SubscribeMarch 10th, 2011
what is “evidence”
I’ve been thinking about what the word “evidence” means. This relates to my current reading of Dawkins’ book and to a comment by QunQun talking about Wittgenstein and the idea of language games.
Evidence as a term means that which tends to prove or disprove something, or it can be grounds for the belief of something. What a definition like this does is make anything potentially “evidence” for any proposition you care to make. I could say, for example, that the Wingabonga lives in the winter jasmine in my garden and cite as evidence for that belief my dream about the Wingabonga, and the fact that I found the Wingabonga’s favourite food near the plant. This counts as evidence because the dream and my finding orange peel on the pavement in my yard are the grounds upon which my belief in the Wingabonga’s residence took hold. They are also evidence for the existence of the Wingabonga. Does this really count as “evidence”? Sure, why not? It meets the limits of the definition.
Looking at the term “proof” doesn’t help because all it means is “evidence sufficient to establish a thing as true”. Ambivalence: that’s the nature of words.
What Wittgenstein showed with his language games concept is that what the word “evidence” actually means is how it is used within a specific language community. So Dawkins, being a scientist, has an idea of what evidence means that is established by how “evidence” is used in the science language community. This involves, amongst other things, checking to see if Wingabongas actually exist in the empirical world. This fact checking with respect to the empirical world acts as a guide to whether a Wingabonga can possibly live under my winter jasmine. My dreams and my orange peel evidence are secondary to the empirical fact of the Wingabonga’s non-existence. This empirical fact (the Wingabonga’s non-existence) negates the evidence of my dreams and the orange peel detritus. It doesn’t say I didn’t have the dream and that I didn’t find the orange peel, just that the dream and the placement of the orange peel mean something other than what I thought.
This is the kind of empirical evidence Dawkins wants for god. And of course there isn’t any.
So what counts as evidence for a theist? There are a good many, but most of them have to do with the human community. There are things like the fact that all human cultures worship some form of divine, for example. Why isn’t this good enough for Dawkins? Because it is like my orange peel evidence. Sure the orange peel is there. Does that mean a Wingabonga lives in my winter jasmine? No. There will be another explanation, although I may not be privy to it.
Then there are the arguments for god that try to base themselves on empirical evidence. I think these kinds of arguments have arisen (like creationism) because science and its idea of evidence is clearly successful and powerful. Science and empirical evidence has become the one to beat. The problem with that is that the natural “territory” of religious language includes the word “evidence” but it isn’t the kind based on empirical data. That word has rules, and one is to test the hypothesis for empirical validity, and, because of that, the god test keeps failing.
What appears to me, though, is that those who keep bashing up against the empirical wall don’t seem to realize that there is a fundamental difference between what they took as “evidence” for the existence of god (their church, their feelings, their family belief, their assessment of odd events as they relate to their story of origin) is not the same thing as the “evidence” that supports things like evolution. So they keep doing silly things like the banana proof without any apparent clue to how foolish they appear.
So which “evidence” is right? Neither of course. However, if you use the theistic form of the term in the scientific language community you’re going to get intellectually smashed. Expecting otherwise is not a mark of intelligence.
January 6th, 2011
dead birds and word power
You have heard of the dead blackbirds I am sure. Here is the most useful coverage of it I have seen.
Are birds falling from the sky examples of pareidolia, eschatology, or something else?
Essentially the blackbirds died because fireworks frightened them out of their wits. But never mind the facts, this is a “sure sign” that Harold Camping is right. Ugh.
There is a difference between what we experience and what we think it means.
December 13th, 2010
valuing reason and narrative equally
Following up with Lilian’s value postings, I have also thought more about what it is I value and why. I do find it stimulating because along with my reading, such thinking has triggered a cascade of important and revealing dreams. This might not be a comfortable thing, because some are best classified as nightmares, but it is a healing and helpful thing. So thank you Lilian and litlove for getting this started.
In the first values-post I started with autonomy and I stick with that because, as someone who lives marginally, I know what domination feels like and looks like and I don’t like it. It is all too human of course, the desire to dominate, and as such needs to be recognized not as a “side effect” but as just one of the things it means to be human. We have a lot of bits and bobs that make us up. Some of them are for public use, some are best done alone and in the quiet. As we mature we learn what those things are and find ways to control our bodily functions as well as our mental ones to conform to the public standards and for the public good. We think about those things over time and some of them move from private-only to public display (such as men’s and women’s naked knees) and some stay rigorously private-only (such as defecation). Autonomy is one of those values that maintains its value over time. Everyone, pretty much, wants it. The question is what to do with it if you are lucky enough to have got you some.
This leads me to my second value. I think I have to say this feels like the ability to think, to reason, to seek verifiable narrative to explain how things happen. Despite the fact that my last posting on values had loyalty and social compassion prior to reason, I now think that the ability to reason and to think critically is fundamental to the capacity for social compassion that isn’t hiding some conversion agenda. For example, there have been some historical situations in which the religieux of the area had the monopoly on food and refused it to the starving if they wouldn’t first accept indoctrination into the faith. Not really a hidden agenda but I’m sure you can think of others. I have to say I despise this kind of thing and my habit of thinking is what got me there.
Thinking is what I do with my freedom. What I’ve discovered about the world through the (definitely arduous) process of thinking things through has led me to the place where I am and to the kinds of things I do. For example, thinking about what it means to be human has led me to my valuing of the practical responsibilities that social compassion dictates. One must realize, for example, that no matter how much a culture thinks of itself as the pinnacle of human development, cultures, groups, beliefs, nations rise and fall. What we are today, what we believe, espouse, are certain of and value, will, in time, seem archaic and, frankly, silly. What has enduring value is the thing that enables the species to thrive and this, in all cases, requires the moderation of desire and its mandible belief.
The problem is that there are so many competing stories about what it means to be human that one has to decide upon some system for evaluating the various narratives. This is where critical thinking becomes central. I mean one can make a judgment based on “this is what I was always told to believe” and many people do that and live completely comfortably with the results but I’m afraid I can’t do that. The reason for that is that these kinds of systems are often based on an “us” and “them” categorization of the universe and if you happen to be amongst the “them” group and the “us” group is in power, well, life can be hard and one’s personal good (or bad) luck seems not a very coherent way to decide on a human value .
These categorizations are natural of course, just as the desire to dominate is completely normal. But they are things that have to be moderated in society to enable the “them” a place with “us” at the table, so to speak. The only way to do this is to recognize that the “us” and “them” categorizations are a narrative and not really part of the way the world is. “Us” and “them” are a part of the way the human mind structures experience, and not representative of the world itself except in so far as the human being is part of (and a result of) the world. Categorization is a mental construction and it can be recognized as such. It can also be moderated. Critical thinking is the way to begin.
The real joy in this is that once narratives are recognized as distinct from what actually is true about the world, it makes narratives much more fun. No longer do we need to fight and die for one or another of them, but we can simply agree to play in the world of each others’ stories and not limit ourselves from the necessary analytical investigation that change, adaption and learning requires. It’s not that I think we can see outside narrative. Once we acquire language, I don’t think we can really. But what we can do, that is in the practical world just as good, is replay the facts of the case inside different story rubrics. This allow us to remember that all our stories have some truth value but none of them is to be mistaken for the truth itself. So essentially, I am saying we have to recognize narrative as equally of value with the capacity for reason, and this is largely the case because we can’t seem to live without narrative (and it is truly delightful) and we can’t seem to live decently with others without the application of reason to those same narratives.)
That ability, the capacity to think critically about our narratives, is central to living a valuable, moral and ethical life in the presence and midst of others.
November 13th, 2010
nothing coheres
Living is normally like a narrative. Moments of time cohere, seem as if they are antecedent and subsequent to this one moment now. But for the last two days things refuse to join up.
Today at Trout Lake the ducks – preening that soft spot under wing. Yesterday at civil twilight, no ducks to be seen, but their quiet croaks drift past the frenzied joy of playing dogs.
There is a change in park personnel at twilight. The dog owners give way to after-work runners and those coming to find a place to drink then sleep. Dogs and day-chittering sparrows give way to skunks, raccoons and coyotes. At the same time flights of crows float forward below low hanging clouds, homeward to roost, nestled together.
It’s really hard to write poetry when the mind skitters. Even to read more than a paragraph or two seems impossible.
I slept on and off until 3 this afternoon, and still I’m tired.
The neighbour cat comes running when I come home. He stops at the door and peers in at my three female cats and then asks for kibble. My cats just ignore him now. At first they hissed and made a terrible fuss. I’ve carried him in a few times and he seems interested and not at all afraid, but then asks for his kibble on the stone outside the door.
It’s not unpleasant this mindlessness, except, perhaps, for a modicum of fear. Am I losing my mind? Absurd of course.
What does it mean that nothing is inherently meaningful?
November 9th, 2010
sound and calm
I’ve been thinking about what constitutes “quiet” for me. It’s not the absence of sound certainly. For example, yesterday I was anxious, out of sorts, almost panicky in my need for this elusive “silence.” I thought at first just to stay home where it is, in fact, pretty quiet but the thought of that drove the panic into a little flurry. So I got dressed, grabbed my stuff and got in the car.
Driving out on the highway has a calming effect on me most of the time. City traffic cuts down on the sensation but once there is some speed, some space and an open window spilling life smells into my personal space, I almost always feel tension lifting. And of course, driving with one’s window open is not quiet at all.
It’s not even the absence of human sounds because I often come to this cafe where there are always people talking, music playing, the sounds of cars moving on the road: the chitter of civilization. But the sounds make sense. They have a kind of harmony once one is accustomed.
But yesterday even that seemed impossible so I found myself heading along the highway to a small marine park I know just over the U.S. border. I got there, through a patch of hail, to find a blue sky, sun filled afternoon with just a touch of cold breeze. I travel with blankets and a pillow at all times so I just set up a temporary camp in this driftwood enclosure. I took my shoes and socks off, curled up under the sleeping bag and turned my face to the sun.
As I breathed I could feel the calm spreading. Where the tension had left on the drive here, instead there was a spreading warmth, a kind of resilient looseness that I haven’t felt much of in these last years. That calm has something to do with the sound world. The waves were a small shush, the bird calls and pronouncements were pointed, like arpeggios in an otherwise stately piece. The wind had the quiet power of a viola, and the dogs and their people were like well placed percussion. I didn’t hear anything with specific meaning, that is, nothing was intelligible but somehow everything had meaning. I’m sure you know what I mean.
Periodically I would sit up, read a bit, write when phrases would pass through my head on their way from and to where ever. Then I would lay down again. Sometimes I turned so the sun warmed the back of my head, sometimes I would keep my eyes open so that I could watch the bald eagle sit at the end of the pier watching the ocean. Most of the time I had my eyes closed and just drifted on the harmony that I was perceiving as sound.
I spent several hours that way.
I think, just based on my own experience, that there are certain sound ‘scapes that are conducive to promoting this “calm.” Certain kinds of nature work best for me, although the coffee house works to release tension most days. I suspect that these ‘scapes are somehow simlilar to the pattern of organization that is present in me when that calm is working. Like a kind of mimesis, the pattern of the calm is an echo of the pattern of sound of that day at the marine park and so one can foster the other.
That make sense? I’m talking out of my hat here.
November 3rd, 2010
At the limits of intelligibility, part 2
I’ve had a bit of a minor quake in my thinking about representation in the last two days. I’ve been reading the essays in Picture Theory by WJT Mitchell and then my son sent me a link to a podcast about the power and beauty of words. The two came together and smashed.
1st piece:
On November 1 I started talking about meaning, intelligibility and representation essentially saying that meaning was a process that occurs as beings experience their world given that all beings have motive. That is, they have limits which conscribe their perceptual world that have to do with biological survival. For example, we have taste buds that recognize “bitter” as well as “sweet” because we need to stay away from some foods and gravitate toward others.
Intelligibility is that aspect of meaning that is aware and is linked with language in humans. I concluded with my current understanding that the limits of intelligibility is where meaning and intelligibility diverge.
2nd piece:
In Mitchell’s book there is an essay on narrative and description as processes related to the technology of memory and our control of time and space. It’s in a section on the pictorial nature of text. One of the things that section does is examine how narrative controls our sense of time and how description works to establish our sense of place. One of the interesting things that came out of my first reading of the section are the differences between how these two processes work in Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Morrison’s Beloved. Through his examination of the three texts, Mitchell shows how the judicious use of description and narrative, through the construction of memory, controls our sense of self, and therefore our representations.
3rd piece:
Then I listened to the podcast. In it there is a piece about a deaf man who grew up without language. The idea that there is a time prior to memory, that and the way in which the group of deaf men used description, repeated, repeated and accessorized with additional descriptors, caused a re-ordering of my thinking, or perhaps, a coalescence of my thinking about sign, representation and intelligibility.
The process is far from over but certain things have started to emerge. For example, the control of time seems to be definitively related to language. This might go some way to explain why slave narratives, and other populations restrained from full access to human power tend to focus on description and the control of space. Virginia’s room, for example. Small safe places where some autonomy can be maintained.
Not that these places exist outside of time exactly, but time is minimized; a slow-ticking backwater is created where time’s inexorability can be forestalled, and the safe present, the now, can be emphasized. It’s as if, lacking full power over one’s own identity, the instinct is to push away the narrative because it is controlled by someone else. The retreat to space seems to suggest that we understand narrative as related to time in some fundamental way. So the emphasis of those dis-empowered populations is on something they can control – space. The thing is, that based on what little I know about A Man Without Words (one of the books suggested about the deaf men’s communication without language), and what I know about being deaf without sign, is that this control of space is a common thread.
Even with ASL, space is a deeply important communicative agent to the deaf. So much meaning is contained within the sign space. Meaning is created by how one uses, divides and transgresses that space. Even time is represented through spatial relations (e.g. the position of the “sun” along the “horizon” of the arm).
I find that deeply, deeply interesting.
There is a link here to the functioning of memory, but more on that later.
November 1st, 2010
At the limits of intelligibility, part 1
I feel like I’m ready to start writing out what I mean by “at the limits of intelligibility.” Please understand this is an ever adaptive phrase that has quite a lot to do with how I think poetry functions and, I suppose, art in general.
I am led to this obsession because of my odd perceptual capacity—that is, that sometimes I have these little “seizures” that have me experience the world in unusual ways: yellow as a “ting” sound; the light on the horizon as a blue “hiss” and the like. All I claim for this oddity is that has clarified for me the ineluctable relationship between the constitution of our bodies/cultures and our representations of experience.
I should also say that the phrase itself comes from my reading of Gadamer but that I have been tracing the idea through others, including Wittgenstein, Hegel and Heidegger. I have also be talking to friends (Thanks PL!) about these ideas, and while I make no claims of support from either these discussions or texts, I can say that ideas are always a shared phenomenon but that responsibility is personal.
Why do I say this? Because there are two idealets that have rooted themselves strongly in the humus that is my mind. The first is the importance of the verb and the second is the intrinsicality of time to the nature of representation.
The verb is just my short-form for the process-like aspects of meaning construction. Not that nouns are secondary. They are not. Rather nouns and verbs (or determinacy and indeterminacy, if you like) are co-dependent. For us, one cannot exist without the other; one inhabits the other so to speak.
There are nouns, as there are determinate things because we make it so by being limited ourselves and by grabbing hold of the world and eating it whole. We digest some bits and defecate or ignore other bits. By this very process we begin the process of determination, and therefore, of meaning.
Meaning at its broadest is the sum of a being’s relationship with something particular. So meaning is both limited in that there are things not included and limitless in that it is always adapting to the ever changing relationship of being and its environment, since both are in time and mutable. So for a starfish a bivalve has the meaning “food” regardless of the fact that it has not the brain to form the concept. It’s body has the concept and enacts it through its chemical and electrical biology.
Intelligibility is when this broad sense of meaning is willfully perceived. To say something is intelligible and unconscious is meaningless, like saying an orange has desires. An orange needs things for sustained life but this is not the same thing as desire. Or like saying 2+2=sea. So for something to be intelligible requires self awareness but not necessarily language, unless language and self awareness are necessarily linked, which I don’t know.
(Maybe. I’m not so sure about my examples here. More on that later.)
There can be meaningfulness without intelligibility but not intelligibility without meaningfulness. (Pretty sure about this.)
So the edge of intelligibility is where intelligibility and meaning diverge.
More on this and its relationship to the nature of representation later.
October 2nd, 2010
The eye or the ear?
There is a fascinating paragraph in Picture Theory that occurs near the opening of the chapter on visible language and William Blake.
What is it that writing and grammatology exclude or displace? Nothing more or less than the image—the picture, likeness, or simulacrum— and the iconology that aspires to be its science. If “différance” is the key term of grammatolgy, “similitude” is the central notion of iconology. If writing is the medium of absence and artifice, the image is the medium of presence and nature, sometimes cozening us with illusion, sometimes with powerful recollection and sensory immediacy. Writing is caught between two othernesses, voice and vision, the speaking and the seeing subject. Derrida mainly speaks of the struggle of writing with voice, but the addition of vision and image reveals the writer’s dilemma on another flank. How do we say who we see, and how can we make the reader see?
The paragraph went bong-bong-bong in my head and throughout this day I have returned to it repeatedly trying to let surface the chord it struck. No go so far.
To track this elusive illumination/understanding I had to open out some of the terms. Différance, for example. As I understand it différance refers to the relationship between event (the singular, non-repeatable experience of life in this moment) and machine (machine-like repeatability; the chemical and physical nature of the inorganic). Both event and machine express themselves in human beings as kinds of thinking that appear to be incommensurate yet, according to Derrida, each is internal to the other and yet remain independent.
This analysis has implications for the production of meaning in text. Words get their meaning by how they differ from other words. The example in the Wikipedia article linked above used the word “house.” “House” gets its meaning by “how it differs from “shed”, “mansion”, “hotel”, “building”, etc.” Since other words impact the meaning of “house,” no final meaning is ever achieved—there is always going to be a gap—or a circle / meaning travels around it, a semantic ouroboros and words link, ultimately, only to each other.
So that’s différance. What then is similitude and iconology? Where grammatology is the study of writing, iconology is the study of imagery; and where difference is the leavening agent with respect to meaning production in text, similarity/ resemblance is the yeast which enables visual communication. Similitude is also the source of Mitchell’s insistence that text and image are both forms of representation and not merely in opposition to each other. He says, in a footnote:
I will employ the typographic convention of the slash to designate “image/text” as a problematic gap, cleavage, or rupture in representation. The term “imagetext” designates composite, synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text. “Image-text,” with a hyphen, designates relations of the visual and verbal.
What it seems to me is that différance is an aspect of image/text and what Mitchell is trying to do is move to a place more inclusive of the work done by representation. Hence the focus on similitude. But what of the passage that starts, “if writing is the medium of absence and artifice…”?
To address this is as simple as reflecting on the choice of conceptual mirror in the chapter. William Blake and his text+images and typography are both the conceptual bearers and the narrators of meaning. It is perhaps easiest seen in the last section that is devoted to Blake’s type. It is, first of all, a hand-produced, repeated pattern (hand drawn on copper plate for reproduction). That is, by being both event and machine, Blake’s type straddles the différance gap. One example Mitchell uses is the script that creates the word “marriage.” It was
inscribed in flowing engraver’s calligraphy, and the tails of the letters merge with the vegetative forms in the pictured scene, Blake literally embodies in the calligraphic form of “marriage the symbolic marriage that his “types” prefigure in the text of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
By doing this Blake draws in our other senses, declares text as integral to the world and reaches a place where senses create an experience rather than a loosely jumbled set of different sensations. In Mitchell’s words, “Blake wants a writing that will make us see with our ears and hear with our eyes because he wants to transform us into revolutionary readers, to deliver us from the notion that history is a closed book to be taken in one sense.” That is, meaning is not either of the eye nor of the ear. Meaning is of the senses wound together into that of which the hand is capable.
As for that last sentence—How do we say who we see, and how can we make the reader see? That’s the question, yes? My specific iteration of it is how to make the reader see sound. Don’t know yet, may never know, but nevertheless, I will keep struggling to find a form that allows for it. Rock on Blake!
July 30th, 2010
Jung’s Red Book and the instinct for the sacred
I recently purchased The Red Book. As you probably know it is the reproduction of Carl Jung’s most personal work on what he calls the collective unconscious. The book is astoundingly beautiful. It is full of illuminations and calligraphic text. I know this despite the fact that I have yet to open the cover.
I may have reservations about Jung’s theories and the concept of humanity that results but I nevertheless feel a sense of reverence for The Red Book. Partly it is the sheer beauty of the drawings. When its publication was announced and I went surfing looking for material on it, deciding whether I would buy a copy, I stumbled across a few example illustrations. From the first I knew I was going to drop the (then) $200.
So I did. The day it came I was home ill. During one of my breaks between waves of pain, I went up to the front yard with the dog and found that UPS had been. I found the package (huge) propped up in the open laundry room. When the dog was done we all went inside.
I sat down with the box and just held it for a while. I knew what it was and I was kind of awed at its heft. Bodes well for the interior heft I am currently seeking, I thought.
I got the scissors and opened the outer box only to find a slightly smaller inner box that was free of markings. An indiscript brown package.
Jung’s work, as is true of many of today’s magicians and alchemists, roots in and through the mythic imagination. There’s usually no question when you’ve found yourself connected to the master narratives: hackles, goosebumps, shivers and other bodily signposts shudder into awareness.
What I felt holding the blank brown box were the trembling fingers of the great silence, the inhuman void that I have always known as the wyrd. When I feel that prickle, I take it as bodily recognition of something potentially and powerfully connective. I got a quick sense of a new aspen sucker wiggling above ground and beginning the transformation of what had been fundamentally barren ground.
Anyway after a while I opened the inner box and lifted out The Red Book. I just sat and paid attention to what I was feeling. It was immediately clear that I was not going to open the cover. I just stroked it. Reminded myself of Hagrid and his book of monsters, but that is what it felt like. I had just met a new friend, one that I knew I would be able to communicate with and that would, in its turn, communicate with me. I knew that I had met something fundamentally non-human and I was glad to get the chance to share space.
The power to be momentarily deeply, viscerally aware of sharing space, that’s the sacred thing, the magic that powers transformation. Even though this is a book of a man’s exploration of his inner narratives, symbols, and images, there is a network of dense mythic and narrative root-stuff under what shows and, like the aspen root network, it is longer lasting than the things that grow up into the air from its earthly source. How this works seems of some import, yet the question has not been answered in any satisfactory way. I don’t think archetypes float in some plane any more than I can get behind Potinus’ emanations — but the evolutionary biomechanics of it? Waaaaay to soon to say. Still, mythic magic works on us and if we create a bunch of new narratives to explain it, what of it? Isn’t the creative process what makes being human so much fun?
All these days later I have yet to open the book. I am waiting for my hands to feel like meeting the first page. But despite the physical stillness of the material book, it is already moving around in my cavernous interior. I have, for example, been thinking about what makes this reverence of mine for Jung’s book any different from my recent JW visitor’s reverence for the Bible.
I don’t think there is any real difference, except that I know the red book is a mythic representation of self and she, I’m afraid, thinks the black book is representative of something other than human reality. But all the bodily awareness, the perceptual reactions, the consequent sense of connection, all this is identical.
But wait a minute! I just said that I felt that what lies underneath the red book and provides it’s power to provoke sensory reaction is fundamentally inhuman and yet I am aware that what Jung represents is the human universe (not the larger material one out of which we sprout). The only way I can reconcile the two things (both of which I feel as fundamentally true), is to understand that there are parts of what shape human existence that are essentially non-human.
At the biological level this is easy to see. There are, for example, these fascinating little buggers called mitochondria. They are part of us, we cannot exist without them and neither can much of the rest of life (human or otherwise) on the planet. Yet they are not human. I mean even my finger nail isn’t really human despite the fact that it is part of me, but mitochondria are really not human. (Go read about how they work and their history if you don’t believe me.) So imagine getting a quick peak at the world from the point of view of the mitochondria. What it means to be human doesn’t have any meaning at that level. What it means to be human can only exist at a state of complexity far distinct from that of the lovely mitochondria. The two realms are invisible to each other with respect to meaning. Not that we can’t understand how they work but that is not the same thing at all as describing what it means to be mitochondria. In fact, that last bit is really a nonsensical phrase.
There are these limits beyond which what it means to be human just has no purchase. Meaning itself begins to dissolve at these margins. Sacred objects, poems, mythic narratives are those that allow us to approach the limits of intelligibility and experience for ourselves where in us the wyrd pushes. That’s what The Red Book is to me, a pathway to the thin outer reaches of the wyrd. It is a bridge to that realm where I experience the fundamental meaningless of the world that supports me and paradoxically, it is by that very experience, that the potency of my power to generate meaning for myself is made evident. At the edge of death, life is the most precious.
So both human and inhuman — when, through the gifts of the evolved brain and body we reach into that dynamo that Jung called the collective unconscious we get zapped by the inhumanity of our origins. Whether through Jung’s “active imagination” or any of the other myriad perceptual techniques, we seem to connect to aspects of ourselves that have a longer evolutionary history than has this current set of properties and skills that we define as “what it means to be human.” The contact of realms is always electric and if one is the studious type, sometimes transformative.
Contemporary alchemy. The transformation of awareness. That’s what Jung offers and make no mistake, this capacity humans have to make meaning out of drawings and words is our most sacred magic. The bodily shiver that comes with the contact with the other, even if the other is actually as aspect of self, that’s the instinct for the sacred. And one day, soon probably, I’ll get to open the cover and step across the threshold to the meeting ground.
Cool.