KYBELE: WILD AT HEART Body of Images; Wilderness of Soul by Iona Miller, (c)2019
https://ionamiller2020.weebly.com/cybele.html
Jung introduced the notion that archetypes, ancient gods and goddesses, are dynamic patterns that eternally operate in our lives and our world. They are the primal driving forces of humanity and nature. Their metaphysical influence pervades the whole spectrum of domains from cosmic to subatomic. Theirs is the fabric that weaves Above and Below together, seamlessly, as a holographic whole.
Our worldviews, basic assumptions about the way the world is, are grounded and sustained with mythic patterns which condition our beliefs, thoughts, feelings and actions. Personal mythology is a vibrant infrastructure that informs your life, consciously or unconsciously. Fixed patterns of belief and behavior function as trances.
Living mythically means becoming aware of our personal and collective origins. Their articulation opens up new experiential space. These forms structure our awareness; in them we find the root cause of our difficulties and our healing. Solutions to intrapersonal conflict is a first step toward solving global conflict.
Ralph Waldo Emerson described power as residing in "the moment of transition from a past to a new state." Empowerment is effected through the act of transition. It is embedded in numerous subtle gradations of trance as ways of knowing and being. The goal of ecstatic transport, as in Tantra, is possession by the goddess.
By directing our attention both inwardly and outwardly, we connect with the eternal source of wisdom and our intuition comes to the fore. There is an inherent process of changing from the inside out. The deepest self transforms downline faculties such as beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior, as well as psychosomatic condition. Thus, resilience can be seen as the ability to dynamically change at the most fundamental level toward a more adaptive way of being in the world.
We can develop a sense of wholeness on all three levels of identity: 1). the egoic, an adaptive cohesive sense of self identity with and yet separate from the world; 2). the existential, an egoic state requiring a more coherent sense of our individuated state within the human condition; and 3). the transpersonal, which transcends the egoic, existential identities into a heightened awareness of essential unity with all human beings, living things, and perhaps the cosmos.
Panpsychism, in philosophy, is either the view that all parts of matter involve mind, or the more holistic view that the whole universe is an organism that possesses a mind (see pandeism and panentheism). A stronger and more ambitious view than animism or hylozoism, all things are alive. Panpsychism believes constituent parts of matter are composed of some form of mind and are sentient.
Psychologist Rollo May suggests that it is the loss of our primary mythic narrative that has created the widening existential void that is crippling Western Civilization. “Our powerful hunger for myth
is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home, and one would indeed clutch for other cultures to find some place at some time a ‘mythic womb.’”
Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche. Dr. May suggests myths are “involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings.” According to Jung, “They are the psychic life of the primitive tribe, which immediately falls to pieces and decays when it loses its mythological heritage, like a man who has lost his soul.”
Marsilio Ficino said, "Creation is a more excellent act than illumination." Whatever we make of our lives — hopefully something soulful — matters more than our bare understanding and illumination."
James Hillman (2006) observes, the ideas advanced in this thesis about interconnections with the wider world of nature have been perhaps “repressed” but have still continued to exist throughout the history of Western thought:
"It is affirmed in differing ways in Plato, the Stoics, Plotinus, and in Jewish and Christian mystics; it appears splendidly in the Renaissance psychology of Marsilio Ficino, in Swedenborg; it is revered in Mariology, Sophianic devotion, in the Shekinah. We find notions of it in German and British Romantics and American Transcendentalists; in philosophers of various sorts of panpsychism from Leibniz through Pierce, Schiller, Whitehead, and Harshorne . . .
Anima mundi reappears in further guises as ‘the collective unconscious’ in Jung, as physiognomic character in the Gestalt psychology of Koffka and Kohler, in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, of van den Berg, . . . and of course, ever and again in the great poets, specifically of this century in Yeats and Rilke, Williams and Stevens." (pp. 47-48)"
Any time in the wilds of Earth now brings solace, without which we lose our psychological and spiritual footing as the ongoing litany of loss, corruption, degradation, aggression, death and trauma that is the daily news assaults us all. It is in nature, and loving nature with all our hearts on a daily basis, where we find the equanimity necessary to continue walking forward into our increasingly broken world.
"Even if the recollection of mythology is perhaps the single most characteristic move shared by all 'archetypalists', the myths themselves are understood as metaphors—never as transcendental metaphysics whose categories are divine figures. ... Myths do not ground, they open." [James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account. Dallas: Spring, 1983, p. 20]
