[Dennis Slattery]

Hi Drewie: Just a short coda to your response to Marianne:

 

Jung’s pages on S. are very revealing for pointing out how the WAY we think about something is, for me, also mythic. Styles of consciousness are mythic; how I process experiences that may evoke meaning, is also a mythic act. So is reading classics of world literature both mythic and involves what Jung called active imagination, where one allows the characters in the story to speak directly to you and you back at them. Moving out of a causal way of processing the world into one of a-causality changes the playing field dramatically and deliciously. For Jung, the medieval imagination was able to hold both causality and acausality with little problem; with the rise of the scientific attitude in the 17th. century the West began to lose faith in the valu of its own experiences. What a loss; thank the Gods and Goddesses for people like Campbell, Jung, Woodman, von Franz and a host of others–James Hillman I add here–to retrieve the soulful substance of myth.

Mythic consciousness is not causal but metaphoric, symbolic and storied. In the myth there is always meaning and that is part of the hero’s adventure to discover it. It takes a lifetime but I would not have it any other way. Gratitude to you all for your insights.