My open blog for people who want to read my books,articles, and any other things that I might produce, keep track of storytelling engagements, listen to my less demented rantings, and generally play nice (or naughty, I'm easy... as is widely known).
The Five Jars parts 2 & 3
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My reading of chapters two and three of M R James' (1922) children's fantasy book "The Five Jars". The narrator discovers the power of the magical potions for the ears and eyes. New worlds open up before him!
Teaching both literacy and psychology sometimes brings collisions of thought. In English emotions are treated as abstract nouns, states of being in and of themselves... which may possibly be an accurate assessment of emotions as internalised experiences. However, would it be more constructive to consider emotions as verbs, that is to say actions? The English are stereotypically stilted in their expression of emotions, and maybe in part this is because of how we conceive of emotions in the first place. It's all well and good saying you love someone, but does this express itself through loving action? What do you actually do to make your love more than just a word in your head? If an emotion never leaves the realm of the abstract, is it really worth much of anything? Clearly a mental state may develop over a long period of time before culminating in action ~ probably few rapists go out and commit their crimes after a mere 5 minutes of considering them. Most have likely indulged in v...
A recording for the Suffolk Jungian Circle about Eric Berne's notion of Life Scripts (part of his practice of Transactional Analysis) and how it relates to Jung - and to Greek mythology. This got cut short by a few minutes due to someone knocking ta the door (and me not knowing how to pause a recording).In the last few minutes I was going to add that Berne argued that not only did individual people have scripts but that organisations, communities, even entire nations could have scripts that they played out (though it is much less obvious how they develop scripts). At the national level the transmission route for the script is partially via the mass media. From a Jungian stance the scripts tie in to an idea that was partially discussed at the June meeting, around individuation being the path (a positive script, if you like) of the Self archetype and James Hillman arguing that other archetypes had their own trajectories or paths which might be followed instead - we spoke about this ...
The meaning of life is a topic that has taxed the greatest (and the least able) minds since the dawn of human existence. It was brought to mind again recently in a discussion with a friend who suggested that having a meaning to one’s life was vital to good mental health. Numerous psychologists, philosophers and scholars agree that both a sense of purpose, and the degree of spiritual reflection that precedes finding a purpose, are highly beneficial. It is better to have a sense of why you are here than to merely trudge from day to day in a largely pointless routine. In fact, many have argued that just having a purpose in itself is actually far more important than the exact nature of the purpose. One of the key questions in the matter of meaning is the source of that meaning and what is actually more than a linguistic nicety ~ doe we discover the meaning of our lives, or create it? That is to say, is the meaning already determined (whether by a god, Wyrd, karma or anything else)...
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