Nature as the Sanctum for Introspection in Roethke's “Meditation at Oyster River”

Toward a theory of landscape aesthetics

Rupi Kaur is a Canadian young poet that employed natural elements in her poems to reflect the genuine human experiences. She has recently made great fame on social media and her poetry collections have made a great impact on Canadian literature. Her poetry can be analyzed through the ecocritical lens. Kaur’s poetry is not abstruse, or metaphysically oriented rather it is easy, and simple and reflects the plight of women and her journey from stumbling, falling, breaking, rising, and finally blooming. This journey sounds more like a non-human experience that is natural for instance the cycle of life of flowers. Through mobilizing several vivid images she channels the metaphors to human life in the form of natural images regarding feeling, shaping, flourishing, and prospering. The ecocritical approach is applied in this paper to pinpoint this common tendency among humans and their counterparts from non-human entities. Moreover, it casts the light on Kaur’s descriptive force and skillfulness in forming settings fit to her perpetual slippage from certain natural asset to the other. The paper also musters certain images, metaphors and other poetic devices to show the ecocritical awareness among people with reference to this modern approach that studies the interconnectedness between nature and culture. Applying of the ecocritical approach to Rupi Kaur’s poetry may afford a feasible solution to the physical/transcendental dualism, whereas we observe the formulation of hybrid identity that results from the merging of nature and human attitudes. This study traces the five sections of the Volume “The Sun and Her Flowers” and attributes them to the development of Rupi Kaur the woman.

This book elucidates the complex cross-cultural genealogy of themes, ideas, and practices crucial to the creation of a new hybrid form of Buddhism that has emerged within the last 150 years. Buddhism modernism is not just Buddhism that happens to exist in the modern world but a distinct form of Buddhism constituted by cross-fertilization with western ideas and practices. Using primarily examples that have shaped western articulations of Buddhism, the book shows how modern representations of Buddhism have not only changed the way the tradition is understood, but have also generated new forms of demythologized, detraditionalized, and deinstitutionalized Buddhism. The book creates a lineage of Buddhist modernism that includes liberal borrowing from scientific vocabulary in reformulations of Buddhist concepts of causality, interdependence, and meditation. It also draws upon Romantic and Transcendentalist conceptions of cosmology, creativity, spontaneity, and the interior depths of the human being. Additionally, Buddhist modernism reconfigures Buddhism as a kind of psychology or interior science, drawing both upon analytic psychology and current trends in neurobiology. In its novel approaches to meditation and mindfulness, as well as political activism, it draws heavily from western individualism, distinctively modern modes of world-affirmation, liberal political sensibilities, and modernist literary sources. The book also examines this uniquely modern Buddhism as it moves into postmodern iterations and enters the currents of global communication, media, and commerce.

This monograph consists of an introduction, the first part discussing the experience of spiritual development that occurs in the oriental ways of the spirit, the second part devoted to the Jungian and Hillman concept of myth, an afterword, and bibliography. The subject of the first part of the monograph is analysis of the concept of the experience of spiritual development in the thought of Carl Gustav Jung, an outstanding Swiss researcher of Eastern and Western methods of spiritual development. In this section, we engage in hermeneutical reflection upon the Jungian interpretation of philosophical and religious texts of oriental cultures, which is closely related to the relationship between two concepts fundamental to its system: the center of consciousness — the ego and the psychological whole that transcends it — the self. We provide an outline of Jung’s theory of individuation in order to prepare a stable ground for the following considerations on attaining self-awareness as shown in the writings of Chinese Taoism, Tibetan and Japanese Buddhism, and also of Indian yoga. We analyze the successive stages of the Jungian interpretation of the problem of opposites. These include, for example, the Taoist problem of oppositions functioning in the psyche, the problem of the relationship between the notion of the collective unconscious and the Buddhist concept of the universal mind, or the Hindu problem of the nature of the atman experienced in yoga. In this section we also consider a very difficult philosophical problem that initiates the following question: how do we express in terms the almost inexpressible experience of the self? The second part of the monograph concerns the psychological approach to myth according to Carl Gustav Jung and James Hillman. It is a reconstruction of their views on the collective unconscious as a source of human myth-making activity, and an attempt to show to what extent Hillman relies on Jung’s depth psychology, and in which he creates his own point of view on the myth-creating aspects of the psyche. In this part, we present the problem of interpreting the presence of a myth as a phenomenon resulting from collective creation. The most important issues concerning this challenge are raised. We present the views of psychologists regarding the very idea of the unconscious and the relationship of man to myth as an archetypal activity. The issue of the relationship between psychotherapy and myth is also raised. This issue, also widely considered, concerns, inter alia, impoverishment at the level of creating mythical symbols, which contributes to the occurrence of mental disorders at the individual level and a sense of cultural alienation. There is a vast range of disciplines that study myths, ranging from ethnological, anthropological, cultural, and psychological. This part highlights the specificity of theoretical speculations about myth undertaken in the narrow field of Jung’s analytical psychology and the continuator of his thoughts, the creator of Hillman’s archetypal psychology. The concept of the unconscious and the archetype, as well as the situation of the human individual against the background of issues, i.e. the role of myth in culture and its impact on individual existence, are described. The ways to the Unconscious. Myth and meditation in depth psychology focus the reader’s attention on the experience of inner development that occurs under the influence of contact with the unconscious. Both the oriental journey to the roots of the psyche and the journey that revives the archetypal world of the imagination of the Western wisdom seeker recall to mind the space of truth, hidden deep in a cave, which anyone who values universal knowledge, knowledge that brings a human to life, can venture into.

The world heritage city Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka, significant for spiritually cherished spatial orientation manifests in the city; reflecting ‘spiritual sustainability’, that integrates nature, natural elements, topography, built elements with the performances of people. This research examines comprehending ‘genius loci’ in heritage city Anuradhapura, and how this occurrence relates to spiritual sustainability. It explores in-depth dimensions of the place, related to ‘spiritual orientation’; a novel approach for understanding heritage sites. This paper proposes an original interdisciplinary study and method to examine ‘spiritual sustainability’ of the place and meanings by employing contextual concepts, and generalised concepts. It utilises Buddhist concepts, to explore in-depth meanings of the place, attached with the locus, vision, and cultural/religious views. Further, it discusses how these meanings shape and sustain the heritage city between divine/mundane dimensions. The same universal concept flourished upon architecture, landscape, villages and cities, from pre-history to the Buddhist city Anuradhapura, gathered in the same locus comprehending ‘genius loci’, established ‘spiritual sustainability’. In conclusion, the Buddhist heritage city sustains between physical and non-physical dimensions, a dynamic process, reveal more in-depth meanings of the place. This study presents a new insight to value heritage places and a new perspective for sustainable developments.

تناول الباحث التشخيص في التعبير القرآني في ثلاث محاور رئيسية: حيث تطرق في المحور الاول مفهوم لفظة التشخيص لغة واصطلاحا. وتناول في المبحث الثاني التشخيص في التعبير القرآني حيث تكلم فيها عن تشخيص عناصر الطبيعة وظواهرها والتشخيص النفسي والتشخيص العقلي مستندا الى ذلك بالآيات الكريمة من القران والاحاديث النبوية والالفاظ اللغوية والنحوية.Abstract<br /><br />This paper is entitled "Personification in the Quranic Expression". It aims at unfolding the rhetorical personification images in the Holy Book of Quran, investigating them, and questioning them for their elements of beauty and the purposes behind them. Personification is the attribution of human qualities to the inanimate; it means addressing, abstract, and immaterial things as if they were human beings. Such things then could be treated as if they had senses and feelings, i.e., as human of reason.<br />The paper consists of three sections: personification of natural elements and phenomena, psychical, and mental personification respectively. <br />Most significantly, the study has found out that many of the artistic Quranic images have been based on personification in a miracle rhetorical style of the Quranic expression. The Holy Quran presents spoken moving vivid images that are full of life, renewal, and restoration, especially those of natural elements and phenomena. Most of such images are sensuous and visual that best suit the Arabian environment and the Arabs as recipients at the time of revelation. This explicates why the psychical personification images come next while the mental images come later. Thus, in the Quranic expression, the psychical images interpose between the sensuous and the mental images. All these types of image have their own social, psychological, and artistic purposes simultaneously in a way that lead people to believe in Allah the Almighty.<br />