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The pure act cannot be grasped
Sunday, 6 October 2024 at 22:09
Le Bateleur
The pure act cannot be grasped
Tomberg suggests a kind of spiritual attunement or atOnement on the part of The Magician, a connection with the Divine – that results, quite literally, in grace-full creativity. In the magician’s deftness of hand, Tomberg presents an analogy of being that is concentration without conscious effort, which is magical. But this standpoint of atOneness is not without its limitations as we have already discovered. Both the genius and the limitations of the Magician are summed up at the beginning of Tomberg’s second meditation as follows:
But the pure act... in itself cannot be grasped; it is only its reflection which tenders it perceptible, comparable and understandable or, in other words, it is by virtue of the reflection that we become conscious of it...
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Creative spontaneity
Thursday, 3 October 2024 at 20:48
Creative spontaneity
In meditating upon the tarot card that has the image of the Magician, Tomberg describes an adept who is perfectly at ease with his craft. What the Magician does with his hands is with perfect spontaneity: it is easy play and not work. The Magician himself does not follow the movement of his own hands, his gaze is elsewhere.
The Magician represents the man who has attained harmony and equilibrium between the spontaneity of the unconscious (in the sense given to it by C. G. Jung) and the deliberate action of the conscious (in the sense of ‘I’ or ego consciousness). His state of consciousness is the synthesis of the conscious and the unconscious - of creative spontaneity and deliberately executed activity. It is the state of consciousness that the psychological school of C. G. Jung calls ‘individuation’, or ‘synthesis of the conscious and unconscious elements in the personality’, or ‘synthesis of the self’.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Consciousness is the mystery
Tuesday, 1 October 2024 at 22:23
Valentin Tomberg
Consciousness is the mystery
Having travelled the long and hard road to individuation to develop and purify the active element of being, it was hard to accept that consciousness needs another element, a passive element. However, there is no consciousness without these two elements, and the suppression of this duality in the Substance, or the Absolute I of Idealism, must necessarily lead to the extinction not of being but rather of consciousness.
Consciousness is the mystery, not being. Consciousness is where the magic lives and encounter opens the door to it. Where better then to turn than to a Magician, as Valentin Tomberg did in his Meditations upon the Tarot?
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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