The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World

Rating:
Summary: a beautiful book full of heart
Review: In this, one of Hillman's best books, he rewrites two talks as essays, both of which revisualize the literal blood pump in the chest as the metaphorical place where imagination begins and image connects consciousness and world.

To hear that world and the soul which animates it (for soul isn't just locked up in the head or body), we must dwell on its specifics. Here are some illustrative quotations:

My practice tells me I can no longer distinguish clearly between neurosis of self and neurosis of world, psychopathology of self and psychopathology of world. Moreover, it tells me that to place neurosis and psychopathology solely in personal reality is a delusional repression of what is actually, realistically, being experienced.

The world, because of its breakdown, is entering a new moment of consciousness: by drawing attention to itself by means of its symptoms, it is becoming aware of itself as a psychic reality.

Let us imagine the anima mundi [world soul] neither above the world encircling it as a divine and remote emanation of spirit, a world of powers, archetypes, and principles transcendent to things, nor within the material world as its unifying panpsychic life-principle. Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form.