“To sense penetratingly we must imagine, and to imagine accurately we must sense.”
James Hillman
( Continues in photo captions)
James Hillman
ages of the soul. A new feeling of self-forgiveness and self-acceptance begins to spread and circulate. It is as if the heart and the left side were extending their dominion. Shadow aspects of the personality continue to play their burdensome roles but now within a larger tale, the myth of oneself, just what one is which begins to feel as if that is how
one is meant to be. My myth becomes my truth; my life symbolic and allegorical. Self-forgiveness, self-acceptance, self-love; more, one finds oneself sinful but not guilty, grateful for the sins one has and not another’s, loving one’s lot even to the point of desire to have and to be always in this vivid inner connection with one’s own individual portion. Such strong experiences of religious emotion seem to be the gift again of the anima.
James Hillman
appearance of imagination, as if the inner world now come to life begins to act spontaneously, by itself, undirected and even unattended by ego-consciousness. The inner world not only begins more and more to take care of itself, producing crises and resolving them within its own transformations, but it also takes care of you, your ego-worries and ego-claims. This is the feminine Shakti of India at a higher state; it is also the nine Muses responsible for culture and creativity. One feels lived by imagination.
James Hillman
heroic ego sleeps, is a direct participation mystique in nature, a fundamental, even ontological experience of the world as alive and in dread. Objects become subjects; they move with life while one is oneself paralyzed with fear. When existence is experienced through instinctual levels of fear, aggression, hunger or sexuality, images take
on compelling life of their own. The imaginal is never more vivid than when we are connected with it instinctually. The world alive is of course animism; that this living world is divine and imaged by different gods with attributes and characteristics is polytheistic pantheism. That fear, dread, horror are natural is wisdom. In Whitehead’s term nature alive means Pan, and panic flings open a door into this reality.
James Hillman
When particulars have no essential virtue, then my own virtue as a particular depends wholly and only on my subjectivity or on your desire for me, or fear of me: I must be desirable, attractive, a sex-object, or win importance and power. For without these investments in my particular person, coming either from your subjectivity or my own, I too am but a dead thing among dead things, potentially forever lonely.”
and involves. She makes us fall into love. We cannot remain the detached observer looking through a lens. In fact, she probably doesn’t partake in optical metaphors at all. Instead, she is continually weaving, stewing, and enchanting consciousness into passionate attachments away from the vantage point of a perspective.
(James Hillman, Anima, ix-x)
James Hillman
If psychotherapy is to understand the dreaming soul from within, it had best turn to “theatrical logic.” The nature of mind as it presents itself most immediately has a specific form: Dionysian form. Dionysus may be the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, but this force is not dumb. It has an internal organization. In psychology this language speaks not genetically, not biochemically in the information of DNA codes, but directly in Dionysus’s own art form, theatrical poetics. This means the dream is not a coded message at all, but a display, a Schau, in which the dreamer himself plays a part or is in the audience, and thus always involved. No
wonder that Aristotle placed psychotherapy (catharsis) in the context of theater. Our lives are the enactment of our dreams; our case histories are from the very beginning, archetypally, dramas; we are masks (personae) through which the gods sound (personare). Like dreams, inner fantasy too has the compelling logic of theater.
James Hillman
stories through dramatic tensions and not through conceptual opposites; we are composed of agonies not polarities. Dionysian consciousness is the mode of making sense of our lives and worlds through awareness of mimesis, recognizing that our entire case history is an enactment, “either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical- comical-pastoral,” and that to be “psychological” means to see myself in the masks of this particular fiction that is my fate to enact.
Finally, to view ourselves from within a drama refers to the
religious origins, not only of drama, but of the mythical enactments that we perform and name with the mask of “behavior.”
James Hillman
BlissNinja 