consciousness – Page 4

I must Find And Wake Lisl

Dreamtime /ObE adventure

Dreamtime
Astral Adventure
February 8 2013…..early morning Dreaming.
“I Must Find and Wake Lisl”

NOte: Was at lisls til a little after 2. Had drank a shot or so of cherry moonshine and a beer, but nothing more. Felt very alert and lucid, not typical for being that late. We had been speaking in depth about various things like consciousness and OBE etc. When I got home, I spoke to the Purple Sage Trout and afterwards was totally bombed and came in and went straight to bed. I was so tired and heavy, and as i took off my shoes I thought to myself ‘good god, i just wanna lay down and sink into my pillows….fuck dreaming and whatever else, all I care about is a long deep sleep in the black void’ …..I laid down around 3am. Shortly after falling asleep, this is what I experienced

⭐️I am in the course of a normal ‘dream’ and I suddenly catch on that I am ‘dreaming’ and immediately the very ‘air’ changes around me, It is like walking thru a mist into a more vivid reality, almost like the dream dissolves away all around me, and I can see the ‘pixels’ start to oscillate higher or and I feel that I am going incredibly Lucid and get super excited. The first thing I do is stretch my arms above my head and ‘lift off’ with my Intent, shooting straight up into the sky. As I am traveling up at great speeds, I think to myself, ‘I cant imagine I will be able to retain lucidity in the Astral very long, so I better get straight to what I want to do’….

Once I get up a certain distance, im looking below at earth and I dive straight down……im gathering momentum and intensity, rocketing toward earth, eyes open, energy rushing past me til I am inside the vortex, riding the wormhole down faster and faster; at a certain point I focus my intent and INTEND to find Lisl. As I am swirling thru at immense velocity with my Intention to Find Lisl I repeat to myself ‘I am with Lisl I am with Lisl’ trying to tune into her and make my way there. Instantaneous, often…..when there is no conflicting or subconscious thoughts that make ones path stray. But when I ‘arrive’ at destination, out of the vortex/wormhole…I am in a large building, industrial style. I know I am not in the vicinity of Lisls, and so wonder where I can be, how did I ‘think’ or ‘intend’ myself to this spot. So Im exploring the building a little bit, very conscious of the fact that its been a long time since Ive had enough focus and ability to keep my Astral Aware and Vivid. I find It strange that I was able to get OBE while so tired and under the influence of smoke…which often makes it harder for me.

Im enjoying walking thru the building but start to get impatient so I just go up thru the ceilings and layer thru layer til I get to the roof. I look out over the landscape and I do not recognize it…..its not a big city but its not a tiny place either. I am trying to orient myself, thinking….which direction to Lisl? The whole time my focus is on trying to Find LiSL….determined to get to her and get her awake in the astral. I give up on physically trying to orient myself. I go to method 2 and close my ‘eyes’ and INTEND to be with Lisl…..I dive from the building to build focus and momentum and again find myself in the Vortex and I just keep my Intent focused on Lisl. This time i find myself around some people. I have drawn attention from some folks who come over and are interested in what or who I am…..their energy turns to somewhat threatening, and I am trying to ‘push back’ and I struggle with them, trying to ‘fight’ them away or something, its doing no good, their force is stronger the more I resist. SO I suddenly remember (its been a good while since Ive consistently done astral travel/adventures) that they can do nothing to me when I am in the Love vibration….Immediately I hold up my two palms, toward them, and INTEND (hard to explain other than knowing the feeling of using energy with INTENT and the art of INTENDING which is a little different energetically/astral than what many think of as INTENTIONS etc on this plane) Love coming from my palms toward them. Immediately they are kept at a distance, they cannot come past the ‘barrier’ of love that is coming from my hands and that I am now surrounding myself in. As I do this, I also remember that I can travel via this energy in a different way. I want to get out of wherever I have found my way into, im obviously not welcome there, and I put palms toward earth, and Intend again, the love energy, and the force propells me like a rocket up into the sky……

Im playing with this energy, practicing maneuvering with the force of my Intent as manifest thru my palms….and getting better and better able to modulate myself. I then, again, create/stretch into a Vortex and am just letting it take me wherever it goes, thinking that maybe I should just follow wherever my subconscious is wanting to take me….its like resting in an all embracing ocean of vibration……but with the feeling of vast movevement all around me. I stop. Everything is crisp and lucid. Im on a hill, and way off in the distance I can see lights and what seems to be a city….I am drawn to it, in a playful manner, and I think to myself that ‘wow, im still Awake in the AStral, and its already been quite a while….”

I dont want to lose focus so I stretch method up into the sky again and dive back down, generating velocity which helps me to stay focused and alert and not fade into ‘dreaming’….so i decide I will take a little fun flight over to that city way in the distance. Instead of flying the way I usually do though, I play more with the IntentLOVE from my palms and I lay on my back, though hovering in the air about 10 feet above the ground…..I ‘boost’ myself, again taking off like a rocket, backwards, and as if laying looking at the sky. Its almost like sledding on an air current. As I get close to the city I think to myself ‘this is NYC!!!!’ and I boost up so I can get a better perspective and Im way above so that I can get the birds eye view of the lights and all that. I revel and feel so free and joyous. But i also realize time is running out, there is a sense of urgency of not letting this Lucidity go to waste. I have ‘work to do’.

So again, I try to get to Lisl. I end up in some house. There is someone asleep in a bed, I guess Im in a bedroom. Its still dark, very early morning Im guessing….but inching closer to dawn. I dont want to be where I am, because I am aware that I do not know the person asleep and I am trying to find Lisl, not a stranger. I am starting to lose Focus, my Energy is waning, and as I try to go thru the wall to pass right thru I bump it at first. I gather myself, try to generate energy so I dont completely fade into ‘dreaming’ and I am able to pull myself thru the wall…..not smoothly like when i have alot of Intent stored up/Energy….but almost like trudging thru, though im only passing thru a maybe 1.5-2 foot wall. It takes me a little bit to get myself thru it, as if my Density is intensifying, my ability to vibrate high enough to keep percieving and having access to my Awareness and Lucidiy is shifting. But I get outside and Im then looking up into the sky, there is one ‘star’ that seems huge to me, or is in some way ‘different’ with my astral eyes, it seems like its Calling Me….like Its beckoning. I think to self, ‘well I will see if i can get all the way up there and maybe from that vantage point I can figure out which direction to go for Lisl’, since I obviously cannot keep stray thoughts from redirecting my attempts to get to her. So I zoom up toward this Star, all the while focusing on Lisls Energy, and trying to tune in, so I can match vibration and ‘be there’ (which is usually how I do it)……but I end up just playing in the air, way out in space, practicing shifting my energy and intent and using my hands for focusing Love and all that.

Im then back in a flash to my apartment……I know that I am nearing waking, I cant maintain the Consciousness or the Energy/Astral Focus….but I dont want it to end, Im fighting against it….and I literally reach up thru the ceiling, hardly able to get off the ground at this point, but manage to get my hands thru the ceiling, and can feel each individual layer of the spackle and the boards and etc etc….very slowly and laboriously pulling my way up thru……to where I feel like im caught halfway, dangling out, because I am unable to keep the vibration high enough to maneuver anymore. Then I snap awake.

Thrilled about the experience. Its about 6am. I look toward the window….I can see very light snow falling, just barely, and I think to myself ‘well, here we go STORM!’ then I lay for awhile going over and over the experience, with a massive amount of excitement, yet wonder, at how i managed to have enough lucidity to go Astral, so late at night and so tired and after being ‘not clear headed’ when falling asleep. The core of the dream was that It was So important to find Lisl so I could not only excitedly tell her I was OBE-ing….but to help her ‘get out of her body too’, if I could do that, it would be way easier for her to manage the experience herself next time. Its like creating a neuronal path, once the ‘door is opened’ its easier and easier to move thru it at will.

Soul-Speech

All modern therapies which claim that action is more curative than words (Moreno) and which seek techniques other than talk (rather than in addition to it) are repressing the most human of all faculties-the
telling of the tales of our souls. These therapies may be curative of the child in us who has not learned to speak or the animal who cannot, or a spirit-daimon that is beyond words because it is beyond soul. But only continued attempts at accurate soul-speech can cure our speech of its chatter and restore it to its first function, the communication of soul.

Soul of bulk and substance can be evoked by words and expressed in words; for myth and poetry, so altogether verbal and "fleshless," nonetheless resonate with the deepest intimacies of organic existence. A mark of imaginal man is the speech of his soul, and the range of this speech, its self-generative spontaneity, its precise subtlety and ambiguous suggestion, its capacity, as Hegel said,
"to receive and reproduce every modification of our ideational faculty, “ can be supplanted neither by the technology of communication media, by contemplative spiritual silence, nor by physical gestures and signs. The more we hold back from the risk of speaking because of the semantic anxiety that
keeps the soul in secret incommunicado, private and personal, the greater grows the credibility gap between what we are and what we say, splitting psyche and logos. The more we become tied by linguistic self-consciousness, the more we abdicate the ruling principle of psychological existence. That we then turn to the rats of Skinner and the dogs
of Pavlov, the geese and wolves of Lorenz--tune into dolphins or consider man a naked ape-in order to find prototypes for human behavior, indicates to what extent we are losing our speech and with it our sense of a distinctly human nature. It is not animal prototypes we need for discovering our original patterns, but personified archetypes, each of whom speaks, has a name, 'I' and has its existence in the language world of myth. Without speech we lose soul, and human being assumes the fantasy being of animals. But man is half-angel because he can
speak. The more we distrust speech in therapy or the capacity of speech to be therapeutic, the closer we are to an absorption into the fantasy of the archetypal subhuman, and the sooner the archetypal barbarian
strides into the communication ruins of a culture that refused eloquence as a mirror of its soul.

James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology

The Artist Spews…..

🌟Rank asked why the artist so often avoids clinical neurosis when he is so much a candidate for it because of his vivid imagination, his openness to the finest and broadest aspects of experience, his isolation from the cultural world-view that satisfies everyone else. The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art. The neurotic is precisely the one who cannot create—the “artiste-manque,” as Rank so aptly called him. We might say that both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an external, active, work project. The neurotic can’t marshal this creative response embodied in a specific work, and so he chokes on his introversions. The artist has similar large-scale introversions, but he uses them as material.🌟

:::🌟Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

{Self Portrait Series 8-7-24 part 2}

Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

The neurotic exhausts himself not only in self-preoccupations like hypochondrial fears and all sorts of fantasies, but also in others: those around him on whom he is dependent become his therapeutic work project; he takes out his subjective problems on them. But people are not clay to be molded; they have needs and counter-wills of their own. The neurotic’s frustration as a failed artist can’t be remedied by anything but an objective creative work of his own. Another way of looking at it is to say that the more totally one takes in the world as a problem, the more inferior or “bad” one is going to feel inside oneself. He can try to work out this “badness” by striving for perfection, and then the neurotic symptom becomes his “creative” work; or he can try to make himself perfect by means his partner. But it is obvious to us that the only way to work on perfection is in the form of an objective work that is fully under your control and is perfectible in some real ways. Either you eat up yourself and others around you, trying for perfection; or you objectify that imperfection in a work, on which you then unleash your creative powers. In this sense, some kind of objective creativity is the only answer man has to the problem of life. In this way he satisfies nature, which asks that he live and act objectively as a vital animal plunging into the world; but he also satisfies his own distinctive human nature because he plunges in on his own symbolic terms and not as a reflex of the world as given to mere physical sense experience. He takes in the world, makes a total problem out of it, and then gives out a fashioned, human answer to that problem. This, as Goethe saw in Faust, is the highest that man can achieve.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

In Jung’s terms-that we noted previously-the work is the artist’s own transference projection, and he knows that consciously and critically. Whatever he does he is stuck with himself, can’t get securely outside and beyond himself. He is also stuck with the work of art itself. Like any material achievement it is visible, earthly, impermanent. No matter how great it is, it still pales in some ways next to the transcending majesty of nature; and so it is ambiguous, hardly a solid immortality symbol. In his greatest genius man is still mocked. No matter that historically art and psychosis have had such an intimate relationship, that the road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there. The artist and the madman are trapped by their own fabrications; they wallow in their own anality, in their protest that they really are something special in creation.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something–an object or ourselves–and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

And so we see the paradox that evolution has handed us. If man is the only animal whose consciousness of self gives him an unusual dignity in the animal kingdom, he also pays a tragic price for it. The fact that the child has to identify -first- means that his very first identity is a social product. His habitation of his own body is built from the outside in; not from the inside out. He doesn’t unfold into the world, the world unfolds into him. As the child responds to the vocal symbols learned from his object, he often gives the pathetic impression of being a true social puppet, jerked by alien symbols and sounds. What sensitive parent does not have his satisfaction tinged with sadness as the child repeats with such vital earnestness the little symbols that are taught him?

Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man

Man cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn’t bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small manageable pieces, as a beaver does. He uses all kinds of techniques, which we call the “character defenses”: he learns not to expose himself, not to stand out; he learns to embed himself in other-power, both of concrete persons and of things and cultural commands; the result is that he comes to exist in the imagined infallibility of the world around him. He doesn’t have to have fears when his feet are solidly mired and his life mapped out in a ready-made maze. All he has to do is to plunge ahead in a compulsive style of drivenness in the “ways of the world.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

[Man] literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

To grow up at all is to conceal the mass of internal scar tissue that throbs in our dreams.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

By the time the child grows up, the inverted search for a personal existence through perversity gets set in an individual mold, and it becomes more secret. It has to be secret because the community won’t stand for the attempt by people to wholly individualize themselves. If there is going to be a victory over human incompleteness and limitation, it has to be a social project and not an individual one. Society wants to be the one to decide how people are to transcend death; it will tolerate the causa-sui project only if it fits into the standard social project. Otherwise there is the alarm of “Anarchy!” This is one of the reasons for bigotry and censorship of all kinds over personal morality: people fear that the standard morality will be undermined-another way of saying that they fear they will no longer be able to control life and death. A person is said to be “socialized” precisely when he accepts to “sublimate” the body-sexual character of his Oedipal project. Now these euphemisms mean usually that he accepts to work on becoming the father of himself by abandoning his own project and by giving it over to “The Fathers.” The castration complex has done its work, and one submits to “social reality”; he can now deflate his own desires and claims and can play it safe in the world of the powerful elders. He can even give his body over to the tribe, the state, the embracing magic umbrella of the elders and their symbols; that way it will no longer be a dangerous negation for him. But there is no real difference between a childish impossibility and an adult one; the only thing that the person achieves is a practiced self-deceit-what we call the “mature” character.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

The ironic thing about the narrowing-down of neurosis is that the person seeks to avoid death, but he does it by killing off so much of himself and so large a spectrum of his action-world that he is actually isolating and diminishing himself and becomes as though dead. There is just no way for the living creature to avoid life and death, and it is probably poetic justice that if he tries too hard to do so he destroys himself.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Kierkegaard gives us some portrait sketches of the styles of denying possibility, or the lies of character-which is the same thing. He is intent on describing what we today call “inauthentic” men, men who avoid developing their own uniqueness; they follow out the styles of automatic and uncritical living in which they were conditioned as children. They are “inauthentic” in that they do not belong to themselves, are not “their own” person, do not act from their own center, do not see reality on its terms; they are the one-dimensional men totally immersed in the fictional games being played in their society, unable to transcend their social conditioning: the corporation men in the West, the bureaucrats in the East, the tribal men locked up in tradition-man everywhere who doesn’t understand what it means to think for himself and who, if he did, would shrink back at the idea of such audacity and exposure.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Anthropologists have long known that when a tribe of people lose their feeling that their way of life is worth-while they may stop reproducing, or in large numbers simply lie down and die beside streams full of fish: food is not the primary nourishment of man.

Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man

Beyond a given point man is not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Take stock of those around you and you will … hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyse those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his “ideas” are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

The man of knowledge in our time is bowed down under a burden he never imagined he would ever have: the overproduction of truth that cannot be consumed.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

There is no doubt that creative work is itself done under a compulsion often indistinguishable from a purely clinical obsession. In this sense, what we call a creative gift is merely the social license to be obsessed. And what we call “cultural routine” is a similar license: the proletariat demands the obsession of work in order to keep from going crazy. I used to wonder how people could stand the really demonic activity of working behind those hellish ranges in hotel kitchens, the frantic whirl of waiting on a dozen tables at one time, the madness of the travel agent’s office at the height of the tourist season, or the torture of working with a jack-hammer all day on a hot summer street. The answer is so simple that it eludes us: the craziness of these activities is exactly that of the human condition. They are “right” for us because the alternative is natural desperation. The daily madness of these jobs is a repeated vaccination against the madness of the asylum. Look at the joy and eagerness with which workers return from vacation to their compulsive routines. They plunge into their work with equanimity and lightheartedness because it drowns out something more ominous.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

In other words, as long as man is an ambiguous creature he can never banish anxiety; what he can do instead is to use anxiety as an eternal spring for growth into new dimensions of thought and trust. Faith poses a new life task, the adventure in openness to a multi-dimensional reality.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

The “healthy” person, the true individual, the self-realized soul, the “real” man, is the one who has transcended himself.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act. … What would the average man (sic) do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Take the average man who has to stage in his own way the life drama of his own worth and significance. As a youth he, like everyone else, feels that deep down he has a special talent, an indefinable but real something to contribute to the richness and success of life in the universe. But, like almost everyone else, he doesn’t seem to hit on the unfolding of this special something; his life takes on the character of a series of accidents and encounters that carry him along, willy-nilly, into new experiences and responsibilities. Career, marriage, family, approaching old age – all these happen to him, he doesn’t command them. Instead of his staging the drama of his own significance, he himself is staged, programmed by the standard scenario laid down by his society.

Ernest Becker, Angel in Armor: A Post-Freudian Perspective on the Nature of Man

Secrets and silences make life more real: the individual, self-absorbed and inwardly musing, taking himself very seriously, radiates a contagious aura: the tacit communication that the serious and the meaningful exist.

Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man

Kierkegaard put it this way: But while one sort of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, a second sort permits itself as it were to be defrauded by “the others.” By seeing the multitude of men about it, by getting engaged in all sorts of wordly affairs, by becoming wise about how things go in this world, such a man forgets himself… does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too venturesome a thing to be himself, far easier and safer to be like the others, to become an imitation, a number, a cipher in the crowd.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

We fear our highest possibility (as well as our lowest ones). We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments…. We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe and fear before these very same possibilities.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Archetypal psychology

🔥 In contrast, archetypal psychology holds that the true iconoclast is the image itself which explodes its allegorical meanings, releasing startling new insights. Thus the most distressing images in dreams and fantasies, those we shy from for their disgusting distortion and perversion, are precisely the ones that break the allegorical frame of what we think we
know about this person or that, this trait of ourselves or that. The “worst” images are thus the best, for they are the ones that restore a figure to its pristine power as a numinous person at work in the soul…

….A more general result of nominalism is “logophobia,” a dread of words especially of big words which might harbor irrealities. Our difficulty with the word archetype and with envisioning the reality of archetypal images and ideas is one of the effects of nominalism. We are in peculiar double bind with words; they fascinate and at the same time repel. For because of nominalism words have become both bloated in importance and dried in content. In the modern language-games of Wittgenstein, words are the very fundamentals of conscious existence, yet they are also severed from things and from truth. They exist in a world of their own. In modern structural linguistics, words have no inherent sense, for they can be reduced, every single one of them, to basic quasi-mathematical units. The fantasy of a basic number of irreducible elements out of which all speech can be constituted is a dissecting technique of the analytic mind which applies logical atomism to Logos itself–a suicide of the word.

Of course there is a credibility gap, since we no longer trust words of any sort as true carriers of meaning. Of course, in psychiatry, words have become schizogenic, themselves a cause and source of mental disease. Of course we live in a world of slogan, jargon, and press releases, approximating the “Newspeak” of Orwell’s 1984.

As one art and academic field after another falls into the paralyzing coils of obsession with language and communication, speech succumbs to a new semantic anxiety. Even psychotherapy, which began as a “talking cure” – ‘ the rediscovery of the oral tradition of telling one’s story- is abandoning language for touch, cry, and gesture. We dare not
be eloquent. To be passionate, psychotherapy now says we must be physical or primitive. Such psychotherapy promotes a new barbarism.
Our semantic anxiety has made us forget that words, too, burn and become flesh as we speak.

A new angelology of words is needed so that we may once again have faith in them. Without the inherence of the angel in the word- and angel means originally “’emissary, “‘message-bearer” -how can we utter anything but personal opinions, things made up in our subjective minds? How can anything of worth and soul be conveyed from one psyche to another, as in a conversation, a letter, or a book, if archetypal significances are not carried in the depths of our words?

We need to recall the angel aspect of the word, recognizing words as independent carriers of soul between people. We need to recall that we do not just make words up or learn them in school, or ever have them fully under control. Words, like angels, are powers which have Invisible power over us. They are personal presences which have whole mythologies: genders, genealogies (etymologies concerning origins and creations), histories, and vogues; and their own guarding, blaspheming, creating, and annihilating effects. For words are persons. This aspect of the word transcends their nominalistic definitions and contexts and evokes in our souls a universal resonance. Without the inherence of soul
In words, speech would not move us, words would not provide forms for carrying our lives and giving sense to our deaths. “Death” itself, and “soul” “Gods,” “persons, would become, as Antiphon the Sophist said thousands of years ago, mere conventions and artifacts.’ Personifying would be simply a manner of nominalistic speech.

It is this person in the word, its angelic power, that nominalism dreads. Nominalism is not simply a philosophical position which would disembowel words, emptying them into windbags, fatus voci. It is a psychological defense against the psychic component of the word. The bigness it fears and would reduce refers to the complex nature of words
which act upon us as complexes and release complexes in us. Philosophy works wholly with words, so it must bring their complexities into rational order. This is the job of rational speech whether in logic,
theology, or science. In fact, rational use of words was what the word “sanity” originally meant in Latin. Therefore, nominalism refuses to recognize the person in the word or to personify them; to do so implies insanity.

I admit that the personifying path we are on is, indeed, deviant if not mad. But it is from this psychological perspective that we must look at
all judgments against personifying. For these judgments come from a tradition that has progressively depotentiated both images and words
in order to maintain a particular vision of man, reason, and reality. This vision divides the world into objects and egos, giving to the soul no more place than the pea-sized pineal gland, to which island in the middle of the brain Descartes banished the psyche at the beginning of our modern period….🔥

🌟James Hillman , Re-Visioning Psychology pg.8-10

Anthropomorphism

🌜✨🌟….Anthropomorphism, the attribution of human form and character …..ascription of a human attribute of personality to anything impersonal or 'irrational" enters the English language in 1793 via the
French. Animism , the attribution of a living soul to inanimate objects and natural phenomena “, occurs a century later in the present sense made familiar by the anthropologist Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871).
The first is an emissary into English of the French Enlightenment with its acute sensitiveness to the irrationality of religion and its investment in the Cartesian world of dead and impersonal objects. The second is a product of Victorian progressive scientism. Both are heritages of nominalism. Both deprive that mode of experience to which they purportedly refer of its native validity. So we shall not use the terms anthropomorphism and animism but rather the term personifying to signify the basic psychological activity- the spontaneous experiencing
envisioning and speaking of the configurations of existence as psychic presences- and hopefully thereby save this authentic activity from being condemned as personification.

Personification is a psychologism. It implies a human being who creates Gods in human likeness much as an author creates characten out of his own personality. These Gods depict his own needs; they are his projections. Personification cannot imagine that these psychic presences (Gods, daemons, and other persons of the mythical realm) have autonomous substantial reality. It cannot imagine that an author, say, is driven to bear the messages of "his" characters, that it is their will that is done, that he is their scribe, and that they are creating him even
while he creates them. An author's fictions are often more significant than his own reality, containing more psychic substance, which lasts long after their
"creator" has gone. An author creates only by their
authority. The notion that literary fictions have an inherent autonomy is itself visioned by means of a personified Muse, without whose aid the entire writing venture becomes precarious.

All three terms- anthropomorphism, animism, personification - contain one basic idea: there exists a “mode of thought” which takes an inside event and puts it outside, at the same time making this content
alive, personal, and even divine. These three terms by saying that human beings tend to imagine things into souls, are actually describing a manner of soul-making. But by calling this activity a "mode of
thought" it becomes an act we perform- conscious or unconscious- rather than something we immediately experience. Where these three
terms assume thought makes soul, personifying recognizes soul as existent prior to reflection. Personifying is a way of being in the world and
experiencing the world as a psychological field, where persons are given with events, so that events are experiences that touch us, move us, appeal to us.

But as Van der Leeuw has said we waste breath trying to disprove the theory of animism. It can, however, be seen through as a psychological statement saying less about the soul of primitives than about the primitive soul of those writing about them. Animism is an anthropological report about the soul of anthropology. “In its entire structure and
tendency," says van der Leeuw, “this theory suits the second half of the nineteenth century far better than it does the primitive world."

The theory of animism represents a condition of soul (anima) which cannot find soul except as projected into infantile behavior, psychopathology of fetishism, the common people of the collective mind, or the dark places and peculiar behaviors of exotic peoples in distant islands or insane asylums. Through these concepts —personification, anthropomorphism, animism-- reason could indeed make stones live again and even create souls and Gods. The rational tradition, having lost its base in the psyche, was trying to Rediscover it through the anthropology of animism. “ 🌟✨🌛

James Hillman, are-Visioning Psychology ,pg.12-13

Animistic

🔥🃏🔥 But there was another tradition, which continued to regard personifying as a necessary mode of understanding the world and of being in it
It began with the Greeks and Romans, who personified such psychic powers as Fame, Insolence, Night, Ugliness, Timing, Hope, to name but a few. These were regarded as “real daemons to be worshipped and propitiated and no mere figments of the imagination. And, as is well known, they were actually worshipped in every Greek city. To mention Athens alone, we find altars and sanctuaries of Victory, Fortune, Friendship, Forgetfulness, Modesty, Mercy, Peace, and many more.

Many consider this practice as merely animistic, but it was really an act of ensouling; for there is no question that the personifying of the ancient Greeks and Romans provided altars for configurations of the
soul. When these are not provided for, when these Gods and daemons are not given their proper place and recognition, they become diseases -a point Jung made often enough. The need to provide containers for the many configurations of the soul was formulated in the third century A.D. by the greatest of all Platonist philosophers, Plotinus. In a section of his Enneads called appropriately "The Problems of the Soul" we find this passage:

~”I think, therefore, that those ancient sages, who sought to secure the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines and statues, showed
insight into the nature of the All; they perceived that, though this soul is everywhere tractable, its presence will be secured all the more readilywhen an appropriate receptacie is elaborated, a place especially capable of receiving some portion or phase of it, something reproducing it, or
representing it and serving like a mirror to catch an image of it.”~

When in the next passage (IV, 3, 12) he speaks of "the souls of men, seeing their images in the mirror of Dionysus," he seems again to be referring to the ability of the soul to divide into many parts, and that
its portions and phases reflect the various images of divine persons. Personifying not only aids discrimination; it also offers another avenue of loving, of imagining things in a personal form so that we can find access to them with our hearts. Words with capital letters are charged with affect, they jump out of their sentences and become images. The
tradition of depersonifying recognized full well that personified words tend to become cherished and sacred, affecting the reason of the heart. Hence nominalists disparage the personified style of expression, calling it rhetoric with emotive meaning only. But this very recognition, that personifying emotionalizes, shift the discussion from nominalism to imagination, from head to heart.

The image of the heart- “l'immagine del cuor"- was an important idea in the work of Michelangelo who was strongly influenced by the Platonist tradition. Imagining with the heart refers to a mode of perception that penetrates through names and physical appearances to a personified interior image, from the heart to the heart. When Michelangelo portrayed Lorenzo and Giuliano Medici in the Sacristy of Sen Lorenzo, the features which he depicted were unnatural, not as they appeared in life but rather transfigured to conform with the true image
of their persons in the heart. While the scientific Renaissance (Bacon and Galileo) insisted on the primacy of sense perception, Michelangelo’s “imagine del cuor" implied that perception is secondary to imagination. By imagining through and beyond what the eye see, the imagination envisions primordial images. And these present themselves in
personified forms.

Nearer our own times another Mediterranean, the Spaniard Miguel de Unamuno (b. 1864), returned to the relationship of heart and personified images and explained the necessary interdependence between love and personifying:

~”In order to love everything, in order to pity everything, human and extra-human, living and non-living, you must feel everything within yourself, you must personalize everything. For everything that it loves, everything that it pities, love personalizes. We only love--that which is like ourselves . . . it is love itself that reveals these resemblances to us. ... Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea.«”

He sums up, saying: "Our feeling of the world, upon which is based our understanding of it, is necessarily anthropomorphic and mythopeic. Loving is a way of knowing, and for loving to know, it must personify.
Personifying is thus a way of knowing, especially knowing what is invisible, hidden in the heart.
In this perspective personifying is not a lesser, primitive mode of apprehending but a finer one. It presents in psychological theory the attempt to integrate heart into method and to return abstract thoughts and dead matter to their human shapes. Because personifying is an epistemology of the heart, a thought mode of feeling, we do wrong to
judge it as inferior, archaic thinking appropriate only to those allowed emotive speech and affective logic- children, madmen, poets, and primitives. Method in psychology must not hinder love from working
and we are foolish to decry as inferior the very means by which love understands. If we have not understood personifying, it is because the
main tradition has always tried to explain it rather than understand it.

James Hillman , Re-Visioning psychology pg. 13-15

Mythic Perspective

🌀🌟To the mythic perspective the world appears personified, implying a passionate engagement with it. We do not ask: "Are things alive or dead?" or "Are Gods real or are they symbolic projections?" Questions of this sort “may be thought illegitimate," says the most psychological of all classicists, E. R. Dodds, “so long as myth-making is a living mode
of thought to confront it with this sort of brutal either-or' is to force upon it a choice which destroys its being. Mythic consciousness answers with Cassirer: "There is nowhere an 'it' as a dead object, a mere thing.'* Subject and object, man and Gods, I and Thou, are not apart and isolated each with a different sort of being, one living or real, the
other dead or imaginary. The world and the Gods are dead or alive according to the condition of our souls. A world view that perceives a dead world or declares the Gods to be symbolic projections derives from a perceiving subject who no longer experiences in a personified way, who has lost his ‘immagine del cuor.’

To rekindle this life we start with soul, reimagining its internal processes anthropomorphically.This leads to the ultimate conclusion that we do not actually per sonify at all. Mythical consciousness is a mode of being in the world that brings with it imaginal persons. They are given with the imagination and are its data. Where imagination reigns, personifying happens. We experience it nightly, spontaneously, in dreams. Just as we do not create our dreams, but they happen to us, so we do not invent the persons of myth and religion; they, too, happen to us. The persons present themselves as existing prior to any effort of ours to personify. To mythic consciousness, the persons of the imagination are real. The late German classical scholar who had the deepest insight into the nature of mythical persons, Walter F. Otto, made this same point in an attack against his rationalist and reductive colleagues:

~There is no such thing as personification, only a depersonification--just as there is no mythologizing (in the authentic sense) only a demythologizing. Schelling said that the question how did man ever come to God is senseless; there is only the question, how did man ever come away from God. So-called abstract concepts and words would never have been raised into the personal had they not been from the very beginning personal, that is, divine forms."

James Hillman , Revisionimg psychology pg.16-17

Personifying

Jung’s early work with word associations did not rest with quantifying results; he personified them. He discovered complexes which were invested with feeling, intention, autonomy, and fragments of consciousness. They were independent entities because they behaved as such. The same complex can alter the association of words, show itself as unwanted symptoms, and appear as a person in a dream. Dream persons are complexes walking around; symptoms are the irruption of these persons into our normal lives. Our personal complexities are indeed the persons of our complexes.

Where other psychologists might have used a so-called objective and neutral language of numbers, structures, or functions to account for the
same disturbances, Jung reverted courageously to the direct mode of personifying which in his day was still considered a primitive formulation.” He stood firmly by his method of naming, explicitly comparing
it with the spontaneous speech of the insane and the noncivilized. What was radically courageous then we now take for granted, so easily imagining ourselves to play roles, enter into games, and be composed of
different characters.

James Hillman , are-Visioning Psychology pg.21/22

“Jung’s animism is tightly tied to his notion of anima,” which is the word he uses for one’s personal and personified soul-image. The Anima Is a person and anima is a conceptual notion and anima means soul. Jung calls her “she,” and she it is who creates conflicting confusions and attractions, who brings moods and desires and neurovegetative symptoms, who kindles the peculiar fascinations of fantasy that turn
one’s head, and yet also conveys a vague sense of interiority, a sense of soul.”
~James Hillman

A person may converse with her, as for example, when a poet talks With his muse, a philosopher with his daimon, a mystic with his tutelary angel, or a madman with his hallucination. We find her in mythology In countless forms, and expressly as the maiden Psyche. ~ James Hillman

Jung’s position here states that the fundamental facts of existence are the “fantasy-images” of the psyche. All consciousness depends on these images. Everything else–ideas of the mind, sensations of the body, perceptions of the world around us, beliefs, feelings, hungers–must present themselves as images in order to become experienced. ” ‘Experience’ is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images.”‘ Should we ask: just what is psyche? What do you mean by psychic experience and psychic reality?
The answer is: fantasy- images. “Image is psyche, ” says Jung. “The psyche consists essentially of images . … a
“picturing’ of vital activities.” In the beginning is the image; first imagination then perception; first fantasy then reality. Or as Jung puts it: “The psyche creates reality
every day. The only expression I can use for this activity is fantasy. “
Man is primarily an imagemaker and our psychic substance consists of images; our being is imaginal being, an existence in imagination. We are indeed such stuff as dreams are made on. Since we can know only fantasy-images directly and immediately , and from these images create our worlds and call them realities, we live in a world that is neither “inner” nor
“outer.” Rather the psychic world is an imaginal world, just as image is psyche. Paradoxically, at the same time these images are in us and we live in the midst of them. The psychic world is experienced empirically as inside us and yet it encompasses us with images. I dream and experience my dreams as inside me and yet at the same time I walk around in my dreams and am inside them.
James Hillman

Because our psychic stuff is images, image-making is a via regia, a royal road to soul-making. The making of soul-stuff calls for dreaming, fantasying, imagining. To live psychologically means to imagine things; To be in touch with soul means to live in sensuous connection with fantasy. To be in soul is to experience the fantasy in all realities and the
basic reality of fantasy.
~James Hillman

Polycentricity

Clinically, this polycentricity would be condemned as schizoid fragmentation, demonstrating the ambivalence of a center that cannot hold.
But mythically we might look for a God in the disease, perhaps Hermes-Mercury or the Trickster. For schizoid polycentricity is a style of consciousness and not only a disease; and this style thrives in plural
meanings, in cryptic double-talk, in escaping definitions, in not taking heroic committed stances, in ambisexuality, in psychically detached and separated body parts.

Or this style of consciousness could be given another clinical name: hysteria.” Then we might look for Dionysus and his community, where self division, dismemberment, and a flowing multiplicity belong to a mythical pattern. Again, consciousness is not heroic and fixed to one point, but seeps as if through mystical participation in a processional
of personifications, interfused, enthusiastic, suggestible, labilc. Whether schizoid and Mercurial, whether hysterical and Dionysian, there are archetypal patterns at work, Gods affecting our styles of consciousness.

~James Hillman , Re-Visioning psychology pg 35

Anima

As the latter, anima has a series of meanings." First. (a) she is the personification of our unconsciousness-our stupidities, follies, intractable problems. Then (b) she is a particular personification appearing in a particular moment- call girl, shopgirl, schoolgirl--who presents a precise image of the current emotions of the soul. She is also (c) the feeling of personal interiority. She brings the sense of having an interior life, changing events into experience that means “me." She makes possible the inner ground of faith in myself as a person, giving the conviction that what happens matters to the soul and that one's existence is personal and important." She thus (d) personalizes existence. Anima, moreover, is (e) that person by means of whom we are initiated into imaginal understanding, who makes possible experiencing through images, for she embodies the reflective, reactive, mirroring activity of
consciousness. Functionally anima works as that complex which connects our usual consciousness with imagination by provoking desire or clouding us with fantasies and reveries, or deepening our reflection. She
is both bridge to the imaginal and also the other side, personifying the imagination of the soul. Anima is psyche personified, as Psyche in the ancient story of her by Apuleius personified the soul.

So the movement into psychological existence proceeds through her in one form or another. The movement through the constructed world of concepts and dead things into an animistic, subjective, mythical
consciousness, where fantasy is alive in a world alive and means follows anima. She teaches personifying, and the very first lesson of her teaching is the reality of her independent personality over and against the habitual modes of experiencing with which we are so identified that they are called ego, I. The second lesson is love; shé comes to life through love and insists on it, just as Psyche in the old tale is paired forever with Eros.

Perhaps the loving comes first. Perhaps only through love is it possible to recognize the person of the soul. And this connection between love and psyche means a love for everything psychological, every symptom or habit, finding place for it within the heart of imagination, finding a mythical person who is its supportive ground. The connection between love and psyche means as well bringing a psychological eye to all of love's manifestations-that all its mad and deviate cravings seek ultimately the connection with psyche.

Whether we conceive of this interior person as Anima or as an Angel, a Daemon, a Genius, or a Paredros, or one of the personified souls in the traditions of ancient China and Egypt, this figure is indispensable to the notion of human personality. Some traditions, in fact, have asserted that an individual without his soul figure is not a human being. Such a one has lost soul.

James Hillman , Revisioning Psychology