Green Man, Earth Angel


Green ManWe must descend fully into the real, messy world, and not stop short of the real individuals who make it up. We get so constricted! So many are afraid to think about the world because only Scientists can do that. So many are afraid of their innate creativity because that is the realm of Artists. But anyone can experience the thrill that accompanies the new ways of seeing that lie at the heart of scientific discovery, anyone can write, or paint, or make music. And yet we mostly don’t. Because, “I’m too busy . . . I’m not smart enough, I’m not good enough, I can’t really dance, or sing, or write poetry or make pots … I’d be too embarrassed.” We are haunted by the Canon, by the experts, by the professionals. We are afraid of our selves, afraid that we won’t measure up. When great thought, art, and literature become an impediment to human life and action rather than an inspiration, then something is seriously wrong. The democratization of imagination is essential for the full descent into the world of all the virtual beings crying out in their sadness to be revealed.

Tom Cheetham, Green Man, Earth Angel

Zeitgeist & Zeitgeist: Addendum

Two important pieces of work in terms of understanding some of the foundational aspects of our prevailing social world. I am not sure that we can always posit a conspiracy when the system of thought forms the type of ideologies that both support ad resist its existence. In other words, the ideologies are part of the emergent system itself rather than consitituting it. Somewhat “chicken & egg” I suppose, but important to the type of alternative ways of being that are possible and the type of resistance that emerges as a result.

More information is at: http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/

ZEITGEIST: ADDENDUM

ZEITGEIST MOVEMENT: ORIENTATION PRESENTATION

A Super 8 Spectacular: Childhood Memories

A compilation of Super 8 footage from my childhood and a small tribute to Norton Buffalo, who died recently. “Thank you lord for giving me another day” says Norton. My sister Kathy is unavoidably throughout this video, just as she is in all the footage I have. She seems the one constant throughout our entire family experience when I was young and the film confirms this as she weaves in and out of the scenes of the film, just as she wove in and out of our lives and became a driving force in our family dynamic. Now that she has been gone, dead from brain cancer, for more than 18 years, it seems less bitter sweet to look back and put together a compilation of all the footage collecting dust and cobwebs in our parents attic. Most of my memories of Kathy are truly as she appears in the film: as a child bursting with exuberance and angst rather than the often angry and determined adult she became. We were always friends and always at odds. She challenged me just as she challenged my brothers as the only girl among us four siblings. These were good times, but they seem another life as I watch having now replaced old memories with many new. Nostalgia is simply part of the art now rather than remembrance.

C.G. Jung Face-to-Face

Click on the still image below or on the link to the right to go to a separate page and view the 1959 film Face to Face with Carl Jung (00:39:27). You can also listen to Memories, Dreams, Reflections <<–here.

Carl Gustav Jung

Carl Gustav Jung (click image to view film)

The Late Years for C.G. Jung

(From: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A653410)

As he got older, Jung’s interest in the world expanded rather than contracted. Though originally eschewing the idea of disciples or any ambition to start a school of psychology, Jung helped found the CG Jung Institute in Zürich, in 1948, and was its first president, serving until he retired in 1950.

After 1945 and until his death in 1961, Jung did, however, see fewer patients, concentrating instead on his alchemical work. This profound interest in alchemy culminated in the publication of ‘The Psychology of the Transference’ (1946; In: The Practice of Psychotherapy, 1954; CW 16); Psychology and Alchemy (1953; CW 12); Alchemical Studies (1967; CW 13); and his magnum opus Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955-6; CW 14). Containing dream commentaries and amplifications on the images and symbols of individuation as portrayed in alchemy, these works provided his followers with alchemical insights into the analytical process and relationship.

In an effort to ‘popularize’ his work, and with the firm conviction that it would be the ordinary people who would carry on his psychology, Jung decided (in his early 80s) to write and get published his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections (<<–click the link to listen), as well as a collaborative work entitled Man and His Symbols. Explaining his psychology in a most fundamental way was an appeal for the public to realise the reality of the unconscious and, above all, to take their own souls seriously. To this end he needed to reach a wider public and, in 1959, he agreed to be interviewed by John Freeman for a BBC series about famous living people, called Face to Face. The interview was a success, with his much quoted remark about the existence of God – ‘I don’t believe, I know’ – arousing a storm of comment at the time.

Jung had many premonitions of approaching death, and he took these as both a preparation and a reassurance. In one impressive dream he saw the ‘other Bollingen’ bathed in a glow of light, and a voice told him that it was completed and ready for habitation5. The golden tower (as vessel of the Self) on ‘the other shore of the lake’ was now ready for him to move into.’

Jung died in Küsnacht, near Zürich, at a quarter to four on Tuesday afternoon, 6 June, 1961. It was synchronistic that about an hour or so afterwards, lightning struck a tall popular tree in his garden at the lake’s edge.

Jung himself saw death as paradoxical, an event that had elicited contrasting emotions of grief and joy. He further said that death was ‘a fearful piece of brutality… not only as a physical event, but far more so psychically: a human being is torn away from us, and what remains is the icy stillness of death’6.

May 19, 2009 • Posted in: Uncategorized • 1 Comment