Guns and Roses Part I by Honora Foah

M I   

It might be said that we owe the fairest flowers of our love-‐life to the reactions against the hostile impulse which we divine in our breasts. SIGMUND FREUD

Fall & Winter 2012 Why Does Venus Love Mars? Honora Foah Exploring the relationship between beauty and brutality.

War, Peace and the American Imagination Jean Houston Dr. Houston’s introductory remarks from a debate held at Emory University.

War, Peace and the American Imagination James Hillman Dr. Hillman’s introductory remarks from a debate held at Emory University.

War, Peace and the American Imagination Deepak Chopra Dr. Chopra’s introductory remarks from a debate held at Emory University.

And Ceasar’s spirit, ranging for revenge, With Ate by his side come hot from hell, Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

War is the father of all. HERACLITUS

Being reveals itself as war. EMMANUEL LEVINAS

We reflect on this war because it causes us to rise into another aspect of our being. It calls us into being. JEAN HOUSTON

If it is a primordial component of being, then war fathers the very structure of existence and our thinking about it: our ideas of the universe, of religions, of ethics; war determines the thought patterns of Aristotle’s logic of opposites, Kant’s antinomies, Darwin’s natural selection, Marx’s struggle of classes, and even Freud’s repression of the id by the ego and superego. JAMES HILLMAN

Never, believe me, do the Gods appear alone. FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER

Where war is Venus will be. JAMES HILLMAN

Why Does Venus Love Mars?

Why Does Venus

Love Mars?

Honora Foah President, Mythic Imagination Institute

Often people say to us at

experience of being

Mythic Imagination, as they

alive…that we actually feel

said to Joseph Campbell—We

the rapture of being alive.’

all are seeking a meaning for life. Campbell answered, ‘I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an

This hunger is so powerful that we will seek it even in destructive ways, because it is precisely in danger and duress that we are most likely to

become aware of the life force itself and the preciousness of it. Drugs, speed, war.

This experience is often an

A moment of peace, of rest,

quickening of beauty and the

experience of beauty. Beauty

of completion, of stopping.

quickening of a sense of

in any form seems to quicken

Beauty can help us experience

purpose and consequent

the spirit while calming at the

‘enough.’ Beauty can create

valor can feel similar. We

same time. Or perhaps not

silence. But oddly, it can also

need to face this. What is the

calming exactly, but creating a

create the opposite,

relationship between beauty

sense of rightness, of finally

insatiable desire.

and brutality? Why does

being in the right place, there is no where else to be. To see this sunset is enough.

The quickening of sex and violence can feel alike. The

Venus love Mars?

Ah—who can resist those bad boys? She doesn’t marry him though. No, Venus marries the maker, the magical maker of things, the master of the forge, Hephaestus, Vulcan. For the long term, it is art not war, creativity not destruction. But, Oh, those bad boys. Despite my extreme discomfort at having to put myself in the company of hedge fund managers and the Wall Street Masters of the Universe who fancy themselves the Śivas of our time, they have a point. They have taken to justifying themselves through the doctrine of ‘creative destruction.’ As a student of Śiva, I can only acknowledge that destruction is necessary, death is necessary, for life to be renewed. This much I will concede—the MOTU, while often hailed as the creators of opportunity, are in fact the grim reapers. Look at the speed, the danger, the power of the Wall Street life. When you are moving that fast, everything feels pared to an exhilarating essential drive—and moral nuance is for pansies.

In a television program I was watching the other night, the FBI was trying to take down some insider traders. The sting involved penetrating the 25,000 dollar-‐entry fight club the brokers had put together. The winners of the fights were given illegal inside trade-‐worthy information. The portrayal of the boxing and the portrayal of the competition on the trading floor were all of a piece. You beat someone bloody, you’ve earned the right to bloody the law, you win, you’re given a leg up to win. For the storywriter, the equivalents were clear, as they are to any American viewer. Fight Club, one of my favorite movies, works with a deeper, darker picture. Fight Club is about materialism and capitalism and what that does to the soul. One of the reasons I like it so much is because someone has tried to take on this subject. It is especially about the losers, specifically the men who are not the Masters of the Universe. They also form a fight club, which is some kind of cathartic, desperate assertion of manhood, in the midst of a soulless world.

A few years ago, Mythic Imagination and The

home to roost is considered blasphemous.

Alliance for a New Humanity held a

And I mean that in the religious sense. These

conversation between James Hillman and

images of ourselves are held as sacred and to

Deepak Chopra, moderated by Jean Houston

ask questions, to attempt other images is

called War, Peace and the American

treated as a burning offense.

Imagination.

In the highly recommended, A Terrible Love of

As he stepped to the podium James Hillman

War that Hillman wrote, one chapter is

asks, why am I here? and answers himself by

specifically about War as Religion and Religion

saying, lately it seems that it is not so much

as War.

for the sake of war and peace, as much as it is for the American imagination.

Deepak, in his opening remarks chooses to paint an imagination of what it would be like

He places our violence and soullessness in the

to escape the diabolical imagination, the

realm of the flatland of materialism, in the

creativity that dreams up exotic weapons and

inability to imagine the lives of others, in our

fantastical tortures, and enter a realm of

inability to imagine and therefore to care

consciousness where these opposing forces

about the consequences of what we do. Our

melt away under the power of a wider and

failure to imagine is a willful thing. We do not

deeper experience of connection and joy.

want to imagine what the rollout of our war machine actually does. We don’t have to—we are too busy, we are moving too fast, we have to get on with business. We are happy in the story that we are the good guys, that we are innocent and after 9/11, that we are the victims. Any mention of chickens coming

Jean Houston begins by placing us inside an American story of division, calling the Civil War our American Mahabharata. She also says, “We reflect on…war because it calls us to rise into another aspect of our being.”

To make a suggestion as you enter this world, this other aspect of our being, which is described in these opening remarks by Hillman, Houston and Chopra—it is beautiful and necessary to hear what Deepak pictures for us. If there are not profound imaginations of a way forward, that reality cannot come into being. But, consider resisting the impulse to run into the arms of this vision too quickly. Linger to do the hard and necessary work which Hillman asks us to do. What is utterly remarkable about this conversation is how necessary, and in the end complementary, both, very different points of view are.

So, perhaps rather than asking why, it is more important to simply accept and begin from the fait accompli – Venus loves Mars. Now what do we do? Hillman asks us to own our Martial desires. If we do so, we may then as the rightful owner, offer them, surrender them into the keeping of the vast ocean that is the source of the great life force that we long to feel coursing through us with power and grace.

The first principle of psychological method holds that any phenomenon to be understood must be sympathetically imagined. JAMES HILLMAN

War, Peace and the American Imagination Deepak Chopra, author of Peace Is The Way, believes it is possible for individuals to transform their consciousness to such an extent that humanity will bring an end to war. James Hillman, author of A Terrible Love of War, suggests that we are ceaselessly driven by archetypal realities that reveal themselves in a multitude of ways, including the bloodlust of war. He wonders if we can tame this drive, but questions if it can ever be transformed. On September 20, 2006 in Glenn Memorial Auditorium at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia these great minds discussed and debated the causes of war, examined the possibilities of peace, and explored the role of the imagination. The renowned philosopher and mythologist Jean Houston moderated the evening's conversation hosted by the Mythic Imagination Institute. What follows are the introductory remarks made prior to the debate.

Jean Houston

James Hillman

Deepak Chopra

War, Peace and the American Imagination 1st Speaker

Jean Houston I'd like to begin where we are, in Atlanta, but not now, no, one-‐hundred-‐and-‐forty-‐three years ago. Perhaps around Peachtree Creek or Nancy Creek or in Inman Park. It seems to me that I can almost hear it, the shuffling of dusty feet of men in tattered gray and blue. The horses neighing. The old songs picked out on the banjo around some campfire the night before the battle: Tenting Tonight, My Old Kentucky Home, Just Before the Battle Mother, When the Cruel War Is Over, Somebody's Darling. I can hear the soft, southern voices reading aloud the letters from home, and I can hear the quiet tang of the northern ones writing the utter fullness of their hearts to their loved ones.

I can see what happened across the various creeks where the southern soldiers were on one side and the northern on the other. But at night, as many of you know, they would actually cross the creek and sing together and read their letters to each other and share tiny bits of food, or a chaw of tobacco. Then the next day, across the creek, they would have to be enemies again. War and Peace. It has been called the crossroads of our being, this Civil War. It has been said that it defined us as to what we are and it opened us to what we became both for good and certainly for ill. It exists in our minds like a great, great passion play, a mystery drama that

forever beckons only to recede into the smoke of some ghost of a battle when we think we have actually come close to it. This Passion Play has spawned as much reflection, artwork, novels, studies, poems, films, plays, and music of the last hundred and forty odd years as has the Passion of Christ, and for perhaps the same reasons. Whole industries exist to perpetuate its memory. Ken Burns’ PBS series, how many of you saw that? It stunned the public with the power, the truth, the mastery of its presentation.

Letter to his wife Sarah, from Sullivan Ballou July 14, 1861 Camp Clark, Washington

My very dear Sarah: The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days— perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write again, I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more. I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American Civilization now leans on the triumph of the Government and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the Revolution. And I am willing— perfectly willing—to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt. Sarah my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me unresistibly on with all these chains to the battle field. The memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you come creeping over me, and I feel most gratified to God and to you that I have enjoyed them for so long. And hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when, God willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and seen our sons grown up to honorable manhood, around us. I have, I know, but few and small claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me—perhaps it is the wafted prayer of my little Edgar, that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed.

If I do not my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battle field, it will whisper your name. Forgive my many faults and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless and foolish I have often times been! How gladly would I wash out with my tears every little spot upon your happiness. But, O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the gladdest days and in the darkest nights . . . always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by. Sarah do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again.

Sullivan Ballou

Yet my love of Country comes over

me like a strong windâ&#x20AC;Ś and bears me unresistibly on to the battle field.

War calls us into being.

We reflect on this war because it causes us to rise into another aspect of our being. It calls us into being. It chills our heart with its horror—the sheer horror of war. It cracks our mind by its enormity, and it draws us into myth by its very being. It is our Iliad, our Homeric epic; it is our Mahabharata. But although it is long since over and done with, it continues to exist in a between-‐the-‐worlds place where on some forever landscape it perpetually plays itself out and there it remains unresting, relentless, demanding that we try to understand it, be available to its mystery, incarnate its passion and redeem its yet untold vision. As Elliot said, "Redeem the time; redeem the unread vision of the higher dream." What is in this higher dream? This is something that will be part of the discussion tonight. What is there beyond the polarity of war and peace? Is something new trying to emerge? Is there any saving for us at all?

Redeem the time; redeem the unread vision of the higher dream. T.S. Elliot

We'll go back two thousand years and Virgil i n this first line of the Aeneid writes "of arms and the man I sing." Of arms and the man I sing. The warrior is Aeneas who proclaims his willingness to fight to death for his country and what it stands for. This line became the call to arms of generations of English schoolboys as they were sent out to rule the empire. Several decades later, Jesus is reputed to have said, "Put up thy sword, for they that live by the sword shall die by the sword." The image of the man without armor. Jonathan Schell has observed that since then these two great conflicting traditions, one worldly and sanctioning violence, the other spiritual and forbidding it, have existed. Each tradition inspires people. Indeed, as James Hillman shows in his profound and penetrating study, A Terrible Love of War, war has inspired both

a sublime as well as a religious sensibility. Many attempts have been made to reconcile these two traditions. St. Augustine writes of the two distinct realms of existence: the spiritual realm of love and peace and non-‐violence, called the Civitate Dei, The City of God; and then there's the public, political city of man where the law of force always reigns. Machiavelli i n The Prince— now Machiavelli was very interesting because at night he would take off his country garb, he would put on beautiful robes, he would go into his study, and he would dialogue with ancient men. In these dialogues he would speak and he would listen. But in these dialogues, he was talking about the dualist perception between what is good for one's soul and what is good for the Republic.

Throughout history, we often find that the Call to Arms occurs simultaneously with the Call to Spirit and the regeneration of the heart. It's fascinating isn't it that when we consider the 20th Century, often called the century of total violence, it was also the century of the rise of extraordinary means of non-‐violent action: Peace. Gandhi, and his movement of resistance to the British Empire in both South Africa and India—the resistance that inspired Martin Luther King's civil rights movement in the United States, as well as the non-‐violent movements in Europe, in Russia, the efforts of Anwar Sadat in Egypt, of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Vaclav Hovel in Czechoslovakia, Rosa Parks

in the United States, as well as the great tides of women the world over who have resisted and risen above the seductive and clamorous dogs of war. I myself would say that perhaps the most important movement of the last 5,000 years is happening now, the rise of women slowly but surely to full partnership with men i n the whole domain of human affairs. Which might just change everything. In fact, it might even result in the soul of culture no longer being a satellite to economics, but economics becoming a satellite to the soul of culture. (applause)

Two very ingenious, inventive, maverick minds here having written two very potent books representing this great, dual tradition: James Hillman, who writes from a lifetime fascination and study of war; Deepak Chopra did that—this is it for many, many reasons, not only the rise of women, but the technology—the global village—all of this suggesting that perhaps there is a new alliance for peace that is possible if we allow consciousness to evolve. Something else that I'm going to bring up between these two gentlemen is, in many ways, a very different take on consciousness.

Dr. Hillman, with his extraordinarily astute archeology of mind and psyche, really having taken depth probings of the human psyche. Dr. Chopra, coming not only from a medical background but very much of an Eastern background, a Hindu background, who looks at consciousness as being pulled along by the luminous strange attractor: the emergent form.

When I was very, very young, I had the good fortune to walk for two years on Tuesdays and Thursdays with a man whom I called Mr. Tayer, but who turned out to be Teilhard de Chardin. He lived across the street from me and he was saying: Jean, the people of your time, they will be taking the tiller of the world, but you cannot go directly. You have to touch every people, every consciousness. It has to be a great weave, a newer sphere, a sphere of mind. I said, "But, but Mr. Tayer, how is it going to happen? There's so much war? How can this happen?" He said, "Oh, don't worry, it is coming!" But he never told me how. But in Peace is the Way, Dr. Chopra does offer the ways and means that I think Teilhard would have been very pleased with— ways and means to move consciousness in an evolutionary direction toward an integral to peace. So we have here, as you see, the possibility of an extraordinary conversation. I'm going to begin by asking James Hillman to speak first. Each will speak for about fifteen minutes and then I will give them a very zany question to open up the conversation for another forty minutes. Then we will open it to you. So, let us begin.

The Goddess Liberty

War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it. WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN

C ntd

t ot heDeadl i es t Bat t l ei nAmer i ca

It is well that war is so terrible— otherwise we would grow too fond of it. ROBERT E. LEE

God help me, I do love it so. GEORGE S. PATTON

I think a curse should rest on me because I love this war. I know it's smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment, and yet I can't help it—I enjoy every second of it. WINSTON CHURCHILL

graffiti on a wall in Bethlehem

War, Peace and the American Imagination

2nd Speaker

James Hillman

In thinking about this program, I ask myself why I am here? I think I am here for a different reason this evening than I thought about when I was thinking about it before. (laughter) These last days, this last three weeks, I'm here because of the American Imagination. I'm here less because

of war and peace I think, but because of this enormous, tragic, horror which is the American imagination. The lack of it, the failure of it, the absence of it, and that really is a kind of esthetic numbing in the country. That is what really brings me and what really moves me.

If we don't imagine, we get Iraq. We get New Orleans. We get criminal irresponsibility. McNamara says 'the failure of imagination.' McNamara, The Fog of War, who ran the defense department under Kennedy and then under Johnson, the Vietnam War: "We can now understand these catastrophes for what they were. Essentially the products of a failure of imagination."

Donald Rumsfeld, talking about surprise and its consequence said, "It is due to the poverty of expectations, the failure of imagination." The director of the National Security Agency, Michael Hayden, said about the twin towers, "Perhaps it was more a failure of imagination this time than last." Meaning Pearl Harbor. The failure of imagination.

What is wrong with us? What is this failure of imagination? Keegan, one of the great writers on war, said that one of the essential aspects of war is deliberate cruelty. Deliberate cruelty, not accidental cruelty, not the cruelty of near misses and so on, but deliberate cruelty. It is this that we get when we plan and we don't imagine.

We know how to plan. We had plans for New Orleans, excellent plans. But we didn't have an imagination of what could happen. This is a very important thing because where does imagination go to school in the United States? Where is our esthetic, artistic, fantastic, speculative possibility? That's what's missing. We know how to plan. We can plan a ten thousand carpet bomb. We can use the big, conceptual words like evacuation; we can talk about the bridge. But we can't imagine what goes on in the hearts of the victims, or what goes on in the hearts of the actual people. For example, since New Orleans is in everyone's mind, people are told to

evacuate—mandatory evacuation—but does anyone imagine that you may not have the money for the gas or to have a car? That's imagination, not planning. We are excellent at planning but can we imagine? Can we imagine the lasting consequences of war? The wanderings of people. The waste. The wasted lives. The woundings that are carried ever after. And the numbers of psychic damages ever after— each person's life, body, family, neighborhood, carrying the wounds. We are still carrying the wounds of Vietnam, deeply, heavily, implacably.

Something else that we have to understand is that command and control—which is fundamental in our way of thinking “taking charge”— command and control broke down completely in regard to New Orleans and is clearly not working in Iraq. So one has to think not how do we reinforce and rebuild command and control, but how do we re-‐ imagine what this is? Why it doesn't work? What fails in regard to the human heart in regard to that? Now by going to war—which is what I think we have to do, we who are here partly because of the word 'peace' in the title of this event—that is, we are doves in heart, we do want peace but we are the ones who must turn to war and give it deep thought. Because if we don't, we leave war to the hawks, to the war colleges, to the war planners. We leave it to Kristal and Wolfowitz and company.

We leave it to the warmongers if those who are dedicated to peace and long for peace, don't put their minds into the depth of the importance of war. We have to remember now that Kant, Immanuel Kant the philosopher, said, "the natural state of human beings is war." The French philosopher Levinas said, "Being reveals itself as war." Perhaps he was going back to Heraclites at the beginning of Western thought who said, "War is the father of all things."

In other words, these are very profound thinkers who have said that war is the first question. War is the first question. To think ourselves into its truth, into its reality. If we don't do this kind of thinking, we can only oppose war or work our way through war by going to war. We have to go to war in our mind. That's the painful part of it. So that you yourself, by feeling it and imagining it, are hurt by it. Not

simply as a witness on TV shows, but realize the implacable, eternal, archetypal force of it that comes—that there are more wars in recorded history than there are years in recorded history. The fact that wars have been with us since the beginning of time and continue to be with us all through this century. Even now as we are sitting here, there are I don't know how many wars going on in different parts of the world.

So as I am saying, the American imagination is interested in planning, command and control, and fact-‐finding. Think of Columbine, think of the school in Colorado. What happened with Columbine? They sealed the place off. They removed the bullet holes. The study of Columbine was how much sooner could the cops get there? Why did this happen? How many bullets holes were there in the walls? They were all counted; all the facts were gathered. But the imagination of what was going on in the hearts of those boys, where's that?

Sartre said, "He who begins with facts will never arrive at essences." It's that. It's getting to the essence of the issues. The facts don't take us to the essences. We gather the facts. We have fact-‐finding commissions after every event, but do we imagine? Then the imagination continues underground as conspiracy theories. The Kennedy assassination was dealt with in fact-‐finding in the Warren Report. Every bloody possibility of how the bullets entered and came out and went through another head and so on have been registered and recorded. We have all the facts. But it does nothing to the imagination, which continues and continues and continues in conspiracy theories.

So my plea is for imagining. Now how do we imagine? And what is imagining? It isn't simple the way I understand it; it's entering into the heart of the Other. It is an activity in Islamic mysticism. It is an activity of the heart. The heart imagines. Now that isn't simply 'feeling' into the Other, as we learn in psychotherapy: empathy or sympathy and so on, or kibbutz. It's even something other than compassion because it has not so much to do with the feeling as it has to do with imagining into the Other.

Can we imagine into the Other? Imagine the enemy? Imagine what he and she and they are living and thinking and believing? If we think of Iraq then we have to think why the insurgency? What is in the heart of the insurgency? Then we would step back and think about where are we in relation to what's in their heart? Not the fear in our heart, but what's in their heart.

If you think about—put yourself into it—we look at our men exposing themselves to terrible risks in the streets of Baghdad or Fallujah or Nejaf and so on, but imagine how they look if you are an Iraqi. These great guys with their uniforms and their pieces and their equipment and their stuff. There's a kind of aesthetic insult in a

culture which has an esthetic way of looking at the world. Something we don't even know about. We don't even know the languages. We have a great shortage of translators. You know all this; this is news. But what I am trying to say is that there are ways of imagining how we appear to them. Not our theories, not our politics,

not our ideals, that's not what I mean. Our esthetic presentation, ourselves as we are, what that is to someone else. We have to think as, let's say, anthropologists on a field trip in order to enter into how we are perceived, seeing ourselves from the other side, that's the kind of imaging that I'm calling for.

I don't want to talk yet about peace. I think that will come up in our discussion. But I do want to say something about love and the importance of love in war. What we often have forgotten is the fact that we love war. There is love in war among the soldiers, there is love for war, the marching off to war, and there is the love of war itself. War is in love with itself and wants to go on and on and on continuing. There is a certain kind of love that belongs to war. It has its own love; it has its own beauty. There are

many examples of the charity, the kindness, the nobility of soul, the sacrifice of one's self for the other, the relation of the buddies to each other—these buddies can be men and women, it's not necessarily only men—this kind of emotional sweetness that some say they have never felt at any other moment in their lives except in the midst of battle. They've also felt fear and horror and misery, yes, I don't deny that, but what we need to remember is that there is a kind of love there that surpasses for

some who have been in it and with it, surpasses all other sorts. I don't want to read passages of that, I have a lot of that in my book called A Terrible Love of War, but it's there. There is a beauty, a love for the beauty of war that overwhelms people.

As the Allied armada moved toward the North African beaches, Ernie Pyle, one of the great writers of the Second World War, wrote, "Hour after hour I stood at the rail looking at an almost choking sense of beauty, and power enveloped me." A member of Patton's staff in Sicily wrote to his wife "and speaking of wonderful things, the high-‐water mark and perhaps the most beautiful as well as satisfactory sight I have ever beheld was a flaming enemy bomber spattering itself and its occupants against the side of a mountain. God, it was gorgeous." That's a sense of beauty that people don't want to accept—that they are thrilled, that they find something superlative, sublime in the midst of war. So if we don't understand the attraction, if we don't understand the attraction of war, we will go on being innocents. That's our American addiction, the addiction to innocence. That's our only addiction. It's not drugs and it's not marijuana and so on. It's the addiction to not knowing, not wanting to know. (applause)

So we can talk about ending war and having peace, but there is something about the God of War that attracts. Mars was always paired with Venus. Venus is beauty, attraction, seduction, charm, pleasure. If we don't get to that, if we just stand back and say 'war is horrible I can't look,' we remain children.

There are many kinds of war and there are many kinds of love. One of the aspects has been said by a French philosopher, Foucault, that what war offers is a maximum of intensity and a maximum of impossibility at the same time. That is very close to an intense, esthetic, mystical experience.

Maximum of intensity. That's why when they come back they can't talk about it because they were in another plane, in another state. A maximum of intensity and a maximum of impossibility, death and love at the same moment. Eros and Thanatos in Freud's language.

message written on a bunker

So the battle engagement for some, and often reported by many in different cultures: most sublime, romantic moment comparable only to falling in love in the sexual, passionate. In other words, the Venus aspect of the Mars-‐Venus pair. The mythic imagination that seizes.

Now the third part that I want to stress is that war transcends human causes. Moderator: You have one more minute. Okay, we'll skip that. We'll go to something else. (laughter) I should've had two minutes. Anyway, besides the fact that it is archetypal, transcendent, and that as Barbara Ehrenreich says, "War wants only one thing, to continue." Therefore they are so unstoppable and so ungovernable. It wants to go on. But there are leashes that one can put on the mad dog and that I think we should get to when we have our conversation. What human leashes can you place on what Shakespeare calls "the mad dog of war?" What are the human leashes, not the human causes, but what can we do to slow it or hold it in check. There's my minute. Thank you. (applause)

Why did millions of people begin to kill one another? Who told them to do it? It would seem that it was clear to each of them that this could not benefit any of them, but would be worse for them all. Why did they do it? Endless retrospective conjectures can be made, and are made, of the causes of this senseless event, but the immense number of these explanations, and their concurrence in one purpose, only proves that the causes were innumerable and that not one of them deserved to be called the cause. LEO TOLSTOY

You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place. ALEXANDRA FULLER

Is it war’s fault that we have not grasped its meaning? JAMES HILLMAN

War Peace and the

American Imagination

War, Peace and the American Imagination 3rd Speaker Deepak Chopra I thought I was here to disagree and debate Dr. Hillman and actually I have no disagreement with what he says, that war offers sublimation. Violence offers many purposes. It serves theological purposes; it is entertainment; it is economics; it is eroticism; it is empowerment; it is morality; it is rationality for we are going there and killing the Iraqis so that we can give them freedom. (laughter) It is ritual; it is coming of age; it is the rite of passage; it is a psychological transformation; it is power of an intoxicating kind. So it’s very seductive, there’s no question about it.

That’s the archetypal, mythical explanation that we have Mars inside us and Mars is betrothed to Venus and you can’t h ave romance, you can’t have eroticism, you can’t have seduction, you can’t even have sensuality unless it is part of our violent nature. So there’s no disagreement. That’s a good psychological, very deep understanding of mythic archetypes and how these invisible forces govern our very being. From a biological standpoint also, violence has its role. You know the planet is only 3.8 billion years old. The universe is about 14 billion years old.

Human being have been around for only 200,000 years. Of those 200,000 years maybe the last 10,000 years we have had some kind of awareness. Written language is about 6,000 years old, oral language a little longer than that. And self-‐ awareness perhaps goes back 5,000 years at most, to the time of the axial sages, the sages of the Upanishads in India, and the Greek philosophers, and Lao Tzu and Confucius in the East, the emergence of axial wisdom around about 5,000 years.

So if you were to say the history of the planet started on January 1, then about June 1 the first life forms appeared. On December 31st human beings showed up. About 15 minutes ago human beings learned to communicate verbally through written language. Self-‐awareness is about 5 minutes ago. The Internet and modern forms of communication including modern warfare are about half a minute ago. So I think we can be very forgiving if we want to be. We haven’t reached puberty. We’re not even in our infancy.

Biologically, by the way, that part of our brain which is called the limbic brain is known as the fight/flight response. When I was in medical school the way we remembered the functions of the limbic system were the four F’s: feeling, fighting, fleeing, and procreation. (laughter) So, we became good at it. (laughter) We became so good at it that right now we are the predator on this planet. There is some wisdom in the saying that “a permanently victorious species risks its own extinction.” A permanently victorious species risks its own extinction. That’s where we are. If you could look at this planet from some vantage point in outer space and you were to ask yourself who’s the most dangerous animal? If this planet is a living organism then what’s the cancer?

The cancer is Homo sapiens, metastasizing, multiplying, gouging, plundering, destroying the eco system. The problem with that, even though it’s all true, is that when you combine this ancient way of living, this ancient, tribal, atavistic, primordial aspect of human nature, and you combine it with modern capacities then the outlook is very, very bleak right now.

I would disagree in one aspect with Dr. Hillman that there is lack of imagination. I think we have tremendous imagination. But our imagination serves diabolical purposes. I was just reading the other day that there is now technology to create a neutron bomb and if you dropped it on a city it would be seeking human temperature and what that would result in is complete vaporization of human beings through radiation. Every other living species would be spared, only human beings would disappear. Even your clothes would remain intact. You could walk into a city and it would be totally intact except there would be no human beings. My god, that is imagination. (uneasy laughter) I’m reading of technologies that say that in about ten years from now we won’t even need these neutron bombs. We

won’t even need these biological weapons. We could have something like a simple handheld computer like my little Trio. We would move electrons here and interfere with air traffic signals and hijack not one plane but all the planes. We would be able to cut off the electricity in a city like Atlanta and suffocate it, interfere with air transportation systems, poison the food chain,

cause nuclear plants to leak and wreak havoc— enter the food chain with things like depleted uranium and cause malformations for generations to come. This is not lack of imagination. This is imagination that actually spells doom for our planet and for the extinction of all species and the extinction of our own species. And imagination will do it.

I was talking to an anthropologist friend of mine and he said, “Maybe in the universe’s imagination the thought came, you know human beings? They were an interesting species, didn’t work. (laughter) Was a good experiment, didn’t work. So be done with it and move on.” And it wouldn’t make a bit of a difference to nature. Wouldn’t make a bit of a difference to the

magnificence and awesome mystery of the universe. After all, we’re a speck of dust in a huge void. In our self-‐importance we may think we’re more than that, but you know from nature’s vantage point: get rid of this species, the cancer on the planet.

Arrival of the Gods of War

But there’s another aspect to our imagination also. I think the imagination is not lacking, it’s the sense of Self that’s lacking. If we could answer one question and understand what our real identity is, then perhaps the same imagination which is diabolical at this moment could find a new creativity, a new inspiration, a new insight, a new imagination that would for the first time in recorded history—we cannot go by the example of recorded history—but for the first time we could understand that the universe is becoming

self-‐conscious to us. We are the only species that has a nervous system that is aware—that we are aware. The only species that is conscious that we are conscious. And now we are beginning, at least some people in the world are beginning, to understand that consciousness is the ground of being, the raw material that differentiates into biological organisms, into environments, into behaviors, into cognitions, into perceptions, into emotions, into social interactions, into personal relationships, and into the web of creation that we call the eco system.

The human soul is a place of ambiguity.

In that self-‐awareness perhaps lies our salvation. I have imagined for you the diabolical aspects of human creativity and human imagination. But perhaps we could imagine the divine aspects of human creativity also because the human soul is a place of ambiguity. It has the sacred, it has the profane, it has the divine, it has the diabolical, it has forbidden lust, but it also has love and compassion, and understanding and beauty, and intuition and nurturing and tenderness, and the possibility to evolving into a new species altogether. (applause)

So we have the fight/flight response within us but we have something called the reactive response. We have something called the restful-‐awareness response. We have something called the intuitive response, which is a form of intelligence that is contextual and relational and holistic and nurturing, and doesn’t have a win/loose orientation, that sees the interdependent core rising of form and phenomena in the entire universe. We have the creative response which is the ability to create something that never existed before. We have the visionary response which says, in Martin Luther King’s words, “I have a dream,” and we know immediately it’s not a personal dream but a collective dream, an archetypal dream seeking freedom and creativity and liberation not for one person but for an entire humanity. (applause)

Then we have something called the sacred response. The sacred response is waking up to the luminous mystery in which we are bathed. The fact is that we may never be able to unravel this mystery, but it certainly is a mystery. There is no bigger human emotion I think than a sense of mystery, a sense of wonder, a sense of awe, a sense of feeling that we are connected with the sacred powers and the sacred source of the universe.

Rumi, my favorite Sufi poet, says, “When I die I will soar with angels. But when I die to the angels, what I shall become you cannot imagine.”

Because to imagine what I shall become you have to have the imagination of an angel.

Evolutionary biologists are now telling us that evolution is not a random adaptation to environmental forces, but evolution is punctuated by periods of what I call punctuated disequilibrium where there is the progressive proliferation of chaos, even anarchy. Within that chaotic, anarchic soup of ambiguity and confusion, is the rising of a new emergent property. Nietzsche, the German philosopher, said when there is chaos, there is the possibility of the birth of a dancing star.

I would say to you that perhaps another way of looking at our times is that we are in that phase transition. Phase transitions are recognized in natural systems when water turns to steam— that’s a phase transition. All phase transitions are punctuated, are actually an expression of great turbulence. Right now we see that turbulence in the destruction of our eco systems, in the wars, in the terrorisms, and the terrorist activities that we read about every day, in great social injustice, in economic disparities where 8 million people die every year because they are too poor to live. We obviously don’t see the relationship between say something like Katrina and human activity, but it’s time to ask those questions. Is it time to ask questions like does global warming have anything to do with rising tidal waves and depleted ozone layers?

Does the fact that we are seeing disappearing shorelines because of us and our human activity by dams that artificially change the course of rivers? Does deforestation in Asia and Africa have anything to do with changing weather patterns because there is only one atmosphere?

Does the destruction of the flora and fauna have anything to do with the migration of birds, with the natural habitats of the eco system, which also affects weather patterns in one place, affecting them globally?

No longer can we separate ourselves from nature because we are expressions of nature. And I think the great quantum leap that we need to make right now with a sense of urgency is that leap in imagination. But that leap in imagination coming from a place of Self that says I’m not a skin-‐ encapsulated ego that is squeezed into the volume of a body in the span of a lifetime—that my consciousness transcends my physical identity. (applause) And that when that consciousness reaches a critical mass perhaps we will see an age the even Homer never dreamed of. (applause and cheering)

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War, Peace and The American Imagination Podcasts

Listen to the passion in their voices as our speakers give their opening remarks prior to the debate in a series of podcasts hosted by Honora Foah. The podcasts can be found on the Mythic Imagination website in the Magazine Section.

War, Peace and The American Imagination Now on DVD

Watch the exciting debate between James Hillman and Deepak Chopra moderated by Jean Houston. Details on how to receive this limited edition DVD can be found on the Mythic Imagination Institute’s website in the Membership Section.

You can’t say that civilization don’t advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way. WILL ROGERS

Contributors

Cover Art Dahna Lorrain Koth

Artist

Dahna Koth, the designer of the artwork for the cover of Guns and Roses Part I, serves as Marketing Director and Fellow of the Mythic Imagination Institute. In this capacity, she has produced and co-‐written with Honora Foah over a dozen full-‐length podcasts, served as a creative consultant for Mythic Imagination Magazine, and designed and implemented the layouts for the collateral material in the Mythic Imagination online store. Ms. Koth is Director of Creative Services for the international business group, DLK Ltd. As a writer and creative director, her clients in corporate communications and business theater have included Fortune 500 companies such as Coca-‐Cola, BellSouth, Eli Lilly, SAAB, Ritz-‐ Carlton, Delta Airlines, Cingular, and Nortel Networks. Prior to joining DLK Ltd., Ms. Koth was Creative Director for two of the nation’s top corporate communications firms, PGI and The Jack Morton Company. At Conduit Communications, an offshoot of Turner Broadcasting, she served as Vice President of Marketing and Development, specializing in television programming and joint venture relations with New World Entertainment. For seven years, Ms. Koth worked as Development Project Manager for the Dollywood Company where she focused on the development of a world-‐class resort for Dollywood, and a $4.5 million themed dinner extravaganza called Dixie Stampede, as well as Dollywood theme park expansions. After leaving Dollywood, she was commissioned by Dolly Parton to write two feature film scripts, and by Dollywood to write two musicals. Other unique projects have included entertainment zones for the states of New Mexico and Georgia, a major expansion of Marineland, Florida, and a concert series for the United Nations Earth Summit Committee, Ireland. Ms. Koth is the guest editor of Guns and Roses Part I. She is currently working with Honora Foah on the television and media series, The Art of Myth.

The Warriors Jacek Malczewski

Artist

Title: Self-‐Portrait with Muse Artist: Jacek Malczewski (1864—1929) Location: Lviv National Art Gallery Notes: Jacek Malczewski is considered a genius of Polish Symbolism, the late nineteenth-‐century art movement with origins in France, Russia, and Belgium. The first period of Malczewski’s rich and uneven oeuvre was the Siberian cycle. It illustrated the torment of Polish deportees, which he portrayed naturalistically or filtered through his vision of the mystical poetry of Slowacki. During the Young Poland period, Malczewski created his own unique, symbolic vocabulary in which robust corporeal figures of chimeras, fauns, angels, and water sprites appear in allegorical portraits. He made many costume-‐clad self-‐ portraits, landscapes, genre and religious scenes and compositions that do not correspond to any thematic conventions. The muse was a favored element in many of his paintings. Malczewski’s work is dominated by two motifs: the vocation of art and the artist, and death, usually in the form of the god Thanatos. It is a vivid example of an intermingling of folk motifs and an anti-‐classical, Dionysian vision of antiquity which was typical of Polish modernism. He created a peculiar polonisation of ancient mythology, not only by placing chimeras and fauns in a Polish landscape but also within historical-‐national context.

Why Does Venus Love Mars?

Honora Foah

Author

Honora Foah is the President and Creative Director of Mythic Imagination Institute as well as a member of its Board of Directors. She headed the development group for the Mythic Journeys Conference and Performance Festivals held in 2004 and 2006. Ms. Foah is a multimedia artist whose work is an exploration of the alchemists’ guiding principle: as above, so below. As such, she is interested in direct experience, intense observation and science. In May 2013, a multimedia opera she created and directed, The Birth of Color: A Marriage of Darkness and Light will premiere in Rome. She was the Chief Designer and Producer for two World Expo pavilions for the United Nations (Italy and Korea) as well as exhibitions for Fernbank Science Museum, Sandler-‐ Hudson Gallery, and video art installations in several children’s hospitals. Ms. Foah is currently working on a book about taste, exploring the multi-‐valent experiences, metaphors and myths of the six tastes used in traditional Indian Ayurvedic medicine: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, pungent and astringent. Ms. Foah received her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from the University of North Carolina. In addition to her university education, Foah studied dance under such greats as Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, trained extensively in drama and music, and is an accomplished performer in each of these areas. As co-‐director of her own dance theater company Schene Hill Dancing, one of the most innovative dance companies in New York City, which was known for combining multi-‐media images, set design, dance, photography and voice, Ms. Foah was awarded a prestigious grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1987, she teamed up with her husband, Dahlan Robert Foah to form the production house, Visioneering International, and has recently become a member of Difference Design Lab.

Why Does Venus Love Mars? Rubens and Brueghel

Artists

Title: The Return from War: Mars Disarmed by Venus Artists: Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder Date: About 1610 -‐ 1612 Medium: oil on panel Dimensions: 50 1/8 x 64 3/8 in. Location: The Getty Center Los Angeles Notes: In a corner of Vulcan's forge, Venus stares at her lover, Mars, who is transfixed by her alluring gaze. Seized by her beauty and paralyzed in the seduction, Mars is no longer capable of making war. In the 1600s, the subject of Venus disarming Mars was understood as an allegory of Peace. Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder's interpretation of the subject emphasizes the fragility of peace. Weapons production continues in the background at the burning fires of Vulcan's hearth, signaling that love's conquest of war may be only temporary. Rubens and Brueghel, who were close colleagues, collaborated on at least twenty-‐five paintings. This painting displays each virtuoso's talents: Rubens's robust figural style and Brueghel's intricate still life details. The luminous figure of Venus, the reflective quality of the weapons and armor, and the tactile quality of the lush painting are a testament to their skills.

War, Peace & the American Imagination

Jean Houston

Speaker

Jean Houston, Ph.D., scholar, philosopher and researcher in Human Capacities, is one of the foremost visionary thinkers and doers of our time. She is long regarded as one of the principal founders of the Human Potential Movement. Dr. Houston is noted for her ability to combine a deep knowledge of history, culture, new science, spirituality and human development into her teaching. She is known for her inter-‐disciplinary perspective delivered in inspirational and humorous keynote addresses. A prolific writer, Dr. Houston is the author of 26 books including “Jump Time,” “ A Passion for the Possible,” “Search for the Beloved,” “Life Force,” “The Possible Human,” “Public Like a Frog,” “A Mythic Life: Learning to Live Our Greater Story,” and “Manual of the Peacemaker.” As Advisor to UNICEF in human and cultural development, she has worked around the world helping to implement some of their extensive educational programs. In September of 1999, she traveled to Dharamsala, India as a member of a group chosen to work with the Dalai Lama in a learning and advisory capacity. Dr. Houston has also served in an advisory capacity to President and Mrs. Clinton as well as assisting Mrs. Clinton in writing her book, “It Takes A Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us.” She has met with President and Mrs. Carter, and with leaders i n many countries and cultures. As a high school student, she worked closely with another First Lady of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt, in developing strategies to introduce international awareness and United Nations work to young people.

War, Peace & the American Imagination George E. Bissell

Designer

Title: Scottish-‐American Soldiers Monument Designer: George E. Bissell Date: unveiled 1893 Medium: bronze Location: Old Calton Cemetery, Edinburgh, Scotland Notes: The Scottish-‐American Soldiers Monument stands in the Old Calton Cemetery in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was raised in remembrance of the Scottish-‐American Soldiers who fought in the American Civil War. The monument presents the standing figure of Abraham Lincoln, with a freed slave giving thanks at his feet. A bronze shield bears the old American flag, and is wreathed in thistles to the left and cotton to the right. Two regimental flags lay furled since the battle is over and victory attained. The freed slave holds a book, indicating that he is not only free, he is also educated. This was the first statue dedicated to an American president and the only monument to the American Civil War in any country outside the United States, as well as the only statue of Lincoln in Scotland. The inscription, "To preserve the jewel of liberty in the framework of freedom" is a quotation from the writings of Abraham Lincoln.