“But our capacity for consciousness is no sure thing. Of what, really, can we become conscious? Isolated facts here and there, occasional patterns, and rarely, deep intimations of the divine through dreams, visions, art, and mythologies. We keep trying to catch and hold what seems so fleeting, “we try to possess, to hold lightly in our simple hands, with our stupefied gaze, our tongueless heart. Wishing to become it, yet to whom may we pass it on? Though we long to hold onto it forever.”
Our brains are feeble tools in the face of complexity and immensity. Our sight is sated, our hearts rendered dumb and inarticulate. We wish to merge with the flow, to become it, and it passes by us. And what are we to do with what we perceive, to whom do we give it, that which we can so scarcely retain? Without the tools of metaphor and symbol we would have precious little to say, for they allow us to talk about that about which we cannot talk.”
(page 48)
James Hollis, The Archetypal Imagination. Houston: Texas A&M University Press, 2000.
Chanced on and borrowed from the Grande Bibliothèque, Montréal.
Libraries Within Libraries 