THE WISDOM OF DREAMING MIND

Gustav Theodor Fechner:

“Here stands the tree; many a single leaf may fall from it; yet its root and its unity are firm and perfect. It will always develop new branches, and new leaves will continue to fall; the tree itself will not fall: it will put forth blossoms of beauty, and instead of being rooted in faith, it will bear the fruits of faith.”  [1]

 ‘Art is the Tree of Life ... Science is the Tree of Death'. [2]

William Blake

Murray  Ciaran:

 “Blake has gone far beyond this, to take life and death as representing different orders of knowledge: knowledge as intellect and knowledge as instinct. Knowledge as intellect is science, a word related to 'schism' and ‘scissors' [3] - and therefore to division and, in Blake's view, death; while art is a knowing in the biblical sense, instinctual, intuitive and intimate: the fullness of life as perceived by romanticism.”  [4]

In the fil Avatar:

 “The centre of life is a holy tree where tribal memories and the wisdom of the ancestors is theirs for the asking.  It grows in land the humans want to strip mine.”

 “In the alchemical treatise attributed to Thomas Aquinas, it is said of wisdom lignum vitae est his qui apprehenderit eam, et lumen indeficiens - 'she is a tree of life to those who grasp her, and a never-failing light' [5] ? as if light itself were the fruit of the tree.’

Klimt, Tree of Life, 1909

Schism: noun: 1 - a division between strongly opposed parties, caused by differences in opinion or belief. 2 - the formal separation of a Church into two Churches or the secession of a group owing to doctrinal and other differences. ORIGIN:  Middle English: from Old French scisme, via ecclesiastical Latin from Greek skhisma 'cleft', from skhizein 'to split'.

 Scissors: ORIGIN: Middle English: from Old French cisoires, from late Latin cisoria, plural of cisorium 'cutting instrument'; the sc- spelling arose by association with the Latin stem sciss- 'cut'.

"The survival of cultures, as well as genes, dictates that each generation must integrate old wisdom with new knowledge. This was the function of myths, ritual initiation rites, and religion, as it still is the function of dreams. Myth provides a people with its unifying metaphor, it narrative sense of owning a place in the story of creation. Religion provides us with a code of behavior, regulating how we treat each other and the living world around us. The trouble with the present century is that we have not only lost our myth but have forgotten our manners. Too readily we overlook the simple truth that we are here as temporary guests of our Mother, Nature, and that, like spoiled children, we have abused her hospitality. She has made us a beautiful nest and we have fouled it. But her indulgence is not inexhaustible. Already she gives signs of growing restive, implying that we have overstayed out welcome, and she is contemplating means of getting rid of us. If we wish to stay on we must learn to mend our ways. Instead of behaving like hooligans, we need to show some deference and humility. This is the message of Lovelock's Gaia myth. Greater consciousness is the key, but it has to be mythic consciousness, informed with the intuitive wisdom of the dreaming mind as well as the factual knowledge of left-hemispheric consciousness."

Anthony Stevens, Private Myths - Dreams and Dreaming, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1995, p. 252

"And when from seeing I turned to looking, strange lights sprang up and everything took on meaning. Thus I suddenly discovered that a Dance of the Trees exists. Not all of them possess the secret of dancing in the wind. But those to whom this grace had been given arrange dances of leaves,  branches, twigs about their own swaying trunks: the rhythm that begins in the leaves, a restless, ascending rhythm - with the surge and breaking of waves, with gentle pauses and rests - which suddenly becomes a storm of rejoicing. There is nothing more beautiful than a bamboo thicket dancing in the breeze. No human choreography can equal the eurhythmy of a branch outlined against the sky. I asked myself whether the higher forms of aesthetic emotion do not consist merely in a supreme understanding of creation. A day will come when men will discover an alphabet in the eyes of chalcedonies, in the markings of the moth, and will learn in astonishment that every spotted snail has always been a poem."   

Alejo Carpentier - The Lost Steps

“St Constantine’s Day is a day of coronation for the fig and the pomegranate; the owner of the trees pays them a special visit and crowns them with wreaths of oleander and wild marjoram. The peasants call this ‘getting engaged’, and the object of the ceremony is to make the trees bare. If, adds the story, the owner omits this ceremony and does not visit his trees, they imagine him to have died and from sadness do not bear.”

Lawrence Durrell, Reflections on a Marine Venus.

techne and psyche   - Congo _Uranium  - Roshing Uranium mine in Namibia

“It is no secret that men are in trouble today. From war to ecological collapse, most of the world’s critical problems stem from a distorted masculinity out of control. Yet our culture rewards the very dysfunctions responsible for those problems. To Matthew Fox, our crucial task is to open our minds to a deeper understanding of the healthy masculine than we receive from our media, culture, and religions.”

Even little boys have WWR Smackdown on their backpacks – not to mention battle camouflage. .

“Behold, the ideal killing machine.”

Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired Magazine, April 2000.

Dendrological Society   -   Oak activists

“ . . Management must be done by science and logic and making rational and often controversial and unpleasant choices.”

Sheree Bega, The next crop of sylvan champions, Weekend Argus, Cape Town, January 16^th 2010. Champion Tree status – deemed of ‘exceptional importance’ and deserving of national protection because of their outstanding size, age, aesthetic, cultural, historical or tourism value.

Monitored by the Dendrological Society . . .  – under “Forestry” .