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SEEING THE SOUL
AN ART OF THE IMAGINATION;
the journey of the soul in return to Self
DEDICATION - TO EDEN
HEATHER TAYLOR-ZIMMERMAN
JOURNEY
The Way is physical and psychological
Orienting to descend into the underworld and the unconscious, within and without
INSIGHT
Jung's Quest for Soul
“There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul.”
C JUNG
THE GIFT
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”
~ PABLO PICASSO
THE SOUL EXALTS — An art-based journey
Jung believed that the artist should bring something back from the depths of the unconscious and art can be seen as the gift of the artist—as The Red Book was Jung’s gift. In Jung’s art-based and soul-based approach we are all artists or, more aptly the soul is the artist. Yet this is different kind of art than what we might think. It is an art of imagination in which the true gift is individuation or the journey of the soul in return to the Self—to Eden and the gods.
Leaving aside the question of what art is, this website is my gift, having returned from the depths of my own art-based journey. It is also my attempt to serve my soul (who communicated through my visionary art that I should create this website). Critically, it is also my attempt to serve the dead, as Jung did in The Red Book, and Hillman noted in serving Jung. In particular, I will try to bring his art-based path to a wider circle and open people’s eyes to the reality of the soul as he said he failed to do.
THE JOURNEY — Not all who wander are lost
An orientation to Jung’s art-based process, this section illuminates the structure of the website as a warren of tunneling paths or a chthonic map. Entering into the underground depths of these pathways, we follow Jung (1933) who said that he “so often travelled this path with individual patients” (p. 72). This is an art-based journey or “process” that Jung never “succeeded” in “making clear to a wider circle” by “working it up in a form suitable for publication” (p. 72), yet it is also an archetypal path walked by the ancestors of old. Like a perennial planted in the soil of the psyche it emerges naturally from the rich earth and the waters of the unconscious. In this section we will begin with information about The Red Book and Jung’s art-based approach as we till the soil of Jung’s soul process.
In this section the path or way forward (and back) is discussed. Jung (2009) said that “there is only one way and that is your way” (p. 125), and here the navigation of the process is introduced to begin to map out your journey, orienting to the descent into the underworld and the unconscious. This map orients you to both time and space as well as the center and periphery. Orienting both within and without, the way is physical and psychological. It is a way of the body and the body of art.
To read quotes from The Red Book to help you find your way, click below.
THE DARK — THE UNCONSCIOUS WHEEL
The soul’s relationship to the night and night vision is embodied in the mythic figures of Lilith (night) and Eve (evening) as well as the relationship to the darkness as the unconscious. Jung’s soul testified to this night vision when she said that: “The soul of humanity is like the great zodiacal wheel (seen in the night sky) that rolls along the way,” adding that, “Everything that comes up in a constant movement from below to the heights was already there.
There is no part of the wheel that does not come around again” (p. 394). Comparing the cyclical movement of the night sky’s return to the return of human history as “giving birth to the ancient in a new time” and the purpose of the soul of humanity through the “inborn properties of human nature” (p. 394), Jung said that “it belongs in the essence of forward movement that what was returns” (p. 394). Like the clock’s hand turning around the circle of time, charting both day and night, we must learn to see in the darkness of dreams, visions, and prehistory as a time held in dreams and visions.
“There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul.”
C JUNG
The dark night of the soul can be seen in the turning of the wheel in Buddhism.
PERCEPTION — Perceptual v Conception
Aristotle said “the soul never thinks without a picture” and this section introduces us to Jung’s approach to perceiving through the activation of the imagination or what called visioning, a picture method, and trancing before arriving at active imagination. A n embodied perception, this is tacit knowledge or nonverbal creativity (other than metaphor) in which the body and a body of art serve as the organ of perception. Including all of the senses, perception in this multifaceted or synthetic sense is like entering a picture like an imaginary landscape—becoming one of the actors, as Jung suggested.
Viewing visionary art, the term Jung (1933) coined for art based on the inner vision of the imagination, teaches us how to create and view a painting as a window to the soul. Art in this sense is a way to see and see through the soul. The website Seeing Through Art focuses on and sees through a specific line that Jung gave toward the end of The Red Book when Elijah asserted, “I do not like this [the soul’s] multiplicity. It is not easy to think it” (p. 547). In response Jung declared: “It [soul] is not to be thought; it is to be viewed. It is a painting.” This website is an exploration of how to create and view the soul through the many brushstrokes of a painting to overcome Elijah’s “old and ingrained mistake, that the one excludes the many” and that thinking is exclusive of viewing.
"It is not to be thought; it is to be viewed. It is a painting." Jung of his soul