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Inner Worlds And Creative Emergencies
Dionysos is not the God behind the mask. He is the mask.
In our psychological culture, the quest for the real and true Self conceals an anti-Dionysian fantasy and a typically monotheistic one. We do not easily recognize Dionysos, patron of actors, who invites us to play every role, tragic as well as comic, grotesque as well as solemn, with intensity, with spirit and brio. … As God of the carnival, of the masquerade, he is concerned with the constant metamorphosis of identity and opposed to any fixed identification with a role.
The ascetic, who will never allow a little fun, a little drunkenness, who forbids excess and fears intensity, is not the only anti-Dionysian type. The fantasy that one day I will find my authentic self, the one behind the mask, behind the mirror, behind the roles, is also anti-Dionysian…
No masks can belong to us definitively or exclusively; masks belong to the divinities….
— Ginette Paris
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“There is no place that this blaze of radiant awareness does not penetrate…
Consciousness is the most delicate vibration and unity of the hum of a cosmic wakefulness. This ocean that roars, ranges to a stillness so still that it reflects the whole memory of existence in my — everyone’s — awareness. My experience is…
