Synopsis "Dive Manual: Empirical Investigations of Mysticism"
Do you know what it's like to lose your mind? The mystics of antiquity from east to west spoke of living, breathing realms within the imagination. Melancholy or mania, ecstasy or entrancement, wisdom or insanity, divine or demonic, day or night, conscious or unconscious...Some people claim to have relationships with things like a divine creator, things that don't seem to rightly exist, but they seem to be all the better for it. And yet, others spend their lives in a schizophrenic psychosis, apparently having a much better reason to speak of such things and still being far worse off for it. What's the difference? Surely there is one, but oftentimes these nuances are very, very subtle. Hard to pinpoint. As psychoanalyst CG Jung once wrote, “This is the fund of unconscious images which fatally confuse the mental patient. But it is also the matrix of a mythopoeic imagination which has vanished from our rational age. Though such imagination is present everywhere, it is both tabooed and dreaded, so that it even appears to be a risky experiment or a questionable adventure to entrust oneself to the uncertain path that leads into the depths of the unconscious. It is considered the path of error, of equivocation and misunderstanding. I am reminded of Goethe’s words; ‘Now let me dare to open wide the gate/ Past which men’s steps have ever flinching trod.’ …Unpopular, ambiguous, and dangerous, it is a voyage of discovery to the other pole of the world.”Come with me if you want to dive.
