Traversing Imaginary Landscapes

I recently discovered this book by happenstance, and am sorry that it wasn't one of the books that I had in my research arsenal when working on The Immanence of Myth. It is right up the alley of what I was trying to express in the sections on the mythologies of science, at least for the most part, and I would highly suggest it as a companion work to that book, or vice versa.

"In the Beginning was the Word are the words that begin the Gospel that establishes the quintessentially Western cosmology in which the world is a word, a sound  that unfolded space through time. Our word "cosmology" still echoes with the reverberations of that Johannine vision of seven Greek syllables  seven deeply resonant vowels that, like the opening of Bach's Art of the Fugue, set forth the theme that has the architecture of its variations implicit within it. From the seven syllables of Creation t the seven seals of the Apocalypse, the story of our world is the sound it makes in its passing. It is only after the opening of the Seventh Seal that there is silence in heaven of half an hour.
In telling the story of once upon a time in gospel, myth, or fairy tale, in returning in the imagination or the time of the arche, it is not so much what one says that builds a world, for once can say that the world began in wind or water or word, but it is the telling itself that sets up the structure of identification, the narrative structure that gives form to time and space. When the newly born infant moves its arms and legs in rhythm to its mother's speech, it does not yet know the mother's language, but the sounds themselves set up a relationship of Self and Other that is the fundamental arising of a world." (Imaginary Landscape). 

We may consider so many other models of cosmology, from the Logos and representational models of cosmology that emphasize the word, such as in the Sefer Yetzirah, the original (recognized) Qabbalistic text which lays out the basis of creation as the permutation of a divine language, the Torah itself "made of fire" Or we might consider the more pictographic and fanciful cosmology of the Pueblo Indians, who show a 4-fold creation story that at once calls to mind elements of the Osiris myth and the ascention of Shiva and Shakti in the Kundalini serpent in the Tantrik traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism  (As diverse as those two traditions are otherwise.) Regardless, this idea holds true, and it is with this concept of cosmology and narrative that we enfold ourselves without our world and at once make sense of it and find our place within it.

The same is true within our very bodies.

In fact, as previously mention on this site, I have been running a sort of web class with the intent of helping people in facilitating creativity and possibly presence of mind. It's a sort of loosely defined system of movement meditation practices.

"Internal Arts will be a series dealing with the creative process in its various guises: from meditative techniques to anecdotal material from independent artists." 

Catch that HERE on Alterati, and at the same time, consider exploring it alongside works like Imaginary Landscape, Apocalyptic Imaginary, and The Immanence of Myth. These books may appear somewhere between dense and obtuse if you are unfamiliar with a certainly philosophical approach, and they all employ an element of repetition to get ideas across. But they also constitute a sort of teaching, the self teaching the self through a deeper exploration of symbols, that cannot be given in a classroom, or certainly not a classroom that merely provides us with facts and figures. They represent the culmination of decades of work between us, and the practices that I'm trying to share in Internal Arts, while I try to pass them along without any pretense of authority, are not easily discovered nor gained.

And I know that I have what most people would consider a verbose way of speaking and writing when I am doing so "naturally" that is out of sync with "the times" and I should really "get with it." I'd like you all to know that I typed this entire paragraph with my middle finger.

Goodnight, friends.

IoM is Myth Dead

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]