Archive for January, 2016

Introduction: To Begin With… Part One

Posted by craigjeffery

“…the human adventure is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul. Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul” (Hillman, 1975, p. xv).

And this changes everything. If the purpose of our life is to make soul of it; not a career, nor legacy, nor reputation, nor any of the myriad of tasks we set ourselves to – all of the dangling carrots – but to make soul.

Soul.

How different would our orientation be?

It is an adventure. A wandering. Not a mission from one end of the vale to the other. Not a five day hike for the sake of team building. We can no longer match our whereabouts with “how well we are doing”. There is no more conative striving. No more proscriptive procedure. Yet passion; Eros, is central. Getting lost is part of the adventure. Through the vale of the world. We are not ascending to new heights. We are investigating the murky depths. We are getting mud on our hands. And we do this for love.

“and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it” (Hillman, 1975, p. xv). To make soul. Like an alchemical procedure, we feed our life through a perspective that turns our raw experiences, our prima materia into soul. We make something of it. Not a thing that happens to us but a thing we participate in the co-creation of. Not in an egocentric way. In an erotic way.

A fundamentally artistic, perceptive-love-making.

Greeting the world as you would a lover.

Get naked and sweaty and loud.

Re-Visioning Psychology is a “book about soul-making” (Hillman, 1975, xv). A re-visioning of psychology away from medical, moral or biological models towards a psychology from the point of view of soul. It’s needs and wants. So often radically different from what the ego aims at. From the egoic perspective it is almost a psychology from the point of view of the contradistinction. Our aim is not to dissect or cure; to be hygienic, to shame, punish, judge or to explain ourselves.

The challenge of this cannot be overestimated. It is essentially asking you to all but abandon every common-place idea that we have to be replaced with ideas that – from our swollen egocentric and hyper-rational perspective – seem utterly absurd and probably more to the point – exceedingly dangerous.

To, in a sense, forget yourself to the chaos. To let the wild and unblemished through.

So why do this?

Because what we are currently doing does not work. We are destroying ourselves and the capacity of the earth to support us. We insist on our rationality and on our capacity to be moral and yet we kill the very thing that sustains our lives. The very thing you are reading this on has undoubtedly caused many people untold hardship not much different in scope or barbarism then to enjoying some sugar in your tea in the 18th century. Our entire western existence is based on the exploitation of everything, including ourselves.

So let’s cut the bullshit. We’re not rational. Or if we are, we’re rational the way a sociopath is rational. And we are not moral. Were we moral our lives would not be able to exist the way they currently do. We are anethnatized consumers who plod along ignoring the actual rape and murder that happen on our behalf so that we can have conveniences that slowly erode our well-being or outright kill us.

And we’re fucking miserable doing it.

We exist in a dream world of untended consequences and moral amnesia. We live in a fiction already. We should at the very least make it a more interesting one.

A policy initiative is not going to do the trick. A diet or a one hour commitment once a year to respect the fucking planet is not going to do it.

What we need is a radical shift in the very way we perceive the world.

Introduction: To Begin With… Part Two

Posted by craigjeffery

The “privileged mode of access to knowledge of soul” (Hillman, 1975, p. xvii) is through the “raw materials and finished products of psyche” (Hillman, 1975, p. xvii): fantasy images. Taken from Jung, we follow the poetic usage of the term to mean “the basic givens of psychic life, self-originating, inventive, spontaneous, complete, and organized in archetypal patterns” (Hillman, 1975, p. xvii). To have a psychology from the point of view of soul, you have to have a psychology that starts in the process of imagination. So our orientation shifts to being deeply concerned with our own processes of imagining. We have to pay close attention to the deep poetry going on in our own hearts and lives.

Like listening to the quite song playing across your spine.

To carry on a dialogue with it. A caring for our images and our relationship to them. To the fountainhead from which our images arise. We give this precedence. Not a back seat and not a sideways glance; we acknowledge it face-to-face. And we don’t dissect it. We don’t tear it apart for the sake of science. We let it breath. On it’s own. Meeting it, as it were, one being to another.

Within this process we encounter the archetypes. “Let us then imagine archetypes as the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the roots of the soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves and the world” (Hillman, 1975 xix). Jung reintroduced the term stressing the indefinable and metaphoric aspects essential to its functioning. At base, the archetypes inform and inspire every perception we are capable of having. Everything in existence has an archetype, a primordial image, the hidden and secret numinosm burning a blue fire within; touching and communicating with our hidden secret depths in a divine conversation.

Lovers running a gentle finger down each other’s backs in the still hours of the morning.

It is the mechanism by which our world is made glorious and full of awe. That it defies the rational, concretized, literal perspective that has come to dominate our world only means that we have lost touch with the point of our existence.

That is all.

If we are not here to be filled with the grace of being here, I haven’t the faintest idea what we’ve come here for. But we deny these depths because our rational minds can’t adequately explain them. So we cut them off. And thus, alienate ourselves from the profound, unspeakable and unexplainable beauty of our existence. *1

And yet these Gods in our senses and in our Souls do not go away. They will fight to be heard with whatever is at their disposal. A thwarted archetype is a pathology. And our world is nothing if not pathological.

The great archetype of our time is that of the hero. “…feelings of independence, strength and achievement, in ideas of decisive action, coping, planning, virtue, conquest (over animality), and in psychopathologies of battle, overpowering masculinity and single-mindedness” (Hillman, 1975 p. xx). That which prefers “interpretations, analysis and conclusions” (Moore, 1982, p. 29). We have come to call this hero “ego”. All encompassing and with a brutal hand ego is a jealous God and would not have any others in its stead. It rules alone. Isolated and not a bit shack-whacky.

Re-Visioning Psychology eludes the ego and it’s needs. “So this is a psychology book without mention of conative striving, motivation or learning, free-will or choice”(Hillman, 1975, p. xx). Feelings of independence, feelings of achievement, planning, conquest, overpowering masculinity and single-mindedness…. These things we will (try to) leave at the door. Ego is a part of Soul – as everything is – but the heroic ego runs so counter to the rest of soul it is as if it were outside – and bearing down ruthlessly. To elude ego is to give the rest of soul – and within Soul the phantasmagoria of other archetypes, other perceptions and perspectives, other ways of being – a chance to come up for air. To be seen and heard.

We do this in part by moving from a monotheistic perspective to that of a polytheistic perspective. From the one – isolated and alone and driving itself crazy – to the many. Reaching back into the depths and finding the other voices. The other orientations that speak heretically of our egocentric lives and the terrors left in their wake.

 

1. I do not deny the horror of existence. I do, however, believe that our conception of beauty has to be broad enough to account for it.