Grail Wisdom Revival
The medieval legend of the Grail, a tale about the search for supreme mystical experience, has never ceased to intrigue writers and scholars by its wildly variegated forms: the settings have ranged from Britain to the Punjab to the Temple of Zeus at Dodona; the Grail itself has been described as the chalice used by Christ at the Last Supper, a stone with miraculous youth-preserving virtues, a vessel containing a man's head swimming in blood; the Grail has been kept in a castle by a beautiful damsel, seen floating through the air in Arthur's palace, and used as a talisman in the East to distinguish the chaste from the unchaste.
The Grail, once a Celtic vessel of plenty, evolved into the Christian Grail with miraculous powers. The principal texts fall into two classes: those that relate the adventures of the knights in King Arthur's time and those that account for the Grail's removal from the Holy Land to Britain.
The Grail, once a Celtic vessel of plenty, evolved into the Christian Grail with miraculous powers. The principal texts fall into two classes: those that relate the adventures of the knights in King Arthur's time and those that account for the Grail's removal from the Holy Land to Britain.
GRAIL WISDOM REVIVAL
Sacred Blood; Sacred Path
Iona Miller
The image reflects a reality whose properties resemble "participation mystique" where the cosmos, other beings and most importantly our collective psyche are seamlessly interconnected. It is within this realm where "the noetic and the imaginal no longer oppose each other" ("Silver" 22). The Grail Quest is essentially about restoring life to that condition known as the "wasteland," which is a metaphor for an inauthentically lived life, which is role-bound and therefore sterile. It is a search for the deeper Reality which underlies the mundane.
The Grail Quest is part of the Arthurian legends, and one of its foremost characters is Parcival. In asking, "Where is the Grail?," he asks in essence, "where is the supreme reality, the essence, the source of existence, the creative potency, the holy kingdom."
Parcival is the fool, or innocent, who stumbles through life's adventures and follies, never quite getting it, and getting caught as a result in a passionless life. In mythic journeys such as Parcival's the shadow plays a large role. In psychological terms, the shadow is the repressed, disowned and unacknowledged aspects of the self.
When these qualities are recognized and reconciled, a person often experiences a movement toward greater wholeness, depth, and maturity. Mythic knowing balances shadow and light in individuals and cultures. When liberated, this shadow energy is the fount of our finest qualities and taproot of our Essence. According to Joseph Campbell, myth plays four major functions in our psychology and social functioning:
Our primal purpose may be seen in one sense, simply as the replication and continued survival of DNA in the multitude of forms it may take throughout the cosmos. One test of the Truth of our theories is induction where we take one class of facts and coincide them with an induction obtained from another different class, such as natural science and metaphysics.
Epistemological confusion in "how we know what we know" arises when we mistake one world of experience for another. Theoretically, conceptual unity (consilience) ends such confusion by reaching across many levels of complexity, dissolving artificial boundaries between natural sciences.
In the Enlightenment, science sought to map the entire cosmos in a disinterested objectivity...but even a holistic map of flatland is far from an experience of that vast territory. Bacon proclaimed a pyramid of disciplines, with natural history forming the base, physics above and subsuming it, and metaphysics at the peak, explaining everything below. He founded the discipline of the philosophy of science.
Descarte gave us a three-dimensional world, but he actually dreamed up his system of rationality where matter is seen as pure mechanism (causality), and systematic doubt is the first principle of learning. His separation of mind and matter carried humanity's self-image further from its perception of the remainder of the universe, and the full reality of the universe actually seemed to grow progressively more alien, and alienation is what the Grail Quest is all about.
Modern quantum theory and chaos theory have shown us that reality is not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind and may be, in some cases, counter-intuitive. Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution (DNA), but not the purpose of evolution. Yet, science travels its own way, from Romanticism to the Postmodern ennui which currently infecting us. Most scientists are no more than highly-specialized prospectors.
Enlightenment thinkers believed we could know everything, and radical postmodernists believe we can know nothing. Reality is a state constructed by the mind. Thus, we have a postmodern prohibition against universal truth, and all becomes a deconstructed metaphor of reality. These "root metaphors" are ruling images in the thinker's mind whereby he designs theories and experiments.
Diversity of metaphors is found in the hereditary orderliness that has borne our species through geological time and stamped it with the residues of deep history. Original thinking either views disorder and tries to create order, or encountering order tries to protest it by creating disorder. This tension is what drives learning forward--the dance at the edge of chaos.
Sacred Blood; Sacred Path
Iona Miller
The image reflects a reality whose properties resemble "participation mystique" where the cosmos, other beings and most importantly our collective psyche are seamlessly interconnected. It is within this realm where "the noetic and the imaginal no longer oppose each other" ("Silver" 22). The Grail Quest is essentially about restoring life to that condition known as the "wasteland," which is a metaphor for an inauthentically lived life, which is role-bound and therefore sterile. It is a search for the deeper Reality which underlies the mundane.
The Grail Quest is part of the Arthurian legends, and one of its foremost characters is Parcival. In asking, "Where is the Grail?," he asks in essence, "where is the supreme reality, the essence, the source of existence, the creative potency, the holy kingdom."
Parcival is the fool, or innocent, who stumbles through life's adventures and follies, never quite getting it, and getting caught as a result in a passionless life. In mythic journeys such as Parcival's the shadow plays a large role. In psychological terms, the shadow is the repressed, disowned and unacknowledged aspects of the self.
When these qualities are recognized and reconciled, a person often experiences a movement toward greater wholeness, depth, and maturity. Mythic knowing balances shadow and light in individuals and cultures. When liberated, this shadow energy is the fount of our finest qualities and taproot of our Essence. According to Joseph Campbell, myth plays four major functions in our psychology and social functioning:
- facilitates communication with the transcendent realms and the eternal form;
- gives us the art, music, and poetry to express the realization that we belong to the universal with meaning and purpose;
- produces rituals of living and dying which have spiritual and moral roots (alienation leads to the desperate quest for meaning to restore or replace the lost mythology);
- fosters the centering and unfolding of the individual in integrity with the self, culture and universe--the ultimate creative Mystery.
Our primal purpose may be seen in one sense, simply as the replication and continued survival of DNA in the multitude of forms it may take throughout the cosmos. One test of the Truth of our theories is induction where we take one class of facts and coincide them with an induction obtained from another different class, such as natural science and metaphysics.
Epistemological confusion in "how we know what we know" arises when we mistake one world of experience for another. Theoretically, conceptual unity (consilience) ends such confusion by reaching across many levels of complexity, dissolving artificial boundaries between natural sciences.
In the Enlightenment, science sought to map the entire cosmos in a disinterested objectivity...but even a holistic map of flatland is far from an experience of that vast territory. Bacon proclaimed a pyramid of disciplines, with natural history forming the base, physics above and subsuming it, and metaphysics at the peak, explaining everything below. He founded the discipline of the philosophy of science.
Descarte gave us a three-dimensional world, but he actually dreamed up his system of rationality where matter is seen as pure mechanism (causality), and systematic doubt is the first principle of learning. His separation of mind and matter carried humanity's self-image further from its perception of the remainder of the universe, and the full reality of the universe actually seemed to grow progressively more alien, and alienation is what the Grail Quest is all about.
Modern quantum theory and chaos theory have shown us that reality is not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind and may be, in some cases, counter-intuitive. Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution (DNA), but not the purpose of evolution. Yet, science travels its own way, from Romanticism to the Postmodern ennui which currently infecting us. Most scientists are no more than highly-specialized prospectors.
Enlightenment thinkers believed we could know everything, and radical postmodernists believe we can know nothing. Reality is a state constructed by the mind. Thus, we have a postmodern prohibition against universal truth, and all becomes a deconstructed metaphor of reality. These "root metaphors" are ruling images in the thinker's mind whereby he designs theories and experiments.
Diversity of metaphors is found in the hereditary orderliness that has borne our species through geological time and stamped it with the residues of deep history. Original thinking either views disorder and tries to create order, or encountering order tries to protest it by creating disorder. This tension is what drives learning forward--the dance at the edge of chaos.
Green Sophia, Daniel Mirante
http://danielmirante.com/paintings/green-sophia/
Golden Sophia
http://danielmirante.com/paintings/green-sophia/
Golden Sophia
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[email protected]
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.