washing dishes: a father’s glimpses

HHI: Hillman hits it

By

I’ve been smitten with James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code: in search of character and calling since I read the four word phrase this book champions children on page 13. In the dozen pages before, he writes how “by preserving the myth we may better preserve ourselves and prosper” (pg 8) and

Our lives may be determined less by our childhood than by the way we have learned to imagine our childhoods. We are less damaged by the traumas of childhood than by the traumatic way we remember childhood as a time of unnecessary and externally caused calamities that wrongly shaped us. So this book wants to repair some of that damage by showing what else was there, is there, in your nature.

But, its the 4.5 pages at the century mark that captivates me in the many definitions and descriptions of intuition, as Hillman writes:

  1. Perceiving the invisible, perceiving the acorn.
  2. Mythic sensibility; when a myth strikes and gives sudden insight.
  3. psychology: direct and unmediated knowledge.
  4. Immediate, innate apprehension of complex group of data.
  5. A thoughtless, nonfeeling state.
  6. Clear, quick, full apprehension.
  7. Experience absent reflective thinking or cogitation.
  8. Taking others in wholly, that is accent, clothes, build, expression.
  9. Sensing invisible significance in [spite of] massive, tedious data.
  10. Perceiving the image, the whole gestalt.
  11. What occurs as a sudden idea, a definitive judgment, a grasped meaning.
  12. What is brought by or inherent in an event.
  13. Rapid understanding.
  14. A revelation independent of time.
  15. Capable of missing the mark.
  16. according to Jung, 1 of 4 functions of consciousness with thinking, feeling, and sensing.
  17. Inescapable-squared: creativity and genius that cannot be explained.
  18. Mythical perception.
  19. A precursor to myth.
  20. Sudden illumination.

I distill paragraphs from a book excerpt into a long list of definitions because new associations with an old world like intuition are useful and to be able to access the many examples of how to illustrate. As Hillman describes an anecdote as “a telling example that lights up an obscure idea.”