They are the mirror that reveals to us what we really are

What's The Big Idea?

If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé.

It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief. But post-Enlightenment and post-idea, while related, are not exactly the same.

Post-Enlightenment refers to a style of thinking that no longer deploys the techniques of rational thought. Post-idea refers to thinking that is no longer done, regardless of the style.

What the future portends is more and more information — Everests of it. There won’t be anything we won’t know. But there will be no one thinking about it. 

Think about that.~"The Elusive Big Idea" NYT

We won't get far
Flying in circles inside a jar
Because the air we breathe
Is thinning with the words that we speak

Artistic creation, including philosophy and scientific theories, as well as literature and the visual arts, is inner vision incarnate. It is the visible evidence of the human acculturating process. Artistic creations perform for society much the same function that dreams perform for the individual. They are the mirror that reveals to us what we really are. Dreams reveal to the individual the dynamics of his personal destiny. Art makes manifest the collective Zeitgeist of society. In the case of the true artist these two functions become one. The individual artist suffers the fate of society, and his personal dreams and visions become identical with the expressions of the transpersonal world spirit.~Melville's Moby-Dick Edinger

. . .

(Gott ist tot?)

'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark
Is by a forgèd process of my death
Rankly abused. But know, thou noble youth,
The serpent that did sting thy father’s life
Now wears his crown.

The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.

A couple of drinks on the house an' he was
A fortune teller he said
"Nail me to my car and I'll tell you who you are"

the agony of the cruciatus curse (man and machine; or, spirit and matter)

He answered me in a weak voice saying, "I am Ion, Priest of the Adytum, and I have borne an intolerable force. For someone came at me headlong in the morning and dismembered me with a sword and tore me apart, according to the rigor of harmony. And, having cut my head off with the sword, he mashed my flesh with my bones and burned them in the fire of the treatment, until, my body transformed, I should learn to become a spirit. And I sustained the same intolerable force."  

(The Mystery Play?) From description: "Trailer for Stranger Than Fiction with Emma Thompson from Harry Potter (Professor Trelawny) and Will Ferrell . For the Harry Potter fans out there, this movie reminds me of what it would be like if JK were to try to kill off Harry. Let's hope she doesn't, *crosses fingers* . . ."

(I think that I just realized that I'm a character in a fictional book. It happened to Dave Bowman, too.)

(Consciousness is living information--are you Dave or HAL?)

Picard: In a sense, who knows? Our reality may be very much like theirs. All this might just be an elaborate simulation running inside a little device sitting on someone's table.

. . .

If this be true, it is small wonder that an artist usually has a disturbed and often tragic personal life. It is not so much that his personal life explains his art; it is rather that his function as artist explains his personal life. The collective, objective psyche has commandeered him to make of him its mouthpiece. He has little to say in the matter. The gift is thrust upon him, yet he "must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire." The artist must function through his own personality, which necessarily includes his personal complexes and traumata. So it is legitimate to observe and discuss the effects of these personal complexes and traumata in his artistic work. However,

"The essence of a work of art is not to be found in the personal idiosyncrasies that creep into it--indeed, the more there are of them, the less it is a work of art--but in its rising above the personal and speaking from the mind and heart of the artist to the mind and heart of mankind.(Jung)"~Melville's Moby-Dick Edward Edinger

MACBETH

. . . Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

. . .

The Hidden Owl: "Behind every successful man . . ."

Mystery = The Mysteries of Isis = Miss Story. Sophia's guiding principle is still to be seen beneath the ignorant ramblings of the Demiurge. (This is an allegory for the Bible, in which His Story conceals the Mystery.) Real world example: J.K. R-owling (Sophia as the Wise Owl) wrote the Demiurge's story (but Potter doesn't know it, being ignorant to that which is above himself). The head of Gryffindor is "Minerva" McGonagall.

"No. But it wasn't a dream. It was a place. And you - and you - and you - and you were there."

Exit the wheel by answering the Tom Riddle of the Sphinx.

The madness of synchronicity seems to be in noticing that one is trapped inside a ritual drama (or comedy of errors). Hamlet is already in on it, he breaks the 4th wall and talks to the audience. Doesn't help much. (Groundhog Day; Sleeping Beauty was killed on a spinning wheel.) If external images are signs pointing toward psychic wholeness, well, this may drive one insane if the signs are seen but not heeded. (It probably will if either path is taken.)

(Stephan Hoeller)

Hamlet's madness? (Looking for God in Harry Potter by John Granger)

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Chapter 22 (again)

'I ... well, I was asleep ...' said Harry and, even in his terror and his desperation to make Dumbledore understand, he felt slightly irritated that the Headmaster was not looking at him, but examining his own interlocked fingers. 'But it wasn't an ordinary dream ... it was real ... I saw it happen ...' He took a deep breath, 'Ron's dad--Mr. Weasley--has been attacked by a giant snake.'

The words seemed to reverberate in the air after he had said them, sounding slightly ridiculous, even comic. There was a pause in which Dumbledore leaned back and stared meditatively at the ceiling. Ron looked from Harry to Dumbledore, white-faced and shocked.

'How did you see this?' Dumbledore asked quietly, still not looking at Harry.

'Well ... I don't know,' said Harry, rather angrily--what did it matter? 'Inside my head, I suppose--'

'You misunderstand me,' said Dumbledore, still in the same calm tone. 'I mean ... can you remember--er--where you were positioned as you watched this attack happen? Were you perhaps standing beside the victim, or else looking down on the scene from above?'

This was such a curious question that Harry gaped at Dumbledore; it was almost as though he knew ...

'I was the snake,' he said. 'I saw it all from the snake's point of view.'

Nobody else spoke for a moment, then Dumbledore, now looking at Ron who was still whey-faced, asked in a new and sharper voice, 'Is Arthur seriously injured?'

'Yes,' said Harry emphatically--why were they all so slow on the uptake, did they not realise how much a person bled when fangs that long pierced their side? [...]

'Naturally, naturally,' murmured Dumbledore apparently to himself, still observing the stream of smoke without the slightest sign of surprise. 'But in essence divided?'

Harry could make neither head nor tail of this question. The smoke serpent, however, split itself instantly into two snakes, both coiling and undulating in the dark air.

(Granger)

Harry closed his eyes. If he had not gone to save Sirius, Sirius would not have died.... More to stave off the moment when he would have to think of Sirius again, Harry asked, without caring much about the answer, "The end of the prophecy ... it was something about ... 'neither one can live...'"

"'...while the other survives,'" said Dumbledore.

"So," said Harry, dredging up the words from what he felt like a deep well of despair inside him, "so does that mean that ... that one of us has got to kill the other one ... in the end?"

. . .