Check out the trailer for the book The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall
It's easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
Ben Okri, from the beginning of the book Monoculture.
"I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so difficult?"
From Demian by Hermann Hesse.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Great book. I absolutely loved reading it. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a fantastic tale of split brains, multi-dimensional realities, treacherous underworlds, myth, imagination and the immense gravity of love.
It also struck me that the entire book is also a meditation on the world of the Platonic shadow, the daemon, the eidolon, the Underworld and the battle for soul (not in the Christian sense, but more Jungian and Archetypally. Think Partick Harpur’s books instead).
More on that later.
Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation.
Alejandro Jodorowsky is a fascinating human.
James Hillman, visionary, iconoclast, father of Archetypal Psychology and intellectual successor to Jung has died. Hillman’s writings on Soul and Psyche have been influential to how I approach writing.
He’ll be missed.