Saturday, 31 March 2018

Where we use symbols to take in ' information' that endures through time, to reach into the parts of the mind that has become asleep and unaware.


The light energy has become interesting because it bypasses the mind, and the mind still requires to have some kind of intention, input and reasoning with whats going on. I have moments of being absolutely no thing, with no memory, no (3d) motivation, no impulse, no identity, no body, no form; just resting on a vast shelf of energy within  which I merge. 
 If my mind tries to figure out what is going on, a momentary flurry of worry wavers through, because it  feels close to not coming back at all.

It feels like waking up from a big sleep, and I get clunky and clumsy, when I come back;  my mind not sure what it is that I am supposed to be doing and I become like Bambi, not sure of how to walk in the world. 

Maybe the story of Sleeping Beauty, where tangles of weeds and unpenetrable forests grow up all around, that binds the 'sleeping one/s' into a distant and dark dreamtime world....
 ....and all other such  fairytales, legends and folk lore that indicate 'mankind' as a sleeping identity... 
declares that we really do need to have the kiss and embrace of real love in order to wake up. 
  
Maybe we have these stories woven into our civilisations and cultures, because somewhere deep inside the collective psyche is the unknown and unpronounced 'knowing' that we hold within us the  instruction to WAKE UP.   Michaela.






https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Beauty

Sleeping Beauty

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Sleeping Beauty" (FrenchLa Belle au bois dormant "The Beauty in the sleeping Wood") by Charles Perrault, or "Little Briar Rose" (GermanDornröschen), is a classic fairy tale which involves a beautiful princess, a sleeping enchantment, and a handsome prince. The version collected by the Brothers Grimm was an orally transmitted version of the originally literary tale published by Charles Perrault in Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697.[1] This in turn was based on Sun, Moon, and Talia by Italian poet Giambattista Basile (published posthumously in 1634), which was in turn based on one or more folk tales. The earliest known version of the story is found in the narrative Perceforest, composed between 1330 and 1344 and first printed in 2000.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folklore

Folklore

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Overview[edit]

To fully understand folklore, it is helpful to clarify its component parts: the terms folk and lore. It is well-documented that the term was coined in 1846 by the Englishman William Thoms. He fabricated it to replace the contemporary terminology of "popular antiquities" or "popular literature". The second half of the compound word, lore, proves easier to define as its meaning has stayed relatively stable over the last two centuries. Coming from Old English lār 'instruction,' and with German and Dutch cognates, it is the knowledge and traditions of a particular group, frequently passed along by word of mouth.[1]
The concept of folk proves somewhat more elusive. When Thoms first created this term, folk applied only to rural, frequently poor and illiterate peasants. A more modern definition of folk is a social group which includes two or more persons with common traits, who express their shared identity through distinctive traditions. "Folk is a flexible concept which can refer to a nation as in American folklore or to a single family."[2] This expanded social definition of folk supports a broader view of the material, i.e. the lore, considered to be folklore artifacts. These now include all "things people make with words (verbal lore), things they make with their hands (material lore), and things they make with their actions (customary lore)".[3] Folklore is no longer circumscribed as being chronologically old or obsolete. The folklorist studies the traditional artifacts of a social group and how they are transmitted.
Transmission is a vital part of the folklore process. Without communicating these beliefs and customs within the group over space and time, they would become cultural shards relegated to cultural archaeologists. For folklore is also a verb. These folk artifacts continue to be passed along informally, as a rule anonymously and always in multiple variants. The folk group is not individualistic, it is community-based and nurtures its lore in community. "As new groups emerge, new folklore is created… surfers, motorcyclists, computer programmers".[4] In direct contrast to high culture, where any single work of a named artist is protected by copyright law, folklore is a function of shared identity within the social group.[5]
Having identified folk artifacts, the professional folklorist strives to understand the significance of these beliefs, customs and objects for the group. For these cultural units[6] would not be passed along unless they had some continued relevance within the group. That meaning can however shift and morph. So Halloween of the 21st century is not the All Hallows' Eve of the Middle Ages, and even gives rise to its own set of urban legends independent of the historical celebration. The cleansing rituals of Orthodox Judaism were originally good public health in a land with little water; now these customs signify identification as an Orthodox Jew. Compare this to brushing your teeth, also transmitted within a group, which remains a practical hygiene and health issue and does not rise to the level of a group-defining tradition.[7] For tradition is initially remembered behavior. Once it loses its practical purpose, there is no reason for further transmission unless it has been imbued with meaning beyond the initial practicality of the action. This meaning is at the core of folkloristics, the study of folklore.
With an increasingly theoretical sophistication of the social sciences, it has become evident that folklore is a naturally occurring and necessary component of any social group, it is indeed all around us.[8] It does not have to be old or antiquated. It continues to be created, transmitted and in any group is used to differentiate between "us" and "them".

http://literature.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-79

Symbolism Matters

Fairy tales refer to events taking place once upon a time, in a faraway realm—not here and now—and the opening and ending formulas of the tales underscore the otherness of the themes.1 A deceased mother takes the shape of a cow to help her daughter, boys turned into ravens dwell in a crystal mountain, girls prick themselves into a long sleep in the woods … Scores of such unreal stories have kept audiences and readers captive for untold generations, which suggests that—as Friedrich Max Müller put it long ago—the “epidemic” of “incredible and impossible” matter in Märchen and myth must “possess some raison d’être.”2

One way to understand the otherness of fairy tales is to assume that they are literally true to the reality of other times and places. Such was the prevailing understanding in the 19th century. The assumption that fairy tales are the narrative survival of customs and beliefs from other times and places has inspired two sorts of explanatory models. On the one hand, the evolutionist hypothesis stresses survival in time. As the British folklorist Andrew Lang put it, folklorists find in “proverbs and riddles, and nursery tales and superstitions … the relics of a stage of thought, which is dying out in Europe, but which still exists in many parts of the world.”3Specifically, fairy-tale imagery—being rife with magic, cannibalistic episodes, and a general lack of distinction between animals and humans—bespeaks “an age of savage fancy.”4 On the other hand, the diffusionist persuasion stresses resilience in space. The notion that tales were invented only once and then traveled, while carrying the cultural mark of their place of origin, had a worthy exponent in Emmanuel Cosquin. This French folklorist embraced the view that fairy tales originated in India, and he repeatedly argued that fairy-tale motifs match Hindu representations.5
Alas, it is hard to envision individuals bothering to learn something and pass it on if it means nothing to them.6Cosquin thought nothing of branding a chain of metamorphoses in a French text as an “ultra-bizarre ending” and then, one step ahead, professing that “such an Indian ending” is a true “Made in India” mark of origin.7This perilous line of argument raises various issues but focus on the main question: Why, if India’s conceptions were so unique, would Indian tales have been borrowed and nurtured by people who found them “bizarre”? A related problem plagues the evolutionist model. Lang acknowledges that some tale “forms are fitter than others, survive more powerfully, and are more widely spread.”8 This notion of differential fitness supposes a process of cultural selection that would discard any meaningless contents while preserving those themes that make sense to the taletellers and their audiences. This is a sensible assumption.9 But, crucially, it contradicts the notion that the “savage fancy” of bygone eras might survive in the modern fairy tale.
In short, the assumption that fairy tales might carry alien cultural traits fails to explain why those traits should have survived at all. Alternatively, the premise of symbolism assumes that the bizarre elements in fairy tales are (somehow) relevant to the taletellers and their audiences. Models that address fairy-tale contents as the symbolic expression of notions that are relevant to individuals and communities have no trouble explaining how fairy tales persist in tradition.

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