Yes, you are right, Andrew. When Hillman hears the word "transcendence" he reaches for his revolver. But I am not sure that this in itself disqualifies his position from mysticism.
Hillman writes:
"The 'emptying out' of Western positivisms, comparable to a Zen exercise or a way of Nirvana, is precisely what archetypal psychology has effectuated, though by means that are utterly Western, where 'Western' refers to a psychology of soul as imagined in the tradition of the south." – Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account.
Hillman calls himself a Neoplatonist, and often quotes the Dialogues.
Roberts Avens expands:
"Perhaps, then, a Western Nirvana would require that the West first lose itself in the immeasurably vast and dangerous caverns of the imagination before it may reach the heights of Eastern spirituality; for otherwise there is a risk of a monistic adulation of the spirit-principle. First imagination, then spirit." p 8.
"But also: there is no spiritualization without imagination because in the end it is the imagination that ‘images’ the spirit even when the latter pretends to be independent from the imagination; for spiritual independence or detachment, like everything else humanly created, is a product and a fantasy of the soul." p 8.
"I take the view that imagination is the common ground of both Eastern and Western spiritualities in their most diverse manifestations insofar as their professed aim is to transcend all duality." p 9.
"By transcendence I do not mean going beyond duality in the direction of oneness and unity nor any other sort of ‘wholeing’, but rather an awareness of the essential polycentricity of life - seeing ontological value in the absence of ‘eternal’ values and principles. For I am convinced that there is no other way of being human and free." p 9.
This is the Zen idea of "Non-Duality" - where the transcendent is experienced as immanent in the world - undivided. As the Buddha says: "Samsara IS Nirvana".
Hillman calls Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) "the first work of modern psychology." For Hillman, as for Blake, heaven and hell are modes of the Divine Imagination.
Hillman's reduction, if indeed it is a true reduction, is the reduction of all experience to the psychic image, which for him is the fundamental building block of all experience - the atoms of the psyche, as it were. Nothing ever happens unless it becomes an image to Psyche. But since the image is "a complex datum", it is infinitely expandable.
Hillman claims that in his psychology "Reductionism is defeated from the start because the mind is poetic to begin with, and consciousness is not a later, secondary elaboration upon a primitive base but is given with that base in every image." Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, p 10.
Yes, I did see your depression thread, Andrew. I do look in when I am not participating. Unfortunately I was in one of my "voiceless" phases. Being a type of Persephone, I spend certain seasons in the deep and cold underworld. Not that I am rendered literally mute, I carry on almost as normal, but I have trouble with articulation at those times. Poetry becomes a laughable impossibility. And my temper at such times is not conducive to a discussion board. Ask someone who has tried to live with me! So I choose to absent myself.
But if someone were to offer me a guaranteed "cure" for this condition, I would refuse it. Because I know that anything of any value I might have written, or will write in the future, is utterly dependent on this condition.
I meant to say to Rose - I love that avatar!
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