Schopenhauer and the Unconscious Fate of Recurrent Thought

Recognise the truth in yourself, recognise yourself in the truth; and in the same moment you will find, to your astonishment, that the home which you have long been looking for in vain, which has filled your most ardent dreams, is there in its entirety, with every detail of it true, in the very place where you stand. It is there that your heaven touches your earth. Arthur Schopenhauer. On The Wisdom Of Life: Aphorisms

Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit by H.P. Haack (photo)

Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature. Joseph Campbell. What is Metaphor? 

Here, I continue to find cross-references between three great thinkers of the 20th century, now with their source in the earlier precedence of Schopenhauer. The 20th century, with its unveiling of depth psychology towards the transpersonal meanings of self and agency in the will of the world have risen this line of Schopenhauer's thoughtful development with poignant regard. Joseph Campbell, James Hillman, Terence McKenna, all arrived independently at three concurrent patterns of human behaviour as a self-reflective being; character (self), narrative (fate) and dream (unconscious). The most accurate form of self-identification seems to be when we see ourselves as characters. As McKenna said, "we are in some kind of engine of narrative." Where Schopenhauer linked this to dream psychology underlies the mystic identification of fate by Carl Jung who said, "the unconscious exists in our lives as fate." The unconscious, fate, and the narrative engine of character are central to analyzing dream psychology as the major themes which now lead the humankind towards a humbling before nature as the greater mind of collective agency, and that to know nature, is ultimately to experience self-knowledge from the deepest base of the unconscious to a fully conscious, self-willed awakening of independent and transnational human sovereignty on Earth. 

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a city rat friend and I duel with competitive rage, amassing a firebomber brigade of red trucks fuming with the waterless engine of their stolen malfunctioning, and careening past the lights of midtown manhattan we stream as a rapid at open floodgate through the sleepless streets out of town

The Painting Reads: The Neighbourhood Belongs to the People Not Big Business

over a northbound bridge, we find refuge in an overgrown motel lot, the air is sweet, and we are invited to tea inside a cozy, furnished lobby, strangely reminiscent of a personal home, with sofa, television, and toys for young children, and our steam fumigates absently, unaware we separate to each our own rooms 

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Playful mortality, and the scream of death
Under stadium lights,
3rd block West Clinton Street New Bedford

And mortality reigns with his eminent consort Time
Ever-gazing into the strict law of entrance into the beyond,
Beyond reclining chairs and horizontal graves
...

Beneath a delicate skin of man
Braving the deforested aftermath of Assimilation
In the name of survivalist migration

After years of subconscious insubordination,
The doorway now flattened with the invincible family bond
Carrying our name and grown humor

excerpts from "Playful Mortality"

The Humours of Sufism in Iranian New Wave Cinema

The prophet Khizr Khan Khwaja by Anonymous

"I know you've been dreaming of me. But don't take it seriously. You know that dawn is when God visits his devotees. And divides the daily bread among them." Spoken by a Sufi Mystic who appears in dream visions in the Iranian film Pari by Dariush Mehrjui

Interestingly, this brilliant film was originally adapted from "Franny and Zooey" by J.D. Salinger without authorization, by iconoclastic and renowned Persian film director, Dariush Mehrjui. The film was adamantly attacked on all sides, by both Salinger's lawyers and Islamic approval. It seems that artists are often at work portraying characters and illustrations of their own internal struggle, where in this film, Pari, a young aspiring theatre actress drowns in pseudo-mystic emotionalism surrounded by a family of intellectuals and artists. Pari (a Persian name meaning "mermaid") finds herself swimming in over her head, a being caught between two worlds, and wishing to unite with her beloved uncle who took his own life. Indeed, the auteur filmmaker, and artists of a higher order conceive the focal point of their internal development, interwoven with an external social conflict, as a kind of dreaming, where it is seen through towards the dawn, beyond both the day of social tension and the night of inner turmoil.

For a great wealth of film reviews on Dariush Mehrjui's extraordinary work visit The Film Sufi

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a Fellini-esque mindtrip of character haunts, my feet dragging through superstitious nostalgias and the blind opacity of lost friendships, tragic wants, and open futures.

"Fellini, la Grande Parade" by Jean-Pierre Dalbera

black and white fur, white and black fur, the coloration of his follicles, a childhood escape through naming, and here he is again, in full glory, my dead companion of all things meditative, a leader in the subconscious wave of true surrender to the spiritual laughter of play 

Myojakdo (Painting of Cats and Sparrows) by Byeon Sang-byeok

here he is, I can feel his warmth in that little heart beating patiently between two rib cages of delicate whimsy, and he leads on through the empty darkness, a labyrinth of hollows beckons me forward, through to a sweetening, mental taste

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“I saw the trunk,”
Her Hindu elephant from outside
Walks coolly from music’s grand Guest

At the public house,
In the window,
A final flicker before traversing the footboard
loosened with railroad age
           Over the national telephone of spiritual callings
           Abused by electrified tradition
           Stunned in the tingled alcoholic flame
                  In isolated, deserted and abandoned bodies
                          Whose spirits bore a frail passage,
                          engraved in the air of soundless rhyme

A knowing
Ever thoughtless to the strength in pure being,
To grasp coldly into the summer’s beaten plea
           To sustain our musical sharing
           In human heaven’s piercing
                  Through the empty eye holes
                  Peering with my mirrored face of light
                          Radiating, through absolute darkness
                          as a visible cry
                                 To haunt our sacred sanctuary

“That inebriated muse!”
Drinking the words of men into her silent womb,
To fixate her fingers into the cross
           Formed over a chest glorified with Catholic warnings
           To relieve one’s self of the world
           and ask divinity to replace human desire

To become one collective struggling
As a unified presence,
Whose heart remained fixedly sanctified
           Before the death of the Mother and the Father’s bared ghost
                  Pictured as a beacon
                  Blended into our animalistic foresight

excerpt from "An Unknown Pleasure of Respect"

Reflection on "The Force of Character" by James Hillman

James Hillman, an archetypal depth psychologist, whose post-Jungian conception of the human experience is essentially imaginative, and whose amoral fluctuation between endurance and immaturity lies nascent in the temporal grains of salt which gather and line the throat with ever increasing grab as aging commences upon the personality. Written at an old age, the author speaks clearly against any kind of aging therapy, and humanizes the current malaise which treats aging as a virus.

The author unwraps biological naturalism with the psychological bloom of a mind fermented with insightful, though not inundated, research on the literary and aesthetic character of human aging as a welcoming asset to life, in flagrant contrast to the ceremonial traditionalism of preparing for death, a non-issue in the continuous envelopment of life throughout the growing and falling of seasonal lasting. Dreams are referred to for their imagistic plentitude in bringing the holistic human experience towards fruition in the entire round of consciousness.

In short, Hillman's psychology is life-affirming unto the limits of modern knowledge-bearing with regard to the biological strength of humankind to age well and vigorously, as an essential presence in social reflection, as a memory of characterful belonging in the psyche of an unconscious gathering of the old triumphant spirit of age in all its mythic fortitude and human vulnerability.

Read Scott London's brilliant interview with the late author: On Soul, Character and Calling : A Conversation with James Hillman

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Strutting down main street, Northampton, the little city atmosphere in a smaller town, brevity of metrosexual burning. Eyehole of gouged recollection, that there is a grayer hiss over the obscure horizon edge. A paranoiac whereabouts, a drinkability churning in the ingrate stomach as cold rice turns to frothy fluid within mellowed bowels. The attuned ear swings in frantic respite as the free march to movie theatre skies nickels and dimes my racy birth rite beginnings in the stingy hollow of American noonday education.

Northampton (Massachusetts) by William Henry Bartlett

Deeper along the edge of the township, towards rougher pasture, the greener grass gives to a brown floor of the barn stead. Outside, a reenactment of the medieval lance posture, only instead of a game between knights, the Anglo matador speaks in a murderous war with the human horse. I try my hand. With two lances upraised, I pierce the flesh of a gorgeous brown horse, mirroring the hue of the dirt circle fenced by a weak wooden ring and an audience steeped in American farmhouse poverty. As other horses, unsaddled and with fierce eyes, carouse into the ring, I jet from the gathering into a blacker city.

The Present by Thomas Cole

The jurist is deliberate, patient and silent. Instead of an easy interpretation by the passive jury of bored, directionless public witnessing, a guitarist lights the court with unfailing melodies, an original spirit of human will, to impose the individual struggle with death outside of foreign deliberation in the mind of an other. Because truly, in listening, the other melds seamlessly with the brain of a decidedly active witness, pardoning all in the sonic flight of metaphysical charm.

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Gazing at my Love's face, I see through the apparent reality to a frameless art. A sacred geometry in the flesh. A timeless elision, going beyond spent energy.

To consume a day; imagining with laughter in the midst of family. 

- excerpt from "Gazing at Love's Face"