consciousness is the source of all things

 

Odilon Redon

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When a poet carries the mind into a context of meanings and then pitches it past those, one knows that marvelous rapture that comes from going past all categories of definition. Here we sense the function of metaphor that allows us to make a journey we could not otherwise make, past all categories of definition.

If you read “Jesus ascended to heaven” in terms of its metaphoric connotation, you see that he has gone inward – not into outer space but into inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. The images are outward, but their reflection is inward.

The point is that we should ascend with him by going inward. It is a metaphor of returning to the source, alpha and omega, of leaving the fixation on the body behind and going to the body’s dynamic source.


—Joseph Campbell
Thou Art That
excerpts

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20 And when he was demanded of the Pharisees when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, 

The kingdom of God cometh not with observation:

21 Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

—Jesus of Nazareth

Luke 17:20-21

King James Version

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I’d woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist. —Fernando Pessoa

 

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My originality consists in putting logic of the visible 

to the service of the invisible.

—Odilon Redon

The Death of Buddha

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So what can they tell us,

the writers of dreambooks,

the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,

the doctors

with couches for analyses—

if anything fits,

it’s accidental,

and for one reason only,

that in our dreamings,

in their shadowings and gleamings,

in their multiplings, inconceivablings,

in their haphazardings and widescatterings at times

even a clear-cut meaning may slip through.

—Wisława Szymborska

Dreams, excerpt

Clare Cavanaugh and Stanisław Barańczak version

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