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Odissey

In "2001: A Space Odissey", Arthur C. Clarke portraits astronaut David Bowman (played by Keir Dullea) on a voyage to some place where time and space fold in such a way that the old Bowman, the newborn baby Bowman and the actual astronaut Bowman are just aspects in a greater representation of Bowman's psyche, something that he found only after travelling through space and time (so it seems) in an effort to decypher the Monolith (an object with golden proportions, the square of 1, 2, and 3 units make its three-dimensional measures).

The Monolith, as an object of "golden" proportions (it alludes to alchemical symbolism), represents mankind's search for the supreme understanding, mainly the complex answers to the three questions: "who am I", "where do I come from", "where will I go".

As he slips through a light gateway (some kind of what astrophysicists call "wormhole", also called "stargate" by some people, some kind of gravitational tunnel where it is possible to achieve lightspeed -- although here "where" and "speed" have very relativistic meanings), Bowman says, amazed: "It's full of stars!"

Stars -- constellations included -- are effectively very distant objects from which people have been withdrawing, time after time, several aspects of the objective psyche. To the stars the thoughts of poets and physicists, astrologists and astrophysicists, have been constinuously dedicated, creating a mythological set of knowledge from which we can achieve (using books on one hand and maybe telescopes on another) some kind of relief from our everyday consciousness.

How many times do we look to the stars along our lives? How many times do we look into ourselves during our lifetimes? There is a relationship between what is most distant and what is nearest.

The word "Odissey" is in fact very importantly adequated to this masterpiece from Stanley Kubrick: Homer's Odissey, Ulisses voyage back on Ancient Greece, is the story of a man in search of his soul; so it is this work from Kubrick.

 

Self-knowledge and Social Responsibility

Carl Gustav Jung, in his preface to the Volume 7 of his Collected Works, talked about the necessity that people should know themselves deeply, in order to recognize that the path to peace necessarily encompasses profound understanding and continuous searching of each and any individual for their true relation with what they are as human beings to themselves and therefore their relationship with the external world.

Actually, this is a recurring theme in Jung's lifework: the development of the individual personality is always focused from a perspective of an increasing awareness of oneself, side-by-side with a continuous engagement in an ethical way of life.

Psyche and soul are one and the same for Jung, but that is not everything there is to understand. One thing that we must realize when studying Jung is that he was his work; this has important implications, for it is impossible to be able to create without being able to manifest soul itself along a lifetime. This means that it is always possible to walk in disguise as a Jungian, a Freudian, a Christian, a Catholic, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Physician, a Physicist, a Mathematician, a Scientist (any), a Priest (any), and so on.

In fact it is so easy to do such a thing that one might easily start to believe that one is only what one plays on the stage of everyday life, forgetting that he/she should understand that the same one represents the entire universe in the chain of the unfolding spacetime development of consciousness, or what is most important, the possibility of the fifth element, the center of alchemical life and the ark from which it is possible to uncover the treasure of treasures, the Philosopher's Stone.

It is incredibly important for me, continuously, to develop the notion of Social Responsibility, not as something to just talk about; but also as something to practice in order to learn first, and to teach later.

This is what is meant in Karma Yoga, where one should practice everything that is learned through theory, i.e., there is no effective wisdom without action, which is not the same as saying that there should be only action and no theoretical study! People need to have room for many things in life: there is a time for daisies and a time for rain. It is not possible for one alone to create daisies or rain, but it is possible to meet those facts of life, learning with them. These thoughts carry necessarily the understanding, beyond, but not leaving aside, any belief, feeling and reasoning that if we want a better life for ourselves we ought to realize that there is always someone else, near and away, who in essence is our brother, related to us by every frontier of human knowledge.

Not only we share a human pool of genes, but we are also sharers of the same fact of creation and we depend on it, as we should depend on each other not only as an economical development issue, but as a rule beyond any doubt, because this is actually what happens, want it or not.

 

First Day.

Hi, you are probably wondering why this is "Feeding the Soul II". Yeap, there is a "I" (a one, a first, not only an ego - this is not only "Feeding the soul me-me", as the first wasn't "Feeding the soul me". The "I" here, no confusion meant but the wordplay was already done, was something that should signify, for a start, the beginning of something.

Well, the first development of an ego should also be considered a beginning of something, but we'll have to consider what is, actually, an ego; a piece of conscience, some projection from the unconscious which has the primary function of knowing the self, or, in other terms, developing self-knowledge.

So, crazy as it seems, let's get back to the "I" meaning "number one". There was a first version which I intended to be "food for thought", but not only that, it should also become "food for sensibility", so I called it "Feeding the Soul". That was back near 1997, when we had to create webpages on Netscape Gold 3.0. What? You don't know what it is, you think I am too old, well, times just goes on and Cronos simply doesn't forgive no one at all, he keeps on eating people's unawareness, until a faint sparkle of consciousness -- some son of Cronos, too, which escapes from the wrath of his terrible hunger --, represented by Zeus, starts to project life as something that folds time into space (and things start to have a place to be). That probably happens on the deepest levels of the unconscious (better speaking, the objective psyche) much before any conscious development of the ego; of course, that doesn't mean that there is an ego prefigurated at that time, but that doesn't mean there is not some level of prefiguration of the ego, designated (eventually more or less "designed", too, although maybe not in a common material and strict sense) by the word telos.

Now this isn't the case anymore: I was trying and experimenting at that time, and now I'm not. There is some kind of responsibility in writing, even though I can't consider myself as a great English writer -- just an improved one, judging myself from the old days. Anyway, I believe that I'll get better in time.