{"id":11033,"date":"2024-01-24T14:28:52","date_gmt":"2024-01-24T13:28:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/?p=11033"},"modified":"2024-01-24T14:28:53","modified_gmt":"2024-01-24T13:28:53","slug":"martin-nawrath-proud-pouti-proud-mysli","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/martin-nawrath-proud-pouti-proud-mysli\/","title":{"rendered":"Martin Nawrath: The flow of pilgrimage, the flow of mind"},"content":{"rendered":"

This essay "The Flow of Pilgrimage, the Flow of Mind" by Martin Nawrath was published in the thematic issue 4 of the XXXVII. year 2023 of the magazine Veronica<\/em> (pp. 4-6), dedicated to pilgrimages through the countryside.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At my age, I sometimes let my steps take a slower pace. Perhaps the body of my legs knows better than I do what speed to walk at in this stage of life. My head still likes to feel the terrain of the pilgrimage on the map, considering options, looking for interesting things, sights, and unusual things that it would like not to miss. But then the first step finally comes. Sometimes heavy with its earthiness, sometimes bolder with its fire, sometimes more cautious with the dampness of uncertainty from the delicate battle of disparate feelings, sometimes carried by the airiness of the directions of the momentary wind. No, I am not a great pilgrim and writer, more of a lover of small journeys and verbal gestures. A lover of texts of small volumes and discoveries. No, I am not a great naturalist, an expert on a large number of specific details, rather I dissolve in great moments, images, and moods with pilgrimages and nature. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I used to wander through the world of ideas and open up the crossroads of the contents of new and new books, the nature of internalized competition prevailed in me. Who among the other authors will surpass with his interpretation what the previous author has surpassed? He divided, boxed, sorted, separated the stream of pilgrimage and mind, wanting to get rid of the old, false, superfluous. Wanting to avoid streams that end in a dry and empty channel, from where the path no longer leads. A change in my view of the nature of crossroads was brought to me at the same time by two books focused on pilgrimages through the twists and turns of the human mind. The first is the well-known and damned Psychological types<\/em> (Port\u00e1l, 2020) of the still controversial but by many, including me, beloved Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. It is a paradox of the post-Jung era that, on the one hand, his typology is widely used in various versions of personality tests \u2013 popular psychological literature is teeming with quotes from Jung \u2013 and on the other hand, Jung is permanently relegated by the academic sphere to the category of an incomprehensible, or at worst, delusional mystic. In my opinion, the most interesting element of the book itself is that a systematic and detailed description of the four, or eight basic psychological types is the content of the very conclusion of the voluminous book. In the previous chapters, Jung perhaps in a somewhat complicated and at the same time fascinating way wades through the seemingly random stages of the history of the psyche. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One could simply say that his psychological types are some kind of lawful currents and subsequent and parallel countercurrents, but not blind arms of our mind. They are the pulls of time and their subsequent balancing, which, with Jung's abundant intellectual help, crystallized into a final, lawfully incomplete, because not closed, and by nature not even endable summary of individual types. The absence of final definitions is given by the elemental nature of Jung's types. The elements are simply alive, mobile, they do not stand still, they cannot be caught, and on top of that they like to mix. Nevertheless, we somehow know how to experience and recognize them, especially in their extreme positions, where they are fully colored. We know them by experiencing them together, because we are of the same nature as them. Jung's pilgrim sometimes stops his head at the crossroads to make the right decision, to his next step - he measures the kilometers and elevation on the map and adjusts his watch. At other times he lets his heart be drawn to a detour by the promised natural scenery in tourist guides. In another situation of the direction of the path he is drawn by the senses, the wind or the warmth of the sun, so that in yet another situation he prefers closed eyelids and a vague and unpredictable intuition seeking its deepening. His mind is a pilgrimage through the elements, his pilgrimage is a living stream of the mind.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not unlike the folds of the mind (it must be remembered that he consciously only deals with the Western mind) in his book The Passion of the Western Mind<\/em> (Gaia Institute, 2023) American philosopher and archetypal astrologer Richard Tarnas. This fellow traveler of one of Jung's followers Stanislav Grof wrote a respected textbook on the history of philosophy, the Czech translation of which is available to us from this year. Although it is a history of philosophy, which does not lack mentions of the most important thinkers and their ideas (some kind of clues in the flow of time), it is not history in the classical sense of the word. History in the style of "it began like this, so that it continued like this and inevitably ended like that". From my point of view, the most interesting thing about the book is that very soon, after a few pages, we become direct, because alive, participants in a pilgrimage that has not yet ended, and continues to offer a certain offer that is still missing a point, a perpetrator, a culprit or a winner. Like every good book, this one will mysteriously turn the reader into the one who is its hero himself. Just as Bastian in The never-ending story<\/em> becomes Atreus and enters the story to be decided by the reader as an actor, Tarnas offers a very similar experience. The difference is that with Tarnas we find ourselves in the position of the reader, who has to decide the fate of history, the fate of the direction of his own mind, in his own way. The pilgrim has been traveling and writing down his experiences from his travels, summarizing his discoveries and apparent mistakes. He has sat down at a crossroads and hesitates about what to do next. Somehow he knows that this path was the only possible one, that there is nothing to regret, no one to complain about. The pilgrimage has become his life, his destiny, and without exaggeration the destiny of humanity, the destiny of his mind, his passion for sniffing out other possibilities, not stopping and not stopping at anything. The pilgrim weaves through the landscape like a snake. His tongue and eyes are already diving into the next millennium, but his body is still in all its serpentine might in contact with everything past, when the word past loses a little of its meaning.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many pilgrims today would like to reveal the origins and the point, thinking that they may know it. Many pilgrims would like to find the culprit, the mover, big enough to be on the cross for everyone to see. Many pilgrims have resigned themselves to reason, which in itself has proven to be insufficient. They immerse themselves in the power of emotions, with which they want to force the shared power of the story on their fellow believers. All of this has its place here at the crossroads. It belongs here, it fits here. It falls into the black hole of the Earth, which will bear this infinite weight.      <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I find myself in the skin of that snake, lying in a place where the remnants of darkness alternate with the rising sun for a while. My fingers touch the keyboard, without my mind ever consistently understanding what is actually happening between the pad of my left index finger and the letter "t" on my computer monitor. I perceive my body, a little sore from life and the coming day, a body absorbing the scent of the drink that revives and awakens it. I can already open the door of the coming day, but I still hesitate, how great the distance is between worry and enthusiasm, between hope and fear, trust and openness to whatever comes. I put on slippers for my hunches. Today, too, I will be one of the overlooked on my journey, one of billions. But today, too, my decisions will somehow touch the whole world in the space that my mind opens. Just my mind and only my mind? On a land whose end cannot be measured in the same way as its beginning? In a breath that will momentarily become part of my body, so that I can exhale my body with another step of space around me? The stream of pilgrimage takes on a circular outline, nourished by blood and swells with breath, the circle becomes a sphere. The sphere of the Earth. The globe. The soul of the world, Anima Mundi.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This essay "The flow of pilgrimage, the flow of mind" by Martin Nawrath was published in the thematic issue 4 of the XXXVII. year 2023 of the Veronica magazine (pp. 4-6), dedicated to pilgrimages through the landscape. At my age, I sometimes let my steps slow down. Perhaps the body of my legs knows better than I do what speeds to walk at in this stage of life. My head still likes to touch the terrain of the pilgrimage on the map,\u2026 Continue reading Martin Nawrath: The flow of pilgrimage, the flow of mind<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11034,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[39,28],"class_list":["post-11033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-texty","tag-martin-nawrath","tag-poutnictvi","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11033"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11035,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11033\/revisions\/11035"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}