Little Big World

I only have about 30 minutes, surely not enough time for a proper post. I'd like to move on from Corbin, so let's dash through the rest of this book and mine any remaining nuggets. Only the big ones. We'll throw back the little ones.

This I like: "the Creator is one with the imagining Creature because each Creative Imagination is a theophany, a recurrence of the Creation."

As such, "Psychology is indistinguishable from cosmology," which appeals to me because it means that I, as a psychologist, am not just a glorified bag boy with too little ambition and too much curiosity, but the very gatekeeper of reality!

I always go back to page one of the Bible, to the third and fifth words, beginning and creates (there are no tenses in Hebrew, right?).

In traditional writing, it is often the case that primacy in importance is characterized by priority in presentation, so this would be doubly Important, being that Genesis is first, and these are the first things in Genesis: the beginning is always now, and God ceaselessly creates in it.

Furthermore, it would appear that, above all else -- or at least coincident with it -- God is a trinity of creator, creativity, and creation.

I would also venture to say that we can read it as Creation Beginning God, or Beginning God Creation, since each of these is bound up with the others. God Creates. Now.

Likewise, if we get right down to it, what characterizes man above all else? Clearly his creativity, which is what distinguishes us from all other animals. It is what puts us in history instead of mere biology or physics.

Creativity is tied in with freedom, since it is not linear or deterministic; likewise beauty, since this is the point -- the telos -- of creativity. I think it would be safe to toss love into the mix as well, because it is implicit in the idea of a beautiful creator who creates such unsurpassable beauty. It's all so gratuitous.

You might say that man's creative imagination mediates between Reality and what a leftist or other materialist would call "reality." Nothing happens if we default to one side or the other -- i.e., head or matter. Rather, it all goes down -- and up -- in the space in between, the creative imagination, the transitional space, the mysterious psychic Third.

An additional benefit of this perspective is that "it heals the split between psychology and physics, between mind and matter, and between the subjective and objective" -- which, coincidentally enough, was precisely the subject of my doctoral dissertation back in a prior but apparently identical now.

For clearly, I am still exploring the same phase space, and being pulled into the same strange attractor. This is "the adventurous search for truth through subjectivity," as opposed to limping along with mere objectivity, which can get you nowhere (since it eliminates the adventurer before the adventure even starts).

And the whole thing works because "The goal is the cause of the beginning," except not in any predetermined way. It is at the author end of the polarity that provides the energy for the journey.

"The space of heaven... is filled with the peace and the teleological energies of the invisible realm..."

Yes, this is the Big World "in which spirits are corporealized and bodies spiritualized."

It's kinda like Art; or, Art is like a very focussed version of the adventure of consciousness:

"In creating a work of art, the psyche or soul of the artist ascends from the earthly realm into the heavenly.... And precisely at the boundary between the two worlds, the soul's spiritual knowledge assumes the shapes of symbolic imagery: and it is these images that make the permanent work of art. Art is thus the materialized dream."

Well, that was fast. How timelessness flies!