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Wednesday 30 April 2014

The Archetypes Of Beauty: Plato, Carl Jung & Joseph Campbell The Poet As Its Beholder:Jim Morrison's Coming In The Present World













We live, We die & death NOT ends it......
Journey we more into the night the American Night ......
                             
                                 THE CONNECTORS

What is Connection?
When two motions, thought to be infinite & mutually exclusive, meet at a moment
Of Time?
Yes.
Time does not exist.
There is no time.

-Time is a straight plantation.  
                                   
                                         - Jim Morrison

THE ROLE OF POETICS & BEAUTY

Poetry in its innate form holds the highest potential of human expression and imagination. It could be defined as the medium to attain emotive perfection, a Cathartic purgation and over all an immaculate sense of cosmic harmony. As the notes on a guitar string or the keys of a piano that brings forth music to the ears, poetry and its rhythmic or non rhythmic words brings forth life to the soul. As Human existence would be meaningless in the absence of a Cosmic poet whom we address as the Divine creator or a Master architect similarly poetics in itself finds its highest recognition through the perception of beauty..... Deriving its flow through an underlying sense of beauty as its vortex point, thereby opening up all possibilities and potentialities within itself.
                                            - Monalisa

UNDERSTANDING ARCHETYPES



"Those who know, not only that the Everlasting lies in them, but that what they, and all things, really are is the Everlasting, dwell in the groves of the wish fulfilling trees, drink the brew of immortality, and listen everywhere to the unheard music of eternal concord."
                                                  - Campbell

Referrenced from the Jungian archetypes and the collective Unconscious to Arnold Von Geppe's Rites du passages including a detailed study of Frazer's Golden Bough to Ethnography and folklore alongwith influences from James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake comes forth Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces enriched with the concept of monomyth a term borrowed from Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Dealing with mythological accounts dating back to centuries across distant historical places weaving forth an inspirational journey,an adventure,a psychological insight and a spiritual quest that leads to A Becoming.


"The fantasy is a reassurance—promise that the peace of Paradise, which was known first within the mother womb, is not to be lost; that it supports the present and stands in the future as well as in the past (is omega as well as alpha); that though omnipotence may seem to be endangered by the threshold passages and life awakenings, protective power is always and ever present within or just behind the unfamiliar features of the world. 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. Mother Nature herself supports the mighty task. And in so far as the hero's act coincides with that for which his society is ready, he seems to ride on the great rhythm of the historical process."
                                                                                                   - Campbell

THE CONCEPT OF MONOMYTH
"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man."

Borrowed from Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the term monomyth is extensively used by Campbell to best describe the mythical voyage of the hero passing through different phases. The Hero's Journey in other words, the concept of monomyth is hence used to outline or highlight the synonymity of the classical myths to other myths or narratives varying from different source or ages sharing a similar pattern or plot structure. As Campbell discovers the underlying symmetry or the shared ideas following the same as if a part of a unified consciousness coming from different civilizations. Such synonymity can be traced in the stories of Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Prometheus, Osiris......following a similar lineage. Influenced by Ethnographer Arnold Van Geppe's Les Rites de Passage (The three stages of The Rites Of Passages) the fundamental stages in Campbell's monomythical narrative are classified into three structural sections respectively. First -Departure or Separation, secondly- the Quest or Initiation, leading to the third - Final Homecoming or Return.

"Freedom to pass back and forth across the world division, from the perspective of the apparitions of time to that of the causal deep and back—not contaminating the principles of the one with those of the other, yet permitting the mind to know the one by virtue of the other—is the talent of the master. The Cosmic Dancer, declares Nietzsche, does not rest heavily in a single spot, but gaily, lightly, turns and leaps from one position to another. It is possible to speak from only one point at a time, but that does not invalidate the insights of the rest. The individual, through prolonged psychological disciplines, gives up completely all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies, hopes and fears, no longer resists the self-annihilation that is prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth, and so becomes ripe, at last, for the great at-one-ment. His personal ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him; he becomes, that is to say, an anonymity."

THE PLATONIC THEORY OF FORMS & IDEALS

"It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself,"
                                        - Plato Symposium of the Form of Beauty 

 Plato's the theory of ideas or the theory of Forms serves as a testimony for the existence of archetypes. According to the Platonic Ideation the real world which we sense is nothing more than a mere emulation or imitation of the reality which transcends us. The Platonic forms are in every sense real and more fundamental than the outer physical world of human imperfection which is born out of mimicking the Ideal Forms.
As Plato writes in his defence against Heraclitus' s concept of nothingness and flux in which there are no things to be known as they exist in a state of constant flux or flow and are ever changing whereas Platonic Ideals are unchangeable fundamental Forms...
"But if the very nature of knowledge changes, at the time when the change occurs there will be no knowledge, and, according to this view, there will be no one to know and nothing to be known: but if that which knows and that which is known exist ever, and the beautiful and the good and every other thing also exist, then I do not think that they can resemble a process of flux, as we were just now supposing.
Since these things are so, we must agree that that which keeps its own form unchangingly, which has not been brought into being and is not destroyed, which neither receives into itself anything else from anywhere else, nor itself enters into anything anywhere, is one thing."
                                                                      - Plato, Timaeus.

PLATO'S ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE

The Platonic Allegory Of The Cave can be considered as the best example to exemplify or substantiate the concept of Plato's Forms and Ideas. As the men locked inside a cave can only see and interpret hazy forms or shadows created on the cave walls by firelight rather than seeing the real objects or people outside. Thus, alike the perception of the cave men which thrives on to the Imprints of outside world without a glimpse of its reality similarly human perception can only intuit the Idealistic forms without really touching them or physically sensing them. Hence Platonic Ideals or Forms can be intuitively felt rather than physically sensed.

JUNGIAN ARCHETYPES OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

 "The archetype is the introspectively recognizable form of a priori psychic orderedness".
                                                    - Carl Jung

Termed as The Primordial Images by Jung borrowing from Swiss Historian Jacob Burckehardt, which he later developed to " The Dominants Of The Collective Unconscious" in 1917 finally using the term Archetypes in his 1919 essay ' Instinct And The Unconscious. As according to Jung, Archetypes are archaic universal patterns embedded in the deep layers of our unconscious mind transforming themselves when entering consciousness into certain idealistic forms or notions based upon our culture and upbringing. Hence, archetypes are subjective images of the Ideal latent in the collective unconsious. Thus, archetypal forms are often associated with Heroic forms as the Ideal Lover, Warrior, King, etc as discussesd in The Hero With A Thousand Faces . Whereas Jung's interpretation of archetypes goes beyond stereotypes to even realistic notions such the archetypes of Mother, Father, the Child, the Hermit or the wise old man, the Trickster, along with archetypal motifs such as the Apocalypse, Exodus, Deluge, or the Judgement Day.

Archetypes are essential form constructs of the unconsious lacking solidity and are more superfluous and ambiguous moreover a fuzzy ideation of some principles, they are metamorphosed into something more real and solid only once they find representation in the outer world or are manifested through art, music or poetics...
Rejecting the Tabula Rasa, Jung concludes that individuals are not born as empty systems which generate meaning and interpretations only through the interaction with the outer world. On the contrary, they at birth bear the psychic imprints of the archetypes predestined for them determining their behaviour, choices and preferences.
Jungian Archetypes are based on a detailed study of  Kantian forms, Platonic Ideas and Schopenhaeur's Prototypes. The Unus Mundus as Jung puts it, to describe the unified consciousness and a unitary nature underlying all phenomena including not only the human psyche and the collective unconscious but all matter and energy, influencing Nobel LaurĂ©ate Wolfgang Pauli and Astronomer Johannes Kepler as they held in following truth....

The absence of inert meaning and its abstract nature makes Archetypes a psychic embodiment of a higher truth and a underlying greater universal order.

Ending with the lines of Campbell.....

"The hero is the champion of things becoming, not of things become, because he is. 'Before Abraham was, I AM.' He does not mistake apparent changelessness in time for the permanence of Being, nor is he fearful of the next moment (or of the 'other thing'), as destroying the permanent with its change. 'Nothing retains its own form; but Nature, the greater renewer, ever makes up forms from forms. Be sure there's nothing perishes in the whole universe; it does but vary and renew its form.' Thus the next moment is permitted to come to pass."

1 comment:

  1. The Red Book Emptiness - Zero Archetypal Embodiment and the Mathematics of Consciousness - The Supramental Riders are coming...
    http://artcritique.wordpress.com

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