generations we’ve forgotten what the psychologists call our
archaic understanding,
a willingness to know things in their deepest, most mythic sense. We’re all born with archaic understanding, and I’d guess that the loss of it goes directly along with the loss of ourselves as creators.
But unless we are creators, we are not fully alive.
—
What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint or clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter what our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts or having some kind of important career. Several women have written to me to complain about
A Swiftly Tilting Planet.
They feel that I should not have allowed Meg Murry to give up a career by marrying Calvin, having children, and quietly helping her husband with his work behind the scenes. But if women are to be free to choose to pursue a career as well as marriage, they must also be free to choose the making of a home and the nurture of a family as their vocation; that was Meg’s choice, and a free one, and it was as creative a choice as if she had gone on to get a Ph.D. in quantum mechanics.
Our freedom to be creators is far less limited than some people would think.
—
Long before Jung came up with his theories of archetypical understanding, William James wrote: “Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest, which co-mingle their roots in the darkness underground. Just so, there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother sea or reservoir.”
The creator is not afraid to leap over the “accidental fences” and to plunge into the deep waters of creation. There, once again, and in yet another way, we lose ourselves to find ourselves.
—
One of the many sad results of the Industrial Revolution was that we came to depend more than ever on the intellect and to ignore the intuition with its symbolic thinking. The creator, and the mystic, have tended more towards Platonism than Aristotelianism, and tend to be willing to accept Plato’s “divine madness,” with its four aspects of prophecy, healing, artistic creativity, and love.
These divine madnesses have been nearly lost in this century, and so we’ve lived almost entirely in the pragmatic, Cartesian world. I wonder if Descartes knew what he was doing when he wrote his famous
I think, therefore I am,
and subsequently, if not consequently, we began even more than before to equate ourselves with our conscious minds.
Cogito, ergo sum
nudges us on to depend solely on intellectual control, and if we insist on intellectual control we have to let go our archaic understanding and our high creativity, because keeping them means going along with all kinds of things we
can’t
control.
And yet, ultimately, our underwater, intuitive selves are never really incompatible with the above-water, intellectual part of our wholeness. Part of Jesus’ freedom came from the radical view of time which allowed him to speak with Moses and Elijah simultaneously, thus bursting through the limitations of time accepted by the intellect. Yet what he did is not at all inconsistent with what contemporary astrophysicists are discovering about the nature of time. Secularists have long tended to laugh away the story of “Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon,” but according to some new research, it now seems as though something actually did happen to the physical world at that time; the earth may have shifted slightly on its axis, and time would have been affected, and the sun for a moment may indeed have stood still.
For the astrophysicist as for the saint,
chronos
and
kairos
converge. Robert Jastrow in his book,
God and the Astronomers,
talks about the astronomers, after all their questions, struggling up to a mountain peak and finding the theologians already
archaic understanding,
a willingness to know things in their deepest, most mythic sense. We’re all born with archaic understanding, and I’d guess that the loss of it goes directly along with the loss of ourselves as creators.
But unless we are creators, we are not fully alive.
—
What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint or clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter what our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts or having some kind of important career. Several women have written to me to complain about
A Swiftly Tilting Planet.
They feel that I should not have allowed Meg Murry to give up a career by marrying Calvin, having children, and quietly helping her husband with his work behind the scenes. But if women are to be free to choose to pursue a career as well as marriage, they must also be free to choose the making of a home and the nurture of a family as their vocation; that was Meg’s choice, and a free one, and it was as creative a choice as if she had gone on to get a Ph.D. in quantum mechanics.
Our freedom to be creators is far less limited than some people would think.
—
Long before Jung came up with his theories of archetypical understanding, William James wrote: “Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest, which co-mingle their roots in the darkness underground. Just so, there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother sea or reservoir.”
The creator is not afraid to leap over the “accidental fences” and to plunge into the deep waters of creation. There, once again, and in yet another way, we lose ourselves to find ourselves.
—
One of the many sad results of the Industrial Revolution was that we came to depend more than ever on the intellect and to ignore the intuition with its symbolic thinking. The creator, and the mystic, have tended more towards Platonism than Aristotelianism, and tend to be willing to accept Plato’s “divine madness,” with its four aspects of prophecy, healing, artistic creativity, and love.
These divine madnesses have been nearly lost in this century, and so we’ve lived almost entirely in the pragmatic, Cartesian world. I wonder if Descartes knew what he was doing when he wrote his famous
I think, therefore I am,
and subsequently, if not consequently, we began even more than before to equate ourselves with our conscious minds.
Cogito, ergo sum
nudges us on to depend solely on intellectual control, and if we insist on intellectual control we have to let go our archaic understanding and our high creativity, because keeping them means going along with all kinds of things we
can’t
control.
And yet, ultimately, our underwater, intuitive selves are never really incompatible with the above-water, intellectual part of our wholeness. Part of Jesus’ freedom came from the radical view of time which allowed him to speak with Moses and Elijah simultaneously, thus bursting through the limitations of time accepted by the intellect. Yet what he did is not at all inconsistent with what contemporary astrophysicists are discovering about the nature of time. Secularists have long tended to laugh away the story of “Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon,” but according to some new research, it now seems as though something actually did happen to the physical world at that time; the earth may have shifted slightly on its axis, and time would have been affected, and the sun for a moment may indeed have stood still.
For the astrophysicist as for the saint,
chronos
and
kairos
converge. Robert Jastrow in his book,
God and the Astronomers,
talks about the astronomers, after all their questions, struggling up to a mountain peak and finding the theologians already
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