Zoyd's dream

[Terrance]

Modern, secular, profane, non religious man's dreams, reveries,
fantasies, and so on--never rise to the ontological status of myths,
precisely because they are not experienced by the whole man and therefor
do not transform a particular situation into a situation that is
paradigmatic. In the same way, modern man's anxieties, his experiences
in dream of imagination, although "religious" from the point of view of
form, do no, as in homo religious, make part of a Weltanschauung and
provide the basis for a system of behavior. 

The unconscious activity of modern man ceaselessly presents him with
innumerable symbols, and each of them has a particular mission to
accomplish, in order to ensure or re-establsih the equilibrium of the
psyche. 

The symbol not only makes the world "open" but also helps religious man
to attain to the universal. For it through symbols that man finds his
way out of his particular situation and "opens himself" to the general
and the universal. Symbols awaken individual experience and transmute it
into a spiritual act, into metaphysical comprehension of the world. 

In the presence of any tree, symbol of the world tree and image of
cosmic life, a man of the premodern societies can attain to the highest
spirituality, for, by understanding the symbol, he succeeds in living
the universal. It is the religious vision of the world, and the
concomitant ideology, that enables him to make this individual
experience bear fruit, to "open" it to the universal. The image of the
tree .... 


Fruit tree, fruit tree
Open your eyes to another year.
They'll all know
That you were here when you're gone.