Perspectives on Change

A series of articles on the perspectives that lie behind the development of Guideways for Change.

Perspectives on Change I: Chaos and Language

Explores how the xiang or Symbol, the basic unit of the language of Change, becomes what chaos people call a Strange Attractor that mirrors the hole or lack in our lives, the missing information that connects us to the (w)hole. This process works in the structure of Change through a fractal doubling or mirroring that tangles language to reveal the Ji, the hidden triggers or wellsprings of Change.

Perspectives on Change II: Archetypal Psychology

Archetypal psychology looks at the crucial cultural connection between generations – the goal of ritual education – through the dual archetype of the Puer and the Senex, the Divine Boy and the Wise Old Man. The connection is soul or Anima, the lost mediating realm. Soul-making reconstitutes this faith in the images. We do it through Personifying the creatures of our dreams and symbols; letting them Pathologize or deconstruct us; Psychologizing outer events and encountering them first of all in soul; and Seeing through the literal events of the world to the psychic realties behind them.

Perspectives on Change III: Intertextuality

A selection of excerpts on the radical cultural philosophy and reading strategy called intertextuality in which each text is “playfully” contained within the imaginative space of the Other(s). Through this continual re-contextualizing dialogue both reader and text experience their historicity as a transformative process.  It opens a shifting and ambiguous landscape where “the Real becomes Not-real when the Unreal’s Real” – the instantaneous movement that characterizes intertextual communication.

The Light that Wilhelm Kindled: Jung’s I Ching and the Spirit of the East

A lecture given at the CG Jung Institute, Los Angeles September 2001. In 1937 Jung was invited to give the Terry Lectures at Yale University, fifteenth in a series of “Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy.” In this talk I quote and paraphrase major works Jung wrote when directly under the influence of the Spirit of the East he discovered through Wilhelm and his work.  It is, so to speak, the “Terry lecture he never gave.”

Death and Renewal: Metaphysics and Psychologies of Change

Session 9 of the UPR Lectures. This is a dramatic re-presentation of one of Richard Wilhelm’s lectures given between 1926 and 1929 at the China Institute in Frankfurt. I would ask you to imagine that Wilhelm himself is speaking.