Mandala 1

(taken from Kenneth Burke Permanence and Change, Michel Foucault “Le ‘non’ du pere”: Carl Jung Aion)

A scapegoat, judged from different eyes, is not linked to distress: the gods appear, only to turn away: the inferior aspects of the personality are present and real, with an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy, and therefore an obsessive or possessive quality: the motives that people ascribe to their actions change: divine violence both illuminates and reduces to ash: while some traits peculiar to the shadow can be recognized without too much difficulty as one’s own personal qualities, others appear to lie, beyond all possibility of doubt, in the other person: any scheme of understanding leads to rationalizing one’s behavior using only the terms of that particular scheme of understanding: artists that showed epic events and heroic deeds were first unnamed, then named but their lives given a vague, symbolic role as hero, then their individuality was conflated with the heroic, and the world of heroic action passed to the world of representations: the effect of projection is to isolate the subject from their environment, since instead of a real relation to it there is now only an illusory one: in the society in which the person was raised, there were rules of conduct, and a terminology of motives to go along with them, so that the person was conditioned not only for what they should and should not do but also about the reasons for their actions: the divine is trapped in a mirror and the threat of absence and emptiness is finally averted: because the projection is performed by the unconscious, one meets the projection rather than making it, and the world appears as a replica of one’s unknown face: when we see a person explaining their conduct by the favored terms of their social code, we can see our own propensity to rationalize, from the other person’s perspective: a work of art no longer achieved its sole meaning as a monument, a memory engraved in stone which was capable of surviving the ravages of time; it now belonged to the legend it had once commemorated and became itself an “exploit” because it conferred eternal truth upon people and upon their ephemeral actions: one dreams a world whose reality remains forever unattainable.

Mandala 2

Taken from Kenneth Burke Permanence and Change, Michel Foucault “The Prose of Actaeon”, Carl Jung Aion

Trained incapacity: one’s abilities function as a blind spot, so that when guided by past education, one acts against one’s intentions and interests. Simulacra: a representation in which the object represented withdraws and conceals itself, a falsehood that causes one to mistake one sign for another. The ego: the center of the field of consciousness.

The means that one chooses to avoid an unsatisfactory situation depend on the interpretation of the cause of the situation: how does one transcribe the insistent order of simulacra: everything unknown falls either into that which is outside us and can be experienced by the senses, or that which is inside us and is experienced immediately, the unconscious: each problem of existence has many interpretations, and these interpretations influence the means we select to deal with it: voices “prompt” each other, insinuate their words in the other’s discourses, constantly animate with movement, a “pneuma” that does not belong to it, but a“soufflant” in the sense of a breath, in the sense of an expiration that blows out a candle, and finally, in the sense in which one takes possession of something meant for another: the personality as a whole does not coincide with the ego, which is only the conscious personality, and is related to the self like a part to a whole: whether or not the judgment of an action is thought of as the result of positive training or of negative incapacity depends solely upon whether the outcome is thought of as arising from selecting the correct means or selecting a faulty means: the speaking subject scatters into voices that suggest one another, extinguish one another, and replace one another, so the writer or speaker is dispersed into the distance of the simulacrum where it loses itself: though the ego is at the center of the field of consciousness, it is impossible to estimate how large or small its share is, how free or how dependent it is, and we are better not to underestimate the ego’s dependence on the unconscious: the problems of existence do not have one fixed, unchanging character; they are not like a label on a bottle.