The Unlocking Of Human Potentials

Posted on June 10, 2009
Filed Under Self Improvement |

Gardens of the Gods: Myth, Magic and Meaning.

Cosmology and values – indeed about the whole order of things as the medieval mind saw it. When you visit the Garden of Versailles you are looking right at something which Louis XIV looked at when he visited it.regarding human potentials A garden can be a metaphor used to convey a mood, a thought, a world view or an ideal, in other words. herbs that work with zoloft for depression Many books could be devoted to using the garden as a metaphor in literature and art. We shall of course touch on this aspect of the subject. Primarily, however, we shall focus on real gardens.

What makes gardens such potentially powerful metaphors is the way in which they bring together nature and art. This combination allows for enormous variations in emphasis, depending on how nature is viewed in particular cultures. Some cultures that live inseparably from nature the concept of a garden can have no meaning, Since a garden is by definition something that is set apart. A garden is often thought of as a refinement of nature by cultures such as the ancient Chinese and Japanese. The modern city dweller is likely to see gardens as places where a lost natural beauty can be recreated.

Then again, a garden means one thing to a dweller in an arid desert environment and another thing to someone from a damp and verdant region. By the same token the individual motifs that appear in gardens vary greatly in the meanings attached to them – woods, for example, are traditionally sacred in northern Europe but grim and perilous places in the south. On the other hand, there are certain motifs that appear to have a universal or widely shared meaning that crosses cultural boundaries – the fountain, with its life-giving water, is one example. There are people who would say that these share symbols belong to the set of images shared by all people, which can be access via the “collective unconscious,” as the psychologist C.G. Jung claimed. Jung believed.|Some people, such as the great psychologist C.G. Jung, believed that these shared symbols are stored images inherited and accessed by all humankind.}G. Jung believed. Your imagination can transform any ordinary garden activity as symbolic as you observe a bee hovering over a flower drinking in the nectar or see the sunlight streaming through the autumn leaves or a spider’s web glistening with dew or catching a glimpse of a thousand other small miracles of life. “Reading” a garden isn’t easy, and a garden can’t be treated as though it were just words on a page with only one meaning.

A garden, like a good poem, contains many levels of meaning and draws a different response from every individual. Enough shared images and symbols exist either within or across cultures to make possible the existence of a language of gardens – or rather many languages, in fact an almost infinite amount.

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