THE MYTH OF ULYSSES AND SECONDARY BEAUTY - Sophia

58 Pages·2010·0.26 MB·English

Antonio Mercurio

THE MYTH OF ULYSSES AND SECONDARY
BEAUTY

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Copyrighted material

Published by
The SOLARIS INSTITUTE
of The SOPHIA UNIVERSITY OF ROME. (S.U.R.)

Copyrignt 2009 by SOPHIA UNIVERSITY OF ROME

All rights reserved.

Original title: Il Mito di Ulisse e la Bellezza Seconda

Translated from Italian by Martha S. Bache-Wiig 2009, authorized by the Author.

ISBN 9788895806075

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Notes from the translator:

- The passages from the Odyssey that the author used are from the renowned
translation from Greek to Italian done by Rosa Calzecchi Onesti, Published by
Einaudi. I have translated these passages, instead of utilizing a renowned
translation from Greek to English, because there seems to be no translation
from Greek into English of the concept of “glorious concordance”, as found in
Calzecchi Onesti’s work, which is an essential theme in the Author’s work.

- In this text, several titles of the author’s books are mentioned. Some are
already available English, and their titles are only in English. Some are in the
process of being translated, and their titles are also in English. Some are
available as of this time only in Italian: these titles have been translated into
English and placed in brackets { }. A list of all the authors books with a
specification of which already are or soon will be available in English, is found
at the end of the book.

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Table of Contents

FORWARD...................................................................................................................5

PART ONE - Bread and Beauty ...................................................................................6

FURTHER REFLECTIONS: Ulysses in search of lost beauty and of beauty to
create......................................................................................................................16

CONCLUSION....................................................................................................37

PART TWO - Between Art, Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art there is continuity as well as a
qualitative leap........................................................................................................40

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Forward

This book was developed from a paper I wrote for Russian and Baltic country
psychologists. They had come to Italy to the Institute in Ascoli Piceno, which is a
member of the Sophia University of Rome, to participate in a seminar on Sophia-
Art and Cosmo-Art.
The same paper was expanded and presented at the Second Ulyssiads of the
Sophia University of Rome, organized by the Institute in Tempio Pausania and
held in Alghero, Sardinia, in the summer of 2005.
This book is a synthesis of my ideas, which include Sophia-Analysis, Sophia-Art,
Cosmo-Art and Existential Personalistic Anthropology.
Reading it can be useful to anyone who wants to discover new ways of thinking
and acting, and who wants to transform him or herself as well as human history.

Antonio Mercurio

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THE MYTH OF ULYSSES AND SECONDARY BEAUTY

A guide for unifying Existential Anthropology, Sophia-Analysis, Sophia-Art and Cosmo-
Art in your lives and your work as Cosmo-Art Anthropologists

“We don’t live on bread alone
but on bread and…. Beauty”.
A.M.

PART ONE

The Greek gods nourished themselves with nectar and ambrosia and I am
firmly convinced that human beings are deeply in need of nourishing themselves with
beauty, more than with any other thing.

The beauty we are familiar with comes in many different forms. I want to look
at three specific types.
The first is Primary beauty, which is found in nature and is always subject to
death.
The next is Secondary beauty, which is created through the artistry of human
beings and once it is created, is no longer subject to death or the law of entropy. It is
immortal, and it guarantees immortality to those who know how to create it.
It is immortal because it lives in the works of art created and preserved by
human beings.
It is immortal because it lives in the archetypes found within the human
species’ collective unconscious.
It is immortal because it lives within the consciousness of the various human
cultures.
It is immortal because it lives in the cosmic consciousness that surrounds this
planet and the entire universe, just as an aura surrounds our bodies and is only
visible with Kirlian photographs.
It is immortal because it can travel from one universe to another, without end.

Primary beauty has to do with form and with the relationship between matter
and form as perceived by our senses, such as sight, hearing, taste and touch.
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Secondary beauty is not necessarily connected to form. To the contrary, it
transcends both form and external sense perception, and it leads individuals directly
to the very special energy field it is made up of and that keeps it alive. This contact
does not come about through the senses, but rather through the vibrations that this
beauty emanates, and that we must train ourselves to perceive.
Up until now, this type of beauty has only been produced by the great artists,
through their immortal works of art. Cosmo-art brings it to a level where all those
who decide to work together to create a Group SELF and a single living organism
made up of a continual synthesis of opposites, can have access to it. This particular
type of beauty signals an evolution in art. It will no longer require a material support
that must be kept alive, and it will no longer remain closed within the confines of this
universe’s space-time.
There is then a third type of beauty, the beauty of life or the beauty of living.
This, too, is a type of primary beauty that is found in nature. It can be lost and found
again, but it cannot be purchased. If it exists, only the I can perceive it, the senses
cannot. If it is not present, both the I and the body perceive a feeling of not being
well.
When we feel as though we have lost this type of beauty and we want to find it
again, we must be willing to undertake a challenging journey, which may be an
existential path that we can begin in many different ways. We have learned to do this
through first the help of Sophia-Analysis, and then with the help of Sophia-Art and
Cosmo-Art.

Placed in the larger context of Existential Personalistic Anthropology, which
studies the laws of human growth, Sophia-Analysis, Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art are
disciplines that both complete and enrich the first. They are paths of knowledge and
of wisdom that can help us transform ourselves, so we can create beauty. Essentially,
this journey is a search for beauty (the beauty of life and secondary beauty) and not
on just a search for knowledge and healing as final goals.
What I would like to propose is how to fuse together the science of Existential
Personalistic Anthropology with the arts of Sophia-Analysis, Sophia-Art and Cosmo-
Art, to create a holistic approach to creating secondary beauty and recuperating the
beauty of life.

We are the ones who must decide to create Secondary beauty, as proposed in
Cosmo-Art, if we are convinced we can become pioneers of a new art form that opens
up new prospects and infinite creative opportunities for humanity.

Whether we work as Existential Anthropologists or as Cosmo-Art
Anthropologists, the first question we must always ask ourselves is, what do you
want to do with your life? Create beauty, or create ugliness?
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The beauty we are talking about is one that is a synthesis of many pairs of
opposites: the I and the YOU, the I and US, the I and the Cosmos. This beauty is a
synthesis of four opposing values: truth, freedom, love and beauty, where beauty
itself is a synthesis of pain, wisdom and art.

If we decide to create secondary beauty, we must first begin investigating our
existential unconscious, from intrauterine life up until adolescence, because the
greatest traumas that paralyze our actions and our creativity happened during that
period of our lives.
An exploration of the existential unconscious (one of the most important
discoveries that Sophia-Analysis made) is indispensable, because it contains our
factual unconscious, our reactive unconscious and our decisional unconscious.

Those who do not continuously map out their existential unconscious (I still do
so and continuously find something new, and I began thirty years ago) are not
making proper use of Sophia-Analysis, because they waste the best source of self-
knowledge available to them, which also helps understand why one’s life goes in one
way and not another.

It is also important to constantly look at the map of our existential
unconscious, because most of the information we need we can gather from our
present situations, and not from the past.

Every time something very difficult happens to me, the first question I ask
myself is, when did this same type of situation happen to me in the past?
The past we are talking about almost always has to do with our intrauterine
life, which we can understand by carefully analyzing the present.

If we analyze Ulysses’ present as narrated in Homer’s Odyssey, which unravels
over the ten long years he is in Troy and another ten spent traveling through the
Mediterranean, we can understand how it is a repetition of his past. We can also
understand how he had to go through it again so he could become aware of it,
transform it and create a new way of being. This new way of being is no longer based
on a choice between being a predator or a victim; it is based on a decision to become
an artist of his own life and of the life of the universe.

Our decisions of love and hate, which determine our lives and our destinies,
are contained within our decisional unconscious.

One of the decisions contained there is the one to repress and deny hatred.
This decision saved us during our prenatal experience, but during our postnatal
lives, it becomes our greatest enemy. It becomes a continuous source of hatred
towards ourselves, towards others and towards life itself, and it takes away our
ability to love ourselves and others.
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Sophia-Analysis is necessary so we can make a first unification, of the many
we must make during the course of our lives. This first unification must come about
between the conscious I and the unknown Fetal I, which does not want to leave the
maternal womb because it is deeply attached to its trauma, its pain and its hatred
towards those who wounded its pride.

This unification happens gradually, through a dialectical process. This process
consists of becoming conscious of what happened in our past by looking at the
present, so we can gain “awareness” of who we really are. On one hand, we have a
narcissistic, omnipotent Fetal I within, which opposes Life and adulthood; on the
other, we have a creative Artistic I within ourselves, which works at a deep level. Once
we become aware¸ we must become willing to accept what is painful for us, and to
have faith in the internal strengths of the I that work for our transformation and for
the creation of the I’s new identity.

Life will give us continual opportunities to face this archaic hatred, which
poisons our lives. We will have to become capable of recognizing it as our own, and of
unraveling it through forgiveness.

However, I repeat, this will only be possible if we have already chosen to create
beauty, as well as to love ourselves completely and wisely. Otherwise, why should we
ever forgive someone else? Where would we ever find the strength to forgive? Since it
often happens that we find ourselves completely immersed in hatred, it also happens
often that we are faced with having to choose between loving or hating ourselves, and
between creating beauty or ugliness. (see “Rules for the Ulysseans’ Nocturnal
Navigation”).

In these circumstances, acting wisely means being able to unify Sophia-
Analysis, Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art. The first helps us to unify our conscious selves
with our unconscious. The second helps us transform ourselves so we can make our
lives into a work of art, and also helps us learn to use the energy that our hidden
unconscious guilt contains. The third gives us the ability to insert our individual
purpose into the cosmic goal, so we can understand what our true identity is, and
why we were given that particular identity and not another one.

Sophia-Analysis is a precious tool at the beginning, but not as we continue our
journey, because it cannot explain why pain exists, or what pain’s precious purpose
is in life. We need Sophia-Art to find the answer: without pain, transformation is not
possible.

Only Cosmo-Art offers a complete answer: PAIN IS NECESSARY TO CREATE.
We, instead, are convinced its purpose is for expiation. Pain helps us face death and
fuse it together with life, the type of life that emanates from secondary beauty. The
reason secondary beauty is immortal is because it does not deny death, but rather,
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by going through pain it encounters it, goes through it, and transforms it into life (see
A.M. “The Ulysseans”, and “La nascita della cosmo-art” {The Birth of Cosmo-Art}.

Another fundamental contribution of Sophia-Analysis lies in its affirmation of
the existence of the Personal SELF (see A.M. “Theory of the Person and Existential
Personalistic Anthropology”). This structure is within every human being, and it
contains a particular type of wisdom and a source of love that operates within us and
for us, often without us even knowing it. Sophia-Analysis not only affirms the
existence of this structure within us, but it demonstrates how it operates in our favor
from the very beginning of our life as embryos.

The laws of life (see A.M. “The Laws of Life”) are also contained in the SELF,
and these are what guide us in learning about our conscious I Person and our deep I
Person, and about how guilty feelings surface when we oppose ourselves to these
laws. The SELF also contains our personal life purpose that we are here to
accomplish, in harmony with the purpose of the universe.

At this point, we must make a second type of unification, between the I Person
and the Self. We must do so to be able to use all the best energies at our disposal,
and to accelerate our process of understanding, of birthing our new identities and of
transformation.

Sophia-Art’s approach to the SELF is indispensible for this second unification
(see A.M., “La vita come opera d’arte e la vita come dono spiegata in 41 film” {Life as a
Work of Art and Life as a Gift explained in 41 films}, and see A.M., “The prayer of the
Ulysseans”, in chapter 23 of “Hypothesis on Ulysses”).

Without Sophia-Art, we would never know how to artistically unify all of the I’s
split parts, and how to make our lives a work of art. We could never recuperate the
beauty of life unless we learn how to do this. (see “The Ulysseans”, Chapter I).

We would know nothing about the dialectical process necessary to achieve a
synthesis of opposites, the ones we carry inside ourselves and the ones that life
continually puts before us.

We would not know how to learn how to look at lives as artists and not as
victims.
A victim is someone who spends their time complaining, and blaming others for
the bad things that have happened to them. An artist is someone who, instead, takes
complete responsibility for his life and wastes nothing of what has happened to him,
as he can use it all to make his very life a work of art.

Sophia-Analysis, with the support of Existential Anthropology, recognizes the
existence of the I Person, and the importance of becoming a Person CAPABLE OF
FREELY LOVING ONESELF, LOVING OTHERS AND BEING LOVED. However, it does
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