Red Book + Chitta Nirodha

 Created between 1914 and 1930, Jung considered the Red Book, or Liber Novus (New Book) to be the central work in his oeuvre.

 

“Every period has its bias, its particular prejudice and its psychic ailment. An epoch is like an individual; it has its own limitations of conscious outlook, and therefore requires a compensatory adjustment” (Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 166)                                                               As language is a function of consciousness, so the unconscious has its own tongue--mythological symbols and archetypes.

"the least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it" (Modern Man in Search of a Soul 65-66)

It took Jungian scholar Dr. Sonu Shamdasani three years to convince Jung's family to bring the book out of hiding. It took another 13 years to translate it.

BBC slide show of pages: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8316000/8316096.stm 

consciousness: Chitta or chaitanya.

1)    A synonym for mind-stuff, chitta; or

2)    the condition or power of perception, awareness, apprehension.

There are myriad gradations of consciousness, from the simple sentience of inanimate matter to the consciousness of basic life forms, to the higher consciousness of human embodiment, to omniscient states of superconsciousness, leading to immersion in the One universal consciousness, Parashakti. Chaitanya and chitta can name both individual consciousness and universal consciousness.

Modifiers indicate the level of awareness, e.g.,

-       vyashti chaitanya, "individual consciousness;"

-       buddhi chitta, "intellectual consciousness;"

-       Sivachaitanya, "God consciousness."

Five classical "states" of awareness are discussed in scripture:

1)    wakefulness (jagrat),

2)    "dream" (svapna) or astral consciousness,

3)    "deep sleep" (sushupti) or subsuperconsciousness,

4)    the superconscious state beyond (turiya "fourth") and

5)    the utterly transcendent state called turiyatita ("beyond the fourth").

CHITTA NIRODHA http://www.omalpha.com/pat.htmlhttp://www.omalpha.com/pat.html

Chitta is one of the four functions of mind (Manas, Chitta, Ahamkara, and Buddhi). Chitta is the memory bank, which stores impressions and experiences. To meditate on Chitta is to cultivate the stance of witnessing the stream of thought patterns rising from Chitta and falling back into it.   http://www.swamij.com/meditationtypes.htm

sublime time

http://fans.wild.nhl.com/topic/16782/t/Astronomy-quot-Pictures-of-the-day-quot-thread.html?page=10

Explanation: If every picture tells a story, this one might make a novel. The six month long exposure compresses the time from December 17, 2007 to June 21, 2008 into a single point of view. Dubbed a solargraph, the remarkable image was recorded with a simple pinhole camera made from a drink can lined with a piece of photographic paper. The Clifton Suspension Bridge over the Avon River Gorge in Bristol, UK emerges from the foreground, but rising and setting each day the Sun arcs overhead, tracing a glowing path through the sky. Cloud cover causes dark gaps in the daily Sun trails. In December, the Sun trails begin lower down and are short, corresponding to a time near the northern hemisphere's winter solstice date. They grow longer and climb higher in the sky as the June 21st summer solstice approaches.

cant catch moon

Winterson : I couldn’t decide what poem to run with this month, so as I am writing a 10 part series for BBC Radio 4 about the Moon, and all my mind is moon just now, it had to be this one…

The Freedom of the Moon

By Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)

I’ve tried the new moon tilted in the air

Above a hazy tree-and-farmhouse cluster

As you might try a jewel in your hair.

I’ve tried it fine with little breadth of luster,

Alone, or in one ornament combining

With one first water-star almost as shining.

I put it shining anywhere I please.

By walking slowly on some evening later

I’ve pulled it from a crate of crooked trees,

And brought it over glossy water, greater,

And dropped it in, and seen the image wallow,

The color run, all sorts of wonder follow.

Alchemy + the Moon

Interviews with Winterson

The Flower of Life

The Flower of Life is a visual expression of the connections life weaves through all sentient beings, believed to contain a type of Akashic Record (a Sanskrit word meaning "sky", "space" or ether) of basic information of all living things.^[5]

There are many spiritual beliefs associated with the Flower of Life; for example, depictions of the five Platonic Solids are found within the symbol of Metatron's Cube, which may be derived from the Flower of Life pattern. Another notable example of that which may be derived from the Flower of Life is the Tree of Life.

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci studied the Flower of Life's form and its mathematical properties. He drew the Flower of Life itself, as well as various components such as the Seed of Life. He drew geometric figures representing shapes such as the platonic solids and also used the golden ratio of phi in his artwork; all of which may be derived from the Flower of Life design.

 

Geometry means measure of earth. In ancient Egypt, from which the Greek inherited this study, the Nile would flood its banks each year, covering the land and obliterating the orderly markings of plot and farm areas. This yearly flood symbolized to the Egyptians the cyclical return of the primal watery chaos, and when the waters receded the work began of redefining and reestablishing the boundaries. This work of measuring was called geometry. Many ancient cultures chose to examine reality through metaphors of geometry and music, and in actuality they were very close to the position of our most contemporary sciences.

vesica pisces ()

Birthplace of Triganometry

The Womb of the Universe

The Vesica Piscis is the intersection of Spirit and Matter, the Soul (psyche)

1)  In the earliest traditions, the supreme being was represented by a sphere, the symbol of a being with no beginning and no end, continually existing, perfectly formed and profoundly symmetrical.  The addition of a second sphere represented the expansion of unity into the duality of male and female, god and goddess. By overlapping, the two spheres, the god and goddess created a divine offspring.  The Vesica Pisces motif (and its derivatives, the Flower of Life, Tree of Life, and fundamentals of geometry) has a history of thousands of years and easily predates virtually all major religions of the current era.

2)  The son or daughter of the god and goddess is associated with the overlapping of the spheres -- the resulting three dimensional figure somewhat like an American football. [Sorry about that!]  In the case of Jesus Christ, the two dimensional figure has also served as a symbol for the miracle of the fishes.  (The “tail” also served to more easily identify the source of the plane figure.)  There is also conveyed the spiritual power originating from the interior of this symbol.

3)  Virtually every medieval church in Europe uses as a standard motif, the Vesica Pisces in two dimensions. The fact many of these churches were dedicated to the Virgin Mary or to Mary Madagalene (aka the goddess) is simply part of the understanding.  Several of the churches in northern France are even located in such a manner that their points of light recreate the “lights” of the constellation Virgo.  In Glastonbury, England, the site normally attributed to Avalon (the island of the Goddess), is also where the Chapel of St. Mary is located -- the latter which is apparently patterned with the use of the Vesica Pisces.

4)  The goddess of any and all religions which recognize her power and significance invariably use the Vesica Pisces to identify her.  From the overlapping pools of water and the chalice well cover in the goddess’s garden in Glastonbury (aka Avalon) to any number of representations of the Tree of Life, the goddess and her ability to create and birth life are celebrated.

5)Drunvalo Melchizedek, in his Flower of Life symbolism, uses the Vesica Pisces as well, and considers it the geometric image through which light was created. 

6)  The Tree of Life is shown in one of its many representations as the primary graphic of the home page of this website, and includes the Vesica Pisces (and Flower of Life) quite deliberately.  The ease with which the patterns fit make the inclusion a virtual automatic.  

 

7)  Robert Lawlor, in one of the best books available on Sacred Geometry [Thames and Hudson, 1982] notes that the Ö3 contained within the Vesica Pisces is “the formative power giving rise to the polygonal ‘world’.” 

http://www.halexandria.org/dward097.htm    
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoMk0estzXc

http://www.toniallen.co.uk/vesica-pisces.htmlhttp://lifeintheshire.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html

perception+physiology

John Gage is an art historian and a Fellow of the British Academy, and his special subject is the meaning of colour. He was a keynote speaker at the Eleventh Congress of the International Colour Association held recently in Sydney, which ranged across everything from colour theory and psychology to colour physics and chemistry. John Gage is interested in our notions of good and bad colours -- and why, in certain cultures at certain times, some colours are preferred over others. listen

colour test

shape and colour test

philosophy of symmetry

Wabi refers to a philosophical construct, a sense of space, direction, or path, while sabi is an aesthetic construct rooted in a given object and its features, plus the occupation of time, chronology, and objectivity.  

Wabi-sabi is an intuitive appreciation of a transient beauty in the physical world that reflects the irreversible flow of life in the spiritual world. It is an understated beauty that exists in the modest, rustic, imperfect, or even decayed, an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things. Symmetry reflects a Hellenistic heritage - as opposed to one connected to nature, yet the body is evoked the moment symmetry is imposed on an object.

Greek philosophers initially felt that aesthetically appealing objects were beautiful in and of themselves. Plato felt that beautiful objects incorporated proportion, harmony, and unity among their parts. Similarly, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle found that the universal elements of beauty were order, symmetry, and definiteness. Aesthetic considerations such as symmetry and simplicity are used in areas of philosophy, such as ethics and theoretical physics and cosmology to define truth, outside of empirical considerations. Beauty and Truth have been argued to be nearly synonymous

http://www.hermitary.com/solitude/aesthetics.html

time space synchronicity

From Metanexus : "Jung’s fascination with physics actually began early in his career as a result of a series of dinners with Albert Einstein between 1909 and 1912. He later wrote that “It was Einstein who first started me thinking about a relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality…years later this stimulus led to my relation with the physicist Professor W. Pauli and to my thesis of psychic synchronicity.” 

"His first public mention of the concept occurred 1928 during a seminar on the interpretation of dreams. Jung noted then that, in addition to the frequent appearance of common mythic motifs, dreams are often connected to coincidences in people’s lives. Taking a phenomenological stance, he said that while it would be “absurd” to consider the conjunction of dream material and life events to be causal, “it is wise to consider the fact that [these coincidences] do happen…The East…considers coincidences as the reliable basis of the world rather than causality. Synchronism is the prejudice of the East; causality is the modern prejudice of the West.”⁹ In 1930, Jung mentioned the concept again in his speech honoring Richard Wilhelm, a scholar of Chinese philosophy who had died earlier that year. In this address (later published as part of his commentary on Wilhelm’s translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower), Jung said “the science of the I Ching is based not on the causality principle but on one which-hitherto unnamed because unfamiliar to us-I have tentatively called the synchronistic principle.” He concluded that “the causality principle” cannot explain “psychic parallelisms” that must somehow be connected but are not causally related.¹⁰ In 1935, he referred once again to the idea during lectures given in London. This time he equated synchronicity with the Chinese Tao and described it as “a peculiar principle active in the world so that things happen together somehow and behave as if they were the same, and yet for us they are not.”¹¹ It was to be many years before Jung would write about this concept again, and when he did, his focus would shift from the empirical and phenomenological aspects of synchronistic phenomena to the ontological and archetypal nature of such events.¹² This shift was the outcome of his long term relationship with Wolfgang Pauli, which began in 1932, when Pauli sought help during a period of intense psychological distress.

This “crisis of his life”, as Pauli would later call the period between 1927 and 1932, was stimulated by his mother’s suicide, his father’s quick remarriage to a woman Pauli’s age, and the end of his own brief marriage to a cabaret singer, all complicated by his own meteoric rise in the world of physics. Pauli’s father suggested he seek treatment with Dr. Jung, and the two great men had their first meeting in January, 1932. By the time of this encounter, Pauli had already written a critique of Einstein’s theory of relativity so perceptive that Einstein later said Pauli was perhaps the only physicist who truly understood his work."

http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/10913/Default.aspx

layers

from Jung's Red Book

 "I am haunted by waters" 
   Norman Maclean A River Runs Through It

Jung, over time, came to see the psyche as an inherently more spiritual and fluid place, an ocean that could be fished for enlightenment and healing.

Our fear of breaking surfaces/skin is a life saving instinct yet in dreams we breathe underwater

“In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&em

caves, the Forms + deep water

In Romanticism, nautical allusions serve as one of the major metaphors for the life journey.

The Raft of the Medusa  
Théodore Géricault 1819

Campbell somewhere suggests each find a single fragment from the pile of shards left in the ruins of the mythic world, a fragment that speaks to you, and then play and work with it.

Novalis: “The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet” 

Campbell, in The Hero’s Journey interprets the outer world as the world of tradition - that which can be taught – and the inner world as your response to it – an interesting view of the poet’s insight into the relation of subject and object.

The soul is the realm of reconciliation of those two parts of the world – inner and outer – that belong together, but have been falling apart. Novalis continues: “The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.” The psyche is a place of potential growth, and the more the inner psychic and the outer cosmic world overlap, the more we gain ground both in the physical and psychic dimension - and the more we are in balance.

The inner and outer worlds are identical anyway; we’re just experiencing the one world in two dimensions. The mystical way of experiencing dissolves the categories of inner and outer. There is only one cosmos, one “undifferentiated consciousness” (Campbell), but it is explored in different ways, by looking inside, or looking outside. An artist has to explore both, because, as Max Beckmann puts it, the purpose of the arts is to make visible the invisible, through reality as the actual mystery of existence.

Where Phantoms Reign:
Myth and Nature in Modern Art
by Martin Weyers published on August 18, 2008 

http://www.martinweyers.com/int_intro_frames.htm 

http://www.jcf.org/new/index.php?categoryid=37&blogid=7

 

Bachelard water + dreams

To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become part of depth of infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds its image in the destiny of water.  

 Bachelard Introduction W+D

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth. 

 Bachelard Poetics of Reverie Ch. 2, 

penetrating veils + blood

What lies beneath is sheathed in the visceral realm 
Real but largely Invisible
still Self but Other
Anonymous but Singular
Unrecognisable but clearly Me.

water & the Todtenbaum

"I always feel at home in a water environment and have grown to appreciate the vital role that water plays in my existence. As a living substance that is the foundation of all life processes on Earth, water is not an ordinary commodity but something marvelous, magical and sacred"

Altman, Sacred Water: The Spiritual Source of Life (Mahwah, NJ: Hidden Spring, 2002)

Bachelard remarks that "water, the substance oflife is also the substance of death for ambivalent reverie" It is also for him a Jungian archetype enabling us to imagine that the  "dead person is given bacl to his mother to be born again"

In is novel Chevengur, the Russian writer Andrei Platonov talks about a "poetics of water" aligned with Bachelard's own imagery.

According to Jung, the image of the Todtenbaum, the death tree,  is associated with the myth of water burial, in which the dead person is imagined to be reborn in the future.  In his dissertation on Platonov, Waterworks: Andrei Platonov's Fluid Anti-Utopia, Seungdo Ra, refers to the Todtenbaum and the Native American practice of burying their dead by either tying stones to the deceased's body and sinking it in a lake, river, or spring, or of setting the body afloat in a canoe. 

"... they believed that the canoe is the womb of the water goddess from which the sould would be re born in a future life. Similarly, in Kotlovan, Platonov shows us a ritual of water burial wehre the kalaks are floated away on a raft along the river. "

A dugout or dugout canoe is a boat which is basically a hollowed tree trunk. Other names for this type of boat are logboat and monoxylon. Monoxylon (μονόξυλον) (pl: monoxyla) is Greek -- mono (single) + xylon (tree) -- and is mostly used in classic Greek texts. Some, but not all, pirogues are also constructed in this manner.
Dugouts are the oldest boats archaeologists have found. In Germany they are called Einbaum (English translation: One tree). This is probably because they are made of massive pieces of wood, which tend to preserve better than, e.g., bark canoes. Einbaum dug-out boat finds in Germany date back to the Stone Age. Along with bark canoe and hide kayak, dugout boats were also used by indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Einbaum

History

The design and manufacture of kayaks have gone through many stages over the centuries, from primitive, handmade crafts used for survival to mass-produced sporting boats. Archeological evidence shows that kayaks were used at least 2,000 years ago by Eskimos for transportation, hunting, and fishing. Eskimo kayaks typically weighed about 26 pounds (12 kg), were 18-20 feet (5.5-6 m) long and 20 inches (51 cm) wide. The Eskimos lashed bone or driftwood into frames with seal sinew or gut. Seal or caribou skins were stripped of hair, tied together, and soaked in water before being tightly stretched over the frame. The skins stretched taut as they dried. Seams were waterproofed with boiled seal oil or caribou fat. Limitations such as the availability, shape, and size of natural materials did not hinder the grace and durability of the Eskimo kayak. Modern kayak designers and manufacturers are indebted to these early engineers both for the concept of the kayak as a low, covered boat as well as for specific features which make the boat so seaworthy.
By A.D. 900, kayaks were being used in Europe. New designs in frames and coverings addressed the need to easily transport the kayak over land. One of these designs was a revolutionary collapsible kayak model called a foldboat which was invented in Germany in the 1800s. The foldboat used a rubberized canvas outer layer stretched over a folding tubular frame. The foldboat could be disassembled and carried in just two suitcases.
More recently, the primary use of kayaks has shifted from hunting and transportation to recreation and competitive sport. Kayaking for recreation began on rivers and lakes in the late 1800s.

http://www.answers.com/topic/kayak#Wooden_kayaks

UNDERGROUND WATER
Blue Holes and Old Canoes
http://www.blueholes.org/The%20Rob%20Palmer%20Blue%20Holes%20Foundation/Archeological%20finds.html
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzwj6xH-uw4

Sub - Urban Adventures

http://www.sub-urban.com/megatron/
http://www.sub-urban.com/crystalphallus/
http://www.sub-urban.com/deepochre/
http://www.sub-urban.com/underground.shtml

Alex Wise images - also underground river and mental hospital Tas
http://www.alexwisephotography.net/blog/tag/urbex/

symbiosis

"Anytime you work with the body, you are also working with the mind and the energy system—which is the bridge between body and mind"  Joan Shivarpita Harrigan, Ph.D director of Patanjali Kundalini Yoga Tennessee

http://www.experiencefestival.com/consciousness_-_philosophy

imago

Theories on art and literature show that the artist is a medium of his own subconscious

 

"One has only to know and trust, and the ageless guardians will appear. Having responded to his own call, and continuing to follow courageously as the consequences unfold, the hero finds all the forces of the unconscious at his side... the soul under the tutelage of the supernatural."  Joseph Campbell

 
 Reflections on visual language 

"The integrated view of the world represented by the mandala, while long embraced by some Eastern religions, has now begun to emerge in Western religious and secular cultures. Awareness of the mandala may have the potential of changing how we see ourselves, our planet, and perhaps even our own life purpose."
(From Mandala: Journey to the Center, by Bailey Cunningham)

the water dreamer

The sea kayak in the arctic, Canada, and British Columbia has a history which spans at least 5,000 years. "It is a fitting tribute to the arctic peoples, builders of the first sea kayak that it survives today as the worlds most popular self propelled watercraft."

The birth place of the kayak was almost certainly the inhospitable coast of Siberia. We know that the peoples who eventually settled the Americas crossed from Siberia sometime during the last Ice age when the land or ice bridge "Berengia" connected the two continents.http://www.coastmountainexpeditions.com/?q=node/141 
Siberia & the Aleutian Islands, the birth place of the sea kayak - “qajaq” .

The oldest known archaeological evidence of a kayak goes back 2,000 years B.P. and there is inferential evidence dating it back another 2,000 years. However, given the reality of surviving the harsh environment, arctic peoples most likely always had some way of getting onto the water to hunt or fish. An 8,000 year existence for the kayak is possible, but we will probably never know for sure.

c o m p a s s i o n

http://www.teamuse.com/article_020102.htmlhttp://www.teamuse.com/article_020102.html 

The original Sanskrit word is 'karuna,' which holds within itself traces of the fragment 'ru,' meaning to weep. While the Oxford dictionary describes compassion as pity bordering on the merciful, karuna is actually our ability to relate to another in so intense a measure that the plight of the other affects us as much as if it had been our own.

Quite unlike conventional love (Sanskrit: priya, kama or trishna), which is rooted in dualistic thinking and is egoistic, possessive and exclusive, in contrast to the all-encompassing nature of compassion. The root meaning of karuna is said to be the anguished cry of deep sorrow and understanding that can only come from an unblemished sense of oneness with others. 

 

Kuan Yin is the Chinese version of the male god Avalokiteshvara, whom the ancient texts eulogize as the patron deity of compassion. It is fascinating however to observe that nowhere in India (where he originated) or Tibet (where he remains the most popular deity) is the latter ever deified as a female figure. In China too, his worship began as a male god

Though often images are encountered, which show her sporting a moustache, emphasizing masculinity; this is negated by the softness of her demeanor. Can anything be more subtly female than her graceful poise - modest and inward looking, yet potent enough to generate and compassionately nourish the whole outside world?

"The divine feminine cannot be suppressed for long. In China, it emerged by the transformation of the male into the female," only god (or the goddess) knows how it will transpire in other cultures. Palmer, Martin and Jay Ramsay, with Man-Ho Kwok. Kuan Yin Myths and Prophecies of the Chinese Goddess of Compassion: London, 1995.

http://www.teamuse.com/article_020102.html

Often Quan Yin is shown pouring a stream of healing water, the "Water of Life," from a small vase. With this water devotees and all living things are blessed with physical and spiritual peace.

"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

- Albert Einstein