The Symbol and the Time of Dreams
The ancient Aboriginal people of Australia tell in their wisdom of a time when the world came into being through divine music ...
Archetypes and legends intertwine in the fascination of a dream, in which everything had its beginning.
A mystical alchemy of reality in which light and sound brought life to this part of the Universe.
Since then the world has grown, cradled to the rhythm of the Sun, the Moon, and the stars ...
Man was part of a cosmic whole in which Nature and Spirit built a divine everyday life, always being reborn at the dawn of a new day among the music and colors of life...
Since antiquity the power of the word was known and valued, but as the centuries passed men lost its evocative effectiveness and in modern times it has been reduced to a miserable practical and material function.
The symbol, which derives from the Greek sun-ballein and means to put together, to unite, has existed long before the word and implies something that lies beyond its obvious and immediate meaning, the unconscious.
When the human mind observes a symbol, it is brought into contact with ideas that lie beyond rational capacities.
“Modern man does not realize how much his “rationalism” has destroyed his ability to respond to symbols and supernatural ideas. He has freed himself from “superstition”, but in this process he has lost his spiritual values to a deeply dangerous extent. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and now he pays the price of this shipwreck in general disorientation and dissociation ....
... Man feels isolated in the cosmos, since he is no longer part of nature and has lost his emotional “unconscious identity” with natural phenomena. These, in turn, have gradually lost their symbolic implications. Thunder is no longer the voice of an angry deity, nor lightning its vengeful dart. Rivers are no longer the home of spirits, nor trees the vital principle of man, nor the snake the incarnation of wisdom ... This enormous loss is only compensated by the symbols of dreams. They present us again with our original nature, with its instincts and its particular thought ...”
C. G. Jung “Man and His Symbols”
We must return to considering symbols as a gift descended from above, so as to rediscover the essence of all things and the universal bond that exists between the small and the great, between the earth and the sky, the rational and the irrational.
By acting in this way we will regain the inner peace and tranquility lost long ago. Ours is a modest contribution to the revaluation of symbols in today’s materialistic reality!
“As the hand is joined to the arm, as all the limbs are joined together, so no part of the universe is separate from the others, and nothing is placed outside the simplest, most perfect order.”
G. Bruno
“All of nature is governed by a profound harmony, invisible lines connect the small things of the earth, such as, for example, the powers of men to the stars and the infinite worlds we do not yet know. The moon causes the tides, and also women’s menstruation, the sun causes the life and death of plants and the alternation of the seasons, and also the life and death of man.”
G. Bruno