Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Wilderness / Paradise Types

A false order casts wilderness and paradise as opposites. Jung's archetypes of the Shadow and Child are set against each other. The Shadow Archetype is the supposed wilderness, the unconscious where personal identity dissolves. In this image of "wilderness" it is said that "Hansel and Gretel were led into the woods and were trapped. Knights discover dragons, ogres, and thieves in the woods. Robin Hood is at home in the wild. Dragons sail the sea of a watery wilderness." On the other hand the Child Archetype is supposed a pattern of new beginnings, a paradise. "It promises that Paradise can be regained. Child images like the New Year's Babe obviously derive from this archetype. So do the golden ring and the golden ball and most flower and circle related images." The wilderness paradise opposition occurs in the same system that argues creativity is a mask of bi-polar disorder, that if you're really creative you must be a bi-polar mad genius. The cure for Jung's shadow, the supposed wilderness "dark side" of the personality, is socialization, social adjustment (4), an order that regulates, contains wilderness. Socialization thus supposedly cleanses that genius of his refusal to conform, to reject as "irrelevant stimuli" the causes of his disorder. Thus Bonhoeffer can be induced to remain in New York at Union Seminary and not go back to Germany where his intransigence made him go. Geniuses can thus keep their ears with Van Gogh if they cultivate proper order.

Professors and clinicians however, with no experience of the divine Afflatus, but stay completely indoors,  tend to consider as aberration anything outside the norm, hence bi-polar. The wilderness of wood and wild said to oppose paradise flower and child thus resembles the so called bi-polar disposal of genius. But the true shadow of the supposed "dark side" is conformity to this civilization that urges socialization. Call it Civilization and its Discontents.

[Wilderness is freedom from the world. Please refer here to  Bear]

If civilization redefined means deaf from ipod, dumb from ignorance, blind from video, and instinctual freedom is the desire not to kill but to escape civilization's suffocating blanket of electrosmog to breathe or feel the sun and see the stars, then advanced civilization replaced with the virtual is a paradigm shift of imagination to deformation. That takes us from the 19th century to the 21st. That takes us to the alters. You don't want to be without an Iphone.

If we did not live in it we would suppose this fiction, the imagination delimited to a Yahoo search. It was once said to Pennsylvania separatists who did not wear the prophylactic of civilization, "be ye separate." Chaung Tzu has said much the same thing, "free yourself from the world." The decades after the nineteenth century progressively validate this.

End note: Add that the appeal to social media for individual standards, asking friends what breakfast cereal they use in order to choose your own, with all such appeals to groups urged by commercial designs, together with the loss of self-esteem measured in those demographics, argue the loss of individuality reaches epidemic proportion. Thus socialization regulates wilderness the more. But the Bonhoeffer resistance to Hitler, the Mennonite resistance to the world in favor of some other, inner value, is no longer the ethical crisis it was (see for example the section, "Moral Confidence," here). "What would you have done under Hitler?" or "could you sacrifice your life?" is reduced to whether or not you dare disconnect from the electronic Friend mind and its cell, the new false paradigm of wilderness / paradise. Some reckoning is at hand, but it starts out unheroically.

No comments:

Post a Comment