Log24

Monday, January 11, 2016

Surreal Midrash

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:25 am

The time of the previous post, 3:10 (AM), suggests, in a
surreal manner that the spirit of the late David Bowie might
find amusing, a review of Log24 posts last year on 3/10 —

An Obit for Dooley and The Big Screw.

As for the time, 6:25, of this  post, see Apocatastasis.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Tuesday July 7, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:10 pm
Review

On June 25
  in this journal–

A Word for AntiChristmas:

“… T. S. Eliot tried to recompose,
   in Four Quartets, the fragments
   he had grieved over
    in The Waste Land.”

— “Beauty and Desecration,”
   Roger Scruton

Today’s word
(thanks to Michael Jackson)–

Tikkun

'Heal the World' at July 7, 2009, Michael Jackson Memorial Service in Los Angeles

From Log24 on Nov. 12, 2005:

“‘Tikkun Olam, the fixing of the world,’ she whispers. ‘I’ve been gathering up the broken vessels to make things whole again.'”

— Miriam in Bee Season

Tikkun Olam, the gathering of the divine fragments, is a religious activity…. How do we work for the repair of the world? If we live in a humpty dumpty world, how do we get it all put back together again?”

A Sunday Sermon
    for Yom Kippur
    by the Rev. Joshua Snyder
    on Oct. 5, 2003
    [See also Log24 on that date.]


“… the tikkun can’t start until everyone asks what happened– not just the Jews but everybody. The strange thing is that Christ evidently saw this.”

— Martha Cooley, The Archivist

Friday, June 26, 2009

Friday June 26, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:48 pm

Apocatastasis Now

I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball:
It will lead you in at Heavens gate,
Built in Jerusalems wall.
— WILLIAM BLAKE

"In 'Apocatastasis Now: A Very Condensed Reading of William Blake's Jerusalem' (JBSSJ [Journal of the Blake Society at St James's] 6 [2001] 18–25), Susanne Sklar argues that Blake is not apocalyptic but apocatastatic, that is (following a doctrine of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa) he believes that all free creatures will be redeemed by God's universal love."

The Year's Work in English Studies, 2003: Vol. 82, No. 1, pp. 493-547

Related material:

 

Thriller

 

From the website of Philip Pullman,
president of The Blake Society:

 

"I must create a System…"

The Blake Society, 25 October 2005: St James’s Church, Piccadilly

I see that the title of this lecture is given as BLAKE'S DARK MATERIALS. Now in the lecturer's handbook, the second rule says "You need take no obsessive notice of the title that has been announced in advance." Whether Blake's materials are dark or not I couldn't really say, but I am going to talk about Blake, partly, and partly about religion. Appropriate, perhaps, in a place like this, but you might think not appropriate from someone whose reputation is that of a scoffer or mocker or critic of religion; but I haven't come here to scoff or mock. Nor have I come here to recant, as a matter of fact. I'm profoundly interested in religion, and I think it's extremely important to understand it. I've been trying to understand it all my life, and every so often it's useful to put one's thoughts in order; but I shall never like God.

Download the full lecture
(pdf format, 155.62 KB)

 

For more dark materials
from the Halloween season
of 2005 — in fact, from the
  very date of Pullman's lecture–
see Darkness Doubled.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Thursday June 25, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Apocatastasis

“… T. S. Eliot tried to recompose,
   in Four Quartets, the fragments
   he had grieved over
    in The Waste Land.”

— “Beauty and Desecration,”
   Roger Scruton
 (link at aldaily.com today)

The formula reproduces exactly the essential features of the symbolic process of transformation. It shows the rotation of the mandala, the antithetical play of complementary (or compensatory) processes, then the apocatastasis, i.e., the restoration of an original state of wholeness….”

— Carl G. Jung in Aion

Related material:
this journal
one year ago today.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Wednesday June 25, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:20 pm
The Cycle of
the Elements

John Baez, Week 266
(June 20, 2008):

“The Renaissance thinkers liked to
organize the four elements using
a chain of analogies running
from light to heavy:

fire : air :: air : water :: water : earth

They also organized them
in a diamond, like this:”

Diamond of the four ancient elements, figure by John Baez

This figure of Baez
is related to a saying
attributed to Heraclitus:

Diamond  showing transformation of the four ancient elements

For related thoughts by Jung,
see Aion, which contains the
following diagram:

Jung's four-diamond figure showing transformations of the self as Imago Dei

“The formula reproduces exactly the essential features of the symbolic process of transformation. It shows the rotation of the mandala, the antithetical play of complementary (or compensatory) processes, then the apocatastasis, i.e., the restoration of an original state of wholeness, which the alchemists expressed through the symbol of the uroboros, and finally the formula repeats the ancient alchemical tetrameria, which is implicit in the fourfold structure of unity.”

— Carl Gustav Jung

That the words Maximus of Tyre (second century A.D.) attributed to Heraclitus imply a cycle of the elements (analogous to the rotation in Jung’s diagram) is not a new concept. For further details, see “The Rotation of the Elements,” a 1995 webpage by one  “John Opsopaus.”

Related material:

Log24 entries of June 9, 2008, and

Quintessence: A Glass Bead Game,”
by Charles Cameron.

Thursday, December 8, 2005

Thursday December 8, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 2:56 pm
Aion Flux

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire…
— Poem title, Gerard Manley Hopkins  

From Jung’s Map of the Soul, by Murray Stein:

“… Jung thinks of the self as undergoing continual transformation during the course of a lifetime…. At the end of his late work Aion, Jung presents a diagram to illustrate the dynamic movements of the self….”

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/JungDiamonds.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“The formula presents a symbol of the self, for the self is not just a stable quantity or constant form, but is also a dynamic process.  In the same way, the ancients saw the imago Dei in man not as a mere imprint, as a sort of lifeless, stereotyped impression, but as an active force…. The four transformations represent a process of restoration or rejuvenation taking place, as it were, inside the self….”

“The formula reproduces exactly the essential features of the symbolic process of transformation. It shows the rotation of the mandala, the antithetical play of complementary (or compensatory) processes, then the apocatastasis, i.e., the restoration of an original state of wholeness, which the alchemists expressed through the symbol of the uroboros, and finally the formula repeats the ancient alchemical tetrameria, which is implicit in the fourfold structure of unity. 

What the formula can only hint at, however, is the higher plane that is reached through the process of transformation and integration. The ‘sublimation’ or progress or qualitative change consists in an unfolding of totality into four parts four times, which means nothing less than its becoming conscious. When psychic contents are split up into four aspects, it means that they have been subjected to discrimination by the four orienting functions of consciousness. Only the production of these four aspects makes a total description possible. The process depicted by our formula changes the originally unconscious totality into a conscious one.” 

— Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part 2, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (1951) 

Related material: 

  The diamond theorem

“Although ‘wholeness’ seems at first sight to be nothing but an abstract idea (like anima and animus), it is nevertheless empirical in so far as it is anticipated by the psyche in the form of  spontaneous or autonomous symbols. These are the quaternity or mandala symbols, which occur not only in the dreams of modern people who have never heard of them, but are widely disseminated in the historical recods of many peoples and many epochs. Their significance as symbols of unity and totality is amply confirmed by history as well as by empirical psychology.  What at first looks like an abstract idea stands in reality for something that exists and can be experienced, that demonstrates its a priori presence spontaneously. Wholeness is thus an objective factor that confronts the subject independently of him… Unity and totality stand at the highest point on the scale of objective values because their symbols can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei. Hence all statements about the God-image apply also to the empirical symbols of totality.”

— Jung, Aion, as quoted in
Carl Jung and Thomas Merton

Powered by WordPress