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Yellow and The Stone

Online Webinar
Salt Lake City, UT

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Dear Alchemy course participant, Login details The following login details will be for all 10 classes. Please click the link below to join the webinar: https://zoom.us/j/353417588 Or iPhone one-tap (US Toll): +14086380968,353417588# or +16465588656,353417588# Or Telephone: Dial: +1 408 638 0968 (US Toll) or +1 646 558 8656 (US Toll) Webinar ID: 353 417 588 International numbers available here. Here are the reading suggestions for class 1: The Yellowing of the Work Alchemical Psychology, James Hillman, p. 204 In his opening gambit JH quotes Jung, making it clear his thoughts are based on him. Jung quotes Heraclitus, showing that his thoughts have their roots in this pre-Socratic philosopher. We are in the realm of tradition. And as usual, I will put my 21st century 10 cents on top of their scaffolding. JH 204 Jung wrote: Four stages [;of the alchemical opus]; RB I prefer to read the word stage here not only as sequential linearity but as "All the world's a stage," by Shakespeare as well. (Even though Jung wrote this in German where this play on words does not work.) The four stages can be seen as part of a four ring circus, each with its own atmosphere, mood and aliveness (including death.) Depending where you look, there you are. This moves us away from a two dimensional story line to 3D simultaneous space. JH 204 {still Jung's quote} The transition to rubedo is formed by citrinitas [;yellowing];, though this, as we said, was omitted later. RB It appears that one of the essences of citrinitas is its transitional nature in-between, much like a stuffed animal (transitional object.) Don't tell its owner that this imaginary friend is a location between the 'inner' and the 'outer' world; but taking it as alchemy, yellow lives between the inner reflection of silver full-moon night and the outer heat of the solar day world. And to the friend of the stuffed animal it is not a stage from one condition to another, but the particular stage of love on which her life plays out. The question JH addresses is: why was this transitional stage left out? Which play in-between did we lose? This chapter begins with the question: what is the force that leads us from our introverted lunar reflection, albedo, (where we spent the entire last semester,) to an extraversion towards the 'outer' world and its attraction? JH 204 ...alchemical craft ...from hand workers' art of metallurgy, embalming, jewelry, shamanistic medicine, cosmetics, and cloth dying RB As JH stresses time and again, alchemy is related to the intelligence of the hands. It is related to our self-presentation throughout eternity, embalming, thus engaging trans-temporal display. It brings up the eternal questions: what is beauty, healing, and how do our garments transform us. These cosmetic garments aren't ephemeral only. Fashion is related to the essential. That's why clothing plays such a large role in traditional religions. To quote Jacques Derrida: depth is on the surface. Depth and surface aren't opposites. Surface displays. Alchemy comes from the arts of display. Surface is physiognomy. It gives the world a face. Surface gives access to intelligibility. (see below) JH 205 ... changes in color in the material at hand to be changes of essential nature ... Dyeing, as bathing or dipping - the Greek word baptizein -- affects essence RB For alchemy there is no distinction between appearance and essence. Its appearance gives it away. Greek phaenomenon from phainein, to show. (A good discussion can be found in the first half of Owen Barfield's book Saving the Appearances.) Alchemy is truly phenomenological: it judges matter by its display. When its display changes, its essence changes. A blue wall is fundamentally different from a yellow wall. Sitting by a blue wall we may get into a different mood than sitting by a yellow wall. We get absorbed by its color and participate in it. Baptism is being dyed by the invisible color of divinity, a change of essence. Like gilding. JH 205 A gilded statuette was considered more precious than one of solid gold because the gilded piece signified the transmutation from a baser metal to a golden state. RB A gilded statuette has been baptized, dedicated to the golden state. It thereby changes its quality throughout. Color is directly related to quality. The moment color is understood as a mathematics of wave forms, qualia disappear and quanta take their place. Thus the shift in understanding color, from qualitative essences to quantitative wave forms, separates the seer from the seen. Color becomes related to observation while in alchemy it is connected to participation. This shift in the understanding of color rings in the split between art and science, fundamentally qualitative understanding and basic quantitative understanding. Alchemy is understood as an Art. JH 205 Western philosophy ... considered colors to be not inherent in things but secondary qualities effected by light upon our subjective eyesight. RB What JH calls Western philosophy is Western scientific philosophy. The transition of emphasis from color to light gets enshrined ultimately in Einstein's relativity theory in which light speed (purely quantitative measurement) is the only constant in the universe. The move from multiple colors to the single absolute primacy of light is thus a movement from the material intimacy of alchemy to the cosmic distance of science. Its importance cannot be overemphasized. To understand alchemy we need to return first to colors as inherent qualities of matter. JH 205 The human eye's ability to distinguish 20,000 varieties of hue helps us read the inherent intelligibility of the world. RB With the qualitative reality of color the world becomes a book of many stories. These aren't stories we make up -- as in the 19th century anthropologistic and psychologistic understanding of animism and projection -- but these stories are actually present in the worlds themselves and we partake in them by way of the many hues of manifestation. In this understanding both objectivity and subjectivity recede behind living presence in which we partake as in food we ingest. Our visual taste buds taste things that are truly present in the world beyond the fact that they are simply fuel, analogous to colors being simply light. JH 205 Yellow ... withering ... aging ...old ...stains ... "putrefaction" and "corruption." ... "disparaging." Cowardice ... jealousy ... craven ...informs on friends ... cheap and lurid ...jaundiced eye of prejudice ... quarantine ...disease ... bitterness of bile ...spit. RB Yellow calls forth decline, negative judgement, matters of a lower order alien to egoic self-image, sliding away from norms of resilient health and decency into sickening realms of rot. Yellow undoes, infects health into pus. Yellow is a territory of inflammation giving access to the underworld and netherworld. Yellow differs from the black of nigredo in its gradual decline as opposed to sudden annihilation. It undoes the shining shell of self-congratulation, "have a nice day," and all's well with the world. Yellow portrays decay as an ongoing peeling away of fragrant optimism. JH 206 yellow ... cheerfully sunny ... ripening grains ... spring flowers, honey, sunlight ... radiant, shining ... most luminous ... vision is most acute RB At the same time that yellow portrays our undoing it shines with bright vision, land of honey, 'I have a Dream.' Yellow is aglow with simultaneous illogical incompatibility shredding the smug comfort zone. JH 206 Yellow is crazy ... troubled minds ... madness ... violent, raving lunacy. RB Maybe the incompatibility within, undoing single-narrative comfort leading to unbearable glaring complicatedness that boggles the mind is an essence of yellow? JH 206 The lens of opposites tends to ignore the context in which the yellow appears, its precise hue RB Yellow calls for burrowing down into specificity of all tendencies evoked by the particularity of this hue. Yellow complicates ever further until all pat generic stories have dissolved. Yellow shines forth with blemish! JH 207 fearless, brilliant, triumphantly luxurious of the yellows of the old-age paintings RB Yellow celebrates old age and the encroaching proximity of death: the unselfconsciously lasting last hurrah, the sheer joy of existence in the face of Not. JH 207 ... anthropological research ... all languages have terms for bright and dark ... third color term ... always red ... yellow-green - the hue the Greeks called chloris - becomes the essential bridge between black-white-red and the color terms that follow: blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray; in that order, more or less universally. RB Black-white-red are the simple basic colors, absolute in nature: night, day and blood. Blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray are colors of subtle differentiation and complexity. Chloris stands between the absolute and the complex, the ones and the many. It is the bridge of complication, complication as bridge, between the absolute idea and manifold reality. JH 208 yellow appears as a specific transitional quality in a temporal process. RB When a simple idea complicates, shines forth with diminishing clarity, it is a time of chloris.

Event

Yellow and The Stone

Psychological Alchemy Course

About the course: Yellowing and the Stone: Fermentation and the Goal of the Opus

Yellowing is about the way the images ferment in the body and bring about the dawning of a fresh sense that life matters profoundly. After innocence growth and greening having gone through a destructive nigredo black, the sadness of the blues and the lunatic reflection of silver, now the material goes unconscious again and becomes a seed to ferment for the whole body. Here the image becomes fully embodied.

In Concerning the Stone, Hillman investigates the goals of alchemy and deconstructs the notions of goal in general.
Here is a fascinating progression of alchemical thought as we move along the tortures, transmutations and ecstasies of the work that poisons us and gives us the profoundest of remedies, exceeding even the notion of health.

James Hillman was a past master of alchemical psychology. This field uses metaphors derived from ancient alchemy to elucidate deep structures in the creative imagination. Creative processes are not random. Imagination embodies along lines that become apparent when we ponder the frequently incomprehensible images of alchemy.
James Hillman was the primary training analyst of Robert Bosnak, who developed the field of embodied imagination: the way in which images can be felt in the body and shape our embodied condition. By studying alchemical psychology we come to understand ourselves and other humans in surprising ways that frequently diverge sharply from the habitual understandings we have unconsciously absorbed from the cultures in which we were raised. These new awarenesses can engender unexpected vitality and wonder.

This course will follow the teachings of Hillman in his final and most profound book, Alchemical Psychology. This volume covers a lifetime of studies and is quite difficult to read by someone who is not deeply steeped in alchemy, the work of C.G. Jung as well as James Hillman. Bosnak has worked with and studied these thinkers for well over 40 years.

In the course we will go through the chapters 'Yellow' and 'The Stone' page by page, and frequently line by line, sometimes dropping even between the lines into the great mystery itself. For those who have tasted these mysteries, there is no way back. One is haunted by them for life. It was so with Jung, Hillman, and with Bosnak as well. It will happen to you if youre open to it.

Robert Bosnak, PsyA, is a Jungian psychoanalyst who graduated from the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich in 1977. Since then he was been in private practice in the United States and Australia. He founded the Santa Barbara Healing Sanctuary, developed a method of working with dreams called Embodied Imagination. He also wrote several books, among which the worldwide bestseller A Little Course In Dreams.

Course: This is a 10 class course. In six months there are 10 web presentations of 1.5 hour.

Dates: live web broadcast, you will get an audio recording of the event as well.

The course starts September 15th, 2016
October 13 ,2016
November 3, 17 ,2016
December 8, 15 ,2016
January 26 ,2017
February 2, 9, 23 ,2017
Time: 6pm PST / 9pm EST
Location: online / webinar

Cost: 10 Sessions: $150 (incl. copy of the audio recording).
Sign up before April 30th, and get another 15% discount and pay only $127.50
Sign up at www.JungPlatform.com

You can also send a check to Jung Platform, 29 Layton Avenue. Salt Lake City. Utah. 84115

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Online Webinar (View)
www.JungPlatform.com
Salt Lake City, UT 84115
United States

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Owner: Jung Platform

On BPT Since: Oct 12, 2013

Machiel Klerk

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