Tag: meaning

The Messenger

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Readers of this blog will know that I occasionally post poems by Steve Taylor, from his regular newsletter. Steve has a knack of getting to the heart of things, such as in the following poem, essentially about learning to trust our intuition, which is very consonant with James Hillman’s ‘acorn theory’ of the daimon (see this post).

The Messenger

It’s not for you to decide
the direction of your life.

It’s not for you to determine
whether your life has meaning.

It’s not for you to deliberate
over whether you’re following the right path.

It’s not for you to doubt
whether your efforts are worthwhile
then grow despondent and give up.

It’s when you deliberate and doubt
that you overrule your intuition
and confuse your inner compass
and lose touch with your purpose.

You have to step aside
and trust the wisdom that is guiding you
even if you can’t comprehend it.

You have to step aside
and let your purpose flow through you
even if you can’t see where it’s heading.

You have to step aside
and leave your channel empty and open
so that your message is clear and unbroken.

Then you have to remain open
through indifference and admiration
through failure and success
until the whole of your message is delivered.

Then your message will make sense
and your meaning will be manifest.  
 

The daimon

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Why are we born at a particular time and place? Is there any meaning to life? Materialism suggests not, we make the best we can of the random circumstances around us. 

But what if we live in a world of meaning, and the life we are born to calls us to an individual destiny or calling?  This is the possibility and challenge presented on James Hillmans’ book The Soul’s Code (1996). Hillman refers to Plato’s idea of the daimon:

“The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth…. The daimon is the carrier of your destiny.”

Hillman’s book is an exploration of this concept, known as the acorn theory for obvious reasons, and gives numerous examples of individuals who have realised specific destinies that came to them at particular times  or were evident from early life. The caution I would apply is that most of his examples are quite remarkable individuals, suggesting that only a subset of individuals are so driven.

It is also notable that the daimon is not necessarily a positive. Too many times do we see in history exceptional individuals driven by narcissism and the will to power over others, apparently driven by demons, a related word.

The dramatic effect of this theory is what many educationalists have always maintained – that the purpose of education is to facilitate the emergence of the child’s true potential, not to train them to conform in the jobs market. 

Hillman suggests that much of modern psychology has tended to treat emerging features of the daimon as psychological problems rather than as facets of the daimon, thus using standardised medication to suppress them. Cf the US Diagnostics and Statistics Manual. 

The daimon is llnked, from Hillman’s perspective, with the concept of character, which is the pattern of the daimon as presented to the world. As we look at todays political shinanegins in the UK Conservative Party we largely look in vain for exemplary characters fulfilling a daimon related to public service. The same is apparent across the pond.

The idea of the daimon fits perfectly with Bruno Huber’s astrological psychology, where the birth chart represents the pattern of energies in the universe at time of birth, and can be used to help in understanding the pattern of the person’s daimon, thus uncovering what has greatest meaning for them and their lives.

Featured islamic pattern by Maureen from Buffalo, USA,
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0,
via Wikimedia Commons

Creativity and Humour

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One of my themes in this blog has been the over-dominance of left brain as against right brain in current Western societies. This was the subject of Iain McGilchrist’s book The Master and His Emissary, reviewed here in 2016. So I was delighted to come across this video of McGilchrist in conversation with John Cleese (of Fawlty Towers fame) on the subject of Creativity, Humour and The Meaning of Life, and their essential relationship with the right brain.

To pick just two points that it inspired for me:

  • Comedy is essentially ‘right brain’, and is not ‘politically correct’ or ‘woke’. Comedy depends on irreverence, and being able to laugh at things that are potentially forbidden subjects. Just think of those TV images of masses of men leading the Soviet Politburo or the central committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Not much comedy in those solemn faces.
  • Meaning, imagination and inspiration are very much related to right brain. Have you noticed just how boring politicians are on the media when they are in the process of spouting some ‘party line’ that the left brain is following? The only interesting speakers on programmes such as the BBC’s Question Time are those with the freedom to speak out from their own life experience.

You will have your own takeaways from listening to this fascinating conversation between an outstanding academic/psychiatrist and a top class comedian. The video is in 3 parts of around 20 minutes each. The first part follows, and will naturally lead you on to the others..

Covid-19 – why now?

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Why did covid-19 emerge now, at this particular point in history?

Rational mind might start to argue about the possibilities – the wet markets in Wuhan, an escaped virus experiment from the nearby Chinese research facility, an act of sabotage in the US/China economic war…?

I suggest the real reason lies in the world of meaning, not in the world of facts. In bringing the whole world to varying degrees of lockdown the virus has choked off economic activity and forced a slowdown in the consumption of fossil fuels, those same fossil fuels that are bringing about climate breakdown, which we know represents an existential threat to current human ways of life across the globe.

This is synchronicity, not coincidence, it has meaning. The warnings are getting louder and louder, the floods, wildfires, refugees, collapsing countries. And now covid-19.

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