VV (2) - Owlglass/Mirror

[Lorentzen / Nicklaus]

david schrieb:

> http://www.oup-usa.org/sc/0195143388/glossaries/character_n.html
>
> Narcissus [nar-sis'sus] or Narkissos, "benumbing."
> The son of the river god Cephisus and the nymph Liriope, he was a handsome 
> young man who had many pursuers, but he would have nothing to do with them. 
> The nymph Echo fell in love with him and followed him from afar through the 
> woods, repeating the ends of his sentences (she had lost her ability to say 
> anything more than the last part of what she heard from others). When 
> Narcissus rejected her, she wasted away until only her voice remained. 
> Another of Narcissus' would-be lovers cursed him to fall hopelessly in love 
> with someone who would reject him, just as he had rejected so many others. 
> Narcissus saw his reflection in a pool and fell in love with himself; he 
> finally died from the grief of his unrequited love. When the nymphs came to 
> place his body on the funeral pyre, they found only a flower, the narcissus 
> (Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.339-510).
>
>
> http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~cjcampb/sourcedocs/narcissus.html
>
> The following is taken from The Miscellaneous Works of Mr. J.J. Rousseau, 
> vol. II (London: Printed for T. Becket and P.A. de Hondt, in the Strand, 
> 1767). The HTML document seeks to duplicate the appearance of the original 
> as closely as possible. The only significant differences are that the 
> character's names have been placed to the left of their respective lines, 
> instead of being centered in a space above, and that several obvious 
> typographical errors have been corrected.
>
>
> http://www.hsa.brown.edu/~maicar/Narcissus.html
>
> Stupid assumption:
> The spring where Narcissus saw himself is said to be in the territory of the 
> Thespians in a place called Donacon. Some reject the story that says that 
> Narcissus, looking into the water, did not understand that he saw his own 
> reflection, and fell in love with himself, dying of love at the spring. For 
> it is stupid, they say, to imagine that a man old enough to fall in love was 
> unable to distinguish a man from a man's reflection.
>
> Some think this version is more credible:
> Instead they say that Narcissus had a twin sister and that both were exactly 
> alike in appearance. He, it is said, fell in love with his sister, and when 
> she died, he used to go to the spring, knowing that it was his reflection 
> that he saw, but finding some relief for his love, because the reflection 
> reminded him of his sister.
>
>
> http://www.npd-central.org/msla1.asp
>
> The popular misconception is that Narcissists love themselves. In reality, 
> they direct their love to second hand impressions of themselves in the eyes 
> of beholders. He who loves impressions is not acquainted with the emotion of 
> loving humans and is, therefore, incapable of loving them. He loves no 
> humans - and, first and foremost, he does not love himself.


  "in the course of my life of understanding, i saw, ever more clearly (and, at 
 last, most perfectly), that every kind of seeking, including every method 
designed to liberate, purify, and perfect life, was founded in the mentality and 
adventure of narcissus. i saw that every conventional yoga, every remedial path, 
and every kind of strategic meditation had a single symptom: the anxious effort 
to dissolve the barriers and the capsule of self in the attempt to enjoy 
fullness, immunity, freedom, and so on. this was always narcissus, for it is 
founded in the original idea of seperateness, the loss of relationsship, and 
thus it is a meditation on self as separateness, on experience as separative, 
and on a longing for the other, for god, for realization of reality, liberation, 
salvation, and so on.
   i concluded that real life was not in fact a matter of a remedial path or 
 technique, but that it was a matter of radical understanding, the root 
understanding of this underlying error in the approach to life. i saw that where 
i persisted as this radical understanding, rather than in the various impulses 
to liberation, there was in fact no dilemma, no separation, and no necessary 
effort. there was simply the enjoyment of reality, prior to any identification 
with the process of avoiding and seeking. and when radical understanding 
directly became my approach to life, there was a constant unfolding of real 
knowledge in freedom and enjoyment.
   for me, the import of meditation was not the search for any kind of 
 experiences. the more i had of experiences, the less important they seemed. and 
by 'experiences' i mean not only internal and visionary phenomena but even the 
kinds of quieting and control that are by-products of the meditative attitude. i 
began to see that what i gained and retained from meditation was exactly that 
with which i began. before, during, and after meditation, there was only 'one 
who has a basic understanding'. thus, i became more and more attentive to this 
understanding itself, in and out of meditation. and i gradually began to drop 
every other kind of formal exercise, such that, more often than not, i simply 
enquired of myself under every condition that passed: 'avoiding relationsship?'"

                           (avatar adi da: the knee of listening. pp. 420f) 

 kai