Golgonooza

  When is a bear, not a bear? Answer when it is a Jungian archetype! If you were Sioux, a bear was someone who, over generations of observation, had acquired a cluster of characteristics from which one could learn.  In their own right, they were intelligent creatures adapting to their world, living their own best life. A bear might choose to befriend you, possibly as a result of your beseeching, coming to you in vision and dream, one that might yield real-time effects - a healing song, say, or a new herb for a particular ailment, even self-decorating tips (for bears like to paint their faces with colored mud).  What a bear would not be would be a symbol generated from your own projecting consciousness, or, for that matter, as an animal, an inferior being. It might be true, as in Christianity, that humans were created last for the Sioux but this did not make them the apex of evolution (as they were in Jung's evolutionary frame) but the youngest and most foolhardy creature...

In 1944, C.G. Jung had a near-death experience and like many recipients of this experience found returning to the body challenging and was only ‘persuaded’ to do so by the sense that there was unfinished work for him to do. He experienced the subsequent return as a case of felt imprisonment. This sense that the everyday world we inhabit is seriously out of step with a deeper underlying and freeing reality is a common one. It is one of the key drivers of ‘religion’. We are not as we are meant to be. The world, as currently perceived, is, at best, awry, at worst, an imprisoning entrapment. Is this simply a misplaced uncertainty? One that should be dispelled from our minds with a healthy, materialist reminder that this is the only world that there is, or could possibly be. Purposefully enjoy it until the end comes, and all is finished. Learn to love your transiency! Yet, as Richard Smoley notes, in his recently published erudite, well-constructed and thoughtful book, "A Theology of L...

  In your New York apartment in 1971, days away from defending your PhD in Philosophy, you are listening to the music of John Coltrane when you notice an intense pattern of lights outside your window. They have no obvious origin - unidentified aerial phenomena would be their future designation - and your girlfriend, Jane, sees them too. They appear entrained to the music, answering it with their own dance. You watch haunted until they disappear and then you both rush to the rooftop, trying to figure out what you have just seen so marvelously. There a young drummer, who lives in the same block, and who you have just turned on to Coltrane’s music, has seen the lights to.  Three witnesses of a meaningful spiritual event held under the rubric of music. For the author, Michael Grosso, one of the prompts from this luminous event was to undertake a deeper exploration of music, music that prompted soul, that helped one go beyond the simply intellectual in life, at once opening it to t...

Loren McIntyre is an accomplished photographer and old Amazonian hand but in his enthusiasm for photographing an 'uncontacted' tribe allows himself to be led into the jungle without laying a trail. Lost, he is now wholly dependent on their continued friendly disposition towards him. To add to this complexity, none of the tribe, at this point, has anyone who speaks either Portuguese or Spanish. He is adrift in a wholly impenetrable linguistic space except for body language and the 'beaming'. The beaming is McIntyre's terminology for his communication with one of the tribe's headmen, a form of telepathy, where McIntyre finds in his head words emerging in English that he feels comes from the headman, and which the headman's subsequent behavior confirms. McIntyre is conscious that this makes him sound deranged (from the perspective of our current materialist assumptions) yet it is a conviction that never leaves him - and the existence of this ''ancient...

  When as a philosophy undergraduate, I found myself reading Plato for the first time, I noted a troublesome disconnect between the Plato that I was reading, and possibly fitfully understanding, and the confident nineteenth and twentieth-century commentators that accompanied this reading.  My Plato was the practitioner of therapeutic wisdom who aimed to convert your being through the devices of dialogue, storytelling, and myth-making accompanied by unambiguous references to embodied spiritual practices (gymnastics, corybantic dance, and so forth). The Plato of the commentators was a rational philosopher and a committed 'dualist' separating an 'ideal' realm of the good from the messy binding world of 'matter' from which we were presumed to want to escape in a fleeing ascent.  You could see where this dualist, binary Plato had come from for he (or better still Socrates) often creates separate images of contrasting worlds to elaborate his points but reading on you ...

One of my realizations reading this excellent double study of the marriage of Edwin and Willa Muir was that exception reporting (the world is going to hell in a handbasket) is a feature of not only news coverage (after all 99.99999% of the population of the United States were not murdered today) but potentially of biography too, built as it is primarily on letters, memoirs/memories and diaries. We tend not to record the everydayness of our contentments and quiet achievements but how our plans went awry, our anxieties over recognition gnawed, or our painful lumbago!  This is important here because Willa Muir especially has been caught between two tendencies.  The first was to downplay her own creative role in comparison with her husband. The patriarchial nature of the society in which she lived (and which continues) meant that her achievements, especially those secured together, most notably the translations from German literature - Kafka and Herman Broch especially - tended to...