Now It Is Time

Rainer Maria Rilke's Now It Is Time That Gods Came Walking Out

Now it is time that gods came walking out
of lived-in Things…
Time that they came and knocked down every wall
inside my house. New page. Only the wind
from such a turning could be strong enough
to toss the air as a shovel tosses dirt:
a fresh-turned field of breath. O gods, gods!
who used to come so often and are still
asleep in the Things around us, who serenely
rise and at wells that we can only guess at
splash icy water on your necks and faces,
and lightly add your restedness to what seems
already filled to bursting: our full lives.
Once again let it be your morning, gods.
We keep repeating. You alone are source.
With you the world arises, and your dawn
gleams on each crack and crevice of our failure…

ReMything the World Anew

 James Hollis' Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth in Modern Life

We are called to reread the world around us, and this includes the daily dance of images provided by the newspaper, by television and by pop culture. The gods are never far away. When we begin to read the world anew, we see that there are spiritual currents in all things, even the most banal. There are energies which, coming from below, drive and distort the culture. Using the Jungian principle of compensation, we can often see the pathologies of our time, both personal and collective, as the outer compensation for the inner wound. We may then understand our wounded comrades rather than judge them. And we will find that the world is a very rich place. (147)

We are required to accept that there is no parent to lead the way, no guru, no ideology to save us from the complexity and ambiguity of life. The measure of our personal development will hinge on two factors: our willingness to accept responsibility for finding our own myth, and our ability to sustain the ambiguity that always precedes a new experience of meaning. This task is critical for the health of both individual and society. (147)

Dreaming Tribe

James Hollis' Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth in Modern Life

Dream is the mythology of the individual and the myth is the dream of the tribe. (84)

"Your Art" Follows Nature

Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto XI, 97-108

Philosophy, for one who understands,
points out, and not in just one place, he said,
how nature follows—as she takes her course—
the Divine Intellect and Divine Art;
and if you read your Physics carefully,
not many pages from the start, you’ll see
that when it can, your art would follow nature,
just as a pupil imitates his master;
so that your art is almost God’s grandchild.
From these two, art and nature, it is fitting,
If you recall how Genesis begins,
for men to make their way, to gain their living…

The Alchemist and Sophia

Jeffrey Raff's Jung and the Alchemical Imagination quotes Paracelsus' “Hermetic Astronomy” in A.E. Waite, ed., The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of “Paracelsus” the Great, vol. 2 and Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens, 1618.

A good active imagination [according to C.G. Jung] leads to the unexpected and creates insight and a fresh perspective (Raff 52). Paracelsus [b.1495], like Boehme [b.1575], whom he influenced, believed in the power of the imagination, but also in the dangers of fantasy:

Moreover, there are physicians without imagination, without faith, who are called phantastics. Phantasy is not imagination, but the frontier of folly. These work for any result, but they do not study in that school which they ought. He who is born in imagination finds out the latent forces of Nature, which the body with its mere phantasy cannot find; for imagination and phantasy differ the one from the other. Imagination exists in the perfect spirit, while phantasy exists in the body without the perfect spirit. He who imagines compels herbs to put forth their hidden nature (Paracelsus 307, qtd. Raff 42)

Fantasy creates illusion and folly, while imagination creates liberation and healing power. The alchemist believed that their work must follow the ways of nature in order to succeed, and they saw in nature a great teacher, but also a repository of latent powers and influences. One great teacher was Sophia, an “ordering principle” that guided and directed the steps of the alchemists. She is a feminine guide, either Nature or Wisdom, showing the way for the alchemist who struggles to follow Her. The alchemist must do its best to follow Nature’s way, or follow the guidance of Wisdom. In either case, it is the imagination that allows the alchemist to discover the hidden path. (Raff 42-44)

Inner wisdom, the imaginative power of the self, leaves behind its footprints, or the symbols that it creates, which the inner alchemist follows on his or her path. Wearing the spectacles of insight, guided by the lamp of consciousness, supported by the staff of inner authority, the alchemist endeavors to follow Sophia’s lead. Notice the plants and fruits symbolizing the endless creativity of Sophia. (Maier, qtd. Raff 46)

Imagination teaches about the nature and needs of the self, of the world, and of the unconscious. In the imaginative experience, the ego encounters “the Other,” and must find its correct position in relation to the Other. Such experiences are often disconcerting to the ego, which likes to think of itself as master of the whole psychic world. The ego finds itself in a position of being only a partner, and not even the managing partner at that. Imagination is a challenge that requires the ego to transcend its previous idea and step into the unknown. Paracelsus saw in nature a mystery containing a hidden world of symbols and signs. The true alchemist must be able to see underneath the surface. In this regard, fantasy involves intellectual thinking, the mind locked into appearances that can never penetrate the hidden meaning behind the surface. Imagination, on the other hand, is the light of nature that reveals all her secrets and allows the physician to determine the correct substance to heal a particular disease. (Raff 47-49)

The Alchemical Rubedo: Revivication

Stanton Marlon's "Inquiry into the Alchemy of Soul-making" from Fire in the Stone: The Alchemy of Desire quotes James Hillman's "Concerning the Stone: Alchemical Images of the Goal" from Sphinx 5.

The relationship with [an] emerging energy and descent to its depths can be seen in an alchemical image, taken from the Rosarium, entitled Reviving [image below]. This descent, which depicts the soul’s return to the material body, is also a vitalization and “revivication.” It is a way of imagining what a soul wants and is a relinking with the body and the world. It is a relinking to the instinctual/archetypal lived body—animal, erotic, and sacred. It is the moment where the soul descends from heaven, “beautiful and glad” (Hillman 1993, 264). The soul yearns to enjoy this world and “has its goal a resurrection in beauty and pleasure” (Hillman, 261). It heralds the alchemical rubedo, the vital reddening of life. (Marlan 30-31)

Mythological Marketing: Making a Spiritual Connection

 Seth Godin's Just a Myth: Brand as Mythology
 http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/07/just-a-myth.html

Most of us remember the mythology stories they taught us in school (Zeus and Thor and the rest of the comic-like heroes.) Myths allow us to project ourselves into their stories, to imagine interactions that never took place, to take what's important to us and live it out through the myth.

Let's try the Wikipedia: Myths are narratives about divine or heroic beings, arranged in a coherent system, passed down traditionally, and linked to the spiritual or religious life of a community, endorsed by rulers or priests.

The key word, I think, is spiritual. Mythological brands make a spiritual connection with the user, delivering something that we can't find on our own... or, at the very least, giving us a slate we can use to write our own spirituality on. 

This can happen accidentally, but it often occurs on purpose. A brand can be deliberately mythological, created to intentionally deliver the benefits of myth. 

It's easy to confuse publicity with mythology, but it doesn't work that way...
It's also easy to assume that mythology will guarantee financial success... 

Praise What is Truly Alive

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Holy Longing

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
Because the massman will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
What longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of love nights,
Where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
A strange feeling comes over you
When you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught
In the obsession with darkness,
And a desire for higher lovemaking
Sweeps you forward.

Distance does not make you falter
Now, arriving in magic, flying
And finally insane for the light,
You are the butterfly, and you are gone.

And so long as you haven't experienced this:
To die, and so to grow,
You are only a troubled guest
On the dark earth.

Alchemical Homeopathy

Edward C. Whitmont's The Alchemy of Healing quotes Carl Kerenyi's Asklepios

According to Carl Kerenyi, the image of the serpent, carrier of potentially deadly poison, has since time immemorial represented also the image of healing [the caduceus-see images below]. “The wounder shall heal,” declared Apollo through the Delphic oracle; hence the healer can also wound:

The Illiad describes Apollo as a bringer of death, yet he is father to Asclepius, the archetypal physician, who in turn is slain by Zeus, presumably for healing too many people. Chiron is a mythological healer carrying a wound that never heals; he chooses death as his vicarious offering to free Prometheus.

Mankind suffers illness; human beings inflict wounds and hurt each other and themselves. We suffer our own inner conflicts and inflict them on one another, and we help heal one another. We also inflict wounds and injuries upon the physical world we live in. As the destruction- and consciousness-carrying “cells” of the earth organism, we wound our earth, we interfere with its vital functioning and, as our consciousness of self and world gradually increases, we also strive to heal these wounds. (191)

This process is symbolized alchemically as the destruction and rebirth of the king (sacrifice of status quo) and the conversion of dross (impasse/illness) to gold (new synthesis/health). (214)

Prometheus and the Great Goddess

Edward C. Whitmont's The Alchemy of Healing: Psyche and Soma

Mythological awareness tells us:
One of the conditions for Prometheus' release from bondage to the rock of materiality was that he reveal to the gods a vital secret upon which the continuity of the world depended, that only he, the representative of mankind, not the gods, knew about. This secret referred to the need for having the Great Goddess joined in marriage to a human mortal, not to another god; the transpersonal must connect with the individuating human consciousness.

For the person, the difficult and often painful, "nearly too difficult" assignment of becoming what one potentially "is" includes alternating phases of illness and healing, of experiencing guilt and redemption, egotism and sacrifice, and thereby integrating one's separatist or destructive drives into the "formal order of the cosmos." (221)

Organic Resonance: The Language of the Magical Landscape

 David W. Kidner's Nature and Psyche: Radical Environmentalism and the Politics of Subjectivity

The metaphor of resonance is a fundamentally integrative notion, since resonances occur between things, expressing relation rather than independence, interaction rather than autonomy, and dynamism rather than stagnation, as in Michael Taussig’s (The Devil and Commodity Fetishism, 167-168) depiction of Aymara culture:

The enchantment of nature and the alliance of its spirits with mankind form an organic resonance of orchestrated social representation. The organization of kith and kin, political organization, use of ecosphere, healing, the rhythm of production and reproduction—all echo each other within one living structure that is the language of the magical landscape. (305)

When Fire Loves Water

Elif Shafak's The Forty Rules of Love

Rule Number Forty:

A life without love is of no account. Don't ask yourself what kind of love you should seek, spiritual or material, divine or mundane, Eastern or Western....Divisions only lead to more divisions. Love has no labels, no definitions. It is what it is, pure and simple.

Love is the water of life. And a lover is a soul of fire!
The universe turns differently when fire loves water. (350)

A Positive Vision

David D. Kidner's Nature and Psyche: Radical Environmentalism and the Politics of Subjectivity

A positive vision of a future natural world contributes to our own psychological survival. Joanna Macy has written of the despair frequently experienced by environmental activism, a despair that is entirely authentic and understandable given the speed with which the natural order is being demolished, and our apparent powerlessness when faced with overwhelmingly powerful interests. However, as Erik Erikson pointed out, one cannot adequately define one's sense of identity by what one is not. While promoting a positive vision integrates and heals one, devoting one's life purely to opposing what one is against is an act of nihilism in which the culmination of one's own success is self-destruction. (285)

Temples of Kindness: Heart and Brain

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

The Phallus: Bringer of Joy

 Erich Neumann's The Origins and History of Consciousness

Phallicism is symbolic of a primitive stage in man’s consciousness of his masculinity. Only gradually does he come to realize his own value and his own world. The male begins by being the copulator, not the begetter; even when the phallus is worshipped by the female as the instrument of fertility, it is far more the opener of the womb—as in the case of certain primitives—than the giver of seed, the bringer of joy rather than of fruitfulness. (308-9)

Mythologically, the phallic-chthonic deities are companions of the Great Mother, not representatives of the specifically masculine. Psychologically this means that the phallic masculinity is still conditioned by the body and thus is under the rule of the Great Mother, whose instrument it remains. (309)

Androgynous and hermaphroditic figures of gods and priests, and cults emphasizing the original bisexuality of the uroboric Great Mother, characterize the transition from the feminine to the masculine. (308)

Eros and this Cave, our Bodies and this Darkness

Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature (2000) and The Eros of Everyday Life (1995)

The shape of this cave, our bodies, this darkness. This darkness which sits so close to us we cannot see, so close that we move away in fear. We turn into ourselves. But here we find the same darkness, we find we are shaped around emptiness, that we are a void we do not know. (2000, 161)

Human consciousness can be rejoined not only with the human body but with the body of earth. Indeed, what seems incipient in the reunion is the recovery of meaning within existence that will infuse every kind of meeting between self and the universe, even in the most daily acts with an Eros; a palpable love, that is also sacred. (1995, 9)

Whenever We Touch Nature We Get Clean

C.G. Jung's Dream Analysis

Whenever we touch nature we get clean. Savages are not dirty—only we are dirty. Domesticated animals are dirty, but never wild animals. Matter in the wrong place is dirt. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods, or a bath in the sea. They may rationalize it in this or that way, but they shake off the fetters and allow nature to touch them. It can be done within or without. Walking in the woods, lying on the grass, taking a bath in the sea, are from the outside; entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams, is touching nature from the inside and this is the same thing, things are put right again. All these things have been used in initiation in past ages. They are all in the old mysteries, the loneliness of nature, the contemplation of the stars, the incubation sleep in the temple. (142)

The Brain: Sky, Sea, and God

Emily Dickinson's The Brain is Wider Than the Sky

The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them, side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.

Practical Magic: Medicine with a Capital "M"

Andrew Weil's "On Integrative Medicine and the Nature of Reality"
excerpt from Voices of Integrative Medicine: Conversations and Encounters ed. Bonnie Horrigan

When Dr. Andrew Weil was investigating Native American Shamanism in the 1970’s, he found their word for medicine had a much larger meaning than our word for medicine:

When they talked about medicine men, medicine women, medicine place, medicine people, it was a much bigger concept that embraced magic and religion, as well as what we mean by medicine.  I call it Medicine with a capital “M,” and I think that our culture desperately needs it. (252)

Dr. Weil's opinion is that our medicine and culture have disowned magic, which is regarded as antiscientific and antirational. Magic, for Weil,  is about “the relationship between internal and external reality and how [anyone] can change or modify external reality with internal operations [...] Being able to instill or awaken in patients a sense that they can get better is an example of "practical magic": change on the level of consciousness that can translate into physiological reality (252)

The Blank Canvas: a Place of Revelation

Rachel Naomi Remen's "Kitchen Table Wisdom: A Conversation that Heals"
excerpt from Voices of Integrative Medicine: Conversations and Encounters ed. Bonnie J. Horrigan

As a physician, I was trained to believe that the unknown is an emergency, like a hemorrhage. It requires action. You need to convert the unknown to the known as quickly and efficiently and cost effectively as possible. But I’ve learned that the unknown does not require action—it requires our attention.  Often, it is the unknown, the Mystery in life, that sustains and strengthens us. My colleague taught me to relate to the unknown as an artist does, with patience. For the artist, the unknown is a blank canvas. It’s a place of revelation. Not only can we witness Mystery; in some profound way we are Mystery. Our lives may not be bounded by our history and many go on longer than we dare dream. If life itself is not fully defined by science, perhaps we too may be more than science would have us believe. (132)

Architecture of Healing

Anthony Lawlor's "Re-imagining the Architecture of Healing"
from Imagination & Medicine: The Future of Healing in an Age of Neuroscience. eds. Stephen Aizenstat and Robert Bosnak (Spring 2009)

Imagination encourages healing by linking the design of buildings to the design of our bodies: A round opening placed at the apex of a dome to receive sunlight is called an oculus. This shape mirrors the circular design of the nerves that enable the eye to perceive light. A labyrinth’s twists and turns embody the winding pathways of the brain. (201)

 

The 2,000,000-Year-Old Man May Know Something

 C.G. Jung's "A Talk with Students at the C.G. Jung Institute of Zurich (1958)"
excerpt from C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, 1977.

What is [wo]man to do with his [/her] passionate, primitive, chthonic nature?

Go to bed. Think of your problem. See what you dream. Perhaps the Great Man, the 2,000,000-year-old-man, will speak. In a cul-de-sac, then only do you hear his voice. The urge to become what one is is invincibly strong, and you can always count on it, but that does not mean that things will necessarily turn out positively. If you are not interested in your own fate, the unconscious is. The 2,000,000-year-old man may know something.

I have no trouble talking to primitives. When I talk of the Great Man, or the equivalent, they understand. The Great Man is something that reacts.

The way is ineffable. One cannot, one must not, betray it. It is like the way of Zen, like a sharp knife, and also twisting like a serpent. One needs faith, courage, and no end of honesty and patience. (359-61)

We Need a God Who Bleeds

Ntozake Shange's A Daughter's Geography
excerpt from "we need a god who bleeds now"

we need a god who bleeds
spreads her lunar vulva &
showers us in shades
of scarlet
thick & warm
like the breath of her
our mothers tearing
to let us in
this place breaks open
like our mothers bleeding
the planet is heaving
mourning our ignorance
the moon tugs the seas
to hold her/to hold her
embrace swelling hills/ I am
not wounded I am bleeding
to life

The Story of the Rainmaker

C.G. Jung’s Interpretation of Visions
"The Story of the Rainmaker of Kiau Tschou"
as told by Richard Wilhelm (1873-1930), a missionary in China and translator of the I Ching (1923)

There was a great drought where Wilhelm lived; for months there had not been a drop of rain and the situation became catastrophic. The Catholics made processions, the Protestants made prayers, the Chinese burned joss sticks and shot off guns to frighten away the demons of the drought, but with no result. Finally the Chinese said: we will fetch the rain maker. And from another province, a dried up old man appeared. The only thing he asked for was a quiet little house somewhere, and there he locked himself in for three days. On the fourth day clouds gathered and there was a great snowstorm at the time of the year when no snow was expected, an unusual amount, and the town was so full of rumors about the wonderful rain maker that Wilhelm went to ask the man how he did it. In true European fashion he said: “They call you the rain maker, will you tell me how you made the snow?” And the little Chinaman said: “I did not make the snow, I am not responsible.” “But what have you done these three days?” “Oh, I can explain that. I come from another country where things are in order. Here they are out of order, they are not as they should be by the ordinance of heaven. Therefore the whole country is not in Tao, and I am also not in the natural order of things because I am in a disordered country. So I had to wait three days until I was back in Tao, and then naturally the rain came.” (1997, 333-334)

Interior Topography

James Hillman's IN
Spring Journal 63: 1998

James Hillman reminds us of what we already know: “‘In’ is no doubt the soul word.” The word connotates an “interior topography,” a literal defined “place into which we go—the unconscious, the body; or a definite time in the past” (11).

This literalization makes us forget what the master said: not the psyche is in me, but I am in the psyche. We forget and literalize the soul inside the skin, the mind inside the skull, the dream, the emotion, the memory inside the “me” to the neglect of the collective psyche, the anima mundi in which we live our lives all day long. (11)

Any dictionary will explain that the preposition “in” means within the limits of space, time, condition, situation, circumstance (12). Once deliteralized and liberated from “Cartesian conundrums that catch it up in personal subjectivity versus the objective world, or mind versus matter, we can at last realize that anything anywhere offers its interiority and can deepen inward continually” (12). Hillman insists that the archetypal realm of interior topography belongs to the goddess Hestia, the “Goddess of the ‘inner’” (15-21). He defines her image and embodiment as a “glowing warmth-emitting hearth” and that the word “hearth” in Latin means focus translated as “the centering attention that warms to life all that comes within its radius” (15). Hestia is “not an object seen but an enlivening, enlightening focus, the soul essence that inhabits anything” (15), a “sacred space giving focus to psychic contents” (17). Like a cave, Hestia provides, what Ginette Paris describes in Pagan Meditations as, a “sacred asylum where one could take refuge” (qtd, 17).

We are Born into this World as Sensate Creatures

Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses,
quotes Daphne and Charles Maurer's The World of the Newborn

His world smells to him much as our world smells to us, but he does not perceive odors as coming through his nose alone. He hears odors, and sees odors, and feels them too. His world is a melée of pungent aromas—and pungent sounds, and bitter-smelling sounds, and sweet-smelling sights, and sour-smelling pressures against the skin. If we could visit the newborn’s world, we would think ourselves inside a hallucinogenic perfumery. (289)

Fertile Ground

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise

"The world, it seemed, had woken up while we had been inside the cave."

Sam Anderson's Entering Darkness

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/magazine/entering-darkness.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Entering%20Darkness&st=cse

Part cathedral, part haunted house, caves hold our earliest arts and our deepest fears.

The Wild Gander

Joseph Campbell's The Flight of the Wild Gander

For there is, in fact, in quiet places, a great deal of deep spiritual quest and finding now in progress in the world, outside the sanctified social centers, beyond the purview and control: by ones and twos, there entering the forest at points which they themselves have chosen, where they see it to be most dark, and there is no beaten way or path (186). In Gottfried's poem: The Love Grotto in the dangerous forest represents the dimension of the depth experience. Holiness, the ideal, and intimations of eternity are focused in the cave, which is not a historical place but a shared psychological condition (177-178). And, in the Paleolithic cavern of Lascaux, there is a shaman depicted, lying in trance, wearing a bird mask and with the figure of a bird perched on a staff beside him (134). There are associations between the shamanistic trance and the flight of a bird (133). In fact, the Hindu master yogis, who in their trance states go beyond all the pales of thought, are known as "wild ganders" (134). It is the Wild Gander who passes from the sphere of waking consciousness, even beyond dream, to where all things shine of their own light, to the nonconditioned, nondual state "between two thoughts," where the subject-object polarity is completely transcended and the distinction even between life and death dissolved (135). "Man is condemned to be free," says Sartre (186). The place of emergence is the womb of the earth (130). It is in this quiet, internal place, a chosen place, from whence the Wild Gander flies.

Humming the Bloodsong on the Heartstring

Jeanne Achterberg's Woman as Healer

Shamans are capable of pearl diving in the collective unconscious and discerning the information writ in their own entrails and bones, the knack of humming the bloodsong on the heartstring...The shaman, like Plato's philosopher, has found the Sun Door and gone outside the cave, has burrowed into the depths of the cave and found that door, too. His (her) job is to bring back images for healing of the soul. (198)

An Animal Sense of the World

James Hillman's  The Thought of the Heart & the Soul of the World

Please, let me insist: by aesthetic response I do not mean beautifying. I do not mean planting trees and going to galleries. I do not mean gentility, soft background music, clipped hedges--that sanitized, deodorized use of the word "aesthetic" that has deprived it of its teeth and tongue and fingers. Beauty, ugliness, and art are neither the full content nor true base of aesthetics. In the Neoplatonic understanding, beauty is simply manifestation, the display of phenomena, the appearance of the anima mundi; were there no beauty, the Gods, virtues, and forms could not be revealed. Beauty is an epistemological necessity; aisthesis is how we know the world. And Aphrodite is the lure, the nudity of things as they show themselves to the sensuous imagination.

Thus, what I do mean by aesthetic response is closer to an animal sense of the world-- a nose for the displayed intelligibility of things, their sound, smell, shape, speaking to and through our heart's reactions, responding to the looks and language, tones and gestures of the things we move among.