birdy nam nam, abbesses:

ps – don’t click this

25. Aedh tells of the perfect Beauty

O CLOUD-PALE eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes
The poets labouring all their days
To build a perfect beauty in rhyme
Are overthrown by a woman’s gaze
And by the unlabouring brood of the skies:
And therefore my heart will bow, when dew
Is dropping sleep, until God burn time,
Before the unlabouring stars and you.

–William Butler Yeats

What Sigmund Freud referred to as the repressed side of our personality, the unconscious exclusion of painful impulses, desires, or fears from the conscious mind, and Carl Jung calls our Shadow, our not recognized desires, Robert Bly in “The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us,” an essay in Meeting the Shadow refers to as an invisible bag each of us drags behind us which we begin to fill as children. He writes that all aspects of ourselves that are unacceptable and displeasing to our family, peers, and society, goes into the bag and it continues to fill until we’re twenty, after which we spend the rest of our lives trying to retrieve from. These shadow selves do not disappear nor do they lie dormant but instead creep out to embarrass or shame our ego, the self we present to the world. William Miller in “Finding the Shadow in Daily Life,” in the same anthology explains it simply, “Shadow is all we wouldn’t dare do, but would like to”…. –text from Susan Bremer

via boingboing, via somethingawful:

A few weeks ago we gave the grindhouse treatment to a lot of popular movies, and it went over quite well. Because original ideas are hard to come by, this week I tasked the Something Awful Forum Goons with giving the grindhouse treatment to breakfast cereals. Now breakfast, that nutritious cornerstone of a healthy day, has never looked so filthy and sordid.

via: integral naked:

As Ken points out, the first movie is fairly easy to grok: everything in the Matrix is bad, everything outside of the Matrix is good. Everyone inside the Matrix is trapped, everyone outside the Matrix is free, and so on. But twenty minutes into part 2, Reloaded, and the audience discovers that the Oracle is a machine program, at which point most people go: um, what?

What had begun as a simple good guy/bad guy movie had just become a complex piece of literature, with different levels of interpretation and a very sophisticated model of reality. Ken suggests that it’s not until the last twenty minutes of part 3, Revolutions, that the key to the trilogy is revealed: although—and perhaps because—Neo is physically blind, he sees the machines as luminous, golden light—not quite how the “bad guys” are seen in most movies. And yet Neo is unmistakable in what he says to Trinity: “If you could see them as I see them, they are all made of Light….” Indeed, the machines represent Spirit, but Spirit as alienated and therefore attacking….

Thus, as Ken summarizes a more integral interpretation (that takes into account what is revealed in all three films), Zion represents body (filmed in blue tint), the Matrix represents mind (green tint), and the machines—this is the kicker revealed in part 3—represent spirit (golden tint). For those of you keeping track, this is indeed quite similar to the Great Nest of Being as taught by the world’s wisdom traditions, a spectrum of being and consciousness reaching from body to mind to spirit.

Borrowing from the wisdom of Christian mysticism, “The flames of Hell are but God’s love denied,” and so an alienated and dissociated spirit manifests as an army of machines bent on destroying humankind. It is only in the integration of body, mind, and spirit that all three are redeemed and peace returns.