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These words are not my own and I take no credit for them. I share them here as a resource for anyone seeking personal growth or as source material for their own creative expansion of the collective.
The mandorla begins the healing of the split. The overlap generally is very thin at first, only a sliver of a new moon, but it is a beginning. As time passes, the greater the overlap, the greater and more complete is the healing. The mandorla binds together that which was torn apart and made unwhole unholy. It is considered the most profound religious experience one can have in life.
Eventually, the god's flesh and blood were eaten in the form of bread and wine, a Dionysian sacrament that concluded the Eleusinian Mysteries. The same theme of death and descent runs through the stories of Persephone, Inanna, Psyche, Orpheus, Osiris, Adonis, and Jesus. Psychologically, this is a metaphor for the necessary suffering and death of the ego. The message is that one cannot attain consciousness, individuation, and a full love of life without first learning humility. After this symbolic death, spring always returns with its warmth, greening, and return of vitality.
Keys represent access to secret realms, full power and authority within these realms, and the condition of being initiated.
In the late patriarchal phase, the sun can be male and the moon female; as siblings, both can assume either sex, or the moon may, at the matriarchal level, be regarded as male; but always the sun-moon relationship is mythologically perceived as a noteworthy celestial phenomenon and, above and beyond that, is often experienced as a symbolic depiction of the relationship between the sexes.
Seed and soul are the same. The triune cycle of life is a natural law that prevails in nature and your psyche. Solar seasons of growth and plenty are balanced by lunar seasons of loss and death. And when winter is over, you can trust Hecate's light of the Law of Three to rise again, pouring out life and love in a springtime of unceasing abundance.
The full moon symbolizes the Mother aspect of your lunar twin. It represents fertility, fullness, stability, and sexuality. Its association with pregnancy hints at a profound truth: suffering always precedes transformation and new life, whether psychological, physical, or spiritual.
The teacher pretended that algebra was a perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn't even know what numbers really were. They were not flowers, not animals, not fossils; they were nothing that could be imagined, mere quantities that resulted from counting. To my confusion these quantities were now represented by letters, which signified sounds, so that it became possible to hear them, so to speak.
The mathematically precise arrangement of a crystal evokes in us the intuitive feeling that even in so-called "dead" matter, there is a spiritual ordering principle at work. Thus the crystal often symbolically stands for the union of extreme opposites of matter and spirit.
In other words, numbers are not concepts consciously invented by men for purposes of calculation: They are spontaneous and autonomous products of the unconscious — as are other archetypal symbols.
The figure of a deformed little girl appears in numerous fairy tales. In such tales the ugliness of the hump usually conceals great beauty, which is revealed when the "right man" comes to free the girl from a magic spell often by a kiss.
A coat is often a symbol of the protective cover or mask (which Jung called the persona) that an individual presents to the world. It has two purposes: first, to make a specific impression on other people: second, to conceal the individual's inner self from their prying eyes.
In mythology, rain was often thought to be a "love-union" between heaven and earth. In the Eleusinian mysteries, for instance, after everything had been purified by water, the call went up to heaven: "Let it rain!" and down to earth: "Be fruitful!" This was understood as a sacred marriage of the gods. In this way rain can be said to represent a "solution" in the literal sense of the word.
In the history of symbolism, the right side generally represents the realm of consciousness; the left, the unconscious.
A mountain pass is a well-known symbol for a "situation of transition" that leads from an old attitude of mind to a new one.
In the Zen sect, the circle represents enlightenment. It symbolizes human perfection.
In the Zen sect, the circle represents enlightenment. It symbolizes human perfection.
The mandala serves a conservative purpose namely, to restore a previously existing order. But it also serves the creative purpose of giving expression and form to something that does not yet exist, something new and unique. The second aspect is perhaps even more important than the first, but does not contradict it. For, in most cases, what restores the old order simultaneously involves some element of new creation. In the new order the older pattern returns on a higher level. The process is that of the ascending spiral, which grows upward while simultaneously returning again and again to the same point.
For while the human being is as different as possible from a stone, yet man's innermost center is in a strange and special way akin to it (perhaps because the stone symbolizes mere existence at the farthest remove from the emotions, feelings, fantasies, and discursive thinking of ego-consciousness). In this sense the stone symbolizes what is perhaps the simplest and deepest experience — the experience of something eternal that man can have in those moments when he feels immortal and unalterable.
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