There is no passivity in the night
As a lover of reading and a lover of photography, I have found that often, if not always, these two passions go hand in hand, whenever I read something interesting and engaging, a photograph I have taken in the past always comes to mind, and which describes the situation I am reading well, and other time the words suggest new images to materialize.
These days I was rummaging through old photographs and I came across this slide taken many years ago on the banks of the Taro river, in Giarola, during a beautiful stormy night. In these same days I am reading a book that investigates, look at random, the very world of night and dreams, and this image curiously condenses and symbolizes many of the meanings exposed in this book. It is a curious fact, because after years of lying buried in oblivion, this photo came back to light "by chance" just the day before I started reading that book, and even this book had been lying forgotten on the shelves for years and dusted off by a my friend who, browsing through my volumes, exclaimed "this book is interesting", making me curious.
This is an energetic night, like every night for me. The night is the moment when my thoughts and creativity are awakened, questions, anxieties, desires are crowded: the night has nothing passive at all, it is not a dead time, a waiting for the new sunrise to resume life, quite the opposite: it is part of life itself, and an important and fascinating part.
The night, with its dark spaces, is very imaginative, it leaves us the freedom to fill those black and indefinite spaces with what most our fantasy or our desires suggest to us, but also our fears and all the monsters that are. able to give birth. If we let ourselves be overwhelmed by fear, then the night and sleep will be terrifying dark forests, if we let ourselves be guided instead by curiosity, then there will be many wonderful secrets that we could discover.
This image conveys to me very well the idea of the night as a laboratory of mysterious energies and forces where, from the encounter between two opposites, between darkness and light, between dreams and lucidity, between earth and sky, the creative spark rise, the idea, the dream. Ours is a world of opposites, it is the realm of duality, of contrasts, these same lightnings arise from the meeting of two energies of opposite sign, + and -, we ourselves are duality made person, our brain is divided into two hemispheres that think differently, and we ourselves live two different lives every day, one during the day governed by our conscience, to which we attach great importance, and one at night, governed by our unconscious, which we underestimate and sometimes ridicule, simply because we don't understand it.
With the complicity of the dark, which has this magical ambivalence halfway between paralyzing fear and electrifying curiosity, the night is a time of turmoil, turmoil and maturation, where thoughts, desires, curiosity and creativity sprout and take root, which then they will blossom into our day life. If we ignore what happens in us during the night and during sleep, especially when we dream, during the day we risk becoming mere puppets. We will mechanically obey projects and programs conceived in us during the night by an unknown part of ourselves, or perhaps by something / someone else that dwells in us, and does not wait for other than the night, that we doze our conscience, in order to act in us. Many of us then during the following day will also be so presumptuous or naive as to claim the authorship of these ideas and these projects.
Perhaps we have never thought about it properly, but our life during sleep is completely transformed, both psychically and physically, and it is absolutely reductive to think that night and sleep are simply a cessation of daily activities to rest and regain energy, far from it ! We probably give too much importance to our day life, and too little to our night life: we are strangers to ourselves for almost half of our life !
All these intriguing observations arise from reading the book DREAMS OF THE DAY AND DREAMS OF THE NIGHT by Giorgio Abraham of which I want to leave you a few sentences that should make us reflect:
"... in sleep the future is built, while in wakefulness we do nothing but administer what has been built at night, albeit underground. (...) The incessant work of the night resembles that of those who, behind the fifth, they write the speeches of the great leaders. (...) Probably during the night the traces that mark our march through time and prepare the next steps towards the future are redrawn. (...)
It is established that in rapid-wave sleep there is a consumption of oxygen and glucose higher than during the day, which cannot be explained as the need for energy recovery (...). There is no passivity in the night ... "
I found many interesting and original ideas in this book, even if in the final part the author delves too much into psychological and psychoanalytic theories that sincerely, and it is only a strictly personal opinion, seem to me so many castles in the air. Maybe I don't have much sympathy with psychology for this very reason, at times they seem to me discussions on the sex of angels, without being able to really produce predictions or solutions, perhaps due to its partiality, because psychology often considers only the mind, without considering that people have also a soul, and these two entities interact producing beings that are each a singularity that is not always predictable and not always framed in a pattern.
Years ago I became interested in this discipline but then I abandoned it because it seemed to me that it did not give answers to my deepest questions, more than answers they seemed to me justifications created a posteriori to frame certain events within a pre-established theory, full of high-sounding big words , erudition, mental bureaucracy.
I have understood over time that in order to seek answers to our most intimate questions, we must not only search in the present but we must go far, far in time, and the farther we go, the closer we get to the Truth, even if It in itself is unknowable for us, and this can be frustrating to accept, but we must understand the limits within which we live, otherwise we risk falling into vulgar presumption, in sterile knowledge.
I have the impression that the ancient philosophical schools, the ancient spiritualities and the ancient mystics have understood much more the human soul and psychology than all the scientific currents in which modern psychology branches off. The same hermetic symbology that is expressed in the Tarot cards, if studied and deepened in all its details, reveals an extraordinary knowledge of the human psyche, a knowledge that opens up immense scenarios, while not uttering any words. And this is not only true for psychology, but also for other sciences, but this is a topic that I will address in another post.
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Reading and reflecting on these topics, It was born in my head, like a spark, the association of these ideas with a Tarot card: the Temperance ! This beautiful Arcanum seems to want to symbolize all of these thoughts. For a more harmonious, profound, connected and complete life, we should appropriately "mix" the worlds, known and unknown, and the opposing energies that harbor within us! Everything that science and psychoanalysis try to express through a multitude of studies, books and publications, is here beautifully condensed into a single small image, only apparently simple, a symbol that goes beyond every word and fills our eyes with profound meanings. through the sublime language of beauty and sweetness, a jewel of art and symbolism:
The Temperance from the Tarot deck "Influence of the Angels" by Jody Boginski Barbessi and Karen Boginski
This sweet angel holds two cups in his hands (which could also represent the two hemispheres of our brain), making two opposite energies flow between them (we also have two types of fluids inside us, a venous blood and an arterial blood ), two energies that must be mixed and harmonized with each other. The angel himself keeps one foot immersed in water, and one placed on dry land, he is suspended halfway between two neighboring but very different worlds, one emerged and one submerged (conscious and unconscious). Two realities that should be kept in balance and in communication with each other, without preferring one over the other. The virtue of temperance, the wise art of knowing how to harmonize and value opposites, without excluding anyone, the card of moderation but not of exclusion! Temperance is aimed precisely at the relationship of man with himself, at the harmonization of our worlds: body and soul, instinct and reason, passivity and activity, conscious and unconscious, day and night, dream and conscience: all dualities in apparent contrast . No element is more important than the other, and each makes sense in relation to the other, our realization occurs when these different worlds communicate, interact and collaborate for a common purpose.
We are made of opposites and we live in a world of polarity in opposition, only with a wise "temperance" of the elements, as a subtle alchemical operation, will we be able to find that unity that reunites us to our home, to Nature, to the living cosmos. Otherwise we will live a fragmented, incomplete life, perhaps an end in itself. We have to recover all the pieces of the puzzle to recompose ourselves.
These opposite worlds, however, should not be amalgamated, by mixing all the colors, in fact, only an insignificant dull gray is obtained. The different polarities must be able to coexist counterbalancing each other, each with its own indispensable peculiarities, and it is in finding this balance that the alchemy lies.
Perhaps from the conscious contact of two energies of opposite sign that very bright spark can be born that makes us glimpse beyond the veil, like a lightning that pierces the night.