with a unique daimon or guardian before we are born, and it has selected an image or a pattern that we will live on earth. The daimon oversaw our experiences with mortality — our fate — our personal yet transcendent god.
The daimon is the soul companion that guides us, but at birth we forget. The daimon remembers, however, what belongs to us, and therefore, it is our daimon that is the carrier of our destiny. It is essentially identical with Jung's notion of the Self. Our daimon is a soul-guide, helpful awareness through the dark.
We can call it a daemon, genius, or muse, guardian angel, death, nature, or any conventional element for the abyss of the transcendent imagination, which has infinite aspects. It is our true calling -- self-determination -- our fate -- soul's intimate connection with death.
Archetypal psychology relativizes and deliteralizes the notion of ego and focuses on what it calls the psyche, or soul. "The reality of the psyche is lived in the death of the literal," according to Gaston Bachelard. The muse connects with the mythic and can help or hinder the creative process. Death is a muse that inform us the darkness of the depths is haunted with loving souls. The essence of soul is the paradox of life/death, light/dark, male/female.
Psyche as Angelic Daemon & Soul Guide
Jung said, “the daemonic is the not yet realized creative.” Perceptual diversity helps us access a variety of non-rational altered states of consciousness, including dreams, trance, imagination, divination, and meditation -- presentational illumination.
The face of the beloved angel is our divinity -- our light that draws breath, our embodied nakedness. The strength of our soul is our own mythological being, animating our own inner voice and transcendent potential. The mythical world of the old gods is not the product of poetry; mankind is the product of the gods.
Virtually all that can be observed is some form of image -- of self, or world, or God. The congealed potential of such imagery can appear as a fog, cloudiness, amorphous generalized grayness without distinct features. We can speculate that this cloudiness represents the diffuse, undifferentiated imagery of all potential imagery: all self-images, all nature-images, all God-images.
Dreams are a way to moisten the soul in the pools of images and feeling, dissolving problems, and changing moods. Spirits of the water and instinctive feminine magic can appear as daemonic archetypal energy whose invisible presence causes alterations of consciousness.
We turn to our own lived experience to find answers to the questions: who am I? where am I? and when am I? We excavate memory and engage in an investigation of the emergent fragments that we interrogate and reflect on to generate narratives of the self. On this non-linear path we are both researcher and the researched.
This transdisciplinary perspective is sort of an archaeological approach, a descent, excavation, or alchemical mining, revealing our psychophysical roots. Panentheism is the belief that the divine pervades and interpenetrates every part of the universe, extending beyond space and time. Unlike pantheism, where the divine and the universe are identical, panentheism is an ontological distinction between the significance of divine and non-divine.
We sketch a landscape of ourselves, connecting with multiple forms and emergent fragments, shards, or splinters in recurring incidents. Narratives weave multiple ways of inquiring, reflecting, and knowing together. We use our influences, artistry, and memory to identify and assimilate negative or positive anchoring and turning points (intense impact).
We can create a new structure for relating the subjective (interiority) with the exterior world and self-actualization. Our search for meaning is about multiple layers of identity. The questing impulse promotes autonomous and self-directed learning pathways. Emerging fragments interplay and interact.
By interrogating our reflections we can identify recurring contextual themes. There are layers or stratification in our lived experience, mirrored in multiple layers of metaphor. Paying close attention, we polish our imagery.
Naturally, there is no guarantee that what we believe is right. Should we believe it. Metaphors embody our ways of knowing that were formerly silent or hidden as new associations. It is easy to confuse what is actually the creation of beliefs with the "discovery of Truth," a common goal of science and theology.
Who's truth?
The basis of the human psyche seems to be a collective of selves--a multimind in a multiverse. Independent and autonomous, they relate with one another mostly unknown to the outer awareness. We could call it polyphasic consciousness, a kaleidoscope of potential selves.
In archetypal psychology the gods are not metaphysical literalisms. Polytheism is not the belief in separate and distinct gods, but acknowledges the principle that reality and the divine appear fragmented and diverse. David Miller calls it "the radical plurality of the self."
Miller explains in The New Polytheism that it “is the reality experienced by men and women when Truth with a capital ‘T’ cannot be articulated according to a single grammar, a single logic or a single symbol system.” It is more concerned with the relationship among living things to give shape to the increasingly complex and varied experiences of life.
Henry Corbin cautions, "To confuse Being with a being is the metaphysical catastrophe. It is the "death of Being" to confuse the unity of Being (Esse) with a pseudo-unity of beings (ens) which is essentially multiple." He believed, "that this imaginal world is the locus of the "rebirth of the Gods..."
"I speak always of the multitude of theophanies and of theophanic forms. The uniquely Divine (Theotes) aspires to be revealed and can only be revealed in multiple theophanies. Each one is autonomous, different from the other, each quite close to being a hypostasis, yet at the same time the totality of Theotes is in each theophanic form."
Narrative identity is not immutable or fixed but mobile. It issues from the combination of the concordance of the story, and the discordance imposed by the encountered events, emotional crossroads, and dislocations. We can revise and expand our elastic and loose-knit stories by including inner or psychic events, or even recounting events differently.
Multisenory modes and metaphors punctuate, co-exist and interact with each other. These include written, visual, aural and kinesthetic modes as elements of communication, as well as the language of stillness and silence. It helps us situate ourselves more objectively (passionate detachment) and historically.
We revise or recount previously unrealized threads with unexpected clues and archetypal embellishments. We can interpret and re-interpret inherited stories, photographic fragments and memories of place in the present moment. We can create artifacts and art.
Revisioning ourselves is a self-reflexive process of artistic observation, an archaeology of open-ended identity. Differentiated self-reference can help us compose our recursive geobiological participation. We select Earthly and living elements in a co-evolutionary coupling of matter and life when presence meets awareness.
We explore the inextricable highs and lows of the human condition in a more loving, self-compassionate, self-empathic way, cultivating an ethical disposition. We are the emergent convergence of multiple lines of descent, catalyzed by transformational change.
Empathy or mirroring may imply a kind of inference, of imaginative simulation or of direct perception.
Phenomenology and embodiment give us direct, unmediated, experiential access to anomalous and numinous states, especially emotions, of others -- even imaginal others. Its cultivation requires not just personal embodiment developed through the process of self-exploration and self-awareness, but sustainable empathy. Naturally, there is no end to the self-discovery process, a great journey through a mysterious realm of transformation.
Cultivating Image, Pathos, & Emergent Self-Exploration
"The Angel is the Face that our God takes for us, and each of us finds his God only when he recognizes that Face." --Henry Corbin
When it wears a personal face, it is called an angel or a daimon, or genius. Still others think of it, in its incorporeal form, as the soul. It does not develop with education or maturity. It is beyond symbols, and is, therefore, neither archetype nor angel, neither wise old man or woman, nor divine child. These symbols point the way.
An imaginal approach reclaims soul as our primary concern -- the sacred and immaterial subtle world, energy body, and psyche. They incorporate spiritual faculties. Ancient Egyptian physicians addressed mind, body, & soul in healing practices in the 27th Century BCE. In Vedanta, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Gnostic Christianity and Kabbalah these spheres are often referred to as the gross/physical, subtle/astral, and mental/causal spheres.
We all have an innate capacity to perceive them all. We can experience direct knowing in relation to the universal nature of all life. Our mind depends on the universal mind. The biggest gaps in our knowledge concern the universe as a whole and our entanglement with it. Entanglement is a property of nonlocal quantum information exchange.
The Quest for the Holy Grail of self-knowledge and self-exploration is a self-initiatory path, including explorations in meaning and body awareness. Soul is the location of our actual experience -- our perceptions of sensations, our emotions, and our thoughts.
The pneumatic is situated, by essence and nature, under the vertical and timeless axis, neither 'before' nor 'after'. So, the archetype personifies or 'incarnates', and may at any moment pierce our personal individual envelope.
This is the multidimensional realm of potentiality, the collective (un)conscious, archetypes, universal tropes and spacetime potentialities. Intuitively, we tend to be at least vaguely aware of a divine unifying consciousness at the point of quantum entanglement.
This practice is not limited to the religious or clinical setting, but is an ancient practice of therapeia, the art of spiritual self-healing. Therapeutes as contemplatives means both worshiper and healer. Various ancient practices were called therapeia ("cure of the soul"; healing mental suffering and distress).
This notion of care, attention, and cure of the soul with healing dreams is more philosophical than metaphysical or religious. Inscribed over the door of the ancient library in Alexandria were the words ΨΥΧΗΣ ΙΑΤΡΕΙΟΝ or “Healing Place of the Soul.” It meant more than bibliotherapy. It was a temple to the muses, part academy, medical school, and part research center, in addition to the great ancient library. A lot of epic poetry, as well as works on geography, history, mathematics, astronomy and medicine were composed during this period.
Ideas about body, soul and the interaction between the two were elaborated by ancient Greek and Roman doctors and thinkers. Stoic philosophers describe how mental functions in humans emanate from the seven ‘mental’ faculties of the ‘ruling part of the soul’ (which they called the hegemonikon, center of consciousness). These include the senses, as well as biological processes such as reproduction and growth.
Psyche, Breath, and Pneuma
Soul as breath is a motif common to all major streams of philosophy. Pneuma (πνεῦμα) is an ancient Greek word for "breath", and in a religious context for "spirit" or "soul". Pneuma and psyche both meant “the breath of life.” The ancient understanding was the energy that animated all of life, a person’s deep, mysterious core essence, and the ancient soul stream of ancestors.
According to Jung, the same pneumatic human person is produced in the East and West, although the practices by which psychic rebirth is attained are different. The spiritual (pneumatic) body is, strictly speaking, not a body at all, but an ideal, archetypal form called the "causal body," because all the other bodies are engendered from it.
The spirit is breath, and the Greek word is pneuma. The soul is life, and the Greek word is psyche. The mind is understanding, and the Greek word is nous. Natural confusion exists between the spirit and the soul since both words, in their roots, mean breath.
But for the Greeks, there were two kinds of breath, in Arabic ruch, in Hebrew ruach and in Greek pneuma. Breathing into one's hands means: "I offer my living soul to God. It is a wordless acted prayer, which could equally well be spoken; Lord into thy hands I commend my spirit.” (Jung, 1931a, pp.72-73).
"The Self within the heart, the seed of the divine, the pneumatic light-spark, the dweller in light, the inner man, was the eternal pilgrim incarnated in matter; those who had this alive and conscious within them were the spiritual or pneumatic". "As in the consummation of the universe the World-soul was reunited with the World-mind, so in the perfecting of the individual the soul was made one with the Self within" (G. R. S. Mead, 2008).
Psychology essentially refers to the study and use (logos) of the breath, soul or spirit of life (psyche) that leaves a person at death and continues in some other form. From such a fundamental perspective, all forms of ancient and modern caring, helping and healing have their foundations in breath-based behavior, experiences, and spirituality.
In Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés says, 'The word pneuma (breath) shares its origins with the word psyche; they are both considered words for soul. So when there is song in a tale or mythos, we know that the gods are being called upon to breathe their wisdom and power into the matter at hand. We know then that the forces are at work in the spirit world, busy crafting soul.”
Jung says, in Childhood Dreams Seminar, "Whatever we say about the psychical, we always are talking out of an archetype." (2010a, p. 72) The archetypes answer in The Red Book (2009, p. 246) through Philemon (Simon Magus), "We are real and not symbols."
All of the parts of the soul can be seen as extensions of pneuma (breath) originating in the hêgemonikon. They defined familiar axes of experience and life, defined by the polarities of sense-perception and future-past. Phantasia and Logos interact to produce inner and outer experience. Impulse is determined by past impressions and Assent determines the course of the future.
'Soul' and 'mind' are interchangeable as the spacious and deep place within individuals where the unnoticed unfolds. It is considered accessible to self-scrutiny. We must differentiate between directed or “primary” imagination and mere fantasy. Philosophy was a way of life with an esoteric goal of wisdom, a healing service.
Ensouled World
James Hillman wanted to return psychological metaphysics to the world, to "think the real in service of soul-making." The approach is closely bound up with the practice of therapeia. Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul. As real as the manifest world, the imaginal realm is soul's natural habitat.
'Imaginal' refers to both imagination and the images we live through. The imaginal element of the thing manifests its chosen image through the World Soul. Initially, there is nothing conceptual about this. He speaks of the need for “a psychology that returns psychic reality to the world” (1982, p. 72).
The place of soul, a world of imagination, passion, fantasy and reflection is the place that binds the physical and the spiritual together (Harris, 2001, p. 33). Jung said that the soul is the psychological experience of the body, the soul and psyche is visible in the body (Jung, 2014, p. 355).
This world penetrates into our dreams and other visionary experiences, including the places we visit during deep meditation or imaginal journeying. The goal is to draw soul into the world via individual creative acts, not to exclude it in the name of social order.
The potential for soul-making is revealed in psychic images. The power of the soul restores a space that sacralizes the ephemeral, earthly state of being. It unites the earthly manifestation with its imaginal counterpart -- focus is on the psychophysical changes that come through inaction, attention to the experience of space, and the primacy of infinite space, awareness, and light.
Feelings stir and images move. Love quickens the soul to its images in the heart, as the place of true imagining. Henri Corbin says it is an act of love to engage the soul of the world through the mediating power of the imaginal.
The Platonic “true cosmos” emerges only after the veil is spread over the universe; then, the world's body was finally fitted to its soul. Our imaginative recognition, the childlike act of imagining the world, animates the world and returns it to soul. (Hillman, 1989, p. 99). Not only is imaginal knowing beneficial and necessary to know the world, it is the psyche as it actually is, a collage of complex embedded meanings and entangled relationships.
The world as a symbol speaks for itself. Imaginal psychology maintains the primacy of the image as a direct expression of soul. As a discipline, it alleges that soul is a primary experience, and seeks to give her a voice. The realm of psyche is a subjective world of depth and meaning that is sometimes corporeal, sometimes not. The world soul permeates body and psyche, and opens us to the mythic.
Existence is more about deepening pathos than solving problems. That cuts us off from listening to the inner qualities of the things of the world that speak for themselves and experiencing soul.
For Hillman, "soul" is about multiplicity and ambiguity, and about being polytheistic; it belongs to the night-world of dreams. Free-arising images express the way the soul perceives the daily realities we live among. But he also suggests, we need to bring soul into action, and action into soul.
Dream of the Butterfly
In Greek mythology, Psyche is the deification of the human soul. She was portrayed in ancient mosaics as a goddess with butterfly wings. She embodies the psychic states experienced on the threshold between consciousness and unconsciousness, a path which involves a return to the unconscious of nature and our nature. Psyche consists essentially of images and the vital activities taking place within us.
“There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the “thorn in the flesh” is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent.” (C. G. Jung, CW, Vol. 12, para. 208)
She is an autonomous force that demonstrates our existence is more than physical, a symbol of transformation emerging from the boundless domain of the deep unconscious, an underworld that is dark, murky, and fraught with unknown, liminal forces. Within the liminal state an integration of new knowledge occurs which requires a reconfiguration. Soul appears more readily in symbol, creativity and paradox, The threshold is access a mytho-poetic imaginal world.
Just as a butterfly experiences a metamorphosis, so the psyche may experience transformations that can be be lived through with awareness of social, psychological and spiritual significance. Our self-mythology is tied to our experience of the universal substrate of the collective unconscious.
Myth remains relevant to the contemporary psyche, a collective form of projection. Like Psyche we may go through a major transition and crisis leading to the emergence of our potential, where the necessity of fate meets the destiny structured by our environment and opportunities.
Much of psychic life remains hidden as in the initial stages of the myth. This includes secret thoughts, feelings, fears, criticisms, anticipations, etc. A psychological initiation occurs when we are suddenly forced to "go within" ourselves and discover or "own" the subconscious processes operating there.
Gradually, we begin to recognize that relationship involves chronic "wounding and healing," despair and exaltation. This is a variation of archetypal dying and resurrecting. In its self-reflecting narcissism, this complex provides no stable sense of identity. We ask ourselves, "Who am I, and why can't I behave as I'd like to?"
Some people seek therapy for this very absence of a stable sense of identity, after trying to form a false identity as a couple. Love brings alterations and fluctuations between feelings of fear, of "being nobody," or worthless when we are wounded, or feeling special and precious when things are going well.
Transitional Phenomena
We are thrust into the liminal position by the colliding pressure between two worlds - conscious and unconscious. It describes our disorientation in a movement through liminal space and time opening strange spaces into which the unconscious can flood. The liminal world enables our experience of the numinous.
Liminal states unite opposing unconscious forces operating through the transcendent function. Jung (1964) described the gradual suspension of ego functioning that allows the unconscious to emerge as individuation, while also emphasizing the need to return to the world.
Liminality finds a place in the everyday world, for example, in expressive arts, and the liminality of the creative state, between the objective world and the realm of imagination and art. Liminality also comes through depression, loss of persona, or other major life transitions and their psychological phenomena.
But, what happens when we lose what appears to be our “everything” and do not know what to do next in the absence of tangible and cultural signifiers? When we feel that we are anxiously floating inbetween we are in the liminal space. We may or may not notice, as the liminal is actually the sub-liminal, between conscious and unconscious, primary and secondary process thinking. Transitions shake things up. Will we survive the transition from the old to new state?
Will we come through breakdowns and breakthroughs and be transformed, or will we die or even just imagine we do? The caterpillar is dissolved back into its primordial state. This “liminality” is an experience of intense non-being, a prelude to psychophysical transformation.
We don't know if it's the tomb or womb of rejuvenation but the end of the cycle is mirrored in the beginning. Metaphorically, death and new life are always emerging. As with liminality, much of the imagery of individuation expresses the themes of birth and rebirth. Liminal spaces auger a rebirth.
The liminal is also archetypal situations and experiences. Reality and identity are challenged in a world of disorder, senselessness and madness. Between world and psyche is a quasi-subjective.space of ambivalent nature. At first, we find ourselves in the dark. Liminality bridges the gap between the subjective world of the psyche and the objective world of (seemingly) external phenomena of identity, belonging, and anxiety. We have to let go to enter liminal space.
The cocoon, a radical transformation in the dark, is a metaphorical threshold, a halfway position, a zone of betweenness, a location or position or status that “falls between the cracks. This is also the zone of emergent creativity, between our old comfort zone and as-yet-unknown solutions. Liminal themes include uncertainty, initiation, and religious experience, ultimately suggesting a move toward a hidden but genuine spiritual response to the questions of psychic and cultural fragmentation.
It can also mean the transition stages between sleep and wakefulness. In the world of dreams and nightmares we definitely leave behind the model-dependent reality of everyday life. But even our waking state is bounded by a vague penumbra of the unknown, altered states, dissociations, traumatic stress, and anomalous realities.
This Lunar consciousness is ambiguous and paradoxical realities that seep into us from the ragged edges of experience, the edge of chaos and order. In liminality, there is substantial distance between the adaptive persona and personal preferences.
We begin ignoring cultural demands, question our essence, lack a sense of self, and rely on new external identifications while we work toward establishing a new persona. Identity hangs in suspended anmation. Archetypal energies such as the Victim, Persecutor, Child, or Hero may be present in the liminal space for us to follow deeper. The potential innovation has deep emotional implications for those who experience this crossing.
Our organic inquiry incorporates archetypal experiences, both transcendent and immanent, spontaneous and intentional, liminal and spiritual–experiences that are beyond ego. The borderland state is required to simultaneously maintain stability and induce transformation. We feel compelled to cross the liminality for the sake of psyche, though we are somehow aware of the risk and the danger involved.
Rituals and symbolic forms foster and channel such crossings in order to reach new configurations. Innovations take place in liminal space. New and different ideas emerge, new knowledge of the world is introduced. Novelty emerges through free recombination of familiar elements with non-familiar elements. The liminal area is a space of many virtual possibilities and potential opportunities, the raw material from which the psyche of all of humanity is drawn.
Liminal space is characterized by instability, by a blurred space-time distinction and by ambiguities. What occurs in liminal space is intense affect. This is the setting and activation of liminality processes that lead to novelty and creativity and enable the creation of new narratives. Narrating is an ongoing process of sensemaking implying bordering and liminality.
A totally different reality that has as much validity lurks behind our normal existence. Liminality is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rites. This is different from shamanic initiation because the unconscious emerges spontaneously in everyday reality through extraordinary synchronicities, significances, and psychic events -- beyond what we normally recognize as 'reality.'. Life-changing events yank us out of our ordinary trance state from one order of reality to another.
Our psyche is reflected, portrayed in the world around us. Humanity is collectively facing James Hillman's dilemma in The Soul's Code, “I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I'm in the psyche…”
Soul is at the Heart of the World.
"According to Plotinus, the world-soul has a tendency towards separation and divisibility, the sine qua non of all change, creation, and reproduction. It is an “unending All of life” and wholly energy; a living organism of ideas which only become effective and real in it." -CW5 ¶ 198."In alchemy, the world-soul is the anima catholica, an idea identical with the spirit of God." -CW8 ¶ 388
The world soul is, according to several systems of thought, an intrinsic connection between all living things on the planet, which relates to our world in much the same way as the soul is connected to the human body. So, personal grief extends into grief for the living world and loss of the sacred and the wild world. What we are losing cannot be regained.
“The psyche is not only a personal problem but a world problem...Nowadays we can see as
never before that the peril which threatens all of us comes not from nature but from man, from the psyche of the individual and the mass. The psychic aberration of man is the danger. Everything depends upon whether or not our psyche functions properly. If certain persons lose their heads, a hydrogen bomb will go off.” MDR p. 132
Our suffering and healing is mutually entangled. Chellis Glendinning writes, “To open our hearts to the sad history of humanity and the devastated state of the Earth is the next step in our reclamation of our bodies, the body of our human community, and the body of the Earth.” Thus, we directly experience the soul of the world, the anima mundi and her seamless embrace, unmediated instinctual intimacy with the living world.
Our collective planetary society is undergoing an analogous unprecedented transition. Our pain and outrage at the sad state of the world, (pollution, extinctions, overpopulation, not to mention man's inhumanity to man), may be her weeping the cumulative grief of the world through us. We tend to interpret the emptiness as a failure of our personality not a hollowness arising from the missing birdsongs, rich tones, saturated tastes, and ephemeral scents of by-gone eras.
“Psyche is the mother of all our attempts to understand Nature,” Jung wrote. "Psyche is image," as Jung says. Psyche, according to Hillman, is the spirit that has "afterlife, cosmic issues, idealistic values, hopes, and universal truths.
We can create our own unique image of ourselves and, in so doing, rediscover our essential nature. Heraclitus said, “One would never discover the limits of psyche, should one traverse every road–so deep a logos does it possess." Like the butterfly, psyche hovers between the material world and the abstract sky of spirit.
The Greek word psyche literally means "spirit, breath, life or animating force". Hillman says, you cannot kill a god or a goddess, or an archetype. They will come again in a different form. The butterfly goddess continues to surface in the psyche, which means butterfly, It hides in fragments of myths and fairy tales, the transition, liminality, chaos, and change of our ordinary lives.
Hillman considers the “dark night of the soul” the death experience of an old pattern, or lifestyle, as the new way of living that is gasping to be born, the soul crawling towards transformation like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, always grounded in the impersonal and unknowable depths of the psyche.
In emergence from the caterpillar state, there is continuity between the caterpillar and the butterfly. They need each other for their different states. Psyche and body are clearly interdependent, concerned with imaginal inner others already present in potentia.
In Reenchantment of Everyday Life, Thomas Moore says to “never forget that 'analysis' means loosening, and the 'psyche' means butterfly, a beautiful but elusive being that should be glimpsed in flight but never pinned down." So, psychoanalysis means, 'letting the soul go free.'
A living and responsive world, the concept of anima mundi is the world as body of God, a turn-around from concepts of matter and nature as dead and exploitable, the aliveness of the world. Psyche, far from being exclusively human, pervades the cosmos. Through death, which is an organic and symbolic part of life, she is born into eternal life by undergoing tests, purifications, death, resurrection, and ascension.
“Death is the translation of life into soul,” Hillman wrote in Animal Presences. Psyche is both mortal and immortal. Psyche archetype is connected with psychic sensitivity, especially towards the mind and feelings of another, but also with being able to feel and communicate with nature and the natural flow of life and time.
The soul’s separation from nature is an illusion of the mind. Rather, the soul generates images unceasingly. The soul lives on images and metaphor. These images form the basis for our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters."
The caterpillar is literally re-membered into a butterfly. We all carry the seeds of our potential deep within the soul. During disintegration, such as a crisis, illness, or midlife transition, memory is stirred and activates the process of individuation, of "psychic growth" gradually results in "a wider and more mature personality" (Jung & Von Franz, 1964, p. 161). Soul, therefore, carries the same transformational elements as that of the caterpillar, which bursts from its death-tomb, with brilliant-colored wings, ready to take flight, ecstatically living and expressing the full power of its new life.
Double Healix
Let the images come into your body. Embrace the image. To heal the mind-body split we need a view of reality that eliminates the dichotomy of "in here" in this separate body vs. "out there" in the alien, external world. Hillman defines soul as a "perspective rather than a substance," the immaterial part of us that actuates individual life: that which is responsible for our thoughts and feelings; the seat of the soul.
Psyche is our soul-guide, our daimon. Dialog, dreams, fantasies, expressive arts, and symbols are suggested by the deeper, uncensored levels of the psyche. Autonomous psyche in its self-generative glory is cultivation of imaginal feedback.
Soul refers to the rich and baffling dualistic drama that is played out moment by moment within each of us. Incompatible instincts assail us, inexplicable shifts in mood, conflicting desires and sudden revulsions, puzzling dreams, hallucinations and fantasies, etc.
Soul designates the fields or patterns of transhuman archetypal ideas, emotions and actions in which each of us is immersed from birth. Psyche is also a pilgrim, compelled toward love and wisdom through circumstantial pains, getting stuck and unstuck, her wings burnt by the flames of Eros.
These universal psychological patterns enfold us long before they begin appearing in our individual identities. In our instinctual longing for reunion, Hillman writes, “the soul becomes operative in converting it into a Thou—making soul of objects, personifying, anthropomorphosing, turning into a partner the object with which it is engaged and which it has implanted soul."
For Jung, Psyche refers to the totality of all psychic forces, totality or processes, conscious as well as unconscious. Soul is more restricted to a "function complex" or partial personality, like anima, animus, or soul-image. Psyche presents itself in, and is reflected upon by images, thoughts, language, feelings, lacunae, symptoms, dreams, the totality of conscious and unconscious processes -- protomental and psychoid, a plurality of vision, with an acceptance of the fluidity of the psyche. Jung said, “A kind of fluid interpenetration belongs to the very nature of all archetypes."
Hillman's tried to restore psyche to "its proper place" in psychology. He sees the soul at work in imagination, fantasy, myth and metaphor. He also sees soul revealed in psychopathology, in the symptoms of psychological disorders. Love that leads to psyche is not bound by human concerns and conditions. It is both active and receptive. It comes in to life as a grace, so that, like Psyche of the tale, one has a relationship to love itself.
Hillman reminds us that we don't have nearly as much to do with psycho-spiritual encounters as we think we do. Divine experiences, like mathematical equations and musical notes, exist apart from the human brain. Psychic phenomena come to us and through us, but not from us.
"As a connecting link, or traditionally third position, between all opposites, the soul differs from the terms which it connects...It is not life that matters, but soul and how life is used to care for soul." (James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, pp. 174-175)
Changing Form
“The caterpillar dies so the butterfly could be born. And, yet, the caterpillar lives in the butterfly and they are but one. So, when I die, it will be that I have been transformed from the caterpillar of earth to the butterfly of the universe.” (John Harricharan)
The significance of the butterfly symbolizes the ability to cross into the Otherworld, transformation and creation. The ancient Egyptians were fascinated by the caterpillar as emblematic of reincarnation. and Mummification rituals were likely developed as a symbolic creation of the cocoon. Ancient Greeks were inspired by their transformation to placed representations of butterflies in their tombs.
Because of its metamorphic capacity for changing form, the caterpillar symbolically can represent individuation, transformation, development, and growth. This psychic journey transforms old ways, attitudes, patterns of thought. When old behaviors and values yield to a new sense of inner life, psychic reality comes forth, emerging like the butterfly.
The conscious personality, or ego, attends to this process through creative introversion. Thus, the caterpillar’s retreat into the dark and silence of the cocoon has been seen as
a model for quiet withdrawal, spiritual focus and meditation. In dreams, the
caterpillar can be an image for a transition, characterized by the death of the old and the birth of new patterns of conduct and attitudes.
Jung suggested that our core issues "must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning." He does not rule out suffering, only the meaninglessness of life against which our denial, repression, and defenses struggle. We can understand our lives and instincts more deeply through archetypal phenomenology, including the the interaction of love and suffering of eros (feeling life) and pathos.
Soulful love is a spiritual path. Most of us have suffered the pathos, confusion and pain, trust and betrayal, jealousy, need for power, loss of identity, erotic fantasy, and even co-dependence. They are born from both our dysfunction and deep longing for authenticity. "Creative life always stands outside convention." (Jung, CW 17, Para 305).
Hillman called this suffering pathos. Existence is, not a problem to be solved, but a pathos to be deepened into in search of insight. Archetypal psychology is a psychology of value, a life-affirming pathos based on eternal return.
Confusion, symptoms, pathos, and complexes are the very things that connect us to soul, to core self-knowledge. Hillman called pathos, “the spiritual component of love or the erotic component of spirit,” and considered it “the longing towards the unattainable, the ungraspable, the incomprehensible.”
Psyche-pathos-logos is the “speech of the suffering soul” or the soul's suffering of meaning. Your former life still seems to exist, but you can't get back to it. You feel panic, guilt, bewilderment. Pathos comes in waves, breaking over us in visceral sensations, delivered with a striking emotional intensity. It befalls us as a necessity and we must suffer and endure it.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. . . I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world ...
Hillman sees the soul at work in imagination, in fantasy, in myth and in metaphor. He also sees soul revealed in psychopathology, in the symptoms. In Greek, pathos is a changeable quality, but especially concerns extreme grief, misfortune, or distress: appetite, anger, fear, confidence, envy, joy, love, hate, longing, jealousy, pity, in general.
We suffer what befalls us. Pathos inspires us to overcome the suffering and sorrow. "The pathos of things" is also "an empathy toward things", or "a sensitivity to ephemera", awareness of impermanence, or transience of things, and a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.
Etymology - Greek páthos suffering, sensation, akin to páschein to suffer. ... the quality or power, esp in literature or speech, of arousing feelings of pity, sorrow, etc. ... a feeling of sympathy or pity: a stab of pathos. "suffering, feeling, emotion, calamity," literally "what befalls one," related to paskhein "to suffer," pathein "to suffer, feel," penthos "grief, sorrow;" from PIE root *kwent(h)- "to suffer." ...
When the dam of repression breaks, a surge of torrential tears erupts like a profound deluge, releasing the grief repressed for so long. Some weep like their eyes would drop from their sockets but grieving openly returns us to a more natural mode; it is less personal and more universal, more self-compassionate, and heartful.
Working with myth, we embody the passion and the pathos of Isis as she seeks to recover the remains of her husband Osiris. We take on Parcival's quest for the Grail. We labor with Hercules and travel with Odysseus into the archetypal islands of inner and outer worlds. Depth psychology in particular must stay close to the appearance of pathos, wistfulness, longing, and loss, which cannot be separated from soul, but is unbound to clinical vision.
It requires that we undertake the extraordinary journey -- the descent into ourselves -- patheia meaning "feeling, perception, passion, affliction, experience". With access to the unconscious, pathos and lament become fulfillment.
We are touched and moved by our pathos. This emotion is pathos. Grief and despair primarily tend to the giving up of breath, the weakening of resolution and control, and the use of minor inflections, and even outcries. Giving up of breath is a giving up of soul - soul loss or depression, the dark night.
An archetypal viewpoint provides an alternative perspective on the pathos present within the imaginal realm. The engendering process re-invokes previous images, memories, dreams, and reflections, imbuing intense pathos with new meaning and significance for those who mourn.
A lament or lamentation is a passionate expression of grief, often in music, poetry, or song form. The pathos of grief is the saga of a broken heart. Pathos is the most difficult emotion to express because it sinks into despair, weakness, and self-loathing with its own rhythms of intensity, throbbing pain, and giving way to tenderness. Even deep in the pathos, the heart always demands some rest in spite of the darkness, and because of the hope.
The grief is most often born of regret, or mourning. Laments can also be expressed in a verbal manner, where the participant laments about something they regret or someone they've lost, usually accompanied by wailing. We learn to treasure our tears and fill our lungs with breath and meaningful vocalizations as the foundation of self-expression.
It can include symbolic discourse of the living with the dead, including loved ones not named so dead to our ears and formal utterance. Grief and the pathos account for the specially plaintive element in some music identified as “soul.” In pathos, our's becomes an archetypal life. We learn to follow our uncertainty.
There is a symmetry in pathos, paradox, and poetics from which self-compassion emerges through the pitch and range of voice. Extreme transitions are marked by movement, tone-color, extreme pitch, and long inflections. Key and range contain emergent power in the act of being.
Right use of power implies sympathetic co-ordination and control by voluntary and involuntary forces. Symbolic and verbal resonance supports strength of voice, which comes from the amount of 'breath' in the lungs, articulation and volume of the tone. Retained breath expresses depth of feeling.
It requires the extraordinary task of dying to our current, local selves and of being reborn to our eternal selves. A psychology with a mythic or sacred base demands that we have the courage both to release the limitation brought about by old wounds and toxic bitterness and to gain access to the undiminished self with its vast inner storehouse of capacities. Consciousness is direct experience which has an intimate connection with pathos; the emotional awareness.
Prostration might go beyond pathos and reach total shock or unhinging of the mental mechanism, which remove from it the power to again act at all. This extremity of condition being the completely broken and irrecoverable, passes out of the consideration of the functional action of mind.
We can then use these capacities to prepare ourselves for the greater agenda--becoming an instrument through which the source may play its great music. Passion (drive) and pathos are reflected in the fact that if the creative spirit isn’t served, we can even become physically ill. Images, ideas and inspirations cry out to become manifested. Order or form yearns to be born from chaos; and those very acts of creation breed destruction of old systems.
We cannot cure and eradicate pathos, or discard old myths for replacement with a new ones. Individual telos finds its expression through our vocation, our calling. Recognition of fate is not fatalism. We have a latent purpose but may fail to recognize it, however, its literalization into definite, overriding goals must be avoided. Hillman says to follow the image is to discover the “telos,” direction of the soul’s path, its destiny. This telos is also clearly illuminated in the body, which is also a metaphorical field.
Psychic events have a telos or integral aspect. We sense their purpose is therapeutic. Imagination bridges body and soul — the material beating heart and the imaginal heart. Looking or seeing through events and things to their imaginal image is not a method, but a way of living. Subjective perspectives deepen vision, reflection, rhetoric, values, and ideas. The telos, the inner direction and goal has been to reconnect with the cosmos in a mature participation mystique.
Authentic suffering is a realistic response to the ragged edges of being. The purpose of therapy is not to remove suffering but to move through it to an enlarged consciousness that can sustain the polarity of painful opposites, the discovery of the dense fabric of correspondence between external and interior events which constitutes every life.
A Depth, Creative, Imagistic, Aesthetic, Phenomenological, &
Non-Directive Experiential Therapeutic Approach
(Metaphorical, Archetypal, Imaginal, Philosophical)
by Iona Miller, 2018
Looking at our lives metaphorically or mythologically funds life with both poetic beauty and imaginal meaning. Using imagination we grasp a truer, more meaningful reality given by soul. Soul is our breadth and depth, the light of the animated body, the flow of divine energy. The essence of soul is connectedness which thrives on relationship and reflexive awareness.
Humanity and the cosmos share the same creation mythos, which describes our ultimate return. We both spring from the dark, formless chaos. Death reverses that creation. Poesis is the making of soul through imagination and metaphor. Like electromagnetism, psyche is an archetypal field, an invisible yet primordial matrix.
Imagination, an unseen but vital realm, precedes perception. The image is irreducible. Our reaction to the stimulus of life is unique -- the living processes of the soul, the deepest most profound part of us. Soul inseparably connects the traumatic and divine. Psyche is a plurality of principles, imaginal multiplicity.
Emergent images are spontaneous, autonomous; they multiply and interpenetrate. Coherent phenomena appear out of and disappear back into psyche. Soul remains ambiguous, elusive, and can be difficult to know with the ordinary mind. The very absence of our imaginal past and future, an invisible but vital realm, frames our present where we feel their impact.
We speak of the 'return of the soul to the world,' when, in fact, it never left, but was repressed and ignored amidst the voluminous flow of our stream of consciousness. Soul flight is a response to trauma. Soul that can travel to forget, by-pass, or diminish awareness can also travel to remember, to re-collect itself.
If the journey initially seems heroic, the voluntary surrender of identity emerges as counterpoint grounded in presence, love, joy, peace, and empathy, and diminished fear. The shallow identity is immersed in the depths of the vast creative source deep within.
Return is more the reiteration and returning of our soul to our awareness. If we notice her in cyclic and repetitive events, we realize it was our own disconnection, dissociation, disaffection, and ignorance of our dreams and images that kept her at bay.
Intuition, creativity, and mindful consciousness, self-observation and self-regulation are revived. The same dissociation and repetitive behaviors can also function hypnotically to allow us to engage another healing reality. Hillman suggests we “can never grasp it apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light” (Hillman, 1975).
Images funnel into the black hole of the unconscious from the vast expanse, while others spew out like a singularity -- a geyser of forms emerging from an undifferentiated packed density. Traditional spirituality usually recognizes what we can called an Upper, Lower, and Middle unconscious.
Upper (mystical, spiritual peak experiences) and Lower (primal wounds and transpersonal shadow) realms are paradoxically transpersonal, while the Middle is personal and individual. Without actually 'going anywhere', soul, too, metaphorically appears and vanishes, either ascending into the transcendent heights 'over the rainbow', or descending into the chaotic darkness and immanent depths of invisibility 'beneath the earth'.
Ours is a balancing act: "Balance is important. Expanding into the lower but not the higher leads one to become psychologically healthy but not spiritually fulfilled (a nontranscending
self-actualizer), and expanding into the higher but not the lower leads one to become a psychologically unhealthy spiritual seeker (the spiritual by-pass). To complete the psychical tour, there exists also a Middle Unconscious, consisting of contents that are unconscious but not defensively repressed and therefore accessible in our normal functioning. Expanding this Middle Unconscious is to open ourselves to the conscious experience of who we really are, disidentifying with the limited range of identities and becoming mindfully aware of our truly expansive real Self." (Hartman, Zimberoff)
The re-enchantment of the world reanimates our vitality and engagement. Psyche links to the past and the dead, our ancestors, and echoing ancient themes common to us all. The lost soul is found within; the mysterious inner world comes into play, into lived relationship with conscious awareness, deepening and grounding consciousness at more primordial levels.
Through illumined senses we can see through the nature of apparent reality for ourselves, if we but try. Things become transparent, shine and speak. Signs echo within us. Then we develop our own philosophy, apart from consensus. When it comes to questions of speculation on the unknown, we can either accept what others have said, or look for ourselves.
We find a new relationship to the divine within matter, within creation, within our body. There is no soul without body. Each object or body is also an imaginal image. The ethereal essence pervades and is diffused throughout nature. It embraces and energizes all life in the cosmos.
When we redeem our relationship, we find her divine light everywhere, a numinosum of wisdom and knowledge that informs our lives and art based on imagination. She is the creative force of inner vision, the world of Mystery.
Imagistic Approach
The ancient Greek philosopher Thales declared, "the whole world is full of gods." The Renaissance revived the idea that the whole world or cosmos has soul. This is the root metaphor of archetypal psychology.
"If we could reoriginate psychology at its Western source in Florence, a way might open again toward a meta-psychology that is a cosmology, a poetic vision of the cosmos which fulfills the soul's need for placing itself in the vast scheme of things.” –James Hillman, Anima Mundi
Theories of meaning and metaphor form an aesthetic basis for aesthetic universals. An archetypal approach explores the aesthetic of expansion, possibility, and depth. The symbolic approach is generalized and conventional, rather than imaginal and novel, particular and peculiar.
Archetypal imagination is also congruent with the metaphoric roots of mythological thinking and symbolic cognition. Hillman distinguished between symbolic and imagistic approaches, where archetypal included 'the field of aesthetics in the broadest sense'. The sublime relates to both religion and aesthetics. Soul mediates between mind and body, idea and matter, actualities and the Beyond.
Psyche is the self-sustaining imaginal substrate of consciousness, a sensed presence. Inner images are the soul's substance. They arise from primordial reality as self-generating and self-revealing psychic life and knowledge of the soul. Our only immediate knowledge is psychic existence. Images are specific, concrete particularizations.
The soul experiences spiritual journeys of descent from and return to the imaginal world. For example, loss pulls us down into the soul of things, the Anima Mundi, world psyche, the imaginal sense of cosmos as psyche. We can lose innocence, trust, spontaneity, courage, and self-esteem. They are sacrificed, stolen, or abandoned in traumatic moments, leaving an immense void -- fear, loneliness, unworthiness, pain, abandonment, and spiritual isolation.
From a mythological perspective, trauma is perceived as a descent of the soul, a dropping or falling down. We can fall apart in grief, shame, betrayal, crushing trauma, orgasmic delirium, or spiritual experience. Descent can be experienced as a sudden violent attack which pulls us down or an agonizing loss of soul too overwhelming for consciousness to contain.
Image bridges the conscious and unconscious situation at the moment. Even soul itself is a fantasy image, for Hillman. The luminous consciousness of the worked on soul arises, revealing the essence of being and sacred embodiment, the images within nature, the secret heart of nature.
Reflection is a metaphor for the mind-mirror -- the interiority of perception and its illusion of projected exteriority through dream, image, and fantasy. Interior domains include naturalism's aesthetics, intersubjectivity, and consciousness (Zimmerman).
Naturalism allows for the emergence of properties like consciousness, values and aesthetics. The unity of nature has aesthetic and existential implications. A depth aesthetic rests on the emergence of the archetypal in all creativity. Sacred 'nature' is an encompassing reality that has no other referent. Nature is all that there is: nature is whatever is as it is.
Our aesthetic reflex is our guide in soul-making -- the imaginative parts of our nature. Aesthetic perception is a catalyst for metaphor. The proximity and availability of our aesthetic response to phenomena is the source of soul-making, witnessing “that immediate thing as image, its smile, a joy, a joy that makes ‘forever’” (Hillman, J. (1992). The thought of the heart and the soul of the world. Spring Pub., p. 49)
Consciousness is continually being imagined (imaged, in-formed) by metaphors. Archetypal states of consciousness frame individual response with comprehensible aesthetic patterns. Imagination is invoked to behold the metaphor that lies beyond literal ‘reality’. We engagea new, equally valid and ‘real’ experience of life rich with significance. Archetypal psychology is “the development of a sense of soul…and the method of therapy is the cultivation of imagination” (Hillman, 1983, p. 15).
Apprehension of meaning includes noticing which archetypes are activated when viewing or engaging with art. Archetypes are the components of the deepest level of knowledge for cognition, the collective unconsciousness, which defines the basic structure of the life-world. Non-active attentiveness to images prevents us from entanglement in materiality of the image.
Experience of the world with archetypal symbols is a new form of aesthetics. A non-critical depth aesthetic rests on the manifestation of the archetypal in all forms of creativity, especially related to the spiritual and religious. The framework of symbolic interactionism, phenomenology of perception and archetypes, suggests that symbols translate information from the physical world to human experience.
Archetypes are the universal knowledge of cognition that generates the background of human experience (the life-world). We experience the world with symbols, and archetypes relate the deepest level of human experience. We do not directly react to the ontological-existing reality, but respond to our understanding of this reality. Each action, object, or event has its own self-revealing meaning.
Archetypal symbols carry implicit meanings and the psychological approach to the archetype is as metaphor. Symbol cueing may facilitate memory and subsequent recall of meaning words associated with symbols. Archetypes provide vitality to art and can be accessed by viewers through attention to bodily responses and emotional awareness enhanced by imagination. Images should not be reduced to mere feelings. The metaphorical becomes meaningful when we experience the image from the inside, when it takes us into the imaginal.
Spirit chases ultimates, unity, and identity, but soul is about dreams, fantasy, images. In the aesthetic domain, imagination overcomes disciplinary, mythic and individual boundaries. A metaphor is a voluntary misassignment of a label, but it is also more than that. In metaphorical reference, a symbol, linguistic or not, is made to refer to something not belonging to the realm normally correlated to the symbol’s schema, rearrangements in a field of reference and affect. Images are part of the realm of experiential psychic reality and do not need interpretation. Fantasy is related to body by image and instinct.
For Hillman, 'the primary, and irreducible, language of...archetypal patterns is the metaphorical discourse of myths' (1983, p. 2). Metaphorical or mythic truth no less a form of truth than literal truth -- autonomous informing powers. Indeed, the literal and the metaphorical in a sense lie on the same continuum. Literal denotation, metaphorical denotation, as well as exemplification and expression, can all contribute to the construction of a world of experience -- a way of seeing the world.
https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/213128/file-2133485071-pdf/docs/Journal_9-1_Soul_Migrations.pdf?t=1420502489674
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262637369_Jung_and_Hypnotherapy
"Once upon a time, I Chuang-tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. . .Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now butterfly dreaming I am a man."
The butterfly is the universal symbol for Psyche, for soul. Like a butterfly struggling to get out of the chrysalis, each of us is struggling to emerge from the undifferentiated into the individuated, the spontaneous image-making of the soul exploring imagination.
Also, like the butterfly, identity is emergent. Self-generation is rejuvenation to keep self-reproducing. We experience the muse, daemon, or 'angels' of creativity in their divine autonomy. The symbol joins us with the wildness of the universe.
How often works of creative genius arrive in consciousness almost fully formed. Every person had their spirit or guardian angel. Every person has their “seed-self”, “guiding force”, or acorn of character from birth.
Plato suggested we are each born with a unique daimon or guardian before we are born, and it has selected an image or a pattern that we will live on earth. The daimon oversaw our experiences with mortality — our fate — our personal yet transcendent god.
The daimon is the soul companion that guides us, but at birth we forget. The daimon remembers, however, what belongs to us, and therefore, it is our daimon that is the carrier of our destiny. It is essentially identical with Jung's notion of the Self. Our daimon is a soul-guide, helpful awareness through the dark.
We can call it a daemon, genius, or muse, guardian angel, death, nature, or any conventional element for the abyss of the transcendent imagination, which has infinite aspects. It is our true calling -- self-determination -- our fate -- soul's intimate connection with death.
Archetypal psychology relativizes and deliteralizes the notion of ego and focuses on what it calls the psyche, or soul. "The reality of the psyche is lived in the death of the literal," according to Gaston Bachelard. The muse connects with the mythic and can help or hinder the creative process. Death is a muse that inform us the darkness of the depths is haunted with loving souls. The essence of soul is the paradox of life/death, light/dark, male/female.
Psyche as Angelic Daemon & Soul Guide
Jung said, “the daemonic is the not yet realized creative.” Perceptual diversity helps us access a variety of non-rational altered states of consciousness, including dreams, trance, imagination, divination, and meditation -- presentational illumination.
The face of the beloved angel is our divinity -- our light that draws breath, our embodied nakedness. The strength of our soul is our own mythological being, animating our own inner voice and transcendent potential. The mythical world of the old gods is not the product of poetry; mankind is the product of the gods.
Virtually all that can be observed is some form of image -- of self, or world, or God. The congealed potential of such imagery can appear as a fog, cloudiness, amorphous generalized grayness without distinct features. We can speculate that this cloudiness represents the diffuse, undifferentiated imagery of all potential imagery: all self-images, all nature-images, all God-images.
Dreams are a way to moisten the soul in the pools of images and feeling, dissolving problems, and changing moods. Spirits of the water and instinctive feminine magic can appear as daemonic archetypal energy whose invisible presence causes alterations of consciousness.
We turn to our own lived experience to find answers to the questions: who am I? where am I? and when am I? We excavate memory and engage in an investigation of the emergent fragments that we interrogate and reflect on to generate narratives of the self. On this non-linear path we are both researcher and the researched.
This transdisciplinary perspective is sort of an archaeological approach, a descent, excavation, or alchemical mining, revealing our psychophysical roots. Panentheism is the belief that the divine pervades and interpenetrates every part of the universe, extending beyond space and time. Unlike pantheism, where the divine and the universe are identical, panentheism is an ontological distinction between the significance of divine and non-divine.
We sketch a landscape of ourselves, connecting with multiple forms and emergent fragments, shards, or splinters in recurring incidents. Narratives weave multiple ways of inquiring, reflecting, and knowing together. We use our influences, artistry, and memory to identify and assimilate negative or positive anchoring and turning points (intense impact).
We can create a new structure for relating the subjective (interiority) with the exterior world and self-actualization. Our search for meaning is about multiple layers of identity. The questing impulse promotes autonomous and self-directed learning pathways. Emerging fragments interplay and interact.
By interrogating our reflections we can identify recurring contextual themes. There are layers or stratification in our lived experience, mirrored in multiple layers of metaphor. Paying close attention, we polish our imagery.
Naturally, there is no guarantee that what we believe is right. Should we believe it. Metaphors embody our ways of knowing that were formerly silent or hidden as new associations. It is easy to confuse what is actually the creation of beliefs with the "discovery of Truth," a common goal of science and theology.
Who's truth?
The basis of the human psyche seems to be a collective of selves--a multimind in a multiverse. Independent and autonomous, they relate with one another mostly unknown to the outer awareness. We could call it polyphasic consciousness, a kaleidoscope of potential selves.
In archetypal psychology the gods are not metaphysical literalisms. Polytheism is not the belief in separate and distinct gods, but acknowledges the principle that reality and the divine appear fragmented and diverse. David Miller calls it "the radical plurality of the self."
Miller explains in The New Polytheism that it “is the reality experienced by men and women when Truth with a capital ‘T’ cannot be articulated according to a single grammar, a single logic or a single symbol system.” It is more concerned with the relationship among living things to give shape to the increasingly complex and varied experiences of life.
Henry Corbin cautions, "To confuse Being with a being is the metaphysical catastrophe. It is the "death of Being" to confuse the unity of Being (Esse) with a pseudo-unity of beings (ens) which is essentially multiple." He believed, "that this imaginal world is the locus of the "rebirth of the Gods..."
"I speak always of the multitude of theophanies and of theophanic forms. The uniquely Divine (Theotes) aspires to be revealed and can only be revealed in multiple theophanies. Each one is autonomous, different from the other, each quite close to being a hypostasis, yet at the same time the totality of Theotes is in each theophanic form."
Narrative identity is not immutable or fixed but mobile. It issues from the combination of the concordance of the story, and the discordance imposed by the encountered events, emotional crossroads, and dislocations. We can revise and expand our elastic and loose-knit stories by including inner or psychic events, or even recounting events differently.
Multisenory modes and metaphors punctuate, co-exist and interact with each other. These include written, visual, aural and kinesthetic modes as elements of communication, as well as the language of stillness and silence. It helps us situate ourselves more objectively (passionate detachment) and historically.
We revise or recount previously unrealized threads with unexpected clues and archetypal embellishments. We can interpret and re-interpret inherited stories, photographic fragments and memories of place in the present moment. We can create artifacts and art.
Revisioning ourselves is a self-reflexive process of artistic observation, an archaeology of open-ended identity. Differentiated self-reference can help us compose our recursive geobiological participation. We select Earthly and living elements in a co-evolutionary coupling of matter and life when presence meets awareness.
We explore the inextricable highs and lows of the human condition in a more loving, self-compassionate, self-empathic way, cultivating an ethical disposition. We are the emergent convergence of multiple lines of descent, catalyzed by transformational change.
Empathy or mirroring may imply a kind of inference, of imaginative simulation or of direct perception.
Phenomenology and embodiment give us direct, unmediated, experiential access to anomalous and numinous states, especially emotions, of others -- even imaginal others. Its cultivation requires not just personal embodiment developed through the process of self-exploration and self-awareness, but sustainable empathy. Naturally, there is no end to the self-discovery process, a great journey through a mysterious realm of transformation.
Cultivating Image, Pathos, & Emergent Self-Exploration
"The Angel is the Face that our God takes for us, and each of us finds his God only when he recognizes that Face." --Henry Corbin
When it wears a personal face, it is called an angel or a daimon, or genius. Still others think of it, in its incorporeal form, as the soul. It does not develop with education or maturity. It is beyond symbols, and is, therefore, neither archetype nor angel, neither wise old man or woman, nor divine child. These symbols point the way.
An imaginal approach reclaims soul as our primary concern -- the sacred and immaterial subtle world, energy body, and psyche. They incorporate spiritual faculties. Ancient Egyptian physicians addressed mind, body, & soul in healing practices in the 27th Century BCE. In Vedanta, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Gnostic Christianity and Kabbalah these spheres are often referred to as the gross/physical, subtle/astral, and mental/causal spheres.
We all have an innate capacity to perceive them all. We can experience direct knowing in relation to the universal nature of all life. Our mind depends on the universal mind. The biggest gaps in our knowledge concern the universe as a whole and our entanglement with it. Entanglement is a property of nonlocal quantum information exchange.
The Quest for the Holy Grail of self-knowledge and self-exploration is a self-initiatory path, including explorations in meaning and body awareness. Soul is the location of our actual experience -- our perceptions of sensations, our emotions, and our thoughts.
The pneumatic is situated, by essence and nature, under the vertical and timeless axis, neither 'before' nor 'after'. So, the archetype personifies or 'incarnates', and may at any moment pierce our personal individual envelope.
This is the multidimensional realm of potentiality, the collective (un)conscious, archetypes, universal tropes and spacetime potentialities. Intuitively, we tend to be at least vaguely aware of a divine unifying consciousness at the point of quantum entanglement.
This practice is not limited to the religious or clinical setting, but is an ancient practice of therapeia, the art of spiritual self-healing. Therapeutes as contemplatives means both worshiper and healer. Various ancient practices were called therapeia ("cure of the soul"; healing mental suffering and distress).
This notion of care, attention, and cure of the soul with healing dreams is more philosophical than metaphysical or religious. Inscribed over the door of the ancient library in Alexandria were the words ΨΥΧΗΣ ΙΑΤΡΕΙΟΝ or “Healing Place of the Soul.” It meant more than bibliotherapy. It was a temple to the muses, part academy, medical school, and part research center, in addition to the great ancient library. A lot of epic poetry, as well as works on geography, history, mathematics, astronomy and medicine were composed during this period.
Ideas about body, soul and the interaction between the two were elaborated by ancient Greek and Roman doctors and thinkers. Stoic philosophers describe how mental functions in humans emanate from the seven ‘mental’ faculties of the ‘ruling part of the soul’ (which they called the hegemonikon, center of consciousness). These include the senses, as well as biological processes such as reproduction and growth.
Psyche, Breath, and Pneuma
Soul as breath is a motif common to all major streams of philosophy. Pneuma (πνεῦμα) is an ancient Greek word for "breath", and in a religious context for "spirit" or "soul". Pneuma and psyche both meant “the breath of life.” The ancient understanding was the energy that animated all of life, a person’s deep, mysterious core essence, and the ancient soul stream of ancestors.
According to Jung, the same pneumatic human person is produced in the East and West, although the practices by which psychic rebirth is attained are different. The spiritual (pneumatic) body is, strictly speaking, not a body at all, but an ideal, archetypal form called the "causal body," because all the other bodies are engendered from it.
The spirit is breath, and the Greek word is pneuma. The soul is life, and the Greek word is psyche. The mind is understanding, and the Greek word is nous. Natural confusion exists between the spirit and the soul since both words, in their roots, mean breath.
But for the Greeks, there were two kinds of breath, in Arabic ruch, in Hebrew ruach and in Greek pneuma. Breathing into one's hands means: "I offer my living soul to God. It is a wordless acted prayer, which could equally well be spoken; Lord into thy hands I commend my spirit.” (Jung, 1931a, pp.72-73).
"The Self within the heart, the seed of the divine, the pneumatic light-spark, the dweller in light, the inner man, was the eternal pilgrim incarnated in matter; those who had this alive and conscious within them were the spiritual or pneumatic". "As in the consummation of the universe the World-soul was reunited with the World-mind, so in the perfecting of the individual the soul was made one with the Self within" (G. R. S. Mead, 2008).
Psychology essentially refers to the study and use (logos) of the breath, soul or spirit of life (psyche) that leaves a person at death and continues in some other form. From such a fundamental perspective, all forms of ancient and modern caring, helping and healing have their foundations in breath-based behavior, experiences, and spirituality.
In Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés says, 'The word pneuma (breath) shares its origins with the word psyche; they are both considered words for soul. So when there is song in a tale or mythos, we know that the gods are being called upon to breathe their wisdom and power into the matter at hand. We know then that the forces are at work in the spirit world, busy crafting soul.”
Jung says, in Childhood Dreams Seminar, "Whatever we say about the psychical, we always are talking out of an archetype." (2010a, p. 72) The archetypes answer in The Red Book (2009, p. 246) through Philemon (Simon Magus), "We are real and not symbols."
All of the parts of the soul can be seen as extensions of pneuma (breath) originating in the hêgemonikon. They defined familiar axes of experience and life, defined by the polarities of sense-perception and future-past. Phantasia and Logos interact to produce inner and outer experience. Impulse is determined by past impressions and Assent determines the course of the future.
'Soul' and 'mind' are interchangeable as the spacious and deep place within individuals where the unnoticed unfolds. It is considered accessible to self-scrutiny. We must differentiate between directed or “primary” imagination and mere fantasy. Philosophy was a way of life with an esoteric goal of wisdom, a healing service.
Ensouled World
James Hillman wanted to return psychological metaphysics to the world, to "think the real in service of soul-making." The approach is closely bound up with the practice of therapeia. Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul. As real as the manifest world, the imaginal realm is soul's natural habitat.
'Imaginal' refers to both imagination and the images we live through. The imaginal element of the thing manifests its chosen image through the World Soul. Initially, there is nothing conceptual about this. He speaks of the need for “a psychology that returns psychic reality to the world” (1982, p. 72).
The place of soul, a world of imagination, passion, fantasy and reflection is the place that binds the physical and the spiritual together (Harris, 2001, p. 33). Jung said that the soul is the psychological experience of the body, the soul and psyche is visible in the body (Jung, 2014, p. 355).
This world penetrates into our dreams and other visionary experiences, including the places we visit during deep meditation or imaginal journeying. The goal is to draw soul into the world via individual creative acts, not to exclude it in the name of social order.
The potential for soul-making is revealed in psychic images. The power of the soul restores a space that sacralizes the ephemeral, earthly state of being. It unites the earthly manifestation with its imaginal counterpart -- focus is on the psychophysical changes that come through inaction, attention to the experience of space, and the primacy of infinite space, awareness, and light.
Feelings stir and images move. Love quickens the soul to its images in the heart, as the place of true imagining. Henri Corbin says it is an act of love to engage the soul of the world through the mediating power of the imaginal.
The Platonic “true cosmos” emerges only after the veil is spread over the universe; then, the world's body was finally fitted to its soul. Our imaginative recognition, the childlike act of imagining the world, animates the world and returns it to soul. (Hillman, 1989, p. 99). Not only is imaginal knowing beneficial and necessary to know the world, it is the psyche as it actually is, a collage of complex embedded meanings and entangled relationships.
The world as a symbol speaks for itself. Imaginal psychology maintains the primacy of the image as a direct expression of soul. As a discipline, it alleges that soul is a primary experience, and seeks to give her a voice. The realm of psyche is a subjective world of depth and meaning that is sometimes corporeal, sometimes not. The world soul permeates body and psyche, and opens us to the mythic.
Existence is more about deepening pathos than solving problems. That cuts us off from listening to the inner qualities of the things of the world that speak for themselves and experiencing soul.
For Hillman, "soul" is about multiplicity and ambiguity, and about being polytheistic; it belongs to the night-world of dreams. Free-arising images express the way the soul perceives the daily realities we live among. But he also suggests, we need to bring soul into action, and action into soul.
Dream of the Butterfly
In Greek mythology, Psyche is the deification of the human soul. She was portrayed in ancient mosaics as a goddess with butterfly wings. She embodies the psychic states experienced on the threshold between consciousness and unconsciousness, a path which involves a return to the unconscious of nature and our nature. Psyche consists essentially of images and the vital activities taking place within us.
“There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the “thorn in the flesh” is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent.” (C. G. Jung, CW, Vol. 12, para. 208)
She is an autonomous force that demonstrates our existence is more than physical, a symbol of transformation emerging from the boundless domain of the deep unconscious, an underworld that is dark, murky, and fraught with unknown, liminal forces. Within the liminal state an integration of new knowledge occurs which requires a reconfiguration. Soul appears more readily in symbol, creativity and paradox, The threshold is access a mytho-poetic imaginal world.
Just as a butterfly experiences a metamorphosis, so the psyche may experience transformations that can be be lived through with awareness of social, psychological and spiritual significance. Our self-mythology is tied to our experience of the universal substrate of the collective unconscious.
Myth remains relevant to the contemporary psyche, a collective form of projection. Like Psyche we may go through a major transition and crisis leading to the emergence of our potential, where the necessity of fate meets the destiny structured by our environment and opportunities.
Much of psychic life remains hidden as in the initial stages of the myth. This includes secret thoughts, feelings, fears, criticisms, anticipations, etc. A psychological initiation occurs when we are suddenly forced to "go within" ourselves and discover or "own" the subconscious processes operating there.
Gradually, we begin to recognize that relationship involves chronic "wounding and healing," despair and exaltation. This is a variation of archetypal dying and resurrecting. In its self-reflecting narcissism, this complex provides no stable sense of identity. We ask ourselves, "Who am I, and why can't I behave as I'd like to?"
Some people seek therapy for this very absence of a stable sense of identity, after trying to form a false identity as a couple. Love brings alterations and fluctuations between feelings of fear, of "being nobody," or worthless when we are wounded, or feeling special and precious when things are going well.
Transitional Phenomena
We are thrust into the liminal position by the colliding pressure between two worlds - conscious and unconscious. It describes our disorientation in a movement through liminal space and time opening strange spaces into which the unconscious can flood. The liminal world enables our experience of the numinous.
Liminal states unite opposing unconscious forces operating through the transcendent function. Jung (1964) described the gradual suspension of ego functioning that allows the unconscious to emerge as individuation, while also emphasizing the need to return to the world.
Liminality finds a place in the everyday world, for example, in expressive arts, and the liminality of the creative state, between the objective world and the realm of imagination and art. Liminality also comes through depression, loss of persona, or other major life transitions and their psychological phenomena.
But, what happens when we lose what appears to be our “everything” and do not know what to do next in the absence of tangible and cultural signifiers? When we feel that we are anxiously floating inbetween we are in the liminal space. We may or may not notice, as the liminal is actually the sub-liminal, between conscious and unconscious, primary and secondary process thinking. Transitions shake things up. Will we survive the transition from the old to new state?
Will we come through breakdowns and breakthroughs and be transformed, or will we die or even just imagine we do? The caterpillar is dissolved back into its primordial state. This “liminality” is an experience of intense non-being, a prelude to psychophysical transformation.
We don't know if it's the tomb or womb of rejuvenation but the end of the cycle is mirrored in the beginning. Metaphorically, death and new life are always emerging. As with liminality, much of the imagery of individuation expresses the themes of birth and rebirth. Liminal spaces auger a rebirth.
The liminal is also archetypal situations and experiences. Reality and identity are challenged in a world of disorder, senselessness and madness. Between world and psyche is a quasi-subjective.space of ambivalent nature. At first, we find ourselves in the dark. Liminality bridges the gap between the subjective world of the psyche and the objective world of (seemingly) external phenomena of identity, belonging, and anxiety. We have to let go to enter liminal space.
The cocoon, a radical transformation in the dark, is a metaphorical threshold, a halfway position, a zone of betweenness, a location or position or status that “falls between the cracks. This is also the zone of emergent creativity, between our old comfort zone and as-yet-unknown solutions. Liminal themes include uncertainty, initiation, and religious experience, ultimately suggesting a move toward a hidden but genuine spiritual response to the questions of psychic and cultural fragmentation.
It can also mean the transition stages between sleep and wakefulness. In the world of dreams and nightmares we definitely leave behind the model-dependent reality of everyday life. But even our waking state is bounded by a vague penumbra of the unknown, altered states, dissociations, traumatic stress, and anomalous realities.
This Lunar consciousness is ambiguous and paradoxical realities that seep into us from the ragged edges of experience, the edge of chaos and order. In liminality, there is substantial distance between the adaptive persona and personal preferences.
We begin ignoring cultural demands, question our essence, lack a sense of self, and rely on new external identifications while we work toward establishing a new persona. Identity hangs in suspended anmation. Archetypal energies such as the Victim, Persecutor, Child, or Hero may be present in the liminal space for us to follow deeper. The potential innovation has deep emotional implications for those who experience this crossing.
Our organic inquiry incorporates archetypal experiences, both transcendent and immanent, spontaneous and intentional, liminal and spiritual–experiences that are beyond ego. The borderland state is required to simultaneously maintain stability and induce transformation. We feel compelled to cross the liminality for the sake of psyche, though we are somehow aware of the risk and the danger involved.
Rituals and symbolic forms foster and channel such crossings in order to reach new configurations. Innovations take place in liminal space. New and different ideas emerge, new knowledge of the world is introduced. Novelty emerges through free recombination of familiar elements with non-familiar elements. The liminal area is a space of many virtual possibilities and potential opportunities, the raw material from which the psyche of all of humanity is drawn.
Liminal space is characterized by instability, by a blurred space-time distinction and by ambiguities. What occurs in liminal space is intense affect. This is the setting and activation of liminality processes that lead to novelty and creativity and enable the creation of new narratives. Narrating is an ongoing process of sensemaking implying bordering and liminality.
A totally different reality that has as much validity lurks behind our normal existence. Liminality is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rites. This is different from shamanic initiation because the unconscious emerges spontaneously in everyday reality through extraordinary synchronicities, significances, and psychic events -- beyond what we normally recognize as 'reality.'. Life-changing events yank us out of our ordinary trance state from one order of reality to another.
Our psyche is reflected, portrayed in the world around us. Humanity is collectively facing James Hillman's dilemma in The Soul's Code, “I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I'm in the psyche…”
Soul is at the Heart of the World.
"According to Plotinus, the world-soul has a tendency towards separation and divisibility, the sine qua non of all change, creation, and reproduction. It is an “unending All of life” and wholly energy; a living organism of ideas which only become effective and real in it." -CW5 ¶ 198."In alchemy, the world-soul is the anima catholica, an idea identical with the spirit of God." -CW8 ¶ 388
The world soul is, according to several systems of thought, an intrinsic connection between all living things on the planet, which relates to our world in much the same way as the soul is connected to the human body. So, personal grief extends into grief for the living world and loss of the sacred and the wild world. What we are losing cannot be regained.
“The psyche is not only a personal problem but a world problem...Nowadays we can see as
never before that the peril which threatens all of us comes not from nature but from man, from the psyche of the individual and the mass. The psychic aberration of man is the danger. Everything depends upon whether or not our psyche functions properly. If certain persons lose their heads, a hydrogen bomb will go off.” MDR p. 132
Our suffering and healing is mutually entangled. Chellis Glendinning writes, “To open our hearts to the sad history of humanity and the devastated state of the Earth is the next step in our reclamation of our bodies, the body of our human community, and the body of the Earth.” Thus, we directly experience the soul of the world, the anima mundi and her seamless embrace, unmediated instinctual intimacy with the living world.
Our collective planetary society is undergoing an analogous unprecedented transition. Our pain and outrage at the sad state of the world, (pollution, extinctions, overpopulation, not to mention man's inhumanity to man), may be her weeping the cumulative grief of the world through us. We tend to interpret the emptiness as a failure of our personality not a hollowness arising from the missing birdsongs, rich tones, saturated tastes, and ephemeral scents of by-gone eras.
“Psyche is the mother of all our attempts to understand Nature,” Jung wrote. "Psyche is image," as Jung says. Psyche, according to Hillman, is the spirit that has "afterlife, cosmic issues, idealistic values, hopes, and universal truths.
We can create our own unique image of ourselves and, in so doing, rediscover our essential nature. Heraclitus said, “One would never discover the limits of psyche, should one traverse every road–so deep a logos does it possess." Like the butterfly, psyche hovers between the material world and the abstract sky of spirit.
The Greek word psyche literally means "spirit, breath, life or animating force". Hillman says, you cannot kill a god or a goddess, or an archetype. They will come again in a different form. The butterfly goddess continues to surface in the psyche, which means butterfly, It hides in fragments of myths and fairy tales, the transition, liminality, chaos, and change of our ordinary lives.
Hillman considers the “dark night of the soul” the death experience of an old pattern, or lifestyle, as the new way of living that is gasping to be born, the soul crawling towards transformation like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, always grounded in the impersonal and unknowable depths of the psyche.
In emergence from the caterpillar state, there is continuity between the caterpillar and the butterfly. They need each other for their different states. Psyche and body are clearly interdependent, concerned with imaginal inner others already present in potentia.
In Reenchantment of Everyday Life, Thomas Moore says to “never forget that 'analysis' means loosening, and the 'psyche' means butterfly, a beautiful but elusive being that should be glimpsed in flight but never pinned down." So, psychoanalysis means, 'letting the soul go free.'
A living and responsive world, the concept of anima mundi is the world as body of God, a turn-around from concepts of matter and nature as dead and exploitable, the aliveness of the world. Psyche, far from being exclusively human, pervades the cosmos. Through death, which is an organic and symbolic part of life, she is born into eternal life by undergoing tests, purifications, death, resurrection, and ascension.
“Death is the translation of life into soul,” Hillman wrote in Animal Presences. Psyche is both mortal and immortal. Psyche archetype is connected with psychic sensitivity, especially towards the mind and feelings of another, but also with being able to feel and communicate with nature and the natural flow of life and time.
The soul’s separation from nature is an illusion of the mind. Rather, the soul generates images unceasingly. The soul lives on images and metaphor. These images form the basis for our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters."
The caterpillar is literally re-membered into a butterfly. We all carry the seeds of our potential deep within the soul. During disintegration, such as a crisis, illness, or midlife transition, memory is stirred and activates the process of individuation, of "psychic growth" gradually results in "a wider and more mature personality" (Jung & Von Franz, 1964, p. 161). Soul, therefore, carries the same transformational elements as that of the caterpillar, which bursts from its death-tomb, with brilliant-colored wings, ready to take flight, ecstatically living and expressing the full power of its new life.
Double Healix
Let the images come into your body. Embrace the image. To heal the mind-body split we need a view of reality that eliminates the dichotomy of "in here" in this separate body vs. "out there" in the alien, external world. Hillman defines soul as a "perspective rather than a substance," the immaterial part of us that actuates individual life: that which is responsible for our thoughts and feelings; the seat of the soul.
Psyche is our soul-guide, our daimon. Dialog, dreams, fantasies, expressive arts, and symbols are suggested by the deeper, uncensored levels of the psyche. Autonomous psyche in its self-generative glory is cultivation of imaginal feedback.
Soul refers to the rich and baffling dualistic drama that is played out moment by moment within each of us. Incompatible instincts assail us, inexplicable shifts in mood, conflicting desires and sudden revulsions, puzzling dreams, hallucinations and fantasies, etc.
Soul designates the fields or patterns of transhuman archetypal ideas, emotions and actions in which each of us is immersed from birth. Psyche is also a pilgrim, compelled toward love and wisdom through circumstantial pains, getting stuck and unstuck, her wings burnt by the flames of Eros.
These universal psychological patterns enfold us long before they begin appearing in our individual identities. In our instinctual longing for reunion, Hillman writes, “the soul becomes operative in converting it into a Thou—making soul of objects, personifying, anthropomorphosing, turning into a partner the object with which it is engaged and which it has implanted soul."
For Jung, Psyche refers to the totality of all psychic forces, totality or processes, conscious as well as unconscious. Soul is more restricted to a "function complex" or partial personality, like anima, animus, or soul-image. Psyche presents itself in, and is reflected upon by images, thoughts, language, feelings, lacunae, symptoms, dreams, the totality of conscious and unconscious processes -- protomental and psychoid, a plurality of vision, with an acceptance of the fluidity of the psyche. Jung said, “A kind of fluid interpenetration belongs to the very nature of all archetypes."
Hillman's tried to restore psyche to "its proper place" in psychology. He sees the soul at work in imagination, fantasy, myth and metaphor. He also sees soul revealed in psychopathology, in the symptoms of psychological disorders. Love that leads to psyche is not bound by human concerns and conditions. It is both active and receptive. It comes in to life as a grace, so that, like Psyche of the tale, one has a relationship to love itself.
Hillman reminds us that we don't have nearly as much to do with psycho-spiritual encounters as we think we do. Divine experiences, like mathematical equations and musical notes, exist apart from the human brain. Psychic phenomena come to us and through us, but not from us.
"As a connecting link, or traditionally third position, between all opposites, the soul differs from the terms which it connects...It is not life that matters, but soul and how life is used to care for soul." (James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, pp. 174-175)
Changing Form
“The caterpillar dies so the butterfly could be born. And, yet, the caterpillar lives in the butterfly and they are but one. So, when I die, it will be that I have been transformed from the caterpillar of earth to the butterfly of the universe.” (John Harricharan)
The significance of the butterfly symbolizes the ability to cross into the Otherworld, transformation and creation. The ancient Egyptians were fascinated by the caterpillar as emblematic of reincarnation. and Mummification rituals were likely developed as a symbolic creation of the cocoon. Ancient Greeks were inspired by their transformation to placed representations of butterflies in their tombs.
Because of its metamorphic capacity for changing form, the caterpillar symbolically can represent individuation, transformation, development, and growth. This psychic journey transforms old ways, attitudes, patterns of thought. When old behaviors and values yield to a new sense of inner life, psychic reality comes forth, emerging like the butterfly.
The conscious personality, or ego, attends to this process through creative introversion. Thus, the caterpillar’s retreat into the dark and silence of the cocoon has been seen as
a model for quiet withdrawal, spiritual focus and meditation. In dreams, the
caterpillar can be an image for a transition, characterized by the death of the old and the birth of new patterns of conduct and attitudes.
Jung suggested that our core issues "must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning." He does not rule out suffering, only the meaninglessness of life against which our denial, repression, and defenses struggle. We can understand our lives and instincts more deeply through archetypal phenomenology, including the the interaction of love and suffering of eros (feeling life) and pathos.
Soulful love is a spiritual path. Most of us have suffered the pathos, confusion and pain, trust and betrayal, jealousy, need for power, loss of identity, erotic fantasy, and even co-dependence. They are born from both our dysfunction and deep longing for authenticity. "Creative life always stands outside convention." (Jung, CW 17, Para 305).
Hillman called this suffering pathos. Existence is, not a problem to be solved, but a pathos to be deepened into in search of insight. Archetypal psychology is a psychology of value, a life-affirming pathos based on eternal return.
Confusion, symptoms, pathos, and complexes are the very things that connect us to soul, to core self-knowledge. Hillman called pathos, “the spiritual component of love or the erotic component of spirit,” and considered it “the longing towards the unattainable, the ungraspable, the incomprehensible.”
Psyche-pathos-logos is the “speech of the suffering soul” or the soul's suffering of meaning. Your former life still seems to exist, but you can't get back to it. You feel panic, guilt, bewilderment. Pathos comes in waves, breaking over us in visceral sensations, delivered with a striking emotional intensity. It befalls us as a necessity and we must suffer and endure it.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. . . I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world ...
Hillman sees the soul at work in imagination, in fantasy, in myth and in metaphor. He also sees soul revealed in psychopathology, in the symptoms. In Greek, pathos is a changeable quality, but especially concerns extreme grief, misfortune, or distress: appetite, anger, fear, confidence, envy, joy, love, hate, longing, jealousy, pity, in general.
We suffer what befalls us. Pathos inspires us to overcome the suffering and sorrow. "The pathos of things" is also "an empathy toward things", or "a sensitivity to ephemera", awareness of impermanence, or transience of things, and a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.
Etymology - Greek páthos suffering, sensation, akin to páschein to suffer. ... the quality or power, esp in literature or speech, of arousing feelings of pity, sorrow, etc. ... a feeling of sympathy or pity: a stab of pathos. "suffering, feeling, emotion, calamity," literally "what befalls one," related to paskhein "to suffer," pathein "to suffer, feel," penthos "grief, sorrow;" from PIE root *kwent(h)- "to suffer." ...
When the dam of repression breaks, a surge of torrential tears erupts like a profound deluge, releasing the grief repressed for so long. Some weep like their eyes would drop from their sockets but grieving openly returns us to a more natural mode; it is less personal and more universal, more self-compassionate, and heartful.
Working with myth, we embody the passion and the pathos of Isis as she seeks to recover the remains of her husband Osiris. We take on Parcival's quest for the Grail. We labor with Hercules and travel with Odysseus into the archetypal islands of inner and outer worlds. Depth psychology in particular must stay close to the appearance of pathos, wistfulness, longing, and loss, which cannot be separated from soul, but is unbound to clinical vision.
It requires that we undertake the extraordinary journey -- the descent into ourselves -- patheia meaning "feeling, perception, passion, affliction, experience". With access to the unconscious, pathos and lament become fulfillment.
We are touched and moved by our pathos. This emotion is pathos. Grief and despair primarily tend to the giving up of breath, the weakening of resolution and control, and the use of minor inflections, and even outcries. Giving up of breath is a giving up of soul - soul loss or depression, the dark night.
An archetypal viewpoint provides an alternative perspective on the pathos present within the imaginal realm. The engendering process re-invokes previous images, memories, dreams, and reflections, imbuing intense pathos with new meaning and significance for those who mourn.
A lament or lamentation is a passionate expression of grief, often in music, poetry, or song form. The pathos of grief is the saga of a broken heart. Pathos is the most difficult emotion to express because it sinks into despair, weakness, and self-loathing with its own rhythms of intensity, throbbing pain, and giving way to tenderness. Even deep in the pathos, the heart always demands some rest in spite of the darkness, and because of the hope.
The grief is most often born of regret, or mourning. Laments can also be expressed in a verbal manner, where the participant laments about something they regret or someone they've lost, usually accompanied by wailing. We learn to treasure our tears and fill our lungs with breath and meaningful vocalizations as the foundation of self-expression.
It can include symbolic discourse of the living with the dead, including loved ones not named so dead to our ears and formal utterance. Grief and the pathos account for the specially plaintive element in some music identified as “soul.” In pathos, our's becomes an archetypal life. We learn to follow our uncertainty.
There is a symmetry in pathos, paradox, and poetics from which self-compassion emerges through the pitch and range of voice. Extreme transitions are marked by movement, tone-color, extreme pitch, and long inflections. Key and range contain emergent power in the act of being.
Right use of power implies sympathetic co-ordination and control by voluntary and involuntary forces. Symbolic and verbal resonance supports strength of voice, which comes from the amount of 'breath' in the lungs, articulation and volume of the tone. Retained breath expresses depth of feeling.
It requires the extraordinary task of dying to our current, local selves and of being reborn to our eternal selves. A psychology with a mythic or sacred base demands that we have the courage both to release the limitation brought about by old wounds and toxic bitterness and to gain access to the undiminished self with its vast inner storehouse of capacities. Consciousness is direct experience which has an intimate connection with pathos; the emotional awareness.
Prostration might go beyond pathos and reach total shock or unhinging of the mental mechanism, which remove from it the power to again act at all. This extremity of condition being the completely broken and irrecoverable, passes out of the consideration of the functional action of mind.
We can then use these capacities to prepare ourselves for the greater agenda--becoming an instrument through which the source may play its great music. Passion (drive) and pathos are reflected in the fact that if the creative spirit isn’t served, we can even become physically ill. Images, ideas and inspirations cry out to become manifested. Order or form yearns to be born from chaos; and those very acts of creation breed destruction of old systems.
We cannot cure and eradicate pathos, or discard old myths for replacement with a new ones. Individual telos finds its expression through our vocation, our calling. Recognition of fate is not fatalism. We have a latent purpose but may fail to recognize it, however, its literalization into definite, overriding goals must be avoided. Hillman says to follow the image is to discover the “telos,” direction of the soul’s path, its destiny. This telos is also clearly illuminated in the body, which is also a metaphorical field.
Psychic events have a telos or integral aspect. We sense their purpose is therapeutic. Imagination bridges body and soul — the material beating heart and the imaginal heart. Looking or seeing through events and things to their imaginal image is not a method, but a way of living. Subjective perspectives deepen vision, reflection, rhetoric, values, and ideas. The telos, the inner direction and goal has been to reconnect with the cosmos in a mature participation mystique.
Authentic suffering is a realistic response to the ragged edges of being. The purpose of therapy is not to remove suffering but to move through it to an enlarged consciousness that can sustain the polarity of painful opposites, the discovery of the dense fabric of correspondence between external and interior events which constitutes every life.
DEPTH INSIGHTS
Finding & Tending the Living Waters
Reflective Speculation
Iona Miller
"Self-reflection, or - what comes to the same thing - the urge to individuation, gathers together what is scattered and multifarious and exalts it to the original of the One, the Primordial Man. In this way our existence as separate beings, our former ego nature, is abolished, the circle of consciousness is widened, and because the paradoxes have been made conscious, the sources of conflict are dried up." ("Transformation Symbolism in the Mass", CW 11, para. 401).
Reflective Speculation
In his magnum opus, Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman writes of "soul": "By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment -- and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground. ... by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy -- that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical."
"The educational process of love through which the Soul becomes psyche begins when the soul feels its modern isolation, begins to feel nostalgia for the archetypal connections and cultural roots of tradition and feels the need to be in touch with the unity of all things, which is the psychic totality or the health of the soul, "our first interest". --James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis
"The awakening of the psyche [and of Psyche] depends entirely on the daimon of eros. The psyche is educated, guided out of its chrysalis, through the rediscovered memory of its pre-existing wings, that is, its a priori relations with the divine archetypal nature of all things. We experience these relationships through the cosmic connotations of the Soul and its associations with nature and the past." Hillman
For most of human history we had no idea how the world or ourselves worked. Most pre-scientific interpretations of universal forces involved spiritual or religious entities -- evil, elemental or ancestral spirits, or god and goddesses that manipulated reality for their own mysterious ends.
The gods found, ground, establish, and substantiate reality. The return to primordial origins is fundamental to all mythologies -- expressing a spontaneous regression to the ground that pierces through the world of appearances to 'reality', to immediacy. We experience our own origins through a kind of identity, through countless beings before and after oneself as the germ of infinity.
Our journey re-unfolds those same images which stream out of the ground, out of the abyss. In this way we are "grounding" ourselves. When we dive down to our own foundations we find the world of our common divine origin. Ceremony translates the mythological value into an act. The world of the ancestors is a subterranean storehouse of everything that grows and comes to birth.
We like to think we have outgrown the religious or spiritual superstitions of by-gone eras, but the fact remains that we still couch our interpretations of cosmic forces in theoretical or metaphorical terms. We can sweep away false assumptions and still retain our metaphorical relationships. The confluence of non-physical psyche and body forms our experience of reality. It is analogous to wave-particle duality.
Carl Jung proposed a convenient hypothesis for the unknown. Complex psychic phenomena share dynamic core elements. The "collective unconscious" is a vast information store containing the entire religious, spiritual and mythological experiences of humanity. According to Jung, these inherited ancient archetypes exist deep with the human psyche and heavily influence our psychophysical being. We access the noumenal via archetypal phenomena.
When we awaken to the need to probe the unconscious, we may prefer the centeredness of Jung (Individuation, mandalas, and the Self) if we are fragmenting. But fantasies of wholeness can be deceptive, as they are not inclusive of everything within the psyche. Rather, "wholeness" is descriptive of a desired state of harmonious integration. But if we compulsively seek wholeness, development, or ascension, we deny all that lives in the darkness of the unconscious, uncertainties, mysteries, doubts.
So, we may resonate with the iconoclast Hillman and archetypal diversity of multiple divinities if we are ossified, stuck or stultified. Hillman has argued for a psychology that acknowledges all the myriad facets of our nature, including pathology, as important and integral to our general psychic well-being.
Western psychology tends to be "monotheistic" with emphasis on rational ego-awareness. Hillman suggested the need for a more "polytheistic" view of psyche, one that might draw fruitfully from the pantheons of ancient mythology for a more fitting representation of psyche's diversity and needs.
Pluralism is a multiplicity of positions or possible selves, with a decentralized, polyphonic character. We don't have to fear the collapse of what we think we are. We don't need to fear the collapse of our personalistic belief system, nor our belief in absolute truth. Awakening the aesthetic heart to ensoul the world releases us from the false conflict of
"therapy" and "art" challenging us to expand our healing parameters beyond the self to include the world.
Creative engagement with chaos means direct experience of self as a changing, pluralistic, multi-dimensional entity. This existential philosophy of "dynamic co-consciousness" is process-oriented, rather than "state-oriented". Based on a plurality of perspectives, a plurality of consciousness, a plurality of worlds, this notion means giving breath to many voices.
"One of the most harmful illusions that can beguile us is probably the belief that we are an indivisible, immutable, totally consistent being....Each of us is a crowd. There can be the rebel and the intellectual, the seducer and the housewife, the saboteur and the aesthete, the organizer and the bon vivant--each with its own mythology, and all more or less comfortably crowded into one single person."--Piero Ferrucci, What We May Be
"The collective unconscious-so far as we can say anything about it at all-appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious. . . . We can therefore study the collective unconscious in two ways, either in mythology or in the analysis of the individual." [Jung, Structure of the Psyche, CW 8, par. 325.]