Titus Burckhardt, Alchemy: Science Of The Cosmos, Science Of The Soul

The Color of Pomegranates (Նռան գույնը) , 1969

When the boundaries between the inner and the outer dissipate, the ego returns home, back into its original unity. In imagination—phantasy—the thin line between the inner and the outer begins to fade: the I of the abyss is the silent dialogue the soul has with itself. The same is true for the dreaming soul, asleep within its original lost unity, recovered, reconstituted—even if only for a moment—a confluence between the inner and outer is subsumed within the underworld. In imagination—the artist of the dream—there is a contraction of the ego back into its interior, bringing the wealth of its experiences to bear upon the soul.

Jon Mills,  The Unconscious Abyss: Hegel’s Anticipation of Psychoanalysis

Symbols of Transformation

C. G. Jung

Taxonomies of misdirection overview

When confronted with a magic trick, you first perceive the relevant sensory information, then store key aspects of it in your memory, and then perhaps use this to reason about how the trick was done. A magician can prevent a spectator from discovering the method by simply manipulating any one of these processes.

These categories define misdirection in terms of the psychological mechanisms affected. The first set of principles manipulate your perception, preventing you from perceiving selected parts of the performance.

—Gustav Kuhn, Experiencing the Impossible

Rudy Rucker, Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite

philippino anting-anting talisman vests

Psychological symptoms, states and processes associated with the dissociation label

Richard J. Brown, Different Types of “Dissociation” Have Different Psychological Mechanisms

The hermeneutic circle describes the process of understanding a text hermeneutically. It refers to the idea that one’s understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one’s understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it is a circle. However, this circular character of interpretation does not make it impossible to interpret a text; rather, it stresses that the meaning of a text must be found within its cultural, historical, and literary context.