Ambiguity

A thought provoking article, The Poetic Basis of Mind written at Myth&Culture asks,
"...what do the lines do for you? How does your mind open in the day when the imaginal is allowed to play? What are at the edges of your imagination as the words drift in and out of your day, like the soft lapping waves of the sea itself?

Why is all this so important right now? Because we have choice to repeat, to mimic the dead ideas that are driving this country, or we can individually choose to mythopoeate our lives, our communities, our country. We can literally see the dead-end choices or we can imaginally “see-through” them. Hillman writes in Re-Visioning Psychology:

Simply to participate in events, or to suffer them strongly, or to accumulate a variety of them, does not differentiate or deepen one’s psychic capacity into what is often called a wise or an old soul. Events are not essential to the soul’s experiencing. It does not need many dreams or many loves or city lights. We have a record of great souls that have thrived in a monk’s cell, a prison, or a suburb [or in a housewife’s kitchen]. But there must be a vision of what is happening, deep ideas to create experience. Otherwise we have had the events without experiencing them, and the experience of what happened comes only later when we gain an idea of it – when it can be envisioned by an archetypal idea.

...Like any craft, any art, any poetry, one must study many things in order to see past the obvious, the literal, the mundane. One must develop a tolerance for ambiguity, because it is only in the ambiguous that we can get a vision of the total truth of a matter, the total experience of an archetype.

To live ambiguously is a frightening but necessary component in the poetic basis of mind. It requires an abandonment of the illusion of safety, the fixed land masses of C.S. Lewis’ brilliant book, Perelandra. It requires instead, a fluidity of thought that carries over to one’s life. This type of life requires courage and determination and a resilience. It requires standing against all those who dismiss the imaginal as fake, lies, useless, nothing. It requires a true commitment to the art of living by living through art." posted by Cyndy | link | | |
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