Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
It seemed to me that most people tended to live and move within their bubbles; we choose
to include like-minded souls whose vision of things syncs with our own, and we dismiss
the others. And as long as we never step out of our own reality and into another one, we
can live happily ever after. But, if, for example, you leave one world where no one believes
in astrology and you enter another one where everyone values its insights, things start to
get a bit more complicated.
The literature of archetypal psychology was the first place where I found earnest conversa-
tionabouttheradical discontinuity oftherealities wealllivein,theincommensurate nature
of our respective worlds. And the fact that this conversation was being carried on, at least
in part, by people within academia made me wonder if I might someday want to reenter
that world to deepen my understanding of these things.
For the most part my exploration of archetypal psychology was a solitary adventure. In my
own world, among my own circle of friends and acquaintances, Hillman and the theories
of archetypal psychology were an unknown quantity. A fortunate exception was my buddy,
Jerry, a talented poet and minstrel who had committed the
I Ching
to memory. He was a
familiar fixture in those days, wandering the streets of Noe Valley in San Francisco, always
carrying his guitar. Over multiple cups of coffee in the Meat Market Café on 24
th
Street, we
would sit and discuss our favorite “nature of reality” topics of the season. He introduced
me to Julian Jaynes'
Bicameral Mind
and, to return the favor, I gave him a copy of one
of Hillman's topics. I was grateful that I finally had someone to talk to about these things.
Jerry had a lively mind, and in these dialogues in which we deconstructed the nature of
reality, he often had startling insights, unfairly enhanced, perhaps, on the days when he was
off his meds, but remarkable nonetheless.
Ancient Roots of the New Age
In the course of my readings in archetypal psychology, I periodically came across allusions
to Renaissance writers. Archetypal psychology clearly identified itself as belonging to a
stream of thought that ran right through the Italian Renaissance. In one of his early seminal
works,
Re-Visioning Psychology
, James Hillman quoted several intriguing passages from a
book by a British writer, Dame Frances Yates, entitled
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic
Tradition
. I found a copy of the topic in the San Francisco Public Library and took it home
with me. Those were my days of selling computerized accounting services for no dough,
so I borrowed rather than bought whenever I could.
The Bruno book was among that handful of texts that you read in the course of a lifetime
that radically change your understanding of the world. I discovered that everything weird
Search WWH ::
Custom Search