21-11-2009, 08:26 PM
Helen Reyes Wrote:.
It's interesting the Milosz's cousin Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Prize Winner in 1980 for his 1953 work The Captive Mind, devotes a lot of that book to retelling a novel (Insatiability by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz) about the Murti-Bing pill, a sort of instant gratification medication from the Orient, and connects it with the importation of Asian religion into Christian Europe at the expense of the ancien regime. Czeslaw Milosz connects this directly with Nazi flirtations with Buddhism, iirc. Nominally his book is about the effect of Marxist-Leninist doctrine on the populations of the Soviet satellites.
(My bolding)
I imagine (but certainly don't know) this is equivalent to the "pill of immortality" of Taoist alchemy that is aimed at sublimating the libido towards greater consciousness-spiritual growth (much like the abstemious practices of Catholic monks) and which I believe had it origins (like Chinese Shoalin Temple martial arts) in India, and which almost certainly equates to Arabic and European Alchemy in the production of the wondrous elixir/Philosophers Stone.
What this thread is telling me is that there is a common fountainhead to all these subjects and that the passionate hunt over untold decades for the underlying truth and knowledge of them is imbedded in the very nature of mankind.
But then as you all know, I am inclined to wax poetical in these subjects.:hmmmm2:
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
Carl Jung - Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.14