And so, with reference, now, to our problem of the symbol, we may say that a symbol, like everything else, shows a double aspect. We must distinguish, therefore, between the “sense” and the “meaning” of the symbol. It seems to me perfectly clear that all the great and little symbolical systems of the past functioned . . . → Read More: The New Mandala – symbol and meaning.
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Some minds require mescalin to dissolve in them their references; others may be quelled by the hypnotizing beat of a drum or the rhythmical organization of a work of art. (For example, which of us ever looked, really, at an old pair of shoes until they were shown to us by Van Gogh?) Certain religious . . . → Read More: The Symbol without meaning: art and science The highest concern of all of the mythologies, ceremonials, ethical systems, and social organizations of the agriculturally based societies has ever been that of suppressing the manifestations of individualism; and this has been generally achieved by compelling or persuading people to identify themselves not with their own interests, intuitions, or modes of experience, but with . . . → Read More: Suppressing individualism in agriculturally based societies.. C. G. Jung has pointed out, in one of his numerous discussions of modern mandalas, that whereas in the traditional but now archaic forms the central figure was a god, “now,” as he declares, “the prisoner, or the well-protected dweller in the mandala, does not seem to be a god, in as much as the . . . → Read More: Mandala as God & Self But let us pause, to repeat: We have named the Proto-Neolithic period of the Natufians, c. 9000 B.C., where the first signs of an incipient grain agriculture appear; the Basal Neolithic of the Aceramic, Ceramic, and Early Chalcolithic villages, c. 7500-4500 B.C., when the mother goddess of an already well-established peasantry makes her first dramatic . . . → Read More: Civilization summarized to symbolic city-state… The phantasmagorias of dream and vision are of “subtle matter.” Extremely fluent and mercurial, they are not illuminated, like gross objects, from without, but are self-luminous. Moreover, their logic is not that of Aristotle. In dream, we all know, the subject and object are not separate from each other-though they seem so to the dreamer-but . . . → Read More: Participation mystique: mythological cosmologies are functions of dream and vision Let us ask, therefore: What can the value or meaning be of a mythological notion which, in the light of modern science, must be said to be erroneous, philosophically false, absurd, or even formally insane? The first answer suggested will no doubt be the one that, in the course of the past century, has been . . . → Read More: What can the value or meaning be of a mythological notion? The elements (the bricks) of this marvelous dream-the tree at the world center, the crossing there of the two roads, the world hoop (+), the world mountain, the guides, the world guardians, and their tokens, magical powers, etc.–are such as are known to mythologies of many orders. The landscape and the animals involved, on the . . . → Read More: Myths as collective and individual dreams… A mythological system, in short, according to this view, is a natural, I spontaneous production of the individual psyche, but a socially controlled reorganization of the imprints of childhood, so contrived that the sign stimuli that move the individual will conduce to the well-being of the local culture, and of that local culture alone. What . . . → Read More: From Social function to Pedagogical Function Shall we join our voice to those who write of a great Perennial Philosophy, which, from time out of mind, has been the one, eternally true wisdom of the human race, revealed somehow from on high? How came this, then, with all its symbols, to the Sioux? Or shall we seek our answer, rather, in . . . → Read More: The Question of Cross-Culturally Shared Motifs |
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