I'm going to try to write shorter posts, more often. I've been told I need to do that.
I'm beginning this post with a picture that my youngest son drew when he was 9 years old. I kept it in a box for a few decades then decided to have it framed and give it to him for his birthday. That's when he told me what the picture was 'saying'. Or what he intended it to 'say'. He was in his late 30's then and I'm sure he could not have told me when he was 9 years old what was in his mind when he painted the Narcissus and butterflies. I remember telling him that Narcissus always face the sun.
When he got the present he remembered right away what he'd thought: " I wanted the flowers to talk to each other, they needed to talk to each other." I was temporarily stunned because the picture was an image of what was going on in his home, in his life and in the bigger picture, the flow of ideas in history, his story.
He has not read the myth of Narcissus and Echo, but until I was in my mid 50's neither had I. I bought a book about Narcissism, The Character Disorder and its Transformation sometime in 1987.That's when I went to a showing of Jung's Wisdom of the Dream,but I'd been influenced very much by Bill Moyers talks with Joseph Campbell also. I had never watched documentaries they were boring to me, but that was the beginning of finding a guru waiting patiently in life's events for me to begin to listen to it.
When I did read about how Narcissus saw his reflection in a pond and was talking to himself, I felt that I was reading words that told me a fact that I'd lived and become aware of. But with the strange literalness of transferring the word 'reflection' to be a reference about his 'thought'. He did not recognize his thought was about himself, but this is not all thought, but certain thought, a certain quality of thought. That kind of thought, which is marked by seeming to be spoken to one, rather that produced by ones one self was new to me but only to me at that junction point. This is an introduction to my own experience when it began to happen to me.
The lonely Echo that repeated the last words he said to his image in the pond were also about a certain relationship many females live unknowingly. I recognized that a 9 years old boy had captured this in his painting.
The metamorphosis of the changes that butterflies go through as an image of a life process may have been stored as unconscious knowledge, i,.e, in certain inner content but the idea was a great distance from 'falling into speech' to quote Emanuel Swedenborg. A lot happened in a few decades that has changed relationships in families. But a few decades had brought that kind of information into speech that was easy to say at that point.
I've experienced that a great distance exists in the mind, between certain content and being able write it then even later say it easily aloud. The information to understand certain experiences many individuals try to write about now, seems to be more available now than it was 25 years ago.
I heard my self and saw my body in a new kind of perception for several years, and learned a lot about my mind and life during that span, when self observation and a life re-view was carefully initiated. Some individuals do not recognize that initiation. Or as the parable of the sower speaks about, its not easy to maintain a fixed idea. The ancients wrote that every thing becomes its opposite as time passes. That seems to hint at a fact!
The history of myths and the fact that they contain in a concealed form a truth was a field we in my family knew nothing about, it was not a topic we talked about at the dinner table.
Suggested reading, its available to read on the Internet or through Amazon: Ethan Allen Hitchcock's book: Remarks Upon Alchemy & the Alchemists 1857. He preceded Jung by a few decades in his thought about the strange relationship of the physical world to the inner world.
When he got the present he remembered right away what he'd thought: " I wanted the flowers to talk to each other, they needed to talk to each other." I was temporarily stunned because the picture was an image of what was going on in his home, in his life and in the bigger picture, the flow of ideas in history, his story.
He has not read the myth of Narcissus and Echo, but until I was in my mid 50's neither had I. I bought a book about Narcissism, The Character Disorder and its Transformation sometime in 1987.That's when I went to a showing of Jung's Wisdom of the Dream,but I'd been influenced very much by Bill Moyers talks with Joseph Campbell also. I had never watched documentaries they were boring to me, but that was the beginning of finding a guru waiting patiently in life's events for me to begin to listen to it.
When I did read about how Narcissus saw his reflection in a pond and was talking to himself, I felt that I was reading words that told me a fact that I'd lived and become aware of. But with the strange literalness of transferring the word 'reflection' to be a reference about his 'thought'. He did not recognize his thought was about himself, but this is not all thought, but certain thought, a certain quality of thought. That kind of thought, which is marked by seeming to be spoken to one, rather that produced by ones one self was new to me but only to me at that junction point. This is an introduction to my own experience when it began to happen to me.
The lonely Echo that repeated the last words he said to his image in the pond were also about a certain relationship many females live unknowingly. I recognized that a 9 years old boy had captured this in his painting.
The metamorphosis of the changes that butterflies go through as an image of a life process may have been stored as unconscious knowledge, i,.e, in certain inner content but the idea was a great distance from 'falling into speech' to quote Emanuel Swedenborg. A lot happened in a few decades that has changed relationships in families. But a few decades had brought that kind of information into speech that was easy to say at that point.
I've experienced that a great distance exists in the mind, between certain content and being able write it then even later say it easily aloud. The information to understand certain experiences many individuals try to write about now, seems to be more available now than it was 25 years ago.
I heard my self and saw my body in a new kind of perception for several years, and learned a lot about my mind and life during that span, when self observation and a life re-view was carefully initiated. Some individuals do not recognize that initiation. Or as the parable of the sower speaks about, its not easy to maintain a fixed idea. The ancients wrote that every thing becomes its opposite as time passes. That seems to hint at a fact!
The history of myths and the fact that they contain in a concealed form a truth was a field we in my family knew nothing about, it was not a topic we talked about at the dinner table.
Suggested reading, its available to read on the Internet or through Amazon: Ethan Allen Hitchcock's book: Remarks Upon Alchemy & the Alchemists 1857. He preceded Jung by a few decades in his thought about the strange relationship of the physical world to the inner world.
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