A New Wrinkle

In addition to being in contact with Jungian colleagues around the question of hierarchy and groups, Eros, and more, I have also been in touch with some friends and colleagues from other disciplines. The following is a comment Antero Alli sent in response to The Third (the post below). I've known Antero since 1980. He is an independent film maker, an actor, a self-created scholar of ritual, an astrologer, and an original...of the highest order. He has come into my dreams a few times since meeting him, always carrying the spirit of the creative animus. His website address is at the bottom of these comments, wherein lie treasures.


Cedrus

The support you give these important ideas involving the cultivation of receptivity (emptying), empathy and the embodiment of Eros express a very high level of consciousness that, I believe, can only be absorbed, integrated and transmitted at the level of the individual. I do not believe this can ever be realized at the level of any institution, no matter what ideals that organization was supposedly based on, due to two key factors. Perhaps in ideal but not in reality.

First, it seems the spectrum of consciousness finds its highest point of expression in the individual experience and its lowest point in crowds, with the lowest common denominator to ratchet lower still with each increase in numbers. Secondly, there follows a natural (and some say regretful) progression from the numen of originating epiphany towards its gradual corruption of consciousness by encasement in beliefs, assumptions, doctrines, systems of hierarchy, defining typologies and stone tablet dogmas as demonstrated by the world's religions and also, by many institutes of higher learning.

In response to these two factors, I choose to participate in a silent revolution of self-work that nurtures and challenges the innate autonomy in myself and those I meet and create with. I no longer seek the respect, approval and regard of institutions of any sort. I do attempt to learn from their unique evolutionary cycles something about the corruption of what once began as a perception so pure as to stand naked before God and simply die to be reborn.

Truly,
Antero Alli
www.paratheatrical.com


In the end, I'm afraid I must agree with him. Perhaps this is my dilemma.

The Artist creates "something out of nothing," which is the process described in many a creation myth. New growth needs this impulse, "...the cultivation of receptivity (emptying)...." Without it, calcification sets in and things commence to rigidify.

Indisputably, I've been having considerable trouble with my joints lately.