Human Heart (v.1.1)

new painting available 

 
 
 
 

" The heart is a living symbol. When we say 'I love you with all my heart', we do not mean the heart as organ whose beats cause the circulation of blood throughout the body, whose failure could drain the body of life. We also mean the heart as feeling, as the soulful, as the heart of the cosmos, echoed and amplified in the primal pulsation of the drum. Heartbeats correspond to the contracting and expanding movements of the universe, while the heart of the body is as essential to life as the sun is to our solar system. Among the first sounds experienced in the womb are the internally resounding rhythms of the mother's heart, enveloping and echoing the quicker beats of the embryo as it grows. The heart's undeniable physical centrality to our existence has its correspondence in the undeniable reality of our emotions, variable heartbeats measuring out our feelings of affection, desire, and delight, as well as pounding out our rages, fears, and vulnerabilities; the heart can be pierced and melted by the darts of Eros as well as broken by love's refusal. . .

. . . The heart shares with lotus flower and the rose the qualities of the hidden, enfolded center beneath the outer surface of things, the secret abode of consciousness, locked away, virgin and so inviolate that when we want to 'let someone in', we must give them 'the key'. The 'heart of the matter' expresses the essential core of any issue, and the heart is so identified as the center and unique essence of a human being that the idea of surgically transplanting a heart from one individual (((or species!))) to another still meets with powerful resistance. As the seat of all emotions, positive and negative, the heart is the point of contact for linkings of hatred or love, envy or compassion, fear or courage, deepest sorrow or brightest joy. "

- _The Book of Symbols : Reflections on Archetypal images_ ( 02010 )

Art & Psyche ( 1 )

"the mandala or circle image seems to be the predominant one in young children who are first learning how to draw. Initially a two-year-old with a pencil or crayon just scribbles, but soon (s)he seems to be attracted by the intersection of lines and begins to make crosses. Then the cross is enclosed by a circle and we have the basic pattern of the mandala. As the child attempts to do human figures, they first emerge as circles, contrary to all visual experience, with the arms and legs being represented only as ray-like extensions of the circle. . ."
 

". . .indicating that the young child experiences the human being as a round, mandala-like structure and verifies in an impressive way the psychological truth of Plato's myth of the original round man. Child therapists also find the mandala an operative, healing image in young children. All of this indicates that, symbolically speaking, the human psyche was originally round, whole, complete ; in a state of oneness and self-sufficiency that is equivalent to deity itself. . ."

 
 

". . . The same archetypal idea that connects childhood with nearness to deity is presented in Wordsworth's 'Ode on Intimations of Immortality' :

Our Birth is but a sleep and a forgetting :
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy !

From the standpoint of later years, the close connection of the child's ego with divinity is a state of inflation. Many subsequent psychological difficulties are due to residues of that identification with deity. Consider, for instance, the psychology of the child in the first five years or so. On one hand it is a time of great freshness of perception and response; the child is in immediate contact with the archetypal realities of life. It is in the stage of original poetry; magnificent and terrifying transpersonal powers are lurking in every commonplace event. But on the other hand the child can be an egotistic little beast, full of cruelty and greed. Childhood is innocent but it is also irresponsible. Hence, it has all the ambiguities of being firmly connected with the archetypal psyche and its extra-personal energy, and at the same time being unconsciously identified with it and uncharacteristically related to it. . ."

". . .Children share with primitive man the identification of ego with the archetypal psyche and ego with outer world. With primitives, inner and outer are not at all distinguished. For the civilized mind, primitives are most attractively related to nature and in tune with the life process ; but they are also savages and fall into the same mistakes of inflation as do children. Modern man, alienated from the source of life meaning, finds the image of the primitive an object of yearning. This accounts for the appeal of Rousseau's concept of the 'noble 'savage' and other more recent works which express the civilized mind's nostalgia for its lost mystical communion with nature. This is one side, but there is also a negative side. The real life of the primitive is dirty, degrading, and obsessed with terror. We would not want that reality for a moment. It is the symbolical for which we yearn.

When one looks back on his psychological origin, it has a two-fold connotation : first, it is seen as a condition of paradise, wholeness, a state of being at one with nature and the gods, and infinitely desirable ; but secondly, by our conscious human standards, which are related to time and space reality, it is an inflated state, a condition of irresponsibility, unregenerate lust, arrogance, and crude desirousness. The basic problem of the adult is how to achieve the union with nature and the gods, with which the child starts, without bringing about the inflation of identification. "

:

Edward f. edinger
_Ego and Archetype_
( c. 01972 )

World Views (3)

State of the World 02020 :

https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/507/State-of-the-World-2020-Bruce-St-page01.html

State of the World 02019 :


https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/506/State-of-the-World-2019-page01.html

State of the World 02018 :

https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/503/State-of-the-World-2018-Bruce-St-page01.html

State of the World 02017 :

https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/495/Bruce-Sterling-and-Jon-Lebkowsky-page01.html

State of the World 02016 :

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/487/Bruce-Sterling-Jon-Lebkowsky-Sta-page01.html
 

State of the World 02015 :

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/478/Bruce-Sterling-Cory-Doctorow-Jon-page01.html


State of the World 02014 :

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/473/Bruce-Sterling-and-Jon-Lebkowsky-page01.html


State of the World 02013 :

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/459/State-of-the-World-2013-Bruce-St-page01.html


State of the World 02012 :

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/430/Bruce-Sterling-and-Jon-Lebkowsky-page01.html


State of the World 02011 :

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/400/State-of-the-World-2011-Bruce-St-page01.html


State of the World 02010 :

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/373/Bruce-Sterling-State-of-the-Worl-page01.html
 

State of the World 02009 :

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/343/Bruce-Sterling-State-of-the-Worl-page01.html


State of the World 02008 :

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/317/Bruce-Sterling-State-of-the-Worl-page01.html


State of the World 02007 :

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/289/Bruce-Sterling-State-of-the-Worl-page01.html


State of the World 02006 :

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/262/Bruce-Sterling-State-of-the-Worl-page01.html


State of the World 02005 :

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/234/Bruce-Sterling-State-of-the-Worl-page01.html


State of the World 02004 :

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/204/The-2004-Bruce-Sterling-State-of-page01.html
 

State of the World 02003 :

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/171/Bruce-Sterling-Tomorrow-Now-Envi-page01.html


State of the World 02002 :

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/134/Bruce-Sterling-2002-The-State-of-page01.html
 

State of the World 02001 :

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/100/Bruce-Sterling-2001-The-State-of-page01.html
 

State of the World 02000 :

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/61/Bruce-Sterling-A-Viridian-Future-page01.html


 


What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

the sources
Eliot himself cites
(and the number key to Figure 2) 
are as follows
:

1. Poems (Gre. --6), Sappho
2. Upanishads (San. --6)
3. Aeneid (Lat. 1), Virgil
4. Metamorphoses (Lat. 1), Ovid
5. Pervigilium Veneris (Lat. 2)
6. Bible (Lat. 4)
7. Confessions (Lat. 4), Augustine
8. Nibelungenlied (Ger. 12)
9. Divine Comedy (Ita. 14), Dante
10. Spanish Tragedy (Eng. 16), Kyd
11. Prothalamian (Eng. 16), Spenser
12. Parliament of Bees (Eng. 17), Day
13. To His Coy Mistress (Eng. 17), Marvell
14. Women Beware Women (Eng. 17), Middleton
15. Paradise Lost (Eng. 17), Milton
16. The Tempest (Eng. 17), Shakespeare
17. White Devil (Eng. 17), Webster
18. The Vicar of Wakefield (Eng. 18), Goldsmith
19. Fleurs du Mal (Fre. 19), Baudelaire
20. The Golden Bough (Eng. 19), Frazer
21. Elizabeth (Eng. 19), Froude
22. Les Chimères (Fre. 19), Nerval
23. Parsifal (Fre. 19), Verlaine
24. Blick ins Chaos (Ger. 20), Hesse
25. Buddhism in Translation (Eng. 20), Warren
26. From Ritual to Romance (Eng. 20), Weston
27. The Waste Land (Eng. 20), Eliot


The Waste Land
by
T. S. Eliot
( 01922 )

audio, read by Eliot :

audio, read by Alec Guinness :

text :

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1321

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