The Colors of the Void

       "The techniques involved are not some esoteric branch of witchcraft that must be reserved for those with PhD degrees in psychology. When the ideas are made sufficiently concrete and explicit, the scientific foundations of psychology can be grasped by sixth-grade children." (Miller, 1969, on accessibility of phenomenology)        While this week has not been entirely about accessibility, this is an issue that has been brought up time and again. What should people have access to? What can they understand? Is there potential danger involved in making "Everything" accessible to the masses in terms of psychology or, in Miller's case, phenomenology?      The truth is, everything has room to be dangerous. Fizzy drinks, warm blankets, walks outside... These are not weapons but people manage to hurt or even kill themselves with them every day. We can't pack people up in cotton wool and expect things to go well. I feel like the same t...

"We are chronicling the link between how we memorialize collective history and how we experience personal history, how silence and suffering in one realm may reproduce silence in the other. Authoritarian structures in the family and individual mirror those in the political world. Amnesia in the political realm can reinforce silencing in personal life. The retrieval of memory and self-expression through the arts can disrupt such a system."   -Watkins & Shulman Art can be used to share feelings and emotions, explanations when words fail us, but it can also be used to create change within lives and within society. Art is often moving in a way that explanation is not. It creates emotion within us and leads us to a sense of empathy that otherwise might have escaped us. - Which in turn can often bring humans together in the name of a cause, in the name of change.  When I consider art that was intended to bring change, I consider a lot of the ads from my childhood. I consider bi...

 "There are numerous references within medicine, anthropology, and the arts to the earliest healing applications of expressive modalities. For example, the Egyptians are reported to have encouraged people with mental illness to engage in artistic activity (Fleshman & Fryrear, 1981); the Greeks used drama and music for its reparative properties (Gladding, 1992); and the story of King Saul in the Bible describes music’s calming attributes. Later, in Europe during the Renaissance, English physician and writer Robert Burton theorized that imagination played a role in health and well-being, while Italian philosopher de Feltre proposed that dance and play were central to children’s healthy growth and development (Coughlin, 1990)" - Cathy A. Malchoidi      It seems as though, without even meaning to, our species has found art, music, drama, and dance as ways to communicate feelings for which we had no real words or no words of our own to present. Before we knew it was ...

 "Every good idea and all creative work are the offspring of the imagination, and have their source in what one is pleased to call infantile fantasy. Not the artist alone, but every creative individual whatsoever owes all that is greatest in his life to fantasy. The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable." - Jung, 1921 Last week, we explored the idea of art as therapy. In particular, we placed a great deal of emphasis on whether art as therapy should be made readily available to the masses or whether it should fall under some realm of control, IE, under the guidance of a therapist or other mental health professional. I was in the grouping that agreed that it should be made available to anyone who was interested or who might benefi...

 "If someone witnessed my behavior at the time and labeled it a manic episode, I would not blame them. Certainly, for some time afterward, having been trained as a clinical psychologist within the Western medical model, I wondered if I was bipolar. Early into my spiritual emergency, I called a psychologist friend and described to him my symptoms. He said that I sounded like his manic-depressive patients in the in-patient unit and that if I went to a hospital, they would probably medicate me. Instead of checking myself into a psychiatric unit, I brought myself to a Jungian psychoanalyst." - Dr. Nisha Gupta Last week, we spoke at length about the creative mind and madness. What constitutes creativity has been a question that has led us along journeys. What constitutes madness feels as though it could take a similar route. Some of the greatest creative minds of our time have experienced periods of intense upheaval and emotion that resulted in amazing pieces of art, music, poetry...

 "Lira refers to a central aspect of the contemplative attitude and the capacity to grasp beauty. He states that ‘beauty is not seen when one is asleep, identified with pleasure or pain, when one is not paying attention and not concentrating, when the mind passes mechanically from one object to another without stopping, when it looks without seeing.'" -Alvaro Ignacio Langer While I missed class this week, this quote seems to me to capture the idea of the lesson. We do not see beauty, we are not held in awe, when we are sleeping or otherwise engaged. It does not exist for us when we are "looking without seeing," but when we look to see .- When we truly take the time to appreciate what we are seeing for all that it is, all that it took to be. Each item, each life around us holds worlds that we pass blindly by in our day-to-day rush. We take so much for granted and evaluate nearly everything (it seems) at surface level.  "...the Vidyadhara described perceptio...