“Personifying has always been fundamental to the religious and poetic imagination, and it is today fundamental to the experience – and to thinking about the experience – of archetypal psychology” (Hillman, 1975, p. 1).

In our normative, sane world we are only allowed to bestow subjectivity on ourselves. What is human is allowed that particular interiority. Certianly not animals, or trees, or the wind. If we find persons there, we are presumed to have put them there ourselves. Our interiority, our personhood transferred to them as “a defensive mode of perception, a projection, a “pathetic fallacy,” a regression to delusional, hallucinatory or illusory modes of adaption” (Hillman, 1975, p.2).

But we treat things differently that we allow personal interiority. We give precedence to soul. Slaves were said to not have soul. Women were said to not have soul. It would appear that what we want to control, or what we want to treat like shit, we de-personify. If something is objective dead matter we can treat it however we want.

But objective dead matter also lacks a certain, deep-seated beauty. Because ultimately what we see when we see beauty is that particular inner spark, that numinosity. But you can’t see it – and you can’t interact with it – if you don’t think it exists in the first place.

“But on this expedition we shall penetrate the interior realm of animism. For we are in search of anima, or soul. From the outset we are assuming that the close connection between the personified world of animism and anima – soul – is more than verbal, and that personifying is a way of soul-making. That is, we are assuming that soul-making depends upon the ability to personify, which in turn depends upon anima” (Hillman, 1975, p. 3).

To personify then is to be open to a broader, deeper reality. To extend the borders of the possible down and in until they drift off the edge of the earth itself. To extend them until they hit the boundary of what we call imagination and then, with a little rhetorical coaxing, to go through that boundary, into the unknown space where these differences are trifling details.

What color were the sheets? Who cares. The sex was amazing.

Feeding our lives through a perspective that has the capacity to personify anything – and by personifying we do not mean making shit up. We are not putting our personality on the world. Nor are we sailing our ships to new lands for cotton and sugar. We are not looking to meet new persons in order to colonize them. To bend them to our will. These are beings unto themselves. With their own logic, their own pathos, their own love, their own surrenders. That has nothing to do with us. We can – should we find ourselves lucky enough – notice them. We can – should we work at it – take inspiration from those who have come before. We can take our cues from them and perhaps, add a few nuances of our own. But most importantly, we can listen to the persons we find in this former dead matter. We can strain our senses through the gauze of our illusions and fears to find the voices that are everywhere.

“The modern vision of ourselves and the world has stultified our imaginations. It has fixed our view of personality (psychology), of   insanity (psychopathology), of matter and objects (science), of the cosmos (metaphysics), and of the nature of the divine (theology). Moreover it has fixed the methods in all of these fields so that they present a unified front against soul. Some people in desperation have turned to witchcraft, magic and occultism, to drugs and madness, anything to rekindle imagination and find a world ensouled. But these reactions are not enough. What is needed is a revisioning. A fundamental shift of perspective out of that soulless predicament we call modern consciousness” (Hillman, 1975, p. 3).

 

The world is alive and beyond our rational capacity to comprehend it. Since the Enlightenment, we have shrunk the world to match an increasing incapacity to manage the myriad of phenomena that occur in and around and through us. At some point, we decided it was more important to explain then experience. But an animal doesn’t question the phenomena it sees or feels. If it did it would be neurotic. It doesn’t need to explain, to question its senses; it needs only to react. To interact.

It accepts.

But we have not just denied the breadth of the potential for our capacity to experience, we have moralized against it, shamed it, made it stupid and naïve and crazy. As Hillman states “Such thinking we say is legitimate only for animistic primitive people, or children, or the insane” (Hillman, 1976, p. 2). So to re-imagine the world as alive is to be primitive (to be primitive from our side of things, in a colonial, commodified world means to be open to the simplest forms of manipulation and exploitation), simple (children are needy and dumb to the way the world really works) and worse yet insane (locked away, alone, incapable and out of the only place we have been told we can truly call home: our minds).

Not surprising then that we actually don’t see the breadth of our experience. Work horses with the blinders securely in place. We can carry our Western loads with no distraction. And should the phenomenal break through our glossy-sheened protective capsule; should something penetrate into our iWorld, we are quick to explain it away and should our attempts at explaining fail; we blame the phenomena and not our capacity to experience it.

But as is the way with our bourgeois, condescending and fearful world-view, the thing that we fear the most is the thing we most invite. A sure sign that our senses are compromised – we run into the burning house we are supposed to be running away from.

There is a wall of cotton around our senses. TV and consumerism, banal sex and pain killers, uppers of all kinds that dupe our body into running itself ragged and pain-stricken leave us open to the simplest forms of manipulation.

And do we understand how the world works really? When the stock-market crashed, who really had a solid understanding of what was going on? Of what had been done?

And lastly, I would argue that we have isolated ourselves in such a way that we are very much alone. We are locked away. And when juxtaposed against a raw animal functioning – a way of life we insist we have evolved passed – we are insane. We are guttural beings. We should be able to trust that first and foremost. Our nervous systems are ideally the only thing we need pay attention to.

I think one thing that happens is that anytime we get a sense of the grandeur of the world we really live in – an ocean and not a fish bowl – the experience is completely overwhelming. We lack the internal resources to navigate. We have become internally frail. And the external resources we depended on for millennia have failed us – through corruption and an incapacity to adequately explain its own teachings in light of modern day rationalism. Were we to acknowledge the breadth of experience that is actually available to us, the world as it is currently constituted looks utterly mad. Like any animal brought back to its senses we would want to flee, immediately. And that is untenable.

And we participate willingly. Happily. Because to feel the presence of unnamed or unnamable mythic sources of divine energy is to simultaneously feel the pain of a God bound. Our livers are eaten out of us every day while we hang on the rock. The eagle of capitalism all too happy to take it’s succor at our hearts and lives day after day. To fight back is to first have to acknowledge our predicament and who has the energy or the time or the courage for that?

But these are all just thoughts. And this is not about thoughts. This is about experience. So do me a favor. Step outside. For just a second strip off all of the expectations we have of this world. All of the demands that we place upon this frail titan we call reality. Stop assuming a difference between the real and the imaginal. The Emperor has no clothes. Strip it all off. Like sticky cotton beside a cool lake. Take a deep breath and look at the world. For a moment, see as an animal sees.

Do you feel that? That density of magic?  It’s not that hard to grasp how in past times we sensed Gods all around us. Isn’t it everywhere? What would life look like if this is how we experienced our lives always?